Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  Coming off the elevator, Dani’s there in the open door to greet him. Mateo’s heart bursts open; he hasn’t seen her in eleven days, since she left L.A., and whenever he sees her after a separation like that, he can’t control his desire. He drops his bags in the hallway and swallows her up, backing her into the apartment.

  “Oh, damn!” she exclaims, pealing laughter.

  Ignoring the apartment he’s never seen before, ignoring the twinkling outside the infinity windows, he finds the bedroom. They get each other naked, begin.

  “Oh thank God, thank God, thank God,” he keeps saying the whole time, bucking his ass back and forth atop Dani, who’s clutching him with both her arms and legs, her head thrown back. And he means it—he’s so giddy with thankfulness to be entwined in her body again that he wants to cry.

  Then it’s over and they lie there, clutching each other. Mateo runs his lips from her neck over her breasts, down the side of her belly, down her leg, up her leg, and back up her belly, where he just holds her and buries his lips in her hair.

  “Missed you so much, Neenee,” he mutters. “Love you so much.”

  “Missed you and love you so much, too, Taytay,” she says.

  They both fall asleep for twenty minutes. Mateo wakes up before her and lies there holding her, thinking about next steps. First would be to pull his bags out of the hallway and close the door behind him. Second would be to inspect the art on the walls he caught out of the corner of his eye while he was bum-rushing Dani into the bedroom. Yep, he thinks, that’s what it was: a tiny Kara Walker cutout and two or three of McGinley’s Morrissey photos. He takes a shower. When he comes back in the bedroom, Dani’s awake.

  “Do you mind if Char comes over?” she asks. “He didn’t know if you’d be up for it or not tonight.”

  “Are you okay if he comes over?” Mateo asks back. There, he thinks, I said he without a hiccup first. Progress! “We can order up some food.”

  “Okay, well, ping him and let him know. I’ll order food. You want Malaysian? There’s a really good place downstairs I can ping.”

  “Yeah, that sounds good.” He’s in the living room now, fishing jeans and a T-shirt out of his bags, wondering if he can still make the midnight meeting on the other end of Houston Street.

  “So what do you think of this place?” Dani calls from the bedroom.

  “Just how you described it to me,” he says. “Very downtown person-with-money aesthetically correct.” And it is: mostly white space with a massive gray couch system facing the infinity window and lots of chunky dark wood, including the requisite kitchen farm table, for the old-timey contrast.

  “Complete with a Kara Walker and a few Ryan McGinleys,” Dani says, and laughs.

  “Yep,” Mateo says, coming back in the bedroom and flopping himself down again near her. “Very correct. But it’ll be comfortable for the next six months.” He kisses her. “Thanks for finding it while I was crazy in London.”

  She strokes his hair. “Are you happy to be here? You feeling weird?”

  “The cab went straight through the East Village tonight. I got a hot flash when we crossed Ninth Street.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the street the Christodora’s on.”

  “You mean you passed it?”

  “No, we were going down Second Avenue and it’s on Avenue B. But I could feel it when we crossed Ninth Street.”

  Dani pauses. “Well, I didn’t grow up here so I don’t exactly know what that means.”

  “It just means I could feel its latitude. Or longitude or whatever.”

  “Ohh,” says Dani. Then: “Milly still lives there?”

  “I think so. I think Jared basically let her have it as a mercy gift when he left her, so the whole thing wouldn’t drag into court. That’s kind of what Kyla told me once.”

  “The same talk when she told you that your grandmother died?”

  Mateo winces slightly. He’s mentioned this to Dani in the past, confided that he felt shitty that he didn’t reach out to Milly, never mind that he hadn’t gotten on a plane to New York for Ava’s funeral and shivah. He’d felt the instinct to do it, felt the loss of that indomitable woman who’d been sweet to him as a kid when she had the time to spare, but the thought of actually doing it—and having to see Milly amid her grief—was more than he could bear. Shamefully, he’d shunted the news aside in his head.

  “She wasn’t really my grandmother,” he says to Dani.

  She laughs, mildly reproving. “You called her your bubbe, Mateo.”

  He raises a hand to his forehead and turns away, at a loss for a response. He flat-out doesn’t like talking about the Heyman-Traums—it sparks remorse and regret in the pit of his stomach, a distinctly unpleasant feeling that threatens to throw him off his confident, present-day linear course.

  Dani senses his displeasure. “Okay,” she says, gently pulling his hand away from his forehead. “I’m sorry I pushed it.”

  He sighs, rubs her wrist with his thumb. “It’s just I get sad and bad feelings when I think about them.”

  “I know, sweetie, I know. But while we’re in the sad and bad zone, there is just one more thing I want to mention, to head it off down the line. You know that Jared has a show opening here in a few weeks.”

  Mateo’s hand flies back to his brow. “Yeah, jeez, I know,” he says. “What, you’re saying I should go?”

  Her face goes all innocent and know-nothing. “I’m not saying anything. Did I say anything?”

  “Well, then, why’d you bring it up?”

  She strokes his hair again. “I just wanted to make sure you knew, because somebody else is probably going to bring it up with you.” She gets up and heads to the shower. “You know I have no opinion about your relationship with Jared and Milly.”

  Mateo laughs sharply. “We have no relationship.”

  Dani turns slowly in the door and looks back at him meaningfully. Then they both laugh.

  “Yeah, right, you have no opinion,” Mateo calls as she closes the bathroom door.

  Twenty minutes later, he buzzes up Char, who got here two weeks ahead of him. Char’s been down at the site and looks tired, bits of paint on his face and T-shirt. Char basically looks like the same baby dyke he met ten years ago doing that mural in L.A., if he added some scruff and a little bit of age to the face, then subtracted boobs.

  Mateo and Char lock fists, hug. “Welcome, brother,” Char says.

  “Thanks. Good to be here.”

  Char gives him a funny double take. “For real?”

  “For real,” he assures. “It’s amazing. It’s exciting. We’re doing public art in New York City! Underground art. Literally underground art. It’s all good.”

  “You better be ready for a full plate this week,” Char says. “You have no fucking idea how difficult it is to paint on scaffolds on curved white tile above your head.”

  “Michelangelo did something like that,” Mateo says. “And he didn’t even have six MFA students working for him.”

  Char looks at Mateo skeptically. “Dude, Michelangelo definitely had assistants. The pope or the king or whatever probably gave him slaves or something.”

  Dani walks in from the bedroom, her hair still wet, gives Char a hug and a hello.

  “Neenee, did Michelangelo have assistants?” Mateo asks.

  She looks up from her tablet, where she’s ordering food. “He had to,” she says. “I mean, right?”

  “He probably had fucking slaves,” Char reiterates. “Everybody had slaves then.”

  “MFA students are the new slaves,” Mateo says.

  Later that night, after the food’s come and after Char’s shown him about a thousand pictures and videos of the project on his tablet, Mateo walks Char down to the street. They pull bikes out of a bike station.

  “See you at the UnderPark a
t nine tomorrow,” Mateo says.

  “You off to a meeting now?” Char asks, to which Mateo nods. “How you doing, being here?”

  “Four hours in, I still don’t have a needle in my arm.”

  Char frown-smiles. “Oh, come on, man, don’t say fucked up shit like that,” he says. “Go to your fucking meeting.” He bikes off toward the Williamsburg Bridge.

  Mateo bikes the opposite way, west and then up to Houston. It’s a mild Sunday night in May, nearly midnight, and the streets are quiet, the faint chlorine smell from white pear-tree blossoms in the air. There’s so much fucking glass everywhere! Some of the glass has been opaqued for the night, but some of it’s clear and he can look right in and up to some of the world’s richest people amid their humdrum Sunday-night routines, sprawling in front of fifteen-foot-wide screens that dance with images and light. But between the glass spires and wedges there are the old stoops, fire escapes, cornices, and witch-hatted water towers he still sees in his dreams.

  On West Houston, near to the river, he comes to the black door with MIDNITE stenciled in white paint on it. He finds a station to dock his bike about a hundred feet away, retraces his steps, nods at a few guys sucking on their vape-sticks outside, and then he walks through the door and up the steep, narrow steps. The last time he was here, four years ago for a show, this place saved his ass. He walks in the candlelit room, where some dude with a bolt through his nose is already telling his tale to the group, and takes the first empty seat he sees, next to a dirty-blond girl with cutely sardonic lips who looks not a day over twenty-five. She glances at him, looks away, then glances back. He catches her glance and smiles.

  When the sharing starts, the girl raises her hand. “Sophie, addict.”

  “Hi, Sophie,” everyone says.

  “I have twenty-nine days today,” she says. The room applauds. Then her tale about how her parents want her to move back to Santa Barbara but she wants to stay in New York but she can barely pay her rent now that she’s lost her job, and does anyone have any advice after the meeting?

  “Thanks, Sophie.”

  Mateo really doesn’t want to get his hand up and share; he feels bleary-eyed and out of it from the flight, but he knows he better. So up goes the hand, which catches the eye of the dude with the nose bolt.

  “Mateo, addick,” he says. Ten years on, he still won’t pronounce the t.

  “Hi, Mateo.”

  “Unnnnnhh, now what did I want to say?” he thinks aloud. A few people chuckle, including Sophie.

  “I wanted to sayyyy,” he continues, “that I’m very glad I’m here. I just got into town from L.A. tonight and this is where I needed to be, and even my girlfriend and my work partner said as much and kicked me the fuck out of the house after dinner.” More chuckles.

  “I can remember when I would raise my hand in meetings and talk bullshit,” he says. “And I’d leave the meeting and go cop, or spend the meeting thinking about what girl I wanted to cop with.” More chuckles, maybe a tiny bit of slightly uncomfortable seat adjustment around the room.

  “So, unnnnhh, I’m truly glad I don’t put my hand up in that bullshit spirit anymore, but more like something I’m able to make myself do when I know I need to. Like I’ve got smart arm nerves or reflexes or something that take over for me. But, unnnnhh, I just wanna say it’s good to be here in a safe place because New York is a very hard place for me to be. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I fucking love this city, but this is where it got really sketchy and sad for me about ten years ago and where I really left some scorched earth behind me. And when I hit the streets here—” and here, he surprises himself, his voice catches hoarsely and he can feel tears welling up in his eyes, and then Sophie’s gentle hand on his back.

  He catches his breath and swallows it back. “When I hit the streets here, it hits me so hard. It’s, like, visceral; it’s, like, uh, cellular memory. And the thing was, it was ten, eleven, twelve years ago. I was a fucking kid—I didn’t even know what the fuck I was doing or why I was so angry. And even now, after being sober almost ten years, therapy and all that shit, talking it through and the Steps and all that, I can just hit the streets here and it’s like the first smell, some particles in the air, bring it back to me. The fucking way the streets are here and the stoops and the doorways. And I can feel my whole body turning to jelly, and that fucking scares me. And it’s not just remembering the needle, it’s—”

  The guy with the bolt through his nose lightly holds up a warning palm to Mateo.

  “Oh, hey,” Mateo continues, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to trigger folks. What I meant was it’s not just the, unh, the using, it’s—” He pauses. “It’s the people. It’s all the fucking loose strings. I have not tied up my loose strings and made some key amends and stuff like that.”

  Half the room nods with him. He feels a bit back in their good graces after his slight gaffe. “But hey,” he says, “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m here, and I’m sober. I mean, I am in fucking New York City and I am sober, and that’s truly a miracle. And I am here on a fucking amazing project with amazing people and I’m psyched about that. And, hey, I just hope I can get here most nights, ’cause it’s gonna be a crazy few months here.”

  After the meeting, after everyone’s said the Serenity Prayer together and unjoined hands, Sophie turns to him. “You’re here to work on the UnderPark, right?” she asks. “You and Charlie Gauthier?”

  Mateo nods. He’s a little taken aback but not really surprised; the news has been all over art verticals the past six months. “That’s why we’re here,” he says.

  “That’s so cool,” she says. “I actually used to be Ruby Levin’s assistant.”

  “Oh, yeah?” he asks. Ruby Levin is the head of Creative Production Fund, a nonprofit that usually has a hand in the biggest public-art projects in the city; in twenty years, she’s kind of become the town’s fairy godmother of popular art, and, no surprise, she’s playing a big role in the art for the UnderPark. “What are you doing now?” Mateo asks her.

  “Well,” says Sophie, pulling back her lank blond hair, “not much. Going to meetings and looking for a job. Ruby fired me for being an alcoholic fuckup.” She laughs, but her face flushes with shame as she says it.

  “And knowing Ruby, she probably gave you about five chances first, right?”

  “Yeah.” Sophie laughs again. “She told me to go to AA about five times before firing me.”

  They laugh together, and Mateo feels that spark. This, he realizes, has become a recurring minor problem. The fucked-up pretty girl, the art groupie, the AA new arrival, and the sudden confusing stabs of empathy and desire he feels for her; the pretty girl who reflects him back to himself and who is so unlike Dani and Char in their stolid, competent, crisp non-fucked-up-ness. He’s learned it’s simply better to let other folks exchange pings with such girls; he can always provide real-time support when he sees them at meetings, but he doesn’t need to have their data. He did that once, a long time ago, and where that led . . .

  So Mateo says, “I guess she finally did what she had to do to get you here, right?”

  Sophie shrugs, sheepish. “I guess she did.”

  He offers her a fist bump, and she accepts. “You’re gonna be okay,” he says. “I remember the crummy loser feeling. It goes away.”

  “Does it really?”

  Oh God, he thinks, she’s breaking my heart with those eyes. “It seriously diminishes,” he says. “If you keep coming here.”

  He walks out of the building and down the treacherous narrow staircase, exchanging hellos and fist bumps with a few familiar faces he knows from when they drop in on meetings in L.A. His gut instinct tells him to hop on a bike and hightail it home to Dani. But God, those quiet, dark post-midnight streets below Houston call him back. Can he do it? Can he walk those streets and face down memories? Hating himself for being the weak addict he is, he buys a nineteen-
dollar pack of cigarettes at a bodega, lights one, ducks a block below Houston and swings left on Prince. Scarcely a soul passes him. Eventually, Prince gives out onto the Bowery and he’s standing in front of the Chinatown YMCA, where they took him Saturday mornings for swim lessons. She would take her coffee and a magazine into the little glassed-in room overlooking the pool while he would take Mateo into the men’s locker room and help him get into his bathing suit and goggles. He’d put Mateo under the shower and point him toward the instructor and the other kids with their inflatable doughnuts on their arms. And from time to time, Mateo would look up and see them behind the glass, watching him, giving him a thumbs-up, and Mateo would wave back at them, feeling the good feeling of being watched over.

  The next morning, Mateo’s at the site at nine A.M. in a ratty old T-shirt and jeans, ready to make things happen. Char’s already there, a dozen scruffy assistants swarming around him. This is the first time Mateo’s been at the site since a brief initial visit six months ago, and he marvels at the progress. Here’s a huge, dank underground space, a former hideaway for subway cars, that a massive infusion of new-style private New York mega-money is transforming into a subterranean park with a high-tech lighting system that collects sunlight up on the street and then funnels and diffuses it below. The interior envelope is nearly complete; the ceiling is countless square feet of undulating silvery reflective material.

  His and Char’s project, the biggest public project they’ve ever been commissioned for, is to paint the entryway corner ceiling in a twinkling profusion of greens, blues, and yellows so that, once trees are planted, their leafy tops will disappear into the work. For the past two days, Char’s been supervising assistants to paint the ceiling in a kind of high-tech primer that will hold their paints; they’ve long since abandoned working with spray cans, precluding anyone from ever again putting the word graffiti anywhere in a description of their art. Besides, the whole point of Mateo and Char, the whole reason for their explosion of highbrow success the past seven years, is that the two of them “revolutionized” street art, transformed it from something that, however artful, always looked like graffiti into something that took an existing wall or surface and made people feel their eyes were playing tricks on them—that, say, an old brick wall was oozing black tar from the center outward, or that the concrete parabolas of a skate park were breaking open with a lacy neon moss.