It seemed like they were getting off to a good start over the first few weeks. Then came a certain Wednesday night that Jared and Asa met up, Jared looking ashen and stunned.
“What’s up?” Asa asked, ordering their usual twin pints.
Jared closed his eyes, shook his head, put his head in his left hand with an elbow propped on the bar. “I almost texted you to tell you I couldn’t make it,” he said. “But I figured I better talk. Because I’m about to start hitting people on the street.”
“What the fuck?” Asa put a hand on his back. “What the fuck is up?”
What was up was, the prior night in therapy, Jared had figured it out.
Finally, that night, finally, finally, Jared had found the courage to say what he’d wanted to say the past several weeks — no, really, the past many, many years. Something that a certain icy intransigence on Milly’s part had laid to rest even before Mateo had come into their lives. And certainly something that fifteen hectic years of Mateo had all but frozen out as a topic.
“Milly,” Jared had said, taking her hand in his before Richard Gallegos as though the therapist were remarrying them, “before it’s too late. . I really, really want to have a child with you.”
Just so Milly couldn’t reply with We’ve had a child. . we have a child, he added, to be utterly clear, “I want to bear a child with you. I want to make a child with you.” He did not make the dread mistake of saying our own child. He’d learned his lesson several years ago about using that phrase.
The beige room plunged into silence. Milly looked at him blankly, then looked away, blinking several times. Richard Gallegos said nothing.
“Are you going to say anything?” Jared finally asked Milly. Already, he was tumbling into regret that he had even asked.
“It’s too late,” Milly finally said. “I think — I think it’s too late.”
“It’s not too late,” Jared shot back. “Look around at people we know. You know it’s not too late. Especially with medicine. We’ve never even really tried.”
But Milly was crumpling under his campaign. She began crying.
Richard Gallegos said not a word for several more seconds — a bit perversely, Jared thought. At length, Gallegos asked, “Milly, what are you feeling? Why are you crying?”
Milly suddenly drew herself up very straight and gave Jared one — one — prolonged look, full of despair and apology. Then she looked away, wiping away tears.
“And then it hit me,” Jared told Asa. “It hit me like a smack in the face, it was so clear. So I said, ‘Milly, were you pregnant once?’ And she nodded. And then I couldn’t even ask the next question.”
“She had a miscarriage?” Asa asked.
Jared smirked bitterly. “She didn’t have any miscarriage.” He held Asa’s stare. “She didn’t have any fucking miscarriage.”
“Oh, shit,” Asa finally said. “She had an abortion?”
Jared looked down dully into his drink.
“Oh, shit, man. When?”
“Before we took in Mateo,” Jared said. “She said she didn’t want to have a mentally ill child.” His eyes locked with Asa’s, then watered over. His jaw trembled. Asa rubbed Jared’s back while Jared blinked rapidly, then smudged away tears with the back of his hand. “I can’t believe she did it,” Jared said, his voice an octave higher than usual. “It was our baby and she just terminated it. She didn’t even tell me.”
“Oh my fucking God, man,” Asa said quietly. “I’m so fucking sorry.” He was at a loss. He thought about his own daughters, if they had simply. . never been. Carolina’s bizarre little made-up songs she hummed under her breath all day, which made him dizzy with love, and the turndown in Alice’s mouth when she encountered even a tiny cruelty, like a lady pulling a little dog too harshly on a leash. Asa believed Alice would one day become a human-rights lawyer, or the president. His stomach churned in a sickening void. “I’m so sorry, man.”
“She had an abortion and then pressured me to adopt Mateo,” Jared said. “Can you believe that? We could have had our own child.”
After Milly’s revelation, she and Jared went into free fall. Jared would express rage and grief while at therapy each week, and Milly would silently sit there and absorb it, rubbing her arms, feeling as though this excoriation was her due. In all the days in between, they lived separate lives and avoided each other. Milly slept in Mateo’s room. She started spending more time than usual with her mother and father. After Milly finished teaching, she would go to her parents’ house on the Upper East Side, the house she’d grown up in, and make dinner for Ava and Sam.
“Where’s Jared tonight?” Ava would ask. That was Ava’s way of saying, Why aren’t you with your husband tonight?
“He’s in the studio,” Milly would answer.
“Does he ever come out of the studio?” Sam would ask.
“Why don’t you call and ask him that, Daddy?” But then she regretted the bite in her tone, especially when her parents exchanged their signature glance that said, Well, well, well.
The truth was she didn’t really know where Jared was most of the time. She’d told her parents that she and Jared were in therapy, that they were having trouble after the traumatic Mateo years, but she didn’t tell them the abortion revelation that had sent everything over the edge. If she had, if she’d been honest about why she’d done it, it would have been a direct affront to her mother — a manic-depressive woman who’d borne a depressive daughter. Of course, Milly told herself, Ava hadn’t borne her thoughtlessly. Ava hadn’t even had any symptoms when she got pregnant with Milly at twenty-six. But it didn’t matter. Milly knew her mother would still take the news as an affront. So she said nothing and was grateful for the book- and art-lined haven of her parents’ home to crawl back into in this most unhappy period.
Somewhere around this time, Jared and Asa were prowling galleries in Chelsea on a Saturday afternoon. “So I think I’m gonna bring it up at therapy this Thursday,” Jared told Asa. “I want to separate.”
Asa turned away from a shag-rug sculpture and looked at his friend. “For real?” he asked. Asa truly hadn’t known if this was coming. Everything had been in limbo for six weeks after Milly’s revelation, and Asa had doubted his friend’s ability to walk away from the woman he’d been crazy over for the better part of thirty years.
Jared nodded and said nothing. An hour later, over a turkey burger and a beer, while the two men were idly discussing the shows they’d just seen, Jared crumpled in his chair and put down his burger and stared into space.
“You okay?” Asa asked.
Jared finally looked up. “How could I ever possibly stay with someone who did that?”
“You’re having a whole debate with yourself in your head, right?” Asa asked. Jared didn’t reply. “Look, why don’t you just say you need some space alone right now and not make it out like it’s permanent?”
Jared’s eyes flicked back toward his friend. “That’s probably a smart idea,” he said.
That Thursday night in therapy, having met Milly there to find she had a miserable cold, Jared pitied her and almost went back on his promise to himself. But then he decided that the moment had come when he simply had to push this thing through or it would never happen. Jared let Richard Gallegos take him and Milly through their routine “check-in,” which meant saying where they were immediately coming from and what state of mind they were in. With each passing week, Jared had grown more tired of this ritual. Tonight, he had to breathe deeply to keep from telling Gallegos to take his $250-a-week check-in and go fuck himself.