Tim Murphy - Christodora

She thought of all the times she’d put her brushes down and sunk into his arms when he got home, happy for the break and for the chance to bury her face in his flannel shirts, which smelled like sawdust and diner bacon. Why had she always abandoned her work so readily, to greet him as though it were her duty? And most of all, she grew to resent his routine query: “How’re your pictures?” Pictures. Before, she’d always thought that sounded sweet and ironic; now it just seemed condescending, diminutizing.

One night she was frustrated, mixing paints to get a particular shade of murky taupe, and he came in with a dishrag over his shoulder and said, “Millipede? You want pasta with asparagus or broccoli rabe or both?”

The words were barely out of his mouth before she turned on him, exasperated. “Why can’t you just give me this space? Just pretend that if I’m in here, I don’t exist.”

Jared winced, as though he’d been slapped. “Jesus Christ,” he exclaimed. “I just wanted to make you dinner. But fine. Have your fucking space.” He grabbed his jacket and left the apartment to go get his own dinner. Milly thought she’d done the right thing, asserted her need for space. But when she heard the door slam, she felt like somehow she hadn’t gone about it the right way.

Ryan liked Jared and tried to tell Milly she was crazy. “Who planted this idea in your head that Jared is holding you back?” he asked her. “Drew?”

Milly blushed, as though she’d been caught out. “It’s not about who planted the idea,” she said. “It’s about: is there truth there? I picture Drew getting up at six every morning and making coffee in her French press and sitting down and writing for those two hours in beautiful, utter solitude. No static flying around her head.”

Ryan laughed derisively. “Drew’s a cokehead! I doubt she’s gotten up at six A.M. in a while, unless she was already up all night.”

“She’s not a cokehead,” Milly balked. “She likes to do a little coke at parties once in a while.”

At that same moment, however, Milly remembered the last time she’d seen Drew, at a party that Drew and some of her flashy advertising and magazine friends, the ones Milly never liked, had given three weeks ago. The party was loud and obnoxious, and Milly was not having a very good time, so she was relieved when Drew finally came over to her. But Drew looked so gaunt, seemed so jittery, so distracted!

They hugged and kissed. “I’m so happy to see you!” Drew exclaimed. But as they stood there trying to make conversation, Drew couldn’t keep her eyes focused. They kept darting around. Milly thought they looked like hollow orbs desperately radiating forced cheer.

Now Ryan asked her, “Do you want Drew’s life or yours?”

But Milly ignored the question. “It’s not just problems with Jared per se,” she continued. “I think I may like women more than men.”

Ryan sighed. “I am not going through this whole topic with you again,” he said. “You’ve never had a relationship with a woman that lasted more than two weeks. Meanwhile, you and Jared have been together — what? Three years now? You’re telling yourself a story in your head about Jared and your work and now you want everything to fit it. The point is you are doing good work, you are productive; Jared is not getting in the way, and you need to chill out a little.”

Milly laughed sharply. “So you’re dismissing me out of hand,” she said. “Too bad you can’t be so blunt with Nora. Maybe she wouldn’t make you microwave her salmon four times.”

They both laughed.

“I just wish you weren’t so suggestible,” Ryan finally said.

That quieted Milly a bit. “I just—” She sighed. “I just need to work .”

Ryan, and everyone who heard this mantra from Milly at the time, thought that she was blowing off steam. But then, to everyone’s astonishment, Milly left Jared. She simply left him and got her own apartment in Cobble Hill, out in Brooklyn. Her anger at Jared didn’t evaporate — in fact it deepened to the point where it certainly wasn’t just about Jared but seemed aimed at something just over his shoulder. She sensed as much herself, but that didn’t keep her from hardening into a kind of icy, sealed-off rage that perplexed and dismayed everyone, including herself. The rage put laser pinpricks into her melty brown eyes and began wearing furrows into her forehead. This was shortly after she’d turned twenty-three.

She’d packed her things and left the Christodora one night when Jared was out of town. He returned to find nothing of hers there save a Guatemalan mitten on the living-room floor that must have fallen out of a hastily stuffed bag. He picked it up, bawling and cursing all over it for ninety minutes.

“You’re fucking crazy, Milly!” he repeated, wiping his snot on it. “You’re fucking lost!” He finally fell asleep there on the floor, exhausted, he and Horace the cat nuzzling the mitten.

As for Milly, the serenity she was looking for after leaving Jared was a long time coming. She kept waking up every day, thinking, Okay, now , my life begins. But by eleven A.M. she’d often feel as though she’d already run off her own rails and had no idea how to salvage the afternoon, what to do next.

One evening, she found herself alone in the West Village after dinner with some high-school friends she wasn’t very close to. She watched a middle-aged woman with a bushel of scraggly salt-and-pepper hair shuffle out of the Häagen Dazs store, licking her cone with manic precision, and a terrifying wave of loneliness engulfed her. I don’t know how to give or receive love, she thought. I’m trapped in this prison. A cold sweat crept over her and she felt disoriented, as though she’d never seen the corner of Hudson and West Tenth before in her life. She sat down for a second on a stoop, scared to meet eyes with passersby, who’d clearly signaled to her that she looked insane.

Eventually, she stood up. Drew lived three blocks away. In her disoriented haze — tears beginning to well in her eyes and crest over, despite her best efforts to hold them back — she walked to Drew’s and hit the buzzer. She waited fifteen seconds and hit it again. Just when a new wave of emptiness was building inside, telling her that she was still completely alone with nowhere to go, Drew came over the intercom, asking who it was.

“It’s Milly,” she barely choked out. “Will you let me up?”

Her arm reached for the door, waiting for the buzz and the click. But a strange second passed before Drew’s voice came back on. “Sweetie, this isn’t a good time.”

Milly pressed the “talk” button. “Well, can you come down for a second? I really need to talk to someone.” Just as she said it, a couple passed, looked at her with glancing concern. She was mortified. Seconds passed. “Can you please come down for a second?” she asked the intercom again.

“Give me a second,” Drew replied.

Milly sat down on the stoop, exhausted. In a moment, Drew would come down with cigarettes and they’d sit close, they’d talk, as they had done on this stoop so many times before. But minutes passed and Drew didn’t come down. This realization settled slowly into Milly, first puzzling, then humiliating and enraging her. Finally, at the ten-minute mark by her watch, she buzzed again. A minute passed with no answer. Milly pressed her finger to the buzzer for a full twenty seconds, feeling insane. No answer. She walked to a payphone and called Drew, whose answering machine clicked on. “I so long to hear your voice,” Drew’s recorded voice said. Then the beep. For a moment, Milly said nothing, half expecting that Drew would pick up. But she didn’t.