Tim Murphy - Christodora

She pulled him back toward her for a moment. “What’s your name again?” she shouted.

“Hector,” he shouted back. “Hector Villanueva.”

“Thank you, Hector,” she said. “You’re sweet.” This was enough, somehow, to trigger a runaway tear. All she really wanted was a sweet guy, she thought. Why was it so hard to find one?

Hector put his hands on her shoulders. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“It’s just been a crazy night.”

“Well, don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get you to Tavi now and then you can get home.” He gave her an awkward little hug, as though to reassure her. Issy hugged him back and found it hard to let go.

At LaGuardia, waiting to board her flight to L.A., Milly made two calls. First, she called her mother, something she did pretty much every day.

“I’m exhausted,” Ava told her. “Two deaths in the house so far this month. Two lovely ladies gone.”

“That’s horrible,” Milly murmured. “I’m so sorry, Ava.” Milly mostly kept her distance from her mother’s work; it just made her too sad.

“Plus,” Ava continued, “the boiler’s on the fritz and we had to run out and buy space heaters for the entire house because you can’t have a houseful of immune-compromised women sleeping without heat in February.”

“You have to be careful, Mom,” Milly told her mother. When had she started toggling between calling her mother Mom and Ava? Probably when she was around sixteen; by that point, she’d done so much mothering of her own mother that “Ava” instead of “Mom” had started popping out of her mouth — sometimes with something like barely suppressed indignation, with a sardonic bite that felt good to the tongue, and yet sometimes tenderly, like, well, let’s face it, she was the little girl here, not Milly, and you needed to say her name gently so she heard it.

And now, often, Milly had to admit, she said Ava’s name with respect. Because for over a decade now, her mother had bitten the bullet, soldiered through the heavy doses of lithium, the weekly psychopharmacological visits, the support groups. She’d said good-bye to her own manic pleasures so she could be there for others. For whom, exactly? For the sick, the poor, the dying. By 1989, what had started as a few strange cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma had blown up into one of the worst epidemics the city had ever seen, one that seemed to prey on homosexuals and drug addicts, groups that people already shunned. Yet the city had done so little about it — for many reasons, certainly, but mainly because the city was run, everyone knew, by a closeted mayor terrified of getting his hands dirty with a gay disease.

At the end of the 1980s, Ava had finally had it with the entropy at the Health Department. She would no longer be demonized and vilified as the enemy in the AIDS epidemic; she would not stand there with that uncomfortable, hateful, oh-isn’t-this-cute smirk on her face that her colleagues put on while those angry boys — including her own former intern, for that matter — chained themselves to her desk and called her a murderer. Oh, no, Ava had told Hector after she’d finally left, that was the last straw! That’s when Ava grit her teeth and summoned all her resources and friends with money and clout and bought that run-down building on Avenue B and started Judith House, a care residence for women with full-blown AIDS. No one would ever look back on this whole thing and say she stood by, a useless bureaucrat. There was only so much more helplessness on her own part that she could tolerate.

But had Ava also bitten the bullet for her own family? For her daughter? Because even now that Ava had clamped down on her manias with heavy drugs, she still felt crappy much of the time and was a scattershot mother at best. Things had gotten a little better, but there were still a million little ways Ava let Milly know that, well, there was simply too much going on — too much sickness, too much death — for Ava to dote over Milly and her homework and her art projects the way other Upper East Side mothers did with their daughters. Sam, Daddy, was there for that. Ava was simply not that sort of mother.

But Milly had had to concede that she still needed her mommy. That was the poignant, humiliating truth of it. And since the breakup with Jared, Ava hadn’t been half bad about being there, Milly had to grant that. The Sunday dinners. The calls that had now become daily, even if they were brief, more about her mother’s travails than her own. (Because, it had to be understood, her mother’s travails were the travails of the city, while Milly’s were merely the travails of one twenty-four-year-old, middle-class woman, and they took place mostly inside her head, the venue of much quibbling and second-guessing and angst.)

So, now, the airport call to Ava. “You have to be careful, Ava,” she repeated. “You’re going to run yourself down like you did last year, then you’ll have to take a week off again and work from home and drive Daddy crazy.”

Ava laughed dimly. “I’m not staying late at Judith House tonight,” she said. “Daddy and I are going to Blue Ribbon for dinner.”

“You guys are so trendy,” Milly remarked drily.

Ava chuckled. “I suppose.” Another pause. “How’s Esther?”

Milly loved the way her mother said that: How’s Esther? In that dutiful, I’m-a-good-mom-for-acknowledging-my-daughter’s-lesbian-partner singsong. The I’m-being-such-a-good-sport-about-this-whole-lesbian-thing-and-biding-my-time-till-it-passes kind of tone.

Milly laughed. “She’s good. She’s away this weekend, too. She’s on a panel at Oberlin.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Ava said. “Is that about women and — and fiction and identity?”

Milly laughed again. “Sort of. It’s all about Willa Cather, actually, in some way.”

“Oh, that’s nice. And how about you, honey? Did you get the NYCHA grant?”

“It’s NYFA, Mom. NYFA. New York Foundation for the Arts.”

“Oh, that’s right. Sorry, NYFA, NYCHA!” NYCHA was the New York City Housing Authority, which Ava had to tussle with regularly.

Milly rolled her eyes. “Right. No, I haven’t heard about the NYFA grant yet. Hopefully in the next week.”

“Right.” Her mother sounded distracted. Milly could hear rowdy gals in the background, the Judith clients and staffers mixing it up, finding daily laughs amid their troubles. Her mother was probably leafing through paperwork right now, as they talked. Well, at least here they were, checking in.

“And what are you and Drew going to do in L.A.?” her mother managed to ask.

“I don’t know!” Milly said brightly. “We’ll probably see friends. Drew said she’d take me to see this, like, cabaret act I’ve always wanted to see — it’s a husband and wife, I guess, a really bad Steve and Eydie, who do lounge versions of Michael Jackson songs on a synthesizer at this cheesy old lounge where everybody — well, you know, like Generation-X types — goes to see them ironically, but they take themselves seriously. I’ve always wanted to see them.”

“That sounds like fun,” her mother said, but so absently that Milly knew she’d lost her mother’s tenuous attention. “And — and—” Her mother was trying to pull back into the conversation. “What about Drew? Is her book out?”

“It comes out in a month, I think.”

“And what’s it called, again? Breathing Lessons ?”

“No, that book already exists. It’s called Learning to Breathe .”

“Oh, right. It’s a novel, right?”

“It’s a memoir.”

“A memoir? She’s twenty-six years old!”

Milly laughed. “I know! Well, she’s written a memoir.”