Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  In the late afternoon, when the sunlight spilled a fantastic golden liquid light into every corner of Montauk, Milly and Jared did what they’d done the past several years and grabbed their sketchbooks and a blanket and retreated into some remote dunes and sketched each other. Then they had sex again on the blanket and, after, lay there naked and talked for a long time.

  “The year we broke up was the worst year of my life,” Jared told her. “I ached through every day of that year. Never a year apart again, okay? Never, never, never.”

  “Never,” Milly murmured. But her own recollections of that year were different. Certainly she remembered the loneliness of those solitary nights in her new apartment without Jared. But she also remembered the clean, open clarity of those days and nights, the feeling that her life, for the first time, was a wide, blank canvas before her. For the first time she had been able to focus intensely on her painting—her own painting, versus her students’ work or even Jared’s. Since then, she had traded chronic, low-level loneliness and pure artistic concentration for companionship and intimacy and a nagging feeling of artistic superficiality and self-postponement. Someday, she’d tell herself, she would be alone in a studio in the woods with perhaps a few other artists to eat and have a glass of wine with at the end of the day, before they repaired for more painting through the night.

  This was her artist-colony fantasy, yet she never got around to actually pinpointing a month on a calendar and finding a colony to apply to. Now she was a woman with a partner, with her own family, his family, her students; a woman engaged in the world.

  Back in the city, after the Montauk weekend, she and Jared plunged into their first week of work at new schools. Diana was everywhere: on the covers of papers and magazines, on every channel 24/7. Milly found herself thinking about her in that idle way you think about a public figure and make private judgments about them just because they’re thrust in your face all the time. Milly felt that Diana had become rather silly in recent years, saying she wanted to be the queen of people’s hearts and that kind of nonsense; it also looked like, in her postmarital thirties, she’d been having the sexy, glamorous fun she’d been deprived of, having been made to put on that ridiculous massive wedding dress and marry into royal suffocation at the age of twenty.

  But there was another feeling Milly couldn’t escape, which only seemed reinforced by the insane outburst of sadness the death was provoking in England, the people crying out in front of the castle and begging the Queen to show sadness, mercy, a soul. It was that Diana was a martyr to goodness and warmth in a world long governed by arbitrary, cold rules. Why couldn’t warmth and generosity prevail? Milly was appalled to find herself wondering this as she went around thinking idly of Diana that whole week—a week of new classrooms, faces, paperwork to wend through. Why were any boys left in group homes? This desperate thought left Milly on the brink of tears. Listening on the radio to the new version of “Candle in the Wind” Elton John had written to sing at Diana’s funeral, Milly told herself that she was crazy and probably needed a higher dose of Wellbutrin.

  The following Saturday, Jared told her he couldn’t go to the boys’ home with her. The art faculty at Art and Design had agreed to meet to reconfigure and reorganize the studio space. Milly set out on her own with about twenty dollars’ worth of paper and crayons. Sister Ellen greeted her as matter-of-factly as though she were showing up for the hundredth time, not the second, and took her into the sunny rec room where about twelve boys, all between four and nine, were playing. Mateo sat alone in a chair wearing his Yankees shirt again, reading The Stinky Cheese Man, idly paddling his feet back and forth in their cheap kid-size Nike knockoffs as he read.

  Milly knelt down. “Do you remember me from last week? Drawing the monsters together?”

  He looked up. Did she catch just a flash of happiness on his face, of excitement to see her again, before he composed himself? “I remember you,” he said dutifully.

  “Do you feel like drawing again? I brought new paper and crayons.”

  “I draw every day anyway.”

  This deflated Milly, leaving her at a loss for words.

  “You can draw if you want to,” he added.

  She had to rally. “I’m going to lay this all out on the floor here,” she said, “and if you want to, you come join.”

  She moved to the open play area and engaged the other little boys. They broke out the supplies and started drawing. Milly calmly started drawing from last week’s memory a certain home in Montauk she liked, all the while encouraging the three or four boys who joined her, giving them gentle tips she thought were appropriate for an art class for four-year-olds. She willed herself not to glance Mateo’s way, which was why she was delighted when, twenty minutes later, she looked up and he was standing over her.

  “Okay, I’m ready to draw now,” he said.

  “That’s great,” Milly said, trying not to sound as triumphant as she felt. She reached for her bag. “Do you want to try some colored pencils? They’re more—” Should she use the word sophisticated with a four-year-old? “They’re for bigger-kid artists, so you might like them.”

  He lay on his belly with his ankles crossed in the air and started in. Milly was careful to leave him alone, to mind her own drawing and focus on the other boys. Milly felt a tremendous calm overtake her; she didn’t feel any sense of having forgotten some urgent other matter, something that often nagged at her. At a certain point, she glanced at Mateo and he glanced up and bugged his eyes out at her, as if to say, What, lady? which made her laugh, which made him smile faintly as he went back to his work.

  “Here,” he said finally, pushing his paper toward her.

  A bloblike creature, all shades of blue and green, floated over a streetscape of pitched-roof houses and passersby—sophisticated figures for a four-year-old—walking down the street. The aquamarine creature, which hovered amid some clouds, with a sun nearby, had blank, unyielding eyes and a straight stick of a mouth.

  “I like it,” Milly said. “I like all the different shades of blue and green you use. What is it?”

  He took a breath, about to declare something serious. “It’s a monster that’s not mean but not friendly, either. It’s an in-between monster.”

  “An in-between monster,” Milly echoed, fighting back her delight, trying to keep a straight face.

  “An in-between monster that doesn’t do bad or good, he just watches everything.”

  That’s what God is, she thought instantly. God just watches us and doesn’t lift a finger. “Ah, I get it,” she said. “An in-between monster. That’s very good.”

  “What are you drawing?” He stood over her now, hands on his hips. He’d picked up a bit of Sister Ellen’s bossy affect.

  She held the paper up to him. “It’s a house that I saw last week that I like a lot.”

  Mateo examined it blankly. “Whose house?”

  “I don’t know. I just saw it and I liked it.”

  “You’re a good drawer,” he said.

  Milly beamed. “Thank you!”

  She went back to the boys’ home the next several Saturdays. One Saturday, she finally got Jared to go with her. He enjoyed himself immensely, especially with a boy named Tranell who only wanted to draw Mariano Rivera over and over again.

  Leaving Ellen’s house one Saturday, he put his arm around her and asked, “Can we have a baby? I wanna be a dad and draw with my son. Or my daughter.”

  She tightened inside. She’d always known that if they stayed together, this would come up. But now? They were both twenty-seven! Jared knew she was on the Pill. She laughed, trying not to sound nervous. “Um, can we table that discussion for another five years?”

  “Five years?” he protested.

  “Okay, fine, five months,” she said.

  But she was actually dealing with that very matter in eight days, when she hadn’t had her peri
od. She’d forgotten to take her pills to Montauk with her Labor Day weekend, the weekend Diana died. So now, without saying a word to Jared, she bought a test at the drugstore and tested herself positive. Without a word to Jared, she visited the doctor, who confirmed it. She walked out of the doctor’s office dazed. Back at work, she went in her tiny little office she’d barely settled into yet—it was only early October—and called Kyla in L.A.

  “Well, hello, Millipede, what a lovely surprise!”

  “Do you have a second?”

  Kyla paused. “Why, what is it?”

  “I just found out I’m pregnant. I just found out, like, twenty minutes ago, at the doctor’s. I haven’t told a soul yet.”

  Kyla gasped. “Oh my goodness. Well?” She paused. “What should I say? ‘Congratulations,’ or ‘Oh, dear,’ or ‘What are you going to do?’”

  “‘What are you going to do?’” Milly said. “And I’m absolutely certain I’m not going to have it. I’m just not going to have it. I’m not even going to tell Jared, I’m just going to take care of it and pretend it didn’t happen and I never missed that weekend of the Pill and just move on like it didn’t happen.”

  “Millicent,” Kyla said sternly, “slow down. You have plenty of time to decide if it only happened a month ago. And why on earth aren’t you going to tell Jared?”

  “Because he’ll want to have it, that’s why!” Milly said bluntly, as though Kyla were an idiot.

  “Well, doesn’t some part of you want to have it, too? People are having babies now, Millipede. I’d probably have a baby with Christian now if I accidentally got pregnant.”

  Accidentally! thought Milly. What an idiot I am! “Accidentally!” she shot back at Kyla. “There you go. You have no plans of getting pregnant. You have a life.”

  “Yes, but I’m saying were I to get pregnant. You don’t want to even consider it?”

  Milly paused and composed herself a little bit, lowered her voice. “I am not bringing a child into this world with my genes. I am not going to watch that and perpetuate the cycle.”

  “Oh my God,” Kyla said. “You are not even bipolar. And your mother has been on meds and more or less fine for years now.”

  “No, you’re wrong, I’m on antidepressants now. I think the whole bipolar cycle thing is starting in me and it’s starting with depression, not the manias, just like it did with my mother.”

  Kyla was silent for several moments. Milly pictured her in front of her computer with the dog on her lap, cold coffee at her elbow. Milly could hear Radiohead in the background.

  “Oh, hon,” Kyla finally said. “Can I ask you one thing? Can I ask you to just sit with this for a few days? You have time. Just sit with it.”

  “Just sit with it while it gets bigger in there and more human and this becomes harder and harder to do?”

  “Listen to me: you have plenty of time. And I seriously think you should tell Jared. You live together.”

  “Can I sit with it just until tomorrow and we’ll talk then?”

  “Yes, sweetheart. I’m here working all week so call me any time you like. But . . . this could be a wonderful thing, you know.”

  Milly sighed, crestfallen. “Thank you, Kylaboo,” she said, and hung up.

  Later that night, she went home. But she did not tell Jared. In fact, she consciously put on a sort of mask before she went into the apartment so he wouldn’t even suspect something was wrong. She just blocked it out. And the next day, and the next day, and the next day, she called Kyla, telling not another soul. Kyla put her in touch with a big psych researcher at Columbia, who told her, in effect, there were no diagnostic tools extant to predict if her child would be mentally ill, or what the chances were. The researcher said instead that by the time the child came of age, treatment would have been fine-tuned to the point where it really wasn’t a problem. But Milly kept picturing years of watching a child in fear of the first terrifying signs of morbidity or mania, or both.

  Finally, she called Kyla and said, in a steely voice, “If I flew you out here, would you go with me to the abortion?”

  Milly waited quite a few moments before Kyla spoke. “Let me ask you one thing,” Kyla finally said. “If you were to set aside this fear you have, would you want to have this child?”

  Milly tried to consider the question honestly. She liked her new job. She liked teaching art to the boys on Saturday. She liked working on her own stuff in the studio on Sunday. She liked having just a bit of money for her and Jared to travel with. “At this point?” she asked Kyla. “Not now. No.”

  Another long pause from Kyla. “Okay then, I will fly out, and you don’t have to pay my way. I’ll schedule some meetings and write off the trip. But one thing: I can’t stay with you unless you tell Jared. That is just too weird for me to be spending a few days with the two of you so we can go off and secretly have an abortion and try to keep that from him and be all, like, la-di-da.”

  “It won’t be so hard if we’re doing it together,” Milly reasoned.

  “I don’t think it’s right that you’re not telling your boyfriend of, what, five years now?”

  “Six years, technically.”

  “Six years, then,” Kyla said. “You are putting up a wall between the two of you and I think you are going to regret it.”

  Milly respected Kyla’s opinion, so this gave her pause. But in her head, she didn’t see any reason why she needed to tell Jared. So she went ahead and scheduled the procedure, informing Kyla. In doing so, she put up a wall that even she was a bit stunned by. She didn’t tell Jared, and in not telling him, she started to resent him in his ignorance of the situation—couldn’t he intuit she was pregnant and in distress? She didn’t tell her mother—that would go to the heart of the whole painful matter. But what surprised her the most was that she didn’t tell her shrink. She couldn’t stand one more person after Kyla telling her this was something she might regret. She had to stay strong and keep her resolve and just get this over with. Deep down, she had no intention of ever having her own baby—ever. She would not watch her own genetic curse unfold before her eyes in the form of her own child.

  Kyla came and stayed in the West Village apartment of an editor friend who was out of town. Milly told Jared that much, and that she and Kyla were going to meet after work for dinner and have a girls’ sleepover. But actually Kyla met Milly in the morning at a SoHo doctor’s office with a lovely, massive ceramic vase of freesia in the center of the room, real art on the walls, and comfortable nubby earth-toned sofas in the waiting room. Finally, seeing Kyla, Milly allowed herself to cry, and Kyla held her.

  “Honestly?” Kyla looked Milly in the eye and asked. “The thing is, Millipede, you think you know what the future holds, and you don’t.”

  “No,” Milly protested quietly, scribbling her way through the paperwork, “it’s that I don’t know. That’s what I can’t stand. It’d be like wondering if you’re raising a time bomb.”

  Kyla sighed. “Oh, Milly,” she said, leading Milly to the sofa. A nurse finally came out and summoned Milly.

  “I’ll be right here,” Kyla said as the nurse led Milly away.

  Milly steeled herself and went into the doctor’s office and willed her mind out of her body through the procedure. The Valium helped, which was good because, now that it was actually happening, she was distressed over the fact she was aborting Jared’s baby (that he’d wanted!) without telling him. What if she could never get pregnant again? Well, wasn’t that what she wanted?

  I really need to remove my mind from this situation, she told herself. So she thought about art supplies, which always gave her a good feeling; she thought about the decent budget she had for that this year in her new job and how she’d bring in a nice supply, and how she could discreetly siphon a bit of that away from school and bring it to the boys’ home on Saturdays. She’d introduce Mateo to watercolors and a paintbrush—she�
�d put his fingers around a paintbrush for the first time!—if Sister Ellen would let her. That would be a joyous afternoon.

  See, she thought, she was able to remove herself from this situation. And this certainly didn’t mean she didn’t love children. It certainly didn’t mean she couldn’t be a good mother. She could be a loving mother, an attentive one, a mother who nurtures her child, not one who merely treats her like an afterthought. This was all still possible. She couldn’t even let herself think about what was going on down there, on the other side of her johnny, and she did her best to tune out the gentle, supportive murmurings of the nurse whose hand she gripped through the procedure. It was best just not to be there.

  When it was over, they drew a comfy old-style quilt over her and told her to rest for a while. She turned on her side, tucked her hands under the pillow, and lay there. She certainly was relieved that was over with. And she certainly would not be forgetting her Pills again any time soon. She felt vaguely crampy but otherwise fine, a bit floaty from the Valium. Kyla came in and sat down beside her and stroked her hair back behind her ear and smiled at her. She loved Kyla, that much was certain. She was feeling bizarre alternating pangs of remorse and resentment toward Jared, but she sure loved Kyla.

  “How are you, sweetie?” Kyla asked.

  “I’m fine, it’s over,” she said. “Thank you so much for coming.”

  “We’ll get in a cab and go back to the West Village and rent a bunch of movies and watch them all day and night,” Kyla said.

  “No movies with children,” Milly said.