Tim Murphy - Christodora

“You are blowing me off right to my face,” Milly said flatly into the phone. “I can’t believe you!” She hung up. Her shock and outrage had somehow trumped her wild despair, and, too exhausted to walk to the train and take it home, she stuck out her hand automatically and hailed a cab she couldn’t really afford, then sat there, spent and dumbfounded, as the taxi took her to her silent new apartment in Cobble Hill.

Not for a month did her fury melt into something more like sober resolve. You asked for all this empty space around you, she told herself. Now you better make good on your word and do something with it. And she endeavored to. She began painting more productively, with what felt to her like more focus. Her galling obsession with the idea that she had been living in thrall to Jared and his ambitions dissipated, and with that came a modicum of calm for Milly.

As it did, of a sort, for Jared. He went out every night and drank with his high-school buddies. Bombed, he would wordlessly approach friends and give them long, rocking hugs. They’d ask how he was doing and he’d shrug slowly, searching for words.

“I’d say I just went from the period of unbearable, scalding misery to the period of abiding but somehow just barely tolerable misery,” he’d finally say. “Like, from waking up in the morning and thinking, first thing, I’m alone, I want to die, to thinking, I’m alone, I want to die, yeah, so fucking get some coffee and the paper and get on with your day and deal with it .”

“Well, that’s a step,” his friends would say, and laugh.

And he would snort out a laugh. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Then his eyes would glass over. A tiny tear would race down his cheek, which he’d flick away, ashamed. His best buddy, Asa, would notice and rub his back while continuing to extol the brilliance of Reservoir Dogs to any interested parties.

As a sidelight to missing Milly, Jared missed Drew, too. He missed her against his better judgment, since he’d been bright enough to put two and two together and realize it’d largely been Drew who’d planted the idea in Milly’s head that Jared was holding her back from her personal best. But he still missed her. And, like everyone by this point, he felt badly for her.

Everyone knew that, when it came to Drew, there was some sad shit there, which most people only knew about elliptically, concealed as it was beneath the hardworking sparkle of her party chatter. That honeymoon picture on her dresser: those handsome parents in Italy — the pretty, dark-haired Jewish mom with her Marlo Thomas flip and that fair-haired, smirking dad; how they met at Berkeley; how Drew was raised a double-dissertation baby. And just the dad, the dad. Don’t pull a my-dad on me and tell me you’re going to be at my reading and then not show up, or maybe you slip in just when I’m finishing. Or One really good tactic in life that’s underrated is, when you blow people off, just pick up where you left off the next time you see them and be lovely and pretend it never happened; that always worked for my dad. Or When you go on about how you don’t know what to do with your life, I feel like I’m talking to my mom when she goes on about my dad. Like, she goes into this trance state of loss and confusion and resentment that’s somehow really comforting for her. And finally I have to say, “Enough, I know it feels good, but now you have to go on a date, or go out with your fucking girlfriends, or go to the gym or quit smoking — basically acknowledge that every day you stew in those yummy sad juices, Dad wins.”

The cards from Dad, the checks from Dad, that mysterious visit from Dad, whom nobody got to meet, which rendered Drew invisible and inaccessible for five days. The handsome, suave, cruel older men who came up again and again in the short fiction she’d read at bars, her own Harlequin-pulp Achilles’ heel. So much complexity spinning around the dad!

Drew lived so voraciously. It was all very self-conscious, built around references to past eras. How many times had Drew mentioned Lily Bart, Jordan Baker, Dorothy Parker, Holly Golightly, Edie Sedgwick? Throwing out these names took the edge off the random sex and the unhappy mornings after the drugs. How far would she go? She had left her best friend down on the stoop when she was clearly in pain and in need, because she couldn’t have her up with the four random magazine people in her living room and all the drugs, and she was too high herself to even go down and talk to her.

“You are blowing me off right to my face,” they’d all heard Milly say over the answering machine. “I can’t believe you!”

They’d looked at one another, cracked out. The guy from Details did the totally inappropriate thing and laughed out loud. The girl who’d been so busy with the Harper’s Bazaar relaunch, the one with Linda Evangelista’s arm in front of her face on the cover (“Enter the Era of Elegance”), looked at Drew sympathetically and shrugged.

“You can’t always be available,” the girl said.

Drew pulled into herself after that, as though the drugs had snapped off — which, increasingly, they did, dashing her into sulky gloom in the middle of the chatter — but remarkably, nobody noticed and everybody stayed till five thirty in the morning.

That was the start of the six-week dark period: Drew having those random magazine and PR people over, usually with a boy staying after; the morning hours of fitful sleep; the dread upon the shallow wake; the afternoons watching crap TV and trying to nap or clean the house; the half hours pretending to work in a café; the evenings pulling it together for somebody’s book party or birthday drinks; the bullshit debates about Tina Brown in the dive bars afterward; the inevitable repairing back to her house. She saw Milly through none of it, too mortified to call her.

Then one late night in September, when everybody had left her apartment, including the boy who’d stayed the night before, Drew got into bed and heard the clicking in the walls and at the windows. She snapped on the light, but the clicking continued. It was in her throat. She lay very still and concentrated on her breathing, but the strange clicking continued. She was trying to cry but couldn’t, she realized. Her heart was beating so fast. She got up, stood in front of the mirror. She didn’t see 1904, 1926, 1963, or 1968. She realized it was 1993, too much upon her to make romance out of it, and for a moment, she saw the Drew whom other people saw — the kind Drew, the compelling Drew, the scary Drew, the sad Drew.

The phone rang at Milly’s five times, then came the answering machine. “Tell me who you are and I’ll get right back to you,” said Milly’s voice. Then: “Mill? Are you there? Can you pick up? It’s me.” A very long pause. “I know I don’t deserve this, but. .”

Milly picked up. “I’m here,” she said, her voice hoarse with sleep. Drew still heard the chill in it. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m so scared, Mill. I can’t cry.”

“You can’t cry?”

“I try, but I can’t.”

“Why do you want to cry in the first place?” There was a pause. “Are you high again?”

“I can’t stop.”

Milly winced, horrified. “Is it in front of you right now?”

“Can you please just come over?”

Milly laughed sharply. “So now you want me to come over. Are you sure you’ll buzz me in?”

Drew knew this was coming. “I’m sorry.”

“How could you do that to me?” Milly pleaded.

But Drew was silent on the other end of the line, which disconcerted Milly. “If you’re that scared,” Milly finally said, “you can come over here.”

“But I’m scared to leave the house!”