“I feel like shit,” Milly said flatly, wiping her nose with a tissue. “I only finished out the afternoon at school because my students had final-term crits.” She looked at Jared, lightly reached for and then briefly took his hand. “I missed you today,” she said.
Jared tried to smile warmly but it probably just appeared wan. Could she sense what was coming? he wondered.
“I feel sort of sick to my stomach tonight,” he said.
“Why so?” asked Gallegos. Milly’s eyes flashed back toward him.
“I decided after last week’s session,” Jared pushed on, making himself meet Milly’s narrowed eyes. “I need to move out for a while. I need to be with myself.”
Slowly, Milly recoiled on the couch, her mouth opening. She raised her eyebrows several times as though to speak, but said nothing. Finally, she said, “That wasn’t the plan. The plan when we came here was to work this thing out.”
“I didn’t know then what I know now,” Jared said.
“Oh, great!” Milly said. “So now you’re punishing me for that.”
“Punishing you?” Jared yelled. “Punishing you? You fucking aborted my child because of your own fucking fears and you never even discussed it with me. How selfish is that?”
“Oh my God,” Milly said, bursting into tears. “Oh my God!”
“Hold up, guys,” Richard Gallegos said. “Hold up. Let’s take a minute of silence, okay?”
Grudgingly, Jared took a breath. Milly kept on crying and shaking her head. Jared fixed on her for a moment, watching her cry, and suddenly a tidal wave of fury — far deeper than anything he’d felt so far, something that truly scared him — began creeping over him from behind his shoulders. I’ve lived twenty years with someone who doesn’t really love me, was the thought he had. Total panic, madness, coursed through his entire body. Yet he steeled himself to stand up and grab his coat.
“I’m not staying for this,” he announced. “I don’t have to stay for this.”
“Jared, can you just sit through the minute of silence with us?” Gallegos asked.
“He doesn’t even want to,” Milly jeered.
That just about did it. “I fucking hate you, Milly,” Jared said.
In a moment, he was down on the street, his heart pounding, the world spinning before his eyes. He walked eight blocks up First Avenue in a blind fugue, with no destination whatsoever, then rounded a block and walked eight blocks back down. He stood outside Lucy’s bar for a moment and contemplated downing several whiskeys in a series of smooth, uninterrupted arm motions until he was completely obliterated and beyond responsibility for something like starting a street fight, because he suddenly wanted to beat the shit out of the male half of every happy couple he passed. He just stood there and stared through the dirty window at the bar, lasering in on what stool he’d choose.
And as he did that, boring down pitilessly with his eyes on one stool, his heart rate slowed. The world stopped spinning. He took an extremely deep breath. He ran his palms over his sweaty forehead, the angry parallel creases above his nose, and then his fingers through his salt-and-honey curls. Then he calmly got on the L train, went to his studio, opened the window, plugged his iPhone into his speakers and cued it up to Radiohead. With a calm and a cold resolve sinking ever deeper into his gut, he blowtorched a six-foot column of metal until two A.M. Then he shut off the lights in the studio, took off his belt and boots, and curled up under a blanket on a couch in the corner. It’s just me now, he whispered to himself, over and over. Just me.
Jared never looked back. In the circle of friends around him and Milly, people would marvel about the cool, clean precision with which Jared had left her, how he seemed to pour all his cold rage and shock and despair into his work, so that in a year he had a solo show at a gallery on Orchard Street that the New York Times praised for its “unadorned Rust Belt materiality.” After that, his work started selling and he wasn’t in his high-school teaching job but six more months. In the following four years, he became that rare figure in an art world that fetishizes the young and the new: a longtime midlevel artist who becomes a collector’s darling around the age of fifty.
For Asa, it was a point of glamour and pride to have a boyhood friend who was now an artist who was out of town half the time supervising the construction of crazy-ass metal hulks on public lawns or in wealthy private yards. And this night, walking a bit reluctantly past the Blue and Gold and on to the bar whose address Jared had voiced to Asa’s tablet a few hours ago, Asa wondered who might be the mysterious third Jared had hinted might later join them.
In the old-timey Prohibition-type bar, after Asa and Jared had shot the shit for an hour or so, Asa finally saw her: a mid-thirtysomething cocoa-skinned beauty with voluminous, curly hair and chunky cobalt earrings, wearing a long swath of iridescent slate-gray fabric that Asa could only identify, inwardly to himself, as “Japanese.”
She entered the bar, Jared’s back to her. Putting a finger to her smiling lips in Asa’s direction, she slipped up behind Jared and lightly kissed his neck.
Jared spun around. “Hey!” he boomed. He planted a happy-puppy kiss on her lips. “You made it!” Then he introduced Asa to Tonya Gomez, an associate curator at the Whitney Museum. Jared had met her at an opening there three weeks before.
Tonya wedged in a stool between Jared and Asa. “This is the third place I’ve been this week that makes me feel like I’m in some old-time gangster movie,” she said.
“You’re right,” Asa enthused. “It’s, like, Prohibition chic.”
“Right?” she said. “I don’t get why we — I mean, why America — why we’re so obsessed with that archetype. Do you? We can’t get enough of it!”
“We love our old-school rogues, I guess,” Asa said.
Tonya lightly put a hand on Asa’s arm in acknowledgment. “I know, right?”
Asa glanced at Jared, who’d pivoted slightly away, smiling placidly into his own reflection in the long antique mirror over the bar.
After Jared left Milly, he’d sublet an apartment in Carroll Gardens for a year. The apartment in the Christodora was his — it was his family’s, fully paid-for long ago. But telling Milly to leave immediately strained the limits of his cool, clean secession. Through a lawyer — because, he quickly realized, he could hardly bear to e-mail her, and certainly couldn’t bear seeing an e-mail from her in his queue — he told her she could stay indefinitely as long as she paid the monthly maintenance. He knew that someday he should reclaim the apartment, either to live there or to sell it — in fact, he knew he probably should get off his butt and talk to a divorce lawyer — but for the moment, he just wanted to be away from the Christodora, from every room and every book and every painting and every kitchen utensil — not to mention every Alphabet City block, café, denizen, dog, and junkie — that reminded him of his life the past twenty years. His therapist — a new one, not Gallegos, to whom he never returned after that night — spent a great deal of time trying to get him to see that those prior twenty years had not been a complete waste and a lie.
As for Milly, she’d sat there on the couch in Gallegos’s office alone, speechless, for several moments after Jared had said, “I fucking hate you, Milly!” and stormed out.
“Let’s just give it a minute,” Gallegos had murmured.
Milly drew her knees up to her chest on the couch. Turning away from Gallegos, she rested her head on the back of the couch and closed her eyes. Finally she said, “I knew it’d end up like this. I knew everybody would leave.”