Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  Lucy was not in the mood for Fun, or for seeing all the people who would inevitably be there: all the people from the last disastrous show, Selma and the Swedes and all the artists who had gotten famous by some fluke and who now wore six-hundred-dollar shoes. If you asked them about the shoes, Lucy had found at a party a few weeks ago at Part Deux, they would say it was another of their projects. “I’m literally walking on capitalism,” said a woman who was wearing loafers covered in Swarovski crystals. “Isn’t it fabulous?” Lucy had nodded and walked away, feeling simultaneous hatred and envy for the woman, at the exact same time: a lady who had found a way to make an intellectual point out of the vain act of wearing glamorous footwear, and who, more importantly, had stolen Lucy’s song.

  That party was more than two months ago now, the night she’d dropped Julian at James’s, and she hadn’t gone out since. The night had felt vapid and the Chinese grocery store had smelled of fish and piss and smoke, and she felt too guilty, about too many things, to enjoy herself at all. Then Toby, drunk, had tried to make a pass at her in the bathroom line, which made her feel even more vulnerable and gross and wrong. She had left the party early, thrown her pack of cigarettes into a puddle, and vowed that from now on she’d be good, she’d be nothing but moral and sweet, she’d offend no one, get involved with nothing. In this effort to purify herself, she called Jamie the next morning and asked for her room back.

  “Fucking finally,” Jamie said in her husky, friendly voice. “I hoped you’d come back before I had to get some other asshole in here.”

  She moved her things out of Raul’s apartment and back to Kleindeutschland. She brought as many Jacob Rey milk cartons as she could fit in a trash bag. She decided she would simply stay in her scotch-yellow room and read all the books she’d never read and think all the pure thoughts she’d never thought before, alone. When she came out again, she reasoned, she’d be cured of all her many vices, stripped of all evil.

  But when she got down to it, she knew it wouldn’t last, and that she wouldn’t last, and that when someone, like Regina, called her, she would not only answer but answer hungrily, with the desperation that came from being cooped up for too long in a city where festering was fatal. Plus, Regina was persistent.

  “If you don’t create an outside self,” Regina said on the phone now, “you’re never going to create an inside self.”

  “Are you deconstructing me?” Lucy had said.

  “Maybe,” Regina said. “Is it working?”

  “Not really,” Lucy lied. She looked down onto Little Germany, watched a fat man go into the porn shop.

  “Too bad,” Regina said then. “ ’Cause we’re already here.” Lucy looked across the street and saw Regina, at a pay phone with Toby, waving up at Lucy’s window.

  Lucy smiled. “Fine, I’m in,” she said, and she could feel the relief, almost like a sigh, sweep through her. She quickly laced up her combat boots, and stopped to study herself in the mirror.

  “You’re older,” Jamie said suddenly, having once again appeared in the doorway, as was her custom. “You’re wondering what’s different? You’re fucking older, Ida.”

  “I’ve been here seventeen months,” Lucy said. “I’m hardly older.” But she knew what Jamie was talking about. Her profile was the same, her proportions, her pose. Her hair had grown out a few inches, to reveal the darker blond beneath the bleach, but that wasn’t it. Something else had changed.

  “Seventeen months in New York City?” Jamie said. “You’re fucking ancient. Not to mention you’re counting.”

  “Come with,” Lucy said, going to Jamie and tugging on her arm. “There’s an opening.”

  “Not a chance,” said Jamie. “You know I hate those things.”

  “No you don’t,” Lucy said, not knowing exactly why she felt emboldened to bring this up to Jamie now, after all this time, during which she had never broached the subject of Jamie as an artist. “I know about your projects, Jame,” she said.

  “Oh, Little Lucy,” Jamie said with a laugh. “No you don’t. You really don’t.”

  “But I do. I found one of your matchbooks at Binibon. I kept it. I keep them all. And I gave one to this art critic I know, and he said he was going to frame it. They’re art, Jamie. They are. And so are your videos. Randy showed me some of them. They’re good, Jamie.”

  Jamie smiled sadly. “It’s just what I do,” she said. “It’s how I get through the other things I do. It doesn’t need to be written about by some critic. It doesn’t need to be framed.”

  “I actually know what you mean,” Lucy said.

  “Good,” Jamie said. “Now let me do your makeup.”

  Regina and Toby were waiting outside of the bodega on the corner, smoking cigarettes. They were wearing matching ski jackets, of the sort that said: I am cool because I’m uncool—part of a thing fashionable people were doing: attempting to look normal as a way to be anything but. They looked like the people who ran the ski lifts at the lodges Lucy had gone to as a kid, only there was an important distinction. They were not those people, who spent their winters pulling levers and drinking Coors Light on chairlifts; they were Toby and Regina, artists and philosophers of the East Village, with no connection to the slopes besides the diamond-shaped designs on their chests.

  “Got cold again,” Regina said, as if to justify the absurdity of their outerwear. She grabbed Lucy around the shoulders and shook her, then kissed her on the cheek.

  “Gorgeous woman,” Toby said, looking Lucy too sincerely in the eyes. “Gorgeous women,” he said, coming between Lucy and Regina and wrapping his big conceptual artist arms around them both. “Andiamo, gorgeous women! Andiamo a Fun!”

  When they were only a block down the street, they heard the clip-clopping of high heels and a sexy, breathless voice.

  “Wait up,” said Jamie, who had thrown an enormous fur coat over her negligee and apparently decided it was an outfit.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in galleries,” Regina said, almost smugly.

  “I don’t,” Jamie said. She winked at Lucy.

  “Women!” Toby shouted out to the street. “Gorgeous women!”

  There was no sign at Fun, and the title of the show wasn’t apparent until they were inside, where it was written in pencil on the white wall: Selling Out. The first piece of art, just next to the title, stopped both Lucy and Jamie in their tracks: it was two of Jamie’s matchbooks, positioned in the center of a huge blank white square in the middle of a frame. The first said: IS THIS SOME KIND OF ART PROJECT? The second: THIS IS UNHOLY. The second was the matchbook Lucy had given to James, as a kind of sexy admission of her own regret, a way to acknowledge the wrongness of their affair and also revel in it. Now, the matchbook made her heart stop. How had it gotten here? To this gallery? And why was Jamie, who had so actively negated the idea of presenting her work to an audience, staring almost lovingly at the matchbooks and saying, “I didn’t know it would feel like this.”

  “Jamie, I think we’ve got to get out of here,” Lucy said, tugging at her fur-clad roommate.

  But Jamie wasn’t listening. “You know what? Maybe your milk cartons are something,” she was saying. “If this is a project, then maybe your milk cartons are a project.”

  “Jamie, I’m telling you we need to leave. I think this is—”

  But now they were being interrupted by a guy Jamie knew who made working sculptures of trains, who immediately launched into a lecture about pneumatic pressure, and how it was what was used to power the first New York City subways. “So basically a giant fucking fan,” he was saying, though Lucy couldn’t really hear him. Her heart was bounding like a fast dog in her chest as she scanned the room; she had seen these paintings, all together as they were now, before. They were definitely James Bennett’s paintings. The ones in his little house on Jane Street, where she had sat so embarrassingly and cried in front of his wife. And there, on the far wall in a huge cone of white light, was the portrait of her.

  Don’t mov
e, Engales had said while she sat for him. Don’t move or I’ll kiss you till you die. It seemed so long ago now. A whole lifetime ago.

  “So you’re the girl in The American Dream,” someone said suddenly, putting an arm around her. It was someone she didn’t know, wearing a fedora that she decided immediately was ugly.

  “No,” she said absently, to the hat. “I’m not anything. I don’t even know what I want to be.”

  “Well you’re pretty enough,” said the hat.

  “It isn’t enough to be beautiful,” Lucy said. She turned away from the hat and saw, on the back wall, the painting of herself, the smooth pink strokes of her skin. In the painting her eyelids were tilted just so, and a spark of white paint hovered just outside her pupil. That’s what was different about her, she saw now. It was the sparkle. The sparkle was gone.

  She had lost herself. She had completely disappeared. She was no longer the girl in that painting, so hopeful, so new. She was old. She was ancient. She turned to go; she wouldn’t be wanted here, at a show put on by the man whose life she’d ruined. She’d leave the gallery and go back to Jamie’s, where she’d spend the night with Sartre and a glass of bad wine from Jamie’s jug of bad wine. She’d forget about the night, the painting, James, Raul. She would never see or think of Raul Engales again, until he was right there in front of her, standing in the gallery’s cold door in an uncharacteristically sharp suit.

  “It’s him,” she said breathlessly to herself, as if Raul Engales were a rock star, or a god, or a man she had admired from afar but never met.

  Engales stood in the shadows outside of Fun, dreading his entrance. There was a low drone of dull chatter coming from inside. He could already hear snippets of inevitable conversations: this new sculptor who was building caves for homeless people to live in; Reynard performing at the Kitchen; this space is amaaaazing, isn’t it?; Winona always has her shows on Tuesdays. He didn’t know what people would be saying about James, if they would find the gesture of this show inspiring or crude, worthy of the good or the bad sort of gallery gossip. Either way, all of it sounded awful in his imagination.

  Cigarette.

  He followed the orange dot of another smoker’s ash and lit up one of his own. In the light of the match, he realized the owner of the other glowing butt was Horatio from the squat. He thought of Horatio’s pure physical force when he made his paintings, the lack of intellectualism in them, the heart. For some reason Horatio did not feel threatening but comforting, someone he had always trusted, and who smiled at him now without an ounce of pity in his face. Engales smiled back, and that was that. They smoked in silence. Engales looked out onto the street, which was humming with life and taxis and smelling like it did, sewer and trash and smoke and tar. He remembered how much he loved that smell, these sounds, these streets, back when he was new here. The thought made him feel briefly confident in some nostalgic way. He was back out in the world, existing. Horatio had said nothing about his hand. Maybe no one would. He could do this. He could go inside. He blew out the last of the smoke, stabbed the cigarette into the wall, pressed his shoulder and hip into the metal door.

  But once inside, he knew he had made the wrong choice to come here. The room’s energy focused in on him; eyes flickered up to him and then stuck. He knew everyone, and everyone was looking at him. Selma, probably trying to fix the awkwardness but failing, rushed over and practically fell on top of him. She was more than a little tipsy, and her hair, which had been slicked back into a vicious bun at the very top of her head, was flying out of its knot in ungraceful spurts.

  “My Raul!” she practically shouted, petting his chest with her long hands. “We’ve all been waiting to see you. Impatiently, Raul. So impatiently. And here you are. Back to your friends. We miss you. We do!”

  Engales managed a smile. “Thank you, Selma.”

  “And we’re so sorry,” Selma went on, trying to give him a meaningful look. “We’re so sorry about the accident. We really are. But life has these ways, you know? These ways of presenting us with mountains? And then we just, we just climb.”

  Engales forced his mouth into a scrunched smile, but his eyes refused to follow. “I’m going to find myself a much-needed drink,” he said, taking her by the shoulder and physically moving her a pace away.

  “Fine,” Selma slurred. “But come right back here and be with me. I need to tell you about everything. We moved, you know. The squat? And it’s really changed my whole process. I’m in a new space in the new space, you know?”

  Engales patted her back before she could finish and walked into the room. He quickly scanned the works on the walls: Diebenkorn, Kligman, Hockney . . . he thought of the binder and the slides, the physical-therapy room with Debbie. And then there was his painting, in the most prominent position on the far wall, the painting of Lucy he’d done when they’d first met. The paintings moved into one another fluidly and correctly, he thought, as if the lot of them were one big piece, part of a larger composition. He suddenly remembered the fondness he had had for James when they had talked about Lucian Freud, the way James seemed to have seen the paintings in the exact way he had. He felt oddly guilty, for one second only, about hitting James in the face so many times. But the guilt faded when he saw Lucy—the bright reminder of how he hated James with his whole heart—peering out at him from behind a column in the middle of the room.

  Engales quickly averted his gaze. He thought of the white jacket, her chin tilt, James’s hand on her shoulder. He wanted desperately to turn and go, but when he looked around he saw all the faces he didn’t want to see, all the land mines of all the artists from his past life, and Winona was manning the door now, and suddenly Lucy looked like the most benevolent and welcoming of all of them. And she was moving toward him now, like a little light on a pathway. Like one of those weird orbs of light that float above swamps. Her blondness blinding him. Her eyes hooking him. Her gold sequins, the same ones from the painting, catching all the bits of light in the room, then tossing them back toward him as if she were a human disco ball.

  “Not now,” Engales said when she arrived to him.

  “Then when?” she said. Her voice was her voice. What was it about her voice? Why did it move him so? How could he detest her so much and still be moved by her voice? He thought of the Clemente painting of the woman and her two men. He looked into Lucy’s eyes, which were lakes of familiar, easy water, flecked with some dangerous, flesh-eating fish. Suddenly he wanted her so badly he couldn’t contain himself.

  “Outside,” he said gruffly, and grabbed her by the arm.

  The show looked perfect, Winona had told James before it opened that evening. Everyone who was anyone was coming, she had promised, and the whole show would sell. Winona had said all of these facts as if they were good things; she had maintained her ecstatic mood, and had told him so in all the ways, including attempting to shove her tongue down his throat in an overindulgent congratulatory kiss just as she swung open the doors to the public. And James had tried hard to believe her. But as soon as people started filing in—and they did, in proud posses and dressed-up duos—and James was forced to begin the requisite kissing of cheeks and kissing of asses, and the explaining of why he was selling the whole lot of his art, he witnessed the slow sinking of his own heart. “It was just time,” he kept saying over and over to the curious gallery-goers. “Just time to move on.”

  But it was not time, and it never would be, to be doing the very thing he had vowed never to do: trading art for money. He had told himself it would be worth it, that it would fix everything, that it would smooth the waters with Marge, disperse of their money problems, cleanse him of his obsessions and his misdeeds. He had vowed not to be sentimental, or emotional, or, as he had proved to be over and over, impulsive. He would simply sit back and let this night wash over him, let the smooth promise of a clean, comfortable new life overshadow whatever vision he’d ever thought he’d had.

  But as he watched each red dot go up as a painting sold, his heart
sank further and further in his body. He thought of the quenching pinks of the Heilmann, the dizzying Germanic gray of his imported Georg Baselitz, the mirrored lake surface of the painted plate Schnabel had all but forced him to take for free as a sarcastic thank-you for a very bad review. He could not quite see the colors now—when Raul had hit him, it was as if he had beaten the colors right out of him—but he could feel the memories of them, which felt almost as distinct and powerful as the sensations themselves. Someone pulled out a checkbook and purchased his burnt orange. Someone else put their claim on his deep-sea ear popping. A woman in a jacket that looked to be adorned with shards of glass bought his foggy morning, his campfire smell, and his chartreuse flashes, all in one swoop.

  He watched the people’s faces as they studied and then abandoned the paintings. Did they see them as he once had? Alive and bright and wretched and perfect? Did they see them at all? Did the paintings move through them and then disappear, put out of their minds for good? Or would there be a time, years later, when they would remember an image they saw here tonight: a square inch of a painting, even, that would transport them back in time to the night James Bennett sold all his art?

  He concluded that no, they would not. And yes, this evening was officially depressing. Because even worse than the selling off of the art, the giving in to the commercial hell of the art world and the contribution to the thoughtless collections of the city’s richest dealers, was the fact that there was no one here to witness it. Here he was, giving up the things he had loved so much, without anyone he cared about here to care alongside him, to assuage the blow. Marge had stayed home with Julian, as they had agreed it would be too late a night for such a little boy. But James knew that’s not why Marge wasn’t here. She could hardly play the role of James’s wife at home. How could she do it out here, with people watching? How could she present herself to a public in a way that didn’t betray her real feelings? Her deep-seated resentment, her despair, her anger? Not to mention that she didn’t support the idea of the show at all, despite the fact that the point of it was to win her back.