Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “Oh my God, this is amazing!” Milly exclaimed, flipping through the 224 pages. “Look at you, you glamorpuss.”

  In the cover photo on the back, Kyla leaned forward seductively into the frame, a black jersey falling off her shoulders . . . and there was that ankh pendant again! And there was Kyla again on the cover, just half her face this time, with Learning spelled out in coke lines against a black background and Breathe spelled out in Zen-like black stones against a white background. (Then, in quiet, small letters, An Early Memoir.) Milly snuck a look at the book’s first line, after the copyright page and quote page (from The Little Prince, she noted). The first line was: “Before I breathed, I screamed.” Hoo boy, Milly thought.

  “I am so fucking proud of you, Kylaboo,” she said.

  “You skipped the dedication page,” Kyla said coyly, her eyes on the road.

  Milly turned to it. “For Milly,” it read, “who buzzed me in.”

  Milly looked at Kyla, who, eyes on the road, snuck a wary sidelong glance at her. Milly thought about that night two years ago—how enraged she had been! How close she had been to telling Kyla simply to go to hell and slamming down the phone! But what Jared had always called her basic Milly-ness, what she thought of as her pushover suckerness, had prevailed, and now here Kyla was, thanking her publicly by name for all the world to see, basically saying that Milly’s decision that night had sort of been the pivotal event in her life . . . the event that had brought her from abject drug use to this: looking gorgeous; with a lovely boyfriend Milly had yet to meet but would shortly; exuding a peace of mind that, Milly had to concede, was slightly puzzling and maybe even a bit suspect because it involved an ankh, but, well, there it was, it could not be denied. And Kyla really did seem to have her shit together; she’d made the down payment on a tiny little house in Silver Lake with her book advance.

  “It’s a good thing I buzzed you in that night, or I might not have gotten the dedication page.” Milly laughed.

  “I know,” Kyla said. “But you did buzz me in, sweetheart. Because you’re Millicent Sophie Heyman, angel of mercy.”

  Milly blushed and put her hand over Kyla’s hand on the stick shift. Then they drove in silence for quite a bit, listening to “Andres.” Milly felt incredibly happy—happy to be in L.A. underneath all that sun, having a reprieve from New York’s brutal winter. She felt happier than she’d felt in quite a while, even during her happiest moments with Esther the past few months. As for Kyla’s ankh pendant, she thought—whatever! What did it matter? Whatever worked!

  At Kyla’s adorable little new house, Milly met Kyla’s boyfriend of the past eight months, Christian, a film editor from England who, like Kyla’s old boyfriend Laith, was slim and pretty and had floppy Edwardian hair, but, unlike Laith, was quiet and sweet and not peremptory. Christian talked self-deprecatingly about being one of about two hundred editors on James Cameron’s movie about the Titanic, which was probably going to end up being the most expensive movie of all time. Christian also adored Kyla; there was a moment when Kyla was reading aloud a snippet of her own Publishers Weekly review, in a comically theatrical voice—“a bracing tonic after the navel-gazing narcissism of Elizabeth Wurtzel!”—and Christian, Milly noted, beamed with pure delight and devotion at Kyla as she read.

  This moved Milly, and gave her a pang, too. Jared would sometimes look at her that way, and she had found it rather puppyish and suffocating, whereas now, Esther—well, Esther seldom looked at her. Esther had said, “Let’s not feel like we have to be cheerleaders for each other’s work; let’s let those be parallel universes.” But the problem was Milly had already read a great deal of Esther’s work, so it came up all the time, and Esther certainly didn’t seem averse to discussing it when it did, whereas the first time Esther had seen some of Milly’s work hung up at Milly’s apartment, and again at the tiny studio space in downtown Brooklyn that Milly shared with three other artists, she had said, “The best gift I can give you on your work is not to comment on it and let that be entirely yours.” Which, at the time, had made sense to Milly, except that—well, couldn’t Esther say something about it? Every time Esther stared at it and said nothing, merely squeezed Milly’s butt and said something cryptic like “You have ideas,” Milly had inner paroxysms of dread. Did Esther hate it?

  “How’s your mom, Millipede?” Kyla asked when Christian had stepped out for a bit.

  Milly sighed. “She’s okay.” She paused, sipping the chai Kyla had made her. (If this were the old Kyla, she’d thought, they’d certainly have cracked open a bottle of red by now, but there was no alcohol in the house. Kyla had met Christian at AA, so he didn’t drink, either.)

  “She’s amazing, actually,” Milly continued. “I mean, the poor woman is so tamped down on meds, it really messes with her focus and energy, and yet she manages to run that residence and keep raising money for it and increasing services. I think she might open another branch uptown. It’s so funny. You know when she was at the Health Department, the AIDS activists would protest her with, like, her head on a stick with a witch’s hat, like in effigy, and now she’s, like, the Liz Taylor of downtown Manhattan!”

  Kyla laughed. “She’s amazing.” A pause. “I think so much about John Russell.” He was a playwright friend of theirs who’d died the prior year of AIDS. “Thirty-one years old. Isn’t that the cruelest?”

  “I know.”

  “I read that some new drugs are in development that are really promising.”

  “I know. My mother talks about them all the time. She has some clients in trials for them. The ones who can stay off drugs, that is.”

  Kyla went mmm knowingly.

  They fell into a comfortable silence for a few moments. Milly’s eyes fell on a photo of a cute little girl in a striped sundress held with a magnet to the refrigerator.

  “Oh my God, is that Blanche?” she asked. Blanche was Kyla’s niece in Menlo Park, a picture of whom Milly hadn’t seen in years.

  “That’s Blanche!” Kyla said, beaming. “Isn’t she adorable and so pretty?”

  “She is,” Milly conceded. “But do you know something? I don’t think I’ll ever have children.” As soon as Milly said it, she was surprised at how the thought had simply flown out of her mouth, unbidden.

  Kyla laughed. “Why? Have you actually been thinking about that?”

  “I’m afraid of having what my mother has.”

  Kyla sighed and put her hand over Milly’s. “Honey, I know you are. But you’ve never shown any signs that you do. Usually, you know, there are signs, even in childhood, right? Hyperactivity and childhood depression. You didn’t have any of that, did you?”

  “I had my share of childhood depression.”

  “Of course you did! Look what you went through with your mom. But, sweetie”—and Kyla laughed softly, maybe with a tinge of her old jealousy—“you are one of the most stable, even-keeled people I know.”

  Kyla had said this to her many times before. Sure, when you compared Milly with people like Kyla and her mother, it was true. But what a pain in the ass it was being the stable, even-keeled one! When do I get to be the mess and have people take care of me? Milly thought.

  But she didn’t say that. She just said: “I mean, why take the chance? Why go through the pain of watching someone you brought into this world go through the pain of going through that?”

  “Sweetie, look at the pain we’ve both been through,” said Kyla. “And we’re not even thirty!” Milly laughed a bit in spite of herself. “Would you rather not have been born than go through it?”

  “Hmm,” Milly said. “Now that’s a tough one.”

  Later that night, right after midnight, they were at the extremely burnt-orange-looking Rat Pack–era Dresden Room, in a banquette with Christian and a handsome screenwriter friend of his named Fabrice and Fabrice’s girlfriend, Sonya, a handbag designer from St. Louis. Milly, Kyla, and Christian dra
nk Pellegrino and Fabrice and Sonya drank martinis. Milly looked around; it was all about trying to look like Pulp Fiction these days, she noticed, the guys in their white spread-collar shirts underneath black jackets, the women with their Uma Thurman blunt cuts. The singing duo, Marty and Elayne, were noodling ridiculously over their synthesizer to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”

  Milly, bobbing her head, threw an affectionate look at Kyla, as though to say, This is so cheesy, I love it! But she caught Kyla’s eyes following the arc of someone’s path in the club, a path that led right to the banquette, and suddenly Kyla was exclaiming, “Oh my God! Well, hi, guys!”

  Milly turned—and felt the blood drain from her face. There was Jared with his New York high school friends Asa and Jeremy. What on earth was he doing here? Was this some kind of a setup? Had Kyla said something to the boys? Would Kyla do something like that to her?

  But Milly made the snap decision to try to deal with the situation like an adult. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed to Jared, trying to sound cheerful—or at least not dismayed. “I didn’t know you were here this weekend.”

  “I didn’t know you were here,” he said. He’d grown his hair out. He looked—older? Just a bit—thicker? Sadder? Milly couldn’t quite determine. He was wearing his dad’s maroon corduroy Pierre Cardin jacket from the 1970s. Milly felt her whole body prop up in the banquette.

  “I—” Jared fumbled. “Jeremy just moved out here.”

  “I knew that!” Kyla said, eyes wide, standing up to kiss hello Jared and the boys. “I’d heard that!”

  There was dead silence around the banquette for a moment, then everyone laughed ridiculously to dispel the awkwardness. “Well,” Kyla continued. “Are—did you guys just get here? Do you want to join us?” Kyla started bumping Christian, Fabrice, and Sonya to the left, opening up the right flank of the banquette. Milly had no choice but to bump to the left as well, and soon Jared was sliding in beside her, right up against her—oh God, she could smell that bacon-y smell of his!—with his boys to his right. Jared didn’t kiss her, didn’t touch her.

  “Hi,” he told her. “Uh, I had no idea you were going to be here this weekend.”

  “I had no idea, either,” she said. “I mean, I had no idea you’d be here.”

  Asa and Jeremy were saying hello to her now, asking about her mom and dad—they’d known her since junior high school, as had Jared. They got talking about New York friends and what they were doing now. She was sort of talking over Jared, who, when he wasn’t talking over her to ask Kyla about L.A., was fairly quiet. Their jawlines were in near proximity at a strange angle. She glanced awkwardly at him; their eyes briefly met and she saw that same flash of sadness again, or was it anger? His thigh, pressed against her own in the too-crowded banquette, flooded her with memories of his body, of the different ways their bodies had fit together. Already, she could see Kyla settling back into conversation with Fabrice and Sonya, Asa and Jeremy back into each other.

  It was just too loud and too difficult to maintain conversations across the banquette. They would have to talk.

  “When are you here till?” she asked him.

  “Monday. I’m flying back with Asa Monday morning, then I have to go back and work on MFA apps.”

  “You’re applying to art school? I didn’t know.” Of course she didn’t know that; they hadn’t been in touch. “Oh, wow. That’s so great. Where?”

  “Yale, Columbia, Chicago, NYU. That’s it.”

  “That’s it? That’s a lot!”

  “I know. I’ve been crazy pulling it all together.”

  “I’m sure!”

  Then they instantly fell into a miserable black hole of silence.

  “Well,” she continued, “I’m really glad to hear you’re applying.”

  “Yeah.” Jared shrugged. “How about you? How’s your work?”

  “It’s good, it’s good. I like my new place. The light is great.”

  “That’s good.” He sounded severe saying it. He doesn’t want to hear about my new place that I ditched him for, Milly thought. “How’s your mom and dad?”

  “They’re good.” She laughed. “They were going to dinner at Blue Ribbon tonight.”

  He laughed, too. “So trendy.”

  “That’s exactly what I told them! And my mom is—she’s very busy, but she’s good. She’s . . . stable.”

  “That’s good.”

  Milly could feel herself sinking into a miasma of sadness. How many nights had he sat with her, lay with her, while she bitched and cried and anguished over her mom? How many times had he told her that she had to take care of herself and not get caught up in her mom’s madness, while never saying a mean word about Ava? How many times had he chatted amiably with Ava when Ava called and Milly was out, or in the shower?

  “How’re your folks?” she asked.

  He nodded slowly, as though to say good. “They can’t wait to get back to Long Island when winter’s done.” He meant Montauk, where their summerhouse was. All the days and nights at that house, Milly recalled: the sketching on the beach, the sex on the washing machine in the pantry while his folks went to buy fish and corn for dinner. His hand was lingering not three inches from her own. She desperately wanted to take it—the impulse was overwhelming, maddening; she could feel her own hand twitching to jump, her gaze flicking back hopelessly to the curve of his jaw, the hereditary faint dark circles under his brown eyes that falsely gave him the air of fatigue.

  “How’s your work?” he asked her, as though reading her mind.

  “Oh! Oh, it’s good,” she said. She actually meant it. She’d been very productive in the past few months; she certainly couldn’t complain about that.

  “How’s the big canvas with the—you know, with the impasto—the flowerlike things?”

  “Oh, it’s beautiful, thank you!” she said. How weirdly formal this was! But she could remember Jared’s excitement about that painting when she started it. “I finished it; I think it’s going to be in a group show in a few months.”

  He smiled with the same tints of melancholy and resentment. “That’s great.”

  Under the table, Kyla squeezed her knee, a supportive gesture. Marty and Elayne were finishing up “Time after Time.” Then, impossibly, they began “The End of a Love Affair,” a Billie Holiday song Milly had loved on a mix tape Jared had made her.

  She and Jared looked at each other helplessly, then started laughing. What else could they do? Jared rubbed his head in his hands.

  Milly turned to Kyla, who looked—wait, that first instinct had been right—didn’t she look a bit smug and triumphant? Still laughing, but perhaps with some rage seeping in, Milly asked, “Kyla, honestly, did you plan this? Did you stage this?”

  Kyla gasped. “What? Did I stage this? Are you kidding me? Millipede, I have a life, too.”

  But, strangely, Milly could feel her rage growing. “It’s just the kind of thing you would do.” Had she really just said that?

  “Mill, come on,” Jared said, but she ignored him, continuing to stare at Kyla, who looked startled, said nothing.

  “Milly . . .” Kyla began. “Yes, Jeremy told me Asa and Jared were visiting this weekend. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  Milly’s eyes narrowed. “But you told them to come here.”

  “Milly, I most certainly did not tell them to come here.”

  “Milly, she didn’t,” Asa popped in.

  Kyla continued: “I told them we’d probably take you to the Dresden Room one night to see Marty and Elayne, because that’s what every­one does with their friends who are visiting.”

  “And, Milly,” Jeremy said, “I did not tell Jared you were in town.”

  “He didn’t,” Jared said flatly.

  “I didn’t want to twist his head all weekend,” Jeremy said. “But, I mean, come on, I had to show these guys Marty and E
layne. They’re an L.A. institution.”

  Milly crumpled back down in resignation, bewilderment.

  “It’s just so hard, Mills,” Kyla began, “with friends and . . .” Kyla shrugged, gestured helplessly at Jared, who shrugged in turn.

  They all just sat there. Will this song ever end? Milly thought. This was torture. Finally, she said, “I think I really need to go to the bathroom.” Jeremy, Asa, and Jared all had to get out of the banquette for her, a process that was prolonged and awkward.

  “You want me to come?” Kyla called. Milly shook her head no as she walked away.

  She didn’t go to the bathroom, though. She walked outside, went and sat on a bench down at the corner of the block. If she still smoked, she’d have smoked now. But she didn’t smoke anymore. She just sat there. First she thought how it was true, nobody walked in L.A., because the streets were all but empty except for people getting in and out of cars.

  Why had she just gotten up and walked out? Because she was angry. Paranoid, she felt Kyla and the boys had conspired to put her and Jared back together. How hard she had worked to have a life apart from Jared! She thought of her apartment in Park Slope, of the pride she’d taken in every piece of furniture or old rug or painting or plant she’d hauled in there from off the street or a thrift shop or her parents’ house. She thought about Jake and Frodo, the cats, lolling around, pressing against the calves of her jeans while she painted. And she thought about the light that came in from the back windows that faced the landlord’s garden, that dusty amber light that floated in the room over her head while she painted, purring to herself over the absolute depth of the paint colors and Leonard Cohen on her little, unfussy CD player, and the smell of the roasted chicken she had in the oven while she painted, the red wine she’d drink with her girlfriends at her very own table that night while they ate the meal. And also how she’d spared no expense on her bed—the best fluffy-white pillows and comforter, the lovely duvet cover, and the quilt her grandmother had knitted—Jake and Frodo settling in around the crooks of her knees when she went to bed at night, a stack of about six books she was reading simultaneously right beside her. She had wanted this life, Milly’s Life Alone, and she had wrapped herself in it completely.