by Tim Murphy
“I just meant—” he says. Oh God, he can feel himself going down one of those bad, bad wormholes. Fuck! He needs to call his sponsor. What would his sponsor say to him right now? What is the right thing to do? He takes a breath. “I just meant it’s okay,” he says in a softer voice. “He didn’t need to come out. I’m really, really doing okay. I feel really good, like I’m on a good track.”
But it’s really too late now. She’s crying. Quietly, but he can see the tears. Then she grimaces in self-disgust as she smudges them away with the knuckle of her index finger.
“Mateo,” she says, “I tried to do the right thing. I—when I started visiting you, I—I guess I just came to love you over time and I—I mean we—we wanted you to have a better chance. I don’t know where I went wrong, honest, I don’t. We just sort of—we were winging it. We did the best we could. We—” She stops, then says, more quietly, “I just, visiting you in the boys’ home, I just really fell in love with that five-year-old face.”
Oh God, he realizes. She’s going all the way back to that? Holy shit. Oh, shit. He knows he must look absolutely like a deer in the headlights right now. He prays to say the right thing.
“I don’t think you did anything wrong,” he finally says. “I’m grateful for what you did for me. I don’t think you had anything to do with the whole drug thing. But I gotta tell you something.” And now—oh, holy shit, he can feel tears coming on, too, but he swallows them back because he doesn’t want to lose his ground on this. “I wanna be an adult now and find out who I am. I lost enough time to this drug bullshit and now I wanna be someone.”
Milly’s face lights up. “Of course,” she says. “Of course! I was hoping for that. And we don’t expect you to live with us when you come back to New York. We’ll understand if you want to get your own place in Brooklyn or live with friends or—”
“No, naw, you don’t understand,” he says. “I don’t think I wanna come back to New York. I think I wanna stay here.”
And the funny thing is he didn’t even know that’s what he wanted until he said it. But suddenly it all comes crashing down on him—New York. Those East Village and Lower East Side streets, every block crawling with drug memories. And her. Her, her, her. The 04/14/1984 photo, presumably tucked back behind his bed at the Christodora where he’d left it, but which he thinks about every few days. Where she was from and where she died. He wants to feel like he doesn’t come from anybody. That he’s not Mateo Heyman-Traum, but just Mateo, nineteen years old, artist, adult. It all clicks into place before his eyes with stunning clarity. He doesn’t want to go back to New York.
Milly sits before him, blank faced, taking it in, her mouth literally an O as she absorbs this. She looks like she’s casting about for a reply. “What about Pratt?” she finally asks.
“I don’t want to go back.” Even as Mateo says it, he realizes: it’s true. He’ll reenroll out here, or maybe he won’t go back to school at all. He’ll figure it out. But he doesn’t want to go back there. He can suddenly feel that in his gut as clear as day.
Millimom doesn’t say anything. She just licks her lips slowly and sits back in her chair and folds her arms. She looks down into her arms and then latches some hair back behind her ear. She glances up at him once—a flash of a look that he doesn’t know whether to read as shock, rage, or a challenge—and then looks back down again. He feels like he’s sinking down, down the wormhole, into sadness and betrayal. But. Well, but. There’s something else. Half of him feels like he’s coasting above those feelings, like he knows he’ll come out the other end. He feels . . . very light. Untethered.
Finally, she looks up again, rather steely. “Don’t worry, Mateo, I’m leaving tomorrow,” she says.
He remembers Kyla’s exhortation to treat Milly well. “It really means a lot to me that you came out,” he says.
She says nothing. The two of them just sit there over their sandwich crumbs. A part of Mateo is telling him to just bolt, just leave. But another part of him tells him to just breathe, that this will pass, that—for once, finally—he’s done nothing wrong. Soon he’ll be back in West Adams where he feels okay, with the guys, with the blue and green leaves flying off the wall just paces away. Just keep picturing the blue and green leaves, he tells himself. Keep picturing Charlice up on her ladder, you down below.
Kyla finally comes back, bearing samples and brochures. “Hiii,” she says breezily, plopping down. She’s going on and on about what she saw, but it doesn’t annoy Mateo. He knows Kyla is sharp enough to have sensed the nanosecond she saw him and Millimom sitting here in this posture that the best thing for her to do was swoop down and take the pressure off either of them to say anything by running on about her interior-design adventure.
“Well, shall we bolt?” Kyla finally says.
“Sure,” Millimom says, gathering the plates.
Everybody’s quiet on the way back to West Adams, the radio filling in the silence. Driving by the lot, he takes in his long afternoon look at the wall. When Kyla pulls up to Triumph House, there are guys on the front porch playing cards.
“I gotta get back in and start dinner prep,” Mateo says. That’s a lie. He had dinner prep last night. He could conceivably spend another hour with Kyla and Millimom, but he doesn’t think he has it in him. “Thanks for coming to see me and thanks for taking me out,” he says. He leans forward in the car to kiss Kyla on the cheek.
“Bye-bye, honeybunch,” Kyla says. “I’ll call you this week.”
He leans right and kisses Millimom’s cheek. “Thank you again for coming out to see me.” Say hi to Dad for me is what he should say right now, he knows, but he doesn’t.
“Bye-bye,” Milly says to him flatly.
He hops out of the car. He squares his shoulders and walks up the path to the house, waving hello to his house buddies as he does. He resolutely does not look back at the VW. He listens and waits until he hears it recede down the street. Bobby G. is sitting on the porch steps reading a battered old James Patterson paperback, probably from the house “library.”
“Mr. Mateo,” he says, “how was your day with the ladies?”
Mateo sits down next to him and puts his head in his hands. “Sometimes I fucking hate myself,” he says.
Bobby G. puts a hand on his shoulder. “Welcome to my world, little man!” He laughs. “The Try-Not-to-Hate-Yourself-Too-Much-Today Club! We’re all VIP members here!”
SEVENTEEN
Revelations
(2017)
Asa Heath, Jared Traum’s buddy dating all the way back to St. Bernard’s School in the early 1980s, hauled his forty-seven years of girth down East Seventh Street. He was sweating in his haste, late to meet Jared at some new bar, and preoccupied, his head still pounding with a day’s worth of data from the office. He’d briefly set aside his tablet while in the subway to rest his eyes but was still seeing algorithms in front of him. Yet he was not too much in his own head to suddenly stop and gape in front of the humble, rickety-awninged redbrick entrance to the Blue and Gold Tavern.
“The Blue and Gold is still here!” he blurted out, aloud, to himself. A lifelong Upper East Sider, he was always elated to discover, when he visited other neighborhoods, anything that still existed from his school days, back when they all had high hopes, say, that Mayor David Dinkins would hold on to a second term. And so this: the Blue and Gold! This was the very bar where he, Jared, Milly, and their other friends—that pretty, crazy Kyla, who’d gotten her act together out in L.A. and become a big writer—had drunk away so many nights, shoveling quarters into the jukebox to hear more Guns N’ Roses.
“Twenty-five years!” exclaimed Asa—again, aloud. He often talked aloud when walking alone. That, he thought, was something you could still do in New York without attracting so much as a raised eyebrow. And yet pretty much every other memory seemed like an unreliable old dream of an analog New York, when you promised friends you
would leave them Friday-night messages on their work voice mails that they might call into from a payphone to find out where to meet you.
Meanwhile, the stores, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops began looking more and more like it was ninety years ago. Of course, in these shops would be the gleaming transparent plastic devices that did the business and the math, but as the future took hold, nobody wanted it to look like the future anymore.
So it was that evening that Asa found himself walking into one of those very throwback, let’s-pretend-it’s-Prohibition bars a block past the good old Blue and Gold, which would’ve suited him just fine. A perfectly scratched, repurposed old mirror ran the length of the bar, surrounded by fake vintage white-and-black subway tiling. At the end of the bar, nursing a pint, sat Jared, his still-full head of honey-colored curls dusted through with white, his hands very calloused and his waist trim, thanks to the vegan diet that virtually everyone seemed to eat now, plus three mornings a week in a concrete-walled gym, tossing heavy balls at a $200-an-hour trainer. Jared, everyone told him, looked far better at forty-seven than he’d looked at forty.
The two men exchanged a rough hug. Asa called for his pint.
“How you been?” he asked.
Jared smiled slyly. “Pretty good.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“In fact,” Jared said, running his thumb cleanly around the rim of his glass, “she may come by in a bit and join us.”
“Sweet!”
Jared smiled and fondly shoulder-bumped his friend. Asa was that friend, the one some people have, if they’re lucky, who hears out decades of highs and lows and only passes judgment if he thinks major self-sabotage is looming. Asa had never played that card with Jared. Certainly not when Milly and Jared adopted Mateo, even though Asa had still been single at the time and, truth be told, viewed the kid at first as a menace to their drinking schedule. But then Asa grew pretty crazy about Mateo. Two years later, when the woman he’d been dating asked him if he wanted kids, he thought about a particular afternoon in Tompkins Square Park kicking around a soccer ball with Jared and Mateo, then about a certain pizza they’d shared at Two Boots afterward—an afternoon that had felt to him like a perfect embodiment of bare-bones male happiness—and he said to his girlfriend, “Very much so.” Together, they then had two daughters.
Still, Asa wasn’t too dim to understand that, for Jared, agreeing to adopt Mateo, just when he had started wanting his own kid, was his concession to Milly, to his love for her. And once they adopted him—well, whoa. They had no idea how hard that would be. Not that there wasn’t a window of about seven years, when Mateo was between ten and fifteen, when the three of them seemed to find their groove. They had some good times in those years together, Jared and Asa with their new families, in Montauk each summer, once or twice in Europe. But then, around fifteen, Mateo, suddenly so full of himself and conscious of his coolness, “turned,” as Milly and Jared would say. A few years later, his drug thing started. And it was around that point Asa started meeting up more and more with just Jared, for a beer or an art crawl.
Those were the years their marriage disintegrated, Jared told Asa. With Mateo’s drug thing at first, when he started failing out of Pratt, there was a feeling that of course he’s doing this, he’s acting out all those childhood feelings of loss and rage and grief, they’re just catching up to him now. Milly and Jared were on the same page at that point, for a moment.
But Jared’s resentment was already starting to show. “I wonder if the zombie will come home tonight,” Jared said one night to Asa.
“Say what?”
“When Mateo first came to live with us, I used to think of him—I mean, I never said this to Milly—as a kind of zombie, because he was so . . . flat. So shut down. Zombie kid from the land of the dead. Then, you know, once he hit nine, ten, he started coming to life. Sweet kid, showing enthusiasm, learning to show affection, really into his art. That’s why, when the dope started, I remember thinking: The zombie’s back. He wasn’t there behind the eyes anymore.”
Asa was the first person Jared had told about the sculpture incident, minus Mateo calling him a “fraud mediocre rich piece of shit.” If Mateo had meant to gut-punch a fortysomething artist who’d not yet attained the status he’d blithely considered his birthright in his early twenties, he’d succeeded, and Jared had too much pride to repeat those damning words.
“He’s become aggressive,” was what Asa had said after hearing the tale. “Like the junkies on the train begging for money.”
Jared nodded. “That’s why I had to ban him from the house.”
Once Mateo went to California and Milly started receiving good news from Kyla, a small window of renewed happiness opened for her and Jared, Asa knew that much. Jared and Milly told each other that what Mateo had needed all along was simply to get away from New York, the scene of his crimes, for a while. Some normality returned for them. They’d have dinner in the neighborhood after work, talk about their students and their own art, walk home together through Tompkins Square Park, curl up and watch a movie in bed, fall asleep to it. Milly slept without the dread fear of waking to Mateo coming home in the wee hours, shuffling through the apartment like a ghost.
“I know this might sound cold,” Jared told Asa one night on the way into a movie, “but it’s so nice just to be alone in the house with Mills again and not have Mateo to worry about.”
“He’s an adult now,” Asa said.
“He’s an adult,” Jared echoed, as though trying to convince himself.
But out in L.A. the adult didn’t last. When Milly gave Jared the news about jail and the girl who’d OD’d, Jared merely rubbed his temple and said nothing. His dismay at the news, and at Milly’s fresh wave of grief, trumped any desire on his part to pull a told you so on Milly. But privately, the news confirmed his belief that Mateo was a lost cause. If he thought about the situation for longer than he cared to, he would peer into a window of a whole sector of New Yorkers whose lives, going back generations, were infinitely more scarred and beset with challenges than his own, and he would feel uncomfortable stirrings of guilt, pity, and helplessness. So he’d return to the more conclusive thought that Mateo was, as he suspected, a lost cause—and thankfully one that was no longer his legal responsibility. Their work was done.
But Milly. “She can’t fucking let go,” Jared complained. “Even at this point. She’s fucking in L.A. right now trying to see him. She’s become, like, a masochist to his drama.” The trip of Milly’s galled him. Why would she go across the country to see someone who’d made it clear he didn’t want to be seen, when he—Jared—yearned for more time alone with her? For the first time in their marriage, doubts rumbled darkly within him.
“It would be nice for once to just see Milly happy,” Asa offered.
Jared snorted in derisive laughter. “Milly won’t let herself be happy. She’s afraid that if she lets herself be happy, her mother will go manic again and ruin the seventh-grade dance for her. She needs a disaster to feel normal.”
As for Milly, she’d not felt remotely normal since that moment Mateo had more or less told her he wanted to be left alone, then left her in the VW with Kyla as he walked back up to his halfway house. Kyla had driven for several minutes before she asked: “So can I ask what you guys talked about in the café?”
Milly continued to stare out the window. “He said he didn’t want to come back to New York.”
Kyla drove on in silence. “You know,” she finally said, “he’s just trying to find himself apart from his parents like any kid his age.”
“I think he wants to cut me out of the picture,” Milly added.
Back home, in the driveway, Kyla hesitated before opening the car door. “Millipede,” she said softly, “can I tell you something? You and Jared did an amazing job with Mateo. Whatever you may think based on the past few years, you did. You helped your mother fulfill a promise
to his mother, and you took him out of a group home and gave him an amazing education and an amazing life and gave him lots of love. But he’s nineteen now. You know what it’s time for now?”
Milly smirked slightly. “What is it time for now?” she said.
“It’s Milly Time.”
Milly laughed. “And what does Milly Time look like to you?”
“That’s for Milly to find out.”
Milly tried to take this idea back to New York with her and her broken heart. She kept reiterating it in her head as: work and Jared, work and Jared. The work part, actually, was not so hard. She had her students she cared about, and on weekends, she was happy to go to her studio and lose herself in paints and canvases for several hours, to the point where, after about six weeks, coming into the holidays of 2012, she was growing a significant new body of work and having one or two of the new Lower East Side gallerists up for studio visits. The works were studies in whites and grays—how many shades of white and gray could she glob and spackle onto a canvas and still create the illusion of a monochrome if you stepped back ten paces? On breaks, she’d sneak her cigarette and sit in the big, open warehouse window, looking at the Manhattan Bridge and wondering what Mateo was doing at that moment. Would he make it this time? Would he survive the night? Would he ever come home?
The Jared part, however, didn’t go so well, to her frustration. Some nagging, quintessentially Milly, to-do-list part of her brain kept telling her that she had to put the magic back into her marriage, and she would pay lip service to this idea by, say, texting Jared midday and asking if he wanted to meet after work to see a movie. But then, before he could even answer, feelings of rage toward Jared would overwhelm her. Years ago, those feelings of rage, if they had any coherence at all, might have said something like He’s stopping me from making art; now they were more like He doesn’t give a damn if he sees Mateo ever again. He just doesn’t care! And Milly, in a paroxysm of conflicted feelings, would text Jared again: “Sorry have to nix that. Forgot faculty meeting. See you home later.” Then she’d go to a movie alone.
