by Tim Murphy
So Gallegos was trying to keep Milly in the studio. And for a few years she was. It wasn’t easy for her, the more famous her two exes got. She talked about that a lot with Gallegos.
“When you go in there, it’s your studio, it’s your art,” he’d say. “It’s for you.”
She tried to keep that in mind. Then she had a sort of epiphany. She was at the Armory Show at the Javits Center. She waited until nearly the end of the run to be as certain as possible she wouldn’t run into either of them, and she also stayed about a mile away from their gallerists. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the art and all the rich jerks browsing it, and she wanted to throw up. She was looking at about the umpteenth stupid neon wall sign. It said in big swoopy pink neon script: MY PUSSY! Like that was some kind of revelation. And Milly thought, That’s it. I don’t need to keep contributing to this pile of junk.
She had probably been to her studio about twice since then, and that had been eighteen months ago. Often, she considered giving it up to no longer have to pay rent on it. The same canvas had been sitting there half-finished since last year. Whenever she thought of picking up the brush, she thought, Here I am, another low- to no-name-recognition New York “artist” adding to the junk heap. We’ll all die and only .00001 percent of this stuff will have any resonance beyond our own lifetimes.
Of course she shared this with Gallegos. He’d once told her he liked to write a little fiction or poetry on the side himself. He shared these little bits of himself with her from time to time very offhandedly, which flattered Milly. She was fairly certain he didn’t do that with all his patients.
Gallegos heard Milly out. Then he said, “But aside from all that, how do you feel when you’re painting? Don’t you feel good?”
And she said, “Honestly, Richard? I feel stupid. I feel silly. I feel there has to be something more productive I could be doing. Kids are growing up nearly illiterate right in my own neighborhood, right over in the projects on Avenue D, and I’m sitting here dabbing and daubing? I’m a joke.”
“How did you feel when you were teaching kids to draw and paint?” he asked.
“That was different,” she said. “That wasn’t necessarily for them to grow up to be professional artists. It was to help them find a creative voice and to introduce them to art and the role it can play in their lives. Especially if they’re from unstable homes. I mean, just to have craft paper and a box of crayons—that’s such a balm.”
Craft paper and a box of crayons. Her eyes welled up as she started to say it. She couldn’t even think about craft paper and a box of crayons.
“What came up just then?” Gallegos asked her. “That affected you?”
Milly deflated in her chair and rubbed her eyes. “I can’t think about craft paper and a box of crayons without thinking about the first time I saw him,” she said. “M.”
“You felt love and delight because you saw a kid being creative and you wanted to encourage it, right?”
“He was drawing scary, hairy monsters.” Oh God, she would never forget him, lying on his stomach, kicking his little sneakers together in the air.
“You could have more of that feeling if you went back to work.”
So that was why he’d brought that up? Milly felt a bit tricked and betrayed. “I don’t have the time or the mental energy anymore to teach,” she said. “I have to take care of my father. He just gets worse and worse.”
“He’s with his own nurse all day,” Gallegos said. “He’s with her right now, safe and sound. Here you are, here with me, and everything’s okay.”
Milly didn’t like this conversation very much, frankly. She no longer liked leaving the house and avoided interacting with other people. The whole thing made her very uncomfortable and exhausted her. She made some exceptions. Groceries, obviously. Sometimes she went to see a movie. Taking the train back and forth to see her father. Even these things, though, she had to bear up for, and the whole time she was out there, she felt like a raw nerve being pummeled by other people. Loud young kids, for one thing, the N-word being every other word that flew out of their mouths. Couples who were too demonstrative. People whom she thought she knew, or had known. They were the worst of all. She literally crossed the street if she thought she saw up ahead someone who looked like someone she thought she once knew.
“I’m sure I’ll go back to work part-time eventually,” she finally said, to shut him down.
He gave her a skeptical look, like he was not very pleased with her.
At least, Milly thought, we’re not talking about her anymore. She meant Kyla. The issue with her had taken up sessions with Gallegos for months. How was Milly feeling about it, one week later? Had she and Kyla communicated? And on and on and on.
Two years ago, Kyla had left Milly a voice mail. For Milly, even just seeing Kyla’s name there in the queue on her tablet was a bit startling, because Milly felt she had barely heard from her in a year. But there was the message, all hushed with portent: “Millipede? It’s Kylaboo. Millipede, I am freaking out, I’m having twins. Call me, please, I need to talk. I’m freaking out. Christian and I are both freaking out. Love you.”
Milly calculated: You had to be several weeks into your pregnancy to find out you were having multiples. That meant Kyla knew she was pregnant weeks before. A fact she hadn’t shared with Milly. And then: A voicemail. She tells me this news on a voicemail, Milly thought.
Milly didn’t call back right away. She actually put down the tablet and went to the window and finally sat and just stared out. Then she stood and picked up the tablet to call Kyla. Then she put it down. The truth was she didn’t know what to say to her. She didn’t know if it was such a good idea that Kyla was doing this at her age. Milly knew the treatment and technology had changed a lot in ten years, but no amount of technology could mitigate the fact that when your kid was ten you were going to be sixty and when they were twenty you were going to be seventy. Your kid was probably going to watch you die when they were thirty or thirty-five. So much for their kids having a grandma. Milly couldn’t get past this, and in some ways, it just felt so completely Kyla to her. Like there was nothing left for Kyla to write about coupledom, or about the new urban couple communes, or about couples growing all their own food on their roof, so she was going to have kids to put herself into the next readership bracket. That didn’t feel very fair to those kids, Milly thought.
So Milly simply didn’t reply for five days. That felt like the decent thing to do because she just didn’t know what to say.
“She’s probably waiting to hear from you,” Gallegos said when she told him about it the next day.
“I don’t know if she’s doing the right thing,” Milly said.
“Can I ask you, Milly? Can I ask you how you really felt when you heard the news?”
“I felt: Don’t tell me you’re going to do that to those kids,” she said to Gallegos. “Just for another book.”
Gallegos challenged her on that. “Here’s your best friend and it’s always been a certain way between the two of you and now it’s probably going to change. She’s probably not going to be able to come to New York as much as she used to. You might need to go out there to see her, help her with the kids.”
“Oh, I hate it out there. It’s still so fake and plastic to me, even though it’s all supposedly become like Brooklyn but with constant sunshine. But obviously some aspect of life out there appeals to her, because she’s never come back to New York.”
Gallegos rolled his eyes in that way that he did. “I’m asking if you’re afraid you’re going to lose the friendship.”
Milly laughed a bit. “I think I’ve told you the friendship’s already been fading the past few years,” she said. “She’s allergic to sadness. If you can’t just make lemons into lemonade and be grateful for whatever happens to you, Kyla doesn’t have a lot of patience for you. It’s all about being gratef
ul with Kyla. Grateful, grateful! I’m sure she’s just grateful she’s having these kids, she’s thanking the universe, and she’s not thinking about these kids when they’re twenty or thirty.”
“Listen carefully to yourself,” Gallegos said. “You’re starting to cut the cord with your best friend of thirty years.”
For better or worse, that thought stuck with Milly over the next several days. She felt quite chastised by Gallegos. Finally, she picked up the tablet. But she could not figure out how she wanted her own voice to sound when Kyla picked up or if it went to voice mail. So she pulled up a text box. “Oh my God!” she pinged. “Awesome news! Keep me posted! xo Mills.” And she sent it.
Five minutes later, Kyla pinged back: “Uh . . . that’s it? No call after six days? :(”
Oh, shit, thought Milly. “I was digesting,” she pinged back. Well, that was honest, right? Should she have to be fake?
Kyla didn’t ping back, which Milly thought was pretty rude. She was probably too busy, Milly thought. She’d probably interrupted Kyla while she was blogging to all the people who hung on her every word. And basically because Kyla blogged or tweeted or CoffeeDated every single moment of her life, it was hard for Milly to avoid following the pregnancy in excruciating detail. It was so obvious she was building up content for a book. What Kyla was eating and what special yoga Kyla was doing to aid the pregnancy, how the pregnancy was affecting her and Christian’s sex life, and then, of course, every minute aspect of how she felt when they learned they were going to have twins. “Twice Blessed, Twice Yikes” that post was called. Yikes? Milly thought. Yuck.
This went on for months without Kyla responding to Milly’s text. Milly thought Kyla would break down and ask her to come out to L.A. for the delivery, but Kyla didn’t. Suddenly Kyla was blogging and tweeting pictures of her, Christian, and two baby girls named Erika and Fiona. The first picture of the four of them she posted, all huddled together like four peas in a pod, Milly just stared at, dumbfounded, for about fifteen minutes. Kyla had had children. They were the two who’d never been through pregnancy when everyone else had, and now Kyla had gone ahead and done it.
Milly told her dad about it over dinner uptown that night. “Kyla had babies this week,” she said. “She had twins. Two girls.”
Sam nodded his head sagely, as though he had something to say about that. “That makes three kids for her now?” he asked.
“She’s never had kids before, Daddy. These are her first.” Milly pushed her father’s water glass away from the edge of the table, where it was sitting perilously near his elbow.
“No, no,” he said. Here we go, Milly thought. Her father was always doing this these days. “She’s got the kid who won the science award in Boston.”
“That’s Liesl,” Milly said. He was thinking about another old friend of hers from college. “Liesl had that kid sixteen years ago. This is Kyla. Remember Kyla, the writer Kyla? She lives in Los Angeles.”
“The one that had the drug problem.”
“Right. The drug problem was twenty-five years ago, though.”
He looked at Milly like she was crazy. “She just went to rehab!” he insisted.
“She went to rehab twenty-five years ago, Daddy.”
Her father looked annoyed. He resumed eating the pasta she’d made him. “I hope she stays off that junk,” he said. “She’s a smart girl.”
Milly just smiled and shook her head. This was her dinner company these days. She loved her dad. Since Ava, her mother, had died of ovarian cancer two years ago, at only seventy-four, it was like a hush had fallen over her and her father. She and Sam could sit at the dinner table together most of the night, watch TV together later, and not say a word, and it was okay. There was a hush in her parents’ busy house after all those years.
And there was a bond. Because Milly and Sam were both empty vessels now. Ava had consumed their lives so completely. Milly had lived most of her life defining herself against someone she didn’t want to become, trying to be the un-her, only to find she had nothing left to work with once Ava was gone. Then came the identity void. The weirdest thing had been sitting with Sam at the memorial service that a bunch of the old downtown AIDS people had organized. Someone would get up to speak and Milly would whisper to her dad, Oh, so that’s the So-and-So she was always complaining about! And then Milly and her dad had heard all the tales. Like when Ava planned a “ceremony” to “honor” the city council speaker, but it was really just to get the speaker to come to Judith House and to trap her in the sitting room with all the clients, all the residents, and say, “Actually the reason we asked you here today was to show you what we’ll lose if you really cut the housing budget 30 percent in fiscal 2015.”
The whole memorial had cracked up when someone, a former Judith House resident who was now a social worker, told this story. “That was Ava!” people were cackling. “That was Ava! You didn’t fuck with her!”
Amid the laughter, Milly and her dad had looked at each other. Her dad shrugged, as though to say, I never knew that, and Milly put her arm around him. There were stories they never knew, or maybe stories they’d only half listened to, and they all belonged to a woman who was larger than the two of them, larger than her own family, who sucked it up and demonstrated heroism every day, and then often came home and had little left for her husband and daughter except perhaps to charm her husband into giving her a foot rub.
“She loved those foot rubs,” Milly’s dad said over dinner. “That’s why she needed me to stick around. I was the foot rub at the end of the day.”
“You were more than a foot rub, Daddy.”
“She was very proud of you,” her dad said.
“I don’t think that’s really true, Daddy.”
“Oh, no, she was. She was just too busy to tell you.”
She and her dad both laughed heartily over this.
Then he’d ask: “How’s the kid?”
This line of questioning never stopped. “Dad, I’ve told you a million times he’s out in Los Angeles and we’re not really in touch.”
“He’s your son. You need to get on the goddamned phone and call him.”
“He doesn’t want to be in touch,” Milly said, too sharply. “I’m sorry.” She put her hand on his. “But I’ve told you that he told me he wanted to live his own life now. Our work is done.”
Her dad shook his head. “I don’t understand that situation one bit.”
“Neither do I.”
But as for Kyla? So, the twins came. Milly saw the constant pictures of the twins. She watched the twins grow up in pictures. And one day when Milly was looking at a picture of the two of them in matching striped onesies, in a moment of softness, she typed, “Adorable!” A few hours later, Milly noticed that Kyla had put a smiley emoji next to her comment. A week later, when Kyla posted a family Halloween picture, Milly wrote, “Boo-dorable!” A few hours later, Kyla posted back, “They’re still so small I almost wanted to pose them inside the pumpkins!” To which Milly posted back her own smiley emoji. Six weeks later came the inevitable holiday Santa-hat pictures.
“First visit from Santa coming up!” Milly posted.
“I know,” Kyla posted back, “Santa better get crackin’!”
This is how they started communicating again. Pathetic, Milly knew, but that was what the world had come to, just these little pleasantries or silly faces people tapped out underneath one another’s pictures. Then one day Milly was on the tablet and Kyla popped up in a chatbox:
“Hi millipede.”
Milly heard the little ping and then just stared at it for about thirty seconds.
“Hi drewpea.”
As soon as she wrote that her gut twisted in an unexpected pang of yearning.
Kyla: Long time no see.
Milly: I know. Well, you’ve been busy.
Kyla: It’s been crazy. Didn’t know what
I was getting myself into.
Milly: Well, you all look pretty happy in the pics.
Kyla: It’s wonderful. It’s a blessing beyond blessings. Grateful doesn’t even describe. [Here we go with the whole grateful thing, Milly thought.] But it’s still exhausting!
Milly: But you have help, right?
Kyla: Yeah, a great girl. But still!
Milly: I’m sure. Well, but wonderful you did it.
Quite a long pause there. Then:
Kyla: I would love for you to meet them. I tell them about you all the time.
[Tell them about me? Milly thought. They’re six months old!]
Milly: I’m sure that holds their interest.
Kyla: It’s mostly just me rambling to them during feedings or rocking the cradle. Rambling on like a crazy mother.
This was almost too twee for Milly to take. Finally she wrote, feeling lame:
Milly: You sure sound busy with them.
Kyla: Do you think you could make it out here to visit?
Suddenly Milly had to go to the bathroom. She went and came back, and then she wrote:
Milly: My dad takes up a lot of my time now.
Kyla: I meant to ask you. How are you both doing? [She means since my mom’s death, obviously, Milly thought.]
Milly: He’s a bit addled but he’s doing okay. He has his Rachel Maddow. He’s had a crush on her for ten years now. He thinks she’s going to come around for him.
Kyla: Haha! What about you?
Milly: Nothing to report.
Kyla: Making work?
Milly: Been too busy with Dad.
Kyla: Mmm. That’s gotta be tough.
Quite a pause passed.
Kyla: We might all make it out to New York next spring to see Xtian’s sister.
Milly: That sounds fun. First time on the plane with the kids?
Kyla: It would be, yeah. Would be so great to see you!
Milly pictured the four of them just coming at her.
Milly: Of course. Let me know if you come.