The cards from Dad, the checks from Dad, that mysterious visit from Dad, whom nobody got to meet, which rendered Drew invisible and inaccessible for five days. The handsome, suave, cruel older men who came up again and again in the short fiction she’d read at bars, her own Harlequin-pulp Achilles’ heel. So much complexity spinning around the dad!
Drew lived so voraciously. It was all very self-conscious, built around references to past eras. How many times had Drew mentioned Lily Bart, Jordan Baker, Dorothy Parker, Holly Golightly, Edie Sedgwick? Throwing out these names took the edge off the random sex and the unhappy mornings after the drugs. How far would she go? She had left her best friend down on the stoop when she was clearly in pain and in need, because she couldn’t have her up with the four random magazine people in her living room and all the drugs, and she was too high herself to even go down and talk to her.
“You are blowing me off right to my face,” they’d all heard Milly say over the answering machine. “I can’t believe you!”
They’d looked at one another, cracked out. The guy from Details did the totally inappropriate thing and laughed out loud. The girl who’d been so busy with the Harper’s Bazaar relaunch, the one with Linda Evangelista’s arm in front of her face on the cover (“Enter the Era of Elegance”), looked at Drew sympathetically and shrugged.
“You can’t always be available,” the girl said.
Drew pulled into herself after that, as though the drugs had snapped off — which, increasingly, they did, dashing her into sulky gloom in the middle of the chatter — but remarkably, nobody noticed and everybody stayed till five thirty in the morning.
That was the start of the six-week dark period: Drew having those random magazine and PR people over, usually with a boy staying after; the morning hours of fitful sleep; the dread upon the shallow wake; the afternoons watching crap TV and trying to nap or clean the house; the half hours pretending to work in a café; the evenings pulling it together for somebody’s book party or birthday drinks; the bullshit debates about Tina Brown in the dive bars afterward; the inevitable repairing back to her house. She saw Milly through none of it, too mortified to call her.
Then one late night in September, when everybody had left her apartment, including the boy who’d stayed the night before, Drew got into bed and heard the clicking in the walls and at the windows. She snapped on the light, but the clicking continued. It was in her throat. She lay very still and concentrated on her breathing, but the strange clicking continued. She was trying to cry but couldn’t, she realized. Her heart was beating so fast. She got up, stood in front of the mirror. She didn’t see 1904, 1926, 1963, or 1968. She realized it was 1993, too much upon her to make romance out of it, and for a moment, she saw the Drew whom other people saw — the kind Drew, the compelling Drew, the scary Drew, the sad Drew.
The phone rang at Milly’s five times, then came the answering machine. “Tell me who you are and I’ll get right back to you,” said Milly’s voice. Then: “Mill? Are you there? Can you pick up? It’s me.” A very long pause. “I know I don’t deserve this, but. .”
Milly picked up. “I’m here,” she said, her voice hoarse with sleep. Drew still heard the chill in it. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m so scared, Mill. I can’t cry.”
“You can’t cry?”
“I try, but I can’t.”
“Why do you want to cry in the first place?” There was a pause. “Are you high again?”
“I can’t stop.”
Milly winced, horrified. “Is it in front of you right now?”
“Can you please just come over?”
Milly laughed sharply. “So now you want me to come over. Are you sure you’ll buzz me in?”
Drew knew this was coming. “I’m sorry.”
“How could you do that to me?” Milly pleaded.
But Drew was silent on the other end of the line, which disconcerted Milly. “If you’re that scared,” Milly finally said, “you can come over here.”
“But I’m scared to leave the house!”
“I’m not coming to you!” Milly fired back, now fully awake. “I’m infuriated at you! You’re not a good friend!”
This was the lance that pierced Drew’s pent-up tears. “Don’t say that,” she sobbed. “I want to be. Sweetie, please! Give me another chance.”
The low break in Drew’s voice, the snuffly snobs, took Milly aback. She sighed deeply, pushed her sleep-tangled hair back from her face. “If you’re that scared, get in a cab and come over here,” she said. “I’m not leaving Brooklyn at three in the morning.”
“I don’t even know where you live now,” Drew snuffled.
Milly gave her the address — Drew said she’d be there soon — and put the phone down. She was annoyed, and annoyed at herself for acquiescing. Hurricane Drew was about to come sweeping through her safe, well-ordered home. She went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, took out the Ativan that she barely ever took anyway, and hid it in a dresser drawer so Drew wouldn’t steal it. She turned against the wall a canvas she was working on so she wouldn’t have to bear some casual remark Drew would make about it. How else could she protect herself? She went into the kitchen and made a pot of chamomile tea and sat there in her bathrobe, fake-mulling over the crossword puzzle in yesterday’s paper.
In the Village, Drew put down the phone. Again, the clicking started and she thought it was coming from the windows and the walls, the neighbors and the authorities trying to get into the apartment in a subtle, quiet way, then arrest or hospitalize her. The thought of pulling herself together, locking the door behind her and venturing down the bright, empty stairwell, braving the sidewalk and hailing a cab, giving the cabbie the impression of normalcy all the way to Brooklyn, terrified her. But she also knew that if she didn’t leave, it would just be her and the clicking until dawn, and she’d go insane. So she blocked out the clicking, dressed, got her bag and keys.
Oh, and the coke. There was that baggie in her bureau she hadn’t told the others about, because surely they’d have gotten her to bring it out, and she’d wanted them to leave. She took it out and, fully acknowledging how crazy she was, scooped a fair-size mound on the end of her key and snorted it. Then she put it in her bag and lay on her back on her bed with her head hanging off the edge until she felt the familiar, comforting tang in the back of her throat. She got up and swaggered out of the apartment — the heels of her boots criminally loud in the echoing stairwell with the buzzing fluorescent lights — and walked to Seventh Avenue and hailed a cab. She even made small talk with the cabbie, careful not to talk a blue streak like a cokehead on a new jag.
When Milly opened her door, Drew embraced her and sobbed. Milly stood there, dumbstruck, finally embracing Drew in return, gingerly.