Tim Murphy - Christodora

So, that’s where her day began. Already, sitting there, she felt the crumbum lack of sleep, the matte-gray ordeal that the day was going to be. The e-mails were next. They were mostly spam and junk. Alerts from the different community action groups she’d gotten involved in over the past few years, but she really couldn’t deal with them anymore. Yes, she hated privatization as much as the next person — on principle, she supposed, less so in practice — but she really couldn’t go to any more meetings where a bunch of middle-aged women who reminded her of herself, frankly, stood up all night and keep yelling “Privatization! Privatization!” She just found it too depressing.

There weren’t so many art e-mails anymore. Let that world slide, stop making stuff or showing up, and at first the notices keep coming. But give it about three, four years, and the only e-mails you’ll get are from people who don’t really know who you are, for stuff you’d never go see anyway because you don’t know who they are. Occasionally there was the e-mail like the one she got last week from Caroline Harrell. Caroline said she’d been at Chuck Pierson’s opening the other week and she and Chuck and some others got to talking and wondering where Milly was. Caroline said she missed Milly and did Milly want to have lunch in the neighborhood or get a coffee?

Milly stared at the e-mail for a long time. She actually got a tight feeling in her throat. She thought about long-ago afternoons in the park with Caroline in her wheelchair on one side, and with him holding her hand on the other side, when he was the darling, adorable child of half the neighborhood, with his paper and box of crayons in his little bag. And Milly kept staring at that e-mail and wondering how Caroline was doing with her disease, her degenerative nerve disease that kept her in that wheelchair, the chair that people would help her out of when she did her performance art. And then Milly decided that she just couldn’t see Caroline and she couldn’t see anybody anymore except her father, and she deleted it and just made herself forget it had ever arrived.

And then there was a day staring her in the face. Up until about a year, maybe eighteen months ago, she’d still head down to the studio in the mornings. To so much as pick up a brush, she’d had to assiduously banish from her mind any thought of the two men who’d divorced her, her ex-husband and her ex-son. And frankly that wasn’t so easy to do anymore, because it felt like she couldn’t scroll the blogs or click on the arts vertical of the Times or New York anymore without seeing or reading about one or the other. She’d just be sitting there having her coffee and innocently reading the Times and there they were.

The worst was when there were pictures — especially with their girlfriends. Well, not M. so much. His girlfriend, an interior designer, was very pretty and looked like a nice person. Milly was glad he was being taken care of, and it appeared he was off the drugs, or if he wasn’t, then he was doing a pretty good job of having a career alongside them, but she was pretty sure he was off them by this point. He’d alluded to being clean and sober in a few articles she’d read, against her own better judgment. She really hoped he was. He’d broken her heart but she still wanted him to be happy out there in the world. What had been the point of raising him all those years if he wasn’t?

As for her real ex — forget it. God forbid she saw some party picture of him alongside that curator. It was like a slap in the face and always made her stomach turn. The final indignity had been two months ago when she saw that picture of them, her with her bump, and Milly knew she was pregnant. The huge smile on J.’s face, that stupid Japanese-type black Yohji Yamamoto asymmetrical suit thing she’d obviously dressed him in, that slim coupe of champagne in his hand!

I guess he’s got absolutely everything he ever wanted now, Milly thought. He’s an art star, he’s got a young art babe for a girlfriend, and he’s finally having a baby. His own baby, as he’d put it. Milly hoped that when his baby was up screaming all night and spitting up and peeing all over him, it didn’t compromise his brilliant career. He’d always made it perfectly clear he couldn’t really have that while playing dad, and he certainly didn’t waste any time relieving himself of his paternal duties. They’d probably just hire a nanny. God forbid he’d let anything come between him and his work. When nobody knows your name until you’re forty-seven, you really have to hustle!

Milly knew how bitter she sounded to herself. She talked a lot with Gallegos about the bitterness. He’d been her marriage therapist, true, but she kept going to him after. After he saw the way that J. went absolutely psychotic on her before he stormed out that night, she felt like Gallegos was the only person who could ever understand what she’d been through, having witnessed it, so she kept going to him.

There she was, one week after the big storming-out, sitting there all by herself. Weeks and weeks went by, and she kept saying to Gallegos, “What do you think? Is he ever going to come back around and see that he’s been absolutely psychotic?”

And Gallegos kept saying to Milly, “Can we put a moratorium on trying to figure out Jared”— Oh God, he said his name, and continued to, rather callously, she thought, until she politely asked him if he would just refer to him as J. — “and talk about what’s going on with you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I raised a drug addict who turned his back on me and I spent the better part of my adult life with a man who told me he hated me and walked out on me. I’m fine. I would just like to find someone who doesn’t walk out on me for a change! Who’s next? My dad? Thank God my dad’s too frail to abandon me, too! They always stick around until they don’t need you anymore, so I guess I have my dad until he passes. Lucky me!”

Gallegos smiled and shook his head. “You do make me laugh, Milly, even when I’m trying to help you break patterns,” he said.

The specific pattern was putting someone else’s happiness before her own. Gallegos would always ask Milly if she’d made it into the studio that week, if she was keeping up with her art-world friendships. He’d even come to a little show of hers several years ago, which Milly thought was touching, because she didn’t think therapists were supposed to do that sort of boundary-crossing thing. But she also thought he wanted to see her work to help him understand her better, or something, and the next week at his office he mentioned how he could see a lot of vulnerability in the work or putting herself on the line or something. She tried to explain to him that she was essentially a formalist and she wasn’t thinking about her problems when she worked, but she supposed a therapist would see what he wanted to see. That was his job.

So Gallegos was trying to keep Milly in the studio. And for a few years she was. It wasn’t easy for her, the more famous her two exes got. She talked about that a lot with Gallegos.

“When you go in there, it’s your studio, it’s your art,” he’d say. “It’s for you.”

She tried to keep that in mind. Then she had a sort of epiphany. She was at the Armory Show at the Javits Center. She waited until nearly the end of the run to be as certain as possible she wouldn’t run into either of them , and she also stayed about a mile away from their gallerists. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the art and all the rich jerks browsing it, and she wanted to throw up. She was looking at about the umpteenth stupid neon wall sign. It said in big swoopy pink neon script: MY PUSSY! Like that was some kind of revelation. And Milly thought, That’s it. I don’t need to keep contributing to this pile of junk.