Tim Murphy: Christodora

“Are you productive today?” she asked Bogdan, whose shaved head, she always marveled, was almost rectangular.

He blew out smoke and frowned. “My arm hurts.”

“Did you call the physical therapist my mom told me about?”

He shook his head, smiled sheepishly.

“Your arm is your livelihood,” she chided.

“I don’t have insurance!” he suddenly barked at her.

“My mom says he has a sliding scale. You can’t take chances with your arm.”

“Okay, I’ll call him.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the old Café Bustelo coffee can they’d filled with sand to make an ashtray. “Why are you so late today?”

“I lingered in the park with Mateo and a friend. The weather this time of year is so perfect.”

He nodded appreciatively. “Labor Day happens too early. Summer goes all the way to October.”

She nodded back. They gossiped about other artists and finished their cigarettes. Milly let out a long sigh and pushed her hair back. “Okay, here goes,” she said.

“Hit it! Attack it!” Bogdan laughed.

“Attack it!” she echoed. “Plunge in!” She went and squared herself by her canvas, put the crook of her finger to her lips and stared at it for a minute or two. She looked back at Bogdan a few times, casting him an aggrieved look to elicit his sympathy over her creaking start, but he’d already turned his back on her toward his own work. Her canvas wasn’t more than a five-by-three rectangle that she’d scraped down to a background field of dusty rose, so pale you could see plenty of canvas through it. She hadn’t touched it since the prior Saturday, and all week she’d held it in her head and wondered what to do next. Finally, she went to her table and squeezed some white paint and a little yellow paint into a cup, then stood before the window mixing it, looking out at the bridge, which seemed to pop toward her off a hard enamel-blue sky. A very unpleasant wave overcame her, a mix of sadness and anxiety, which was odd, because mixing paint usually soothed her.

What is it? she asked herself, looking uneasily at Bogdan, as though to check if he’d felt it as well, but his back remained to her. She scrunched her forehead. If she applied herself, she thought, she could pinpoint the source of the wave and address it. She ticked down items in her head. But the truth was life was okay at the moment. She’d been having these tics since she was sixteen. After years of therapy, she’d come to see them as depressive synapses signaling absolutely nothing going on in life. Nothing is wrong, she told herself. The sky was absolutely blue and she’d had a perfect morning. The path ahead was clear.

She applied a large blob of the pale yellow paint on the right side of the canvas and watched it leak downward a moment until she picked up a scraper and drew it leftward. Thirty seconds later, she was in a sweet spot, a deep voice applauding her for painting her way away from her bogeyman. Ninety minutes later, the thought of a cigarette blooming in her brain like a flower, she shook herself out of her reverie, and at that moment, Bogdan let out a kind of cathartic groan. They turned to each other and laughed and moved toward the table in the center of the room and Bogdan’s cigarettes.

“Are you staying here tonight?” she asked him.

“I have a date,” he growled.

Her face lit up. “You have a date? Who is she?”

“She’s a teacher. A public-school teacher. Like you.”

“Ooh,” she said. “Hot for teacher.”

He frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“It was a song,” she said. She paused. “Oh, wait. I don’t think you were in America yet then.”

She didn’t have much focus left after her cigarette. She applied and scraped for another twenty minutes, then cleaned up and wished Bogdan good night and a good date. Outside, the night was sweet, the sky streaked with wild pinks and golds as the sun set. She stepped into Two Boots pizzeria on Avenue A and ordered two large pizzas, a Saturday ritual. Idling with her cell phone while she waited for them, she noticed Jared had called her but not left a message. Peculiar, she thought, not dwelling much beyond that. They called that her pizzas were ready.

As soon as she walked into the Christodora, Ardit flagged her. “There was a problem,” he said, his tremulous blue eyes narrowing.

Her own eyes grew large. “What?”

“You know Hector?”

“In the building? Yes, why?”

“His dog bit Mateo.”

“What?” She gripped Ardit’s arm. “Is he okay?”

“Jared took him to the hospital. I think he’s okay. It just looked like a little cut.”

“What hospital? Beth Israel?”

Ardit nodded. Milly put the pizzas down on a handsome, high-backed wooden bench in the lobby, pulled out her cell phone, and called Jared. Her heart was pounding.

“Hi,” she said when he answered. “Ardit just told me what happened.”

“He’s fine,” Jared said. “He got, like, two stitches and he’s waiting for a rabies shot. We should be home soon.”

“Is he doing okay?” Milly asked. “Can I talk to him?”

“Sure, he’s right here.”

“Hi, Mommy,” Mateo said.

“You’re okay, sweetheart?”

“I’m okay. I gotta get a shot.”

“What happened, Mateo?”

“I was running down the hall and Sonya came out the door and chased me and bit me until Hector grabbed her and took her back inside.”

“Oh, sweetheart! I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“He’s okay.” It was Jared, back on the line. “We came back in from the park and he wanted to run up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, so I let him. And I guess at some point he decided to run down the hall on Hector’s floor and Hector’s door was ajar and the dog came out.”

“Oh my goodness.” Milly kept glancing up at Ardit, who was shaking his head balefully. “Did Hector say anything?”

“I didn’t wait. Mateo was crying when he got to the apartment so I took him right to the hospital. But I already took pictures of the bite and called a lawyer. Milly, we have to do something about getting Hector out of the building.”

That felt like jumping a step ahead, she thought. The dog, maybe. But Hector himself? “You think so?” she asked weakly.

“He’s becoming a menace. The drugs, the sleazy guys in and out of the apartment at all hours, the negligence with that crazy dog. Some folks think he’s dealing drugs out of there. He’s going to burn down the building one night.”

“Maybe I could ask my mother to talk to him,” she said. “Reconnect and see what he needs.”

Jared harrumphed lightly over the phone, as though he thought it was far too late for that, and slightly as though he was annoyed by Milly’s softness. “Anyway, we’ll be home soon. Don’t worry about Mateo, he’s okay.”

“I have pizza here,” she remembered to add.

After she put away her phone and stood up, a bit dazed from the swift unfolding of events, Ardit said, “That Hector, he’s bad news.”

“Do you think he’s dealing drugs out of the apartment?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Guys in and out of here all night.”

“He’s deteriorating,” Milly said. “He once was very prominent.”

Ardit shrugged, seemingly unimpressed by this news. “He’s got a problem now,” he said.

Milly made her mmm sound again before thanking Ardit and getting into the elevator. Then she did something strange. Instead of pressing “6,” she pressed “9,” Hector’s floor. Stepping out there, she walked down the hall. Even before coming to his door, she could hear the thump of the dance music emanating from his apartment. She stood before his door and pressed her ear to it, able to hear nothing but the music. Should she knock or ring the bell and try to say something to him? Then she thought about Jared calling the lawyer and how he might not like that because it might interfere in some legal proceeding.