Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  He never saw the redheaded graduate student again, but he did see Chagall, in the art classes he signed up for every semester thereafter. Eventually his counselor told him he’d have to switch majors if he wanted to keep avoiding his history requirements, so he did—to art history—and never looked back. In a course titled Paradox: Embracing the Postmodern Paradigm he discovered Duchamp toilets, mysterious “happenings,” and art as essence rather than object. In John Cage’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, played during the seminar by an animated professor with Einsteinian hair, James saw the exact same speckled light he saw when listening to classical music, and tasted, quite distinctly, black pepper, which even made him sneeze. Here it was, he thought while sitting in the bright, silent room, the collisions that happened in his own brain, bursting out before him like explosions.

  He called Grace from his dorm room.

  “I found out what I need to do!” he blurted, unable to contain his excitement.

  “And what’s that, dear James?” Grace said. She had taken on a motherly quality since they’d parted after high school, and was prone to using words like dear and darling.

  “I need to make art,” James said, his mind flying.

  Grace was smiling on the other end of the phone. James could hear it.

  He explained to Grace what he had discovered in Painting 2B, that Kandinsky had synesthesia, and, as he had found out in English 1A, so did Nabokov—he could see colors in letters just as James did!—and they were geniuses of metaphor and color and ideas!

  “You’ll be great,” Grace said, and James thought: Grace is never wrong.

  So invigorated by the possibility of being or becoming a genius, James then plunged into art like it was the blue lake of the letter O, hardly ever rising for air.

  FIVE: BAD ART/GOOD KISS

  Despite fervent passion and excessive diligence, James couldn’t make good art. He couldn’t seem to re-create what was happening in his mind with his hands; his paintings were muddy, his sculptures made no sense, and his teachers cocked their heads during his critiques in a way that suggested confusion as to why he was here in the first place. But James didn’t need their opinions to know: the art was not inside him. He loved looking at art. He loved thinking about art. But this love didn’t come out of his hands—it came out of his mind.

  It was confusing, this love of thinking, and James didn’t know quite what to do with it. He came from a family where thinking had been considered basically unnecessary: his father had once smacked him when he had asked a question about The Red Badge of Courage at the dinner table, and his mother’s only conversations took place with the characters she watched on television—Don’t marry him, Marcy! Don’t do it!—and in this setting, the idea of thought for thought’s sake was hard to think about. He kept epic journals, pouring his thoughts onto the small square pages, but it felt like it was disappearing into an abyss—he deeply wanted someone to understand him, to communicate what he felt and saw with another person. With a lot of other people, maybe. With the world, even, that screamed out to him with all its colors and feelings and pain.

  It wasn’t until junior year, when he scribbled a rant about a student show by a woman whose drawings he quite disliked (the pictures were as rigid as wood, he argued, but weak enough to karate chop in half), and the review was somehow found (okay, he left it in the editor’s mailbox) and published in the Columbia Daily Spectator under the clever headline “Board-Stiff,” that James discovered he could write, and write well enough to be offered a position at the school paper. And it was only after Marge Hollister, the artist whose work he had criticized so ruthlessly, approached him in the quad, shoved him up against a lonely tree, and gave him a violent kiss because he had “made her rethink everything about everything,” that James realized he might have found his calling, and switched majors again, this time to journalism.

  “You’re an odd writer,” his first journalism teacher told him. “But there’s influence in oddity.”

  Just after they met, Marge Hollister began making an entirely new kind of art (cutting up advertisements from women’s magazines and drawing on top of them), disapproved of by her professors but ringing much truer to James, and he realized his professor could be right, that perhaps he could influence the way art was thought about and developed, the making of things, with mere words. And when he finally fucked Marge Hollister in the stacks of the library (the third sexual encounter of his life, if you counted the time Grace had brushed over his area in the back of her father’s car) and then fell in love with Marge Hollister harder than he had ever fallen in love with anyone before (how could he not have, when her red was so wonderful?!), James realized his life was not on paper what it had been in his mind, and that it would never be. He thought of Flaubert’s depressing yet relevant quote: “One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.” Perhaps he was a stool pigeon. Fine! He was born to be a critic, not an artist. He was born to be with Marge Hollister, maker of odd collages and impulsive love. He was born to turn the things that he actually wanted into things he wanted only after having them, just as he was born to feel one thing when he looked at another.

  SIX: WILD STRAWBERRY/LOVE

  At first he had been nervous to tell Marge about his condition, scared he might ruin the whole thing, that he might never get the opportunity to do what they had done in the musty Eastern Religions section of the library again if he did. He had once been stupid enough to confess to Susie Lovett, whom he had loved from afar through high school, that she smelled like buttery popcorn, and though he tried to explain to her that she didn’t actually smell like buttery popcorn, she just felt like how buttery popcorn smelled, which was a good thing, she refused to speak to him after that and began wearing too much of her mother’s perfume, which almost, if not totally, diminished the butteriness he so coveted. But the dirty hem of Marge’s long skirt and the easy way she laughed had made him think that she might be different. That she might get it. And if she didn’t get it, she still might like it, when he told her that having sex with her was just like eating a wild strawberry. That she was red, juicy, full of little seeds, and that when he was finished, he could still taste her sweetness for hours.

  “Having sex with you is just like eating a wild strawberry,” he had confessed, as they walked across campus to the building where she had Intro to Art History and he, a course called Introduction to Connoisseurship, in which they were currently addressing “questions of relative quality” in modern art. And, perhaps because wild strawberries were a less savory and more sensual metaphor for love than buttered popcorn had been, or maybe because she really did get it, Marge had embraced the strange comment with her hoarse, pretty laugh, which was just as red, juicy, and sweet as the sex had been.

  “You felt like a banana,” she said, with another big laugh.

  This exchange had prompted James to lose his breath, gasp for it again, and then trip on a ledge of uneven sidewalk. And because she laughed off his clumsiness and kissed him when they parted for class, her redness stayed all through Connoisseurship, making him feel, for once, like a connoisseur of women. And when the professor, a wool-vested spaz who wore a gold wedding ring shaped like an ear (his wife’s ear, he later divulged to the class at a bourbon-laced mixer), lectured on the ways to tell an original work of art from a fake, James felt red and sturdy himself, knowing he had found an original, that his Marge possessed all the qualities of the real thing, and that what he was experiencing was the authentic and persistent blooming of real love.

  That first summer, James and Marge did that thing that new lovers did: sequestered themselves from society in order to revel in each other’s eyeballs, earlobes, lower regions, arm hairs, armpit smells, toes, kneecaps, and lips. Because neither of them had any income to speak of and both their leases were up, they moved into a tiny studio apartment that cost practically nothing—way, way uptown—with a sink that was also a bath
tub. They had more sex than James had dreamed was possible. They talked for hours every night, sipping beer or puffing on a joint Marge had rolled or sometimes just reading side by side, then repeating whatever they had read to the other person, so they would both know the very same things.

  He often explained to Marge the sensations he felt or the colors he saw at any given moment.

  “You know Gordon? From Philosophy 2? Just looking at him makes me taste sweat.”

  “Sweat?” Marge said, laughing. “Like, human sweat?”

  “Human sweat,” James said.

  “And how, my love, might you know what human sweat tastes like?”

  “Because I taste it whenever I look at Professor Gordon.”

  Marge cackled. “You’re officially nuts,” she said. “Now tell me another one.”

  James went on to tell her how their apartment, being inside of it with her, felt like a slippery oyster in his throat, and how Marge’s friend Delilah, with whom they ate lentils once a week at the communal brownstone she lived in on the other side of campus, put him in the mind of the word fawn. Whether she understood or not, Marge listened easily and with interest, saying always: Another one. Tell me more.

  Marge, in turn, told James winding tales about the all-girls boarding school she had gone to up in Connecticut, where she was always getting into trouble. She waxed poetic about the cigarettes she had sneaked, the adult books she had bought from the back room of the local bookstore and circulated around the dorms, the time they snuck out to the all-boys school five miles away and got caught on their way back, close to 4:00 A.M. As her punishment, she was made to recite Shakespeare for three hours without stopping, but when she was finished with her three hours she had kept going, just to spite the teachers. “Much ado about nothing,” she had said lightly when she finally gave it up, and had sauntered back to her dormitory, unscathed.

  The dichotomy between her spirit of rebellion and deep-seated bourgeois traditionalism was perhaps what made James interested in Marge so totally, if only because his own nurture-versus-nature conflict had been so much the opposite. Marge came from the kind of family who played tennis and stuck signs on their lawn for whichever Republican candidate was up for election, but she had managed to divorce herself from their more terrible philosophies during boarding school and had become liberal in all the senses, taking up her father’s passion for the arts but certainly not his politics; her mother’s affinity for bed skirts but not for bras (in those days, Marge often went sans lingerie). James, who had been raised on stroganoff and soup that somehow came from a box, was endeared and intrigued by the subtle ways in which Marge’s Connecticut childhood blurted out of her at certain moments: when a game was on, she cheered louder than anyone; or at the grocery store, where she wouldn’t buy certain, tackier brands, and favored rich, French foods—salade Niçoise, coq au vin—that one might find on the menu at a country club.

  “People who won’t use butter depress me,” she’d say. Or: “I don’t want to think about pâté, but I want to eat pâté, constantly.”

  She had a boarding school diligence; she often studied until four or five in the morning, but then later he’d go with her to a party on campus where she’d lay back in a whicker chair, puff on a marijuana cigarette, and say, James, this is how it should be. Just like this, and always.

  Back then, neither of them had any problem with being poor. They lived on fried eggs, cans of baked beans, and, because they thought it romantic to gorge on the thing that symbolized their new love, wild strawberries. They’d walk a mile to the water, where they’d fill baskets from a bush that only they knew about, tucked between the river and the Cross Bronx Expressway. The time of day was light orange, the air was diesel and geranium, and she was red, always red, beside him. Her hair, that first summer, was in a braid so long it hit the small of her back when she walked.

  On those walks, for the first time in his life, James felt real acceptance. His whole life he had been waiting for it, this perfect, cadmium-color feeling of affirmation. After a lifetime of being misunderstood, here he finally was, at the forefront of someone’s world. Marge’s eyes spoke of infinity. She was plain and brunette. She was red and sturdy. He’d give her a pink rose, a Popsicle, he’d draw her a picture and leave it on the kitchen table. When you spelled her name out, the colors were M (fuchsia), A (pure red), R (orange), G (forest green) and E (the brightest yellow). When they said good night, it did not mean good-bye. When he woke up next to her, said her name, he brightened.

  “Why on earth would you pick me?” James often asked her as they lay in bed. “Out of all the men in the world?”

  “Because you’re a weirdo,” she’d always say, putting her finger onto his chin or lip. “And I love a good weirdo.”

  The summer turned to fall and the strawberries stopped; they settled for a fruit man across the street who wore gloves and sold only small, easy-to-peel tangerines. They had just a year of school left, and each of them already knew it would not be enough; they wanted to stay in their bubble of art and learning and each other for as long as possible. And plus, neither of them knew what they might possibly do afterward; reality seemed surreal and daunting, something they’d stave off until they absolutely had to succumb to it.

  “Maybe just a little longer?” Marge would say.

  “What are a few more loans?” James agreed.

  So together they applied for graduate programs—Marge in fine arts and James in critical and curatorial studies—and together they were accepted. Marge began making beautiful, odd drawings using a mixture of tree clippings and magazine clippings; she called them her Natural Selection series. James became enamored with a course on exiled artists from the late 1700s, specifically with the art of Francisco de Goya. James immediately associated Goya with Picasso’s blue paintings—not for their content but for the color that was at their core, and for their sound, which was in both cases a bold, steady drum. His paper comparing the two painters, which only Marge could have convinced him (with a series of kisses that went from his neck to his pelvis) was valid and perfect and ready to submit, was published in the relatively-new-yet-already-important magazine Art Forum, an unexpected achievement that got James a whopping twenty-five dollars and a flash of orange confidence so strong that it made him want to do something outrageous.

  SEVEN: THE VILLAGE/VOICE

  If not quite outrageous, the proposal was at least spontaneous. James hadn’t remotely thought it through. It had only occurred to him in that very moment in the middle of the street on that very warm night in the summer of 1970, on their way home from a college bar where he had uncharacteristically taken shots of tequila with some artist friends of Marge’s, that Marge might have any interest in marrying him. Or that he might have any interest in marrying her, for that matter—the whole thing seemed generally archaic and conservative, and on an intellectual level, not for them. But what was intellectual about loving someone? And here was this woman, red and enormously beautiful, walking beside him with all her rosy flesh and interesting thoughts and brain he wanted to live inside, and here he was, so much sillier than her, probably undeserving, walking like a goofball, and yet she loved him, she wanted him, and he was a little drunk, and the moon was out. And there was no other way than this, nothing quite as big as this, to show her how completely he loved her, how gardenia this night felt, how wild strawberry he wanted to make her feel. There was nothing else that seemed so ultimate and right in this very moment. And so he kneeled down in front of her, into a pool of lamplight.

  “What are you doing, James?” Marge said with a nervous laugh.

  James wavered. He felt drunk on his happiness and the tequila, dizzy from both, and his vision was a hive of swarming red. Suddenly he couldn’t imagine what he would say; his heart cinched and stopped.

  “James?”

  “Marge!” he managed.

  “Jammmeess . . .” she said.

  “I have something I want to ask you!” he practically yelled. His k
nee was getting wet from the damp concrete. He might throw up.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I was wondering if you’d . . .” Back-of-throat dryness. Back-of-head dizziness. Be normal. Ask her to marry you like a normal person.

  “Yes, James?”

  “Be like this forever,” he huffed, thinking the worst was over. He got off his knee and hugged her, falling into her a little.

  “You’re drunk,” she said.

  “On your color!” he said, putting his hand on her face. “I’m drunk on your color because you are the color of pink wine!”

  She held him up with her firm shoulder. “You know when I worked at Canary’s they’d have us mix the red and the white together if someone ordered blush?” she said.

  “Marry me,” James said quietly.

  Marge’s cheeks sunk.

  They searched each other’s faces under the lights of the buildings and the shade of the trees and the lights of the stars and the shade of the night.

  James grabbed Marge’s face with both hands.

  “Come on,” he said, desperate now.

  Marge let a smile enter her shocked, wide face.

  “Marry me!” James yelled, shaking her shoulders. “Come on!”

  Marge’s eyes welled with tears and she let out another huge throaty laugh. “Are you . . . are you kidding?” she said.

  “Do you see me laughing?” he said.

  Marge laughed more, and started to cry, too. “You are laughing, James.”