Now Ryan asked her, “Do you want Drew’s life or yours?”
But Milly ignored the question. “It’s not just problems with Jared per se,” she continued. “I think I may like women more than men.”
Ryan sighed. “I am not going through this whole topic with you again,” he said. “You’ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than two weeks. Meanwhile, you and Jared have been together — what? Three years now? You’re telling yourself a story in your head about Jared and your work and now you want everything to fit it. The point is you are doing good work, you are productive; Jared is not getting in the way, and you need to chill out a little.”
Milly laughed sharply. “So you’re dismissing me out of hand,” she said. “Too bad you can’t be so blunt with Nora. Maybe she wouldn’t make you microwave her salmon four times.”
They both laughed.
“I just wish you weren’t so suggestible,” Ryan finally said.
That quieted Milly a bit. “I just—” She sighed. “I just need to work.”
Ryan, and everyone who heard this mantra from Milly at the time, thought that she was blowing off steam. But then, to everyone’s astonishment, Milly left Jared. She simply left him and got her own apartment in Cobble Hill, out in Brooklyn. Her anger at Jared didn’t evaporate — in fact it deepened to the point where it certainly wasn’t just about Jared but seemed aimed at something just over his shoulder. She sensed as much herself, but that didn’t keep her from hardening into a kind of icy, sealed-off rage that perplexed and dismayed everyone, including herself. The rage put laser pinpricks into her melty brown eyes and began wearing furrows into her forehead. This was shortly after she’d turned twenty-three.
She’d packed her things and left the Christodora one night when Jared was out of town. He returned to find nothing of hers there save a Guatemalan mitten on the living-room floor that must have fallen out of a hastily stuffed bag. He picked it up, bawling and cursing all over it for ninety minutes.
“You’re fucking crazy, Milly!” he repeated, wiping his snot on it. “You’re fucking lost!” He finally fell asleep there on the floor, exhausted, he and Horace the cat nuzzling the mitten.
As for Milly, the serenity she was looking for after leaving Jared was a long time coming. She kept waking up every day, thinking, Okay, now, my life begins. But by eleven A.M. she’d often feel as though she’d already run off her own rails and had no idea how to salvage the afternoon, what to do next.
One evening, she found herself alone in the West Village after dinner with some high-school friends she wasn’t very close to. She watched a middle-aged woman with a bushel of scraggly salt-and-pepper hair shuffle out of the Häagen Dazs store, licking her cone with manic precision, and a terrifying wave of loneliness engulfed her. I don’t know how to give or receive love, she thought. I’m trapped in this prison. A cold sweat crept over her and she felt disoriented, as though she’d never seen the corner of Hudson and West Tenth before in her life. She sat down for a second on a stoop, scared to meet eyes with passersby, who’d clearly signaled to her that she looked insane.
Eventually, she stood up. Drew lived three blocks away. In her disoriented haze — tears beginning to well in her eyes and crest over, despite her best efforts to hold them back — she walked to Drew’s and hit the buzzer. She waited fifteen seconds and hit it again. Just when a new wave of emptiness was building inside, telling her that she was still completely alone with nowhere to go, Drew came over the intercom, asking who it was.
“It’s Milly,” she barely choked out. “Will you let me up?”
Her arm reached for the door, waiting for the buzz and the click. But a strange second passed before Drew’s voice came back on. “Sweetie, this isn’t a good time.”
Milly pressed the “talk” button. “Well, can you come down for a second? I really need to talk to someone.” Just as she said it, a couple passed, looked at her with glancing concern. She was mortified. Seconds passed. “Can you please come down for a second?” she asked the intercom again.
“Give me a second,” Drew replied.
Milly sat down on the stoop, exhausted. In a moment, Drew would come down with cigarettes and they’d sit close, they’d talk, as they had done on this stoop so many times before. But minutes passed and Drew didn’t come down. This realization settled slowly into Milly, first puzzling, then humiliating and enraging her. Finally, at the ten-minute mark by her watch, she buzzed again. A minute passed with no answer. Milly pressed her finger to the buzzer for a full twenty seconds, feeling insane. No answer. She walked to a payphone and called Drew, whose answering machine clicked on. “I so long to hear your voice,” Drew’s recorded voice said. Then the beep. For a moment, Milly said nothing, half expecting that Drew would pick up. But she didn’t.
“You are blowing me off right to my face,” Milly said flatly into the phone. “I can’t believe you!” She hung up. Her shock and outrage had somehow trumped her wild despair, and, too exhausted to walk to the train and take it home, she stuck out her hand automatically and hailed a cab she couldn’t really afford, then sat there, spent and dumbfounded, as the taxi took her to her silent new apartment in Cobble Hill.
Not for a month did her fury melt into something more like sober resolve. You asked for all this empty space around you, she told herself. Now you better make good on your word and do something with it. And she endeavored to. She began painting more productively, with what felt to her like more focus. Her galling obsession with the idea that she had been living in thrall to Jared and his ambitions dissipated, and with that came a modicum of calm for Milly.
As it did, of a sort, for Jared. He went out every night and drank with his high-school buddies. Bombed, he would wordlessly approach friends and give them long, rocking hugs. They’d ask how he was doing and he’d shrug slowly, searching for words.
“I’d say I just went from the period of unbearable, scalding misery to the period of abiding but somehow just barely tolerable misery,” he’d finally say. “Like, from waking up in the morning and thinking, first thing, I’m alone, I want to die, to thinking, I’m alone, I want to die, yeah, so fucking get some coffee and the paper and get on with your day and deal with it.”
“Well, that’s a step,” his friends would say, and laugh.
And he would snort out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Then his eyes would glass over. A tiny tear would race down his cheek, which he’d flick away, ashamed. His best buddy, Asa, would notice and rub his back while continuing to extol the brilliance of Reservoir Dogs to any interested parties.
As a sidelight to missing Milly, Jared missed Drew, too. He missed her against his better judgment, since he’d been bright enough to put two and two together and realize it’d largely been Drew who’d planted the idea in Milly’s head that Jared was holding her back from her personal best. But he still missed her. And, like everyone by this point, he felt badly for her.
Everyone knew that, when it came to Drew, there was some sad shit there, which most people only knew about elliptically, concealed as it was beneath the hardworking sparkle of her party chatter. That honeymoon picture on her dresser: those handsome parents in Italy — the pretty, dark-haired Jewish mom with her Marlo Thomas flip and that fair-haired, smirking dad; how they met at Berkeley; how Drew was raised a double-dissertation baby. And just the dad, the dad. Don’t pull a my-dad on me and tell me you’re going to be at my reading and then not show up, or maybe you slip in just when I’m finishing. Or One really good tactic in life that’s underrated is, when you blow people off, just pick up where you left off the next time you see them and be lovely and pretend it never happened; that always worked for my dad. Or When you go on about how you don’t know what to do with your life, I feel like I’m talking to my mom when she goes on about my dad. Like, she goes into this trance state of loss and confusion and resentment that’s somehow really comforting for her. And finally I have to say, “Enough, I know it feels good, but now you have to go on a date, or go out with your fucking girlfriends, or go to the gym or quit smoking — basically acknowledge that every day you stew in those yummy sad juices, Dad wins.”