Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “She’s so brittle at home,” Jared told Asa over a pint. “She can barely look me in the eyes anymore. We haven’t had sex in over a month. Well, anything approaching real sex, I mean.”

  “You guys should probably go to couples therapy,” Asa said.

  Jared mustered up the nerve to say as much to Milly.

  “I already go to therapy!” Milly protested. “I’ve spent my life in therapy.”

  “We need to go to therapy,” Jared said. “Mills, come on. We’re growing apart. We have to talk out what happened with Mateo. You know it.”

  She could hardly bear to hear Mateo’s name. When Jared wasn’t home, she’d go in Mateo’s room and lie down on his bed and stare at his posters of rap artists she couldn’t identify, save one that was clearly labeled TYLER, THE CREATOR. This young man, with his rubber-faced grimaces and baseball cap askew on his head, terrified her. She would stare at his image and, over time, started irrationally blaming him for Mateo’s downfall, even though she’d never heard any of his lyrics. She supposed she could go on the Internet and listen, but that prospect terrified her more.

  She and Jared actually ended up going to couples therapy at the office of Richard Gallegos, MSW, the same guy Mateo had gone to when he was in high school. Going to him had been Milly’s idea. She knew that saying no to couples therapy was all but saying she was through with the marriage, so at least she seemed proactive, being the one to suggest a therapist. Jared actually agreed with Milly’s rationale that at least Gallegos would have some context for them. Really, though, Milly wanted to see someone who, when she said “Mateo,” would see Mateo’s face and know whom she was talking about.

  And so, on a Tuesday night, they walked the few blocks to the still-beige office of Richard Gallegos, now a bit stouter. They told him that, now that it was just the two of them in the house again after fifteen years, they had lost “it”—the marriage, the two-ness, whatever had existed before the Mateo years.

  It seemed like they were getting off to a good start over the first few weeks. Then came a certain Wednesday night that Jared and Asa met up, Jared looking ashen and stunned.

  “What’s up?” Asa asked, ordering their usual twin pints.

  Jared closed his eyes, shook his head, put his head in his left hand with an elbow propped on the bar. “I almost texted you to tell you I couldn’t make it,” he said. “But I figured I better talk. Because I’m about to start hitting people on the street.”

  “What the fuck?” Asa put a hand on his back. “What the fuck is up?”

  What was up was, the prior night in therapy, Jared had figured it out.

  Finally, that night, finally, finally, Jared had found the courage to say what he’d wanted to say the past several weeks—no, really, the past many, many years. Something that a certain icy intransigence on Milly’s part had laid to rest even before Mateo had come into their lives. And certainly something that fifteen hectic years of Mateo had all but frozen out as a topic.

  “Milly,” Jared had said, taking her hand in his before Richard Gallegos as though the therapist were remarrying them, “before it’s too late . . . I really, really want to have a child with you.”

  Just so Milly couldn’t reply with We’ve had a child . . . we have a child, he added, to be utterly clear, “I want to bear a child with you. I want to make a child with you.” He did not make the dread mistake of saying our own child. He’d learned his lesson several years ago about using that phrase.

  The beige room plunged into silence. Milly looked at him blankly, then looked away, blinking several times. Richard Gallegos said nothing.

  “Are you going to say anything?” Jared finally asked Milly. Already, he was tumbling into regret that he had even asked.

  “It’s too late,” Milly finally said. “I think—I think it’s too late.”

  “It’s not too late,” Jared shot back. “Look around at people we know. You know it’s not too late. Especially with medicine. We’ve never even really tried.”

  But Milly was crumpling under his campaign. She began crying.

  Richard Gallegos said not a word for several more seconds—a bit perversely, Jared thought. At length, Gallegos asked, “Milly, what are you feeling? Why are you crying?”

  Milly suddenly drew herself up very straight and gave Jared one—one—prolonged look, full of despair and apology. Then she looked away, wiping away tears.

  “And then it hit me,” Jared told Asa. “It hit me like a smack in the face, it was so clear. So I said, ‘Milly, were you pregnant once?’ And she nodded. And then I couldn’t even ask the next question.”

  “She had a miscarriage?” Asa asked.

  Jared smirked bitterly. “She didn’t have any miscarriage.” He held Asa’s stare. “She didn’t have any fucking miscarriage.”

  “Oh, shit,” Asa finally said. “She had an abortion?”

  Jared looked down dully into his drink.

  “Oh, shit, man. When?”

  “Before we took in Mateo,” Jared said. “She said she didn’t want to have a mentally ill child.” His eyes locked with Asa’s, then watered over. His jaw trembled. Asa rubbed Jared’s back while Jared blinked rapidly, then smudged away tears with the back of his hand. “I can’t believe she did it,” Jared said, his voice an octave higher than usual. “It was our baby and she just terminated it. She didn’t even tell me.”

  “Oh my fucking God, man,” Asa said quietly. “I’m so fucking sorry.” He was at a loss. He thought about his own daughters, if they had simply . . . never been. Carolina’s bizarre little made-up songs she hummed under her breath all day, which made him dizzy with love, and the turndown in Alice’s mouth when she encountered even a tiny cruelty, like a lady pulling a little dog too harshly on a leash. Asa believed Alice would one day become a human-rights lawyer, or the president. His stomach churned in a sickening void. “I’m so sorry, man.”

  “She had an abortion and then pressured me to adopt Mateo,” Jared said. “Can you believe that? We could have had our own child.”

  After Milly’s revelation, she and Jared went into free fall. Jared would express rage and grief while at therapy each week, and Milly would silently sit there and absorb it, rubbing her arms, feeling as though this excoriation was her due. In all the days in between, they lived separate lives and avoided each other. Milly slept in Mateo’s room. She started spending more time than usual with her mother and father. After Milly finished teaching, she would go to her parents’ house on the Upper East Side, the house she’d grown up in, and make dinner for Ava and Sam.

  “Where’s Jared tonight?” Ava would ask. That was Ava’s way of saying, Why aren’t you with your husband tonight?

  “He’s in the studio,” Milly would answer.

  “Does he ever come out of the studio?” Sam would ask.

  “Why don’t you call and ask him that, Daddy?” But then she regretted the bite in her tone, especially when her parents exchanged their signature glance that said, Well, well, well.

  The truth was she didn’t really know where Jared was most of the time. She’d told her parents that she and Jared were in therapy, that they were having trouble after the traumatic Mateo years, but she didn’t tell them the abortion revelation that had sent everything over the edge. If she had, if she’d been honest about why she’d done it, it would have been a direct affront to her mother—a manic-depressive woman who’d borne a depressive daughter. Of course, Milly told herself, Ava hadn’t borne her thoughtlessly. Ava hadn’t even had any symptoms when she got pregnant with Milly at twenty-six. But it didn’t matter. Milly knew her mother would still take the news as an affront. So she said nothing and was grateful for the book- and art-lined haven of her parents’ home to crawl back into in this most unhappy period.

  Somewhere around this time, Jared and Asa were prowling galleries in Chelsea on a Saturday afternoon. “So I think I’m gon
na bring it up at therapy this Thursday,” Jared told Asa. “I want to separate.”

  Asa turned away from a shag-rug sculpture and looked at his friend. “For real?” he asked. Asa truly hadn’t known if this was coming. Everything had been in limbo for six weeks after Milly’s revelation, and Asa had doubted his friend’s ability to walk away from the woman he’d been crazy over for the better part of thirty years.

  Jared nodded and said nothing. An hour later, over a turkey burger and a beer, while the two men were idly discussing the shows they’d just seen, Jared crumpled in his chair and put down his burger and stared into space.

  “You okay?” Asa asked.

  Jared finally looked up. “How could I ever possibly stay with someone who did that?”

  “You’re having a whole debate with yourself in your head, right?” Asa asked. Jared didn’t reply. “Look, why don’t you just say you need some space alone right now and not make it out like it’s permanent?”

  Jared’s eyes flicked back toward his friend. “That’s probably a smart idea,” he said.

  That Thursday night in therapy, having met Milly there to find she had a miserable cold, Jared pitied her and almost went back on his promise to himself. But then he decided that the moment had come when he simply had to push this thing through or it would never happen. Jared let Richard Gallegos take him and Milly through their routine “check-in,” which meant saying where they were immediately coming from and what state of mind they were in. With each passing week, Jared had grown more tired of this ritual. Tonight, he had to breathe deeply to keep from telling Gallegos to take his $250-a-week check-in and go fuck himself.

  “I feel like shit,” Milly said flatly, wiping her nose with a tissue. “I only finished out the afternoon at school because my students had final-term crits.” She looked at Jared, lightly reached for and then briefly took his hand. “I missed you today,” she said.

  Jared tried to smile warmly but it probably just appeared wan. Could she sense what was coming? he wondered.

  “I feel sort of sick to my stomach tonight,” he said.

  “Why so?” asked Gallegos. Milly’s eyes flashed back toward him.

  “I decided after last week’s session,” Jared pushed on, making himself meet Milly’s narrowed eyes. “I need to move out for a while. I need to be with myself.”

  Slowly, Milly recoiled on the couch, her mouth opening. She raised her eyebrows several times as though to speak, but said nothing. Finally, she said, “That wasn’t the plan. The plan when we came here was to work this thing out.”

  “I didn’t know then what I know now,” Jared said.

  “Oh, great!” Milly said. “So now you’re punishing me for that.”

  “Punishing you?” Jared yelled. “Punishing you? You fucking aborted my child because of your own fucking fears and you never even discussed it with me. How selfish is that?”

  “Oh my God,” Milly said, bursting into tears. “Oh my God!”

  “Hold up, guys,” Richard Gallegos said. “Hold up. Let’s take a minute of silence, okay?”

  Grudgingly, Jared took a breath. Milly kept on crying and shaking her head. Jared fixed on her for a moment, watching her cry, and suddenly a tidal wave of fury—far deeper than anything he’d felt so far, something that truly scared him—began creeping over him from behind his shoulders. I’ve lived twenty years with someone who doesn’t really love me, was the thought he had. Total panic, madness, coursed through his entire body. Yet he steeled himself to stand up and grab his coat.

  “I’m not staying for this,” he announced. “I don’t have to stay for this.”

  “Jared, can you just sit through the minute of silence with us?” Gallegos asked.

  “He doesn’t even want to,” Milly jeered.

  That just about did it. “I fucking hate you, Milly,” Jared said.

  In a moment, he was down on the street, his heart pounding, the world spinning before his eyes. He walked eight blocks up First Avenue in a blind fugue, with no destination whatsoever, then rounded a block and walked eight blocks back down. He stood outside Lucy’s bar for a moment and contemplated downing several whiskeys in a series of smooth, uninterrupted arm motions until he was completely obliterated and beyond responsibility for something like starting a street fight, because he suddenly wanted to beat the shit out of the male half of every happy couple he passed. He just stood there and stared through the dirty window at the bar, lasering in on what stool he’d choose.

  And as he did that, boring down pitilessly with his eyes on one stool, his heart rate slowed. The world stopped spinning. He took an extremely deep breath. He ran his palms over his sweaty forehead, the angry parallel creases above his nose, and then his fingers through his salt-and-honey curls. Then he calmly got on the L train, went to his studio, opened the window, plugged his iPhone into his speakers and cued it up to Radiohead. With a calm and a cold resolve sinking ever deeper into his gut, he blowtorched a six-foot column of metal until two A.M. Then he shut off the lights in the studio, took off his belt and boots, and curled up under a blanket on a couch in the corner. It’s just me now, he whispered to himself, over and over. Just me.

  Jared never looked back. In the circle of friends around him and Milly, people would marvel about the cool, clean precision with which Jared had left her, how he seemed to pour all his cold rage and shock and despair into his work, so that in a year he had a solo show at a gallery on Orchard Street that the New York Times praised for its “unadorned Rust Belt materiality.” After that, his work started selling and he wasn’t in his high-school teaching job but six more months. In the following four years, he became that rare figure in an art world that fetishizes the young and the new: a longtime midlevel artist who becomes a collector’s darling around the age of fifty.

  For Asa, it was a point of glamour and pride to have a boyhood friend who was now an artist who was out of town half the time supervising the construction of crazy-ass metal hulks on public lawns or in wealthy private yards. And this night, walking a bit reluctantly past the Blue and Gold and on to the bar whose address Jared had voiced to Asa’s tablet a few hours ago, Asa wondered who might be the mysterious third Jared had hinted might later join them.

  In the old-timey Prohibition-type bar, after Asa and Jared had shot the shit for an hour or so, Asa finally saw her: a mid-thirtysomething cocoa-skinned beauty with voluminous, curly hair and chunky cobalt earrings, wearing a long swath of iridescent slate-gray fabric that Asa could only identify, inwardly to himself, as “Japanese.”

  She entered the bar, Jared’s back to her. Putting a finger to her smiling lips in Asa’s direction, she slipped up behind Jared and lightly kissed his neck.

  Jared spun around. “Hey!” he boomed. He planted a happy-puppy kiss on her lips. “You made it!” Then he introduced Asa to Tonya Gomez, an associate curator at the Whitney Museum. Jared had met her at an opening there three weeks before.

  Tonya wedged in a stool between Jared and Asa. “This is the third place I’ve been this week that makes me feel like I’m in some old-time gangster movie,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Asa enthused. “It’s, like, Prohibition chic.”

  “Right?” she said. “I don’t get why we—I mean, why America—why we’re so obsessed with that archetype. Do you? We can’t get enough of it!”

  “We love our old-school rogues, I guess,” Asa said.

  Tonya lightly put a hand on Asa’s arm in acknowledgment. “I know, right?”

  Asa glanced at Jared, who’d pivoted slightly away, smiling placidly into his own reflection in the long antique mirror over the bar.

  After Jared left Milly, he’d sublet an apartment in Carroll Gardens for a year. The apartment in the Christodora was his—it was his family’s, fully paid-for long ago. But telling Milly to leave immediately strained the limits of his cool, clean secession. Through a lawyer—beca
use, he quickly realized, he could hardly bear to e-mail her, and certainly couldn’t bear seeing an e-mail from her in his queue—he told her she could stay indefinitely as long as she paid the monthly maintenance. He knew that someday he should reclaim the apartment, either to live there or to sell it—in fact, he knew he probably should get off his butt and talk to a divorce lawyer—but for the moment, he just wanted to be away from the Christodora, from every room and every book and every painting and every kitchen utensil—not to mention every Alphabet City block, café, denizen, dog, and junkie—that reminded him of his life the past twenty years. His therapist—a new one, not Gallegos, to whom he never returned after that night—spent a great deal of time trying to get him to see that those prior twenty years had not been a complete waste and a lie.

  As for Milly, she’d sat there on the couch in Gallegos’s office alone, speechless, for several moments after Jared had said, “I fucking hate you, Milly!” and stormed out.

  “Let’s just give it a minute,” Gallegos had murmured.

  Milly drew her knees up to her chest on the couch. Turning away from Gallegos, she rested her head on the back of the couch and closed her eyes. Finally she said, “I knew it’d end up like this. I knew everybody would leave.”

  “Can you just sit in this moment for a minute, Milly?” Gallegos asked.

  She turned to him with a corrosive smile. “I’ve been sitting in this moment my whole life. It doesn’t get any better.”

  “Yes, but you know that’s depression talking, right, Milly? You know that moments vary and change. You know you’ve been happy before and you’ll be happy again.”

  She unleashed a laugh that sounded unhinged to her. “I’m tired of trying so hard to be fucking happy!”

  Sitting up that night at the Christodora, at the dining-room table with the crossword puzzle mostly blank in front of her, Milly waited for Jared to come home. Certainly he’d come home at least to sleep. But, by two A.M., he’d not. In the morning, she had a text from him: “Staying elsewhere for a while. Will be by apt during work hours to pick up some things.” In other words, thought Milly, I’ll be by when you’re not there.