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 therapist, 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?”