Tim Murphy - Christodora

“I think you’re in love with her,” Jared would joke to Milly, after Milly had told him in some detail about something Drew had said, a one-liner she’d concocted, or something slightly outrageous Drew had worn the night before, such as a gingham baby-doll dress with scrunchy white ankle socks and Dr. Martens.

“I think you’re in love with her,” Milly would toss right back.

One night in a bar, three in the morning came around and there were just the three of them left, with “Desperado” on the jukebox. They slipped for a moment into drunken quiet. Jared looked at Drew. “Prose in the Fast Lane,” he said out of nowhere, and the three of them fell into one another, laughing.

“I love you two,” Drew said. “I feel safe when I’m with you.”

“You’re like our daughter,” Jared said.

“Mm-hmm,” said Milly. “You’re our little girl.”

“I finally have two intact parents!” Drew exulted.

But very quickly the relationship between Milly and Drew also became one of those twisted mirror games, a very complicated mix of love, lust, competition, and shared terror over what would happen to them in the areas of vocation and romance. One night, Milly had two paintings in a small group show. Everyone went, including Drew, who later said to Milly, “Your paintings and my writing are alike in that they’re both about artifice and posing, except you kind of celebrate it and I lament it.”

This dismayed Milly. “What am I supposed to say to that?” she asked.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing,” Drew insisted demurely.

Still, the comment obsessed Milly. “Do you think that’s true, what she said?” she asked her gay high-school friend Ryan one day over lunch. Ryan was petite and half Chinese and had a job working part time as Nora Ephron’s administrative assistant. Nora bullied him and he loved it.

“I think you’re becoming obsessed with Drew,” he said. “You talk about her a lot.”

“Jared says that, too.” Milly twirled a forkful of pasta off Ryan’s plate. “I don’t know why — I never had a sister, maybe that’s why? But even before she made that remark, I’m always thinking, What would Drew think of this painting? What would Drew think of this dress? Of my hair like this? Of this other friend of mine? ”

Usually, Milly and Jared would put Drew in a cab to the West Village before walking the few blocks home to the Christodora, but one very alcoholic night, Jared said to Drew, “Come over and see Horace”—that was the new cat — so the three of them walked there arm in arm, with Milly in the middle, which gave her the new and wonderful feeling of holding love on both sides of her body.

“Hello, Horace,” said Drew, covering the cat all over with kisses. “Are you a great Roman thinker? A great Roman cat of letters?” Jared found a stub of a joint that they all shared and put Matthew Sweet on the stereo.

Milly was relating all this to Ryan a few days later. “And then,” she continued, “we had a three-way!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ryan said slowly. “How did it start?”

“I don’t really remember because we were all stoned,” Milly replied. “Just that it was really like Drew was the little girl who was desperately hungry for love, and we wanted to hold and protect her. It was a total inversion of the usual Drew. She was totally quiet, for one thing. We all fell asleep holding each other with Drew in the middle.”

Ryan stared at her blankly for several seconds. “You are fucking with me, right?” he finally asked. “This really happened?”

“Yes! And it was really sweet. She woke up before us and left a note saying, ‘Thank you, I wanted to let you sleep. I’ll call you later.’ But she didn’t call later that day, and we didn’t call her. And I said to Jared, ‘I wonder what it’ll be like with Drew now,’ and he said, ‘Me, too.’ So finally yesterday I called Drew and we met for lunch and we hugged and we were both, like, ‘Hiiiii!’” The tone of Milly’s inflection for Ryan was a sheepish Oh my God, I cannot believe we did that! “So we’re making chitchat, ordering salads before we take them into the park, and finally she was like, ‘So how have you been?’ And I said, ‘I’m okay. I’ve just felt weirdly protective of you ever since Friday night — like I’m seeing you differently, making me feel like you can have those kinds of feelings for more than one person at a time.’”

And Drew had said: “Did you tell Jared that?”

And Milly had said: “Not quite like that. I’m afraid it would freak him out.”

Then Milly leaned over on the park bench and kissed Drew softly near her ear. “You were so quiet that night!” She giggled. “It was so unusual!”

But Drew didn’t giggle back; she just smiled tightly and kind of sadly and looked away. Then she let out a kind of restrained noise that said Mmmmnggh, I can’t stand it anymore!

“I’m so lonely, Mill,” she said. “I cannot be falling in love with a couple. That is not a good plan for me.”

A few weeks prior to the three-way, Drew had finally, agonizingly split up with Perry. Perry had been her tall, deep-voiced, WASPily good-looking boyfriend, an editor at Harper’s , who once, at a party right after Drew said something particularly funny about Thelma and Louise , asked her in a good-humored way, “How does it feel to be a swath of glitter wrapped around an echoing void?”

Nobody could silence Drew like Perry could, but she had been crazy about him and his whole Brideshead aura, his swoopy Edwardian haircut. It was Drew who finally broke it off, but only after Milly and a few of her other friends told her bluntly that Perry was sucking away her last dribs of self-esteem. There had been a whole month near the end of the relationship where Drew didn’t write at all because she couldn’t banish the idea of Perry standing over her shoulder, rolling his eyes at every line.

After Drew spoke, Milly blinked, quiet. “We love you, but we don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do,” she finally said.

Drew looked up at Milly, then turned away from her. “Anyway,” she finally said, “don’t you and Jared have some stuff to work out?”

Milly sat up straight. “What do you mean?”

“Well. .” Drew minutely examined her salad while she talked. “Are either of you making any actual art? A lot of times, when artists date, it’s because they want to distract each other from actually working.”

“I’ve been working!” Milly insisted. “I’ve been applying for grants and residencies all week, putting slides together. I’ve been running all over town.”

“You have to do stuff like that, obviously,” said Drew. “But, sweetie, that’s not working.”

“ You spend a month applying for eight grants at a time and then tell me it’s not working,” Milly snapped back.

They walked out of the park together. Milly slipped her hand in Drew’s, comforted by that and feeling a bit subversive about it, but Drew gave it a quick squeeze and pulled her own hand gently away.

After that conversation, Milly became obsessed with the idea that Jared was distracting her from producing meaningful work. When she was working in the room she painted in, the small bedroom Jared had helped her convert to a studio, she resented it when he had the TV on too loudly, when he shouted random things to her, even when he brought her tea. She got stuck on the fact that here she was, working from the apartment like a hobbyist, while he had a separate workspace in an old warehouse in desolate far-west Chelsea. (Granted, he worked with concrete and old train-track spikes, materials the apartment could never accommodate, but still.) She fixated on the idea that he’d already had a solo show, albeit one in a makeshift gallery in a garage in Park Slope, but she’d only been in group shows.