by Tim Murphy
And yet Milly was always half terrified. The silence whispered to her, Go down this dark, leafy path. In the middle of the night, when she’d wake to go to the bathroom, she could hear it—she could put on slippers and throw a coat on over her boxer shorts and T-shirt and walk outside, down some imaginary forest path in the snow that wound all the way down to a quiet but vast river. That’s why she was terrified, because she could simply keep on walking and never come back. All the trappings of Milly would fall away behind her as she strode deeper into the forest toward the river—the paintings, her mother and father, her friends, the birthday parties, the clothing swaps with her girlfriends, the gallerists, the skirts she’d worn in high school and the fringed suede coats from college, the cats (well, no, she might carry the cats with her into the woods). It would all fall away behind her like well-braised meat falls off the bone, leaving her clean, naked, vulnerable. The silence would whisper for her to do it, and such a deep, terrifying part of herself wanted to, so she would put on Leonard Cohen in the middle of the night and try to ground herself back in the matter of the living, of the very tethered and connected. In the morning, peeking out the window from bed and seeing her landlord in the garden, she was relieved, reminded that it’d all been a four-A.M. half-dream.
But Milly in the middle of the night longed for Jared, who saw through to her terror. By day, his ungroomed, bacon-smelling self—the sheer amount of space he took up, like a farm dog; his hopeless shedding all over her life and her work!—could send her screaming into the forest. In the middle of the night, though, when she’d stumbled back from the bathroom and he’d throw his arm around her and pull her close, she’d melt into that stinky, warm mass and say “I love you” and think Thank you for Jared and fall back asleep.
And suddenly there he was, standing over her on the bench on the corner of North Vermont and Melbourne Avenues.
“What’s up, Millipede?” He lit a cigarette. She moved over on the bench and he sat down beside her. She folded her arms and stared straight ahead, boiling inside with warring feelings.
“Jeremy really didn’t tell me you were here,” Jared finally said. “I freaked when I saw you. But we were right up on the table.”
Her eyes flashed at him with anger. “They planned it,” she said. “Even if they didn’t spell it out, they planned it. I bet Kyla said we’d be here on Friday. They think they’re doing the right thing.” She was dismayed to find she was becoming furious again, just as she had inside. “How dare they? How dare they? I have a right to set my own course. I don’t just have to take shit.” She was surprised to find herself suddenly sobbing. “I have a right to myself.”
Jared had been sitting close, but now he slowly backed away. He stood up, stared down on her. The cigarette fell from his hand. “I’ll leave you then, Milly,” he said.
She stood up and pulled him back down again by his jacket. “No, I don’t want you to leave me,” she sobbed. She buried her face in his jacket. “I miss you. I love you. I miss you so much. I’m just trying to hold on to myself.”
She was racked with sobs, and he held her and rocked her. She felt that rage she’d always felt with him, not at him but something she couldn’t quite make out just over his shoulder, and whatever that hideous, massy thing was, she’d just gone to town on it with a baseball bat. And the relief of it was her realization, while she sobbed, that whatever it was, it wasn’t Jared! He hated it as much as she did—he hated it for her, alongside her.
She cried until her face was raw, until she felt exhausted in his arms.
“We need to go back inside because neither of us has a car,” Jared said.
She rolled her eyes. “I know. So pathetic.”
“I don’t want to swallow you, Milly. All the room is there for you, as wide as you want it.”
She was truly exhausted now. “Let’s just get back to New York and figure it out from there,” she said. “I can’t even think straight in this good weather.”
She pulled away from Jared once they were inside; she was certainly not giving Kyla and the boys that satisfaction. They had to walk directly in front of Marty and Elayne to get back to the banquette.
“Aww,” drawled Elayne into her microphone. “Look at you two! You two kids look like you want to know what love is. Do you want to know what love is? I know I do. Don’t you, Marty?”
“I sure do,” Marty said into his mic. “I think I already know.”
Marty and Elayne then began their inevitable lounge version of the Foreigner song. Milly and Jared got back to the banquette. Kyla looked up at Milly’s blotchy face.
“Did you request the song, too, just to put a cherry on it?” Milly asked Kyla.
Kyla gasped. “You’re so paranoid, Millicent Heyman! You are crazy, you know that, right?”
She and Kyla exploded in laughter. “You are crazy, Kyla McKallagat!” Milly cried. “Learning to breathe! I’ll show you how to breathe!”
Milly lunged at Kyla, wrapped her arms around her. “You’re crazy, you’re crazy!” Kyla shrieked, cackling madly. The boys and everyone else leaned back, like, Uh, what the fuck just happened? And Milly didn’t quite understand herself, except that it was the first time in a long time she felt full of joy.
SEVEN
Portrait of the Artist
(2010)
Mateo has grown. He thinks back bemusedly on his high-school persona, M-Dreem, just over a year ago, so fly in his high-tops and massive T-shirts, the little prince of Art and Design High School. Well, he’s moved on. At Pratt, there are these slightly older kids—the steampunk kids, they’re called—who wear only vintage lace-up boots, tight trousers, vests, old watches on chains, and black hats or slouchy old newsboy hats, and Mateo has become sort of enamored of them, hanging out with them—and they, all being from way upstate or New Jersey, love him because he is “New York” and “real” to them.
He affects some of their look, spending a lot of time when he’s not on campus cruising around thrift stores in the East Village, where he still lives with Millimom and Jared-dad, buying anything black or old looking. The big ’fro now goes in pigtails underneath a bowler, for example, and the fat red-and-black Airs perhaps with knee stockings and twill breeches. He likes the look—he’s mixing genres, listening to less Outkast and more old Josephine Baker and early Cure. And his art: What the F was he thinking back in high school with that glorified notebook doodling? He laughs at it now. As soon as he started seeing more work, hitting the New Museum and the Chelsea and Lower East Side galleries, he changed up his game, became much more minimal, abstract. For the final project of his foundation drawing class, he was taking details from these old Josephine Baker photos—one eye, her feet, her breasts—and drawing them into planes of endlessly repeating water drops, food blobs, or strange, jellylike swirls. He inwardly cringes when he remembers that spider thing he did for his final high-school project. What had he been thinking?
Today, mid-April, it’s the first warm spring day. Everyone’s lying out on campus, shoes off, portfolio cases cast aside, Lady Gaga coming out of the dorm windows. He’s hanging out with Keiko, a sculptor from L.A. who dresses like a Tokyo Harajuku girl (schoolgirl kilts, combat boots, shock of purple in her black hair), whom he’s made out with at a few parties, and with Fenimore, whose real name is Carl, from Rochester, one of the steampunk guys. Keiko’s talking about the Marina Abramovic´ show at MoMA, where Marina just sits there and a visitor sits across from her and they stare at each other for as long as the visitor wants. Keiko went and waited in line for six hours.
“So I finally sit down across from her,” Keiko says, “and it’s amazing, she is almost like a wax sculpture except that she allows herself to blink, and I can see her chest move up and down breathing.”
“But she doesn’t talk, right?” asks Fenimore.
“Nooo,” says Keiko. “And you’re not allowed to make any sort of faces at her or say a
nything, you just stare and see where your mind goes.”
Mateo ponders this for a second. “That is so intense,” he says, because, after thinking about it, he feels that it is. He’d like to go. But it also sounds kind of scary to him.
“It is soooo intense,” says Keiko. She lies down in the grass, puts her head in Mateo’s lap and starts lacing his fingers in her own. Mateo glances at Fenimore, who’s looking away behind his sunglasses, as though he’s lost in thought. Is he jealous? He’d said the other day he thought Keiko was hot. But then there’s his whole obsession with My Own Private Idaho, so Mateo thinks he might really be gay, or at least bi.
“Sooo intense,” Keiko says again. “So at first it was awkward—I was thinking, Why am I sitting across from you and staring at you? I don’t even know you. Then your mind starts to wander. You’re still staring at her face, but your mind wanders, like I started thinking about my grandmother.” Keiko’s grandmother, in San Francisco, had died six months ago. “And before you know it, I’m crying! I’m welling up. And then—and this is the part nobody believes—”
“She hands you a tissue?” Mateo asks. Fenimore laughs. Mateo would never want to admit it, but he always thrills a little when Fenimore laughs at his cracks.
“No!” goes Keiko. “I swear, even though she’s not supposed to talk or make faces, I swear I see her mouth the word no. As in, Don’t cry. And I stopped short. I was horrified! Had that just happened? Then I was, like, confused, like had I imagined it, like at my grandmother’s funeral when I thought my mother said to me, Stop crying, Keiko, you’re embarrassing me. It was so humiliating. Where was I? But she—um, Marina Abramović—was just like a blank slate. Suddenly I thought I’d imagined it. I’m like the 450th person she’s sat across from now for, like, six weeks—she could care less if I cry or what I do. And that kind of killed it for me, so I got up and left.”
“How long were you there for?” Mateo asks. He’s heard people wait hours in line to sit across from her and then some of them sit there for hours, which they’re allowed to. They can stay as long as they want, until the museum closes.
Keiko considers. “Probably twenty, twenty-five minutes in all. I don’t know how some people stay for two hours and just ignore all the people waiting in line behind them.”
“The people waiting in line,” Fenimore says, “are part of the show.”
Keiko takes Mateo’s hand again, plays with his fingers. “I guess so,” she says uncertainly. “I still can’t do that, though.” When her hand goes into Mateo’s, he feels a warm rush, and it reminds him about the baggie in his pocket, which gives him a double warm rush in his stomach, that recall. Ever since that party at Oscar’s last year, he’s been snorting heroin once or twice a month—not more than that, and never more than snorting it, which is way less hard-core than smoking or shooting it. Nobody knows except a few guys on the Lower East Side whom he buys it from and does it with. The fact that he has been able to control it and to keep his occasional mild dopesickness from Millimom and Jared-dad is a point of pride with him. (That morning after Oscar’s party, they thought he was merely drunk.)
He has no one in his life to ask him why he snorts heroin. But if he did, and if he were even able to articulate this, he might say something like: ever since he was twelve, when Millimom and Jared-dad finally sat him down and explained to him that his mother, that woman in the snapshot dated 04/14/1984, had died of AIDS when he was just a baby and left him in the legal guardianship of his bubbe, Ava, and that’s why Millimom and Jared-dad had taken him in as a foster child and then adopted him—well, ever since then, and more every year through his teens, he had felt increasingly disconnected from the world he was being raised in. It felt like a shadow world, a fraud world, the second-best fake version of the world he’d have grown up in if the woman in the snapshot hadn’t disappeared, and if he’d lived with her and with his father. Then he’d have grown up in the world he was supposed to grow up in. As it was, nobody knew who his father was. His real mother, a woman named Ysabel Mendes, had apparently claimed she didn’t know who the father was, which, as Mateo aged and wised up, left him only with the angry, bad feeling that his mother, so sassy and fun-looking in that photo, had been a slut who couldn’t even keep track of her sexual encounters. Often, Mateo fantasized about seeking out her family somewhere in Queens, showing up on their doorstep in some neighborhood an hour’s subway ride from the East Village, with that snapshot in his hand, and saying, Hey, I’m your nephew, or your grandson, or your cousin, and Hey, come on, I want to know my real family.
But Mateo never did this. The thought of actually doing it terrified him. Instead, all through high school, even as he cultivated his cool factor, he grew angrier inside. He felt duped that he’d grown close to Millimom and Jared-dad in his prepubescent years and now looked upon them with increasing suspicion, wondering why they’d adopted him rather than have their own child. They never broached this topic and he certainly didn’t know how to bring it up, so instead, he distanced himself from them, growing chillier even as he realized they were giving him a life he probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. Hey, maybe he didn’t want this fancy white life! Maybe he wanted to be the ghetto thug, the son of a woman who died of AIDS and an unknown baby daddy. But then, of course, he did want his life. He loved it. He loved his high school, his teachers, his friends, his art projects. But then he’d have to go home to them, to his mystery benefactors. Why had his feelings changed? He’d torment himself with this question. Why couldn’t he accept their love and their hugs like he had when he was ten, eleven? Did he hate them? Was that the word? It was all very confusing to him; it brought up all sorts of unwelcome feelings, and he seldom knew how to make them go away, except to lose himself in painting and drawing.
And then he’d discovered heroin. How perfectly 04/14/1984 had blended into that moment. The mysterious past and the confusing present felt continuous. Or perhaps he just felt good and didn’t give a fuck about reconciling the two. He felt perfect, and even when he wasn’t high, he consoled himself with the thought that he soon would be again—on the weekend, say. He felt he had found a way to cope with what he wanted for his future even when the past came knocking too loud.
But now, in this moment with Keiko and Fenimore, he pushes past the warm anticipatory feeling in his stomach. “I have to get home and work,” he says. He has a school crit in three days.
“Can I come to your place for dinner?” Keiko asks.
“Why do you wanna come all the way to the East Village for dinner?” he asks. “I’m just gonna have to send you back; I have work tonight.”
“I like your parents,” Keiko says. “I like being in a real home with people’s parents, especially when the parents are artists. It makes me feel good.”
“Me, too,” Fenimore says. “Can I come, too?”
Mateo sighs, but he’s not against it, because it’s easier to be around the Parentals when his friends are around. The friends kind of fuzz them out. He pulls out his cell.
“What’s up, honey?” Millimom says when she picks up.
“Hey,” he says. “Can I bring Keiko and Fenimore over for dinner tonight? They want to come.”
“I thought it would be just us tonight!” she answers. He hears cars in the background; she’s on the street. “Dad’s in his studio—they won’t even get to talk to him about building and welding. It’ll just be me, a boring, bougie old-lady painter.”
“I’ll tell them that,” Mateo says. He relays the information.
“We still want to come, Millimom!” Keiko shouts into the phone.
“Yeah,” Fenimore shouts. “Bougie old-lady painters kick butt.”
“Tell Fenimore I’m very flattered,” Millimom says. Then: “Why does he call himself Fenimore anyway if his real name is Carl? Is that an art project?”
“Sort of,” Mateo says. “He’s a work in progress. What do you want me to bring
home? Is there wine?”
“None of you should be drinking wine,” she says. “You’re all underage. They’ll send me to jail for being an unfit parent.”
“Dad would let us.”
“We’ll bring wine, Milly!” Keiko shouts.
Millimom sighs. “Whatever. Also bring a head of romaine lettuce and a baguette. And, um, a good jar of red sauce. We’re only having pasta, Mateo.”
“We don’t care.” She starts to say something else but Mateo says, “Bye, see you soon!” and hangs up. In a few minutes, he and Keiko and Fenimore are on the train into the city. After they pick up the groceries, walking into the Christodora, they bump into Ardit, the humorless, square-headed super, and nod hello. Mateo’s stomach jumps a bit, as it always does now when he sees Ardit, because once a few months ago, Ardit caught Mateo nodding by the elevator at three A.M. and Mateo had to make up some bad lie about being so tired that he’d fallen asleep standing up. A few occasions since then, when Mateo came home nodding, he watched the building until he saw Ardit step out for an errand, or ducked immediately into the stairwell and climbed the six flights to avoid waiting at the elevator. That was murder. He’d slump down in the stairwell for up to an hour after that haul, undiscovered by anyone because it was the middle of the night.
When Mateo and Keiko and Fenimore enter the apartment, Milly is at the kitchen table, in front of her laptop, drinking iced tea. Hellos and hugs go around.
“Look at this work, you guys,” Milly says. She’s grading final projects at LaGuardia Music and Arts High School, where she’s taught painting the past thirteen years, and she shows the trio some gouache on wood abstracts by a girl named Cláudia Torres. “What do you think?” Milly asks.
