Christodora

by Tim Murphy

  “I don’t fucking care.”

  Mateo opens the front door and helps Hector down the step so that they’re both out under the ledge in the rain, somewhat lighter now, the empty street silent before them with shuttered warehouses. They stand side by side, getting spattered. Mateo watches Hector fumble on his crutches for something in his pocket. Then Hector pulls out a half-smoked joint that he struggles to light with a book of matches.

  “Here,” says Mateo, taking the matches and lighting it for him. Mateo watches Hector close his eyes as he takes in the first hit, its cinders crackling on the end. Mateo is overcome with a flash of memory, all the times the two of them communed like this: the silences, one holding the flame for the other, the long indrawn breaths, the blissful exhalations, the crumpling together into one barely sentient being. His heart starts pounding and he balls up his fists in his pockets, fighting his instinct to flee.

  Finally Hector releases his hit and hands it to Mateo.

  “No thanks,” Mateo says.

  Hector looks at him, cackles. “You don’t even smoke pot anymore?”

  Mateo shakes his head sheepishly. “I’ve been reprogrammed,” he jokes lamely.

  Hector stares out into the rain, savoring his new high. “I never got that, why some people had to take it to extremes,” he says. “I mean, fine, put down the needle, put down the pipe. But leave me something. You know, negro?”

  Hector looks so comical suddenly, Mateo laughs, and Hector’s eyes pop big and he laughs along. A truck roars down the street and nails a deep puddle in the road so hard that the backsplash nearly reaches the two of them over the sidewalk.

  “Whoa,” Mateo mutters—awkwardly, because he doesn’t know what to say now.

  “What day is it?” Hector finally asks.

  “Thursday,” Mateo says. “It’s Thursday.”

  Hector gives him a sort of for real? look, and Mateo nods. Then the silence engulfs them again. Hector stares placidly forward, looking like he’s content with his buzz despite the rain.

  “I wanna say I’m sorry,” Mateo finally hears himself saying.

  “Sorry for what?”

  Huh? Mateo hadn’t expected he would say that. “For—” Well, for what? Using him for drugs and shelter? Mateo is not about to say that. That last time in L.A.? The truth was Mateo hadn’t needed Hector that time for drugs or shelter. Why had he called Hector from that apartment, the very thought of which never failed to make Mateo shudder? Mateo figures it’ll probably be like that for the rest of his life.

  “If I hadn’t called you that last time in L.A.—” Mateo begins.

  But Hector puts a finger to Mateo’s lips. “Shh,” he goes. He shakes his head, slowly but firmly. “No, no,” he says.

  “But—”

  “No, no,” Hector says. “Not going back there.”

  Mateo is stumped. “Okay,” he says. “Sorry.”

  “Stop saying sorry.”

  Mateo laughs bitterly, surprising himself. “You never stop saying sorry,” he says.

  “Now listen,” Hector says decisively. He’s still staring ahead, not meeting Mateo’s eyes, but something authoritative in his tone disarms Mateo. “You go say you’re sorry to the woman who raised you,” he says. “That’s what you should do.”

  Now Mateo is scrambled. “Say what?”

  “You heard me,” Hector says. “You know now about the woman who had you. Now you go to the woman who raised you.”

  Mateo looks down, kicks one sneaker with the other. “I told you, we haven’t talked in, like, ten years.”

  “Okay, fine,” says Hector. “So now you’re in New York, so you can go pay her a visit.”

  Mateo says nothing.

  Hector laughs. “There,” he says. “Now you know why you came to see me today.”

  “You know why I came to see you,” Mateo protests. “To ask you about my real mother.”

  Hector giggles now, like he’s feeling the full ripeness of his buzz. “Well, negrito, I guess I had more to tell you,” he says. “Because you may forget, but I watched you and that lady—your other mother. Every day, up Avenue A, holding your hand, you with the fucking backpack that was too big for negrito. Fucking nice lady showing everybody in the building somebody’s drawings. Her husband, not so much. But the lady. Ava’s daughter.”

  Hector shoots Mateo a look now. “That was one fucking nice lady,” he continues. “She put a note under my door begging me to go to rehab to keep from getting kicked out of the building. She said she’d help me find one.”

  Mateo looks at him. “Are you serious?”

  “Yep. I still have the note upstairs somewhere.”

  Mateo nearly squirms in discomfort. “She had a fucking guilt trip, that’s all,” he says. “She pitied me. That’s the only reason she adopted me.”

  “No, mijo, I watched her. That wasn’t pity. She needed you.”

  Mateo stuffs his hands in his pockets, tucks his head down. He stares down at the pattern the raindrops make in the puddles on the sidewalk. Then he feels Hector’s hand on his back, right below his neck. Mateo glances sidelong, sees the effort Hector has expended to hold himself up on one crutch to put the other hand on Mateo’s back. Something about the gesture unlocks a compartment deep in Mateo’s chest.

  “I can’t,” Mateo mutters, feeling tears rise behind his eyes. “I can’t deal with it. It’ll crush me.”

  Hector emits a short, sharp guffaw. “Negrito, take it from me. Just go see her,” Hector says.

  Neither of them speaks for a long time. Mateo starts to realize he feels a comfort he hasn’t felt since those times he and Hector would nod out together. Except this time it’s different. He’s actually lucid enough to realize it, that he feels safe with him. I miss this guy, he thinks. Awkwardly, he puts an arm around Hector, careful not to hang on him too heavily.

  Hector turns and looks at him a good long time. “I actually needed this joint to ask you something, negrito.”

  Mateo laughs. “Really? What?”

  “If I give you my e-mail, will you write to me? I get lonely here.”

  “Of course I’ll write to you.” Mateo pulls out his tablet as Hector recites his e-mail, with the prefix SonyaBrisa. “I’ll come see you again before I leave.”

  “There might be more I wanna tell you eventually.”

  “Yeah, definitely,” says Mateo. “When you remember things about my mother, will you tell me? Anything you can remember?”

  Hector regards him keenly, emits a short laugh. “I remember a lot, negrito. I’ll tell you little by little. Okay?”

  Mateo gingerly puts an arm around him, draws closer until their heads are lightly touching. “Okay, brother.”

  Hector looks down at the ground. “Okay,” he says again.

  “I gotta go,” Mateo finally says. “Let me help you back in the house.”

  “No, you go,” Hector says. “I wanna stand here and watch you go.”

  “For real?”

  “Jesus, I just wanna little more fresh air, okay?”

  “Okay! Fine!”

  Gently, still awkwardly, Mateo hugs him good-bye one more time.

  “I can’t hug you back with these crutches, mijo,” Hector says.

  “That’s okay.”

  “If you promised to help Karl, you better do it,” Hector says warningly. “He’ll come find you otherwise.”

  “I will,” Mateo says. “So I’ll see you again.”

  Mateo starts off down the street, his hands thrust in his pockets and his head down against the rain. But after a few paces, he turns and walks backward, watching Hector recede on the cinder block stoop, smaller with every step away Mateo takes. Near the corner, Mateo raises his hand farewell before he turns.

  Moments after he turns, Hector pivots carefully on his crutches and rings the doorbell.
Melvin, the chunky black queen, answers the door.

  “You gotta prop the door, ya damn pothead, so I don’t have to keep coming to do this for you,” Melvin whines.

  “Just help me the fuck back inside,” Hector says, handing off his crutches to Melvin.

  “What a damn pain in the behind you are.”

  Hector looks up at Melvin with a stoned, elated grin. “I did something right, Melvin.”

  “What?”

  Hector slowly brings up a right leg into the house, then the left, held up under one arm by Melvin. “I said I did something right in my life.”

  Melvin sighs. “That’s right, girl, you did something right. You and Karl and you all else saved the day back about a hundred years ago and that’s why we’re all here in this mansion living the high life.”

  Hector lets out a high, ragged laugh. “Fuck you, Melvin.”

  “Come on now, get back on your crutches, Superwoman, and come get your dinner.”

  TWENTY

  Millicent Heyman

  (2021)

  Her life had basically become all about her father. Good old Sam. That’s what Milly said on the rare occasions now when she talked to people and they asked her what was going on. He’d become her organizing principle, in addition to the fact that she loved him deeply.

  She’d wake up. She never got as much sleep as she wanted; she was perpetually tired. She’d sleep in the “small” (Mateo’s old) room, not the “big” (her and Jared’s) room. That started after he, meaning ex-husband he, moved out. She couldn’t bring herself to use either of their names. As for that “other” room, she’d taken down the posters and all the other stuff a long time ago and put it all in a box in the closet, so she didn’t think of it as sleeping in his room per se. It was just the “small room” now, and nobody had slept in the big room since the night she had to take her father to the ER at Beth Israel downtown because he had bronchitis, and by the time they got out of there, it just made more sense for Milly to bring him to the Christodora and put him to bed there. Often, Milly considered bringing her father there permanently for his final days, because she didn’t know how much more of the constant back and forth to the Upper East Side she could take.

  So, the small room. It was filled up with her books and magazines; she supposed she was one of the only people left on earth who still read that way, surrounded by paper clutter. And she stayed up far too late reading, but it didn’t matter, she still seemed to pop awake around six A.M. and was impervious to all efforts to fall back asleep. Those were those ragged gray hours when she kept reminding herself that she should get a cat or a small dog, because those hours were the hardest for her: pulling on her robe, putting on the kettle, sitting at the table by the window that looks down on the slumbering park, tapping on her tablet and looking at the news, which made her sick. The New Reform Era. The whole thing was privatized! Health care was privatized, schools were becoming privatized, hurricane response was privatized. This is what I’ve lived to see in my country, she’d tell herself. Even her own father, who worked in business his whole life and certainly was no Trotskyite like some of his uncles, couldn’t believe what had happened. She guessed it had worked out okay for New York and California and other states run by well-educated technocrats who actually knew how to get people housed and educated and fed. Not so good for the middle of the country and the South, though. It was more of an embarrassment than ever down there. But there you have it. That was the direction the country had gone in while she was creeping through her fifties. Not that she was surprised.

  So, that’s where her day began. Already, sitting there, she felt the crumbum lack of sleep, the matte-gray ordeal that the day was going to be. The e-mails were next. They were mostly spam and junk. Alerts from the different community action groups she’d gotten involved in over the past few years, but she really couldn’t deal with them anymore. Yes, she hated privatization as much as the next person—on principle, she supposed, less so in practice—but she really couldn’t go to any more meetings where a bunch of middle-aged women who reminded her of herself, frankly, stood up all night and keep yelling “Privatization! Privatization!” She just found it too depressing.

  There weren’t so many art e-mails anymore. Let that world slide, stop making stuff or showing up, and at first the notices keep coming. But give it about three, four years, and the only e-mails you’ll get are from people who don’t really know who you are, for stuff you’d never go see anyway because you don’t know who they are. Occasionally there was the e-mail like the one she got last week from Caroline Harrell. Caroline said she’d been at Chuck Pierson’s opening the other week and she and Chuck and some others got to talking and wondering where Milly was. Caroline said she missed Milly and did Milly want to have lunch in the neighborhood or get a coffee?

  Milly stared at the e-mail for a long time. She actually got a tight feeling in her throat. She thought about long-ago afternoons in the park with Caroline in her wheelchair on one side, and with him holding her hand on the other side, when he was the darling, adorable child of half the neighborhood, with his paper and box of crayons in his little bag. And Milly kept staring at that e-mail and wondering how Caroline was doing with her disease, her degenerative nerve disease that kept her in that wheelchair, the chair that people would help her out of when she did her performance art. And then Milly decided that she just couldn’t see Caroline and she couldn’t see anybody anymore except her father, and she deleted it and just made herself forget it had ever arrived.

  And then there was a day staring her in the face. Up until about a year, maybe eighteen months ago, she’d still head down to the studio in the mornings. To so much as pick up a brush, she’d had to assiduously banish from her mind any thought of the two men who’d divorced her, her ex-husband and her ex-son. And frankly that wasn’t so easy to do anymore, because it felt like she couldn’t scroll the blogs or click on the arts vertical of the Times or New York anymore without seeing or reading about one or the other. She’d just be sitting there having her coffee and innocently reading the Times and there they were.

  The worst was when there were pictures—especially with their girlfriends. Well, not M. so much. His girlfriend, an interior designer, was very pretty and looked like a nice person. Milly was glad he was being taken care of, and it appeared he was off the drugs, or if he wasn’t, then he was doing a pretty good job of having a career alongside them, but she was pretty sure he was off them by this point. He’d alluded to being clean and sober in a few articles she’d read, against her own better judgment. She really hoped he was. He’d broken her heart but she still wanted him to be happy out there in the world. What had been the point of raising him all those years if he wasn’t?

  As for her real ex—forget it. God forbid she saw some party picture of him alongside that curator. It was like a slap in the face and always made her stomach turn. The final indignity had been two months ago when she saw that picture of them, her with her bump, and Milly knew she was pregnant. The huge smile on J.’s face, that stupid Japanese-type black Yohji Yamamoto asymmetrical suit thing she’d obviously dressed him in, that slim coupe of champagne in his hand!

  I guess he’s got absolutely everything he ever wanted now, Milly thought. He’s an art star, he’s got a young art babe for a girlfriend, and he’s finally having a baby. His own baby, as he’d put it. Milly hoped that when his baby was up screaming all night and spitting up and peeing all over him, it didn’t compromise his brilliant career. He’d always made it perfectly clear he couldn’t really have that while playing dad, and he certainly didn’t waste any time relieving himself of his paternal duties. They’d probably just hire a nanny. God forbid he’d let anything come between him and his work. When nobody knows your name until you’re forty-seven, you really have to hustle!

  Milly knew how bitter she sounded to herself. She talked a lot with Gallegos about the bitterness. He’d been her marriage ther
apist, true, but she kept going to him after. After he saw the way that J. went absolutely psychotic on her before he stormed out that night, she felt like Gallegos was the only person who could ever understand what she’d been through, having witnessed it, so she kept going to him.

  There she was, one week after the big storming-out, sitting there all by herself. Weeks and weeks went by, and she kept saying to Gallegos, “What do you think? Is he ever going to come back around and see that he’s been absolutely psychotic?”

  And Gallegos kept saying to Milly, “Can we put a moratorium on trying to figure out Jared”—Oh God, he said his name, and continued to, rather callously, she thought, until she politely asked him if he would just refer to him as J.— “and talk about what’s going on with you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I raised a drug addict who turned his back on me and I spent the better part of my adult life with a man who told me he hated me and walked out on me. I’m fine. I would just like to find someone who doesn’t walk out on me for a change! Who’s next? My dad? Thank God my dad’s too frail to abandon me, too! They always stick around until they don’t need you anymore, so I guess I have my dad until he passes. Lucky me!”

  Gallegos smiled and shook his head. “You do make me laugh, Milly, even when I’m trying to help you break patterns,” he said.

  The specific pattern was putting someone else’s happiness before her own. Gallegos would always ask Milly if she’d made it into the studio that week, if she was keeping up with her art-world friendships. He’d even come to a little show of hers several years ago, which Milly thought was touching, because she didn’t think therapists were supposed to do that sort of boundary-crossing thing. But she also thought he wanted to see her work to help him understand her better, or something, and the next week at his office he mentioned how he could see a lot of vulnerability in the work or putting herself on the line or something. She tried to explain to him that she was essentially a formalist and she wasn’t thinking about her problems when she worked, but she supposed a therapist would see what he wanted to see. That was his job.