by Tim Murphy
“Good-bye, baby.” He took a final drag off his cigarette, flicked it out the window, and leaned over to kiss her dutifully on the lips. “Get back in there safe, okay.”
The final crush. She could feel tears welling in her eyes, so she turned quickly and stepped out of the car. She made a point of not looking back as she walked toward the corner of Hudson and King Streets. She would just go inside and find Tavi and forget that had ever happened.
She was approaching the rather forbidding-looking bouncer, a muscular black man with a yellow Mohawk, to ask politely if she could reenter the club, when Tavi’s handsome, nerdy friend walked out of the club.
“Issy!” he called to her. He remembered her name, and she felt bad for having forgotten his. “You waiting for Tavi?”
She wondered if he could tell how disoriented and jangled she felt, between the lingering druggy feeling and the prior moment’s encounter. “Huh?” she asked. “Oh. Well, I’m going back in to find Tavi. I needed to get some air.”
He peered more closely at her behind his glasses. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I just really needed some air.”
He studied her a moment longer. “Well, come on,” he finally said, putting an arm around her. “I’ll go back in and help you find him.”
“But you were leaving, right?”
“It’ll only take a minute. Besides, there’s a guy I met whose number I should try to get. A little blond kid.”
“Oh, boy,” Issy managed to say. “Well, okay then, thanks.”
The bouncer, who’d witnessed this exchange, brushed them back inside. Issy couldn’t believe how crowded the club still was, even though it was now early morning. She’d certainly had enough for tonight, though. The DJ was playing something instrumental, heavy on African-sounding drums and a weird sort of flying-saucer sound. The nerdy guy reached back for her hand, which she offered, as they navigated themselves through the dancers.
She pulled him back toward her for a moment. “What’s your name again?” she shouted.
“Hector,” he shouted back. “Hector Villanueva.”
“Thank you, Hector,” she said. “You’re sweet.” This was enough, somehow, to trigger a runaway tear. All she really wanted was a sweet guy, she thought. Why was it so hard to find one?
Hector put his hands on her shoulders. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“It’s just been a crazy night.”
“Well, don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you to Tavi now and then you can get home.” He gave her an awkward little hug, as though to reassure her. Issy hugged him back and found it hard to let go.
SIX
Learning to Breathe: An Early Memoir
(1995)
At LaGuardia, waiting to board her flight to L.A., Milly made two calls. First, she called her mother, something she did pretty much every day.
“I’m exhausted,” Ava told her. “Two deaths in the house so far this month. Two lovely ladies gone.”
“That’s horrible,” Milly murmured. “I’m so sorry, Ava.” Milly mostly kept her distance from her mother’s work; it just made her too sad.
“Plus,” Ava continued, “the boiler’s on the fritz and we had to run out and buy space heaters for the entire house because you can’t have a houseful of immune-compromised women sleeping without heat in February.”
“You have to be careful, Mom,” Milly told her mother. When had she started toggling between calling her mother Mom and Ava? Probably when she was around sixteen; by that point, she’d done so much mothering of her own mother that “Ava” instead of “Mom” had started popping out of her mouth—sometimes with something like barely suppressed indignation, with a sardonic bite that felt good to the tongue, and yet sometimes tenderly, like, well, let’s face it, she was the little girl here, not Milly, and you needed to say her name gently so she heard it.
And now, often, Milly had to admit, she said Ava’s name with respect. Because for over a decade now, her mother had bitten the bullet, soldiered through the heavy doses of lithium, the weekly psychopharmacological visits, the support groups. She’d said good-bye to her own manic pleasures so she could be there for others. For whom, exactly? For the sick, the poor, the dying. By 1989, what had started as a few strange cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma had blown up into one of the worst epidemics the city had ever seen, one that seemed to prey on homosexuals and drug addicts, groups that people already shunned. Yet the city had done so little about it—for many reasons, certainly, but mainly because the city was run, everyone knew, by a closeted mayor terrified of getting his hands dirty with a gay disease.
At the end of the 1980s, Ava had finally had it with the entropy at the Health Department. She would no longer be demonized and vilified as the enemy in the AIDS epidemic; she would not stand there with that uncomfortable, hateful, oh-isn’t-this-cute smirk on her face that her colleagues put on while those angry boys—including her own former intern, for that matter—chained themselves to her desk and called her a murderer. Oh, no, Ava had told Hector after she’d finally left, that was the last straw! That’s when Ava grit her teeth and summoned all her resources and friends with money and clout and bought that run-down building on Avenue B and started Judith House, a care residence for women with full-blown AIDS. No one would ever look back on this whole thing and say she stood by, a useless bureaucrat. There was only so much more helplessness on her own part that she could tolerate.
But had Ava also bitten the bullet for her own family? For her daughter? Because even now that Ava had clamped down on her manias with heavy drugs, she still felt crappy much of the time and was a scattershot mother at best. Things had gotten a little better, but there were still a million little ways Ava let Milly know that, well, there was simply too much going on—too much sickness, too much death—for Ava to dote over Milly and her homework and her art projects the way other Upper East Side mothers did with their daughters. Sam, Daddy, was there for that. Ava was simply not that sort of mother.
But Milly had had to concede that she still needed her mommy. That was the poignant, humiliating truth of it. And since the breakup with Jared, Ava hadn’t been half bad about being there, Milly had to grant that. The Sunday dinners. The calls that had now become daily, even if they were brief, more about her mother’s travails than her own. (Because, it had to be understood, her mother’s travails were the travails of the city, while Milly’s were merely the travails of one twenty-four-year-old, middle-class woman, and they took place mostly inside her head, the venue of much quibbling and second-guessing and angst.)
So, now, the airport call to Ava. “You have to be careful, Ava,” she repeated. “You’re going to run yourself down like you did last year, then you’ll have to take a week off again and work from home and drive Daddy crazy.”
Ava laughed dimly. “I’m not staying late at Judith House tonight,” she said. “Daddy and I are going to Blue Ribbon for dinner.”
“You guys are so trendy,” Milly remarked drily.
Ava chuckled. “I suppose.” Another pause. “How’s Esther?”
Milly loved the way her mother said that: How’s Esther? In that dutiful, I’m-a-good-mom-for-acknowledging-my-daughter’s-lesbian-partner singsong. The I’m-being-such-a-good-sport-about-this-whole-lesbian-thing-and-biding-my-time-till-it-passes kind of tone.
Milly laughed. “She’s good. She’s away this weekend, too. She’s on a panel at Oberlin.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Ava said. “Is that about women and—and fiction and identity?”
Milly laughed again. “Sort of. It’s all about Willa Cather, actually, in some way.”
“Oh, that’s nice. And how about you, honey? Did you get the NYCHA grant?”
“It’s NYFA, Mom. NYFA. New York Foundation for the Arts.”
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry, NYFA, NYCHA!” NYCHA was the New York City Housing Author
ity, which Ava had to tussle with regularly.
Milly rolled her eyes. “Right. No, I haven’t heard about the NYFA grant yet. Hopefully in the next week.”
“Right.” Her mother sounded distracted. Milly could hear rowdy gals in the background, the Judith clients and staffers mixing it up, finding daily laughs amid their troubles. Her mother was probably leafing through paperwork right now, as they talked. Well, at least here they were, checking in.
“And what are you and Kyla going to do in L.A.?” her mother managed to ask.
“I don’t know!” Milly said brightly. “We’ll probably see friends. Kyla said she’d take me to see this, like, cabaret act I’ve always wanted to see—it’s a husband and wife, I guess, a really bad Steve and Eydie, who do lounge versions of Michael Jackson songs on a synthesizer at this cheesy old lounge where everybody—well, you know, like Generation-X types—goes to see them ironically, but they take themselves seriously. I’ve always wanted to see them.”
“That sounds like fun,” her mother said, but so absently that Milly knew she’d lost her mother’s tenuous attention. “And—and—” Her mother was trying to pull back into the conversation. “What about Kyla? Is her book out?”
“It comes out in a month, I think.”
“And what’s it called, again? Breathing Lessons?”
“No, that book already exists. It’s called Learning to Breathe.”
“Oh, right. It’s a novel, right?”
“It’s a memoir.”
“A memoir? She’s twenty-six years old!”
Milly laughed. “I know! Well, she’s written a memoir.”
“About her whole drug thing.”
“I think so.”
“Well, I hope she portrays you nicely. You certainly were nice to her that whole time.”
“Oh God,” Milly moaned. “I don’t even want to know if I’m in it.”
“I should hope that you are. At least a little bit. In a nice way.”
“Well, I’m sorry about your clients who died. Try not to push yourself too hard, Ava.”
They gave each other their love and ended the call. Then Milly called Esther at the place she was staying at Oberlin. “I wanted to call you before I got on the plane to L.A.,” she said, with that strange, especially girlish and delicate rush of feeling whenever she first spoke to or met up with Esther.
“I can’t talk long, Babyturnip, I’m frantically leafing through these Cather books before the panel starts at one.” Esther called her Babyturnip. Once, when they were having sex, Esther started calling her every manner of fruit or vegetable—pumpkin, kumquat, parsnip, turnip. My little turnip. And somehow, Babyturnip had stuck. On one hand, it goaded Milly just a little bit. She was sufficiently aware of her own beauty to know that she looked nothing like a turnip, and she wondered if this was Esther’s way of debeautifying her, of taking her down a peg. On the other hand, she liked it when lovers, and people in general, had a nickname for her. Jared had called her Millipede, and Kyla continued to, and she liked that nickname even though some people said that the thought of a millipede grossed them out. Not Milly, though. When people gave her a nickname, she felt that she must be special to them. So that’s why she hadn’t objected to Babyturnip.
“It’s okay, I won’t keep you long,” Milly said. She thought of Esther, spread out on the bed in faculty housing at Oberlin, her heavy dark brows knitted together, clamping a chewed-over pen between her teeth. Esther, who was thirty-eight to her twenty-four, who had short, sensible, brushed-back salt-and-pepper hair; wire-rimmed glasses perched low on her nose; generous hips underneath her overalls; a winter parka full of lecture notes, cab receipts, tobacco that she rolled into her own cigarettes—lip balm her only concession to vanity. Esther, the CUNY Grad Center professor, the prolific author of thoughtfully outraged books about women’s sexuality in an age of sexual destabilization and disease stigmatization, even a(n admittedly highly conceptual and allegorical) novel, Cantaloupe Cowgirls. Esther, who people thought was cutting and acerbic in her comments, but who really, Milly knew, was just blunt and assertive and quickly knew whom she liked and respected and whom she didn’t, and couldn’t help but show it.
How alone Milly had been only a year ago! First, Kyla went off to rehab, then she was back for only four months or so—four months of unrelenting twelve-step babble, Milly recalled wearily, though not without relief that Kyla had found some organizing principle to keep her stable. Then suddenly Kyla was off to L.A., having determined that reliably good weather was key to her mental health. Apparently more so than certain good friends, Milly thought, not entirely able to quell her feelings of abandonment.
And Jared was certainly not in Milly’s life anymore. So Milly was alone a great deal, burrowing into the comfort and safety of her Park Slope apartment. Then Esther came and spoke to the women’s book group Milly had joined in her neighborhood. Milly—Milly!—had had the gumption to ask Esther to come join the group for coffee after Esther spoke. Milly had looked plain, powerful Esther straight in the eye and leveraged every bit of beautiful-girl power she knew deep down that she had. And Esther, who had a full, complicated schedule and no time for games or the follies of a long, subtextual courtship, looked right back at her and accepted the invitation to coffee.
Pretty soon, they were having the kind of relationship that all the arty media lesbians in New York talked about, including even the kind of sex they had. The girls said that, when Milly showed up at places with Esther, Milly had the oozy glow of a straight girl who was finally getting the kind of daily working-over she’d waited her whole life for without knowing it. But honestly, Esther worked Milly over like that, oh, maybe once a week—in the past few weeks, possibly even less! Once Esther made it clear to Milly that she was capable of working her over like that—effectively putting a kind of sexual lock on Milly and distracting her from melancholy memories of Jared—Esther went back to her life baseline, which was, basically, that she was too busy to put someone else’s pleasure before her own important work. And this was actually comfortable and familiar to Milly—on one level just how things seemed like they should be—so she didn’t even think about it so much.
“I just wanted to say I’m thinking of you,” Milly told her now over the phone.
“Aw, I love you, Babyturnip,” Esther said. “I’m thinking of you, too.” Funny, that, Milly noted—Esther was talking to her in the same distracted tone her mom had used a moment ago.
“Are you really?” Milly asked coyly.
“Yes, I am,” Esther replied in the cadence of a grade-school teacher. “Are you excited about seeing Kyla?” (Esther and Kyla got along; Esther was clearly attracted to Kyla, and Kyla respected Esther’s literary success, and wanted it as well.) “It’s quite the run-up to her book launch, isn’t it? There was a half-page ad in the TBR today. That’s no small change.”
“They’re putting a lot of money behind the marketing, it’s true.”
“It’s Prozac Nation with a way out of the madness!” Esther proclaimed. Milly laughed. One thing a lot of people didn’t know about Esther was that she had a rimshot, Borscht Belt sense of humor that reminded Milly of her dad.
“Now go catch your plane, Baby-T, so I can pull these notes together, and don’t let me find out you were letting other girls nuzzle your turnip top in L.A.”
Milly laughed weakly. When Esther betrayed jealousy, she suggested only that Milly would be attracted to other women, not men. Why? Milly hadn’t brought that up, though. It was okay for Esther to bring up Jared, and how there were simply layers of Milly that he never could’ve understood or reached. But when Milly brought up Jared, Esther would murmur, in that same grade-school tone, “You know I think it’s better that you talk about Jared with your friends and not me, if you really have to talk about him.”
And Milly would nod and say, “I know, I’m sorry,” wishing she hadn’t hurt Esther an
d perhaps even distracted her briefly from her important work.
Milly read Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body on the flight because Esther had wanted her to. Now they could have good conversations about this, holding each other closely, spooning each other yogurt and berries. Then she slept and dreamed, and in the dream, walking down Avenue B with Jared toward the Christodora, Jared took her in his arms and turned up the edge to her wool cap (because it was winter in the dream) and whispered, “I love you, Millipede.” And she said clearly, in her sleep, “Jared, I miss you so much,” and woke herself up saying it, a thread of drool running out one side of her mouth.
The thirtysomething Persian-looking guy sitting next to her, in a Lakers cap, reading the Economist, glanced sidelong at her, startled, but said nothing.
She wiped her mouth, absolutely mortified and disoriented.
“Milli-peeeeeeeede!” There was Kyla, sitting inside her cherry-red VW Cabriolet, sunglasses on, waiting for her outside the terminal. Milly felt a little joyous starburst in her chest as she hurried toward Kyla, who looked amazing, her chocolaty hair cut in two soft levels, one framing her cheeks, the other curling inward around her shoulders. Thankfully, she wasn’t tan, which relieved Milly, who had a horrible idea that everyone in L.A. was roasted a blood orange. But, Milly noticed, Kyla wore an ankh pendant around her neck.
“You’re wearing an ankh!” Milly exclaimed as they embraced in the car. “So New Age of you.”
“Yeah,” Kyla said airily, “that’s my little spiritual lodestone compass type thing. Just a little something to keep me centered on this new journey.”
“Wow, you’re so West Coast now,” said Milly, which made them both laugh. Kyla was playing L7 and turned it down a bit. She gestured at a slim paperback on the dashboard.
“Check that out,” Kyla said.
Milly picked it up. It was a glossy advanced reader’s copy of Learning to Breathe with a pen in it; Kyla had been marking it up, doing final corrections.