by Tim Murphy
Milly collected herself. “Umm,” she began a reply, aiming to seem game. “How about the Kiki Smith and—um—”
Kyla followed her eyes minutely, rapt. “Who is Kiki Smith with, anyway?” she asked. “Is she married, or with—?”
Nobody seemed to know, though Jared’s friend Asa said that a friend of his parents’ had just bought a Kiki Smith sculpture.
“Well, anyway,” Milly continued. But what did she want to say? She kept bouncing her eyes ridiculously between Kyla and Jared, who seemed to wait amusedly for her to finish her thought. “I mean, Lee Krasner? Give me some credit.”
“Lee Krasner is awesome,” said Kyla.
So that’s how it began. Kyla began spending a lot of time with Milly and Jared, the three of them out late with their high school and college friends, the fledgling filmmakers and painters and actors and, of course, the endless editorial assistants. And it would always end up that Jared and Milly and Kyla would stay out the latest, at some East Village dive like 7A or Blue and Gold, talking drunkenly and intensely about, oh, how could Bret Easton Ellis even put himself in the same category as Donna Tartt just because they went to college together, or who was really more subversive from a gender-deviance point of view, Sinead O’Connor or k.d. lang or even Prince. Or, ironically, they’d put “Man in Motion,” the theme from St. Elmo’s Fire, on the jukebox and then recast the movie with themselves and their friends (and Kyla would laugh and be like, “Oh God, no!” when Jared and Milly would cast her in the Demi Moore part). Or they’d make up names for one another’s memoirs. Jared’s, because he was an installation artist, would be The Boy with the Blocks: The Jared Traum Story. Milly’s: BrushStrokes: A Life, then, beneath, in smaller type, The Millicent Heyman Story.
Kyla’s memoir would be Prose in the Fast Lane. Milly came up with that one, which they all had a good laugh over. Milly had never had a friend quite like Kyla before. Most of her friends she’d known so long they treated her like a little sister, with affection but also a certain carelessness, whereas Kyla was attentive, solicitous, always wanting to know how Milly was—how was her work? Her relationship? And Kyla entertained Milly; sometimes Milly sensed, with both confusion and delight, that Kyla was almost performing a certain kind of wisecracking, all-knowing, tough but goodhearted best girlfriend, like in old movies. Kyla seemed happy to perform like this for Jared as well, which turned Kyla into a subject of enchantment and fascination for both members of the couple.
“I think you’re in love with her,” Jared would joke to Milly, after Milly had told him in some detail about something Kyla had said, a one-liner she’d concocted, or something slightly outrageous Kyla had worn the night before, such as a gingham baby-doll dress with scrunchy white ankle socks and Dr. Martens.
“I think you’re in love with her,” Milly would toss right back.
One night in a bar, three in the morning came around and there were just the three of them left, with “Desperado” on the jukebox. They slipped for a moment into drunken quiet. Jared looked at Kyla. “Prose in the Fast Lane,” he said out of nowhere, and the three of them fell into one another, laughing.
“I love you two,” Kyla said. “I feel safe when I’m with you.”
“You’re like our daughter,” Jared said.
“Mm-hmm,” said Milly. “You’re our little girl.”
“I finally have two intact parents!” Kyla exulted.
But very quickly the relationship between Milly and Kyla also became one of those twisted mirror games, a very complicated mix of love, lust, competition, and shared terror over what would happen to them in the areas of vocation and romance. One night, Milly had two paintings in a small group show. Everyone went, including Kyla, who later said to Milly, “Your paintings and my writing are alike in that they’re both about artifice and posing, except you kind of celebrate it and I lament it.”
This dismayed Milly. “What am I supposed to say to that?” she asked.
“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing,” Kyla insisted demurely.
Still, the comment obsessed Milly. “Do you think that’s true, what she said?” she asked her gay high-school friend Ryan one day over lunch. Ryan was petite and half Chinese and had a job working part time as Nora Ephron’s administrative assistant. Nora bullied him and he loved it.
“I think you’re becoming obsessed with Kyla,” he said. “You talk about her a lot.”
“Jared says that, too.” Milly twirled a forkful of pasta off Ryan’s plate. “I don’t know why—I never had a sister, maybe that’s why? But even before she made that remark, I’m always thinking, What would Kyla think of this painting? What would Kyla think of this dress? Of my hair like this? Of this other friend of mine?”
Usually, Milly and Jared would put Kyla in a cab to Chelsea before walking the few blocks home to the Christodora, but one very alcoholic night, Jared said to Kyla, “Come over and see Horace”—that was the new cat—so the three of them walked there arm in arm, with Milly in the middle, which gave her the new and wonderful feeling of holding love on both sides of her body.
“Hello, Horace,” said Kyla, covering the cat all over with kisses. “Are you a great Roman thinker? A great Roman cat of letters?” Jared found a stub of a joint that they all shared and put Matthew Sweet on the stereo.
Milly was relating all this to Ryan a few days later. “And then,” she continued, “we had a three-way!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ryan said slowly. “How did it start?”
“I don’t really remember because we were all stoned,” Milly replied. “Just that it was really like Kyla was the little girl who was desperately hungry for love, and we wanted to hold and protect her. It was a total inversion of the usual Kyla. She was totally quiet, for one thing. We all fell asleep holding each other with Kyla in the middle.”
Ryan stared at her blankly for several seconds. “You are fucking with me, right?” he finally asked. “This really happened?”
“Yes! And it was really sweet. She woke up before us and left a note saying, ‘Thank you, I wanted to let you sleep. I’ll call you later.’ But she didn’t call later that day, and we didn’t call her. And I said to Jared, ‘I wonder what it’ll be like with Kyla now,’ and he said, ‘Me, too.’ So finally yesterday I called Kyla and we met for lunch and we hugged and we were both, like, ‘Hiiiii!’” The tone of Milly’s inflection for Ryan was a sheepish Oh my God, I cannot believe we did that! “So we’re making chitchat, ordering salads before we take them into the park, and finally she was like, ‘So how have you been?’ And I said, ‘I’m okay. I’ve just felt weirdly protective of you ever since Friday night—like I’m seeing you differently, making me feel like you can have those kinds of feelings for more than one person at a time.’”
And Kyla had said: “Did you tell Jared that?”
And Milly had said: “Not quite like that. I’m afraid it would freak him out.”
Then Milly leaned over on the park bench and kissed Kyla softly near her ear. “You were so quiet that night!” She giggled. “It was so unusual!”
But Kyla didn’t giggle back; she just smiled tightly and kind of sadly and looked away. Then she let out a kind of restrained noise that said Mmmmnggh, I can’t stand it anymore!
“I’m so lonely, Mill,” she said. “I cannot be falling in love with a couple. That is not a good plan for me.”
A few weeks prior to the three-way, Kyla had finally, agonizingly split up with Laith. Laith had been her tall, deep-voiced, WASPily good-looking boyfriend, an editor at Harper’s, who once, at a party right after Kyla said something particularly funny about Thelma and Louise, asked her in a good-humored way, “How does it feel to be a swath of glitter wrapped around an echoing void?”
Nobody could silence Kyla like Laith could, but she had been crazy about him and his whole Brideshead aura, his swoopy Edwardian haircut. It was Kyla who finally broke it off, but o
nly after Milly and a few of her other friends told her bluntly that Laith was sucking away her last dribs of self-esteem. There had been a whole month near the end of the relationship where Kyla didn’t write at all because she couldn’t banish the idea of Laith standing over her shoulder, rolling his eyes at every line.
After Kyla spoke, Milly blinked, quiet. “We love you, but we don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do,” she finally said.
Kyla looked up at Milly, then turned away from her. “Anyway,” she finally said, “don’t you and Jared have some stuff to work out?”
Milly sat up straight. “What do you mean?”
“Well . . .” Kyla minutely examined her salad while she talked. “Are either of you making any actual art? A lot of times, when artists date, it’s because they want to distract each other from actually working.”
“I’ve been working!” Milly insisted. “I’ve been applying for grants and residencies all week, putting slides together. I’ve been running all over town.”
“You have to do stuff like that, obviously,” said Kyla. “But, sweetie, that’s not working.”
“You spend a month applying for eight grants at a time and then tell me it’s not working,” Milly snapped back.
They walked out of the park together. Milly slipped her hand in Kyla’s, comforted by that and feeling a bit subversive about it, but Kyla gave it a quick squeeze and pulled her own hand gently away.
After that conversation, Milly became obsessed with the idea that Jared was distracting her from producing meaningful work. When she was working in the room she painted in, the small bedroom Jared had helped her convert to a studio, she resented it when he had the TV on too loudly, when he shouted random things to her, even when he brought her tea. She got stuck on the fact that here she was, working from the apartment like a hobbyist, while he had a separate workspace in an old warehouse in desolate far-west Chelsea. (Granted, he worked with concrete and old train-track spikes, materials the apartment could never accommodate, but still.) She fixated on the idea that he’d already had a solo show, albeit one in a makeshift gallery in a garage in Park Slope, but she’d only been in group shows.
She thought of all the times she’d put her brushes down and sunk into his arms when he got home, happy for the break and for the chance to bury her face in his flannel shirts, which smelled like sawdust and diner bacon. Why had she always abandoned her work so readily, to greet him as though it were her duty? And most of all, she grew to resent his routine query: “How’re your pictures?” Pictures. Before, she’d always thought that sounded sweet and ironic; now it just seemed condescending, diminutizing.
One night she was frustrated, mixing paints to get a particular shade of murky taupe, and he came in with a dishrag over his shoulder and said, “Millipede? You want pasta with asparagus or broccoli rabe or both?”
The words were barely out of his mouth before she turned on him, exasperated. “Why can’t you just give me this space? Just pretend that if I’m in here, I don’t exist.”
Jared winced, as though he’d been slapped. “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed. “I just wanted to make you dinner. But fine. Have your fucking space.” He grabbed his jacket and left the apartment to go get his own dinner. Milly thought she’d done the right thing, asserted her need for space. But when she heard the door slam, she felt like somehow she hadn’t gone about it the right way.
Ryan liked Jared and tried to tell Milly she was crazy. “Who planted this idea in your head that Jared is holding you back?” he asked her. “Kyla?”
Milly blushed, as though she’d been caught out. “It’s not about who planted the idea,” she said. “It’s about: is there truth there? I picture Kyla getting up at six every morning and making coffee in her French press and sitting down and writing for those two hours in beautiful, utter solitude. No static flying around her head.”
Ryan laughed derisively. “Kyla’s a cokehead! I doubt she’s gotten up at six A.M. in a while, unless she was already up all night.”
“She’s not a cokehead,” Milly balked. “She likes to do a little coke at parties once in a while.”
At that same moment, however, Milly remembered the last time she’d seen Kyla, at a party that Kyla and some of her flashy advertising and magazine friends, the ones Milly never liked, had given three weeks ago. The party was loud and obnoxious, and Milly was not having a very good time, so she was relieved when Kyla finally came over to her. But Kyla looked so gaunt, seemed so jittery, so distracted!
They hugged and kissed. “I’m so happy to see you!” Kyla exclaimed. But as they stood there trying to make conversation, Kyla couldn’t keep her eyes focused. They kept darting around. Milly thought they looked like hollow orbs desperately radiating forced cheer.
Now Ryan asked her, “Do you want Kyla’s life or yours?”
But Milly ignored the question. “It’s not just problems with Jared per se,” she continued. “I think I may like women more than men.”
Ryan sighed. “I am not going through this whole topic with you again,” he said. “You’ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than two weeks. Meanwhile, you and Jared have been together—what? Three years now? You’re telling yourself a story in your head about Jared and your work and now you want everything to fit it. The point is you are doing good work, you are productive; Jared is not getting in the way, and you need to chill out a little.”
Milly laughed sharply. “So you’re dismissing me out of hand,” she said. “Too bad you can’t be so blunt with Nora. Maybe she wouldn’t make you microwave her salmon four times.”
They both laughed.
“I just wish you weren’t so suggestible,” Ryan finally said.
That quieted Milly a bit. “I just—” She sighed. “I just need to work.”
Ryan, and everyone who heard this mantra from Milly at the time, thought that she was blowing off steam. But then, to everyone’s astonishment, Milly left Jared. She simply left him and got her own apartment in Park Slope, out in Brooklyn. Her anger at Jared didn’t evaporate—in fact it deepened to the point where it certainly wasn’t just about Jared but seemed aimed at something just over his shoulder. She sensed as much herself, but that didn’t keep her from hardening into a kind of icy, sealed-off rage that perplexed and dismayed everyone, including herself. The rage put laser pinpricks into her melty brown eyes and began wearing furrows into her forehead. This was shortly after she’d turned twenty-three.
She’d packed her things and left the Christodora one night when Jared was out of town. He returned to find nothing of hers there save a Guatemalan mitten on the living-room floor that must have fallen out of a hastily stuffed bag. He picked it up, bawling and cursing all over it for ninety minutes.
“You’re fucking crazy, Milly!” he repeated, wiping his snot on it. “You’re fucking lost!” He finally fell asleep there on the floor, exhausted, he and Horace the cat nuzzling the mitten.
As for Milly, the serenity she was looking for after leaving Jared was a long time coming. She kept waking up every day, thinking, Okay, now, my life begins. But by eleven A.M. she’d often feel as though she’d already run off her own rails and had no idea how to salvage the afternoon, what to do next.
One evening, she found herself alone in Chelsea after dinner with some high-school friends she wasn’t very close to. She watched a middle-aged woman with a bushel of scraggly salt-and-pepper hair shuffle out of the ice cream store, licking her cone with manic precision, and a terrifying wave of loneliness engulfed her. I don’t know how to give or receive love, she thought. I’m trapped in this prison. A cold sweat crept over her and she felt disoriented, as though she’d never seen the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twentieth Street before in her life. She sat down for a second on a stoop, scared to meet eyes with passersby, who’d clearly signaled to her that she looked insane.
Eventually, she stood up.
Kyla lived three blocks away. In her disoriented haze—tears beginning to well in her eyes and crest over, despite her best efforts to hold them back—she walked to Kyla’s and hit the buzzer. She waited fifteen seconds and hit it again. Just when a new wave of emptiness was building inside, telling her that she was still completely alone with nowhere to go, Kyla came over the intercom, asking who it was.
“It’s Milly,” she barely choked out. “Will you let me up?”
Her arm reached for the door, waiting for the buzz and the click. But a strange second passed before Kyla’s voice came back on. “Sweetie, this isn’t a good time.”
Milly pressed the “talk” button. “Well, can you come down for a second? I really need to talk to someone.” Just as she said it, a couple passed, looked at her with glancing concern. She was mortified. Seconds passed. “Can you please come down for a second?” she asked the intercom again.
“Give me a second,” Kyla replied.
Milly sat down on the stoop, exhausted. In a moment, Kyla would come down with cigarettes and they’d sit close, they’d talk, as they had done on this stoop so many times before. But minutes passed and Kyla didn’t come down. This realization settled slowly into Milly, first puzzling, then humiliating and enraging her. Finally, at the ten-minute mark by her watch, she buzzed again. A minute passed with no answer. Milly pressed her finger to the buzzer for a full twenty seconds, feeling insane. No answer. She walked to a payphone and called Kyla, whose answering machine clicked on. “I so long to hear your voice,” Kyla’s recorded voice said. Then the beep. For a moment, Milly said nothing, half expecting that Kyla would pick up. But she didn’t.
