How alone Milly had been only a year ago! First, Drew went off to rehab, then she was back for only four months or so — four months of unrelenting twelve-step babble, Milly recalled wearily, though not without relief that Drew had found some organizing principle to keep her stable. Then suddenly Drew was off to L.A., having determined that reliably good weather was key to her mental health. Apparently more so than certain good friends, Milly thought, not entirely able to quell her feelings of abandonment.
And Jared was certainly not in Milly’s life anymore. So Milly was alone a great deal, burrowing into the comfort and safety of her Cobble Hill apartment. Then Esther came and spoke to the women’s book group Milly had joined in her neighborhood. Milly — Milly! — had had the gumption to ask Esther to come join the group for coffee after Esther spoke. Milly had looked plain, powerful Esther straight in the eye and leveraged every bit of beautiful-girl power she knew deep down that she had. And Esther, who had a full, complicated schedule and no time for games or the follies of a long, subtextual courtship, looked right back at her and accepted the invitation to coffee.
Pretty soon, they were having the kind of relationship that all the arty media lesbians in New York talked about, including even the kind of sex they had. The girls said that, when Milly showed up at places with Esther, Milly had the oozy glow of a straight girl who was finally getting the kind of daily working-over she’d waited her whole life for without knowing it. But honestly, Esther worked Milly over like that, oh, maybe once a week — in the past few weeks, possibly even less! Once Esther made it clear to Milly that she was capable of working her over like that — effectively putting a kind of sexual lock on Milly and distracting her from melancholy memories of Jared — Esther went back to her life baseline, which was, basically, that she was too busy to put someone else’s pleasure before her own important work. And this was actually comfortable and familiar to Milly — on one level just how things seemed like they should be — so she didn’t even think about it so much.
“I just wanted to say I’m thinking of you,” Milly told her now over the phone.
“Aw, I love you, Babyturnip,” Esther said. “I’m thinking of you, too.” Funny, that, Milly noted — Esther was talking to her in the same distracted tone her mom had used a moment ago.
“Are you really?” Milly asked coyly.
“Yes, I am,” Esther replied in the cadence of a grade-school teacher. “Are you excited about seeing Drew?” (Esther and Drew got along; Esther was clearly attracted to Drew, and Drew respected Esther’s literary success, and wanted it as well.) “It’s quite the run-up to her book launch, isn’t it? There was a half-page ad in the TBR today. That’s no small change.”
“They’re putting a lot of money behind the marketing, it’s true.”
“It’s Prozac Nation with a way out of the madness!” Esther proclaimed. Milly laughed. One thing a lot of people didn’t know about Esther was that she had a rimshot, Borscht Belt sense of humor that reminded Milly of her dad.
“Now go catch your plane, Baby-T, so I can pull these notes together, and don’t let me find out you were letting other girls nuzzle your turnip top in L.A.”
Milly laughed weakly. When Esther betrayed jealousy, she suggested only that Milly would be attracted to other women, not men. Why? Milly hadn’t brought that up, though. It was okay for Esther to bring up Jared, and how there were simply layers of Milly that he never could’ve understood or reached. But when Milly brought up Jared, Esther would murmur, in that same grade-school tone, “You know I think it’s better that you talk about Jared with your friends and not me, if you really have to talk about him.”
And Milly would nod and say, “I know, I’m sorry,” wishing she hadn’t hurt Esther and perhaps even distracted her briefly from her important work.
Milly read Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body on the flight because Esther had wanted her to. Now they could have good conversations about this, holding each other closely, spooning each other yogurt and berries. Then she slept and dreamed, and in the dream, walking down Avenue B with Jared toward the Christodora, Jared took her in his arms and turned up the edge to her wool cap (because it was winter in the dream) and whispered, “I love you, Millipede.” And she said clearly, in her sleep, “Jared, I miss you so much,” and woke herself up saying it, a thread of drool running out one side of her mouth.
The thirtysomething Persian-looking guy sitting next to her, in a Lakers cap, reading the Economist, glanced sidelong at her, startled, but said nothing.
She wiped her mouth, absolutely mortified and disoriented.
“Milli-peeeeeeeede!” There was Drew, sitting inside her cherry-red VW Cabriolet, sunglasses on, waiting for her outside the terminal. Milly felt a little joyous starburst in her chest as she hurried toward Drew, who looked amazing, her chocolaty hair cut in two soft levels, one framing her cheeks, the other curling inward around her shoulders. Thankfully, she wasn’t tan, which relieved Milly, who had a horrible idea that everyone in L.A. was roasted a blood orange. But, Milly noticed, Drew wore an ankh pendant around her neck.
“You’re wearing an ankh!” Milly exclaimed as they embraced in the car. “So New Age of you.”
“Yeah,” Drew said airily, “that’s my little spiritual lodestone compass type thing. Just a little something to keep me centered on this new journey.”
“Wow, you’re so West Coast now,” said Milly, which made them both laugh. Drew was playing L7 and turned it down a bit. She gestured at a slim paperback on the dashboard.
“Check that out,” Drew said.
Milly picked it up. It was a glossy advanced reader’s copy of Learning to Breathe with a pen in it; Drew had been marking it up, doing final corrections.
“Oh my God, this is amazing!” Milly exclaimed, flipping through the 224 pages. “Look at you, you glamorpuss.”
In the cover photo on the back, Drew leaned forward seductively into the frame, a black jersey falling off her shoulders. . and there was that ankh pendant again! And there was Drew again on the cover, just half her face this time, with Learning spelled out in coke lines against a black background and Breathe spelled out in Zen-like black stones against a white background. (Then, in quiet, small letters, An Early Memoir.) Milly snuck a look at the book’s first line, after the copyright page and quote page (from The Little Prince, she noted). The first line was: “Before I breathed, I screamed.” Hoo boy, Milly thought.
“I am so fucking proud of you, Drew-pea,” she said.
“You skipped the dedication page,” Drew said coyly, her eyes on the road.
Milly turned to it. “For Milly,” it read, “who buzzed me in.”
Milly looked at Drew, who, eyes on the road, snuck a wary sidelong glance at her. Milly thought about that night two years ago — how enraged she had been! How close she had been to telling Drew simply to go to hell and slamming down the phone! But what Jared had always called her basic Milly-ness, what she thought of as her pushover suckerness, had prevailed, and now here Drew was, thanking her publicly by name for all the world to see, basically saying that Milly’s decision that night had sort of been the pivotal event in her life. . the event that had brought her from abject drug use to this: looking gorgeous; with a lovely boyfriend Milly had yet to meet but would shortly; exuding a peace of mind that, Milly had to concede, was slightly puzzling and maybe even a bit suspect because it involved an ankh, but, well, there it was, it could not be denied. And Drew really did seem to have her shit together; she’d made the down payment on a tiny little house in Silver Lake with her book advance.