Why had she just gotten up and walked out? Because she was angry. Paranoid, she felt Drew and the boys had conspired to put her and Jared back together. How hard she had worked to have a life apart from Jared! She thought of her apartment in Cobble Hill, of the pride she’d taken in every piece of furniture or old rug or painting or plant she’d hauled in there from off the street or a thrift shop or her parents’ house. She thought about Jake and Frodo, the cats, lolling around, pressing against the calves of her jeans while she painted. And she thought about the light that came in from the back windows that faced the landlord’s garden, that dusty amber light that floated in the room over her head while she painted, purring to herself over the absolute depth of the paint colors and Leonard Cohen on her little, unfussy CD player, and the smell of the roasted chicken she had in the oven while she painted, the red wine she’d drink with her girlfriends at her very own table that night while they ate the meal. And also how she’d spared no expense on her bed — the best fluffy-white pillows and comforter, the lovely duvet cover, and the quilt her grandmother had knitted — Jake and Frodo settling in around the crooks of her knees when she went to bed at night, a stack of about six books she was reading simultaneously right beside her. She had wanted this life, Milly’s Life Alone, and she had wrapped herself in it completely.
And yet Milly was always half terrified. The silence whispered to her, Go down this dark, leafy path. In the middle of the night, when she’d wake to go to the bathroom, she could hear it — she could put on slippers and throw a coat on over her boxer shorts and T-shirt and walk outside, down some imaginary forest path in the snow that wound all the way down to a quiet but vast river. That’s why she was terrified, because she could simply keep on walking and never come back. All the trappings of Milly would fall away behind her as she strode deeper into the forest toward the river — the paintings, her mother and father, her friends, the birthday parties, the clothing swaps with her girlfriends, the gallerists, the skirts she’d worn in high school and the fringed suede coats from college, the cats (well, no, she might carry the cats with her into the woods). It would all fall away behind her like well-braised meat falls off the bone, leaving her clean, naked, vulnerable. The silence would whisper for her to do it, and such a deep, terrifying part of herself wanted to, so she would put on Leonard Cohen in the middle of the night and try to ground herself back in the matter of the living, of the very tethered and connected. In the morning, peeking out the window from bed and seeing her landlord in the garden, she was relieved, reminded that it’d all been a four-A.M. half-dream.
But Milly in the middle of the night longed for Jared, who saw through to her terror. By day, his ungroomed, bacon-smelling self — the sheer amount of space he took up, like a farm dog; his hopeless shedding all over her life and her work! — could send her screaming into the forest. In the middle of the night, though, when she’d stumbled back from the bathroom and he’d throw his arm around her and pull her close, she’d melt into that stinky, warm mass and say “I love you” and think Thank you for Jared and fall back asleep.
And suddenly there he was, standing over her on the bench on the corner of North Vermont and Melbourne Avenues.
“What’s up, Millipede?” He lit a cigarette. She moved over on the bench and he sat down beside her. She folded her arms and stared straight ahead, boiling inside with warring feelings.
“Jeremy really didn’t tell me you were here,” Jared finally said. “I freaked when I saw you. But we were right up on the table.”
Her eyes flashed at him with anger. “They planned it,” she said. “Even if they didn’t spell it out, they planned it. I bet Drew said we’d be here on Friday. They think they’re doing the right thing.” She was dismayed to find she was becoming furious again, just as she had inside. “How dare they? How dare they? I have a right to set my own course. I don’t just have to take shit.” She was surprised to find herself suddenly sobbing. “I have a right to myself.”
Jared had been sitting close, but now he slowly backed away. He stood up, stared down on her. The cigarette fell from his hand. “I’ll leave you then, Milly,” he said.
She stood up and pulled him back down again by his jacket. “No, I don’t want you to leave me,” she sobbed. She buried her face in his jacket. “I miss you. I love you. I miss you so much. I’m just trying to hold on to myself.”
She was racked with sobs, and he held her and rocked her. She felt that rage she’d always felt with him, not at him but something she couldn’t quite make out just over his shoulder, and whatever that hideous, massy thing was, she’d just gone to town on it with a baseball bat. And the relief of it was her realization, while she sobbed, that whatever it was, it wasn’t Jared! He hated it as much as she did — he hated it for her, alongside her.
She cried until her face was raw, until she felt exhausted in his arms.
“We need to go back inside because neither of us has a car,” Jared said.
She rolled her eyes. “I know. So pathetic.”
“I don’t want to swallow you, Milly. All the room is there for you, as wide as you want it.”
She was truly exhausted now. “Let’s just get back to New York and figure it out from there,” she said. “I can’t even think straight in this good weather.”
She pulled away from Jared once they were inside; she was certainly not giving Drew and the boys that satisfaction. They had to walk directly in front of Marty and Elayne to get back to the banquette.
“Aww,” drawled Elayne into her microphone. “Look at you two! You two kids look like you want to know what love is. Do you want to know what love is? I know I do. Don’t you, Marty?”
“I sure do,” Marty said into his mic. “I think I already know.”
Marty and Elayne then began their inevitable lounge version of the Foreigner song. Milly and Jared got back to the banquette. Drew looked up at Milly’s blotchy face.
“Did you request the song, too, just to put a cherry on it?” Milly asked Drew.
Drew gasped. “You’re so paranoid, Millicent Heyman! You are crazy, you know that, right?”
She and Drew exploded in laughter. “You are crazy, Drew Forman!” Milly cried. “Learning to breathe! I’ll show you how to breathe!”
Milly lunged at Drew, wrapped her arms around her. “You’re crazy, you’re crazy!” Drew shrieked, cackling madly. The boys and everyone else leaned back, like, Uh, what the fuck just happened? And Milly didn’t quite understand herself, except that it was the first time in a long time she felt full of joy.
Seven. Portrait of the Artist (2010)
Mateo has grown. He thinks back bemusedly on his high-school persona, M-Dreem, just over a year ago, so fly in his high-tops and massive T-shirts, the little prince of Art and Design High School. Well, he’s moved on. At Pratt, there are these slightly older kids — the steampunk kids, they’re called — who wear only vintage lace-up boots, tight trousers, vests, old watches on chains, and black hats or slouchy old newsboy hats, and Mateo has become sort of enamored of them, hanging out with them — and they, all being from way upstate or New Jersey, love him because he is “New York” and “real” to them.
He affects some of their look, spending a lot of time when he’s not on campus cruising around thrift stores in the East Village, where he still lives with Millimom and Jared-dad, buying anything black or old looking. The big ’fro now goes in pigtails underneath a bowler, for example, and the fat red-and-black Airs perhaps with knee stockings and twill breeches. He likes the look — he’s mixing genres, listening to less Outkast and more old Josephine Baker and early Cure. And his art: What the F was he thinking back in high school with that glorified notebook doodling? He laughs at it now. As soon as he started seeing more work, hitting the New Museum and the Chelsea and Lower East Side galleries, he changed up his game, became much more minimal, abstract. For the final project of his foundation drawing class, he was taking details from these old Josephine Baker photos — one eye, her feet, her breasts — and drawing them into planes of endlessly repeating water drops, food blobs, or strange, jellylike swirls. He inwardly cringes when he remembers that spider thing he did for his final high-school project. What had he been thinking?