Aftermath of Dreaming(93)
When I woke up each morning, it would take me a second to awaken to the Andrew-less reality. It was like having been flung into the ocean on a small dinky craft with no tracking system and the North Star out of sight. Andrew was gone. And my apartment felt empty and quiet, and my life felt colorless, as if it had died inside of me, but had forgotten to notify my body. I carried on, but felt useless.
I tried to hide how I felt when I was with Viv, but she noticed the plunging of my mood. I was sad not to be in a relationship, I said to her. You know, lonely, that’s all. I definitely could not tell her the real reason.
She was already involved with someone, the choreographer she was using for her new video. “And it’s such a relief not to be with a suit!” Viv said, whenever the subject of Craig came up, though they had stayed friends, and Craig was dating around.
A couple of months after the election-night horror, I was still crying a lot. It wasn’t getting any better trying to live without Andrew. How could I ever fall in love with another man? Who could I be with after him? Andrew was the pinnacle, perfect and complete, überman. There was nowhere to go but down. It reminded me of when I left Mississippi at eighteen and had been living in New York for a few months, I realized one day that being up there I had gotten ruined (to ever be able to live in an unfabulous place) and enlightened (as to why I never would) all at the same time. That’s what being with Andrew was like in regard to other men—ruined and enlightened all at the same time. I never said any of that to Viv, but she could hear in my voice that I was still down.
“I have a great idea that will cheer you right up,” Viv said to me one Friday morning over the phone. “Craig wants to do a little sex-and-drugs blowout in Palm Springs this weekend and is looking for a girl to take for some one-on-one fun. I’ll call him and tell him you’ll be his date.”
I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Her ex-boyfriend, for God’s sake, lent to me like a dress to lift my spirits, and I lent to him.
“I’m not some good-time girl, Viv. I don’t want to be a weekend f*ck for your ex-boyfriend.”
“Okay, okay, hush.” I could imagine Viv’s hands flying about, trying to erase our exchange.
“I gotta go,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
We never called each other again. A part of me missed our long talks on her comfy couch, missed discovering great places and getting our nails done. But I couldn’t and didn’t want to get over the suggestion she had made. Like I had any interest in f*cking her ex-boyfriend. Or worse, in being a weekend fling for him. Something to tell the boys about on Monday morning. Was she nuts? Or was she just so used to people f*cking their way to the top that she considered an offer of Craig Beltram as manna from heaven?
A few weeks after Viv and I stopped talking, on New Year’s Eve afternoon, I met Reggie in the bookstore, and having him made Viv’s departure easier to take. And frankly, it was a better exchange.
But I was still ravaged with a depression that I couldn’t shake. I stood for hours in the studio I’d made out of the dressing room in my apartment and tried to get back to my art, which I had ignored for months, but nothing came. I dragged myself through my waitressing shifts and my work for Bill. I lost weight and couldn’t sleep. Nothing interested me. My mind was a treadmill of thoughts and memories and imagined conversations with Andrew that kept running and running repeatedly, making me feel worse. There were hang-ups on my machine that I wanted to believe were from him, but I also didn’t want to kid myself.
In the middle of January, in an effort to break out of my depression, to somehow jump-start my life, I threw myself into my art. I decided that if I got a proper studio, I could work. Maybe the problem was that I was trying to create at home, which held memories of Andrew. I needed someplace new, clean, free of him.
A gallery owner who wanted to see my next batch of work for a planned group show suggested I look into the Santa Fe Art Colony for a space. Which is how I met Steve, by renting part of his studio from him. We became friends through the conversations we had at the end of our work sessions. Or his work sessions, I should say. The change of venue hadn’t done anything to change my mood or lift the block I was in. How could I create when I was feeling so dead?
Then the fantasies of driving my truck off a cliff began. Wonderful, exultant crashes of glass and steel, me crumpling within, the sea taking over, pulling the truck and me under, and tearing us up on the hard sand floor. The Awakening’s ending with an L.A. twist—driving instead of walking into the ocean.
I started going for long drives along the PCH. It was annoying how hard it was to find a place to drive off. I realized that the places I’d seen in movies, commercials, and magazines of craggy, terrifying cliffs at the edge of Highway 1 were all farther up the coast. That was where the drive-off points that I needed were, high above the surf with sharp rocks below and water swirling in and around, an evil accomplice with an undertow. Malibu and Ventura had nothing as dramatic and lethal as that. So I went through the motions of life while silent and graphic auto-suicides played over and over in my mind. But it was better than the constant thoughts of Andrew. Kind of.
One afternoon in Steve’s loft after another very noticeable nonworking session for me and lots of productivity for him, he and I were drinking the green tea he had made and sitting quietly in the large concrete space’s fading light. The February day was pressing against the tall windows, its cold gray a match for the color of the floor. Steve was smoking a cigarette, and I was battling with myself about whether to ask him for one. If I was going to drive off a cliff, why worry about lung cancer?