“It’s a good thing I buzzed you in that night, or I might not have gotten the dedication page.” Milly laughed.
“I know,” Drew said. “But you did buzz me in, sweetheart. Because you’re Millicent Sophie Heyman, angel of mercy.”
Milly blushed and put her hand over Drew’s hand on the stick shift. Then they drove in silence for quite a bit, listening to “Andres.” Milly felt incredibly happy — happy to be in L.A. underneath all that sun, having a reprieve from New York’s brutal winter. She felt happier than she’d felt in quite a while, even during her happiest moments with Esther the past few months. As for Drew’s ankh pendant, she thought — whatever! What did it matter? Whatever worked!
At Drew’s adorable little new house, Milly met Drew’s boyfriend of the past eight months, Christian, a film editor from England who, like Drew’s old boyfriend Perry, was slim and pretty and had floppy Edwardian hair, but, unlike Perry, was quiet and sweet and not peremptory. Christian talked self-deprecatingly about being one of about two hundred editors on James Cameron’s movie about the Titanic, which was probably going to end up being the most expensive movie of all time. Christian also adored Drew; there was a moment when Drew was reading aloud a snippet of her own Publishers Weekly review, in a comically theatrical voice—“a bracing tonic after the navel-gazing narcissism of Elizabeth Wurtzel!”—and Christian, Milly noted, beamed with pure delight and devotion at Drew as she read.
This moved Milly, and gave her a pang, too. Jared would sometimes look at her that way, and she had found it rather puppyish and suffocating, whereas now, Esther — well, Esther seldom looked at her. Esther had said, “Let’s not feel like we have to be cheerleaders for each other’s work; let’s let those be parallel universes.” But the problem was Milly had already read a great deal of Esther’s work, so it came up all the time, and Esther certainly didn’t seem averse to discussing it when it did, whereas the first time Esther had seen some of Milly’s work hung up at Milly’s apartment, and again at the tiny studio space in downtown Brooklyn that Milly shared with three other artists, she had said, “The best gift I can give you on your work is not to comment on it and let that be entirely yours.” Which, at the time, had made sense to Milly, except that — well, couldn’t Esther say something about it? Every time Esther stared at it and said nothing, merely squeezed Milly’s butt and said something cryptic like “You have ideas,” Milly had inner paroxysms of dread. Did Esther hate it?
“How’s your mom, Millipede?” Drew asked when Christian had stepped out for a bit.
Milly sighed. “She’s okay.” She paused, sipping the chai Drew had made her. (If this were the old Drew, she’d thought, they’d certainly have cracked open a bottle of red by now, but there was no alcohol in the house. Drew had met Christian at AA, so he didn’t drink, either.)
“She’s amazing, actually,” Milly continued. “I mean, the poor woman is so tamped down on meds, it really messes with her focus and energy, and yet she manages to run that residence and keep raising money for it and increasing services. I think she might open another branch uptown. It’s so funny. You know when she was at the Health Department, the AIDS activists would protest her with, like, her head on a stick with a witch’s hat, like in effigy, and now she’s, like, the Liz Taylor of downtown Manhattan!”
Drew laughed. “She’s amazing.” A pause. “I think so much about John Russell.” He was a playwright friend of theirs who’d died the prior year of AIDS. “Thirty-one years old. Isn’t that the cruelest?”
“I know.”
“I read that some new drugs are in development that are really promising.”
“I know. My mother talks about them all the time. She has some clients in trials for them. The ones who can stay off drugs, that is.”
Drew went mmm knowingly.
They fell into a comfortable silence for a few moments. Milly’s eyes fell on a photo of a cute little girl in a striped sundress held with a magnet to the refrigerator.
“Oh my God, is that Blanche?” she asked. Blanche was Drew’s niece in Menlo Park, a picture of whom Milly hadn’t seen in years.
“That’s Blanche!” Drew said, beaming. “Isn’t she adorable and so pretty?”
“She is,” Milly conceded. “But do you know something? I don’t think I’ll ever have children.” As soon as Milly said it, she was surprised at how the thought had simply flown out of her mouth, unbidden.
Drew laughed. “Why? Have you actually been thinking about that?”
“I’m afraid of having what my mother has.”
Drew sighed and put her hand over Milly’s. “Honey, I know you are. But you’ve never shown any signs that you do. Usually, you know, there are signs, even in childhood, right? Hyperactivity and childhood depression. You didn’t have any of that, did you?”
“I had my share of childhood depression.”
“Of course you did! Look what you went through with your mom. But, sweetie”—and Drew laughed softly, maybe with a tinge of her old jealousy—“you are one of the most stable, even-keeled people I know.”
Drew had said this to her many times before. Sure, when you compared Milly with people like Drew and her mother, it was true. But what a pain in the ass it was being the stable, even-keeled one! When do I get to be the mess and have people take care of me? Milly thought.
But she didn’t say that. She just said: “I mean, why take the chance? Why go through the pain of watching someone you brought into this world go through the pain of going through that?”
“Sweetie, look at the pain we’ve both been through,” said Drew. “And we’re not even thirty!” Milly laughed a bit in spite of herself. “Would you rather not have been born than go through it?”
“Hmm,” Milly said. “Now that’s a tough one.”
Later that night, right after midnight, they were at the extremely burnt-orange-looking Rat Pack — era Dresden Room, in a banquette with Christian and a handsome screenwriter friend of his named Fabrice and Fabrice’s girlfriend, Sonya, a handbag designer from St. Louis. Milly, Drew, and Christian drank Pellegrino and Fabrice and Sonya drank martinis. Milly looked around; it was all about trying to look like Pulp Fiction these days, she noticed, the guys in their white spread-collar shirts underneath black jackets, the women with their Uma Thurman blunt cuts. The singing duo, Marty and Elayne, were noodling ridiculously over their synthesizer to Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”
Milly, bobbing her head, threw an affectionate look at Drew, as though to say, This is so cheesy, I love it! But she caught Drew’s eyes following the arc of someone’s path in the club, a path that led right to the banquette, and suddenly Drew was exclaiming, “Oh my God! Well, hi, guys!”
Milly turned — and felt the blood drain from her face. There was Jared with his New York high school friends Asa and Jeremy. What on earth was he doing here? Was this some kind of a setup? Had Drew said something to the boys? Would Drew do something like that to her?
But Milly made the snap decision to try to deal with the situation like an adult. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed to Jared, trying to sound cheerful — or at least not dismayed. “I didn’t know you were here this weekend.”