Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “You are blowing me off right to my face,” Milly said flatly into the phone. “I can’t believe you!” She hung up. Her shock and outrage had somehow trumped her wild despair, and, too exhausted to walk to the train and take it home, she stuck out her hand automatically and hailed a cab she couldn’t really afford, then sat there, spent and dumbfounded, as the taxi took her to her silent new apartment in Park Slope.

  Not for a month did her fury melt into something more like sober resolve. You asked for all this empty space around you, she told herself. Now you better make good on your word and do something with it. And she endeavored to. She began painting more productively, with what felt to her like more focus. Her galling obsession with the idea that she had been living in thrall to Jared and his ambitions dissipated, and with that came a modicum of calm for Milly.

  As it did, of a sort, for Jared. He went out every night and drank with his high-school buddies. Bombed, he would wordlessly approach friends and give them long, rocking hugs. They’d ask how he was doing and he’d shrug slowly, searching for words.

  “I’d say I just went from the period of unbearable, scalding misery to the period of abiding but somehow just barely tolerable misery,” he’d finally say. “Like, from waking up in the morning and thinking, first thing, I’m alone, I want to die, to thinking, I’m alone, I want to die, yeah, so fucking get some coffee and the paper and get on with your day and deal with it.”

  “Well, that’s a step,” his friends would say, and laugh.

  And he would snort out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Then his eyes would glass over. A tiny tear would race down his cheek, which he’d flick away, ashamed. His best buddy, Asa, would notice and rub his back while continuing to extol the brilliance of Reservoir Dogs to any interested parties.

  As a sidelight to missing Milly, Jared missed Kyla, too. He missed her against his better judgment, since he’d been bright enough to put two and two together and realize it’d largely been Kyla who’d planted the idea in Milly’s head that Jared was holding her back from her personal best. But he still missed her. And, like everyone by this point, he felt badly for her.

  Everyone knew that, when it came to Kyla, there was some sad shit there, which most people only knew about elliptically, concealed as it was beneath the hardworking sparkle of her party chatter. That honeymoon picture on her dresser: those handsome parents in Italy—the pretty, dark-haired Greek mom with her Marlo Thomas flip and that fair-haired, smirking dad; how they met at Berkeley; how Kyla was raised a double-dissertation baby. And just the dad, the dad. Don’t pull a my-dad on me and tell me you’re going to be at my reading and then not show up, or maybe you slip in just when I’m finishing. Or One really good tactic in life that’s underrated is, when you blow people off, just pick up where you left off the next time you see them and be lovely and pretend it never happened; that always worked for my dad. Or When you go on about how you don’t know what to do with your life, I feel like I’m talking to my mom when she goes on about my dad. Like, she goes into this trance state of loss and confusion and resentment that’s somehow really comforting for her. And finally I have to say, “Enough, I know it feels good, but now you have to go on a date, or go out with your fucking girlfriends, or go to the gym or quit smoking—basically acknowledge that every day you stew in those yummy sad juices, Dad wins.”

  The cards from Dad, the checks from Dad, that mysterious visit from Dad, whom nobody got to meet, which rendered Kyla invisible and inaccessible for five days. The handsome, suave, cruel older men who came up again and again in the short fiction she’d read at bars, her own Harlequin-pulp Achilles’ heel. So much complexity spinning around the dad!

  Kyla lived so voraciously. It was all very self-conscious, built around references to past eras. How many times had Kyla mentioned Lily Bart, Jordan Baker, Dorothy Parker, Holly Golightly, Edie Sedgwick? Throwing out these names took the edge off the random sex and the unhappy mornings after the drugs. How far would she go? She had left her best friend down on the stoop when she was clearly in pain and in need, because she couldn’t have her up with the four random magazine people in her living room and all the drugs, and she was too high herself to even go down and talk to her.

  “You are blowing me off right to my face,” they’d all heard Milly say over the answering machine. “I can’t believe you!”

  They’d looked at one another, cracked out. The guy from Details did the totally inappropriate thing and laughed out loud. The girl who’d been so busy with the Harper’s Bazaar relaunch, the one with Linda Evangelista’s arm in front of her face on the cover (“Enter the Era of Elegance”), looked at Kyla sympathetically and shrugged.

  “You can’t always be available,” the girl said.

  Kyla pulled into herself after that, as though the drugs had snapped off—which, increasingly, they did, dashing her into sulky gloom in the middle of the chatter—but remarkably, nobody noticed and everybody stayed till five thirty in the morning.

  That was the start of the six-week dark period: Kyla having those random magazine and PR people over, usually with a boy staying after; the morning hours of fitful sleep; the dread upon the shallow wake; the afternoons watching crap TV and trying to nap or clean the house; the half hours pretending to work in a café; the evenings pulling it together for somebody’s book party or birthday drinks; the bullshit debates about Tina Brown in the dive bars afterward; the inevitable repairing back to her house. She saw Milly through none of it, too mortified to call her.

  Then one late night in September, when everybody had left her apartment, including the boy who’d stayed the night before, Kyla got into bed and heard the clicking in the walls and at the windows. She snapped on the light, but the clicking continued. It was in her throat. She lay very still and concentrated on her breathing, but the strange clicking continued. She was trying to cry but couldn’t, she realized. Her heart was beating so fast. She got up, stood in front of the mirror. She didn’t see 1904, 1926, 1963, or 1968. She realized it was 1993, too much upon her to make romance out of it, and for a moment, she saw the Kyla whom other people saw—the kind Kyla, the compelling Kyla, the scary Kyla, the sad Kyla.

  The phone rang at Milly’s five times, then came the answering machine. “Tell me who you are and I’ll get right back to you,” said Milly’s voice. Then: “Mill? Are you there? Can you pick up? It’s me.” A very long pause. “I know I don’t deserve this, but . . .”

  Milly picked up. “I’m here,” she said, her voice hoarse with sleep. Kyla still heard the chill in it. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m so scared, Mill. I can’t cry.”

  “You can’t cry?”

  “I try, but I can’t.”

  “Why do you want to cry in the first place?” There was a pause. “Are you high again?”

  “I can’t stop.”

  Milly winced, horrified. “Is it in front of you right now?”

  “Can you please just come over?”

  Milly laughed sharply. “So now you want me to come over. Are you sure you’ll buzz me in?”

  Kyla knew this was coming. “I’m sorry.”

  “How could you do that to me?” Milly pleaded.

  But Kyla was silent on the other end of the line, which disconcerted Milly. “If you’re that scared,” Milly finally said, “you can come over here.”

  “But I’m scared to leave the house!”

  “I’m not coming to you!” Milly fired back, now fully awake. “I’m infuriated at you! You’re not a good friend!”

  This was the lance that pierced Kyla’s pent-up tears. “Don’t say that,” she sobbed. “I want to be. Sweetie, please! Give me another chance.”

  The low break in Kyla’s voice, the snuffly snobs, took Milly aback. She sighed deeply, pushed her sleep-tangled hair back from her face. “If you’re that scared, get in a cab and come over here,” she said. “I’
m not leaving Brooklyn at three in the morning.”

  “I don’t even know where you live now,” Kyla snuffled.

  Milly gave her the address—Kyla said she’d be there soon—and put the phone down. She was annoyed, and annoyed at herself for acquiescing. Hurricane Kyla was about to come sweeping through her safe, well-ordered home. She went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, took out the Ativan that she barely ever took anyway, and hid it in a dresser drawer so Kyla wouldn’t steal it. She turned against the wall a canvas she was working on so she wouldn’t have to bear some casual remark Kyla would make about it. How else could she protect herself? She went into the kitchen and made a pot of chamomile tea and sat there in her bathrobe, fake-mulling over the crossword puzzle in yesterday’s paper.

  In Chelsea, Kyla put down the phone. Again, the clicking started and she thought it was coming from the windows and the walls, the neighbors and the authorities trying to get into the apartment in a subtle, quiet way, then arrest or hospitalize her. The thought of pulling herself together, locking the door behind her and venturing down the bright, empty stairwell, braving the sidewalk and hailing a cab, giving the cabbie the impression of normalcy all the way to Brooklyn, terrified her. But she also knew that if she didn’t leave, it would just be her and the clicking until dawn, and she’d go insane. So she blocked out the clicking, dressed, got her bag and keys.

  Oh, and the coke. There was that baggie in her bureau she hadn’t told the others about, because surely they’d have gotten her to bring it out, and she’d wanted them to leave. She took it out and, fully acknowledging how crazy she was, scooped a fair-size mound on the end of her key and snorted it. Then she put it in her bag and lay on her back on her bed with her head hanging off the edge until she felt the familiar, comforting tang in the back of her throat. She got up and swaggered out of the apartment—the heels of her boots criminally loud in the echoing stairwell with the buzzing fluorescent lights—and walked to Seventh Avenue and hailed a cab. She even made small talk with the cabbie, careful not to talk a blue streak like a cokehead on a new jag.

  When Milly opened her door, Kyla embraced her and sobbed. Milly stood there, dumbstruck, finally embracing Kyla in return, gingerly.

  “When did you start doing drugs tonight?” she asked Kyla.

  “I don’t want to talk about drugs,” Kyla said through tears. “I just want you to know that I stayed away because I want your life too badly, and I hate that feeling.”

  “I don’t think I’m awake enough for a big, deep talk right now,” Milly said. “You should try to get some sleep. I found an Ativan. Do you want it?”

  Kyla nodded yes, following Milly into the kitchen. Milly went away, came back, and set the Ativan down before her on the table with a glass of water. Kyla took it. She reached into her bag for her cigarettes.

  “I don’t smoke in the apartment,” Milly told her, concealing rapid waves of pity, morbid fascination, horror, and sadness. She’d rarely seen Kyla high or so wrecked. In a way, it was a relief to see Kyla letting herself fall apart, finally abandoning her bravura performance. “Come on, we can go up on the roof.”

  Up there under a night sky with a wan sliver of a moon, sitting cross-legged on the roof’s gravelly floor, they smoked, Kyla’s hand shaking. Milly had all but quit smoking and—Wouldn’t it figure, she thought—was having her first cigarette in weeks with Kyla.

  “Can I just tell you one thing?” Milly asked. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want my life if you fully knew what I went through with my mother growing up. I know you didn’t have it easy with your father, but if you could only know what it was like. Because it was really awful. It was like growing up with Patty Duke for a mother.”

  Milly said this gravely, but Kyla laughed, which made Milly laugh, which made Kyla feel a bit better suddenly. The first cool edge of the Ativan was creeping in. She would know peace soon; she would sleep with Milly nearby, perhaps close beside her. A thought dimly formed, which seemed too much to ask for: there could maybe be moments of peace when she could put down the exhausting project of Being Kyla.

  “And,” Milly added, “I hope it’s obvious to you that you have to go to rehab. Everybody thinks so.”

  Kyla continued to nod, staring at the ground. Then she pulled the baggie of coke out of her bag and handed it to Milly. “Will you get rid of it for me?” she asked.

  Milly looked at the small plastic square of white powder in her palm. “What should I do with it? Sell it?”

  “Dump it down the toilet, then rinse the bag and throw that out,” Kyla said. “That way I won’t try to find it wherever you’re hiding it.”

  “Oh my God,” Milly said. “You are so addicted.”

  This made them both laugh again. They finished their cigarettes and went downstairs. On the stairwell, walking behind Kyla, Milly put her hand on Kyla’s shoulder, and Kyla pulled it around to nuzzle it against her face and kiss its back. Kyla went into the bedroom to undress and Milly took the baggie of coke into the bathroom. She knelt down by the toilet and tapped its contents into her left palm, moving it around a bit with the index finger of her right hand. She marveled for a moment at the ability of a lump of inert white substance to so completely steal someone away, to the point that she was barely recognizable anymore. Milly had tried coke only once, in high school, and hadn’t liked the effect at all.

  She dumped the coke into the toilet, brushed her palm, rinsed the baggie in the sink so as not to leave even a powder film of remains in the trash bin that might tempt Kyla, and tore the baggie in two. She felt a bit like she’d felt when she’d spied Laith on the street, rushing self-importantly back to the Harper’s office, unseen by her, a few weeks after he and Kyla had finally broken up. Both cocaine and Laith had given Kyla a sense of being all right in the world, but then had turned on her. Now they were things that Kyla would have to put huge amounts of energy into saying good-bye to rather than enjoying.

  It was exactly how Milly felt about Jared. How can I really judge her when I’m going through that myself? Milly thought. That allowed her, amid her exhaustion and annoyance, her first tiny wave of forgiveness toward Kyla. In the bedroom, with pale strips of light in the slits between the blinds, the Ativan had put Kyla to sleep. She lay on her side, in her ­T-shirt and underpants, her head tucked under both hands. Her face, Milly thought, looked childlike, unguarded, not straining for wit or charm. Milly undressed and lay down the same way, her arm holding Kyla below her breasts, her nose in the scent of Kyla’s hair. It was much the same way Jared had once held her in bed, before she learned she wasn’t free.

  FIVE

  I Want to Thank You

  (1984)

  Ysabel was having so much fun. The music sounded amazing and the men around her were beautiful. Whatever she and Tavi had taken—MDMA, she thought Tavi had said—had made her feel euphoric, and she and Tavi were dancing close, bumping, grinding. In the song, the woman sang something like, Had enough of all the pressure . . . had a life that felt like pouring rain . . . Then I turned around. I was so astounded by your smile. Finally there was light . . . and this is the moment of my life!

  That’s just how Issy felt. There could not be more than a few dozen other women in this packed club, going on two A.M., and she knew none of these men was going to fall in love with her, but she didn’t care. She was with her best friend, Tavi, and a bunch of Tavi’s friends. The music was great, Tavi was holding her close, it was a Saturday night, and she didn’t have to be back at work, in fact, until Thursday, the day after The Fourth of July. She and Tavi locked eyes, held that stare, smiled. Then Tavi kissed her—not his usual kiss on the cheek, but on the lips, openmouthed. Not with his tongue, but still . . . it lingered!

  She put her hand over her lips. “Oh my God, Tavi!” she said. “You did not just!”

  Tavi laughed like a hyena. “Hahaha, yeah, princess, I just did!” That boy was fucking crazy. He was skinny with
a big Boricua ’fro and a gap between his two front teeth, wearing Sergio Valente jeans, a tight yellow T-shirt saying WHERE’S THE BEEF?, and three gold chains. Tavi, her best friend from the block in Corona, Queens. Whom she’d pretty much known was gay since they were fourteen. What other boy ran around the neighborhood in tiny orange gym shorts, a rainbow headband, and Mork from Ork suspenders singing at the top of his lungs, Hey, mister, have you gotta dime? Mister, do you wanna spend some time? Yep, that was Octavio. Tavi-boy, she called him. They did everything together.

  She showed Tavi some of her best moves—kind of like if she were Sheila E. in the new “Glamorous Life” video she was obsessed with, in that shiny tight coat, rocking her shoulders while she thrashed away on those drums. Sheila E. was her new idol. In her mind, she was Sheila E. She did have hair nearly as big as Sheila’s, styled asymmetrically, and she thought she had Sheila’s attitude. Yet Issy was not deluded; she did not think she was as beautiful or sexy as Sheila, even as she tried to make the most of what she had: her large, bright eyes; smooth caramel skin; and fairly good curves. Even though she stood at only five feet four inches, and even if her nose was a little flatter, her forehead a little higher, and her lips a little thinner than she’d have liked, she did her best to distract away from those things with makeup, fashion, and attitude.

  In her neighborhood, she was well liked. She was, after all, the younger sister of Freddy Mendes, a big guy with swagger who’d nearly made the farm team for the Mets and who, frankly, had never much paid her the time of day. But lately, having just turned twenty-five, working toward her dental hygienist certificate while watching all her friends get married and have kids, or not get married but still have kids, she’d started to wonder, What’ll become of me? Will I be alone my whole life? She would then catalog in her head the good qualities she possessed: I’m a caring person, she thought. I have a good sense of humor. I can cook. I take excellent care of my teeth. I don’t take things too sensitively—I can go with the flow! Putting this list together in her head helped her, and she would always top it off with a prayer that she meet the right man for her before she turned twenty-eight. (The previous cut-off had been twenty-five, until she’d turned twenty-five.)