Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  He obliged her, removing the squarish plastic frames. Now that was better. “Have you ever thought of getting contact lenses so we can see how handsome you actually are?”

  He smiled and blushed, exquisitely embarrassed. “I have them, but they hurt my eyes.”

  “When did you come here from Puerto Rico?”

  “When I was thirteen.”

  “Oh, so you went to high school here?”

  “Bronx Science.”

  She beamed. “My brother went to Bronx Science! I went to Cardozo. Did you have Mr. Levy with the cauliflower growth on his neck for chemistry?”

  “I did!” He smiled broadly. “I loved that guy. How do you know about him?”

  “My brother!”

  “Oh, right.”

  They were both quiet for a second. She felt an incredible surge of identification with and affection for him. “So—tropical, huh?”

  He nodded soberly. “Tropical.”

  Tropical was not really her bailiwick. “You’ve read about the dengue outbreaks in Cuba?” she ventured.

  “Yeah, and Castro trying to blame the U.S.” He laughed.

  But she couldn’t really focus on a talk about tropical. She was still wired up from the meeting that morning, and even from the brief volley with Faye. “Health is a shark pit,” she said.

  His eyes widened, confused. “Health?”

  “Health. Health. The DOH.”

  “Oh!”

  “Lauren St. Hilaire hates my guts. Did you see the way she was looking at me in that meeting?”

  Hector grinned slightly. “Well, you kind of hijacked her presentation.”

  Her mouth fell open. She was shocked and a touch offended, then suddenly amused. “You really think so?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s—it’s—” He was flustered now. “You had a good idea, but she was getting to the same idea, I think.”

  “I hate how slow people are with their ideas,” she nearly barked at him. He popped back in his seat. “Spit it out! Spit it out! Let’s save time. The more time we save, the more we can do.”

  He laughed uncomfortably. “I know, but—”

  But. She suddenly felt affectionate, playful toward him again. “You have a girlfriend?” she asked.

  “A what?”

  “A girlfriend. A girl. Friend.”

  “Uh. Not right now.”

  “You like girls?”

  He was squirming, and she liked it! How far could she take him? She had no interest in her food. If anything, she wanted a drink. Also, she had to go back to the office and make sense of that flowchart she’d been diagramming during the meeting and bring it in to Renny. Should she call Renny right now, from the payphone, tell him to set some time aside for her this afternoon? Oh, wait, shit, but Emmy! Serendipity at three o’clock! How much work could she get done between now and three?

  “I—” Still squirming. “I’m too busy for that right now,” he said. “I wanna publish.”

  “You wanna publish?” she cried. “You’re too young to publish.”

  “I’m ambitious!”

  “I can see that! Okay, fine, you wanna publish, I’ll help you publish. Don’t worry about it, Bronx Science guy.”

  Now he finally smiled. “Thank you,” he said. She let the fish off the hook. Their food came. He ate with gusto, but she barely picked at hers. She felt like she was losing hold of her thoughts; they were running ahead of her now just a bit too fast, and she didn’t like the feeling it gave her. A few times, she felt an urge to cry, but she pushed it back.

  Hector looked up at her. “You’re not eating.”

  “I’m not hungry at all,” she said. “I’m thinking about my daughter, Emmy. I don’t do enough for her.”

  They left the restaurant. On Canal Street, they passed a vendor selling Hello Kitty dolls. “I’m buying one for Emmy,” she said. But she ended up buying five of them, each in a different color, and hauling them away in a black plastic garbage bag, the only bag the vendor had. She slung the bag over her shoulder like Santa Claus.

  “You want me to carry those?” Hector asked.

  “No, I’m fine,” she said, barreling through the sidewalk crowd. Back at the office, she dumped the bag, picked up the flowchart from the meeting, stalked into Renny’s office. He was sitting there going over something with Lauren.

  She pulled up a seat. “Can you just give me five minutes?”

  Renny and Lauren looked at her, stunned. And a little scared. “Ava, we’re in the middle of a meeting,” Renny said.

  “I want five minutes of your time.” She stabbed her pad with her pen. “I have a way we can get three times as much out of that meeting in probably half the time. It’s just a process issue.”

  “Okay, Ava,” Renny said—why so gently? That was annoying. “But not now.”

  Lauren glanced at Renny. “Ava,” she ventured.

  “Ava what? Are you angry at me because I stole your thunder in the meeting? Because if you are, I’m sorry. The idea just came to me and I came out with it.”

  “No, Ava,” Lauren said, her voice firm and loud now. “I’m worried that you’re cycling.”

  She sat straight up in her seat. She made a high, indignant sound. She laughed sharply. “You’re worried that I’m cycling? That I’m cycling? No, Lauren, you’re pissed off about the meeting, so you’re going to say instead you’re worried that I’m cycling, when you well know that I was diagnosed unipolar, not bipolar.”

  “Ava,” Renny said, “I think that, in retrospect, you’ve been ramping up for the past two weeks, and now you’re cresting.”

  With a Herculean effort, she sat back in her seat, said not a word. Then, slowly, with excruciating enunciation: “Even if I am, this”—again, she tapped the pen on her pad—“is a better way to do things.”

  Renny and Lauren looked at each other helplessly—how infuriating! “Fine,” Renny said. “We’ll go over it. But not now.”

  “Aw, c’mon, Renny, all I wanted was five minutes!” God, she just sounded like a girl from Queens! She stood up, pad in hand, and walked out. She heard Renny mutter to Lauren: “I have to call Sam.”

  That stopped her cold. She could not see Sam go through the torment he had gone through a year ago. She stepped back into Renny’s office. “Don’t you dare call Sam, Ren,” she all but shouted. “That is not showing concern for us.”

  She stalked back toward her office, well aware that Mrs. Conti and the rest of the support staff had heard her and were tracking her, peering over their fucking glasses as they typed. She stopped at Hector’s closet. “I’m going to my office and closing the door and getting some shit done before I go meet my daughter,” she announced.

  He looked up. She noticed he was looking through the Kaposi’s briefs Blum had brought in earlier. “Okay,” he said. “Are you okay?”

  She put a hand on her hip. “Do you know what I hate, Hector? I hate when people see good, energetic impatience—when they see a touch of activism in the middle of a fucking ossified bureaucracy—and they want to pathologize it because it scares them. Because it means they might have to get off their own fucking asses and actually get something done. And it sounds like—already! even though you know what I’m about—you see me that way, too. You’re scared of me.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he said. But she could see the briefs trembling in his hand.

  She stared at him good and hard. Her affectionate and aggressive feelings toward him were all mixing in her head confusingly. She wanted to cry. Instead, she thought, He is literally sitting here in a closet. That was hilarious to her. “I hope you know you’re literally in the closet,” she said. Then she was horrified. Had she just said that?

  He turned pale. His mouth opened. “I’m not in the closet,” he said, but it came out a croak, barely audible.

&nb
sp; She held her stare. Voices in her head were telling her to continue to taunt him, but something else broke through. A tender voice told her to spare the boy. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Hector,” she said.

  She got back to her office and closed the door. Her fat folder awaited her. She had exactly eighty minutes until she had to leave to meet Emmy. Certainly she could better use that time if she outlined precisely how to use it, how much time to spend on each thing. She flipped her yellow pad to a fresh page, drew a box at the top. “Chinatown Project,” she wrote. “Crunch follow-up data. Call Ben Eng. Spreadsheet format!” And so on like that. Thirty minutes later, she’d completed her outline and was ready to execute it with her remaining fifty minutes. Someone knocked on the door. It was Blum.

  She gave him a stern look. “I’m trying to knock off about eight things before I go meet Emmy.”

  He came in, shut the door, sat down and leaned in a bit toward her. “Aves, everybody’s worried about you,” he said.

  She paused. She gave a helpless, bitterly amused laugh. She laid her palms flat and open on the table before her. “Blum, I can’t win this one, can I? Every bit of passion or oomph I ever show from now on will be judged through the lens of last year, won’t it? If I’m not tamped down with so much lithium I can barely think straight, I’m just a ticking time bomb around here, right?”

  He laughed. Thank God somebody could still laugh at her in the way she wanted! “No, sweetheart,” he said. “No one’s been doing that. It’s the past week or so. You’ve been different.”

  “Blum—” Her voice broke. “Blum, I’ve been feeling good.” She started crying; she could do that around Blum. “I’ve had energy, I’ve had ideas. Don’t take it away from me.”

  “But, Aves.” He leaned forward more. “Look at yourself. You’re crying. Do you really feel good right now?”

  “I’m feeling. I’m feeling. Okay?”

  He sighed, shook his head. “Would you just call Vikram and talk about the lithium? You want me to do it with you now?”

  “I told you I have a million things to do before I go meet Emmy.”

  “You’re meeting Emmy soon?”

  “We meet every Wednesday at three at Serendipity.”

  “Why don’t you take a Valium now, then?”

  “I will consider taking one,” she said. But Blum just sat there. “You are not doing directly observed therapy with me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  Blum stood up, all six feet two inches of him. He was a boy from Midwood; they understood each other. “I know you hate that you have this thing,” he said. “But you have to think about keeping yourself and your family safe.”

  “Safe!” she snorted.

  “We all get crap to deal with, and this is yours, Aves,” he said in a suddenly sharper voice. “Be a grown woman.”

  Blum left, closing the door behind him. She cried. She knew the good times were coming to an end. She should be heading uptown, she thought. But she kept tweaking the damn outline she’d made so she could fully implement it in the morning. There they were, the tears and the anxiety wrestling right alongside the exhilaration about all her plans, that lust for life, that rush. Good-bye to all that. She stuffed her yellow pad into her workbag, slung the black garbage bag of Hello ­Kittys back over her shoulder.

  On the 6 train uptown, she gave withering looks to people whose body touched hers. Finally, to a man who bumped into her, she said, “You could be more careful.”

  “Fuck you, bitch,” he said, before getting off the train.

  Her head was racing. She should take a Valium before meeting Emmy. But in the pit of her stomach, she could remember the dead Valium haze from last year, the hell getting off those things, how proud she was she hadn’t needed one in three months. Being with Emmy would calm her—it always did. She never took her illness out on her child. They were going to have fun today!

  She stepped into Serendipity. There was Emmy, sitting on a white chair, alone at a white table, waiting for her, her dark, curly hair pulled back in barrettes that were woven with pink and blue ribbons. Her Trapper Keeper was in front of her, with the big pink sticker letters on the front spelling out MILLY (Emmy short for M., M. short for Milly.) She smiled when she saw her mother, showing a mouthful of braces. Then, when she noticed her mother was hauling a black plastic garbage bag, the smile disappeared. Her eyes hazed over with fear.

  But Ava didn’t see that. She barreled into the restaurant, knocking down a chair with the black plastic bag. “You can’t leave a chair out in the middle of the room,” she huffed at the waitress who hurried over to pick it up. “Emmy!” Suddenly, she was leaning over, kissing Milly, who cringed—she had schoolfriends just a few tables away; she knew they were already looking over, giggling. “I come from Chinatown bearing gifts!” exclaimed Ava. One by one, she pulled the Hello Kitty dolls from the plastic bag, arranged them in an arc on the tabletop. “Aren’t they cute?”

  Her mother was cuddling up next to her, asking about her day at school, and, mmm, were they sharing a frozen hot chocolate like they usually did?

  “Yes,” said Milly, “but I have to go to the bathroom first; I’d been waiting for you to get here.”

  Walking toward the back, Milly could hear how loudly her mother was talking to the waitress, as though she wanted the whole restaurant to hear. In the back, at the payphone, Milly called her dad’s office, waited for his secretary to put him on the line. Somewhere deep down, she’d broken in two again, just as she had last year. But for now, she put herself above the shock and the humiliation and the knowledge of what the next few days (weeks? months?) would be like. (Well, actually, she thought about Francelle, and how grateful she was that Francelle was not only loving but the same person every day.)

  “You need to come to Serendipity,” she said when her father came on the line. “Mom’s breaking down again.”

  FOUR

  Boyfriends and Girlfriends

  (1992)

  There it was on the plate, in a pool of syrup, a final fat blueberry that had escaped the finished pancake. Milly speared it with her fork and raised it to Jared’s lips.

  “You have it,” she said.

  “No, Millipede, you have it.”

  Milly held the blueberry between her lips, leaned forward, and shared it with Jared—the two of them laughing as they each bit the berry to pull away their half, kissing all the while. The entire transaction took just seconds; they were certainly not the kind of people to engage in ostentatious and drawn-out public displays of affection. But the whole affair had caught the eye of the mid-fortysomething woman sitting across from them in the restaurant, who turned to her companion, another fortysomething woman.

  The first woman said, “I don’t think I can do any more Sunday brunches at this place.”

  Her friend looked moderately alarmed. “Why? We love this place.”

  “I can’t watch another beautiful, bedheaded Gen-X couple come in here with their whole drowsy Sunday vibe of we-just-had-amazing-sex-and-now-we’re-going-to-drowsily-walk-around-the-Chelsea-Flea-holding-hands-before-we-go-home-and-have-more-sex.”

  To which her friend laughed. “Oh, them,” she said. “Yes, I’d noticed them.”

  “You just missed the blueberry make-out trick, unfortunately.”

  Her friend glanced the way of Milly and Jared. “I don’t think they’ll make it to marriage,” she said.

  Friend #1’s eyes narrowed. Now they were playing one of their favorite single-friends games: Prognosticate the Fate of the Happy Couple before You. “Why not?”

  “Look at him!” Friend #2, the harder-bitten of the duo, exclaimed. “Have you watched him run his hands through his lush head of hair? He’s so full of himself. He’ll get tired of her. She’s too needy. You can tell.”

  “Oh, nooo,” said Friend #1. “You have not been sitting from my vantage point. He’s cra
zy about her. I saw the doggy eyes.”

  And on and on they went, and how amusing and perhaps disconcerting it might have been for Jared and Milly if they could have heard the prognostications made about them by two lonely strangers in a crowded Sunday brunch spot. But this wasn’t the case, and Milly and Jared sailed out of the Chelsea nouveau diner as bedheadedly as they’d arrived, back out into the garbage-scented steam of their first postcollegiate New York summer. They were on this side of town, and not in the East Village, because they were meeting friends from school at a new park along the Hudson for some sort of Frisbee/picnic thing, hastily arranged the day before via a batch of messages left on answering machines. This was their life now, Jared having achieved his goal of Milly and hence free to pursue his myriad other goals, and Milly forever glancing over her shoulder, trying to identify the shape-shifting unease that cast a shadow over their happiness.

  At any rate, when they arrived at the picnic, they met someone they’d never seen before, a brunette commanding the crowd on a cluster of blankets under one of the few trees on the pristine grassy expanse. Her name was Kyla: tall and skinny, dark curly hair just as riotous as Milly’s own, faintly olive skin and an assertive nose, a skeptical midwest drawl, and ten toenails painted deep red like Chiclets glinting on perfect, bare feet. She was a fact-checking friend of Colleen’s from Vanity Fair, but she was really a writer who woke at six each morning to work on her novel before heading to work.

  When Milly and Jared arrived, the gang was discussing Václav Havel’s resignation as president of Czechoslovakia. The conversation devolved into puns on his name.

  “Václav Havel resigns wearing a—” Kyla paused. “Sparkly balaclava.” Her fey lisp and her timing were flawless. Everyone laughed. Those were the first words spoken by Kyla that Milly ever heard.

  Colleen introduced them. “Kyla, this is Milly and Jared.”

  “Oh!” Kyla pealed with delight. “This is the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner of the new millennium you told me about! So nice to meet you.”

  She sat up on the blanket and crawled forward a few paces to shake their hands, which was when Milly spied the breasts peeking from beneath Kyla’s shoulder-strapped vintage green floral sundress: two small but wickedly full, darkly nippled orbs that all but whistled from their shadows, Why, hello, Millicent! Milly felt that feeling she had felt periodically since she was twelve and acted on only twice, in college, and not very deftly at that: girl desire. Her eyes caught Kyla’s; the glint was unmistakable. But wait? Was Kyla conferring the same glint on Jared?