At any rate, when they arrived at the picnic, they met someone they’d never seen before, a brunette commanding the crowd on a cluster of blankets under one of the few trees on the pristine grassy expanse. Her name was Drew: tall and skinny, hair the color of dark chocolate brushed back off her face like a boy’s, an assertive nose dotted with freckles, big white teeth that were just slightly and adorably chipmunk-like in the front, a skeptical West Coast drawl, and ten toenails painted deep red like Chiclets glinting on perfect, bare feet. She was a fact-checking friend of Colleen’s from Vanity Fair, but she was really a writer who woke at six each morning to work on her novel before heading to work.
When Milly and Jared arrived, the gang was discussing Václav Havel’s resignation as president of Czechoslovakia. The conversation devolved into puns on his name.
“Václav Havel resigns wearing a—” Drew paused. “Sparkly balaclava.” Her fey lisp and her timing were flawless. Everyone laughed. Those were the first words spoken by Drew that Milly ever heard.
Colleen introduced them. “Drew, this is Milly and Jared.”
“Oh!” Drew pealed with delight. “This is the Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner of the new millennium you told me about! So nice to meet you.”
She sat up on the blanket and crawled forward a few paces to shake their hands, which was when Milly spied the breasts peeking from beneath Drew’s shoulder-strapped vintage green floral sundress: two small but wickedly full, darkly nippled orbs that all but whistled from their shadows, Why, hello, Millicent! Milly felt that feeling she had felt periodically since she was twelve and acted on only twice, in college, and not very deftly at that: girl desire. Her eyes caught Drew’s; the glint was unmistakable. But wait? Was Drew conferring the same glint on Jared?
Milly collected herself. “Umm,” she began a reply, aiming to seem game. “How about the Kiki Smith and — um—”
Drew followed her eyes minutely, rapt. “Who is Kiki Smith with, anyway?” she asked. “Is she married, or with—?”
Nobody seemed to know, though Jared’s friend Asa said that a friend of his parents’ had just bought a Kiki Smith sculpture.
“Well, anyway,” Milly continued. But what did she want to say? She kept bouncing her eyes ridiculously between Drew and Jared, who seemed to wait amusedly for her to finish her thought. “I mean, Lee Krasner? Give me some credit.”
“Lee Krasner is awesome,” said Drew.
So that’s how it began. Drew began spending a lot of time with Milly and Jared, the three of them out late with their high school and college friends, the fledgling filmmakers and painters and actors and, of course, the endless editorial assistants. And it would always end up that Jared and Milly and Drew would stay out the latest, at some East Village dive like 7A or Blue and Gold, talking drunkenly and intensely about, oh, how could Bret Easton Ellis even put himself in the same category as Donna Tartt just because they went to college together, or who was really more subversive from a gender-deviance point of view, Sinead O’Connor or k.d. lang or even Prince. Or, ironically, they’d put “Man in Motion,” the theme from St. Elmo’s Fire, on the jukebox and then recast the movie with themselves and their friends (and Drew would laugh and be like, “Oh God, no!” when Jared and Milly would cast her in the Demi Moore part). Or they’d make up names for one another’s memoirs. Jared’s, because he was an installation artist, would be The Boy with the Blocks: The Jared Traum Story. Milly’s: BrushStrokes: A Life, then, beneath, in smaller type, The Millicent Heyman Story.
Drew’s memoir would be Prose in the Fast Lane. Milly came up with that one, which they all had a good laugh over. Milly had never had a friend quite like Drew before. Most of her friends she’d known so long they treated her like a little sister, with affection but also a certain carelessness, whereas Drew was attentive, solicitous, always wanting to know how Milly was — how was her work? Her relationship? And Drew entertained Milly; sometimes Milly sensed, with both confusion and delight, that Drew was almost performing a certain kind of wisecracking, all-knowing, tough but goodhearted best girlfriend, like in old movies. Drew seemed happy to perform like this for Jared as well, which turned Drew into a subject of enchantment and fascination for both members of the couple.
“I think you’re in love with her,” Jared would joke to Milly, after Milly had told him in some detail about something Drew had said, a one-liner she’d concocted, or something slightly outrageous Drew had worn the night before, such as a gingham baby-doll dress with scrunchy white ankle socks and Dr. Martens.
“I think you’re in love with her,” Milly would toss right back.
One night in a bar, three in the morning came around and there were just the three of them left, with “Desperado” on the jukebox. They slipped for a moment into drunken quiet. Jared looked at Drew. “Prose in the Fast Lane,” he said out of nowhere, and the three of them fell into one another, laughing.
“I love you two,” Drew said. “I feel safe when I’m with you.”
“You’re like our daughter,” Jared said.
“Mm-hmm,” said Milly. “You’re our little girl.”
“I finally have two intact parents!” Drew exulted.
But very quickly the relationship between Milly and Drew also became one of those twisted mirror games, a very complicated mix of love, lust, competition, and shared terror over what would happen to them in the areas of vocation and romance. One night, Milly had two paintings in a small group show. Everyone went, including Drew, who later said to Milly, “Your paintings and my writing are alike in that they’re both about artifice and posing, except you kind of celebrate it and I lament it.”
This dismayed Milly. “What am I supposed to say to that?” she asked.
“I’m not saying it’s a bad thing,” Drew insisted demurely.
Still, the comment obsessed Milly. “Do you think that’s true, what she said?” she asked her gay high-school friend Ryan one day over lunch. Ryan was petite and half Chinese and had a job working part time as Nora Ephron’s administrative assistant. Nora bullied him and he loved it.
“I think you’re becoming obsessed with Drew,” he said. “You talk about her a lot.”
“Jared says that, too.” Milly twirled a forkful of pasta off Ryan’s plate. “I don’t know why — I never had a sister, maybe that’s why? But even before she made that remark, I’m always thinking, What would Drew think of this painting? What would Drew think of this dress? Of my hair like this? Of this other friend of mine?”
Usually, Milly and Jared would put Drew in a cab to the West Village before walking the few blocks home to the Christodora, but one very alcoholic night, Jared said to Drew, “Come over and see Horace”—that was the new cat — so the three of them walked there arm in arm, with Milly in the middle, which gave her the new and wonderful feeling of holding love on both sides of her body.