Aftermath of Dreaming(90)

My days began and ended with the same perpetual thought—were Andrew and I going to be together permanently? It was like some horrible game, like a king with twin sons who takes forever to pick the heir. Someone was going to get picked, but who and when? It was pure hell. And the whole time I tried to appear to him as if I didn’t care. As if I wasn’t the complete wreck I was inside that made me stop eating and barely sleep through the night. If I hadn’t wanted to be with him so much, I would have wanted to die.

One morning in early November, Andrew called me and said, “Why don’t you come over tonight and we’ll watch the election returns?”

After saying yes in what I hoped was a calm voice, we made a plan, and hung up. I was shocked. Our get-togethers were always last-minute, arranged at the end of the night or as he drove toward my apartment in his car. This was a good ten hours away, and it involved politics, a love of his life, almost as much as collecting art. He had shared some of that world with me, particularly when we first met and my father’s Southern Republican opinions still held me in their sway. Andrew taught me about socially responsible government and education instead of arms. I’d ask him the questions that even the forming of confused me, and he would answer at their core, explaining issues and consequences. I wanted to know more about all that for him. I loved his mind and the way he articulated his thoughts. Listening to him talk about politics was like being on an intense-but-intelligent ride—Oh, the places you’ll go!—to quote another great, if quite different mind. So to be asked to watch the election returns with him was like an invitation to meet his family—a huge step. I knew he’d have insightful information about each candidate; hell, he knew and was courted by most of the Democrats.

My entire day was about our date at eight. I somehow got through the mundanity of my lunch shift at the restaurant by trying to distance myself from it. As I drove home afterward, still feeling cruddy from handling plates of food, a horrible fear that had been lurking in me for the past few months raised its head and began shouting at me. Over and over it told me that for Andrew to be with me the way he was with those other women, like Lily and Stephanie, completely and publicly, I would have to be famous. Because in the three-plus decades that his romantic life had been fodder for the media, Andrew had never gone out with a woman who wasn’t as famous as him, or at least close to it since very, very few ever reached his level. And I was nobody. Hadn’t become a big f*cking art star in New York and still wasn’t one. No matter how many glittering parties I went to with Viv, or how many millionaire men I dated, or how much money I spent that I didn’t have on facials and clothes, the reality was the same. I wasn’t in his world. Where I grew up, it was the number of decades your family had lived there that mattered—past a century or so and you were in, and mine went back at least two, but in L.A., it was fame and money that mattered. And it looked like it did for Andrew, too.

But maybe that fear was just f*cking with me. It had to be. Andrew loved me. And he said that I was the only woman in the world that he believed truly loved him—that had to mean a lot. And, good God, his success and fame were enough for ten. Surely, mine couldn’t matter so much to him. We had just never had the chance to really be together, but with Stephanie out of the picture and both of us in the same city, it could finally happen. He had just been taking it slowly, not rushing in, and our date to watch the election returns would be the first step in changing everything.

When I got home, I stripped off my waitress uniform, took a shower, and put on his favorite dress, a small floral-print V-neck with a short pleated skirt. The depth of the neckline, brevity of the skirt, and floral of the fabric were the only differences from my Catholic school uniform. The first time I wore it around him, he opened his door and looked at me for a long while.

“What?” I said.

“You know I’m a sucker for that.”

I hadn’t, but good.

So I wore that, using everything in my arsenal for a winning campaign.



Andrew had the same reaction to the dress when he opened the door as he had had before. I could tell it made him want to blow off watching the returns. I took it as a good sign about the future of the evening and us.

“Let’s miss the beginning,” Andrew said as he led me past the kitchen where the TV was blaring and to his bed. I slipped off my dress, and with it all the fears that had been tormenting me. As I knelt on the sheets, I decided that none of that stuff—the fame and success—really mattered to him. It was just him and me. Us. We were completely similar when we were only in our skin and in each other’s. And that was what mattered.



The marble counter of the island in Andrew’s kitchen was covered with containers and platters of food that Andrew had pulled from his fridge after we finally emerged from his bedroom. We picked through the offerings; giving each other tastes, devouring some, ignoring others. He was into the borscht soup. I thought it looked metallically cold. I was eating sesame noodles. The TV on the counter was still on and the results that were being reported were exactly what Andrew had predicted. He started explaining to me what the party would do and we talked about the different candidates and how they had managed their campaigns—if anyone knew how to handle the media, it was Andrew.

A while later, we were in bed again, right in the middle, when the phone rang. Well, not rang—lit, actually. Andrew’s phones didn’t ring; they lit up all through his house, like Tinkerbell kept alive by an omnipotent invisible child. Even across a bright room with his back to the instrument, he could tell whenever one of the small transparent plastic buttons began blinking. So I wasn’t surprised that in the deep dark of his bedroom—him moving on top of me, I had already had three, but his was still to come—he noticed the sharp small light flashing on the phone on his bedside table.