Tim Murphy - Christodora

A message flashes on his tablet from Gary: “Pray to be protected. Then go to a meeting and get your hand up, idiot.” Mateo laughs. Fucking Gary. How many times has this AARP balding dude, who’s basically been living off rerun checks from his 1980s sitcoms the past thirty-one years, talked him off the ledge and set him back on course over the past decade? Many, in a word. Because there were so many times when Mateo’s daymares and nightmares about Carrie felt like they were going to get him, too. You didn’t deliberately kill her, Gary would tell him, you were just two addicts and sometimes there are casualties — that’s the way it goes. Just pay it forward, pay it forward. So he had, hours and hours doing art projects with unlucky L.A. kids who reminded him of how he’d been born an unlucky New York kid, helping them get into programs and schools, wondering when, when , he would crawl out from under the shadow of hell and into redemption.

Now the taxi is crossing Houston Street, which after decades of work almost looks like some kind of fucking Paris boulevard with its lush, manicured strip of green running down the middle and more glass towers on either side than he wants to count. A message flashes from Dani: “You on your way?”

“Xing Houston in cab,” he thumbs back. Oh, shit, he thinks, these streets! Wasn’t that stoop. . or didn’t it look like that stoop? No, wait, that stoop was on Orchard, right? The stoop where he and Oscar had nodded that Christmas night when the snow fell, leaning against each other in their black puffy coats and black caps, barely able to keep their heads up to look at the swirling wonder, and the feeling that the sky was infinite, that the sky spun counterclockwise to the snow.

His stomach twitches — his first anticipatory junkie twitching in a long, long time. Oh, shit, he thinks. Gary’s right. He really does need a meeting. Maybe later tonight.

The cab pulls up in front of a blue glass sliver on East Broadway. All these fucking tinted glass slivers and shards that have shot up everywhere amid the dirty, old, stone street walls — it’s surreal! There’ll be one, two, three, four old tenements, brick and fire escapes and the like, then suddenly a glass shard, whose street-facing apartments are utterly transparent, like looking in a glass box at someone’s life. They’re either like that or they’re opaque, a milky glowing white or a shimmery onyx. These new apartments never have curtains or blinds anymore, Mateo notes. It’s all this fucking window technology, making the windows go opaque white or black or red or jade.

Coming off the elevator, Dani’s there in the open door to greet him. Mateo’s heart bursts open; he hasn’t seen her in eleven days, since she left L.A., and whenever he sees her after a separation like that, he can’t control his desire. He drops his bags in the hallway and swallows her up, backing her into the apartment.

“Oh, damn!” she exclaims, pealing laughter.

Ignoring the apartment he’s never seen before, ignoring the twinkling outside the infinity windows, he finds the bedroom. They get each other naked, begin.

“Oh thank God, thank God, thank God,” he keeps saying the whole time, bucking his ass back and forth atop Dani, who’s clutching him with both her arms and legs, her head thrown back. And he means it — he’s so giddy with thankfulness to be entwined in her body again that he wants to cry.

Then it’s over and they lie there, clutching each other. Mateo runs his lips from her neck over her breasts, down the side of her belly, down her leg, up her leg, and back up her belly, where he just holds her and buries his lips in her hair.

“Missed you so much, Neenee,” he mutters. “Love you so much.”

“Missed you and love you so much, too, Taytay,” she says.

They both fall asleep for twenty minutes. Mateo wakes up before her and lies there holding her, thinking about next steps. First would be to pull his bags out of the hallway and close the door behind him. Second would be to inspect the art on the walls he caught out of the corner of his eye while he was bum-rushing Dani into the bedroom. Yep, he thinks, that’s what it was: a tiny Kara Walker cutout and two or three of McGinley’s Morrissey photos. He takes a shower. When he comes back in the bedroom, Dani’s awake.

“Do you mind if Char comes over?” she asks. “He didn’t know if you’d be up for it or not tonight.”

“Are you okay if he comes over?” Mateo asks back. There, he thinks, I said he without a hiccup first. Progress! “We can order up some food.”

“Okay, well, ping him and let him know. I’ll order food. You want Malaysian? There’s a really good place downstairs I can ping.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.” He’s in the living room now, fishing jeans and a T-shirt out of his bags, wondering if he can still make the midnight meeting on the other end of Houston Street.

“So what do you think of this place?” Dani calls from the bedroom.

“Just how you described it to me,” he says. “Very downtown person-with-money aesthetically correct.” And it is: mostly white space with a massive gray couch system facing the infinity window and lots of chunky dark wood, including the requisite kitchen farm table, for the old-timey contrast.

“Complete with a Kara Walker and a few Ryan McGinleys,” Dani says, and laughs.

“Yep,” Mateo says, coming back in the bedroom and flopping himself down again near her. “Very correct. But it’ll be comfortable for the next six months.” He kisses her. “Thanks for finding it while I was crazy in London.”

She strokes his hair. “Are you happy to be here? You feeling weird?”

“The cab went straight through the East Village tonight. I got a hot flash when we crossed Ninth Street.”

“Why?”

“That’s the street the Christodora’s on.”

“You mean you passed it?”

“No, we were going down Second Avenue and it’s on Avenue B. But I could feel it when we crossed Ninth Street.”

Dani pauses. “Well, I didn’t grow up here so I don’t exactly know what that means.”

“It just means I could feel its latitude. Or longitude or whatever.”

“Ohh,” says Dani. Then: “Milly still lives there?”

“I think so. I think Jared basically let her have it as a mercy gift when he left her, so the whole thing wouldn’t drag into court. That’s kind of what Drew told me once.”

“The same talk when she told you that your grandmother died?”

Mateo winces slightly. He’s mentioned this to Dani in the past, confided that he felt shitty that he didn’t reach out to Milly, never mind that he hadn’t gotten on a plane to New York for Ava’s funeral and shivah. He’d felt the instinct to do it, felt the loss of that indomitable woman who’d been sweet to him as a kid when she had the time to spare, but the thought of actually doing it — and having to see Milly amid her grief — was more than he could bear. Shamefully, he’d shunted the news aside in his head.

“She wasn’t really my grandmother,” he says to Dani.

She laughs, mildly reproving. “You called her your bubbe , Mateo.”

He raises a hand to his forehead and turns away, at a loss for a response. He flat-out doesn’t like talking about the Heyman-Traums — it sparks remorse and regret in the pit of his stomach, a distinctly unpleasant feeling that threatens to throw him off his confident, present-day linear course.

Dani senses his displeasure. “Okay,” she says, gently pulling his hand away from his forehead. “I’m sorry I pushed it.”

He sighs, rubs her wrist with his thumb. “It’s just I get sad and bad feelings when I think about them.”