Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

“I am mad at you, James. You’re an idiot. But I still want to have your baby. Or a baby.” She smiled with one tiny corner of her mouth.

  James laughed, with effort. “Very funny,” he said. He put his hands around her backside, which felt somehow novel in this position: a new fruit. She kissed his neck and he felt a rush of blood move through his body. With the painting behind her, she glowed red. He moved inside of her and kissed her wild-strawberry face. His worries melted; he suddenly felt sublimely happy. The thought of the Raul Engales show—where he’d arrive tomorrow night at six; he’d wear his white suit—made him pant with pleasure. Then his eyes landed on the eyes of the girl in the painting, on their little white sparkles of light on the black olives of her pupils, and—holy shit that felt good—he ejaculated into Marge without any warning at all. Marge sighed and rolled off him, her face seeming to say, Can’t you do anything right?

  The answer was no. No, he could not do anything right, not one thing. He had proven that to himself time and again, and then in a grand way tonight, at the Winona George Gallery. At the gallery, full of Engales’s immaculate, outrageous portraits, James had experienced all the bright flashes, the water splashes, the music that nearly brought him to tears, all the sensual phenomena from the blue room, everything he’d hoped for. But it was not until he saw the girl in the corner—the girl in his painting whose gaze had brought him to completion against his will the day before—with her bowl of yellow hair and her almond-shaped, glinting eyes, that he felt the nucleus of all of the sensations, the most powerful of all the colors. The girl radiated a spectacular heat, as if her skin could have burned him to the touch, and she was the deepest, most beautiful yellow.

  It struck him like a fist in the face: she was the girl from the night in the park, the girl who was combing the park with her circle of light. And now she was lighting up the room with her wild, open gold. He approached her. What in the holy hell, James?! He approached her. What in the yellow, spangly hell?! He approached her and then immediately regretted doing so. Because as soon as she spoke it was as if a fire hydrant opened up inside of him; the room around him fell away; the paintings no longer mattered; the painter himself no longer mattered (in fact, James never noticed that Raul Engales himself never showed up); it was as if this girl had swallowed him, and now he was swimming around inside of her.

  Inside of her. He had only meant to walk her home, but he had found himself inside of her.

  His plan now, upon coming home from the apartment where he had slept with her, was to erase it from his mind: her sequin shirt, torn off to reveal her small white body. He would absolutely delete the image of her hungry eyes, the tears that glistened in their corners. He planned on denying the very existence of her nipples, the unfinished faces on the canvases that surrounded the bed, the sparks and the bright snakes that had flown around the room. But this proved difficult when, on the third, creaky stair, he caught a glimpse of the giant portrait of her again, hanging like a blazing square of yellow sex above the fireplace.

  He attempted avoidance. He held a hand up to his eyes as he changed his course, went back down the stairs to the bathroom, where he’d need to shower the smell of her off of him—coconut and tar, slashed with cheap Chinatown perfume. He shielded his face again as he climbed the open staircase to the loft, where Marge was asleep on her side: a mound of white goodness. He slid into bed as quietly as he could, letting her roll instinctively onto him. They had always slept like this: James on his back, like a board, and Marge like a malleable beanbag, sinking and fitting over him. Even when she was angry with him, her mood betrayed her in her sleep; she was peaceful.

  But though he could feel her body up against his own, Marge once again felt oceans and light-years and miles away. His mind reeled with the events of the night. The quiet street, the smooth walk, the feeling of Lucy’s brightness, the blackness of the apartment where his penis had been inside of her body.

  His penis. A stranger’s body. A room as black as his heart. The yellow.

  Fuck.

  Sleep eluded him. The squabbles and sirens and drunken stumblings of the world quieted. The night wore thin and the lateness began to wear on his brain. He began to feel sick and worried, and worried sick, and sick in the head. Marge’s skin felt sticky and terrible and off-limits, as if he shouldn’t be allowed to touch it. He wasn’t the sort of guy who did this. He wasn’t a guy who slept with other women, who even noticed other women, and yet, somehow, he had. He had betrayed Marge, who he loved more than anything, who had taken care of him and loved him despite all of his faults, for a woman he cared nothing about. He could hardly comprehend how bad this was. How awful he felt. How bad this was. How awful he felt. How bad this was. How awful he felt.

  How bad this was. How awful he felt.

  And then: how curious.

  Curiosity, creeping in alongside his worry in that deepest part of the night. The part of the night where he had known his brain to turn on him, letting all the wrong things in. Alongside the worry blinked some sort of sexy shame. He squirmed and tossed and was blinded by the moon on his face, but in the agitation and anxiety there was fire and excitement and the memory of pleasure. At the height of this feeling, when he simply could not bear Marge’s weight on him any longer, he slipped out from under her and crept back down the stairs. He flicked on a light and sat on the couch, right in front of the painting.

  Immediately the yellow appeared, humming from the corners of his eyes and then filling them. His face involuntarily morphed into a smile. His body tingled, and he felt splashes of divinely refreshing water on his face. He felt the blood rush to his groin, his underwear tighten. Lucy was looking at him, just as she had hours before. She (bleach blond) was looking at him (painfully bald) in a way that suggested attraction. Her eyes were narrowing and her skin looked radioactively hot. Her shoulders were so small! Her eyes were doing a thing! He should leave, but he was staying. In the new experience, the one he was having while staring at Lucy’s portrait in the privacy of his own home, he felt no tremor of nerves as he had earlier: only bright, deep color. Only bleach blond. Only sudden.

  Suddenly: She dove for him. She was like a famous diver. She had a body so other, so different from the body he knew, so thin, almost a boy’s. So breastless. So un-Marge. Should he try to get out from under her? Should he push her away? But Marge had disappeared already, now that Lucy’s mouth was all over his. He could not remember his own wife. In his arms this new woman dissolved and she pushed. She was a lime after a shot of strong tequila. She was no sunglasses and no sunscreen when you needed both. She was wet tar where your feet got stuck. Her mouth was all tongue and teeth.

  The sex was fierce and warm. She watermelloned and heliumed on top of him. She was forgiving, she forgave him for everything; she was no one, she mattered not at all, she was the lack of pressure, a simple balloon, floating away. But she was not floating away. She was here. She was nipple, white, pink, flesh. She was back of arm, back of leg. She was past midnight, dreamy, nonexistent. She was the feeling after laughter, which was the same as relief, which was the same as swimming. She had a starfish tongue, a bat’s body, a regal bowl of hair. She was ALL SKIN. She had NOTHING UNDERNEATH. She had never happened before. She was ALL NEW. She was a thumbtack pressing into the bottom of his foot; she was wind chimes and ripples on water, light breezes; then she was a tunnel of wind; she was roaring; she loved him; she did not love him, she was an orgasm; she died for him; she was splitting in two; she wrapped her legs like a spider; she was a venomous spider; she was a wicked snake; he exploded; he loved her; he didn’t love her; he loved Marge; he had always loved Marge, and Marge was coming down the stairs in her T-shirt and her underwear, and he looked up at her, and her face told him that she knew, but she didn’t know, how could she know? He looked up at his wife, so solid, so red, and his eyes shone, he knew, with both guilt and apology.

  “It’s so late,” she said quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m coming back.”


  But even when he comes back—slides into bed with his wife, touches her face, makes her coffee the next morning, reads to her from the paper—James will not be back. He will feel an itch in his brain, like a spider running across and into its grooves. It will tickle, and like all tickling, it will lead to unbearable laughter: the wildest and most sincere form of pleasure. It will lead him back to Lucy.

  She will be lying like a blond disaster on the bed. She will pull him toward her, and down. She has been feeling the itch, too, though her itch is a different kind. It is an itch that itches the way a scab does: new skin growing over a place that has been punctured, stretching the skin around it. She understands that she is only meant to scratch around its edges, for scratching the thing itself would make healing impossible. And yet she cannot help it. The relief of the scratch seems worth the blood of a whole new open wound.

  They will have sex again, and then again. They will meet up in the mornings that whole week, and then the week after that, when Marge goes to work. Their sex will be filled with expectation. James will expect the fireworks, and in those fireworks some fundamental shift; she will be the portal back into himself, the light switch that re-illuminates the world. Lucy will expect a losing of herself, a forgetting, a reprieve from the hollowness she feels when alone. She will expect, also, the apartment door to swing open, Raul Engales to walk in on them and, in a fury, tear them apart. Please, she will plead while James is inside of her. Please please please.

  They will not speak of Raul Engales: this will be an unwritten law. Saying his name would be admitting what they are doing, which is clinging to each other, when the person they meant to cling to is nowhere to be found. This is it, they will try to tell themselves, and each other, over and over again. They pant with enough vigor to drown out this other thought: Where is the man I came here for?

  But no matter how hard they fuck, no matter how blue the leaves outside turn and how yellow the room becomes, no matter how naked they get and how ravenously they devour each other, they will not be able to get rid of the itch. The more they try to scratch it the worse it will get, and the door will never open, and they will never get caught, and they will be forced to keep trying, to become more hollow each time they fill each other: many times per morning, for two weeks that feel like much more than that.

  In the yellow haze of these two weeks, James will lose all sight of the article he is supposed to be writing, that he’d promised to Winona George, to himself, to his wife, to the world. It’s too late anyway, he knows. This isn’t the kind of city that waits around. This isn’t the kind of city that gives a shit about the sins you’re committing in order to escape your reality. But in the yellow haze of the affair, the city itself will fall away, reality will fall away, the idea of Raul Engales will fall away, until, on a cold morning—October now, and James is walking aimlessly again—he sees Lucy unexpectedly, out in the real world, and it will all come flooding back.

  When James spots her—sitting at the Binibon diner on Second Avenue, in one of the red booths, alone—he will realize, instantly, what he has done. Because when he sees her there behind the glass, no color will appear. She will just be a regular girl, awash in regular diner light. And he’ll know right then: they’d met among the paintings. They’d fucked among the paintings. Lucy’s yellow had enveloped him, tricked him into thinking it was all he needed to survive. But it hadn’t been Lucy’s yellow at all. It had been Raul Engales’s.

  No matter how too-late he was, no matter two whole weeks—an eternity, in art time—were lost. No matter that he’d probably gone too far down the path of Lucy to find his way out with any grace. No matter that he’d lost his way, taken the detour of this absurd, obscene affair. He would see it clearly then, while walking away from the diner and from Lucy. He should have been trying to find Raul Engales the whole time.

  PART FOUR

  PORTRAIT OF THE END OF AN ERA

  EYES: Toby, in a Peruvian poncho, trudges up to the squat with a giant chandelier on his back. A crystal falls from one of the chandelier’s many hands, hits the pavement, tinks, rolls. Magnificent! says Regina, who’s come outside in her nightgown to greet the chandelier. Noose it up and light the thing, till the windows of the squat twinkle like the pupils of a man in love. I’ll do anything I want to, says the twinkle of a pupil of a man in love. And I’ll keep doing it until my heart’s broken. Till someone holds a gun to my back.

  LIMBS: Two red streamers, left over from a weeks-ago party, have pushed through the sleeves of the second-floor windows. They wave at the naked lindens, the sky, the cops that have just pulled up across the street.

  MOUTH: WE’VE GOT A TYPICAL SITUATION HERE, JIMBO. WHADDAWE GOT, CLEM? BUNCHA THOSE ARTISTIC TYPES. STAY CLEAR A THEIR GLUE GUNS THIS TIME, EH, JIMBO? EH? KEEP YA MOUTH OFFA THOSE GLUE GUNS?! SHOVE IT UP YOUR HAIRY ASS, CLEM. DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.

  STOMACH: Rumbling as things are knocked and gathered. Emptied.

  CHEST: Those are my tits! yells Selma, from behind the thick, unopenable window of the police car, at a cop who’s exited the building with a plaster statue of a pair of breasts. You can’t take that! Those are my fucking tits! The cop studies the sculpture, then sets it on top of a rusty garbage can. He has sausagey fingers, which he uses to grab the breasts, then squeeze. Oh, really? the cop says. Oh, really?

  BODY: It’s just plywood and brick. It’s just brick and mortar. It’s just nails and sheetrock. It’s just concrete and metal. Tell yourself these things, like little prayers. Whisper them in hushed tones that sound like the round brushes on the bottoms of trucks that clean the streets at night. We can get more plywood. There is always more brick. Mortar, we hear, is in high supply. If we wanted concrete and metal, we could just go to jail. Don’t think of the street sweeper whose brush is humming over the sidewalk, just steps from where you’re trying to sleep. He’s almost done with his shift; he’ll park his truck in Queens, fumble through the city back to his apartment in Chinatown. He’ll flick on and off his light, boil water for no reason, turn on a television. You, on the other hand, are homeless now, mumbling about construction materials under the eave of a depressing dental office on Seventh Street with your ten law-breaking comrades, wondering where you might go tomorrow, if you’ll have to split up, thinking about how you miss the piece of plywood that was drilled above the squat’s bathroom sink, where your toothbrush sat, ready to be used whenever you wanted to feel clean.

  MOUTH: Though they’ve never done so before, Toby and Selma grab each other’s faces, kiss. When tragedy strikes, Toby whispers into Selma’s ear, which has plaster stuck in it, from a mold she’s made that hasn’t even begun to dry.

  THE RISING SUN

  When the squat got ransacked and shut down unexpectedly, on a Tuesday morning just after breakfast, Raul Engales and James Bennett saw the whole thing from the south-facing window of the Rising Sun Rehabilitation Clinic, where Raul Engales had been admitted three weeks ago after failing to die. High on the list of unfortunate things about the Rising Sun, to say nothing of its bright pink walls and lethargic nurses, was its regretful location—on East Seventh and Avenue A, right across the street from his old stomping grounds. High on the list of unfortunate things about Raul Engales’s life was that he was living it.

  James had brought coffee—since he’d started his daily visits a week ago, Engales hadn’t had to drink the crap they served in the Rising Sun’s cafeteria; a small but significant relief. The fact of them sipping the hot, delicious stuff while watching the cop cars—three of them now—pull up and then empty themselves of beefy, navy-clad law enforcers gave the scene a removed sensation, as if they were watching a movie or a television show, whose characters happened to have been the cast of Raul Engales’s previous life.

  “They’re your friends in there?” James asked, worried. He was always worried, Engales thought. One of those people who was always worried.

  “Only a matter of time, I guess.”

  There was the blip blip blip of the
siren used halfway, then the sagging clangs of key rings and the thick thunks of heavy boots. They watched the cops bang with their mad hands on the squat’s blue door—the door Selma had painted at 7:00 A.M. one morning because she had dreamed of a blue door and had to realize the dream immediately—then kick through it. With his left hand, Engales struggled to pop the window open; at the Rising Sun, you were only allowed a crack, lest you lose your shit and try to jump out.

  “BAD DAY TO STEAL A CHANDELIER, BUDDY.” Engales could hear the cop’s barrely voice, perhaps genetically modified to sound like asshole, all the way from here. “REAL BAD DAY.”

  “Crap,” said James Bennett. “Will they go to jail?”

  “You’re the type who’s scared of cops, aren’t you?” Engales said. The cold air slithered all over them.

  “I had a feeling about today,” James said. “I woke up to purple.”

  “When you talk like a crazy person,” Engales said, eyes on the cops’ backs as they filed in the door. “It’s hard to be around you. It really is.”

  “Did you know they’re putting Jean-Michel in a movie now?” James said, turning to look at Engales pleadingly.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Engales said. He did not particularly want to think about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cinematic debut, or his rising fame, or anything happening out in the world that did not include him.

  “I’m saying that this”—James opened his hand toward the window—“is going to happen everywhere. To everything. The buildings, the artists themselves, everything is going to be stolen, or at least bought. The money’s coming downtown, and it’ll be this, over and over again. Everything’s going to change, is what I’m saying. Just watch.”

  They watched. The blue tarps from the squat’s second-floor windows puffed in the wind. The cops had gone inside now, and left the front door open behind them, and Engales imagined the cold air blowing into the squat’s common room, the chill that outdid the space heaters and crept under sweaters, no matter how many you piled on. When it was cold like this, back when Engales spent every spare moment at the squat, they’d have the Swedes build one of their massive fires on the concrete slab in the back; outside with fire was warmer than inside without. Not that warmth had mattered much to them. They had had one another, and they had their projects, and they had this space they could make their own—these were the things that kept them from freezing.