Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  “That’s because it’s funny! I’m asking you to marry me! Me! Asking you! To marry me! It’s absurd! I’m absurd! I’m absurd and you’re wonderful! And here I am asking you—”

  “Yes,” she interrupted, kissing him with her salty mouth. “I say yes, you weirdo.”

  This yes was a promise. A midnight promise. A middle-of-the-road-at-midnight promise. Another of James’s wild sensations, crashing around the New York night, landing in his brain like a wonderful dream. But it was also a different kind of promise. A promise that, because the world had agreed collectively to formally acknowledge such promises, was to society. It was a promise to adulthood, a promise that James was a man, a promise that he would become the man he thought of when he thought of a husband: someone capable, reliable, strong-willed, good. Yes, they were young. Yes, James was inexperienced when it came to what he and Marge kept referring to as “real life”—life outside of an academic setting, where more counted than pages written per night or the grade you got on your term paper. Yes, there would be tough times, big fights, months where they didn’t have enough money, doubts and fears. But all of this was eclipsed by the symbolic yes: things were going to be different when they were married. When they put those rings on each other, they were going to grow up.

  After the wedding—an expensive affair hosted by Marge’s family in Connecticut—they moved from their tiny Columbia apartment into a little wooden house in the Village. Marge got a job as an art director at an advertising agency called—absurdly, James thought—Agency, having applied solely based on the fact that the job had art in its title. She seamlessly fell into a nine-to-five routine, slicking her hair back in new ways, coming home with beautiful groceries, talking about her coworkers with equal parts resentment and enjoyment. James, though, had had a rockier transition into reality. If you didn’t count writing articles for the Spectator, which hadn’t paid, James had never in his life held a job, and by certain definitions was practically unemployable. The jobs he did land that first year were of the odd sort—James was a movie-ticket ripper and a lightbulb screwer-inner and a travel agent’s assistant and a typist for a writer of astrology books. None of it worked out, and whether it was because of James’s odd mannerisms (wandering mind, poor sense of time and responsibility, constant references to things other people did not know or could not see) or his own boredom (typing did not hold his attention), he could not say. He understood that he was intelligent, but it was an odd sort of intelligence that others could not quite see, and he could not seem to figure out how that translated to a job, a real job in the real world.

  But simultaneously, he was discovering a whole new world, the world of downtown New York, which had only one requirement for acceptance: interest. And James had that in spades. Immediately upon moving to the Village, by sheer proximity to so much art—its makers and its dealers and its lovers—James’s mind erupted with a cacophony of ideas, colors, sensations, and images. He could hardly control himself: he wanted to taste the art, to feel it, to hold it, to have it. The right sculpture could still give him a hard-on (occasionally trips to the Met got embarrassing) and he continued to discover colors that were actually new, that he had never seen before.

  “It was like a bruised peach,” he’d try to explain to Marge, whose infatuation with his mental metaphors was waning very slightly, a fact that he did not care to admit to himself. “But if you mixed some honey in.”

  He stalked galleries in the daytime when no one else was there, standing for long stretches in front of pieces that made him hear beautiful music. He took photographs of the pieces and made them into slides that he could flip through in his study at night, keeping them in big brown leather binders, organized in an associative language that only James could understand. (LIGHT, read the spine of one binder. LIGHT BLUE, read another.) And though he was not big on crowds or schmoozing or hand shaking—in fact he was awkward and claustrophobic, often saying the exact wrong thing to the exact wrong person—he went to an opening almost every night; he simply could not get enough of what they opened for him.

  Every kind of everything was going on downtown in those years, and he’d see any of it, whether it was at the pristine Midtown museums or the shitty new spaces in SoHo. Cindy Sherman’s slick, sick realism; Robert Barry’s conceptual, whimsical way with words; Jenny Holzer’s very true Truisms (“A SENSE OF TIMING IS THE MARK OF GENIUS”; “AT TIMES YOUR UNCONSCIOUS IS TRUER THAN YOUR CONSCIOUS MIND”; “A LOT OF PROFESSIONALS ARE CRACKPOTS”), which were not displayed in a gallery but around the city on white broadsheets, exposing the city to its injustices and realities, to its face.

  James loved it all: art as object and art as action, stiff irony and loving expressionism, nonsensical tape recordings and super-self-conscious poetry performances; he loved the appropriators and the activists and everyone in between. Still, though, the largest part of his heart belonged to the painters. Paintings, though the stodgiest and definitely the flattest form, always gave James the most pleasure. He could do cerebral for only so long before he gravitated back toward the paintings, in whose faces he could see the most real passion. It seemed honest in a way that no other form, not even photography, did. It was closest, James thought, to his own practice: an individual’s perception of the universe, a map of a mind. When James read about a painting show in the Times, he often got to the gallery before the doors opened, stayed until they closed. For the hours in between he let the two-dimensional works turn on the many dimensions of his brain.

  When he looked at art or wrote about it, it was as if James’s brain were on fire: suddenly the entire universe seemed available and clear. He saw giant perspectives and tiny details. He felt gushes of wind and crawling ants, tasted burnt sugar and gazed at skies’ worth of stars. He forgot about all the parts of life that were not worthy of his thoughts: dirty laundry and dirty bathrooms, small favors for Marge and small talk with colleagues, phone calls to his mother and phone bills due last month. Everything disappeared except what mattered: the potent, powerful stuff of life, the heart explosions, the color, the truth.

  In his notebook, he jotted down the sensations he felt while looking at the work, no matter how nonsensical they might seem—Louise Fishman=strong smell of shampoo; Bill Rice=nocturnal mood, headache. When he got back to the house, with Marge already asleep, he would view the slides and type down his notes on his typewriter—version after version until it made some sort of sense as an art review. Every Friday he would seal one of the pieces into a manila envelope and walk it over to the New York Times building, where he dropped it in the arts editor’s mailbox. Upon releasing the envelope he always felt the same combination of convictions: that the editor would never read it and it would never see the light of day, and that it was bound to be read by someone, and that when that someone did read it, it would captivate them so completely they could not deny its publication.

  “I honestly can’t understand if what I’m writing is good or total shit,” he told Marge. “Which is ironic, isn’t it, considering that I’m trying to forge a career out of understanding what is good and what is total shit.”

  “It’s good,” Marge assured him over and over, though in her voice there was a tinge of How long can this go on for? “The best things can take the longest to discover, right? Don’t they?”

  “Let’s just hope this isn’t a Van Gogh situation,” James said. “Let’s just hope I’m not dead before I can afford to be alive.”

  Finally, after five years of odd jobs and rejections, James got a call from Seth, the New York Times arts editor’s squeaky assistant, who told him his article on the painter Mary Heilmann—whose Crayola-colored works made “this reviewer’s heart feel like it was drinking water”—was going to print tomorrow.

  “Without any edits?”

  “There were no edits necessary, Mr. Bennett,” squeaked the assistant. “The editor said it was fresh.”

  James had hung up the phone and jumped in the air. Then he sat on the floor. Then he leape
d up again and ran outside, looked up and down the street, realized he had gone out there for no reason at all and turned back around to go inside, and sat down at his desk to smile until he couldn’t anymore because his face hurt.

  He and Marge celebrated by going out to dinner at a medium-expensive place that had been recommended by “everyone”—meaning everyone at the Agency office, the sort of crowd that knew what frisée was, how to pronounce haricot vert—where Marge paid. Then they had sex twice.

  “You proud of me?” he said as they lay in bed.

  “Extremely,” she said, nuzzling her face into his chest.

  And that was enough for him. He could have died that day and had no regrets, with Marge’s extremely lingering in his ear.

  After the article ran, James received a check in the mail and alongside it a medium-size package. The check was for a thousand dollars and the package was a Mary Heilmann painting, one of the pink-and-black ones, with a note from Heilmann herself, reading, So your heart will never be thirsty. XO, MH. James spent the thousand immediately, on a drawing by the artist and poet Joe Brainard that he had seen at a makeshift gallery in the East Village the week before—a sketch of a box of cigarettes, which made James’s eyes haze over with a moony, adventurous blue. He hung the two pieces next to each other in his study—small emblems of his small success, reminding him daily that there was beauty in the world, and that he could feel that beauty in his body, and that he could put that beauty onto a page for others to experience. This was how he was meant to engage with society, he thought: from the little ship of his study, through the magnificent portal of the New York fucking Times.

  Over the next years, as the seventies wore on and James and Marge pushed into their late twenties and then, as if it happened overnight, their thirties, people began to notice the articles, and respond to them. They called it a sixth sense—James’s surreal ability to pick out the exact thing that made a work of art good or not, and in extrapolation the ability to hone in on that goodness from far away: years in advance or across a crowded room. James would look at a sculpture and find the exact arc where it became interesting (the arc that felt like an airport and blinked a whitish gray), the precise point on the map of a painting to stick his figurative pin, the mark that made the whole thing worth making at all. He wrote everything he saw behind his eyes when he looked at art—Brice Marden preoccupies me like a shoe that has stepped in gum, or Schnabel, not to be funny, has too many plates in the air—and people told him it was genius, that he was changing the very nature of art critique, that they wanted to take him out for a drink sometime, pick his brain, get his opinion on the new Sol LeWitt.

  All of this led to a sort of trust: the readers trusted him to tell them whether they should spend their Saturday at a show; the artists trusted him to write about them with intelligence and fairness—even if the reviews weren’t always positive, they always reflected something important and intrinsic to the work.

  “I appreciate you, you know that?” a painter named Audrey Flack told James at a gallery after-party. James, the week before, had written that Audrey’s hyperrealistic painting of a handful of wrapped candy was as stale as those sorts of candies get: the kinds that have been sitting too long in a grandmother’s foyer. James had been avoiding Audrey, but here she was, being nice.

  “You thought about it,” she said. “You thought about it, and you got it exactly right. The feminism is embodied in that precise staleness you wrote about—that stuffy, indoor feeling—and you got it.”

  This conversation led to a studio visit, where James ended up doing a complete 180 on Flack’s work, and leaving with one of her paintings—it depicted a shrine of sorts, incorporating Marilyn Monroe’s picture, a set of ripe pears, a burning candle, and a goblet full of silvery pearls. The painting, tucked under James’s arm, smelled of all of the chickens his mother had never roasted.

  Slowly at first and then exponentially, James’s bodies of work had started growing: both this collection of art and his writings. Like Heilmann, the artists often gifted him paintings. Any extra money he had went to buying pieces from artists he especially admired, who he felt deserved it more than he did. They were the geniuses, he always thought. He was just a genius finder.

  In direct correlation to his opinion mattering, the works of art he coveted and collected began mattering more, too. Around town, James’s personal collection became a topic of envy and desire. How had he procured all these works? Where did his impeccable taste come from? Who was his dealer? And why did he not sell? Dealers knocked on James’s door for a quick peek; calls came in from collectors and auction houses.

  “I heard you had a Ruth Kligman over there,” said one scary-sounding caller. “Mind if I come over and take a look?”

  “Oh, I don’t sell art,” James said shyly. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time.”

  “Damn right I wasted my time,” said the voice, and the phone hung up loudly on the other end.

  When it came to the collection, James operated under a strict and self-imposed ethical code, which stated that artworks were meant to provide pleasure, not income, and art was not about fame but about feeling. His modus operandi was simple: buy pieces he loved and could (at least sort of) afford. Nothing more. If they appreciated in value (and many of them had, or would), that was fine. But the not-selling part was crucial—James took to his collection as if it were a work of art itself; selling a piece could mean ruining the whole composition. He did not want to be known as a man who simply reviewed art or owned art, but as a man who understood it. Who breathed it, even.

  He always felt a bit wobbly about the attention; he wasn’t in this to be noticed, he was in it to be true to himself and to the artists he loved, and to fulfill his oblique yearning to leave an impression on the world. He had discovered early on that there was a smarmy nature to much of the New York art scene—the dealers who just wanted their cut; the tastemakers who wanted to shape culture into capital; the friends of the artists who followed the artists around, trying in vain to bask in their celebrity, or at least their free champagne. But there was an element of the whole thing that James secretly took pleasure in: it felt good to be noticed, to be understood. For the first time in his life, he was not the strange bird, the odd duck, the loopy man in the corner, staring at a painting until the gallery closed. Instead, inadvertently, he was becoming part of an in-crowd. He was one of the tastemakers. He, James Bennett, had actual power of influence, which he knew had to do with the very thing that used to make him uncool growing up: his affliction. What had once been his handicap was now what allowed him to communicate with art in the way he did, to see things in a way that others couldn’t, to choose the right paintings for his house and to write about them in a way no one else could.

  Not to mention, he saw out of the corner of his eye, the pleasure Marge got out of even the most moderate of his successes.

  “James has a piece coming out today!” he overheard her telling her mother on the phone. This was novel, considering that for years she had avoided uttering his name to her mother, who only worried about when that son-in-law of hers was going to get a real job.

  “Front page!” Marge bragged. “Keep an eye out, okay, Mom?”

  Marge didn’t seem to mind that she had to pick up most of the slack moneywise (art writing paid enough but never more than that, and what James earned was more than likely spent on buying more art). She believed in him, she said, and she knew doing the thing he loved would pay off eventually. In a special moment of pride (and perhaps a better understanding of personal presentation) Marge bought him a white suit at Bloomingdale’s, for more formal events or openings. He began to wear it quite often, despite that looking at it in the mirror made him smell ammonia and too-strong cologne.

  But occasionally, when rent was due, for example, Marge was forced to plead with him about his art habit.

  “We’re sort of going broke, James,” she’d say. “Do you see that we are sort of going broke?”

>   “I know, Marge, I know. It’s just, isn’t it stunning?”

  That particular “it” could be anything from a miniature sketch by Richard Diebenkorn that James had ordered from California, or a mammoth spray-painted piece of cardboard by a young street artist that covered much of the living room’s east wall, which James had insisted on paying the kid a thousand dollars for.

  “Of course it’s stunning,” Marge said. “But we have to live, you know? What good is art if we can’t live to enjoy it?”

  “But what good is life without art?” James said, bringing her in for a hug.

  “I just get worried,” she said, letting him kiss her head. “We’re in our thirties.”

  “So?”

  “So we’re in our thirties!”

  “Tell me what being in our thirties means,” James said. “Considering it is almost 1980 and we live in New York City; I don’t think the suburban time line need apply to us.”

  “James!” Marge said, hitting him playfully. “I want a teeny baby!”

  “I’ll give you a teeny baby,” he said, but in a way that referred more to their joke and less to real life.

  Marge leaned back and looked at him. “I’m being serious, James. Can you tell from my eyes?”

  James put his finger on her chin and squinted.

  “Let me check,” he said.

  And here was their biggest real-life endeavor: Marge was now carrying four months’ worth of teeny baby inside of her—the size of an avocado, according to the woman who’d administered the sonogram that morning. To Winona’s party Marge had worn a burgundy dress, of the sort that hugged her shape rather than hiding it, and James, as if he were a kid again, found himself mentally aroused when he looked at her for too long. Marge’s stomach was soft and low, like a pile of sloping sand. Her breasts had grown in size and confidence, seeming to dictate to the lowly citizens (her feet, her back, her butt cheeks) how to stand and how to move. Her face had widened slightly, and paled. Layers of darkness had amassed under her eyes, and the result was something . . . well, pomegranate. Where she had felt strawberry to James before—wild and small and individual—she now felt pomegranate: she was holding a million seeds of new, red life.