by Tim Murphy
The girl looked blank for a minute. Then, locking on to a new depth in his eyes, her face colored. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. That night.”
“Yes.” He laughed. “That night!” He put his hand in hers. She just hid her face behind her hand and laughed quietly, mortified.
“I guess I had to be there,” Ava said.
“Oh, no, you didn’t!” the girl said. “No, no, no.”
“Well, okay, whatever,” Ava murmured. “No, no, no. Well, anyway, stick with this one”—she nodded at Hector—“and you’ll be okay.”
“I’ve known for a year now,” the girl said, “and I can’t tell my family. My father and brother will kill me.”
“Why don’t you just come back into the meeting with me?” Hector said. “You don’t have to figure everything out at once. What’s your name again? I’m Hector.”
“It’s Issy. From Ysabel. But just Issy is fine. I need advice. This doctor wants me to take AZT but I’m scared to take it after what happened to Tavi. He was so sick from it and it barely even helped him.”
Hector stood up, lifted Issy up gently under her arm. “Come into the meeting.”
Ava rose. “I’m gonna get home.” She kissed Hector on the cheek. “Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll have more intel for you on the caseworkers.”
“Thank you for coming,” Hector told her.
“Don’t thank me, that’s insulting.” Ava turned to Issy. “Stick with him,” she said again, nodding to Hector. Ava put her hand on the girl’s arm. You’ll be okay, she was about to say. But how could she really say that?
She walked out of the building into the sweet June night. Absently, her thoughts still at the meeting, she wandered into a bodega and bought a pack of gum. Gum had become a kind of soothing cud for her through all these years of medication-related misery. She stepped back outside, pulled out a stick of gum, and walked. After a few blocks, she came upon a black woman wearing flip-flops, jean shorts, and a filthy-looking old Rick James concert T-shirt, sitting on a cardboard box. The woman’s face was emaciated—she looked like Munch’s The Scream.
“You got a cigarette?” the woman asked her in a hoarse voice.
Ava’s jaw dropped. You’re sick, you shouldn’t be smoking, she was about to say. “I don’t smoke” was all she said, though.
“Well, can I have a piece of gum then?”
Ava handed a stick to the woman who, rather than unwrapping it and putting it in her mouth, tucked it away jealously in her pocket.
“Do you have any place to live?” Ava finally asked the woman, swallowing a fear she was being rude. She was always torn between her everyday New Yorker’s instinct to ignore street people and her health worker’s instinct to get real information about how city systems were working.
But the woman didn’t seem perturbed. “I don’t wanna live in no shelter,” she said. “I won’t move somewhere unless I have my own room.”
Ava took twenty dollars out of her bag and gave it to the woman. “Can you buy some food with that?”
“Ain’t you scared I’m gonna spend it on crack?” the woman asked gleefully. “Because I might!”
Ava couldn’t help but laugh with the woman. “It’s your choice, but I really hope you buy some food with it.”
The woman shrugged noncommittally. “Well, thank you,” she finally said. “That’s mighty kind of you.”
Ava smiled wanly and moved on. She knew that by going to the meeting tonight, by giving Hector that information, she’d made herself vulnerable, and that made her feel . . . free. Her own illness had enraged her. To her psychopharmacologist, to her doctors, she was a puzzle to be resolved. They had no idea of the terror she experienced taking the subway. Would she lash out at someone against her will? Or of the hell of the crash from mania, or the fear of the crash, which was almost as bad. The inner landscape of sickness was wild, roiling, and her doctors were so dry, so cold! She didn’t want to be that way.
Finally, at Union Square, she got in a cab going uptown. Idly, she watched pedestrians—and, good Lord, there was Milly, her own daughter, walking side by side with a tall, honey-haired boy. What was she doing in those saggy, fringy hippie clothes? Ava twisted around in her seat to watch them until they were out of sight. The sensation was peculiar—Milly had been home for the summer for a few weeks, but this was as though Ava was really seeing her for the first time in years. That’s because, though Ava could not articulate this, guilt had forced her to think of Milly, and even look at Milly, as little as possible. Ava knew too well that her own illness had eclipsed Milly’s growing up.
But—Milly had turned out okay, right? Graduated with all sorts of honors from high school and brought home a fine transcript from her first year of college. She was going to be an artist! Certainly the Heymans, having scratched their way from Russian peasant stock up into the New York professional classes, had never had an artist among their ranks before. That was cause for pride. And Ava was proud of Milly. But Milly also had two qualities Ava was jealous of. One was beauty. Ava had been sexy, but her looks had been muddled, a bit Streisand cross-eyed, whereas Ava’s best features had harmonized with Sam’s in Milly, who had almost Disneyish brown eyes, a delicate nose, and loose dark curls.
The other quality, part of which probably came out of the beauty, was quietude. Milly was quiet. Ava was not. Ava was loud and showboaty and got what she needed, or sometimes didn’t get what she needed, because of it. But Milly was so delicate, amused, wry! Milly had always been this way, Ava thought. It had to be the gentle, loose-curled influence of Sam, who was also quiet, forbearing. Milly’s beauty and quietude made her almost unbearable to her mother, a thought so awful that Ava wasn’t even fully aware of it.
The cab drove on, dropped her in front of her brownstone. Inside, she found Sam in front of the TV, watching the videotaped MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, his tie cast aside and his black-stockinged feet up on the coffee table. She dropped her bag on the floor, kicked off her low heels, and collapsed alongside him on the couch.
“Can I beg you for a foot rub, handsome man?” she asked.
Sam lifted her left foot in his hands and kissed it before setting to work on it. “You’re back later than usual tonight,” he noted. He’d had to stop running because of a knee problem and he’d gained fifteen pounds in the ensuing two years, but Ava found his new thickness comforting, if not exactly arousing, to the limited extent she cared about being aroused anymore.
“I went and met with the AIDS activists,” she said, then groaned in pleasure from the massage, her head falling back on a pillow.
“And how was that?”
“They reamed me. But I had it coming.”
Sam laughed gently. “You can take it. You’re a tough lady.”
She lifted her head, looked at him. “Too tough?” she asked. “Not a good person? Not a good mother?”
Sam blinked, taken aback. “Where’s this coming from?”
“I was coming uptown in the cab tonight and I saw Emmy on the street, walking with a boy. It was such a strange feeling. She looked so—” Ava paused, grasping for the word. “Foreign. To me. Like I hadn’t seen her in years. And suddenly I wondered—” Ava began to cry, feeling as though the entire evening was catching up to her. She swiveled on the couch and crawled into Sam’s chest. “I don’t know, Sam, I just got a really bad feeling and I wondered, have I—”
Sam shushed her, stroking her hair. “No, you have not,” he said firmly. “No, you have not.” She had, he thought, but he would never tell her so. What would be the point of that?
“You okay?” Jared asked Milly.
She looked up at him, put her hand in his large hand, flecked on the back with red hair. “I’m okay, just hot. Do you want to have a drink?”
They walked to the Blue and Gold on East Seventh Street. Friends of Jared’s from high school
, Asa and Jeremy, were inside, and they fed the jukebox and drank pitchers for the next several hours, listening to Fleetwood Mac and Steve Miller. Milly got drunk and felt happy and carefree for the first time in over a week. There was a long, messy conversation about George Bush and what a dickwad he was, and about how sad it was that Barbara Bush couldn’t just come out and say she was pro-choice. Around three o’clock, Milly and Jared parted in front of the bar from Asa and Jeremy, and Jared asked Milly to come to his place at the Christodora, which his dad had bought just the year before—at the bargain-basement price of $90,000, Jared noted proudly.
Milly said yes, and as they approached the entrance of the very plain, handsome, and boxy brick building that towered over Tompkins Square Park, Milly looked up at the bizarre bit of frieze work over the door, which featured eerie winged creatures, and asked, “What does Christodora mean?”
“I dunno,” Jared says. “It reminds me of Stella D’oro cookies. This building used to be, like, a settlement house in the Depression. Can you believe the city bought the whole building in the seventies for, like, fifty thousand dollars? That’s what a shithole it was.”
“The name reminds me of a Rossetti poem or a pre-Raphaelite painting,” Milly said.
Upstairs, in a dark, high-ceilinged apartment littered with dirty clothes, secondhand furniture, and art supplies, Jared pulled out pot and a pipe, then put Sinead O’Connor on his CD player.
He drew on the pipe, then held it out to Milly. “You wanna?” he asked.
Milly frowned. “I probably shouldn’t,” she said. She’d had some bad, paranoid experiences with pot the past few years. But then again, that was in groups of six, seven.
“Just have a hit.”
“Will you light it for me?” she asked.
He did, the two of them standing face to face in the middle of the dark living room. Milly felt the rush of stonedness overcome her, the confusion, the heightened sense of Jared’s body against her own. What was she doing? Jared took another hit off the pipe and put it down. The room suddenly seemed enormous, and scary, to Milly. She suffered that unfortunate effect of pot, of suddenly doubting whether she really knew whom she was with, even though she’d known Jared since she was eleven.
“Can we light candles?” Milly asked.
Jared darted away, rummaged in the kitchen, came back with about half a dozen candles and holders, lit them all. Now the room danced with shadows—theirs and that of the boxy, tweed-covered sofas and chairs. Jared came back to her and took her in his arms, pulled her hair back, tied it loosely behind her head, drew her by her nape toward his lips.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful I think you are since we were in ninth grade?”
She laughed. “That sentence came out pretty ungrammatical,” she said. She was overcome with lust, pulled Jared’s T-shirt over his head, pressed her face into the amber-colored fur on his flat chest.
“You’re so beautiful,” she said, as Jared pulled the bandanna out of her hair, which he ran his hands through, then slowly lifted her batik sleeveless jersey off her chest, her arms rising in the air. He unlatched her bra in the back, then, as she stood there with her arms out, crouched down and kissed her nipples all over until they rose.
He looked up at her, his hair wild where she’d run her hands through it. He smiled.
“I love your little crooked tooth,” she said.
“I was going to get it fixed, but now I won’t,” he said. Gently, he put her at arm’s length. “Get naked in front of me.”
She smiled. In her stonedness, Jared was both Jared and not-Jared; he was also some hot frat creep she didn’t know who scared her a little bit, and she liked this duality. She stepped out of her huaraches, out of her skirt. They both lost their smiles and stared at each other flatly. She pulled off her panties in front of him until she was naked.
Now he smiled again. “Fuck,” he said.
“Now you go,” she said.
He pulled off each dirty Chuck Taylor low-top with the toes of his other foot. He was sockless and Milly could smell the faint, sour smell of his large, sweaty feet, his toes flecked with light brown hair. He unbuttoned his Levi’s and stepped out of them, his erection tent-poling his light, paisley-patterned boxer shorts.
She laughed a little bit, raising her eyebrows. “Wowza,” she said. “Are you gonna show me the goods?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “It’s big, right?” he asked, without a hint of humor.
Milly laughed. “It looks that way. I’m a little afraid. Can I see it?”
Jared blushed, but he was clearly so proud. He pulled it out of his boxers. It was sizable and stood there, bobbing, pointed at her like a greedy weapon. Her mouth fell open; she was amazed, but also a bit scared.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s huge.”
She laughed. “Don’t be too self-deprecating or anything!”
Jared just shrugged. The chorus of the song came up. Nothing compares to you, she sang to him, then cracked up.
His face lit up. “Millicent Heyman,” he said slowly. He stepped in toward her, sang, All the flowers that you planted, Mama, in the backyard. He knelt down, put his arms around her waist, brought her down to the shag rug with him. He reached up, pulled a rough shantung roll pillow off the couch, put it behind her head. He sank below her again, his hands up over her breasts, lying on his stomach.
“Oh my God,” gasped Milly when she felt his tongue inside her. “I’m new to this rodeo.”
He looked up at her, his mouth glistening. “Really? A cunnilingus virgin?”
She giggled and nodded.
“I’ve been jerking off to this thought for about a year,” he said.
“Oh my God!” she gasped again. She was horrified and delighted. “You really had to share that with me?”
He looked up again. “After all those art classes. Looking at your picture in the freshman directory.”
“No, please tell me you haven’t,” she said. She arched her head back on the roll pillow and put her hands up to her face, but he pulled them down and held them. She lay there. Oh God. She was terrified, mesmerized. Every arrow in the world is pointing right at me, she thought. It’s like a white-hot spotlight. I don’t deserve this much attention. She writhed and moaned. It was almost as if Jared had disappeared in the dark and there was just a lapping demon on her. She felt almost unbearably uncomfortable having the world focused on her so completely like this.
She gripped his hands, choked out, “No, it’s too much.”
He gripped her hands back. “No, it’s not.”
She started crying.
He stopped and pulled up to her, head to head, brushing back her hair. “What?” he asked. “You don’t like it?”
“It’s too much.” She couldn’t believe she was crying. What a—what a wuss she was! “I don’t deserve it.” Now she was mortified. Had she really just said that? She wanted to die.
Jared laughed. “That’s the issue? Did you like it?”
“I can’t take that much pleasure. I’ll go nuts on you.”
His face lit up again. “I want you to. Such a good girl.”
“You don’t really know me,” she told him. She was fully stoned now and had no idea what she was saying. “I can’t lose control.”
He sighed a bit. “I might know you more than you think,” he said.
“No, you don’t.”
He ran a finger around her lips, over her nose. “People show themselves,” he said.
This possibility truly dismayed her. Jared put one arm around Milly and moved the other one back down between her legs, which she’d absently left open.
“What do you want, Milly?” he asked her.
Why did he have to ask her that? But—she locked into the deepest center of his eyes, and in that random moment, she had the blessing of having her self-conscious
ness taken away, replaced by the full gratitude of feeling him naked against her in the big room with jumping shadows on the walls.
“Okay,” she managed to say. “If you really want to know. I want us to fuck and to feel you inside of me and feel incredibly close to you.” A fire truck blared by several stories below and threw crazy lights against the ceiling for a second.
Jared smiled, quite self-satisfied. “I can give you that,” he said.
After that, it got better for Milly. She had lost her virginity that past year to a guy from Atlanta she’d dated for exactly seven weeks in the fall and she’d had her share of sex, but she’d never felt both so satisfyingly base and so safe as she did in this moment with Jared. The allure of his honey-fuzz-covered pale skin, that little bit of white softness right around the waist, the claylike flatness at the end of his nose. He was very close to entering her with his prize trophy when he reached over for his pants, pulled out his wallet, and took out a condom.
“Here,” she said, sitting up and rolling it over him. In the time between his first entering her, with the gasps and fits and starts, and the thirty, thirty-five minutes when they simply didn’t stop, her world spun over her. There was her senior year, that bizarre road trip with her dad when they’d visited Vassar and then visited her mom on the way back, that image of her mom—Milly and her dad entering a living room of zombielike people sitting in front of Sally Jesse Raphael, no Ava in sight, until a tight ball on the couch covered in a hospital-issue thermal sheet turned out to be her, out cold. Then the spittle around her mouth as she tried to talk once they’d woken her up. These were the images going through her head as Jared slowly moved in, their eyes locked, their lips grazing. It really didn’t pay for her to get stoned before sex, she noted, feeling like her brain would burst as Jared’s widest point approached.
“What is it?” He stopped, looked at her. “Where are you?”
“I’m here,” she said. She pressed his hips down harder into her. The two guys that night, Hector and the blond, the kiss she’d caught on the street and how they’d caught her looking, how she’d darted away. What had she wanted to say to them? Jared was so deep inside her now, sweating in the air-conditionless, ceiling-fanned apartment.