In the morning, when she woke alone in the bed, she pulled herself together and went downstairs for coffee, to find Jared and his family watching CNN.
“Princess Di died,” Jared’s mother, a good-looking woman with a silver-blond bob who’d run the same hunger nonprofit the last twelve years, said as Milly came in. “Last night in a horrible car crash in a tunnel in Paris.”
“Oh, that’s horrible!” Milly exclaimed. “Her poor sons!”
They ate breakfast in a disjointed way in front of the TV, each of them retreating to the kitchen to get coffee or a bowl of cereal, then coming back to the drama on CNN. Eventually they pulled towels and umbrellas together and went down to the beach. But the death, and the allegations swirling around it that it might have been murder, followed them down there like a strange pall. It was strange in that Diana may as well have been a fictional character to them; no one among them could think of anyone who knew anyone who knew anyone who’d known her, or even once met her. Milly kept thinking of the two sweet boys being left with their horrible, cold father and their grandmother, the Queen. And this merged back into thoughts of Mateo and what he might be doing at any given hour of the many long hours in the boys’ home.
In the late afternoon, when the sunlight spilled a fantastic golden liquid light into every corner of Montauk, Milly and Jared did what they’d done the past several years and grabbed their sketchbooks and a blanket and retreated into some remote dunes and sketched each other. Then they had sex again on the blanket and, after, lay there naked and talked for a long time.
“The year we broke up was the worst year of my life,” Jared told her. “I ached through every day of that year. Never a year apart again, okay? Never, never, never.”
“Never,” Milly murmured. But her own recollections of that year were different. Certainly she remembered the loneliness of those solitary nights in her new apartment without Jared. But she also remembered the clean, open clarity of those days and nights, the feeling that her life, for the first time, was a wide, blank canvas before her. For the first time she had been able to focus intensely on her painting — her own painting, versus her students’ work or even Jared’s. Since then, she had traded chronic, low-level loneliness and pure artistic concentration for companionship and intimacy and a nagging feeling of artistic superficiality and self-postponement. Someday, she’d tell herself, she would be alone in a studio in the woods with perhaps a few other artists to eat and have a glass of wine with at the end of the day, before they repaired for more painting through the night.
This was her artist-colony fantasy, yet she never got around to actually pinpointing a month on a calendar and finding a colony to apply to. Now she was a woman with a partner, with her own family, his family, her students; a woman engaged in the world.
Back in the city, after the Montauk weekend, she and Jared plunged into their first week of work at new schools. Diana was everywhere: on the covers of papers and magazines, on every channel 24/7. Milly found herself thinking about her in that idle way you think about a public figure and make private judgments about them just because they’re thrust in your face all the time. Milly felt that Diana had become rather silly in recent years, saying she wanted to be the queen of people’s hearts and that kind of nonsense; it also looked like, in her postmarital thirties, she’d been having the sexy, glamorous fun she’d been deprived of, having been made to put on that ridiculous massive wedding dress and marry into royal suffocation at the age of twenty.
But there was another feeling Milly couldn’t escape, which only seemed reinforced by the insane outburst of sadness the death was provoking in England, the people crying out in front of the castle and begging the Queen to show sadness, mercy, a soul. It was that Diana was a martyr to goodness and warmth in a world long governed by arbitrary, cold rules. Why couldn’t warmth and generosity prevail? Milly was appalled to find herself wondering this as she went around thinking idly of Diana that whole week — a week of new classrooms, faces, paperwork to wend through. Why were any boys left in group homes? This desperate thought left Milly on the brink of tears. Listening on the radio to the new version of “Candle in the Wind” Elton John had written to sing at Diana’s funeral, Milly told herself that she was crazy and probably needed a higher dose of Wellbutrin.
The following Saturday, Jared told her he couldn’t go to the boys’ home with her. The art faculty at Art and Design had agreed to meet to reconfigure and reorganize the studio space. Milly set out on her own with about twenty dollars’ worth of paper and crayons. Sister Ellen greeted her as matter-of-factly as though she were showing up for the hundredth time, not the second, and took her into the sunny rec room where about twelve boys, all between four and nine, were playing. Mateo sat alone in a chair wearing his Yankees shirt again, reading The Stinky Cheese Man, idly paddling his feet back and forth in their cheap kid-size Nike knockoffs as he read.
Milly knelt down. “Do you remember me from last week? Drawing the monsters together?”
He looked up. Did she catch just a flash of happiness on his face, of excitement to see her again, before he composed himself? “I remember you,” he said dutifully.
“Do you feel like drawing again? I brought new paper and crayons.”
“I draw every day anyway.”
This deflated Milly, leaving her at a loss for words.
“You can draw if you want to,” he added.
She had to rally. “I’m going to lay this all out on the floor here,” she said, “and if you want to, you come join.”
She moved to the open play area and engaged the other little boys. They broke out the supplies and started drawing. Milly calmly started drawing from last week’s memory a certain home in Montauk she liked, all the while encouraging the three or four boys who joined her, giving them gentle tips she thought were appropriate for an art class for four-year-olds. She willed herself not to glance Mateo’s way, which was why she was delighted when, twenty minutes later, she looked up and he was standing over her.
“Okay, I’m ready to draw now,” he said.
“That’s great,” Milly said, trying not to sound as triumphant as she felt. She reached for her bag. “Do you want to try some colored pencils? They’re more—” Should she use the word sophisticated with a four-year-old? “They’re for bigger-kid artists, so you might like them.”
He lay on his belly with his ankles crossed in the air and started in. Milly was careful to leave him alone, to mind her own drawing and focus on the other boys. Milly felt a tremendous calm overtake her; she didn’t feel any sense of having forgotten some urgent other matter, something that often nagged at her. At a certain point, she glanced at Mateo and he glanced up and bugged his eyes out at her, as if to say, What, lady? which made her laugh, which made him smile faintly as he went back to his work.
“Here,” he said finally, pushing his paper toward her.
A bloblike creature, all shades of blue and green, floated over a streetscape of pitched-roof houses and passersby — sophisticated figures for a four-year-old — walking down the street. The aquamarine creature, which hovered amid some clouds, with a sun nearby, had blank, unyielding eyes and a straight stick of a mouth.