Mateo winces slightly. He’s mentioned this to Dani in the past, confided that he felt shitty that he didn’t reach out to Milly, never mind that he hadn’t gotten on a plane to New York for Ava’s funeral and shivah. He’d felt the instinct to do it, felt the loss of that indomitable woman who’d been sweet to him as a kid when she had the time to spare, but the thought of actually doing it — and having to see Milly amid her grief — was more than he could bear. Shamefully, he’d shunted the news aside in his head.
“She wasn’t really my grandmother,” he says to Dani.
She laughs, mildly reproving. “You called her your bubbe, Mateo.”
He raises a hand to his forehead and turns away, at a loss for a response. He flat-out doesn’t like talking about the Heyman-Traums — it sparks remorse and regret in the pit of his stomach, a distinctly unpleasant feeling that threatens to throw him off his confident, present-day linear course.
Dani senses his displeasure. “Okay,” she says, gently pulling his hand away from his forehead. “I’m sorry I pushed it.”
He sighs, rubs her wrist with his thumb. “It’s just I get sad and bad feelings when I think about them.”
“I know, sweetie, I know. But while we’re in the sad and bad zone, there is just one more thing I want to mention, to head it off down the line. You know that Jared has a show opening here in a few weeks.”
Mateo’s hand flies back to his brow. “Yeah, jeez, I know,” he says. “What, you’re saying I should go?”
Her face goes all innocent and know-nothing. “I’m not saying anything. Did I say anything?”
“Well, then, why’d you bring it up?”
She strokes his hair again. “I just wanted to make sure you knew, because somebody else is probably going to bring it up with you.” She gets up and heads to the shower. “You know I have no opinion about your relationship with Jared and Milly.”
Mateo laughs sharply. “We have no relationship.”
Dani turns slowly in the door and looks back at him meaningfully. Then they both laugh.
“Yeah, right, you have no opinion,” Mateo calls as she closes the bathroom door.
Twenty minutes later, he buzzes up Char, who got here two weeks ahead of him. Char’s been down at the site and looks tired, bits of paint on his face and T-shirt. Char basically looks like the same baby dyke he met ten years ago doing that mural in L.A., if he added some scruff and a little bit of age to the face, then subtracted boobs.
Mateo and Char lock fists, hug. “Welcome, brother,” Char says.
“Thanks. Good to be here.”
Char gives him a funny double take. “For real?”
“For real,” he assures. “It’s amazing. It’s exciting. We’re doing public art in New York City! Underground art. Literally underground art. It’s all good.”
“You better be ready for a full plate this week,” Char says. “You have no fucking idea how difficult it is to paint on scaffolds on curved white tile above your head.”
“Michelangelo did something like that,” Mateo says. “And he didn’t even have six MFA students working for him.”
Char looks at Mateo skeptically. “Dude, Michelangelo definitely had assistants. The pope or the king or whatever probably gave him slaves or something.”
Dani walks in from the bedroom, her hair still wet, gives Char a hug and a hello.
“Neenee, did Michelangelo have assistants?” Mateo asks.
She looks up from her tablet, where she’s ordering food. “He had to,” she says. “I mean, right?”
“He probably had fucking slaves,” Char reiterates. “Everybody had slaves then.”
“MFA students are the new slaves,” Mateo says.
Later that night, after the food’s come and after Char’s shown him about a thousand pictures and videos of the project on his tablet, Mateo walks Char down to the street. They pull bikes out of a bike station.
“See you at the UnderPark at nine tomorrow,” Mateo says.
“You off to a meeting now?” Char asks, to which Mateo nods. “How you doing, being here?”
“Four hours in, I still don’t have a needle in my arm.”
Char frown-smiles. “Oh, come on, man, don’t say fucked up shit like that,” he says. “Go to your fucking meeting.” He bikes off toward the Williamsburg Bridge.
Mateo bikes the opposite way, west and then up to Houston. It’s a mild Sunday night in May, nearly midnight, and the streets are quiet, the faint chlorine smell from white pear-tree blossoms in the air. There’s so much fucking glass everywhere! Some of the glass has been opaqued for the night, but some of it’s clear and he can look right in and up to some of the world’s richest people amid their humdrum Sunday-night routines, sprawling in front of fifteen-foot-wide screens that dance with images and light. But between the glass spires and wedges there are the old stoops, fire escapes, cornices, and witch-hatted water towers he still sees in his dreams.
On West Houston, near to the river, he comes to the black door with MIDNITE stenciled in white paint on it. He finds a station to dock his bike about a hundred feet away, retraces his steps, nods at a few guys sucking on their vape-sticks outside, and then he walks through the door and up the steep, narrow steps. The last time he was here, four years ago for a show, this place saved his ass. He walks in the candlelit room, where some dude with a bolt through his nose is already telling his tale to the group, and takes the first empty seat he sees, next to a dirty-blond girl with cutely sardonic lips who looks not a day over twenty-five. She glances at him, looks away, then glances back. He catches her glance and smiles.
When the sharing starts, the girl raises her hand. “Sophie, addict.”
“Hi, Sophie,” everyone says.
“I have twenty-nine days today,” she says. The room applauds. Then her tale about how her parents want her to move back to Santa Barbara but she wants to stay in New York but she can barely pay her rent now that she’s lost her job, and does anyone have any advice after the meeting?
“Thanks, Sophie.”
Mateo really doesn’t want to get his hand up and share; he feels bleary-eyed and out of it from the flight, but he knows he better. So up goes the hand, which catches the eye of the dude with the nose bolt.
“Mateo, addick,” he says. Ten years on, he still won’t pronounce the t.
“Hi, Mateo.”
“Unnnnnhh, now what did I want to say?” he thinks aloud. A few people chuckle, including Sophie.
“I wanted to sayyyy,” he continues, “that I’m very glad I’m here. I just got into town from L.A. tonight and this is where I needed to be, and even my girlfriend and my work partner said as much and kicked me the fuck out of the house after dinner.” More chuckles.
“I can remember when I would raise my hand in meetings and talk bullshit,” he says. “And I’d leave the meeting and go cop, or spend the meeting thinking about what girl I wanted to cop with.” More chuckles, maybe a tiny bit of slightly uncomfortable seat adjustment around the room.
“So, unnnnhh, I’m truly glad I don’t put my hand up in that bullshit spirit anymore, but more like something I’m able to make myself do when I know I need to. Like I’ve got smart arm nerves or reflexes or something that take over for me. But, unnnnhh, I just wanna say it’s good to be here in a safe place because New York is a very hard place for me to be. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I fucking love this city, but this is where it got really sketchy and sad for me about ten years ago and where I really left some scorched earth behind me. And when I hit the streets here—” and here, he surprises himself, his voice catches hoarsely and he can feel tears welling up in his eyes, and then Sophie’s gentle hand on his back.
He catches his breath and swallows it back. “When I hit the streets here, it hits me so hard. It’s, like, visceral; it’s, like, uh, cellular memory. And the thing was, it was ten, eleven, twelve years ago. I was a fucking kid — I didn’t even know what the fuck I was doing or why I was so angry. And even now, after being sober almost ten years, therapy and all that shit, talking it through and the Steps and all that, I can just hit the streets here and it’s like the first smell, some particles in the air, bring it back to me. The fucking way the streets are here and the stoops and the doorways. And I can feel my whole body turning to jelly, and that fucking scares me. And it’s not just remembering the needle, it’s—”