Mateo ran along the fence to follow the dogs at play, leaving the two women alone for a moment.
“He was so high, Milly,” Elysa said, disapproval in her voice. “Hector.”
“That’s what everyone’s saying,” Milly replied. She didn’t have much drug experience except for college-era pot and one episode each with mushrooms and ecstasy, so she wasn’t quite sure how to tell if people were high, or what they were high on. “His dog sure was crazy.”
“Probably because he’s been holed up in his apartment since yesterday doing drugs and hadn’t taken her out. The poor thing. That’s animal cruelty.”
Milly shook her head. “He was such a big deal once in the whole world of AIDS research.”
“You told me. He used to work with your mother, right?”
“For my mother,” Milly corrected. “He started under her, like, twenty years ago. And then he got fed up because nobody was doing anything and he became one of the activists, and then he became a huge deal and was working in the Clinton administration to release all those new medications. He was always in D.C. I think he even lived there for a year or two before he moved into the Christodora.”
Elysa slowly shook her head. “He looks worse every time I see him.” She paused. “I think I know what drug he’s on.”
“It’s coke, right?”
“No, it’s called crystal meth. It’s like a hundred times stronger than coke and it makes you stay up and have sex for, like, days.”
Milly laughed. “That doesn’t sound so bad!” She glanced over Elysa’s shoulder to check on Mateo, who seemed to be happily feeding a leaf to a little dachshund through the gate.
“No, no, no, it’s really bad,” Elysa insisted. “You don’t eat or sleep for days and you get all paranoid and then you finally crash and you wake up, like, three days later and you’re a total mess. It’s horrible. All these gay guys I know in theater are talking about it and saying that guys are having unsafe sex because of it and getting HIV.”
Milly processed all this for a moment. “I don’t know if my mother ever told me if Hector had HIV or not. He had a boyfriend, or a lover, who died from it. My mother told me that much.”
“Well, that’s sad,” Elysa said, softening a bit. “But if he doesn’t already have it, he’s probably going to get it with the parade of guys he has coming in and out of the apartment all the time.”
Milly paused, last night’s wee-hours interlude coming back to her. “I think I saw one of them last night. In the elevator at, like, four A.M.”
“What were you doing in the elevator at four A.M.?”
Milly blushed, embarrassed. She didn’t like people to think she was peculiar. “I was going to the bodega.”
“Are you still having insomnia? I wish you’d go to that hypnotist I told you about.”
“I was only up for about an hour. But there was a gay guy coming down in the elevator from a higher floor and he seemed really drugged up.”
“How do you know he was gay?”
“He had gelled hair and a tank top and one of those armband tattoos.”
“Oh.” Elysa nodded.
“I wonder if there’s anything we can do—” Milly began. For him, meaning Hector, she was about to say. But an eruption from inside the dog run cut her off. Kenji was locked in a vicious, humping, jaws-on-neck brawl with yet another pit mix and a dazed-looking wire fox terrier. Various owners were screaming at the scrum, one of them trying to break it up with a big stick. Elysa ran toward the spectacle, screaming Kenji’s name. She pulled him out of the melee by his collar, only to be scolded by an older woman, her frizzy gray hair askew as she cradled the fox terrier.
“I’m sorry,” Elysa pleaded. “I’m so sorry.”
The frizzy woman: “You can’t bring him here, Elysa. We’ve talked about this. He’s not trained.”
“He is trained!”
“You call that trained?”
Milly and Mateo watched the showdown from the safety of the far side of the fence. “Kenji’s being bad today,” Mateo commented.
“Mmm,” murmured Milly, her hands on the boy’s shoulders. “He has more energy than he knows what to do with.”
Shamed, Elysa dragged Kenji out of the dog run back toward them. Kenji’s eyes were wild and googly with exhilaration after his brawl. Elysa’s social ostracism was lost on him.
“It’s a catch-22,” said Elysa, looping Kenji’s leash on to her shoulder so she could refasten her hair, which had come undone during the scuffle. Her minidress was covered in dust. “He’ll never learn to behave at the dog run if I don’t take him regularly. But every time I take him, something like this happens and they ban me again.”
“Well,” said Milly, trying to soothe, “technically they banned Kenji, not you.”
Elysa looked perplexed by this. “Why would I want to come to the dog run without Kenji?”
“Freets!” Mateo suddenly shouted. “Can we get freets?”
“Can we get what?” asked Elysa.
“He means frites, the Belgian fries,” said Milly. “They’re his newest obsession.”
Elysa’s eyes widened. “Oh, frites! You’re so cosmopolitan, Mateo.”
Mateo was already crouching again, covering Kenji with kisses. “What does that mean?” he asked, looking up.
“Umm,” began Elysa as the trio plus the dog wended their way out of the park. “It means very, um, fancy and knowing about things from different places all over the world. Very sophisticated.”
“The frites are right on Avenue A,” Mateo said.
“Yes, I know, but they come from Belgium.”
Milly steered Mateo around an unwashed teenage white girl with dreadlocks who was crouching and rocking on the sidewalk. “You know where Belgium is on the map, Mateo,” she said. “It’s in Europe. Where we’re going next year.”
“Oh, yeah, I know that,” he said confidently.
They bought their fries, collected their napkins and tiny cups of ketchup and mayonnaise, and crossed back into the park to sit on a bench. A shirtless middle-aged black man rode by on an old bike mounted with a boom box that blared “Try Again,” by Aaliyah. He wore a top hat with a sign affixed to it: R.I.P. AALIYAH, 1979–2001.
Elysa followed his trajectory, shaking her head. “That’s terrible about that poor girl,” she remarked. “Every single person died in that plane crash that weekend.”
Milly nodded in that silently clucking way that, when she caught herself doing it, reminded her of her mother. “She was such a beautiful girl.”
Her cell phone bleeped. It was Jared, not far away. Five minutes later, there he was, brandishing his own cone of fries. At thirty-one, he betrayed the first flecks of gray on his temples and the trace of a belly underneath an old, grease-smeared Pavement T-shirt. He set down on the bench a clanking messenger bag of tools he’d brought from his studio, then kissed his wife, son, and neighbor hello.
“You’re looking very industrial,” Elysa noted.
“I’m a macho art guy,” he deadpanned. “Big tools, big mess. No pussy watercolors for me.”
“I don’t use watercolors!” Milly protested.
Jared raised his hands defensively. “Whoa, Nelly! Did I say you? I meant, like, archetypally.”
“I don’t exactly think early Georgia O’Keeffe watercolors are pussy-ish,” Milly said.
“The pussies came later!” exclaimed Elysa.
But Milly didn’t seem to hear the joke. “And I don’t think the watercolors I’ve done are pussy-ish either,” she said.