Christodora Read online

  And as for Millicent, the short answer to a complicated question would be to say that she loved Jared, too. And that is how she came to live in the Christodora with him after college, when Jared’s father fully ceded the apartment to them, and also how, in a matter of about seven years, in a series of extremely random events that somehow all tied together, she and Jared ended up adopting an orphan boy named Mateo, which led to the three of them all living in the Christodora together.

  There, as they all slept, Milly would often dream she was flying. She could feel it coming, a stirring, a vibration in her body. It was certainly the world’s greatest feeling, slipping off earthly weights. She rose up in the bed, stretched out her arms, and soon it was as though the bedroom were a body of water and she was swimming around in it with a delicious, slow ease of movement, Jared snoring on the bed five or six feet below her. She somersaulted languorously in the air, and then she sailed out the open window, six stories high, and into the warm city night. She watched their apartment building recede as she breaststroked her way higher and higher, until the Manhattan grid emerged below her and she was gently maneuvering her way around the corners of buildings fifteen, twenty stories high. Through windows, she saw neighbors sleeping, turning fitfully—so drearily earthbound! Up here, above the city lights, the stars emerged. She stretched out her arms and wiggled her bare toes, her nightshirt flapping around her thighs, her black curls whipping across her eyes.

  The city twinkled beneath her, late-night cabs crisscrossing the grid—Like dumb toys! she thought. The Chrysler Building loomed before her, the chevrons atop its crown glowing like white thorns. It was fascinating to spy the crown so close, as she drew a broad arc around it in the air from the southeast. She treaded night air—so warm! almost steamy! and slightly opaque, a bit milky—to cut a clear path away from it. But—oh, good Lord. She seemed to be caught in a wind tunnel. Against her will, she sailed ever closer to those white-hot chevrons. And she was sailing much faster than she’d like. Oh, this was not good. She’d lost the freedom she’d savored a moment ago; it had all gone wrong. She was seconds away from the chevrons, trying to push back against the current with all her might. How bad would the impact hurt? Terror caught in her throat.

  “Oh my God, help!”

  She bolted upright in bed, her heart pounding. Oh thank God, she thought, gasping for breath, I’m alive. It was a dream.

  Jared stirred beside her. He reached out—a repulsive and reassuring mass of warm nighttime body smells, foul breath, and oniony underarms—and pulled her close as her breathing slowed. “Were you flying again?” he muttered.

  “Uh-huh. I flew into the Chrysler Building.”

  He laughed in his half-sleep. “Fancy.”

  That made her laugh a little, too. “It looked amazing up close,” she said.

  He ran a hand through her hair. “Go back to sleep now, Millipede. It’s okay. I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Predictably, Jared was snoring again in fourteen seconds. The jarring memory of the dream alone was enough to keep her awake, but now there was that. Milly took comfort under Jared’s arm a few more seconds, then wriggled and turned away. A stripe of light from a streetlamp outside fell across her night table, where a photo of her, Jared, and Mateo on the beach last month in Montauk sat in a new frame. She always had trouble getting back to sleep after these dreams; she stayed awake trying to remember the weightless arabesques of floating and flying and trying to shake off the horror of the inevitable crash.

  She reached for her cell phone, charging on the nightstand. It was 4:07 A.M. She crept from the bed, padded barefoot into the bathroom, pulled down her panties, and sat to pee. There, taped to the bathroom door, was a drawing of a dinosaur that Mateo had done last Thursday, his first week back in school. She thought idly about the accuracy and sophistication in Mateo’s lines, especially in the tricky area around the dinosaur’s haunches and feet. When she finished in the bathroom, she poked her head into Mateo’s room, resisting the urge to step inside and watch him while he slept, lest she wake him. Tomorrow, she thought, it’s our morning together!

  She sat in the kitchen, mulling over the crossword puzzle. Through the half-open window, she saw, on the sidewalk alongside Tompkins Square Park, which several years before had been bulldozed and landscaped into a treasure of velvety green knolls and winding pathways, some loud drunk kids stumbling forward. She thought about nights in the East Village—oh, eight, nine years ago, well before the unexpected arrival of Mateo—when it might have been her and Jared stumbling home at four in the morning. How radically their lives had changed in almost four years! Everyone else their age she knew were only now just having babies. And certainly nobody had adopted.

  Milly sighed amid the gloom of the kitchen. Too often, she found herself sitting at this table in the middle of the night while the men in her life, as she thought of them, slept deeply. What did she need to get back to sleep? she asked herself. What? She must be strong and not go downstairs to the bodega and buy cigarettes. She’d gone nine days without a cigarette and she wouldn’t do that. But certainly she could go downstairs and buy, say, a juice? A banana-strawberry Tropicana. Noiselessly, she pulled shorts and a T-shirt out of the bedroom, pulled her hair back with an elastic, grabbed the keys, and slipped into flip-flops. In the hallway, the fluorescent lamps—those horrible lamps the co-op board needed to vote on to replace—buzzed lightly. Milly shuddered a bit at the rogue thrill of popping out in the middle of the night. She pressed for the elevator.

  When it arrived, to her surprise and then mild alarm, there was a young man in it. He, too, seemed alarmed to see someone at the late hour and shrank back into the corner, his hands thrust into the pockets of his tight jeans. His short, spiky hair was gelled, his eyes were obscured by tinted Ray-Bans, his leanly muscled body was constrained only by a tank top, and one high-top sneaker was crossed over the other. He had one of those crown-of-thorns tattoos around his biceps that gay men everywhere suddenly seemed to have. He was clutching a cell phone in one hand, worrying it like a lucky stone.

  She hesitated to get in the elevator. She’d never seen him in the building before. But he seemed to be shrinking away from her. Wordlessly, she got in and pressed the button to hasten the descent. She stood in the far corner from him, smelling his cologne and cigarette smoke and noting in the corner of her eye that he rapidly tapped his right foot.

  Halfway down, she surmised that he was probably a trick of Hector’s. This was something that was starting to become a murmur in the Christodora, where everyone talked, that for the past year or so Hector had been having a parade of guys in and out of his apartment on the ninth floor at all hours of the day and night. When the elevator reached the lobby, the spiky-haired guy scurried from the elevator and across the lobby out into the night, hands thrust deep into his pockets.

  Bora was on duty in the lobby, slouched behind the desk with his tiny TV on low, set to a soccer-game broadcast in a foreign language. Albanian, Milly figured. Bora was the college-aged son of Ardit, the super, and he had some accounting textbooks and a laptop spread out before him. Milly saw how he watched the tank-top guy exit the lobby with heavy-lidded, suspicious eyes.

  “I’m just going to the deli to get some juice,” she told him. She felt the need to explain why she was up so late. “Do you want anything?”

  “Will you get me a coffee?”

  “Of course. How do you want it?”

  “Milk and sugar. Will you get me a cookie, too?”

  She grinned slightly. “Of course. Late-night sweet tooth?”

  “Thank you.” Bora smiled sleepily. “You saw him?” He nodded toward the front door.

  “We were just in the elevator together. I’ve never seen him before.”

  “Ninth floor,” Bora said. “Guys in and out, in and out, all the time.”

  Milly merely raised her eyebrows and made a face
as though to say, Hmm. She didn’t know what to say about Hector. She felt hurt by him, mainly. Four years before, she had intervened, at her mother’s urging, to get Hector into the building. She thought it would be lovely to have a longtime colleague and friend of her mother’s in the ­Christodora—one who, like her mother, had done so much in the fight against AIDS in the city. And once Hector moved in, she’d invited him down to dinner several times. But he rebuffed the offer repeatedly, mumbling excuses. In fact, when they saw each other coming in or out, he seemed as though he barely wanted to talk to her. He’d hurry away, murmuring a hello, his eyes averted, buried in his cell phone. Eventually, Milly started avoiding him, too.

  “Drugs,” said Bora.

  Milly nodded her head. “I’ve heard that.”

  She stepped outside. The air was mild and had that delicious, mysterious moisture that the night holds in its wee hours. She walked a few blocks to the deli, passing along the way one of the regular neighborhood addicts—“the rockers,” as she thought of them—crouching in a doorway, blissfully comatose. She felt a bit wild, being out alone so late—an echo of the untethered thrill she’d felt in her flying dream. Arabic music met her in the bodega, its plaintive wail.

  Omar, like Bora, sat behind the counter watching a soccer game on a tiny TV. He looked up when she came in. “Hello, pretty lady,” he said. He’d called her this for at least three years now. Milly couldn’t even remember when it had begun.

  “Hi, Omar.” She asked him to fix Bora’s coffee, fetched her juice from the refrigerator, and picked up a black-and-white cookie for Bora.

  “You can’t sleep again tonight?” he asked, handing back her change.

  She rolled her eyes. “You know me too well. I just had a dream where I flew into the Chrysler Building and then I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  “In Egypt, we say allah ysallimik. You know what that means?”

  Milly smiled. “No.”

  “May God protect you.”

  Milly said the phrase. Omar corrected her and she said it again.

  “That’s closer,” he said. “There, so you don’t fly into any more buildings.” He smiled at her, an eyebrow raised flirtatiously.

  She laughed. She could have stayed chatting with Omar, who had a kind face and darkly handsome eyes, but she felt it would be unseemly—not because it was too intimate, but because what sad soul visited with the bodega man at four A.M. because she couldn’t sleep?

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “Thank you for the blessing. I’m gonna hold you to it!”

  “Watch, you’ll see.” He wagged a finger after her. “It will work.”

  Back in the lobby, she refused Bora’s offer to pay for the coffee and cookie. “I’m going to take my insomniac self back up to bed,” she said, as though by saying it she could make it happen.

  She took exactly two sips of her juice in the elevator. She reentered her apartment with a slight sense of wonder, as though she were actually seeing it for the first time in a long time. She looked at the jumble of hats, coats, and shoes on the rack in the hallway—hers and Jared’s mixed in with Mateo’s tiny miniature additions, the windbreaker, the Nikes, the Yankees cap. In the living room, she considered her own color-field canvas hanging over the sofa, a small metal sculpture of Jared’s on a table nearby. Mateo’s pictures and crayons covered the coffee table. She had the feeling that she’d fled her home, this source of familiarity and love, out into the night because of some mild panic, but before anything bad could happen, she’d returned, slipped back into her life, and was relieved and grateful to find it the same, undisturbed. She stepped out of her shorts and laced her arm around Jared back in bed. How exactly did you say that blessing that Omar had said? she thought. Salaam alaikum? No, that wasn’t quite it. But before she could muse on it further, she drifted into sleep.

  When she woke, shortly after nine, she found the sky blue and the bed empty, which was not alarming, as Jared woke early on Saturdays to walk across the bridge to Williamsburg, where he had a large studio in an old warehouse where he could drag huge pieces of metal across the floor and weld them. She sat up in bed, a morning shadow passing over her mind, and she remembered the episode of the night before: the exhilarating and then terrifying dream, the strange encounter in the elevator, the brief foray into the night, Omar, the hasty return. It all felt like a dream to her now, not just the dream itself—a memory of shadowy corridors with dread around one corner, then comfort around the next.

  In the living room, she found Mateo on the floor in front of the TV, watching his new favorite cartoon, The Fairly OddParents, and eating dry Cheerios out of a plastic cup. He was still in his SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas, lying on his stomach and absently kicking his butt with his bare feet, his mop of curly black hair pushed up by one little fist, plus a throw pillow. A pile of his drawings and crayons were splayed out in front of him.

  “Hi, buddy,” Milly called from the kitchen, pouring herself coffee that Jared had made. “Did you see Dad leave?”

  “Yep,” he called, not twisting around. “He went over the bridge.”

  She brought her coffee and the Saturday New York Times over to the couch by the TV. She ran her hand through his hair, which, with the exception of mixing paints and running into the water at Montauk the first time every summer, was just about her favorite thing in the world. “Do I get a morning kiss?”

  “Yep.” He smooched loudly toward the TV to suggest it was for her.

  “I meant for real.” She bent down and nuzzled his face and planted a kiss on his chubby cheek, which made him giggle and squirm and vaguely smile.

  “Squinch over on the floor so there’s some room for my feet,” she said. He did so.

  She curled up on the couch, her coffee on its armrest, and watched him absently, the newspaper ignored beside her. Later in the day, they would switch roles: Jared would take Mateo and she would go to her (considerably smaller) studio space in Chinatown and paint until she brought home a pizza for dinner. But for now, she was alone with the little boy who’d become her son, the initial hard years of adjustment over. She felt contented. They’d found a groove, the three of them.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked her, not averting his eyes from the TV.

  “Nothing.” She paused. “Shouldn’t we go for a haircut today?”

  This was enough to break his gaze. “I don’t wanna haircut! I like my hair.”

  “Because it’s so skater boy?” she teased him. He wanted to be a skater boy. It was inevitable. It was impossible to walk around with him in the neighborhood without him seeing the skater boys, so cool with their flat-brimmed baseball caps and baggy jeans and high-tops, and not hear him say, “That’s cool, I wanna do that.”

  “You’ll break your neck if you do that,” Milly would say to him, tightening her grip on his hand as they walked through the park.

  “No, I won’t,” he’d reply, his valor wounded. “You’re not cool.”

  Now it was she who was wounded. “A lot of people think I’m cool,” she’d say. “My students think I’m cool. You don’t need to ride a skateboard to be cool.”

  “I’m not saying I need to ride a skateboard to be cool,” he’d reply slowly, as though he were talking to an idiot. “I’m saying I want to, because it’s cool.”

  “Well, thank you for that clarification,” Milly would say. “I think this is definitely an issue we can table until you turn twelve.”

  “We can what?”

  “We can table,” she said. “Meaning we can just put on the table and deal with it later.”

  He said nothing for several seconds. “That’s weird,” he finally said.

  “It’s not weird,” she’d say. “I think eight is too young for you to be out on a skateboard.”

  “No, using that word like that,” he’d say. “A table is a noun.”

  “Some nouns you
can also use as verbs.”

  And on and on they’d go like that, and amid it, Milly would realize that she was pretty much happier than she’d ever been in her life, that at this moment, right here—as the old guys who played chess at the stone chess tables in the park’s southwest corner looked up and said, “Heeeey, Mateeeo, how you doin’ today, little man?” and as Mateo waved back to them—she felt no trace of the doubt and anxiety that usually nagged at the edges of her mind. Sometimes, very quietly, in a whisper even to herself, she’d think, I made the right decision four years ago, I did the right thing. This was the right choice for us, this little guy needed us.

  “You’re very popular with the chess crowd,” she’d remark as they exited the park and made their way to, say, the Belgian fries stand, which, along with clusters of skateboarders and paper and crayons, was a bliss-trigger for Mateo. After she said it, Milly would glance down at Mateo to see his face beaming with smug pride at his park popularity, and she’d pull him toward her in a smothery sort of hug while they walked. And when he stayed there for just one moment of surrender before tugging himself away as any eight-year-old boy would do from his mother, she’d again think, I did the right thing.

  So this morning, before the TV cartoons, she said, “Okay, well, I guess no haircut then.”

  “No haircut,” he repeated sternly, his eyes still fixed on the screen.

  “So should we see if Elysa and Kenji want to come out with us? It’s beautiful outside. We can all take Kenji to the dog run together.”

  “Yeahhhh!” he exploded, his feet suddenly kicking his butt rapidly. “Kenji, Kenji, Kenji!”