by Tim Murphy
“Why are you crying?” he asked her, a note of frowny disapproval in his voice.
Milly brushed away tears with the back of her hand, embarrassed. “Because I’m happy,” she said, all her defenses down.
He took back her hand and put it on his again and rubbed it in a curious, reassuring way. “You’re a nice lady,” he said.
She laughed, which, amid her tears, became a bit of a snort. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re a nice boy.”
For a few seconds, neither of them said anything.
“So,” Milly finally said, pulling herself together. “We’ll talk about it after with Sister Ellen, okay?” But he’d already gone back to his drawing.
In just one month, after an afternoon of good-byes at Sister Ellen’s where everyone was crying for one reason or another—the boys because Mateo was leaving them behind, Ellen because Mateo was leaving them behind, Milly a bit because the heartbreak of the scene was just too much for her, everyone, really, except for strong, dad-like Jared and curiously matter-of-fact Mateo, who exuded the cool, quiet entitlement of someone who was about to have his own room—they took him home on the subway, all his worldly possessions of his five years, including many, many drawings and paintings and a bit of clay sculpture, fitting in a duffel bag and a box.
He said absolutely nothing on the subway—he could have been riding alone, giving just perfunctory nods when Milly or Jared said something to him, such as how much they thought he was going to like the art supply store around the corner from them, or the great art teacher at the kindergarten he’d be going to. He said nothing to Ardit, the super, or the other building staffers at the Christodora, all of whom had been expecting his arrival for a month now. He said nothing in the elevator, nothing in the apartment, nothing even upon entering the former study/guest room they’d furnished into a boy’s bedroom, careful not to decorate or paint save for a few superhero posters, so Mateo could make all the decisions himself and create a room entirely his own.
“You can figure out how you want to make your room, my friend,” Jared said. “What colors, what pictures.”
Mateo sat down tentatively on the bed. Milly caught his hands trembling. “Can I take a nap?” he asked.
“Right now?” Milly asked. “Do you want to go see the neighborhood? It’s really nice outside.”
“I’m tired. I wanna take a nap first.”
“Take a nap,” said Jared. “Get comfortable in your new room.” Jared gently drew Milly out of the room.
“Can you please close the door?” Mateo asked.
“Sure,” Jared said. He closed it behind them, leaving it slightly ajar.
“All the way?” Mateo called back.
Milly and Jared looked at each other. Then Jared shrugged and fully closed the door. Milly put her arms around herself and walked, in a daze, to the kitchen, Jared following her. She sat down at the kitchen table and looked down six flights at the boys playing basketball in Tompkins Square Park. Jared brought them each a glass of water.
“He’s in shock,” Jared said quietly. “Give it time.”
“I’m in shock,” Milly said.
They sat there, holding hands across the table. “We can’t leave our own house on a Saturday afternoon,” Jared said in a low voice full of amazed amusement. He started laughing quietly, gripped her hand. “What the fuck have we done?”
Milly smiled a little, shook her head. “I hope you don’t hate me for this.”
They heard a high, hiccup-y sound. Milly kicked off her shoes and, in stocking feet, padded to Mateo’s door, then padded back. She took Jared’s hand again. “He’s crying,” she whispered. “Really softly, like he doesn’t want us to hear him.”
Jared came around the table and raised her up, held her. “This is going to take time, Milly.”
All through 1998, with the whole soap opera of Monica Lewinsky in the news every day, Milly watched while Mateo glacially adjusted to his new life. Mateo made friends in kindergarten, at the playground. Mateo had playdates. Mateo had white friends, Mateo went with Milly and Jared to galleries and performances, Mateo went to Montauk and saw the beach for the first time and fell in love with the waves—and with crabs, just like the ones he’d drawn. (Real crabs didn’t smile, though.)
Milly and Jared would take Mateo back with them to Ellen’s home at first, and then after about six months, he said, with no fanfare, he didn’t want to go back anymore. Milly and Jared looked at each other, thought it best to leave it at that. Milly went back herself to do art with the boys a few more times, then finally had to tell Ellen she didn’t have the time anymore. She was now a mother, or some approximation of a mother, in a nuclear family, and she was feeling the closing in of priorities that all parents feel: that sense of letting go a bit of engagement with the broader, bigger issues of the world; that sense—which seems so solipsistic from the outside, but so utterly inevitable from the inside—that the world of the home was a crowded and challenging enough universe in and of itself.
One Sunday night, in the summer, they took a train back from Montauk. Milly and Jared carried Mateo upstairs in the elevator and put him to bed with sand in his hair, because he’d fallen asleep in the cab home from Penn Station. The next morning, Milly went to change the sheets in his little bed and she found, jammed between the mattress and the wall, a beat-up snapshot of a game-looking Latina with moussed hair and a leather jacket and a denim miniskirt, posing with some guy and a boom box.
She turned it over and read the date stamp: 04/14/1984. She turned it back around and stared at it intently. Neither Sister Ellen nor Mateo had ever mentioned this picture to her. But she didn’t have to think too hard to realize that it was likely Mateo’s mother, Ysabel Mendes, of whom her own mother had often spoken.
Milly scrutinized the woman’s face—not especially pretty but not ugly, either; eyes large and alive—looking for signs of Mateo. Mateo was lighter than his mother. He’d certainly received her wild curls, though. Milly felt tenderness for the woman, and gratitude, and also burning curiosity about exactly whom she’d gotten with to make Mateo. I hope you know he’s okay, she thought, talking to the picture. My mom took care of him for you. You can relax.
Later that afternoon, Milly was in the drugstore and bought a frame for the picture. She got home and took the frame into Mateo’s room and intended to put the picture in the frame and place it on Mateo’s dresser. But as she began to, she thought better of it. She found some photos she had just had developed of all of them at the beach and put one in the frame and set that on Mateo’s dresser instead. She left the photo of his mother tucked between his mattress and the wall, just where she’d found it, and never said a word about it to Mateo.
Occasionally in the coming years, when Mateo wasn’t home—and amid an overall new happiness and sense of purpose Milly felt upon being a mother, which settled deeply and comfortably into her bones and went a long way toward dulling the quiver of dread she’d lived with most of her life—she’d slip into his room and examine the photo and ponder the final years of Ysabel Mendes.
TWELVE
Born This Way
(2012)
On the street in front of the apartment in Westlake, Hector got in his long-term rental car, shaking. You are so fucking high, he told himself. The deep, deep-down survival voice told him that if he didn’t take a Klonopin right now, he was going to do something very, very bad, like drive the car over the first cliff he saw. He found the pill in the front pocket of his jeans, chewed it carefully and thoroughly, washed it down with the rest of a sticky bottle of Gatorade lying on the floor of the car. The pill wouldn’t kick in for thirty minutes, he knew, but he still had to act fast. He pulled out his cell, started to dial 911, then noticed that the young, skinny twink he’d been with had left his own cell phone on the seat of the car. All the better, then. Hector picked it up, punched in 911. The woman on the other end was immediate
ly barking for his name, address, phone number, location.
“There’s three people fucked up on drugs in an apartment on the corner of West Second Street and South Union and I think one of them is overdosing. You have to send EMTs.”
“Sir, what is the address and number of the apartment?”
He didn’t know. “It’s right at the corner of West Second Street and South Union. It’s off-white with a flat roof.”
“Sir, what is your name? Are you at the scene, sir?”
“I told you where it is, you just better get there,” he said.
He tried to hang up but the call, an emergency call, wouldn’t let him. He backed up the car to the building, where he noted the address and spoke it into the phone. He couldn’t remember what buzzer they’d buzzed only—when was that? How much time had passed? Fifteen minutes or three hours? The sun was rising in the east, pushing dazzling grades of red and gold into the sky, the neighborhood still silent. He threw the phone onto the small plot of lawn in front of the building.
The pill wouldn’t kick in for a while, but he had to drive—he had to get out of here. No, no, wait! He couldn’t go until he knew EMTs were coming. He started the car. The volume of the radio startled him. Had they really been blasting it that loud on the way here? He turned it down. It was that Lady Gaga song from the year before, “Born This Way,” the one that sounded like the old Madonna song. Paranoid from the drugs and making too many connections, he freaked out: it was a sign from Ricky, who’d been obsessed with Madonna!
He steadied himself to drive around the corner, where he parked. He blasted the A/C; he was soaked in sweat. He thrust his right hand into his pants and slowly masturbated to give himself something to focus on, to keep himself from going crazy. He dreaded that at any minute someone might walk or jog by with a dog, spot him behind his black sunglasses, but nobody did; he finally glanced at the car clock and realized it was 6:30 A.M. On Wednesday? Thursday? As soon as he’d flown in to Palm Springs over a week ago, as soon as he’d settled into the tiny studio apartment he rented each winter for nearly nothing from an old New York friend who’d long ago moved west but spent the winter in Puerto Rico, as soon as he’d made a meth connection and the glass pipe and torch had come out, he’d lost track of time. After that, it was just the laptop, the porn, the random visitors with their intermittent glances through the blinds at the sun-baked pool in the courtyard, from which they thought they heard laughter but which appeared deserted. Were people playing tricks on them? Hector and his visitors wondered, as the light and dark rotated rapidly outside like in a time-lapse video.
Now, in the car, he thought he was hearing sirens. No, wait, he was hearing sirens. He was relieved and terrified, because he often thought he was hearing sirens, getting closer, always waiting for the sirens to crest outside his apartment, stop, the silence, then the inevitable raid he’d been waiting for for years now that never happened, remarkably. (Why not? He had half wanted it to happen, to be delivered finally from his paranoia.) Unmistakably, now, these sirens were approaching. He heard them surge and stop around the corner. Gripping the wheel, he U-turned in the street, saw the ambulances pulling up in front of the building, and drove on. He felt his first wave of something approaching a notch less than psychosis. They might get in trouble with the law—how many drugs had he left in the apartment?—but at least nobody would die.
He drove aimlessly, so anxiously he was driving at a ridiculous crawl. His eyes felt like they were prying their way out of their sockets behind his sunglasses and he kept thinking he was seeing things—children, animals—in his periphery. He was in some truly nondescript part of L.A., all ugly, boxy, sand-hued 1960s apartment buildings, tired old palm trees in front of them, as the sun climbed higher and the same wearying California azure suffused the sky. What to do? Could he possibly get back to Palm Springs?
Then the thought sprang up on him again, hard, for the first time since that moment the boy had said the name aloud—Ysabel Mendes!—and he said aloud, “Oh my God,” and had to pull over again. He just sat there. Why had the boy said it? He started making horrible connections: the boy was living in the Christodora because Ava’s daughter had adopted him. Ava and Issy. Had he ever heard—had he heard, back in 1994, 1995, that Issy had had a baby before she died? Heard that from Ava or somebody in the world of AIDS? He couldn’t remember. By that point, he’d almost completely broken away from the original street activists and was usually either in D.C., in meetings with his elite colleagues and pharma and the feds, or off at big circuit parties, expensive raves for gay jet-setters, fucking everyone he could to forget about Ricky. He was ashamed to admit that when Ava had given him the date for Issy’s memorial service, he found the thought of attending too painful, so he’d not canceled his meetings in D.C. He’d sent flowers instead.
The boy looked like Issy, he could see it now. The nose—not as flat as Issy’s, but flat. And the fucking wild hair! But the boy’s skin was lighter. The boy’s eyes and his build. Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. Hector began to cry. No, no, no, please God, no. He found and swallowed half of another Klonopin, started the car, drove onto a wider, multilane road. He drove past a massive, modern yellow-brick building. Then he saw there was a big crucifix on it and, at the ungodly hour of 6:52 A.M., some women were walking into it. He parked his car across the street and walked toward the church. CATHEDRAL OF OUR LADY OF THE ANGELS, said the sign. Hector felt he had nothing to lose at this point. He went inside the church, which was the size of a stadium. He passed a woman on the way in and expected her to grimace, because he knew he stank, but she smiled. In a second, he could see why. A mass was getting under way, with some engaged attendees, but they were clustered what seemed a quarter mile beyond, in the first ten rows.
The rest of the endless sea of pews was dotted with homeless people, some of them with mountains of baggage at their side. Hector sat in one of the last rows. In his youth, in the many churches he’d been inside in San Juan and New York with his mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins, the only church that approached this one’s size was St. Pat’s in New York, which he and the other activists had stormed on a Sunday years before to protest the archdiocese’s AIDS policies, its opposition to condoms, and its hatred of gays.
“I hope it’s fucking okay that I’m here today,” he said aloud, as though waiting for approval. Nobody so much as turned toward him, which irritated him slightly. Were they deliberately ignoring him? He could feel the Klonopin kicking in—his eyes didn’t feel quite so much like they were straining to crawl out of their sockets. He laughed softly. “Fuck you, Ricky,” he said—he thought he said it aloud, at any rate; he wasn’t sure, just as he wasn’t sure if the legions of characters on the tapestries hanging overhead were moving, watching him, talking about him.
“The thing with you, Ricky,” he continued to himself, mumbling parts aloud, “you just didn’t want to live. That’s why I say fuck you, as harsh as that sounds. Because you didn’t even care that there were two people involved, not just you. You put me through that for, unh, what would that have been, from about 1989 when I first knew until ’92. You wouldn’t get tested, you wouldn’t go on meds until they forced you on meds in the hospital and it was too late, and you fucking—what about all my other work? I had to give up all that fucking work, going to Washington, because you wouldn’t take care of yourself, and then I had to watch you die, like I didn’t have better things to do that year.”
He must have really been talking out loud, at least at some point, because a guy with a leathery tanned face and a matted beard four pews ahead finally turned around and said, “Shut the fuck up, man.”
So he did, closing his eyes for a minute, one hand thrust in his pants. But at some point, the monologue began again: “You just weren’t very educated. And that your father, cutting you off. Well, that’s no reason to make me watch you die, you dumb fuck. You never had any interest in the data. Not at all. You were a dumb t
wink, basically.” Hector laughed. “A fucking hairstylist. I ended up with a fucking hairstylist.”
He started crying, tears engulfed with lust. “But I miss your beautiful face, Ricky. I miss it so much. Every day. And I miss your ass.”
“What the fuck, man?” The matted-beard guy four pews up had turned around again. “This is a fucking church.”
Hector didn’t even know why the guy was talking to him. He tried to look squarely at the guy through his tears. The guy looked like a filthy, sun-baked version of Charlton Heston. “I’m sorry,” he told the guy.
Now the guy’s face lit up, laughing. He made an exaggerated sign-of-the-cross benediction in his direction. “Well, my child, I forgive you. Get your hand out of your pants, though, man. You look like a fucking pervert.”
Hector took his hand out of his pants. The Klonopin was pushing down on him now like a giant, velvety hand. Probably it would be okay for him to lie down for a little bit, to get twenty minutes of sleep before he got back in the car. So he did that, feeling hugely warm and calm and protected, unable to stop babbling to himself as he fell asleep.
When he woke up, a fat, gentle-faced Latina, probably Honduran or Salvadoran, was standing over him, gently shaking his shoulder.
“Sir, you have to leave the church now, it’s almost six o’clock, we’re closing.”
“It’s seven in the morning,” he said.
“No, sir, it’s six o’clock in the evening. You’re the last person in the cathedral. You have to leave now.”
Six in the evening! Holy shit. Hector stumbled his way out of the cathedral and onto the street. His car was gone. “Oh fuck me, no,” he said. He’d parked it illegally and it had been towed? He had no idea. He’d left his wallet in the car—or at the girl’s apartment? He couldn’t remember. He hadn’t a credit card or a dollar on his person and he really didn’t much give a shit. He looked back at the benches outside the cathedral, walked across the street, lay down on one, fell asleep. How much time passed before the same fat Latina was shaking his shoulder?
