Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  The whole pregnancy thing had felt abstract to James until just today. He had been unable to immerse himself in the pure joy of it, and had even had the private urge to not think about it, since when he did he only seemed to worry. He worried that he would be a bad father, or worse, that he would not feel for his son or daughter the way he should, which was totally in love and in awe. He also selfishly wondered if a baby would transform his life into something he never signed up for, that his existence would shift completely to diaper duty and stroller rolling, and that he would not have time for or the urge to write. If he were to be completely honest, though of course with Marge he was not, he might go as far to admit that he was counting down his months and days of freedom, mentally cringing as they lapsed.

  But today, when the technician had showed them the grainy sonogram, James had actually cried with happiness. It was the first ultrasound that had actually revealed something that made sense to James—a hand, a nose, a beating heart—and it had physically made his own heart ache. It was visually stunning: a white smudgy bean in the deep cone of black, like a negative of a photograph. The black cone made him hear his father’s mean voice, but the white bean made him taste salt, as if he had just run a marathon and was licking his lips of his own sweat. It was attachment to nature and commitment to the future. It was real. The baby was real life. And it was a miracle. And it was precisely this intersection of reality and miracle that kept James in awe of this life: a life that was indeed built with equal parts biology and beauty.

  “Should we?” Marge said now, nudging her head toward Winona’s fogging glass door. Her voice was sticky and soft.

  “We should,” he said.

  Though it was freezing out, Winona’s guests were gathering outside, on the convent’s balcony, which was adorned with perilous-looking wrought-iron sculptures. James could spot the artists from a mile away: there was David Salle in his Picasso-inspired striped shirt, images of bodies projected on top of and above him, just like in his paintings. There was Baldessari, big and white-haired, who did not know how to dress for the cold; James could feel the California air radiating through his T-shirt, even from behind the glass. There was Keith Haring, whose mouse-ish size did not affect the bigness of his presence; when James looked at him, he saw entire cosmos.

  What would happen to them all this year? How would 1980 change them, morph them, dictate their fates? Sometimes James worried for them, the artists he so loved and admired. The world, especially the art world, was changing; he could feel it. The city was handing out promises, dangling fame in front of even the most radical artists’ noses; in turn, a sharpness was being dulled. The brilliant bohemia he’d discovered when he’d moved to the Village had been ratcheted up a notch; pop had paved the way for commercialism and plastic and shine; there was a new air of possibility and a new wave of capital coming in, which gave the scene a new edge. There was the notion, now, that one could make it; James had watched the luckier artists get snatched from the rubble and lifted into the cloud of success. The successful left behind them a residue of opportunity: the surreal, toxic cloud of fame and fortune that both motivated and toppled the rest of them. Even the number 8 of 1980 felt glossy and airy and shiny in his mind, like an unpoppable balloon, nothing like its bony predecessor, 7. The year ahead would either ooze with brightness or deflate with emptiness, or perhaps both. Only time—specifically midnight—would tell.

  James followed Marge to the coatroom—Winona had dedicated a whole nun’s quarters to other people’s coats—and grabbed his own. It only occurred to him after Marge had already wrenched her first arm in to help her with hers; he pulled it over her other shoulder. As they headed toward the door they passed a blue-walled room, and something caught James’s eye. A white firework, the smell of smoke. The audible, wonderful flapping of butterfly wings. James got the quickest glimpse of a young man, standing in the blue room behind a large mahogany desk, a black mole jutting from his face and his eyes glossing with what looked to be tears, before Marge tugged on James’s sleeve and pulled him toward the door to the balcony.

  Outside, someone yelled, “Four minutes!” which was followed by a giddy buzz of chatter. A man in a ruler-wide red tie circled with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, topping off people’s skinny glasses. Marge looked up at James. She was shivering and smiling. James felt the chill of the night on his cheeks, felt Marge’s soft body leaning in against his.

  “Our year,” Marge said.

  “Our year,” James echoed, but his mind was back inside. Who was that man? And how could James make his way back into Winona’s convent to find out? He’d bathroom-break himself away from Marge, through the crowd, the glass doors. He’d slither up to the blue room, peek his head inside. No one would be there, but the residue would have lingered: like when you close your eyes against the glare but the shape of the sun is still there. The man would be gone, but James would find him again. He would scour the party and the city until he did. But not before he kissed his beautiful wife, just as the clock moved the world into a new decade. Not before, somewhere in the distance, a ball was dropped.

  ALREADY FAMOUS

  Just hours before midnight, at the squat on East Seventh Street, Raul Engales was in the corner of the Big Room, being touched on the biceps by two barely dressed women. Some people called him a ladies’ man, which he didn’t mind because it was true. His looks alone—warm skin, squinted umber eyes, restless eyebrows, and a swell of jet-black hair—gave women the impression that he was as sensitive as he was serious, that his passion would outweigh his pitfalls, and that he would transport them, by way of the thick, chugging train of his shorter-than-average-but-somehow-still-dominating body, to some exotic locale that they’d never even heard of. He knew this, just as he knew the power of the mole on the right side of his face, that pointless piece of black flesh that he had once hated but had come to cherish; it seemed to have some sort of planetary pull. He kept the women who gravitated toward it in his orbit only long enough to enjoy the pleasure of them; anything beyond pleasure was not worth his time. Women are like painting, he had been known to say if he was drunk enough. You want to live inside them while you are doing them. Then maybe you never want to look at them again.

  It was New Year’s Eve, the squat’s annual blowout party. Hardly necessary to nominate it as such, Engales thought, since every night at the squat was a party, blowout or otherwise. He was here not because he especially wanted to be but because he was always here. The squat, with its seven to twelve rotating residents, had become a sort of second home for Engales. Its core inhabitants: nonmonogamous conceptual artists Toby and Regina, performance artist and chain-smoker Horatio Caldas, sculptor and throat singer and professional grower of her own hair Selma Saint Regis, Swedish twins named Mans and Hans who had immaculate bodies and a propensity for lighting things on fire, three flamboyant parrots who squawked not-your-average obscenities at newcomers (Baby’s balls sack! Mongoose! Rug muncher! Failed artist!) . . . this was who he surrounded himself with. They were a family of misfits, and he was what they referred to as an “orphan”: one of the myriad artists whom they had agreed to take in, get drunk, talk about and make art with, but who didn’t live on the premises. This was the case not only because he had been gifted a rent-free apartment by a friend-of-a-friend Frenchman, but also because he didn’t believe in shitting where he ate. As with his women, he sought pleasure, not headache, and with any commitment to anyone else, such as living in a cement-floored, windowpane-less ex-factory with ten other people, headache was inevitable.

  Now, though it was hardly nine, Engales could already feel an energetic fuss in the room: the frenetic vibrations of people trying to place themselves in proximity to the right lips before midnight, so that when the time came to enter into the future they would not have to do it alone. But lips did not concern him just now; he had his pick of two pairs, and neither was appealing. The two women, whose sentences were all spoken like questions, were not holding his attention. He scanned t
he crowded room for something that might, and though many things were attention-grabbing—Selma painting her nipples with glow-in-the-dark paint, one of the Swedes lighting a clear liquid on fire in a small glass—none of it was attention-holding. Raul itched for something novel, something revelatory. It didn’t have to be a woman. It was the brink of a New Year, and he longed to cross over into it a new man. A man people knew about, paid attention to. Not only a ladies’ man, but a people’s man. Someone who mattered. A real artist.

  At the edge of the room, just near the door, he saw the top of a hedge of hair, floating into the crowd. He recognized the hair: huge and effervescent, dominating. It was Rumi Gibraltar, who he had met outside a party last summer; she had been lounging on the stoop outside the building as if it were a daybed, in a shirt that looked to have been made from lacy napkins. Rumi, the curator who had promised him she’d come to his studio to see his paintings. Rumi, who had not kept that promise. Rumi, whose lips he would put himself in proximity to sometime before midnight, if not for pleasure then for business: he needed her to get him a show.

  The woman on his right reached her face up toward his, lips first. He ignored her and shed both of the women as if they were clothing, making his way toward Rumi. She was taller than him and regal. Her hair was a masterpiece.

  “Well hello, Ms. No-Show,” he said when her eyes found his.

  “Well hello, Mr. Delaroche,” she said. She was referencing the night when they had met, when Engales had professed to her that he was a painter, and she had said to him flatly, “Don’t you know that painting is dead?”

  When he appeared confused she had gone on: Didn’t he know Delaroche? No? Well he should look him up, because painting has been dead since 1839! When Engales had looked it up, in an encyclopedia at the NYU library the following week, he had found that Paul Delaroche had declared the whole form of painting obsolete after the invention of an early form of photography.

  “I found his old ass in the encyclopedia,” Engales said now.

  “A studious one,” she said.

  “His argument doesn’t hold up.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “There are two kinds of painters. The painter who paints to decorate, and the painter who paints to paint. Photography would only make any sort of problem for the first kind of painter.”

  “A studious and actually smart one. Good combination.”

  “Why haven’t you come to see me?”

  “I am a very busy woman,” she said, her eyes leveling into him, filled with what looked like lusty promise.

  “I like busy women,” he said.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “I have a good idea,” Engales said impulsively.

  “Artists always think they have good ideas.”

  “Come see my paintings now. Come to my studio.”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” she said.

  “An observant one,” he said.

  “We’re at a party,” she said.

  “Don’t you know that parties are dead?” he said.

  Rumi smiled with one half of her mouth: her first concession.

  Before she could protest, Engales grabbed her thin arm, took her out into the icy night. Rats pitched from their path as they made their way across town on East Seventh. The cops were out in packs, scanning arrogantly, braced for the worst after what had happened last year: mobs in Times Square, a few murders, even. A woman on Broadway called to a man she was separating from regretfully, “Midnight! The Eagle! Find me! You promise?” Up Broadway to Washington Place, where it crossed with Mercer, through the locked door and up the dark stairwell to the studio Engales had come to call his own.

  Engales had learned of the NYU studios from a woman he’d slept with on his third day in New York, an art student with a thick pout and a set of inappropriate pigtails, whom he had met at the Laundromat That Never Sleeps. The concept of the Laundromat had eluded him, and he had fumbled with the quarters, the locks on the washers, the darks, the lights, the little packets of soap they sold in vending machines.

  “Why are you so bad at laundry?” the girl had asked, while folding a shirt that looked to belong to a baby.

  “Laundry is boring,” Engales had replied, knowing immediately upon looking her over—lanky limbs, a miniature skirt, the long dark pigtails framing her long young face—that they would sleep together.

  “Everything’s boring,” she had said with a tone that showed she might mean it. When you were as young as she was—probably eighteen or nineteen, he guessed, when time seemed endless and unbreakable and empty—you still had the potential to be so bored. Though he was only twenty-three himself at that point, the girl made Engales feel old. He had perhaps become old, in spirit at least, much earlier: when your parents die, so does the idea of infinite time on the planet. Instead, you are forced into becoming weirdly wise, gaining too soon the knowledge that life is both precious and perfectly meaningless, neither philosophy leaving much room for boredom.

  “Not everything,” he had said, pressing her up against a spinning dryer. They left their laundry in the moldy baskets meant for transporting it from washer to dryer and went upstairs to his hotel room. The walls were papered with roses and the air was musty, and from the next room, as they had the hasty sort of sex you have with people you don’t respect, they could hear the occasional scream.

  “So what’s it like being a rich kid?” he had asked the girl after they had finished.

  “What do you mean?” she had said.

  “Well, you go to that fancy university, you wear these, what do you call them?” He flopped one of her pigtails with his fingers.

  “Pigtails,” she said quietly.

  “Pigtails!” He laughed. “Jesus.”

  “I don’t even know why my parents pay for it,” she said then, with a sort of shy defiance, propping herself up on the bed and tugging the rubber bands out of her hair. “I mean they hardly teach you anything. If my parents weren’t such assholes I’d just teach myself the same stuff. Just walk into NYU and teach myself how to draw.”

  Engales’s eyes were distant, looking at the roses on the wall, on whose two-dimensional petals two mosquitoes were courting each other spastically. He pushed the girl away—she was attempting to fondle his earlobe—and stood up. He suddenly very much disliked this person whom he was currently lying in bed with, but could she be on to something? He had no money at all to buy any paint or supplies. He had nothing, and nothing to lose. He looked at the girl’s breasts, which were large and falling down to one side, like a pair of mating walruses; he wanted to paint the walruses, give them mustaches. Could he just walk into a school full of rich kids and act like he went there? Set up shop? When the pigtailed girl went to the bathroom, he nabbed the key from her pant pocket whose brass face read STUDIO. He might as well try.

  The next day he had shaved his scruffy face and stolen a backpack from a sporting goods shop on Broadway, then walked confidently past a very fat security guard who was busy studying his own stomach. After some wandering—through poorly lit corridors that smelled like aging books and empty rooms lined with green metal cabinets—he found the painting studio, unlocked and filled with sunlight. Only two harmless-looking students were working, and he staked out the prime real estate: a corner easel with the most light, which poured onto the easel from two large windows.

  Engales was in awe of his discovery: this place was his idea of heaven. He had never had an easel before; he had never even painted on canvas. All of his painting back home had taken place inside of sticky notebooks or on butcher paper, tacked to the walls of his dead parents’ bedroom. This place had canvas you could just take, on a huge roll in the corner, and big rolls of good paper, too, and cans of turpentine, and scissors and paper cutters and wooden models of human bodies and hands whose digits moved into whatever position you wanted them to. He looked to one of the students, who was quietly painting in her own corner, for confirmation that this was indeed real, or to see if she might
be as excited about all of this as he was, but she was busy getting very close to her canvas and fogging her glasses with her own breath, the same breath he would smell when he took her to bed later that week. As for the Pigtail girl, he saw her only once on campus after that; she glared at him in a way that suggested she hated him for never calling her back, then twitched her mouth in a way that suggested she’d never tell his imposter’s secret to a soul.

  Now Engales used the Pigtail Key to let Rumi, curator extraordinaire and very rare beauty, into the studio, at close to eleven on New Year’s Eve. Of course, Engales was planning on a private experience—a little tour of his work, a little taking off of clothes. But to his surprise, the lights were on and he could hear Arlene’s hippie music drifting from her back corner.

  “You’re here?” he yelled back to her.

  “Where the fuck else would I be?” Arlene said in the way that Arlene said everything, with unapologetic crassness. He loved Arlene’s way of speaking, which he had come to know was a distinctly New York accent: complaining vowels, absent R’s, words emerging sideways from somewhere in her bottom jaw.

  “At a party? Being a normal person? It’s New Year’s!”

  “It’s a real shame that I’m not a normal person,” she said, tossing her fat brush into a tin canister. “A serious fucking shame.”

  Engales had met Arlene on his second day in the studio, and they had become fast, if unexpected, friends. He had guessed that she was in her late forties, from the single gray streak in her red hair and the shallow lines forking out around her eyes, and he had worried that she was the boss of the studio, ready to kick him out of his newfound art mecca.