Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  “You’re being rash,” she’d told James when he’d gotten off the phone with Winona. “You’re acting impulsively. Again. This isn’t what you want.”

  “But I’m doing this for us,” he had said. “For our family. And I want you to come.”

  “We’re not really a family right now,” she had said in the tone she had taken to using with him, which was robust in its bitchiness yet also very normal, as if these cutting snippets were just regular things that people said. He had nodded, as he nodded about everything; she was right about everything now, she had all upper hands. But he had secretly hoped she would show up anyway. She was all he had. Other than her, if he was even allowed to count her, he had no one. He was like a tree in a forest. No one would see or hear him fall.

  In an alley called Extra Place, against a wall that read in bulbous yellow letters FOR THE SO-CALLED AVANT GARDE, Engales and Lucy had sex. It was the sort of sex that happened in alleys: hasty and necessary, crude by design. Lucy felt tipsy, and needy, and guilty. She whispered that she missed him. She did. She missed him terribly, the whole thing of him, and his presence was making her drunker than she already was. He did not whisper back but only continued to press her against the wall with his body, her back chafing on the bricks, her face hurting. She could feel a piece of her own hair in her mouth. She could feel the stump of his arm on the side of her stomach, which made her want to cry. He smelled like him: the first good smell of New York City. Cigarette mouth, clean skin, dirty hair. In a way that felt familiar and also crass, he put his mouth on her neck. He tore at the sequins on her shirt until some of them fell, like gold snowflakes, to the ground.

  “Call me Spot,” Lucy tried.

  “No,” Engales countered.

  When they finished, Lucy pulled down her skirt and wiped her hair out of her face. She tried to smile up at him, but found it was hard to look him in the eyes. What was she supposed to say to him? How was she supposed to tell him about everything that had happened since he’d disappeared from her life two months ago, apparently to some rehab institution on Winona’s dime, but how the hell was she supposed to know that? Winona was a bitch for not telling her, not to mention James, and Engales had never called, never thought to tell her he was even alive. And too much had happened: the boy, his sister, James. Everything had been upended, and so much of it was her fault. What were her excuses? She bit her lip, as was her custom when she did not know what she should say.

  “I like your suit,” she said, immediately regretting it.

  “Did you meet him?” Engales asked. He was zipping up his pants now, not looking at her.

  “What?”

  “Did you meet him? The boy?”

  Lucy shook her foot. She shook her head. Then she nodded.

  “Well?”

  Lucy shook her head again. The lip biting was starting to hurt.

  “Fucking say something!” Engales screamed. It echoed through the alley and out onto First Street. Two people walking on First Street turned their heads to look down the alley, then scurried away.

  “What do you want me to say?” Lucy yelled back. Again, the sound rang off the graffitied walls and was followed by a long, silent moment. Lucy was breathing hard. She felt all her anger rise in her and her body felt hot and tense with adrenaline. “Do you want me to tell you I fucked someone else? Is that what you want me to say? I did, okay? But that’s because you threw me out! You told me to go away! That you never wanted to see me again!”

  Engales had his hand in his pocket, and his fingers were pushing down on the cloth, digging into his leg. He said nothing as Lucy went on.

  “You don’t think I feel terrible?” she yelled. “You don’t think I wanted to help you? You don’t think I cried myself to sleep every single night since you’ve been gone? But you didn’t tell me where you were, Raul. You didn’t even tell me if you were okay. So what was I supposed to do? The last thing you told me was that you hated me, remember? You told the nurses to ban me. And then you disappeared!”

  “Have you considered for one second that this is not about you?” he said, seething.

  She got quiet, looked at her boots, which she was using to scrape at the gravel. Then she looked up at him, straight in the eyes.

  “I didn’t know you had a sister,” she said.

  “Well, now you do,” he said.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about her before, though?”

  “Because I failed her,” Engales said. “I abandoned her just like I abandoned you. That’s what I do, Lucy. Don’t you see that?”

  “But you don’t have to!” she pleaded. “I love you, Raul. So much! No matter what!”

  “You don’t even know what that means,” he said coldly.

  “Why are you so angry with me?” she said. “What did I do to you? Why do I make you so, so angry?”

  “You know what you do to me?” He snarled. “You need me.”

  “Yes, I do need you!”

  “But it’s not just me. It’s everyone. You need everyone because you have no idea how to need yourself. Or even how to be yourself.”

  Lucy looked confused and was shaking her head from side to side slightly. A wind came through the alleyway, and she pulled her jacket tighter.

  “Don’t you get it, Lucy? That boy is the only member of my entire family. He is the only person who has the same blood as me, the only person on this earth. And what do you do? Drop him off with the person you’re fucking.”

  He began to walk away from her, out of the alley and toward the street. She yelled after him. “That’s not true! It’s not! I swear that’s not true!”

  At the end of the alley he turned around. “Go home, Lucy,” he said, and it sped toward her like an arrow and brought her, with its sharp point, down.

  The gravel dug into her knees as she fell to them. She would go home. She wouldn’t let the city’s lights steal what was left of her innocence, and she would go home and look for it in the grass. She would gather her childhood back out of the branches of the fir trees. She would find her silliness under a pile of old, out-of-style jeans. She would think of Raul Engales while drinking whiskey at a bonfire, and whenever she saw a man with a mole on his face. She’d think of James when she smoked cigarettes in secret on her parents’ back porch: the feeling of bad pleasure. She would remember her first and only art project, Jacob Rey, when she saw the many faces of children who disappeared after him, immortalized and then thrown away on the sides of cartons of dairy. She would find Manhattan, often, right before she fell asleep: the honking of a horn, the way it opened and filled her, a blue balloon she’d seen drifting up through the skinny slice of sky between the skyscrapers. She’d hold the Big City to her chest, like a little golden locket that held something only she understood. She and a few others—red-lipped Jamie, loud-mouthed Arlene, maybe, and of course Engales, the original artist, the first one she’d ever loved. All of them were there, right up under her collarbone, lodged and safe.

  Later still she would let them all fly away, like that blue balloon. She would untangle herself from the city’s gray grip. She would become womanly in the hips and face. Her misdeeds would taper. She would work for Randall the lawyer, not Randy the bartender. She’d smile at a man from across a garden party, where light jazz music played; they’d have a child who couldn’t say his R’s. If he would have gotten to meet Raul, he would have called him Owl. She won’t see Raul again, but she’ll see his handsome photograph. Printed in a book she pulls from the Ketchum Library, called, simply, Downtown, Volume II.

  See you soon, girlywog, she said now, through her tears, to the rat that had taken an interest in Jamie’s purse. She had never given it back, though surely she had meant to.

  At the gallery, the night began to descend in the way that shows do when all the free wine is gone, though there was still a case of it, visibly available under the drink table. Even so, people started tapping one another on the shoulder and listing the names of bars nearby. Four times, James heard the phr
ase, “I completely forgot to eat dinner,” coming from the smarter dressed of the women and, in one case, an extra-short man in a fedora. James wanted to tell each of them that their hungry plight was not nuanced; “forgetting” to eat dinner was an urban norm. Did anyone, anywhere else in the country, even in the world, forget to eat dinner? Or was it just the New Yorkers who found themselves, after a night of looking at art, starving?

  Sullenly he kissed them all good-bye. He didn’t know them or care for them. A few of them he knew, and he didn’t care for them still. Winona George, in leather pants that looked to have been applied with glue, announced: “Have to duck out of my own party, sadly, as I was not a good enough hostess to provide more than one olive per guest! But congratulations on an epic show, James. Phenomenal. Just phenomenal.”

  After Winona left and every painting’s tag boasted a red dot and the solitary bowl of chips that Winona had set out was empty, James saw no point in keeping up appearances, and slumped to sitting against the back wall, next to the case of wine. He pulled out an open bottle, drank from it. He wanted only to go home, but his home did not want him. He stared at the painting on the wall in front of him. It was a giant blue square. If only life could be as simple as that, he thought. Just a big blue square. But when he looked at it for long enough he began to remember all of the things that painting had once conjured for him: molasses, sand dunes, the feeling of holding hands. It was never that simple, he knew. On top of life, there was always more life.

  He wanted to cry into the blue square. He wanted to call his mother, whom he had not talked to in close to two years, and tell her about his night. All of them sold, Mom, he would say. Each and every one of them. I’ve earned millions of dollars, Mom. Are you proud of me? Are you proud of your son? Of course she wouldn’t be. Pride wasn’t part of her emotional vocabulary. And why was he thinking of his mother? He never thought of his mother; it depressed him. His leg itched with what felt like a fly landing on it, but there was nothing. When he looked up, there were Marge and Julian.

  He felt filled with emotion when he saw them walking across the room in their puffy coats, overcome with elation and thankfulness, and for one quick second, he thought he saw Marge’s deep red. Or was it the memory of her red? He couldn’t tell and it didn’t matter. She had come! She had changed her mind and she had come! He didn’t care if the red stayed or faded; it didn’t matter. He didn’t care that he had sold all of his paintings; it didn’t matter. She mattered. She was the only thing that mattered.

  But when she came closer, James saw the unmistakable signs that she had just been crying. Her gray eyes were glazed over, the lines around her mouth pronounced and shadowed.

  He went to her. “You came,” he said, putting his hands on her arms.

  “Just quickly,” she said.

  “Why quickly?” he said. “There’s wine.”

  “I see that,” she said. “What, the rich people weren’t thirsty?”

  They both tried to laugh, failed.

  “And don’t you look like a big kid,” James said to Julian. He rustled his hair. No response, of course—Julian had not spoken a single word to them since he arrived—but the fact that he was not crying was enough for the rustling of the hair to feel heart-wrenchingly intimate. He looked back up at Marge.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  “I’m tired,” she said.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  “But I’m really tired,” she said. “Of everything.”

  “You’re tired of me.”

  “Yes, James. I’m tired of you.”

  “I know,” he said. He looked down at Julian and gave him what he hoped was a kind look. His heart broke.

  “I read your book,” she said.

  James’s face tightened; Marge’s red flared. Stay there, he willed the color, but he couldn’t hold on to it, and it smudged away.

  “What book?” he said.

  “The pages in your study.”

  “That? Marge. Marge, you read that? That’s just a bunch of crap I’ve been writing. Not a book. No, there’s no book.”

  “There is,” she said.

  James couldn’t bring himself to say anything more about what he had written: a document full of ramblings that Marge never should have read in the first place for all the sad, gross, probably poorly written truths it exposed. He remembered his very first review in Art Forum: Marge, kissing his white stomach, telling him: It’s ready, James. But are you? Marge knew. She knew what things were. And her eyes were steady and perfect. And she was tired, and he did not want to tire her more. Instead, he wanted to take care of her. Rock her in safety. Give her things. Give her everything, because she deserved it.

  “I sold it all,” he said.

  “I knew you would,” she said.

  “Are you proud?” he said.

  “Extremely,” she said. Then she bent in and hugged him. Into the collar of his shirt, she whispered: “He’s out.”

  “Oh,” James said. He put his hand on the back of her head. At the very thought of Raul Engales, his pupils flooded with blue. The paintings in the gallery sprung toward him: a rap song, the smell of late-spring gardens, the word caesura. Marge’s red gathered and swelled around her, and his heart chimed and swung.

  “He came to the house,” Marge said, pulling away slightly, which felt like a window opening, letting in a gust of too-cold air. James wanted to hug her for always. “I saw him at the door,” she said. “Through the glass. I couldn’t bring myself to open it.”

  “Okay,” said James, nodding.

  “I need your help with this one.”

  “Okay,” said James, continuing to nod as if the gesture would somehow bring him confidence, but the colors were swirling around him and Marge, and he wasn’t quite sure what he was agreeing to, he just was. He was just agreeing. To Marge. To helping. To the colors. To all of this.

  “Good night, James,” she said. She blinked, then turned, then began to walk off, her little white triangle heels clacking on the smooth cement floors. The red that had occurred around her followed her like a cloud, and James noted something different about it . . . some multitudinous quality . . . was it . . . pomegranate? Was it, could it possibly be, the same seed-filled red she had embodied when she was pregnant last year? Could Marge possibly be . . . no, she couldn’t leave him here now!

  “Wait!” said James, uselessly. “Where are you going? Marge, Julian’s here!”

  “I trust you, James,” he heard her say. She did not turn around. James watched his wife tuck out the door and disappear. His heart was somewhere near his ankles, pounding. He grabbed for Julian’s hand just as the boy started to cry.

  “Gonna close up soon!” yelled a fat security guard at the front entrance. “Everybody’s gone!”

  Everybody was gone. James’s colors gradually faded again: fabric that had been out in the sun too long. The edges on everything blurred, but that was just the water gathering in his eyes.

  Engales ran across the street and grabbed the security guard’s giant arm. “Are you closing?” he said breathlessly. “I need to get back in.” Upon closer inspection, Engales realized it was José, from the arts building at NYU.

  “Hey, I know you,” said José. “You’re that fucker that is always sneaking in over at the school!

  “You look different now, though,” José was saying, looking Engales up and down. “Something change?”

  Engales held up his arm. José said: “Oh, shit.”

  “That’s right, oh, shit. Now would you mind letting me in there? It’s important.”

  “Always trying to get into places you don’t belong!” José said. “It’s closed. No more show.”

  “José,” Engales said, in Spanish now. “I lost my fucking hand. I have one person in my family, and he’s inside. Let me in, José.”

  “Jesus,” José said, holding his hands up. “Five minutes, then I’m going out drinking and finding a lady.” He wagged his lips.

  “Fin
e,” Engales said, unamused. Would there have been a time when he would have given José a high five?

  Where the room had been brightly lit and bubbly when he was here last, now many of the tracks of bulbs had been turned off, and there was only one rectangle of light toward the back of the room. In it, sitting against the wall in a row, were James and a little boy. James was petting the boy’s hair in a way that was unflattering for both of them: Julian’s hair was becoming matted to his forehead; James’s face was growing bleak with desperation. Julian cried harder.

  Engales went toward them, his nervousness eclipsed by intention. He knew they couldn’t see him; he was in the shadowy dark area. “It’s okay, Juli,” James was saying in his pandering, desperate James voice. Engales felt a proprietary pull—hearing that name aloud, his grandfather’s name, a name that was so like Franca to have chosen—and here was James, uttering it in nickname form. He coughed, announcing himself.

  “Holy shit, Raul! You scared me.”

  Engales ignored James now; he could see the little boy’s face, splotchy with tears but already so familiar. The boy hiccupped from the last gulps of his crying. Small head, small body, small shoes, huge eyes. Franca’s eyes. Franca’s everything. James set him down on the floor. With a sudden, awkward movement Engales crouched down to the boy’s level. He grabbed him by the arm with his good hand and the stump of his bad one. He searched him. The world stopped when he pulled the boy’s small body tightly to his, wrapping his one arm around his tiny body. The world stopped when he smelled the wet crackers and warm milk and the laundry detergent everyone used in Argentina. He let go quickly and the world spun. The boy looked at him with his big Franca eyes. Engales felt stupid, like he shouldn’t have hugged him. The boy would have no idea who he was, he would be frightened, probably—Engales flushed with shame. But then the boy said, through his hiccups, with his little mouse’s mouth: