Aftermath of Dreaming(89)

He gives me a hug and quick kiss. For the first time, I don’t try to feel more from it than is really there.

“Okay, well. I’d better get in gear if I’m gonna make my meeting. Hey, do you wanna stick around, watch the deejay? I can have breakfast with you in a little bit.”

“That’s okay, thanks. I need to go.”

Winter blows in. I have a feeling she was just outside the door, listening the whole time and waiting to make her entrance.

“Bye, Michael.” I pass Winter in the doorway. As I walk away, I can feel his attention shift from me to her to his radio station. A national news program ends and a local one begins as I exit the building and enter the bright, white day.





25




It had ended. Finally the relationship was over. Gossips chattered that Stephanie and Andrew’s romance had stopped because their work together was done and there had never been anything real and lasting between them. As opposed to all the other real and lasting celebrity couplings in Hollywood.

Valiant Hour held its top ten box office position well into the summer with public sightings of Andrew and Stephanie as a couple continuing until August when it all disappeared. Theaters replaced the movie with newer fare and Stephanie went on a much-publicized romantic trip to Scotland with the film’s cinematographer. Which is how I found out. Andrew hadn’t told me and there had been little to no shift in his attitude or time with me; we still saw each other regularly. So I was thrilled it was over, but nervous. I wanted to be the woman who filled Stephanie’s place. Or not filled it, because I never believed in her feelings for him anyway. Maybe “take over” would be a better way to say it. I wanted it to be Andrew and me and no one else.

On Labor Day weekend, a few weeks after I found out that Andrew and Stephanie were kaput, I didn’t hear from him for a day and a half and I started to get concerned. All right, scared. Okay, terrified. He had met someone else and fallen in love that quickly. Fuck. And this new person probably wasn’t just an in-between girl, but someone who would fill every space in him so much that there would no longer be any room or need for me. Panic moved in from the outside of my skin and settled under my breath all day, pushing it up when I tried to inhale, and pulling in when I tried to blow out. I was a wreck.

I bought a bottle of Absolut and some tonic, and drank a lot of it while sitting on my futon wishing my phone would ring.

It finally did at two A.M., but by then I had been passed out—I mean, asleep—for a few hours.

“Hi, sweet-y-vette. I’m in Venice,” Andrew said over waves of soft white noise.

I wondered why he was telling me that, but all I cared about was that his voice was on my line calling me.

“Should I meet you at your house?” I was struggling to get my brain and body to match his alertness.

“No, I’m in Italy. Venice, Italy.”

“Italy?”

“I’m in Venice, Italy; not Venice, L.A. At the film festival. I’ll be home in a few days.”

Now I understood. Oh, thank God, he had called and all the way from there.

“Go back to sleep, honey, I’ll call you when I get home. If you need me, call Patrick and he’ll get me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you still love me?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I…” He was quiet for a moment as if he were going to say the same thing. “I’ll talk to you soon. Sweet dreams, Yvette.”

“Bye, Andrew.”

I hung up the phone and started to put it on the floor, then decided to let it stay on the bed with me, so that his voice it had transported could escort me into sleep. Andrew called. I wondered what time it was in Italy. New York was three hours ahead, and Europe six, so nine would make it eleven A.M. where he was. Jesus, I hoped a woman hadn’t just left his bed. Okay, he probably was having sex with other women; they just better be one-time-only things that didn’t mean anything to him. At least when he was with Stephanie, as horrible as that was, I knew who she was and I could perform the mental gymnastics required to diminish her threat to me, but these God-knows-who-and-how-many-other women were harder to dispel. Fuck. Oh, Andrew, come home from there and make me the only woman in your life. I fell asleep to that prayer.



For the next month, every time I saw him and every time he called, all I could think about was whether or not Andrew and I were getting closer to being a real couple. To the public, to him, to me. All behavior and conversation between us was looked at through that prism. I was obsessed. It was like some kind of relationship diet. I only felt good on days when the score of promising signs of our togetherness outweighed the bad ones. Seeing him was at the top of the list for making me feel good, but then it would make me feel shitty because why weren’t we going out in public? Phone calls, lots of them in one day, were always a good sign, except when was he going to say “I love you” to me?

My art fell by the wayside, completely forgotten. I made mistakes working for Bill and dropped a lot of dishes at the restaurant. I stopped calling friends back—what was the point? I could only think about one thing—Andrew—and I couldn’t talk about him with any of them. Especially Viv, who, inspired by Stephanie—all right, maybe not, but I thought of it that way—had broken up with Craig and was just loving her new single status. It made me want to scream. That was the last thing I could hear about, especially from her, since it included more harangues about how great Stephanie was doing now that she was finished with that scumbag Andrew. Though I figured Viv would have to stop trashing him soon since her main conduit for information on him had dried up. Her last diatribe against him sounded like a death rattle.