by Tim Murphy
“Go get dressed,” she said.
Twenty minutes later, they were standing in front of the Christodora in T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. Kenji, a manic boy-puppy pit-shepherd mix, tore out of the lobby, dragging behind him on a leash Elysa, who wore kneesocks, Converse low-tops, and a cotton plaid minidress, her red curls corkscrewing in all directions. She was a thirty-three-year-old off-Broadway actress who sent everyone in the building AOL e-mail invites to her plays.
Mateo and Kenji lunged at each other. “Kenji, Kenji, Kenji, Kenji, I love you, Kenji, Kenji, Kenji!” Mateo laughed hysterically while the dog licked his face shiny wet.
“It looks like the two guys missed each other,” noted Elysa, who often spoke in the knowing, indulgent tones of a much older woman.
“Indeed it does,” said Milly, giving a kiss hello to Elysa, her best friend in the Christodora. “A reunion long overdue.”
“Kenji, down!” commanded Elysa, aiming to put some bass in her voice and sound authoritative. Kenji obeyed her for about two seconds before resuming his love assault on Mateo, who screamed again in delight.
“Kenji, you’re crazy today!” Mateo exclaimed.
An explosion of barking came from the lobby. A fully grown, glossy-black pit-shepherd mix scrambled out the door, followed on a massive leather leash by Hector, shaven headed, with a leather vest fitted snugly over a shaven, muscled brown chest. The leather vest melted into tight black jeans and construction boots. His eyes were obscured by massive black wraparound sunglasses. A lit cigarette dangled between his full lips.
Instantly, Kenji and the other dog were lunging ferociously at each other, their growls so menacing that the boys playing basketball across the street in the park stopped and turned to stare. Elysa and Hector held their dogs apart.
Hector fumbled to take the cigarette from his mouth. “Sonya!” he barked. “Shut the fuck up! Back the fuck down!”
Mateo, whom Milly had scurried to and pulled back from the fracas behind her right arm, watched the proceedings, rapt. “He just said the F-word, Mom,” Mateo noted.
“I know,” muttered Milly, not amused. She hadn’t seen Hector in a few weeks and was dumbstruck by his dishevelment.
By this point, both Elysa and Hector had reeled in their dogs and crouched down to grip them in a soothing embrace. Hector let his smoldering cigarette fall to the sidewalk. “You’ve got to really curb your dog, Hector,” Elysa said, an angry edge in her voice. “She’s enormous and she’s rough.”
“She’s a crazy girl,” Hector said. He put the wild-eyed dog in a headlock. “Aren’t you, you crazy bitch? Aren’t you, puta?”
Milly cringed at the explosion of profanity in front of Mateo. Elysa spoke for her: “Hector, you’re in front of a kid!”
Hector didn’t seem to register the comment. “I gotta walk her bad,” he said. He picked up the cigarette and put it back in his mouth. “She’s full of crazy energy today.” He stood up and yanked on the dog’s leash. “Come on, crazy girl. Look, you got me in trouble.” He shambled down the sidewalk and around the corner with a cocky gait that reminded Milly of John Travolta in the opening shot of Saturday Night Fever, his dog, Sonya, all the while straining her neck back to glower hatefully at the pit-mix puppy.
“Good Lord,” Milly finally said, exhaling.
“Why’s his dog so mean?” Mateo asked.
“She’s just not well trained, Mateo,” Elysa said.
The four of them made their way into the park. At the dog run, Elysa took the puppy inside, let him off his leash and into the scrum of wrestling canines, then walked to the gate, where Milly and Mateo waited on the other side. (Milly would not let Mateo into the run, fearing he’d be mauled. It had happened to other children. Horribly, in fact.)
Mateo ran along the fence to follow the dogs at play, leaving the two women alone for a moment.
“He was so high, Milly,” Elysa said, disapproval in her voice. “Hector.”
“That’s what everyone’s saying,” Milly replied. She didn’t have much drug experience except for college-era pot and one episode each with mushrooms and ecstasy, so she wasn’t quite sure how to tell if people were high, or what they were high on. “His dog sure was crazy.”
“Probably because he’s been holed up in his apartment since yesterday doing drugs and hadn’t taken her out. The poor thing. That’s animal cruelty.”
Milly shook her head. “He was such a big deal once in the whole world of AIDS research.”
“You told me. He used to work with your mother, right?”
“For my mother,” Milly corrected. “He started under her, like, twenty years ago. And then he got fed up because nobody was doing anything and he became one of the activists, and then he became a huge deal and was working in the Clinton administration to release all those new medications. He was always in D.C. I think he even lived there for a year or two before he moved into the Christodora.”
Elysa slowly shook her head. “He looks worse every time I see him.” She paused. “I think I know what drug he’s on.”
“It’s coke, right?”
“No, it’s called crystal meth. It’s like a hundred times stronger than coke and it makes you stay up and have sex for, like, days.”
Milly laughed. “That doesn’t sound so bad!” She glanced over Elysa’s shoulder to check on Mateo, who seemed to be happily feeding a leaf to a little dachshund through the gate.
“No, no, no, it’s really bad,” Elysa insisted. “You don’t eat or sleep for days and you get all paranoid and then you finally crash and you wake up, like, three days later and you’re a total mess. It’s horrible. All these gay guys I know in theater are talking about it and saying that guys are having unsafe sex because of it and getting HIV.”
Milly processed all this for a moment. “I don’t know if my mother ever told me if Hector had HIV or not. He had a boyfriend, or a lover, who died from it. My mother told me that much.”
“Well, that’s sad,” Elysa said, softening a bit. “But if he doesn’t already have it, he’s probably going to get it with the parade of guys he has coming in and out of the apartment all the time.”
Milly paused, last night’s wee-hours interlude coming back to her. “I think I saw one of them last night. In the elevator at, like, four A.M.”
“What were you doing in the elevator at four A.M.?”
Milly blushed, embarrassed. She didn’t like people to think she was peculiar. “I was going to the bodega.”
“Are you still having insomnia? I wish you’d go to that hypnotist I told you about.”
“I was only up for about an hour. But there was a gay guy coming down in the elevator from a higher floor and he seemed really drugged up.”
“How do you know he was gay?”
“He had gelled hair and a tank top and one of those armband tattoos.”
“Oh.” Elysa nodded.
“I wonder if there’s anything we can do—” Milly began. For him, meaning Hector, she was about to say. But an eruption from inside the dog run cut her off. Kenji was locked in a vicious, humping, jaws-on-neck brawl with yet another pit mix and a dazed-looking wire fox terrier. Various owners were screaming at the scrum, one of them trying to break it up with a big stick. Elysa ran toward the spectacle, screaming Kenji’s name. She pulled him out of the melee by his collar, only to be scolded by an older woman, her frizzy gray hair askew as she cradled the fox terrier.
“I’m sorry,” Elysa pleaded. “I’m so sorry.”
The frizzy woman: “You can’t bring him here, Elysa. We’ve talked about this. He’s not trained.”
“He is trained!”
“You call that trained?”
Milly and Mateo watched the showdown from the safety of the far side of the fence. “Kenji’s being bad today,” Mateo commented.
“Mmm,” murmured Milly, her hands on the boy’s shoulder
s. “He has more energy than he knows what to do with.”
Shamed, Elysa dragged Kenji out of the dog run back toward them. Kenji’s eyes were wild and googly with exhilaration after his brawl. Elysa’s social ostracism was lost on him.
“It’s a catch-22,” said Elysa, looping Kenji’s leash on to her shoulder so she could refasten her hair, which had come undone during the scuffle. Her minidress was covered in dust. “He’ll never learn to behave at the dog run if I don’t take him regularly. But every time I take him, something like this happens and they ban me again.”
“Well,” said Milly, trying to soothe, “technically they banned Kenji, not you.”
Elysa looked perplexed by this. “Why would I want to come to the dog run without Kenji?”
“Freets!” Mateo suddenly shouted. “Can we get freets?”
“Can we get what?” asked Elysa.
“He means frites, the Belgian fries,” said Milly. “They’re his newest obsession.”
Elysa’s eyes widened. “Oh, frites! You’re so cosmopolitan, Mateo.”
Mateo was already crouching again, covering Kenji with kisses. “What does that mean?” he asked, looking up.
“Umm,” began Elysa as the trio plus the dog wended their way out of the park. “It means very, um, fancy and knowing about things from different places all over the world. Very sophisticated.”
“The frites are right on Avenue A,” Mateo said.
“Yes, I know, but they come from Belgium.”
Milly steered Mateo around an unwashed teenage white girl with dreadlocks who was crouching and rocking on the sidewalk. “You know where Belgium is on the map, Mateo,” she said. “It’s in Europe. Where we’re going next year.”
“Oh, yeah, I know that,” he said confidently.
They bought their fries, collected their napkins and tiny cups of ketchup and mayonnaise, and crossed back into the park to sit on a bench. A shirtless middle-aged black man rode by on an old bike mounted with a boom box that blared “Try Again,” by Aaliyah. He wore a top hat with a sign affixed to it: R.I.P. AALIYAH, 1979–2001.
Elysa followed his trajectory, shaking her head. “That’s terrible about that poor girl,” she remarked. “Every single person died in that plane crash that weekend.”
Milly nodded in that silently clucking way that, when she caught herself doing it, reminded her of her mother. “She was such a beautiful girl.”
Her cell phone bleeped. It was Jared, not far away. Five minutes later, there he was, brandishing his own cone of fries. At thirty-one, he betrayed the first flecks of gray on his temples and the trace of a belly underneath an old, grease-smeared Pavement T-shirt. He set down on the bench a clanking messenger bag of tools he’d brought from his studio, then kissed his wife, son, and neighbor hello.
“You’re looking very industrial,” Elysa noted.
“I’m a macho art guy,” he deadpanned. “Big tools, big mess. No pussy watercolors for me.”
“I don’t use watercolors!” Milly protested.
Jared raised his hands defensively. “Whoa, Nelly! Did I say you? I meant, like, archetypally.”
“I don’t exactly think early Georgia O’Keeffe watercolors are pussy-ish,” Milly said.
“The pussies came later!” exclaimed Elysa.
But Milly didn’t seem to hear the joke. “And I don’t think the watercolors I’ve done are pussy-ish either,” she said.
“Millipede, come on,” Jared protested. “You’ve barely worked in watercolor.”
“But you know that I have,” she countered. Why else would he have said that? she was asking herself.
Jared just stood there, exasperated. He shrugged.
Elysa put an arm on each of their shoulders. “Come on, you two,” she singsonged. “We all know there are two talented artists in the household.”
“Three, actually,” Milly said, pointing to Mateo. “He just gets better and better.”
“I know!” Elysa exclaimed. “I’ve seen it! Mateo, when did you start using actual paint?”
Mateo was lost in his fries, meticulously pairing different ones with different condiments. “I dunno,” he said absently. “A few months ago?”
“This summer,” Milly clarified. “In a summer class.”
“Yo, bro,” Jared said, clamping his hand over Mateo’s hair and scratching it. “Are you gonna be the first in the family to start bringing in some money with your art?”
“I dunno,” Mateo repeated, still lost in his fries. “I wanna do big metal things like you.”
This caused Milly to look up at Jared, her eyes bright with pleasure.
Jared paused a moment. “Nah,” he finally said. “I think you’re going to be a painter like mamita. You two have that whole color thing going on.”
Moments later, Milly kissed everyone good-bye and made off to her studio in Chinatown. She shared the space with Bogdan, a Russian guy, a friend of a friend, and she found him there, ignoring his canvas, smoking and reading the Village Voice. When she was in her studio—whose windows, wide-open today, gave onto a view of the Manhattan Bridge—she felt macho and badass and free, and she allowed herself only a moment’s guilt before she pulled a cigarette from Bogdan’s pack and lit up with him. This reminded her of long nights in the studio in college, before the first wiry gray strands had emerged on her own head of hair, when Jared was first falling in love with her, he later told her. That was an interesting thing to think about, because Milly hadn’t truly fallen in love with Jared until much later, once they’d had sex.
“Are you productive today?” she asked Bogdan, whose shaved head, she always marveled, was almost rectangular.
He blew out smoke and frowned. “My arm hurts.”
“Did you call the physical therapist my mom told me about?”
He shook his head, smiled sheepishly.
“Your arm is your livelihood,” she chided.
“I don’t have insurance!” he suddenly barked at her.
“My mom says he has a sliding scale. You can’t take chances with your arm.”
“Okay, I’ll call him.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the old Café Bustelo coffee can they’d filled with sand to make an ashtray. “Why are you so late today?”
“I lingered in the park with Mateo and a friend. The weather this time of year is so perfect.”
He nodded appreciatively. “Labor Day happens too early. Summer goes all the way to October.”
She nodded back. They gossiped about other artists and finished their cigarettes. Milly let out a long sigh and pushed her hair back. “Okay, here goes,” she said.
“Hit it! Attack it!” Bogdan laughed.
“Attack it!” she echoed. “Plunge in!” She went and squared herself by her canvas, put the crook of her finger to her lips and stared at it for a minute or two. She looked back at Bogdan a few times, casting him an aggrieved look to elicit his sympathy over her creaking start, but he’d already turned his back on her toward his own work. Her canvas wasn’t more than a five-by-three rectangle that she’d scraped down to a background field of dusty rose, so pale you could see plenty of canvas through it. She hadn’t touched it since the prior Saturday, and all week she’d held it in her head and wondered what to do next. Finally, she went to her table and squeezed some white paint and a little yellow paint into a cup, then stood before the window mixing it, looking out at the bridge, which seemed to pop toward her off a hard enamel-blue sky. A very unpleasant wave overcame her, a mix of sadness and anxiety, which was odd, because mixing paint usually soothed her.
What is it? she asked herself, looking uneasily at Bogdan, as though to check if he’d felt it as well, but his back remained to her. She scrunched her forehead. If she applied herself, she thought, she could pinpoint the source of the wave and address it. She ticked down items in her head. But the truth was life was okay at t
he moment. She’d been having these tics since she was sixteen. After years of therapy, she’d come to see them as depressive synapses signaling absolutely nothing going on in life. Nothing is wrong, she told herself. The sky was absolutely blue and she’d had a perfect morning. The path ahead was clear.
She applied a large blob of the pale yellow paint on the right side of the canvas and watched it leak downward a moment until she picked up a scraper and drew it leftward. Thirty seconds later, she was in a sweet spot, a deep voice applauding her for painting her way away from her bogeyman. Ninety minutes later, the thought of a cigarette blooming in her brain like a flower, she shook herself out of her reverie, and at that moment, Bogdan let out a kind of cathartic groan. They turned to each other and laughed and moved toward the table in the center of the room and Bogdan’s cigarettes.
“Are you staying here tonight?” she asked him.
“I have a date,” he growled.
Her face lit up. “You have a date? Who is she?”
“She’s a teacher. A public-school teacher. Like you.”
“Ooh,” she said. “Hot for teacher.”
He frowned. “Why do you say that?”
“It was a song,” she said. She paused. “Oh, wait. I don’t think you were in America yet then.”
She didn’t have much focus left after her cigarette. She applied and scraped for another twenty minutes, then cleaned up and wished Bogdan good night and a good date. Outside, the night was sweet, the sky streaked with wild pinks and golds as the sun set. She stepped into Two Boots pizzeria on Avenue A and ordered two large pizzas, a Saturday ritual. Idling with her cell phone while she waited for them, she noticed Jared had called her but not left a message. Peculiar, she thought, not dwelling much beyond that. They called that her pizzas were ready.
As soon as she walked into the Christodora, Ardit flagged her. “There was a problem,” he said, his tremulous blue eyes narrowing.
Her own eyes grew large. “What?”
“You know Hector?”
“In the building? Yes, why?”
“His dog bit Mateo.”
“What?” She gripped Ardit’s arm. “Is he okay?”
