“Hello, Horace,” said Drew, covering the cat all over with kisses. “Are you a great Roman thinker? A great Roman cat of letters?” Jared found a stub of a joint that they all shared and put Matthew Sweet on the stereo.
Milly was relating all this to Ryan a few days later. “And then,” she continued, “we had a three-way!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Ryan said slowly. “How did it start?”
“I don’t really remember because we were all stoned,” Milly replied. “Just that it was really like Drew was the little girl who was desperately hungry for love, and we wanted to hold and protect her. It was a total inversion of the usual Drew. She was totally quiet, for one thing. We all fell asleep holding each other with Drew in the middle.”
Ryan stared at her blankly for several seconds. “You are fucking with me, right?” he finally asked. “This really happened?”
“Yes! And it was really sweet. She woke up before us and left a note saying, ‘Thank you, I wanted to let you sleep. I’ll call you later.’ But she didn’t call later that day, and we didn’t call her. And I said to Jared, ‘I wonder what it’ll be like with Drew now,’ and he said, ‘Me, too.’ So finally yesterday I called Drew and we met for lunch and we hugged and we were both, like, ‘Hiiiii!’” The tone of Milly’s inflection for Ryan was a sheepish Oh my God, I cannot believe we did that! “So we’re making chitchat, ordering salads before we take them into the park, and finally she was like, ‘So how have you been?’ And I said, ‘I’m okay. I’ve just felt weirdly protective of you ever since Friday night — like I’m seeing you differently, making me feel like you can have those kinds of feelings for more than one person at a time.’”
And Drew had said: “Did you tell Jared that?”
And Milly had said: “Not quite like that. I’m afraid it would freak him out.”
Then Milly leaned over on the park bench and kissed Drew softly near her ear. “You were so quiet that night!” She giggled. “It was so unusual!”
But Drew didn’t giggle back; she just smiled tightly and kind of sadly and looked away. Then she let out a kind of restrained noise that said Mmmmnggh, I can’t stand it anymore!
“I’m so lonely, Mill,” she said. “I cannot be falling in love with a couple. That is not a good plan for me.”
A few weeks prior to the three-way, Drew had finally, agonizingly split up with Perry. Perry had been her tall, deep-voiced, WASPily good-looking boyfriend, an editor at Harper’s, who once, at a party right after Drew said something particularly funny about Thelma and Louise, asked her in a good-humored way, “How does it feel to be a swath of glitter wrapped around an echoing void?”
Nobody could silence Drew like Perry could, but she had been crazy about him and his whole Brideshead aura, his swoopy Edwardian haircut. It was Drew who finally broke it off, but only after Milly and a few of her other friends told her bluntly that Perry was sucking away her last dribs of self-esteem. There had been a whole month near the end of the relationship where Drew didn’t write at all because she couldn’t banish the idea of Perry standing over her shoulder, rolling his eyes at every line.
After Drew spoke, Milly blinked, quiet. “We love you, but we don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do,” she finally said.
Drew looked up at Milly, then turned away from her. “Anyway,” she finally said, “don’t you and Jared have some stuff to work out?”
Milly sat up straight. “What do you mean?”
“Well. .” Drew minutely examined her salad while she talked. “Are either of you making any actual art? A lot of times, when artists date, it’s because they want to distract each other from actually working.”
“I’ve been working!” Milly insisted. “I’ve been applying for grants and residencies all week, putting slides together. I’ve been running all over town.”
“You have to do stuff like that, obviously,” said Drew. “But, sweetie, that’s not working.”
“You spend a month applying for eight grants at a time and then tell me it’s not working,” Milly snapped back.
They walked out of the park together. Milly slipped her hand in Drew’s, comforted by that and feeling a bit subversive about it, but Drew gave it a quick squeeze and pulled her own hand gently away.
After that conversation, Milly became obsessed with the idea that Jared was distracting her from producing meaningful work. When she was working in the room she painted in, the small bedroom Jared had helped her convert to a studio, she resented it when he had the TV on too loudly, when he shouted random things to her, even when he brought her tea. She got stuck on the fact that here she was, working from the apartment like a hobbyist, while he had a separate workspace in an old warehouse in desolate far-west Chelsea. (Granted, he worked with concrete and old train-track spikes, materials the apartment could never accommodate, but still.) She fixated on the idea that he’d already had a solo show, albeit one in a makeshift gallery in a garage in Park Slope, but she’d only been in group shows.
She thought of all the times she’d put her brushes down and sunk into his arms when he got home, happy for the break and for the chance to bury her face in his flannel shirts, which smelled like sawdust and diner bacon. Why had she always abandoned her work so readily, to greet him as though it were her duty? And most of all, she grew to resent his routine query: “How’re your pictures?” Pictures. Before, she’d always thought that sounded sweet and ironic; now it just seemed condescending, diminutizing.
One night she was frustrated, mixing paints to get a particular shade of murky taupe, and he came in with a dishrag over his shoulder and said, “Millipede? You want pasta with asparagus or broccoli rabe or both?”
The words were barely out of his mouth before she turned on him, exasperated. “Why can’t you just give me this space? Just pretend that if I’m in here, I don’t exist.”
Jared winced, as though he’d been slapped. “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed. “I just wanted to make you dinner. But fine. Have your fucking space.” He grabbed his jacket and left the apartment to go get his own dinner. Milly thought she’d done the right thing, asserted her need for space. But when she heard the door slam, she felt like somehow she hadn’t gone about it the right way.
Ryan liked Jared and tried to tell Milly she was crazy. “Who planted this idea in your head that Jared is holding you back?” he asked her. “Drew?”
Milly blushed, as though she’d been caught out. “It’s not about who planted the idea,” she said. “It’s about: is there truth there? I picture Drew getting up at six every morning and making coffee in her French press and sitting down and writing for those two hours in beautiful, utter solitude. No static flying around her head.”
Ryan laughed derisively. “Drew’s a cokehead! I doubt she’s gotten up at six A.M. in a while, unless she was already up all night.”
“She’s not a cokehead,” Milly balked. “She likes to do a little coke at parties once in a while.”
At that same moment, however, Milly remembered the last time she’d seen Drew, at a party that Drew and some of her flashy advertising and magazine friends, the ones Milly never liked, had given three weeks ago. The party was loud and obnoxious, and Milly was not having a very good time, so she was relieved when Drew finally came over to her. But Drew looked so gaunt, seemed so jittery, so distracted!
They hugged and kissed. “I’m so happy to see you!” Drew exclaimed. But as they stood there trying to make conversation, Drew couldn’t keep her eyes focused. They kept darting around. Milly thought they looked like hollow orbs desperately radiating forced cheer.