Tim Murphy - Christodora

“You’re wearing an ankh!” Milly exclaimed as they embraced in the car. “So New Age of you.”

“Yeah,” Drew said airily, “that’s my little spiritual lodestone compass type thing. Just a little something to keep me centered on this new journey.”

“Wow, you’re so West Coast now,” said Milly, which made them both laugh. Drew was playing L7 and turned it down a bit. She gestured at a slim paperback on the dashboard.

“Check that out,” Drew said.

Milly picked it up. It was a glossy advanced reader’s copy of Learning to Breathe with a pen in it; Drew had been marking it up, doing final corrections.

“Oh my God, this is amazing!” Milly exclaimed, flipping through the 224 pages. “Look at you, you glamorpuss.”

In the cover photo on the back, Drew leaned forward seductively into the frame, a black jersey falling off her shoulders. . and there was that ankh pendant again! And there was Drew again on the cover, just half her face this time, with Learning spelled out in coke lines against a black background and Breathe spelled out in Zen-like black stones against a white background. (Then, in quiet, small letters, An Early Memoir .) Milly snuck a look at the book’s first line, after the copyright page and quote page (from The Little Prince , she noted). The first line was: “Before I breathed, I screamed.” Hoo boy, Milly thought.

“I am so fucking proud of you, Drew-pea,” she said.

“You skipped the dedication page,” Drew said coyly, her eyes on the road.

Milly turned to it. “For Milly,” it read, “who buzzed me in.”

Milly looked at Drew, who, eyes on the road, snuck a wary sidelong glance at her. Milly thought about that night two years ago — how enraged she had been! How close she had been to telling Drew simply to go to hell and slamming down the phone! But what Jared had always called her basic Milly-ness, what she thought of as her pushover suckerness, had prevailed, and now here Drew was, thanking her publicly by name for all the world to see, basically saying that Milly’s decision that night had sort of been the pivotal event in her life. . the event that had brought her from abject drug use to this: looking gorgeous; with a lovely boyfriend Milly had yet to meet but would shortly; exuding a peace of mind that, Milly had to concede, was slightly puzzling and maybe even a bit suspect because it involved an ankh, but, well, there it was, it could not be denied. And Drew really did seem to have her shit together; she’d made the down payment on a tiny little house in Silver Lake with her book advance.

“It’s a good thing I buzzed you in that night, or I might not have gotten the dedication page.” Milly laughed.

“I know,” Drew said. “But you did buzz me in, sweetheart. Because you’re Millicent Sophie Heyman, angel of mercy.”

Milly blushed and put her hand over Drew’s hand on the stick shift. Then they drove in silence for quite a bit, listening to “Andres.” Milly felt incredibly happy — happy to be in L.A. underneath all that sun, having a reprieve from New York’s brutal winter. She felt happier than she’d felt in quite a while, even during her happiest moments with Esther the past few months. As for Drew’s ankh pendant, she thought — whatever! What did it matter? Whatever worked!

At Drew’s adorable little new house, Milly met Drew’s boyfriend of the past eight months, Christian, a film editor from England who, like Drew’s old boyfriend Perry, was slim and pretty and had floppy Edwardian hair, but, unlike Perry, was quiet and sweet and not peremptory. Christian talked self-deprecatingly about being one of about two hundred editors on James Cameron’s movie about the Titanic , which was probably going to end up being the most expensive movie of all time. Christian also adored Drew; there was a moment when Drew was reading aloud a snippet of her own Publishers Weekly review, in a comically theatrical voice—“a bracing tonic after the navel-gazing narcissism of Elizabeth Wurtzel!”—and Christian, Milly noted, beamed with pure delight and devotion at Drew as she read.

This moved Milly, and gave her a pang, too. Jared would sometimes look at her that way, and she had found it rather puppyish and suffocating, whereas now, Esther — well, Esther seldom looked at her. Esther had said, “Let’s not feel like we have to be cheerleaders for each other’s work; let’s let those be parallel universes.” But the problem was Milly had already read a great deal of Esther’s work, so it came up all the time, and Esther certainly didn’t seem averse to discussing it when it did, whereas the first time Esther had seen some of Milly’s work hung up at Milly’s apartment, and again at the tiny studio space in downtown Brooklyn that Milly shared with three other artists, she had said, “The best gift I can give you on your work is not to comment on it and let that be entirely yours.” Which, at the time, had made sense to Milly, except that — well, couldn’t Esther say something about it? Every time Esther stared at it and said nothing, merely squeezed Milly’s butt and said something cryptic like “You have ideas ,” Milly had inner paroxysms of dread. Did Esther hate it?

“How’s your mom, Millipede?” Drew asked when Christian had stepped out for a bit.

Milly sighed. “She’s okay.” She paused, sipping the chai Drew had made her. (If this were the old Drew, she’d thought, they’d certainly have cracked open a bottle of red by now, but there was no alcohol in the house. Drew had met Christian at AA, so he didn’t drink, either.)

“She’s amazing, actually,” Milly continued. “I mean, the poor woman is so tamped down on meds, it really messes with her focus and energy, and yet she manages to run that residence and keep raising money for it and increasing services. I think she might open another branch uptown. It’s so funny. You know when she was at the Health Department, the AIDS activists would protest her with, like, her head on a stick with a witch’s hat, like in effigy, and now she’s, like, the Liz Taylor of downtown Manhattan!”

Drew laughed. “She’s amazing.” A pause. “I think so much about John Russell.” He was a playwright friend of theirs who’d died the prior year of AIDS. “Thirty-one years old. Isn’t that the cruelest?”

“I know.”

“I read that some new drugs are in development that are really promising.”

“I know. My mother talks about them all the time. She has some clients in trials for them. The ones who can stay off drugs, that is.”

Drew went mmm knowingly.

They fell into a comfortable silence for a few moments. Milly’s eyes fell on a photo of a cute little girl in a striped sundress held with a magnet to the refrigerator.

“Oh my God, is that Blanche?” she asked. Blanche was Drew’s niece in Menlo Park, a picture of whom Milly hadn’t seen in years.

“That’s Blanche!” Drew said, beaming. “Isn’t she adorable and so pretty?”

“She is,” Milly conceded. “But do you know something? I don’t think I’ll ever have children.” As soon as Milly said it, she was surprised at how the thought had simply flown out of her mouth, unbidden.

Drew laughed. “Why? Have you actually been thinking about that?”

“I’m afraid of having what my mother has.”

Drew sighed and put her hand over Milly’s. “Honey, I know you are. But you’ve never shown any signs that you do. Usually, you know, there are signs, even in childhood, right? Hyperactivity and childhood depression. You didn’t have any of that, did you?”

“I had my share of childhood depression.”

“Of course you did! Look what you went through with your mom. But, sweetie”—and Drew laughed softly, maybe with a tinge of her old jealousy—“you are one of the most stable, even-keeled people I know.”