But the woman didn’t seem perturbed. “I don’t wanna live in no shelter,” she said. “I won’t move somewhere unless I have my own room.”
Ava took twenty dollars out of her bag and gave it to the woman. “Can you buy some food with that?”
“Ain’t you scared I’m gonna spend it on crack?” the woman asked gleefully. “Because I might!”
Ava couldn’t help but laugh with the woman. “It’s your choice, but I really hope you buy some food with it.”
The woman shrugged noncommittally. “Well, thank you,” she finally said. “That’s mighty kind of you.”
Ava smiled wanly and moved on. She knew that by going to the meeting tonight, by giving Hector that information, she’d made herself vulnerable, and that made her feel. . free. Her own illness had enraged her. To her psychopharmacologist, to her doctors, she was a puzzle to be resolved. They had no idea of the terror she experienced taking the subway. Would she lash out at someone against her will? Or of the hell of the crash from mania, or the fear of the crash, which was almost as bad. The inner landscape of sickness was wild, roiling, and her doctors were so dry, so cold! She didn’t want to be that way.
Finally, at Union Square, she got in a cab going uptown. Idly, she watched pedestrians — and, good Lord, there was Milly, her own daughter, walking side by side with a tall, honey-haired boy. What was she doing in those saggy, fringy hippie clothes? Ava twisted around in her seat to watch them until they were out of sight. The sensation was peculiar — Milly had been home for the summer for a few weeks, but this was as though Ava was really seeing her for the first time in years. That’s because, though Ava could not articulate this, guilt had forced her to think of Milly, and even look at Milly, as little as possible. Ava knew too well that her own illness had eclipsed Milly’s growing up.
But — Milly had turned out okay, right? Graduated with all sorts of honors from high school and brought home a fine transcript from her first year of college. She was going to be an artist! Certainly the Heymans, having scratched their way from Russian peasant stock up into the New York professional classes, had never had an artist among their ranks before. That was cause for pride. And Ava was proud of Milly. But Milly also had two qualities Ava was jealous of. One was beauty. Ava had been sexy, but her looks had been muddled, a bit Streisand cross-eyed, whereas Ava’s best features had harmonized with Sam’s in Milly, who had almost Disneyish brown eyes, a delicate nose, and loose dark curls.
The other quality, part of which probably came out of the beauty, was quietude. Milly was quiet. Ava was not. Ava was loud and showboaty and got what she needed, or sometimes didn’t get what she needed, because of it. But Milly was so delicate, amused, wry! Milly had always been this way, Ava thought. It had to be the gentle, loose-curled influence of Sam, who was also quiet, forbearing. Milly’s beauty and quietude made her almost unbearable to her mother, a thought so awful that Ava wasn’t even fully aware of it.
The cab drove on, dropped her in front of her brownstone. Inside, she found Sam in front of the TV, watching the videotaped MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, his tie cast aside and his black-stockinged feet up on the coffee table. She dropped her bag on the floor, kicked off her low heels, and collapsed alongside him on the couch.
“Can I beg you for a foot rub, handsome man?” she asked.
Sam lifted her left foot in his hands and kissed it before setting to work on it. “You’re back later than usual tonight,” he noted. He’d had to stop running because of a knee problem and he’d gained fifteen pounds in the ensuing two years, but Ava found his new thickness comforting, if not exactly arousing, to the limited extent she cared about being aroused anymore.
“I went and met with the AIDS activists,” she said, then groaned in pleasure from the massage, her head falling back on a pillow.
“And how was that?”
“They reamed me. But I had it coming.”
Sam laughed gently. “You can take it. You’re a tough lady.”
She lifted her head, looked at him. “Too tough?” she asked. “Not a good person? Not a good mother?”
Sam blinked, taken aback. “Where’s this coming from?”
“I was coming uptown in the cab tonight and I saw Emmy on the street, walking with a boy. It was such a strange feeling. She looked so—” Ava paused, grasping for the word. “Foreign. To me. Like I hadn’t seen her in years. And suddenly I wondered—” Ava began to cry, feeling as though the entire evening was catching up to her. She swiveled on the couch and crawled into Sam’s chest. “I don’t know, Sam, I just got a really bad feeling and I wondered, have I—”
Sam shushed her, stroking her hair. “No, you have not,” he said firmly. “No, you have not.” She had, he thought, but he would never tell her so. What would be the point of that?
“You okay?” Jared asked Milly.
She looked up at him, put her hand in his large hand, flecked on the back with red hair. “I’m okay, just hot. Do you want to have a drink?”
They walked to the Blue and Gold on East Seventh Street. Friends of Jared’s from high school, Asa and Jeremy, were inside, and they fed the jukebox and drank pitchers for the next several hours, listening to Fleetwood Mac and Steve Miller. Milly got drunk and felt happy and carefree for the first time in over a week. There was a long, messy conversation about George Bush and what a dickwad he was, and about how sad it was that Barbara Bush couldn’t just come out and say she was pro-choice. Around three o’clock, Milly and Jared parted in front of the bar from Asa and Jeremy, and Jared asked Milly to come to his place at the Christodora, which his dad had bought just the year before — at the bargain-basement price of $90,000, Jared noted proudly.
Milly said yes, and as they approached the entrance of the very plain, handsome, and boxy brick building that towered over Tompkins Square Park, Milly looked up at the bizarre bit of frieze work over the door, which featured eerie winged creatures, and asked, “What does Christodora mean?”
“I dunno,” Jared says. “It reminds me of Stella D’oro cookies. This building used to be, like, a settlement house in the Depression. Can you believe the city bought the whole building in the seventies for, like, fifty thousand dollars? That’s what a shithole it was.”
“The name reminds me of a Rossetti poem or a pre-Raphaelite painting,” Milly said.
Upstairs, in a dark, high-ceilinged apartment littered with dirty clothes, secondhand furniture, and art supplies, Jared pulled out pot and a pipe, then put Sinead O’Connor on his CD player.
He drew on the pipe, then held it out to Milly. “You wanna?” he asked.
Milly frowned. “I probably shouldn’t,” she said. She’d had some bad, paranoid experiences with pot the past few years. But then again, that was in groups of six, seven.
“Just have a hit.”
“Will you light it for me?” she asked.
He did, the two of them standing face to face in the middle of the dark living room. Milly felt the rush of stonedness overcome her, the confusion, the heightened sense of Jared’s body against her own. What was she doing? Jared took another hit off the pipe and put it down. The room suddenly seemed enormous, and scary, to Milly. She suffered that unfortunate effect of pot, of suddenly doubting whether she really knew whom she was with, even though she’d known Jared since she was eleven.
“Can we light candles?” Milly asked.
Jared darted away, rummaged in the kitchen, came back with about half a dozen candles and holders, lit them all. Now the room danced with shadows — theirs and that of the boxy, tweed-covered sofas and chairs. Jared came back to her and took her in his arms, pulled her hair back, tied it loosely behind her head, drew her by her nape toward his lips.