Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  Did he have stage fright? she wanted to know. Was he scared of all the people who are going to fall in complete love with him? Had he skipped town? Was he ill?

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Lucy said, avoiding Winona’s eyes. But Lucy was a bad liar, and Winona was a bad person to lie to: like a predatory bird, she would peck the flesh until she hit the bone.

  “An accident,” Lucy finally divulged after the pecking began to hurt, the word pushing like something spiky in her mouth. “There’s been an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?” Winona flared. “Is everything all right?”

  “Not really,” Lucy said.

  Winona George, who Lucy had imagined would be very angry with her for pulling the wool over her eyes this whole week, was instead visibly excited. The mystery of the artist’s whereabouts would simply make everything more interesting. Tragedy was what art was about, Lucy could imagine Winona saying, in her high-brow, low-pitched voice. It took tragedy to be an artist in the first place, or at least a tragic heart, and anything on top of that was just a Van Gogh–style bonus, a chip off the old ear, and then eventually, when they died, a posthumous cash cow.

  “If he died, though,” Winona actually did have the nerve to say, “I’ll need to know. Because there’s a whole other thing that goes on with that. We’ll need to do the finances differently. And I’ll need to know.”

  “He didn’t die,” Lucy said softly, looking down at her heavy black boots, which had at one point seemed so important—she had bought them because she had seen Regina from the squat wearing similarly aggressive footwear—and now felt like a burden.

  “Then what?” Winona was saying. “What happened? Lucy, you do need to tell me. You know that, don’t you?”

  Just then a man walked up between them, his long nose inserting himself like a blinder between Winona and Lucy, blocking Winona’s interrogation. Lucy saw Winona’s face change, from frantic to cool, and then to mildly uncomfortable.

  “Well if it isn’t James Bennett,” she said. “I’m so thrilled you’re here. And what do you think? Isn’t he fabulous? Can I show you around? I am happy to give you some sound bites for your piece. . . . This one here is called Chinatown, you’ll notice the juxtaposition of the physical and metaphysical, this deformed cheek and the unfinished piece here, this hole in the work. . . .”

  The man ignored Winona and looked straight, hard, direct at Lucy. His gaze was awful and invasive, and Lucy looked away, toward the wall beside her, the way you were supposed to when a man looked at you like that.

  “It’s you,” the man said, still looking at her. His eyes were a clear, chaotic blue: eyes you could see through, the kind Lucy had never trusted, though she was aware that they were a direct reflection of her own.

  “Ha! James!” Winona said quite loudly. “Always the odd duck, aren’t you, James?” She inserted her own nose between James’s and Lucy’s now, a little game of noses.

  “It’s you!” he said again, his smile broadening to reveal a set of stained, amiable teeth. “You’re the girl in my painting!”

  A strange feeling rushed up into Lucy at being recognized like this. It was a double recognition, first by this man (who had called her a girl, that delicious little word that tinkled from the mouth, half of the word from the postcard that had brought her here), and then by Engales, who seemed so far away from her now. She thought of that first night he had painted her, how strange and exciting it had felt to have someone look at her for that long. The itchy collar of her sequin shirt, the same one she wore now. His eyes moving up and down, up and down again, as he studied her lines and her colors. Lucy now looked up at this man, this man she didn’t know but who knew her, who was living with that very portrait.

  “How do you have that painting?” Lucy asked, though right when she asked it she knew the answer. And you won’t believe who bought it. Let’s just say it’s someone with fantastic taste.

  “Well because of me!” Winona breathed. “It was a Sotheby’s situation. Absurd, really, how much of a cut those people take. If I had known how much James was going to spend on that thing I would have sold it directly to him myself!”

  But Winona’s voice began to dissolve into the noise of the room as the two of them, Lucy and James, looked at each other. And in that looking Lucy felt something shift inside her, though she couldn’t pinpoint quite what it was.

  “You know I thought I saw you one night, before,” said the man with apparently fantastic taste, his voice drifting. “In the park.”

  “In the park?” she said.

  “Yes, in the park.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t remember being in the park.”

  Something was definitely happening: a moment was happening. Winona, seeming to recognize it, held up her two hands, said Jesus Christ, and sunk away from them. But what was it? What was happening? It wasn’t attraction, surely, since this James person was not handsome in any way she could define or understand. And it was not recognition, not in the sense that she knew him, because she had never laid eyes on this man before. But there was recognition of the feeling itself, it was familiar to her, the sense that the whole landscape of her life was about to change, and that she could be the one to change it.

  She could steal her mother’s turquoise beads from her dresser—the ones she had admired for so long and imagined swallowing like little candies or wearing them in the bath like a mermaid—and her mother would never know because she would bury them behind the house, cover them with a pile of pine needles.

  She could find her high school art teacher—the one whose eyes looked right into her heart in class—at the school dance, in the bright hallway outside the bathroom. She could take him inside that bathroom, pull down his pants.

  She could move to New York City, pierce her nose, bleach her hair, sleep with a painter. By sleeping with him, she could make him love her.

  She could actively, viciously, if necessary, follow her heart, and in doing so, affect the hearts of others.

  She could allow her stomach to grow hot, as this James Bennett’s eyes reached into some special, dark spot inside her.

  “I didn’t approach you, well, because I wasn’t sure it was you!” James said then. “And also because it would have been odd.”

  “And this isn’t?” she said, surprised to hear herself laugh quickly after she said it. She had not laughed in a week, since the accident.

  “You’re right,” James said. “This is odd. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be odd. I just am. I am odd. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people my whole life. I just am odd.”

  Lucy laughed again. Why was she laughing? Who was this guy, whose hair was thin and getting thinner, whose ears were translucent and large, whose suit was dated and wrinkled and white? And why was he making her laugh, on a night when no one should be laughing, because a man, the man she loved, had gotten hurt, and would never do the thing he lived for again, and here they all were, celebrating in spite of that. All of it was a bad idea. She should really go, she thought, scanning the room for a clear path to the door. But then James Bennett said something, and she found herself tangled in it, unable to move her feet.

  “If I tell you something,” he said. “Do you promise to maintain that I am just odd, and not totally crazy?”

  “Okay,” she found herself saying. Tell me, she found her eyes saying, with their flitting lashes. This was something she knew how to do, flit her lashes to say tell me.

  “You are very yellow,” he said. He had a bald spot, Lucy saw. A shiny, ugly bald spot.

  “I’m yellow?” she said, and she noticed that her voice was becoming playful in a way she was not intending. “I’m yellow. Hm. I think I’ll have to go with crazy on this one.”

  “Understood,” James said, smiling lightly. “I just thought I’d tell you anyway, though. It’s very rare, at least lately, that I see such a bright color.”

  Lucy found herself struggling to point her thoughts back to Engales: she was sad
, remember? And yet they kept wandering back into the present moment, back to the present person, back to James. Her ache was being quickly transformed into a longing, and the lower parts of her body felt hot and tingly, against her deepest will.

  “I don’t like being here,” she said suddenly.

  “Why’s that?” James asked. “Because a crazy man is telling you that you are the color of a zucchini flower? It’s that exact color—of a zucchini flower!”

  “It makes me sad,” she said, ignoring James’s odd joke, if it could have been called a joke. “To be around all these paintings.”

  “Are you going to leave, then?” James said, with surprising seriousness.

  “Are you going to come with me, then?” she said, with surprising seriousness.

  It was too fast, this back-and-forth, and Lucy regretted it as soon as she said it. She watched James’s face fall with indecision.

  “Oh,” he said, playing with his hands.

  “Oh, you don’t have to,” she said. “Never mind. I mean. I just meant walking me home. That’s all I meant. Because I’m going to leave. But you don’t have to. I mean I don’t even know you.”

  “Oh, um, sure!” He brightened, thankful for her gift of a way out. “A walk sounds great. It’s so cold.”

  For some reason both of them laughed at this, and again, Lucy wondered why she was laughing when no joke had been told. Was she laughing at him? Was she laughing at this man, in his funny outfit, with his bumbling manner? Or at herself, for feeling intrigued by him, for talking to him at all?

  But no, she knew as they wove through the crowd and emerged into the street, and then walked down it easily and silently, leaving everyone who was anyone behind, not caring or remembering that the people from the squat might see them leave together (and maybe, in that scary, off-limits part of herself, even wanting them to). She wanted to laugh again, so she did. She wanted to toss her arm through the triangle of James Bennett’s arm, so she did. There was nothing funny and there was nothing fun about any of it, about anything. But she was just laughing. Like a person does. Because she had to. She had to be swept up, carried away. She had to disappear. She had to be alive in this moment. A moment and a mood that just felt right, and then, as they neared Raul Engales’s apartment on the alley off Avenue A, just wrong enough to light it on fire.

  LUCY’S YELLOW

  He had only meant to walk her home.

  He had only meant to walk her home.

  He had only meant to walk her, the girl in his painting, home. Because it was late at night and girls like her—young girls, blond, beautiful girls, girls who have paintings made in their likeness—should not be walking through the dangerous streets of downtown New York alone.

  Right?

  Right?

  He had only meant to walk her home. Instead, he was entering his own home with the colors of another woman all over him, the colors that had changed everything. Under the influence of the colors—which had pounced on him like predatory cats when he walked into the Winona George Gallery—meaning itself changed almost entirely. Under the influence of his colors, meaning to do something meant practically nothing, just like meaning to make a quiet entrance when your wife was asleep upstairs didn’t make the third stair up to his bedroom lose its creak.

  I didn’t mean to, he wanted to say to the stair. But you did, the stair whined back at him. You did. He had.

  He had gone to Raul Engales’s show that evening with a soaring heart; it was finally here, the evening he’d been waiting for. The show had been all he could think about for weeks, ever since he’d bought the Engales painting, stared at it for twenty-four hours straight (to Marge’s confusion and chagrin), and then promptly called Winona to find out what she knew about this Raul Engales person, and how he could see more of his work.

  “Oh, didn’t you know?” Winona had said. “It was me who put it up for sale! Kind of a test, really, to see if he would sell well. I do that sometimes, at those little things Sotheby’s does, where they bring in the hopefuls at the end there. Turns out he sold for quite a lot, as you know, James, but I wasn’t expecting it to be you, of all people, I mean I thought you were above auctions!”

  “I was. I mean, I am . . .”

  “Anyway,” Winona broke in. “He’s my new guy. Fabulous. The talent. The energy. Just fabulous. I’m throwing him into the ring with a solo show. Little bastard hasn’t returned any of my calls, of course, but then again I’m sure he’s busy painting! Prolific, that one.”

  A solo show. The thought thrilled James. He imagined a whole gallery full of Raul Engales paintings, a whole sea of sensations. And he imagined meeting Raul Engales finally—the man who’d conjured the butterfly wings and angelic music on New Year’s—and shaking his hand; he imagined a spark, literally, flying from that hand.

  “Does the fact that you spent an exorbitant amount of money on his painting mean that you will review his show?” Winona said, using her manipulative/flirtatious voice.

  “You can count on it,” James said, beaming.

  Yes, she could count on it. He could do this. After all, the man responsible for the show was the man responsible for the painting that now leaned so beautifully on his mantel and on his heart. The painting that had entered his consciousness and his spirit and was now sitting inside of him somewhere, like an extra rib. If the other work in the show was anything like the painting he now owned, he would have no trouble with the writing. His article would contain all the magic that the painting did, and that the show surely would. He marked the date of the show on Marge’s kitchen calendar—on which she had not so long ago written things like ovulating, but where she now only wrote things like rent—with a large, ambiguous star. He watched the star grow closer as Marge ticked off the days with her X’s (ticking off days was something Marge did, as if by living through each day, deleting it from time, she had completed a task). He couldn’t wait. The piece he wrote about Raul Engales would be the pièce de résistance of his career, the piece of writing that would get him back to writing.

  Are you proud of me? he would ask Marge when the article came out, its stately columns of text dominating the front page of the Arts section.

  Extremely, she’d say. She’d read it out loud to him over Sunday eggs, like she did.

  But yesterday, the Monday before the Tuesday that was the show, James had been unexpectedly nervous. The day had gained the sweaty stench of too much anticipation; it had been given the death kiss of exaggerated buildup. His Running List began to gain momentum: What if the other paintings didn’t do for him what that first one did? What if he couldn’t write about them at all? What if this article was bound to fail, just as all the others he’d sent in this year had? What if the Arts editor refused to even read it? What if he failed Marge again? Would it be the last time she allowed him to?

  Marge made it clear, mostly with her excessive use of the sigh, the official sound of spousal judgment, that he was continuing to disappoint her. First he had lied about the column, then he had bought the painting without consulting her, and now he was sitting in front of it for long stretches, doing nothing but letting his eyes bulge from his head. He knew what she was thinking when she watched him from the kitchen doorway: if this painting meant that much to him, as much as a year’s worth of rent and his wife’s trust, he should probably be writing about it.

  “Get any writing done today?” she’d say at dinner, her voice higher than nature had made it.

  “Gestation,” James had to say. “Percolation. Ideas.”

  “Any good ones?” she’d say. She was trying, he knew, to make the passive aggression less aggressive, to cut it with something familiar, with love perhaps. But he wanted to tell her that passive aggression, by definition, was already a covering-up, that you couldn’t get away with covering up twice. Instead, he’d stay quiet, and Marge would sigh again and put something away in the fridge. The cold air would blow from it: another sigh.

  The sighing would usually make him feel l
ike a useless piece of crap; he’d pander to Marge, apologize. But now, with the painting in the house and in his brain, he began to resent it—and the rest of Marge’s attitude—and to believe it was coming from exactly the wrong place. What Marge wanted, he felt, was for him to succeed in some understandable way, some direct way that she could tell her friends and her mother about, and that she could use to make herself feel safe and normal, when what he wanted was perhaps exactly the opposite. He wanted to succeed in a way that was not necessarily understandable. How could it be, when it was inside of him and only him? Marge’s presence began to feel restricting, inhibiting, just as he was starting to feel free again. He felt far from her, as if she was on the other side of a lake, and the water was too cold to want to get in and swim to her. Knowing she was still furious about the painting he’d spent all their money on, he didn’t even tell her about his plan to write about the show. He didn’t tell her about the show at all. Instead, he watched his painting from the couch, let himself fly away on its wings. He’d surprise her with his success, in one big, lovely swoop that would flip their world back to normal. Until then, he’d have to live with the sighs.

  So it surprised him when Marge interrupted his couch paralysis that morning with a shocking proposal.

  “Fuck me,” she whispered, landing, front-ways, on his lap. They hadn’t “tried,” in the baby-making sense, since the auction, so the proposal felt even more out of left field than it might have otherwise; Marge was not the kind of woman who used the word fuck when speaking about lovemaking.

  “Are you ovulating?” he had said, stupidly, trying to wrestle the newspaper he had been pretending to read out from between their bodies. It stuck.

  “I don’t care,” she said, her eyes like steel traps.

  “Okay,” James said. “Sorry, it just hasn’t seemed like you’ve wanted to lately. I thought you were mad at me.”