“Millipede, come on,” Jared protested. “You’ve barely worked in watercolor.”
“But you know that I have,” she countered. Why else would he have said that? she was asking herself.
Jared just stood there, exasperated. He shrugged.
Elysa put an arm on each of their shoulders. “Come on, you two,” she singsonged. “We all know there are two talented artists in the household.”
“Three, actually,” Milly said, pointing to Mateo. “He just gets better and better.”
“I know!” Elysa exclaimed. “I’ve seen it! Mateo, when did you start using actual paint?”
Mateo was lost in his fries, meticulously pairing different ones with different condiments. “I dunno,” he said absently. “A few months ago?”
“This summer,” Milly clarified. “In a summer class.”
“Yo, bro,” Jared said, clamping his hand over Mateo’s hair and scratching it. “Are you gonna be the first in the family to start bringing in some money with your art?”
“I dunno,” Mateo repeated, still lost in his fries. “I wanna do big metal things like you.”
This caused Milly to look up at Jared, her eyes bright with pleasure.
Jared paused a moment. “Nah,” he finally said. “I think you’re going to be a painter like mamita. You two have that whole color thing going on.”
Moments later, Milly kissed everyone good-bye and made off to her studio in Chinatown. She shared the space with Bogdan, a Russian guy, a friend of a friend, and she found him there, ignoring his canvas, smoking and reading the Village Voice. When she was in her studio — whose windows, wide-open today, gave onto a view of the Manhattan Bridge — she felt macho and badass and free, and she allowed herself only a moment’s guilt before she pulled a cigarette from Bogdan’s pack and lit up with him. This reminded her of long nights in the studio in college, before the first wiry gray strands had emerged on her own head of hair, when Jared was first falling in love with her, he later told her. That was an interesting thing to think about, because Milly hadn’t truly fallen in love with Jared until much later, once they’d had sex.
“Are you productive today?” she asked Bogdan, whose shaved head, she always marveled, was almost rectangular.
He blew out smoke and frowned. “My arm hurts.”
“Did you call the physical therapist my mom told me about?”
He shook his head, smiled sheepishly.
“Your arm is your livelihood,” she chided.
“I don’t have insurance!” he suddenly barked at her.
“My mom says he has a sliding scale. You can’t take chances with your arm.”
“Okay, I’ll call him.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the old Café Bustelo coffee can they’d filled with sand to make an ashtray. “Why are you so late today?”
“I lingered in the park with Mateo and a friend. The weather this time of year is so perfect.”
He nodded appreciatively. “Labor Day happens too early. Summer goes all the way to October.”
She nodded back. They gossiped about other artists and finished their cigarettes. Milly let out a long sigh and pushed her hair back. “Okay, here goes,” she said.
“Hit it! Attack it!” Bogdan laughed.
“Attack it!” she echoed. “Plunge in!” She went and squared herself by her canvas, put the crook of her finger to her lips and stared at it for a minute or two. She looked back at Bogdan a few times, casting him an aggrieved look to elicit his sympathy over her creaking start, but he’d already turned his back on her toward his own work. Her canvas wasn’t more than a five-by-three rectangle that she’d scraped down to a background field of dusty rose, so pale you could see plenty of canvas through it. She hadn’t touched it since the prior Saturday, and all week she’d held it in her head and wondered what to do next. Finally, she went to her table and squeezed some white paint and a little yellow paint into a cup, then stood before the window mixing it, looking out at the bridge, which seemed to pop toward her off a hard enamel-blue sky. A very unpleasant wave overcame her, a mix of sadness and anxiety, which was odd, because mixing paint usually soothed her.
What is it? she asked herself, looking uneasily at Bogdan, as though to check if he’d felt it as well, but his back remained to her. She scrunched her forehead. If she applied herself, she thought, she could pinpoint the source of the wave and address it. She ticked down items in her head. But the truth was life was okay at the moment. She’d been having these tics since she was sixteen. After years of therapy, she’d come to see them as depressive synapses signaling absolutely nothing going on in life. Nothing is wrong, she told herself. The sky was absolutely blue and she’d had a perfect morning. The path ahead was clear.
She applied a large blob of the pale yellow paint on the right side of the canvas and watched it leak downward a moment until she picked up a scraper and drew it leftward. Thirty seconds later, she was in a sweet spot, a deep voice applauding her for painting her way away from her bogeyman. Ninety minutes later, the thought of a cigarette blooming in her brain like a flower, she shook herself out of her reverie, and at that moment, Bogdan let out a kind of cathartic groan. They turned to each other and laughed and moved toward the table in the center of the room and Bogdan’s cigarettes.
“Are you staying here tonight?” she asked him.
“I have a date,” he growled.
Her face lit up. “You have a date? Who is she?”
“She’s a teacher. A public-school teacher. Like you.”
“Ooh,” she said. “Hot for teacher.”
He frowned. “Why do you say that?”
“It was a song,” she said. She paused. “Oh, wait. I don’t think you were in America yet then.”
She didn’t have much focus left after her cigarette. She applied and scraped for another twenty minutes, then cleaned up and wished Bogdan good night and a good date. Outside, the night was sweet, the sky streaked with wild pinks and golds as the sun set. She stepped into Two Boots pizzeria on Avenue A and ordered two large pizzas, a Saturday ritual. Idling with her cell phone while she waited for them, she noticed Jared had called her but not left a message. Peculiar, she thought, not dwelling much beyond that. They called that her pizzas were ready.
As soon as she walked into the Christodora, Ardit flagged her. “There was a problem,” he said, his tremulous blue eyes narrowing.
Her own eyes grew large. “What?”
“You know Hector?”
“In the building? Yes, why?”
“His dog bit Mateo.”
“What?” She gripped Ardit’s arm. “Is he okay?”
“Jared took him to the hospital. I think he’s okay. It just looked like a little cut.”
“What hospital? Beth Israel?”
Ardit nodded. Milly put the pizzas down on a handsome, high-backed wooden bench in the lobby, pulled out her cell phone, and called Jared. Her heart was pounding.
“Hi,” she said when he answered. “Ardit just told me what happened.”
“He’s fine,” Jared said. “He got, like, two stitches and he’s waiting for a rabies shot. We should be home soon.”
“Is he doing okay?” Milly asked. “Can I talk to him?”
“Sure, he’s right here.”
“Hi, Mommy,” Mateo said.
“You’re okay, sweetheart?”
“I’m okay. I gotta get a shot.”
“What happened, Mateo?”
“I was running down the hall and Sonya came out the door and chased me and bit me until Hector grabbed her and took her back inside.”
“Oh, sweetheart! I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“He’s okay.” It was Jared, back on the line. “We came back in from the park and he wanted to run up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, so I let him. And I guess at some point he decided to run down the hall on Hector’s floor and Hector’s door was ajar and the dog came out.”