“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.
So Gallegos was trying to keep Milly in the studio. And for a few years she was. It wasn’t easy for her, the more famous her two exes got. She talked about that a lot with Gallegos.
“When you go in there, it’s your studio, it’s your art,” he’d say. “It’s for you.”
She tried to keep that in mind. Then she had a sort of epiphany. She was at the Armory Show at the Javits Center. She waited until nearly the end of the run to be as certain as possible she wouldn’t run into either of them, and she also stayed about a mile away from their gallerists. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the art and all the rich jerks browsing it, and she wanted to throw up. She was looking at about the umpteenth stupid neon wall sign. It said in big swoopy pink neon script: MY PUSSY! Like that was some kind of revelation. And Milly thought, That’s it. I don’t need to keep contributing to this pile of junk.
She had probably been to her studio about twice since then, and that had been eighteen months ago. Often, she considered giving it up to no longer have to pay rent on it. The same canvas had been sitting there half-finished since last year. Whenever she thought of picking up the brush, she thought, Here I am, another low- to no-name-recognition New York “artist” adding to the junk heap. We’ll all die and only.00001 percent of this stuff will have any resonance beyond our own lifetimes.
Of course she shared this with Gallegos. He’d once told her he liked to write a little fiction or poetry on the side himself. He shared these little bits of himself with her from time to time very offhandedly, which flattered Milly. She was fairly certain he didn’t do that with all his patients.
Gallegos heard Milly out. Then he said, “But aside from all that, how do you feel when you’re painting? Don’t you feel good?”
And she said, “Honestly, Richard? I feel stupid. I feel silly. I feel there has to be something more productive I could be doing. Kids are growing up nearly illiterate right in my own neighborhood, right over in the projects on Avenue D, and I’m sitting here dabbing and daubing? I’m a joke.”
“How did you feel when you were teaching kids to draw and paint?” he asked.
“That was different,” she said. “That wasn’t necessarily for them to grow up to be professional artists. It was to help them find a creative voice and to introduce them to art and the role it can play in their lives. Especially if they’re from unstable homes. I mean, just to have craft paper and a box of crayons — that’s such a balm.”
Craft paper and a box of crayons. Her eyes welled up as she started to say it. She couldn’t even think about craft paper and a box of crayons.
“What came up just then?” Gallegos asked her. “That affected you?”
Milly deflated in her chair and rubbed her eyes. “I can’t think about craft paper and a box of crayons without thinking about the first time I saw him,” she said. “M.”
“You felt love and delight because you saw a kid being creative and you wanted to encourage it, right?”
“He was drawing scary, hairy monsters.” Oh God, she would never forget him, lying on his stomach, kicking his little sneakers together in the air.
“You could have more of that feeling if you went back to work.”
So that was why he’d brought that up? Milly felt a bit tricked and betrayed. “I don’t have the time or the mental energy anymore to teach,” she said. “I have to take care of my father. He just gets worse and worse.”
“He’s with his own nurse all day,” Gallegos said. “He’s with her right now, safe and sound. Here you are, here with me, and everything’s okay.”
Milly didn’t like this conversation very much, frankly. She no longer liked leaving the house and avoided interacting with other people. The whole thing made her very uncomfortable and exhausted her. She made some exceptions. Groceries, obviously. Sometimes she went to see a movie. Taking the train back and forth to see her father. Even these things, though, she had to bear up for, and the whole time she was out there, she felt like a raw nerve being pummeled by other people. Loud young kids, for one thing, the N-word being every other word that flew out of their mouths. Couples who were too demonstrative. People whom she thought she knew, or had known. They were the worst of all. She literally crossed the street if she thought she saw up ahead someone who looked like someone she thought she once knew.
“I’m sure I’ll go back to work part-time eventually,” she finally said, to shut him down.
He gave her a skeptical look, like he was not very pleased with her.
At least, Milly thought, we’re not talking about her anymore. She meant Drew. The issue with her had taken up sessions with Gallegos for months. How was Milly feeling about it, one week later? Had she and Drew communicated? And on and on and on.
Two years ago, Drew had left Milly a voice mail. For Milly, even just seeing Drew’s name there in the queue on her tablet was a bit startling, because Milly felt she had barely heard from her in a year. But there was the message, all hushed with portent: “Millipede? It’s Drew-pea. Millipede, I am freaking out, I’m having twins. Call me, please, I need to talk. I’m freaking out. Christian and I are both freaking out. Love you.”
Milly calculated: You had to be several weeks into your pregnancy to find out you were having multiples. That meant Drew knew she was pregnant weeks before. A fact she hadn’t shared with Milly. And then: A voicemail. She tells me this news on a voicemail, Milly thought.
Milly didn’t call back right away. She actually put down the tablet and went to the window and finally sat and just stared out. Then she stood and picked up the tablet to call Drew. Then she put it down. The truth was she didn’t know what to say to her. She didn’t know if it was such a good idea that Drew was doing this at her age. Milly knew the treatment and technology had changed a lot in ten years, but no amount of technology could mitigate the fact that when your kid was ten you were going to be sixty and when they were twenty you were going to be seventy. Your kid was probably going to watch you die when they were thirty or thirty-five. So much for their kids having a grandma. Milly couldn’t get past this, and in some ways, it just felt so completely Drew to her. Like there was nothing left for Drew to write about coupledom, or about the new urban couple communes, or about couples growing all their own food on their roof, so she was going to have kids to put herself into the next readership bracket. That didn’t feel very fair to those kids, Milly thought.