Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  Lucy gave everything new energy, a new perspective. The sour-smelling herbs of Chinatown, the sweat on the subway, the sirens at night: the grossest of sensations became appealing to him, with her there to give them meaning. The all-night excursions to the Mudd Club or Max’s became rife with stolen moments of pleasure; they’d find each other in a crowd and somehow it would feel new each time, like they’d just met right then. (I found a blade of grass tacked to the bathroom wall, she’d say. It was so beautiful.) They’d escape together back to his apartment, where she’d lie in bed and watch an enormous moth in the upper corner of the room—they’d named him Max, after the venue where they had just spent the night gawking over at Andy Warhol’s table, then not caring about Andy Warhol because they had each other. And then he’d start painting. It could be midnight or morning when they got home, but he’d always start painting. You’re a maniac, she’d say. You’re a mouse, he’d say with a grin. The paintings piled up around them, their own little fort.

  Something would happen with the paintings, this much was clear. Both of them could feel it: the pressure that the paintings built, the inevitability of their success; it was only a matter of when. The idea of fame hovered over him. Lucy stroked that idea, cradled it and kissed it; her belief in him was total. And when Winona George called, the idea of fame consolidating into a mass and then landing, they leaped around the apartment like children, their hands wrapped around each other’s forearms, their blood so bubbly they felt drunk.

  But as the show grew nearer, Engales had become frazzled and undone, and Lucy’s presence, her eyes on the paintings and her body in the room, became a reminder that her love for the paintings was possibly not enough. There was a whole world in which he could fail, and if he did, she would be witness to that failure. He imagined this James Bennett person reviewing the show, what he might say. If he panned it, could Engales handle it? And if he glorified it, could he handle that, either? Painting had been his salvation through everything, and now it was going to be judged, potentially wrecked, by a public he didn’t necessarily trust. The apartment had become full of these humming doubts. Flies buzzed around and got caught in mounds of paint. Lucy buzzed around, too, annoying him now. Suddenly, under the stress of the world outside their bubble, Lucy’s presence had become a liability.

  “I’ll miss you too much,” she’d said before he’d left for the studio this morning, still lying naked in the bed, draped in the sheet of early fall light.

  “Don’t,” he’d said.

  The studio smelled like it always did, turpentine and cleaning fluid, plus Arlene: her signature combination of body odor, Egyptian musk, and yerba maté, which, inspired by Engales’s Argentineanism, she had started drinking out of a gourd. Arlene had been acting different since New Year’s, unsettled and easily annoyed, and she had developed a new antagonism toward Engales that he was pretty sure had to do with Lucy. He was spending too much time with that girl, she’d said more than once. And not enough time in the studio.

  “I’m painting more than ever,” he told her calmly each time, but she shook her head.

  “I’m just saying nothing great ever came from being in love,” she’d said.

  Engales had given her a skeptical look and she had yelled, “It’s true! Name one genius thing that came out of someone fucking their way into oblivion!”

  “Human life?” he had said, with as much actual annoyance as humor.

  “Human life is crap,” she had said, and then she had mumbled something under her breath, and Engales could have sworn it had the tone of a confession, though he couldn’t be sure.

  Now Arlene stood wide-legged on her wobbly ladder, holding her gourd in one hand and her brush in the other. Her underarm hair spurted out in a shock of orange, and Engales imagined painting that hair—a spiky orange scribble with a dry-bristled brush. He felt a softness for her even as he ignored her; he probably always would. He pulled a painting of a limp-faced Chinese woman, holding a head of bok choy like a trophy, from the back of his unfinished stack.

  He had seen the Chinese woman on his first week in New York City, and though that was years ago now, he still remembered her face almost perfectly. One part of the face was drooping, as if the skin that covered it had lost all elasticity, and the fat of the cheek had migrated down into the hammock of loose skin. He had stared at her for probably too long, until she looked up from her bok choy and directly at him. He saw in her eyes the sort of pain that he guessed was reserved for the deformed; the eyes seemed to say, This is how it is, how it will always be, and there’s nothing I can do about it except keep living. He pitied her. He remembered the pity just as well as he remembered the face. He also remembered how he had felt the urge to smile at her because of this pity, but had then forced himself to revoke the pity and the smile, which seemed to satisfy her: she had toasted him with her leafy greens. It was then, on his very first day, that he knew he had found his place in New York, a place for the deranged and wrecked and bold, a place where pity couldn’t exist if it wanted to because there would have to be too much of it. The woman had wobbled away with her cloth bags, and as she did, he thought he heard her begin to sing.

  These were the kinds of moments that popped up again and again in Engales’s artwork; these were the kinds of people who populated his life with their flaws. He loved the flaws; they were invariably the most interesting parts of people’s faces and bodies, the parts that held the strangest lines, the most beautiful shadows. Wounds and deformities and cracks and boils and stomachs: this was the stuff that moved Engales. Usually while he detailed a broken nose or sketched a lumpy body he felt as if he was zeroing in on what it meant to be alive. He could hear his father saying: The scratches are what makes a life.

  He had started painting portraits the year his parents died, thanks to an obese and kind art teacher named Señor Romano. Aside from English, art was the only class he never skipped, much because Romano had taken a special liking to him that was beyond the pity that the other teachers doled out—the same pity that he hated to feel in any form now. If Romano pitied him, it had never shown; he seemed to understand that what Raul wanted was to be treated like a human, not a child who had lost his parents. In class, they did boring drawing projects and elementary color wheels, but when Señor Romano saw the way Raul engaged with the materials—his sketches of fruit became deranged faces, he cut up his color wheels and collaged them together to make an entirely new rainbow—he sent Raul home with a wooden briefcase full of half-squeezed bottles of oil paint and used brushes. “This doesn’t come out with water,” Señor Romano had told him, his only piece of instruction. He also gave him a tin of turpentine and a new name; he’d call him by his last name, Engales. That would be his artist’s name.

  Engales had begged paper off Maurizio, the butcher down the block. Maurizio, like everyone else in the neighborhood, would give Raul or Franca most anything they wanted; he and his sister only had to blink their eyes like the orphans they were. They got free steak from Maurizio; gross, free candies from the grocer; free bread from the bakery where Franca worked. When Raul got home he taped a sheet of the butcher paper to the wall of his bedroom and squirted some of the paints onto one of his mother’s china plates. Here was one perk of having dead parents: you could paint with the china, and use the walls as your easel. The first thing that came to his mind to paint was Señor Romano himself: his tomato cheeks, his puffy eyelids, his big body, which filled the huge piece of butcher paper. He started with Romano’s edges, and then he found himself zooming in on small areas he had noticed: the deep lines around Romano’s eyes, the handsome lips, the tie that slung down over his huge stomach and was covered in a paisley pattern that Engales remembered almost photographically. It felt so completely natural to him it was as if he wasn’t even in control of his own hand, as if the hand were re-creating Romano all on its own. He could see Romano there in the room with him, and he could feel him. For the first time since his parents had died, he did not feel entirely alone.


  The painting then became obsessive. He painted after school and into the night. He asked Romano for more supplies, and with his own money, Romano bought him an entire stock of brand-new paints and brushes to add to the wooden box. Engales populated his bedroom with figures: the lady in the red hat who he passed on the street on his way to school; the old man who made them lemonades at Café Crocodile, whom they called El Jefe; Maurizio, whose face was shaped like a laugh; the girl he thought was beautiful in his English class, whose top lip looked like a half-moon. He painted tens and perhaps hundreds of portraits of his sister, who was the only one who would actually sit for him: Franca in a party hat; Franca wearing their father’s suit; Franca with a flower in her mouth like a tango dancer; Franca frowning, because that was how he knew her face the best. When his bedroom walls became too small to hold all the large sheets of paper, he began to store them under his bed in big stacks. One morning he woke up to see that Franca had found his stash, and that the paintings had been pinned up on every empty wall throughout the house. He found Franca herself standing in the hallway outside their parents’ bedroom, touching a rendition of her own face.

  The painting also did something else: it pointed toward escape. Just a month before he died, Engales’s father had spent a week in New York City and had returned with an infectious enthusiasm for the place. “It’s swarming with artists and musicians and writers,” Braulio had reported over dinner. “I mean, just listen to this!” Engales’s father then put on a flamboyant jazz record that bipped and bopped and hiccupped and screeched on the player through the rest of Braulio’s exotic descriptions of the far-off city: underground poetry rooms, fantastic fashion, smoke that rose like breath from the holes in the street. Taken by his father’s excitement, fourteen-year-old Raul asked bluntly, “When can I go?” Braulio chuckled, leaned back, wiped steak sauce from his big face. “Whenever you want, son. Thanks to your fetal impatience, you can go to America whenever you see properly fit.” Raul had been born a month before his due date, at the tail end of his parents’ stay there, and it had become one of their little family jokes: Raul was born for New York City.

  And now here he was: a part of that world his father had described, or at least about to be a part of it, if he could bring himself to finish this Chinese woman’s bulbous cheek. He paid special attention to the cheek, painstakingly adding wrinkles, highlighting it just right. But then he had been working on it for hours and it wasn’t just right. It wasn’t the woman who he remembered. The face did not feel like her face. Instead of acknowledging the viewer with forgiveness, she held a look of mistrust. Where was it coming from? Her eyes? The creases around her mouth? The cheek itself?

  He stood back to take a look. The flaw didn’t feel like a flaw, it felt planned.

  The Winona George complex, Arlene had named the uneasiness he felt now, the whirlpool of doubt that had begun to circulate in the studio and in his head. He had always wanted exactly what he had now: to be able to paint for a reason. But now that he had one, he felt that the reason was arbitrary, which made the painting seem that way.

  A panic swept through him, and he felt his confidence sliding down the epic slope of almost-failure toward failure itself. Quickly the panic mixed with the fear he had felt in his dream that morning, creating a spiral of things to add to Franca’s list. Left his sister with a stupid, spineless husband in a country that was practically self-destructing. Left without turning around to look at her, without saying good-bye. Never returning her letter, never finding out her big news. Why was he thinking about her now?

  From across the room, he heard Arlene yell: “Do something else, Raul.”

  This was code for one of Arlene’s earliest studio lessons: when you start doubting, you stop painting. You eat a sandwich, walk around the block, do jumping jacks, make sketches. Anything to circumnavigate the doubt, change its course. Doubt was the fucking enemy, Arlene said. Of all good art.

  Though Engales was not in the mood to listen to Arlene, he knew she was right; the doubt was feeding off the strange morning, filling him quickly, sinking him. But he couldn’t take a walk—he had so much to do. He had to make the sketches for his four new paintings, so he decided to cut paper. They had only bulk paper at the studio, which came in enormous sheets, which he would rip, then rip again, then stack, then cut all at once, until he had a bunch of rough-edged squares. When he had ripped the whole roll, he inserted his book-size stack into the guillotine, a paper cutter meant to cut entire volumes, in the darker corner of the studio. He slid the paper to the back edge of the cutter with his hand.

  There was a flash. It was silver and slick: a mirror breaking; a window slamming shut. Franca’s body went limp in his arms. His heart stopped. His sister’s heart stopped. Broken music played from somewhere outside. When he looked up, his hand was lying on the counter behind the blade of the guillotine, completely severed from the rest of his body.

  For an entire minute, he glares at it. The thick, silver blade, separating one part of him from the other. The wall of the metal up against the hair and skin of his arm. Arlene’s red hair is flying toward him like a fire. Her long skirt with the elephants on it. A scream from one of the students cracks through the heavy air. On the windows, fog spreads and shrinks with the collective breath of the room. His arm, cut just under the elbow, is a cross section of red and white, now bleeding out over the counter and onto the floor.

  Arlene wraps the stump of his wrist in a paint rag, her mouth open with frenzied, frantic questions, but Engales cannot hear or see her. Instead, he sees Franca’s face in her face: strewn with sadness because she has dropped a carton of eggs. The rag turns orange rapidly, the stain of blood blooming out to its edges. Franca watches the orange yolk bleed into the sidewalk’s veins. Everything goes white, then red, then white. Engales walks on ahead of her. Hurry up, egghead. They’re just eggs. He vomits, greenish, into the stainless-steel sink.

  Arlene knots the hand itself into another rag and places the bundle into a tin canister used for paintbrushes. His dead fingers blacken in the turpentine. He opens his mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. There is his painting hand in a can full of paintbrushes. There is the gaping hole of his mouth.

  NO MORE MIDNIGHT COCA-COLA

  It is a dream. This was what Lucy told herself when she showed up at St. Vincent’s hospital, coatless, still slightly high from a bump of cocaine Random Randy had given her at the bar just before she’d taken Arlene’s call. The cocaine had felt necessary at the time, a little bump to lift her just a little bit above her circumstance: the front end of her regular Tuesday-night shift, where she was dealing with the 4:00 P.M.–ers, those downtrodden enough to seek afternoon refuge in whiskey and Lucy’s tits. But now the drugs only contributed to the sense that the scene she was living in could not be real. It was only dreams that rooms turned into other rooms so quickly and without transition, that the log cabin of the Eagle could transform into the stark, bright hall of St. Vincent’s hospital in what felt like one seamless instant. It was only in dreams that thin, bruised men, flanked by turquoise curtains and dingy bedside lamps, looked out on you from their rooms as if their diseases were your fault: the sad, almost-ghosts of an epidemic you knew close to nothing about. And it was only in dreams—or perhaps only nightmares—when you saw something like what Lucy saw in the papery bed of room 1313: her lover, sleeping beside the bandaged stump of his own arm, its tip bright red with tenacious blood.

  “Finally,” said a voice. Arlene’s New Yorker voice, always adding O’s in where they didn’t belong. F-O-inally. Lucy gulped. That Arlene did not like Lucy was as much a fact as the bloody stump, which Lucy could not take her eyes off of as she approached.

  “I came as fast as I could,” she said to Arlene, as if it mattered what she said to Arlene. “I ran here.”

  From the foot of the bed, Lucy looked up its lumpy landscape to her lover’s face: so peaceful in sleep, his deep pores filled with paint or dirt, that mouth that she had so recently
kissed so carelessly, the way you kissed when you assumed there were endless kisses, a lifetime of them even. Her eyes welled and sprung with tears, which she attempted unsuccessfully to swat away with her sleeve.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Arlene said from her chair by the bed. Lucy did her best to ignore Arlene, but Arlene was right. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus was right.