Free Aftermath of Dreaming by DeLaune Michel Page A

were young and the topic of future possible summer jobs came up. “Babysitting is just fine.” Then he walked out of the room to go to his work shed to make another musical instrument, and that meant the subject was at an end. But I was all the way up north, it wasn’t waitressing, and anyway, Daddy had been out of my life for four years at that point.
    Andrew was sitting at one of a line of tables that jutted out from awall of windows shimmering with the gold-draped chains that the restaurant used instead of blinds. Two catty-corner walls were of this: panels of glass sheathed with swings of delicate gold chains one on top of another, like a totem pole of invisible necks, the chains swinging and swaying against one another, then flinging their shine across the room to echo upon the opposite no-gold walls. Against this backdrop, Andrew sat. With two women. One was a famous actress; both were horrifically beautiful. He was on one side of the table; they were on the other.
    The air around them seemed stunned. It created a special space; the molecular makeup of their force field was clearly different from that of the other diners—as if the air itself realized it was too coarse in its natural form for them, so had transmuted itself finer and sweeter for their delicate intake. Everyone could see this. The captain of their table, Jurgos, practically gasped each time he penetrated the circumference surrounding them, knowing instinctively that the air he needed to breathe was not like their own.
    It was into this atmosphere that I was asked (told, really) to carry a phone—this being 1987. Something about a call and Bonnie Davis, a name I also recognized, but even if I hadn’t, the urgency and importance with which Seamus, the Irish maître d’, commanded me to do this—his brogue, already usually thick, now running all over itself—signaled its unusual significance. Which I found odd. Henry Kissinger, the Kennedys, and have-different-last-names-but-still-somehow-are-Kennedys, and all the New York gods ate here regularly, so why some silly movie star, for Christ’s sake, was putting Seamus into such a state, I had no idea.
    The dining room was full. It was a Saturday night, late August, meaning the habitués were in the Hamptons. The city cleared each summer weekend, and that was my favorite time. Getting off work at the end of the night—eleven, if I came on at four; twelve, if I started at five—I would walk most of the distance home. Set out on Park Avenue, but usually, quickly, take one of the blocks over to Madison or Fifth. Those were the best. They were deserted; literally, quite empty. Often I would walk in the middle of Fifth Avenue so I could see the odd bus or cab approaching as Iheaded downtown, and the buildings stood on each side of me like tall adults surrounding a child’s first solo stroll, ready to reach out and hold me, if I were to fall. They felt mine in that dark, in that late-hour coolness, in that emptiness and uselessness they had at just those moments in time. Summer weekend nights made Manhattan a different country that I was able to enter by the sheer act of being there. I’d walk up Fifth, turn west at the park, and continue on, walking on the building side, passing the doormen at the restaurants and apartment buildings and hotels.
    They were fighting when I got to the table. I was carrying the phone, the black streamlined (I think that model is called) phone with the funny push buttons on the receiver that were small and round and protruded like so many pegs. The dining room had the hushed buzz it would get—the vibrations of the diners’ hopes and needs and desires and fears all rising, moving up over their heads until each voice met and mingled with the buzz of the others already there, then the hush would step in, blending them all together, and the gold swinging chains caught so many verbs and nouns that the words lay on them like