Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  “The wonderful thing is that its unclear whether it’s finished!” James had said. “That white background! You feel the entire tension of the painter’s plight in that background! His whole internal drama: Should he keep going? Or should he leave it so perfectly undone? Did he stop because he doubted himself or because he loved what he had made? It’s all there, the whole story and the whole big question!”

  Engales nodded slightly. He remembered when Arlene had first showed him the painting, how he had had such a similar thought. James launched into a spirited little speech about Bacon and Freud, about their friendship and their days spent in the studio together, smoking, eating, talking, painting each other. Then their gambling, how they’d hock their cars or their paintings to pay their growing debts. How the gambling was the same as the painting, when you thought about it; art was always a hunch, a lead you followed into the dark, whose outcome you’d never know until it was all over, a game that you could lose.

  “I always felt like the best artists knew what their outcome would be,” Engales said. “That they had an idea first, and then the work came out of that idea. I don’t have any ideas. I always just painted until there was a painting. I always thought I must be doing something wrong.”

  “Oh, no,” said James spiritedly, his eyes widening. “You are underestimating the power of the associative brain! That’s what an artist is! Someone whose way of looking at the world—just their gaze—is already an idea in itself!”

  Engales was quiet, thinking this over. He imagined Bacon and Freud, their wrinkled faces, the smell of the turpentine, the tiny bits of blue they’d add for each other’s shadows. Somehow sitting here with James Bennett, talking about two old guys and ideas and art, no matter that he could no longer make it anymore, made him feel not-so-terrible. He could feel it happening, perhaps against his own will, or perhaps because of it, so quickly and seamlessly that he couldn’t have seen it coming or articulated its trajectory: James Bennett was becoming his friend. And what, right then, did he have to lose? He’d follow this hunch into the dark. He’d maybe even bet on it.

  A game: Raul Engales holds a slide from the binder up to the window. James Bennett blurts out what he feels when he looks at it. “Laundry detergent!” James says when Engales holds up a Walter Robinson slide. “Astonished gray!” he says about Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities. “What the fuck is astonished gray?” says Engales; they laugh. “My wife’s neck,” James says to a Ross Bleckner piece, of wavy lines that cascade down the tiny window like hair.

  An Engales proclamation: “Fuck abstraction and fuck surrealism and fuck sunsets. Especially fuck sunsets. Give me nostrils, you know? Big ugly ones. With boogers.”

  A James question: “What happened to your hand?”

  An Engales answer: “I was robbed.”

  A James proclamation: “It could come back. You never know. One day you could wake up and have it back. The color of the world, the beauty of it. Trust me, I know.”

  An Engales rejection: “You don’t know shit.”

  An Engales question: “What are you doing here again?”

  A James answer: “Talking to you.”

  “My bet’s on a gallery,” James Bennett said now, from his perch at the window, as they watched the cops tuck the artists into the backs of their low cop cars, one by one. “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the great irony of capitalism. How about we kick out the artists to make room for the art?”

  “There’s Regina,” Engales said. Regina, with her dishwater-blond hair stuck to her tear-stained face, had never before seemed vulnerable to Engales. Now she looked like a frightened fawn, her legs and lips wobbling. Behind her, the rest of them followed—Selma in her long black pirate’s coat; Toby in his Peruvian poncho that seemed, in the light of the day, both culturally and visually offensive; Horatio, carrying only his paint-covered boxing gloves. Engales felt the distinct tug of exclusion again; he wanted desperately to be in that line with them. But why? Why would he wish himself into this terrible scene? Why did he suddenly want back into his old life, right when it was being upended?

  A memory appeared to him with so much vividness he could have painted it, and before he could realize it he was speaking the memory out loud.

  “The apartment building across from ours burned down,” Engales said. The memory, when verbalized, gained physical traction; he felt the heat from the fire on his face. “When I was fifteen, the year after my parents died. We were just teenagers, alone in this giant house, just me and my sister. I woke up because it had gotten so hot, the flames were all the way across the street but the heat was blasting through our window. Bright orange flames, like they were fake, from a movie. I woke up my sister and we ran downstairs and out into the street, where the whole neighborhood was outside watching the fire eat up this building. We stood and watched it for a while, and I knew exactly what my sister was thinking, because I was thinking it, too.”

  “Which was?”

  “We wanted to be the kids whose house had burned down,” he said.

  James was quiet. By the looks of it, his bodega coffee had gotten cold, its cream blanketing its surface.

  “All the families from the apartment building moved into a temporary pavilion in the park, all together,” Engales went on, his eyes glazing as his mind moved away from the present and into the past. “We didn’t have a pavilion. We just had this huge, freezing house.”

  Down on the street, they saw Selma begin to scream and try to wriggle from the cop who held her: a huge, red-faced man with a blond mustache and porky lips. With seemingly little effort, he stilled her.

  “We tried to go and stand with the group of people from the fire,” Engales went on. “They were all crying, and we wanted to cry with them, but we couldn’t. We knew it wasn’t ours; it wasn’t our tragedy. And suddenly we looked at each other and without even consulting each other, we took off running down the street. We had both known the other was going to run, and to where. We went to the cemetery and sat on top of our parents’ graves. I was on Dad’s and Franca was on Mom’s. We had never been to the graves before—we were too scared to see them, or to imagine that our parents’ bodies were actually in them. But we went that night. We had both known we had to go, at exactly the same time. We knew where our tragedy was, and we had to feel it right then.”

  Why he was telling this to James Bennett now he didn’t know exactly, but Engales couldn’t stop talking. It was the first time he had spoken about Franca since he had arrived in New York; he hadn’t even told Lucy about her. It was as if Franca had been a caged animal inside of him, and now she was thrashing around, trying to get out.

  “With Franca,” he went on. “It was one of those things where we were too close. We understood too much about each other. We saw too much. It almost hurt to be around her.”

  “Is that why you came here?”

  “It’s my fault,” Engales said. His voice had gotten low and dark, as black as the coffee in his hand.

  “What’s your fault?”

  “I left her there. Even when I fucking knew what would happen.”

  “What would happen?”

  “I had a dream about her on the morning of my accident. And then I saw her, right when it happened, when the blade was in my arm I saw her.”

  “So you don’t know something happened. Have you called her?”

  “You don’t get what I’m saying, do you? You have no idea what I’m talking about. I left her alone with a man who can’t take care of her. Something’s happened. The country’s fucked and something happened, I just know it.”

  “But you haven’t talked to anybody yet and—”

  “Just shut up,” Engales said, his face suddenly enflamed. “Just stop telling me things you know nothing about. And also? So you know? I’m not going to paint again. Never a-fucking-gain. Do you hear me? Can your associative brain comprehend that? So stop trying to act like you know anything about my life. Like it’s all so fucking clear to you.”

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry, I . . . I shouldn’t have said anything,” James said, taken aback by Engales’s sudden hostile outburst. “I just get confused. Because it seems clear. When I’m around you, everything seems clear.”

  “Well, it’s not,” Engales said, his heart still trampling over his lungs in his chest. He wanted to show Franca his arm right then. She was the only one who would understand its scar.

  The two men went quiet and looked back out the window, where a white plastic bag had gotten caught in the nearest tree. When the wind freed it, its message was revealed: I NEW YORK. It soared into the white sky until the sky swallowed it. Below, switches were flicked and sirens started. Then the artists were gone.

  THE MISSING BOY AND THE LOST GIRL

  Lucy woke from a whiskey-soaked sleep to the unsettling sound of sirens and a loud knocking on the apartment door. A siren in the morning was like a drink before noon: it was a signal that things were getting bad. The sound of knocking, however, was a relief. James had come back.

  She wobbled up into a sitting position, rolled her legs off the bed. Her head china-dolled to one side, too heavy for its own neck. The floor of the apartment was betraying her, tilting this way and that, and she had the distinct feeling that she couldn’t place herself in time. Was it actually October? Had the last month of her life actually happened? Had Engales actually lost his hand? And disappeared? And had James Bennett actually taken his place in the bed for two whole weeks after the show, then abruptly disappeared himself, without so much as a call? Also: last night. Was she, could she possibly be, twenty-three?

  She stumbled to the door, the idea of James’s warm body under his ugly trench coat pulling her forward. She’d sink into him. She’d ask him where he’d been all week, but then she’d tell him she understood. She knew he had a life. She knew he couldn’t come every day. Still, she’d say. I missed you. Which was only true within the confines of the thing they’d created together, which was, of course, a big old lie. Still: a soothing lie. A lie she wouldn’t mind right now; at least there was another human involved.

  No, said the cruel, pulsing world of the worst hangover of all time. You shan’t be wrecking any homes today. It was not James at the door. At the door, when Lucy yanked open the rusty deadbolt and pulled it open, was a tall, blond woman in a gray overcoat, holding the hand of a very small boy.

  The missing boy, Lucy thought, just before she felt a hand grab her insides and twist. She ran to the bathroom, emptied herself of last night.

  Last night had been a mess of lipstick and whiskey: the kind of night a girl has when the men she counts on to save her do not. It had been her twenty-third birthday, and there had been no one to celebrate with, and nothing worth celebrating. There was no Engales—she’d tried in vain to track him down, but nothing—and there was no James; he’d stopped showing up at the apartment a week ago, without any explanation. She spent the morning feeling sorry for herself, remembering her last birthday, when Jamie and the R boys had made her a lumpy cake and, when it proved to be inedible, took her out to the Mudd Club, where they’d spun around and around on the dance floor, spilling their drinks, just one in a million groups of friends in New York, out to feed on the city together. Now there was no together, there was no one, and when a birthday alone became too much for her to fathom, she’d finally decided to take things into her own hands; she would call James’s house, ask him where he’d been, convince him to come over, kiss him until he adored her again.

  This call called for the steely nerves that could only be achieved through alcohol, so she’d gone to Telemondo’s for a flask. She chose Jim Beam, held the bottle to her chest like a comforting teddy bear, humble in its little brown bag. As she was leaving, she had paused to flip through a magazine on the rack near the door. It flapped open to an ad for lipstick that read: Does any man really understand you?

  No, she had thought as she scanned the image of a busty brunette, whose lips were laced with risky iridescence. The ad was for Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, another of the lipstick colors that Jamie swore by. Nobody really does.

  Nobody knew that she had a flat silver washer from Mason & Mick’s tucked in her front pocket at all times; they probably assumed it was the presumptuous outline of an unused condom. Nobody knew what she really smelled like, which was soil and manure and honeysuckle from the garden; they knew her smell as stale cigarettes, knock-off perfume from Chinatown, cherry lip gloss, sex. Nobody knew what her mother called her: girlywog; here she was Raul’s chick or Ida or ’Tender. Nobody knew that as soon as it got dark she went out into the city with a flashlight to look for a missing child, or that she slept surrounded by milk cartons with that child’s face on it; if they did, they’d think that it was a project, some foray into their artistic world, rather than what it actually was, which was girlish superstition, lonely reaching. They didn’t want to talk about superstition in New York. They wanted cold, hard facts: like if you are or are not fucking a married man in your newly crippled boyfriend’s bed.

  Revlon understands you as you really are . . . Oh-so-warm and a little reckless.

  Okay, then, Revlon. Okay, then, New York. One tube of Cherries in the Snow from the pharmacy across the street, placed slyly in the pocket of her lumberjack coat that used to be her dad’s. One smear of the stuff on her cracking lips, using the pay phone’s grimy silver surface as a mirror. One—no, two—swigs of the Jim Beam, for the steeling of nerves. One quick scan of the soft, flimsy pages of the pay phone’s phonebook, to find one James Bennett’s phone number. But look, here’s something even better. James Bennett’s address.

  She could steal her mother’s turquoise; she could determine her own fate; she could walk across town to 24 Jane Street and look into James Bennett’s smaller-than-average window.

  This was where he lived, where he actually lived, with his wife, who was standing now at the kitchen counter, working at something with a knife. Lucy stood there, wobbly with whiskey, looking in on this woman. A woman with soft brown hair and a purple shirt. A woman with a casserole pan. A woman who had probably gone to college. In other words, the very opposite of Lucy. Then there was James, who came through to the kitchen to wrap his arms around her. The arms said: I have known how to wrap my arms around this person for my whole life. The arms said: You, Lucy Marie Olliason, are a terrible fucking person.

  She had burst into Jim Beam tears. Since when do you drink Jim Beam? Since I realized it could make me burst into tears at any given moment. James did not love her; Engales did not love her; neither of them even knew her; nobody fucking knew her. She rubbed the iridescent lipstick from her mouth with her wrist. She fled down Jane and back across town, but not before making stops at every bar she saw along the way. In each of them, she made some version of the same sloppy scene. At the Eagle, she put Blondie on the jukebox and danced alone (if you could call it dancing; it was mostly arms); Random Randy watched on sadly. At the Aztec Lounge she pulled a fat man’s tie and kissed his rosy, blubbery face. At Eileen’s Reno Bar, where plastic plants hung from the ceiling and the men wore blue, sparkly shadow, she pounded her fist on the bar and tried to recount to the bartender her plight.

  “We were just here,” she whined. “Me and Raul. We were dancing, and Winona had just called. He was so happy. ‘Winona George loves me,’ he said. I told him everybody loved him. ‘Like who?’ he said. ‘Like me,’ I said. It was the first time I told him. That I loved him, I mean.”

  The bartender didn’t care about this story, or the ones she recounted after that, about his hand, about James, about James’s wife in the window. No one cared. In the end, Devereux, a transvestite who was often at the squat, had walked her home, whispering, Darling daffodil, darling rose, over and over in her sweet, deliberately pitched voice, until Lucy threw up onto Devereux’s sparkly shoes.

  Male. Hispanic. Six years old. 40 inches. Dark hair, brown eyes.

  It’s him, Lucy thought as she splashed her face with water in the bathroom, in whose sink a water cockroach
had taken up residence, not to be drowned for anything. The boy at the door had to be Jacob Rey. He met all the descriptions on the milk cartons, and hadn’t he been carrying a backpack? Jacob Rey had a backpack. She thought of the night of the accident, the searching, ghostly faces of the mothers. She had known then that she had entered into the fate of the boy, and here he was. Here was the missing boy, right here at the door. Here was fate, coming for her.

  No, said the cruel, pulsing world of the worst hangover of all time, when she went back out to find him at the door. You shan’t be saving any lost boys today.

  It wasn’t Jacob Rey, she saw now. The eyes were different. They were not Jacob Rey’s eyes, and yet they were still familiar. She knew the boy in some other way. In some other way that involved his eyes.

  “Are you the wife?” the blond woman said, in halting English, before Lucy could place the boy’s eyes into the library of eyes she knew.

  “Excuse me?” Lucy said, reorienting herself toward the woman, whose cheeks were like two pink cherries. Cherries in the Snow. The thought of the lipstick made her want to vomit again. She sucked in her breath.

  “Raul Engales’s wife?” the woman said.

  Whether it was because she wished it to be true or because she couldn’t think straight, Lucy didn’t know, but she nodded.

  “Good then,” the tall woman said. She extracted an orange envelope from her wide purse, pulled out a white sheet of paper, and pressed it into Lucy’s hands. It was a letter, written in beautiful, unsmudged script. The words were written in Spanish.

  “Oh, I don’t read Spanish,” Lucy said apologetically.

  The woman tapped at the paper, to an indented section.

  Raul Engales (hermano)

  265 Avenue A, Apartment 6

  New York, New York 10009

  Lucy looked up at the woman, whose pale face held no answers. Lucy was thoroughly confused. Hermano. This much she knew in Spanish. But Engales had never mentioned a brother or sister. He had always said he had no family—they were all dead.