Aftermath of Dreaming(82)
By the end of the weekend, it was clear his film had done well. Exploded, you could say. I woke up Monday morning and began baking bread. We hadn’t seen each other in over a week, but I had known what was taking up his time, the culmination of years of his professional and private life up on the screen.
It had been a while since I had baked for him—that was in the fall, and now it was late spring. I decided to do apple bread, an old recipe of my grandmother’s that required two types of apples very finely chopped. I enjoyed the detail work. Cutting each apple slice into a precise amount of minuscule cubes that would almost melt when baked, the membranes of apple dissolving under the heat. I liked tools that create small out of large. A whole represented by a wee part. I remembered an art teacher at the School of Visual Arts who used to say, “If you want an orange, one slice is better than a whole apple.” Which was kind of how my relationship was with Andrew—a slice of him, which was better than the whole of someone else, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough for much longer. Hopefully, he’d get rid of Stephanie since the film was finally out.
The bread was cooling when Andrew called. It was almost eleven in the morning, far past the normal time that we spoke. My apartment was warm from the oven, and the open windows were letting in dim sounds from Wilshire Boulevard along with a small breeze.
When I told him what I was doing, he asked how soon I could be there. I had been to his home only a few times during daylight hours, and this was a Monday, a brighter workday than the others, the ravages of the weekend exposed, projects left undone on Friday loudly yelling their impatient needs. In the midst of all that, I entered Andrew’s home.
Patrick answered the door, a further signal of the careercentric day. While asking how I was, he led me to the pool where Andrew was sitting on a chaise longue, phone at his ear, notepad and pen on the low table next to him.
I was holding the two loaves of bread. I thought I would go into the kitchen for a knife, but Andrew gave me a silent kiss, while taking a loaf from me. He quietly unwrapped it, and broke pieces off with his hand, silently chewing while listening to the person on the phone. He pantomimed his delight about the bread to me with his face, and reached over and rubbed my leg. I was stretched out on the chaise next to him. The sun was softer up where he lived, muted by an ocean breeze that pushed it through so the harshest rays were dispersed someplace less fortunate. Glaring white towels were stacked on a wrought-iron shelf, and the pool was a miniature Aegean Sea—a fount of pleasure for men and mermaids.
Andrew finished his call and turned to me, but before the kiss was complete, Patrick was at his side with a list.
“Hold everything until I tell you, even Stephanie,” Andrew said, without even looking at the paper Patrick proffered. “And would you put these in the kitchen, please?” He handed Patrick the bread, then stood up, and taking my hand, walked me to his bed. It felt as if we were playing hooky from school, but the teacher knew where we were.
Lunch, the result of a call Andrew made to Patrick stating what we wanted, was waiting for us two hours later when we emerged from his bedroom and entered the green-walled, dark wood dining room. Sitting at the large round cherrywood table, I thought how very Andrew it was to not have a rectangular one, bypassing the need to decide who would sit opposite him at the other end.
On the long art-filled walk back to his bed, we passed a maid running a vacuum. She immediately turned it off when she saw Andrew, her body and the machine silent as if that would make them invisible as we went by. In bed again, we napped, then I woke him with my mouth. The room was dark from the wide expanse of drawn curtains, day for night.
Afterward we went down to his screening room, past his gym, and lay on the dove-gray velvet sofa watching the films that had opened against his that past weekend. And still he took no phone calls. Patrick rang in at one point to tell him he was leaving, and I could tell that he asked if Andrew wanted to know who had called, but was told, “No, tomorrow.” We were out of town together, gone. Escaping further into home, instead of leaving, but protected as if by great distance. After viewing most of one film, then part of another, and bits of a third, we got bored with them. I was more interested in listening to his reaction to the actors and directors and writers than what was on the screen anyway. One actor he called “a very talented little girl”; an actress was hard on the eyes to watch.
We went upstairs to the kitchen and rooted around in the fridge for food. He definitely had the best “leftovers” of anyone I’d ever known. Whole geographical regions represented by bowls and containers of scrumptious cuisine. It was heaven. The large house was still except for us, other than the constantly flashing light on his phones when there was a call to remind us that the world was outside while we pretended it wasn’t.
In his bed again, only sensations of him in me and him through me and me for him were present. It was quiet in the dark, in the almost pitch-blackness, in the inky ravenness, like his Ritz-Carlton room had been that night when we were together in it five and a half years before. As I moved on top of him, Andrew’s voice said firmly in my ear, “Why are you the only woman in the world who I believe truly loves me?”
He looked me deep in my eyes when he said it, then his words kept reappearing the longer we looked at each other, coming over and over again. Lying together afterward, each sound, each syllable, each breath they were carried on traveled deep into my heart, then journeyed out along my veins where they would never be separate from me.