Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  He ducked back into his corner. His skin grew hot and his head slammed with barbaric thoughts: run after her; smack her with the stump of his arm; find a knife somehow, put it in the back of the white suit. But instead, he followed them. In the shadows, like a creepy, crippled spy. They were walking in synch and talking and laughing. The man—Engales had still not seen his face—was telling some sort of story, gesticulating with his pale hands. On the back of the white suit jacket, Engales noted a black stain, as if the man had sat in paint. Slob, Engales thought. And to take the judgment a step further: Nobody wears a white suit anymore. They were on Second Avenue now. And they were at East Tenth now. And then they were in front of Engales’s own apartment now. And then they were BOTH. GOING. INSIDE.

  As the heavy door of his own apartment building slammed behind them, Engales heaved out of his shadow and made a noise with his mouth that to anyone watching would have been called a roar, but to him felt like the only thing available, the last noise left in the world. He tried to conjure what he had felt in the hospital: He did not want her. He did not want her. He did not want her. And yet it didn’t feel that way. He suddenly wanted her desperately, hatefully, stupidly, entirely. He wanted to feel how he had felt with her before this all happened: invincible, like a comet that could only move forward and would never burn out. He wanted to dance with her at Eileen’s and have breakfast with her at Binibon, and he wanted to touch her skin with both of his hands, wrapping them around her little body with complete, satisfying control. He wanted to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge with her, like they had done only a few weeks ago, up the slow, red hill of it and into a sea of men with black hats and curls dangling from their heads like springs, men he would paint later that night. He wanted to be in the middle of the bridge again, telling her about his dream. He would rise to the top, he had said in the middle of the bridge, just as the late summer breeze had picked up. Like a piece of gold in a pan full of sand. It was something he had never said out loud before, to anyone, but she made him want to say it. He would rise to the top, he said again, this time out into the East River, to the five boroughs, to the skyline, to the sky. Like a piece of gold in a pan full of sand.

  But that was not his fate, was it? And did it take something like this—a total and complete ruining—to begin to acknowledge that fate existed at all, and that a terrible one had befallen him? An image of Lucy’s armpit flashed into his head. That little hollow space: a gray, intimate shadow. He imagined her lifting her shirt. Tilting her head. Sucking a cock. He flung his hand, hard, into the building’s brick wall. He felt a rush of blood seep from his stitches, not to be contained by the world’s most pointless wad of gauze.

  LIFE IS CONFUSING AT THIS POINT—SAMO

  This, flanked by I LOVE MAXINE and CALL YOUR MOTHER, on the wall of the phone booth you find yourself in moments later, while attempting to end your own life, on the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue A.

  There are ten bright seconds when you forget there was an accident. When you think you can respond to SAMO’s scrawl like you always do, a tradition you’ve kept up for years now: a battle—or was it a sort of courting dance?—of scrawls on walls and on arms.

  You’d write: LUCY OLLIASON IS A WHORE.

  And yet you have no hand to write with: your ten bright seconds are gone. There are only these four dirty walls, this phone with no one on the other end, these pills.

  The pill bottle is one of the many things in the world that is made with the idea that the person who will open it will have two hands. One to hold its little orange body, one to press down on and tear off its head. You smash its head into the silver box of the telephone until the cap breaks off and the pills fly like little white marbles to the floor of the telephone booth.

  You pick them up one by one. You swallow them.

  Your throat is lined with sand.

  When the wavy feeling of the pills brushes at your cheek, you notice something. A little blue box—perched like some mechanical tumor on the top of the phone. It is the little blue box that Arlene had told you about so long ago. You hear her muscley voice: It means the phreaks have hacked it. Once you have the secret number, you can call anyone you fucking want for free.

  You can call anyone you fucking want for free, and your heart squirms, and your mind is only a smooth wave.

  Your heart squirms and there is a dial tone and then the rattle of a real ring, and you are there with your sister, under the kitchen table, tying your parents’ shoes together.

  Answer. Please answer.

  You are there with her. She is whispering a secret recipe into your ear. A recipe that makes kids into adults and adults into kids.

  Cigarette.

  Please answer.

  You are there with her, and she is pretending to be asleep. You are pretending to be asleep, too. Each of you knows you are doing the other a favor. Pretending to be asleep but not actually being asleep. If you were actually asleep, it would be considered a betrayal.

  Please answer. You are the only thing that’s left.

  When she picks up she will gasp, even before she hears your voice. She will know it’s you because she always knows it’s you. You will both be silent at first and then it will be sudden, the way she returns to you, you’ll be children in matching corduroy pants, with parents, dinner, the light coming in, black-and-white cartoons, forts made of bed sheets, the stories your mother tells, hours of Loba de Menos, small shoes, city flowers, trinkets brought home from Italy or Russia, your father’s Beatles record on the record player, your mother dancing in her bell-sleeved dress—somewhere in there, the tango, somewhere in there, the nothing to lose—your even breathing as you pretend to be asleep for each other, the flicking of your toes, which promises you are not.

  But there is only ringing, and you curse the little blue box, which doesn’t seem to be working properly, does it? And you rip the little phreak box from the top of the phone and throw it to the ground and yell, to no one, motherfucker!

  And why would she talk to you if she had picked up? After you had abandoned her for so long? Why would you expect her to show up for your tragedy when you had never shown up for her, not even to hear her big news? And why had you called her anyway? When nothing meant anything? When everything meant nothing? Why had you turned to her when the world was ending if the world was already ending, whether you got a hold of your sister or not?

  The coins bang back into their clanky chamber at the bottom of the phone. The white shape of that man’s suit jacket blazes under your eyelids. There are exactly six more pills—there had been twenty-five to start with—and you take them all in one swallow, slumping onto the wet floor of the phone booth on Tenth Street until your sister tucks you under a blanket of nothingness. Go ahead, Raul, she whispers. Disappear off the face of the earth.

  You are there with her, crouching over her crate of broken eggs, the remnants of the terrible accident.

  You are there with her, shoving a piece of her good cake in your mouth, resenting her, thanking god for her.

  But you hadn’t said thank you. You hadn’t ever said thank you.

  You have to call her back, but the phreak box is on the floor now, a pile of blue and red wires.

  It’s okay, she says, stroking your cheek with her potato chip fingernails. You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.

  White suit, moon glow, smooth wave. Take her to see what you’ve made. Prove to her that you have made something. Show her why you left her, show her how it was worth it.

  Exit the phone booth, lumber back down Second Avenue, your eyes heavy as loaves of bread. On Bond Street again, toward the well-lit room where everyone is saying your name. Show her the heads of the people who are saying your name. Show her how they move so easily on the necks of the people who are saying your name.

  Show her your slide show, Señor Romano’s big belly shadow in the way of the projector.

  Slide one: all blue. That wonderful, original void.

  Let your body dis
solve into millions of particles, let them hover together in a fog, then dissipate.

  A blue square. A hard stoop. Let your eyes close all the way.

  Change slides: black, then white, then black.

  Change slides: Yves jumping from the eaves.

  You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay. Just fall asleep now, to the sound of the sirens and the dogs and the trucks on the cobblestones, their metal roofs clanging.

  How can one man be dragging garbage while another man . . .

  You’re okay.

  Sprinkle yourself among the sounds of the city, like a dust with a finite place to fall.

  Change slides: the artist falls toward the pavement below, toward death in the name of art.

  THE SHOW MUST GO ON

  Everyone who was anyone: that was the phrase certain people, probably the people who were not anyone, might have used to describe the attendees of the Raul Engales show at the Winona George Gallery. Lucy had watched them file in from her perch in the corner: the collectors and the critics and the never-ending stream of Winona’s personal friends, who managed to cover Winona’s powdered face in lipstick marks before the wine was even uncorked. Rumi was there, her big hair expanding to fit the space, and some of the same people from the Times Square show—Lucy recognized a couple who only dressed in head-to-toe red, and a lanky man in a baseball hat that read, in blue embroidery, ART IS MY HELL.

  All of their friends from the squat were there, too—Toby and Regina circulated like a two-headed insect, wearing one long scarf that was tied around both of their necks; Horatio and Selma trailed them, Horatio in checkerboard pants he’d spray-painted himself and Selma in a shirt that looked to be made of cellophane, revealing the shape and shadows of her small, ubiquitous breasts. But though Lucy had spent the summer reveling in their grimy genius, emulating their curiosity and their conversation, she knew now that they were not her real friends; they belonged to Engales. Engales would not want her to tell any of them about his accident, she knew, and so the terror of it would be hers alone to bear, while she attempted to avoid the artists, clinging to the periphery of the party with the paintings, her back toward the room as she studied her lover’s subjects.

  But it wasn’t long before they spotted and approached her, with questions about Engales’s whereabouts. “We haven’t seen him around,” said Toby. “And he’s always around,” said Regina. Lucy shrugged and changed the subject to the problem of commercial galleries, which she knew would distract Toby, at least long enough to figure out another tactic of evasion. When he got to the part where he compared the gallery artists to factory laborers, she snuck away into the crowd, where she began to see that the rumor of Engales’s absence had officially started to circle. A family emergency maybe, one large woman with an alligator head on her purse said. I heard no one’s seen him in a week, someone else countered. Soon, after enough time had passed and enough wine had been consumed, Raul Engales’s absence began to gain even more dramatic traction. I hope he didn’t disappear like that boy, an old woman with an emerald broach said with passion. Isn’t that just the most tragic thing? Horatio stopped Lucy next to a painting of a Chinese woman with a deformed cheek, holding a wad of bok choy. Lucy noticed only now a blank spot in the woman’s sweater: a spot that had not been finished. She thought of the floor of the studio where she’d picked up the painting a few days earlier—stained with blackish blood.

  “When do you think he’ll show up?” Horatio said in his blocky accent.

  “Probably soon!” Lucy said, trying to be cheery, though her eyes were still on the blank spot and her stomach was hot with fear that she had done every single wrong thing.

  She knew Engales wouldn’t show up soon, or ever. And if he did—if by some stroke of magic they had let him out of the hospital and he happened to find out that the show had not been canceled—he would only be furious with her, even more than he already was. He would know or find out that it was her who had made this whole thing happen. That it was her who had called the number Winona had left on the message machine, set up a meeting. Who had gotten Random Randy from the bar to come over with the truck and help her haul the paintings to the gallery. He’d find out that it was her who had signed the papers agreeing to the terms of sale, whose fault it would be when all of his paintings were gone, and all that was left was a wad of cash. She thought, desperately now as she watched Winona stick a red dot on the bok choy painting: Why on earth did I do this?

  She did it because of cereal. More specifically, she did it because of milk. She hadn’t eaten anything for two whole days after seeing the bloody gauze wrapped around Engales’s arm, and, while trying to buy cigarettes and beer with the vague idea that she needed some sort of sustenance, the Telemondo guy noticed the shape she was in.

  “You look no good,” he said to her, and she just shook her head, put the blue package of cigarettes on the counter.

  “You look no good,” she said back.

  He ignored her and pulled a box of cereal from a shelf and a carton of milk from the fridge behind him.

  “No charge,” he said, his brown eyes steady on hers. She slowly, tentatively, pulled the meager groceries from the counter, seeming to sense from the Telemondo guy’s eyes that she should take them, or else. Or else what? she wanted to say, but instead she just left, walking like a zombie through the East Village with the cereal in one hand and the milk in the other.

  It was because of these groceries that she went into the kitchen, a skinny arm of a room that she seldom entered; she wasn’t much for cooking, and lately, not eating, either. And it was because she went into the kitchen and set down her miserable fare and stood there wondering if she should eat some of the cereal or not that she noticed two things. One: on the back of the milk carton was Jacob Rey’s face. Two: on the bulky black answering machine was a blinking red light.

  These things were surprising not only in their juxtaposition but in their novelty: Jacob Rey’s face belonged on telephone poles and bulletin boards, out in the grave wide world, not here in her domestic realm. Never before had Lucy seen a missing person advertised on a household product, and Jacob Rey’s face, a mascot for that terrible night, seemed to have been placed here just for her, as if his ghost had followed her into Engales’s kitchen. His image both haunted and intrigued her: a family’s private loss made into a public image, then sent by way of a common dairy product into people’s private homes. Involuntarily she imagined her own face on the milk carton, but it was while she was doing this that she noticed the message machine—a relic of the previous tenant’s, Engales had told her, that still had François’s outgoing message: Bonjour. It’s François. Who are you?—blinking for her attention like the eyes of a hopeful puppy waiting to be pet. Lucy pushed the button.

  First the machine spoke in the way machines speak: a human’s voice turned into a robot’s, unable to make the curves of words and so piecing them together at the angles, like numbers on a digital clock.

  TOOSDAY, SEPT-EM-BHER SIX-TEENTH. THREE OH FIVE PEE EM.

  Last Tuesday. The same day as the accident.

  Then, in stark contrast to the robot, a husky woman’s voice.

  Raul. Sorry to call so late. But I have wonderful news. Sotheby’s went swimmingly. More than swimmingly—you’re practically rich already and we haven’t even had the show! And you won’t believe who bought it. Let’s just say it’s someone with fantastic taste. Call me back, Raul. Five five nine, oh nine four seven. It’s Winona, by the way, Raul. Oh and get your ass over here with the rest of the paintings, my little star. We’re about to show you off to the world.

  Lucy had understood right then that the message was meant for her, just like Jacob Rey’s face on the back of her milk. Just as she had been asked by the mother on Broadway to help her search for Jacob, she was being asked now, by Winona, to make sure Raul Engales’s show went up next week. Her logic was perhaps skewed, she knew. But in the blur of the moment, so rife with messages, she reasoned that it was her dut
y to share Raul Engales’s paintings with the world. She even went so far as to convince herself that the show, if it went as swimmingly as the auction, might turn Engales back toward himself, that he would witness his own success and visualize a future of possibility and prospects, rather than one of hopelessness. If Engales could see that the world loved his paintings, she thought, perhaps he could love himself again. And maybe even love her.

  So she had called Winona back. And as for the milk carton, she had dumped out its contents into the sink—forgoing cereal altogether—and set it on the windowsill above Raul Engales’s bed: a talisman, or an offering to no one.

  Now, at the gallery, as she deflected questions dizzily, Lucy realized she had been an idiot to think this was a good idea; it wasn’t her place. If Engales were to see her now, in her sparkly shirt drinking sparkling wine, he would hate her. He would hate her more than he already seemed to hate her. (It isn’t your project, she imagined him saying, over and over in her head.) And now all she wanted to do was leave. But Winona—who was in a tizzy, Lucy could tell by her hair: usually a pristine fountain, now teased into a Pomeranian-like pouf—would not have that. She found Lucy in the corner, by the wine, and put one of her pointy-nailed hands on Lucy’s shoulder.

  “So what’s the deal, Miss Lucy?” she said. “Where’s our guy?”

  Lucy couldn’t answer at first, and took large swallows of her wine.

  “I mean seriously,” Winona went on. “You don’t just miss this. You don’t miss your debut. Not in this city. Not with Winona George.”