Tuesday Nights in 1980 (11 page)

Engales laughed. “I don't think so. She didn't even get my name.”

“Just wait,” Rumi said. “You'll never give a shit about Times Square after what she does to you. But at least I can say I knew you when.” She winked.

“So what do we do now?” Engales said, bringing Rumi's plastic watch up to his nose.

“We go to the best bar in New York City and we toast preemptively to your success,” said Rumi. She pushed herself up from the stoop with what looked to be a last breath of effort. “Maybe we can even find someone for you to kiss.”

They got up to go, pausing for just a moment to watch Keith, who was painting an enormous heart on a temporary barricade across the street; inside of it he wrote in his bulbous script:
1980.
When he turned around and saw them across the street, he gave them a juicy grin.
You guys headed to the squat later, or what?

I
t was just after midnight on New Year's Eve, in the first hours of the bubbly new decade, when Lucy Marie Olliason fell in love at first sight. She had been making a round of Manhattans for a mob of mannequin-like models, inwardly lamenting the anticlimactic climax of the night, when the Love that she First Sighted came into the bar and quickly, with the tossing of his black hair and the awkward yet charming grin he gave her, made her realize that the night had actually just begun. He forced himself to the front of the bar, through two big men she had been serving Long Island iced teas, and put his forearms on the bar like he was about to eat a plate of spaghetti. The mole on the side of his face said:
Spot.

“What?” she said. Had he said something? Or had she hallucinated? She could feel her provincial stupidity shining through her and she longed for the excellent coolness of a real local, even a dash of it. But there was no acquiring that in the amount of time she had, which was seconds, nanoseconds even, before this man said what he'd said again.

“
Spot!
I'm naming you that. I've just given you that name, right now.”

Her heart leaped. This was the sort of thing she had believed in then, during her first winter in New York. She believed in a handsome man walking into her bar, a sort of downtown knight, a savior. She believed in the intimacy of nicknames. She believed in good luck and good looks. (And this man's looks—hair that was dark enough to be exotic but wavy enough to be familiar, lips that bow-tied at the cleft and smiled easily, and triangular, almost sinister eyebrows—were
definitely
good.) She believed in this man's eyes (warm as redwood bark) and in this man's mole (a rubbery knob that wagged when he spoke), and she believed she could love that mole, that beautiful mole, that bounded out of his face and toward her, when he touched her earlobe over the bar. She believed in fate and destiny, and that she had stumbled upon hers, when he told her, leaning over the bar and whispering into her ear, that he was a painter. Finally, after the months that had felt like years in the Big City, in the first moments of the new decade, she had met her first artist. One of the men in her stolen library book. One of the men whose lives she had so badly wanted to know.

Lucy had arrived
in New York City just five months earlier, in July 1979, during the peak of a massive heat wave that had rendered even the rats lethargic. She was twenty-one years old. She had pulled the trigger on the move—from Ketchum, Idaho, to what people in Ketchum, Idaho, called the “Big City” or the “Big Apple” or sometimes even the “Capital of the World”—because of a book and a postcard, which she believed to be signs.

The book she had found in the art section of the Ketchum Library, a black glossy volume called simply
Downtown
. It was full of photographs of paintings and sculptures. Huge, looming sculptures, bigger than bodies, and paintings whose compositions made, to Lucy, no sense at all. She loved the feeling that she didn't understand something, that there were things out in the world that she might be in awe of, that could elude her. But even more than the objects it was the artists themselves who interested her: the black-and-white pictures of these men—yes, they were mostly men—whose eyes shone alongside their artworks with ideas and city intelligence. She wanted to know everything about them: what they ate for dinner; who their wives were; how they thought up their odd creations. Was what moved these men the same thing that moved her? The unbearable feeling that if you didn't
do
something, if you didn't
fill up the entire world with your longings
, then you would explode? Lucy checked the book out many times in a row, until the librarian told her she needed to leave a week in between checkouts, and she grew embarrassed, thinking that the librarian knew what she was doing with it, which was staring at the photographs of men, dreaming of them, and occasionally reaching down over the crotch of her jeans and pressing her hand there, while she looked into a particularly beautiful artist's eyes.

The postcard she had found while she was driving her father's pickup to her friend Karly's house—a white flash, caught in the grass on the side of the road—that she had for some reason felt the need to pull over and examine. It was a faded picture of the New York skyline on a black night, in all its jagged, sparkly glory. The back said:
See you soon, girlywog.
Her heart actually stopped when she read it.
Girlywog.
The same absurd noun that her mother had bestowed upon her as a term of endearment:
Sleep tight, girlywog.
Though she had no idea who would send a postcard like this, or whose dashboard it had flown off in order to land on this particular patch of weeds, or who the real girlywog was, she knew that it was meant for her. She had turned the truck around and gone back to her parents' house, walked into the kitchen where they were preparing dinner, and told their backs: she was moving to New York and that was final.

“You know you don't have to go,” her mother had said the night before she left. She was sitting on the edge of Lucy's bed, watching her pack the rest of her clothes into an enormous black void of a suitcase that she had bought for five bucks at the Ketchum Goodwill. “You've got your whole life! Nobody's making you go, you know.”

“If someone was making me go,” Lucy said with sarcasm left over from her teenage years, “I wouldn't be going.”

She had been stuck in Ketchum since high school, along with a whole crew of creepy townies who had not felt the need to apply for college, working at Mason & Mick's, the hardware store where she had actually been
born
. No one was making her go; she was going because she physically had to.

“I know, I know,” her mother said, in a voice that Lucy wanted to recoil from and already missed. “It's your decision. I'm just saying. Just putting it out there. Options.”

Lucy's mother knew her better than anyone, because the truth was they were made of the same stuff: unfulfilled desires, pale Norwegian skin, warring impulses to be comfortable or to be courageous, sweet or sour. The difference was that her mother's wars had already been fought, her desires already mostly squashed or else fulfilled, and she had ended up here, in a house in the middle of what some might call nowhere. The light in the bedroom was dim, the way all light becomes in rooms made entirely of unfinished wood. The wood sucked up the light into its grain, and turned what it did not consume a burnt orange color. The whole house was like this, a barnish place on a twelve-acre patch of land, flanked by two emerald hills and nestled in a grove of grand firs; there was never a time of day without shadows.

Her mother played with a tassel of one of the blankets, kneading it between her thumb and forefinger.

“Randall could figure something out for you here,” she said. “And not just the elementary stuff. Lord knows you can write. He'd be having you write whole briefs for him, would be my guess.”

Her mother had done that night what everyone in town had been doing for weeks: tried to convince her that the wooded borders of Ketchum, Idaho, were where the world ended. Everything you needed was right here, they all said. But her book and her postcard and something else inside her told her otherwise. She believed that the world was wide and available and filled with the potential for feeling and subversion and art and wonder. She secretly took pleasure in the fact that all of Ketchum, including her own mother, thought she was crazy. She was smart enough to know that crazy also meant brave.

“But you'll land on something there, too,” her mother said that night. “You've always been so pretty. And they do have all the big modeling agencies there.”

From her mother, this was a backhanded compliment, and they both knew it. Lucy knew that her mother meant that she would probably
not
land on something, not unless that something was as unsubstantial as
modeling.
Apparently the Lord knew she could write briefs for a subpar lawyer in Ketchum, but in the Capital of the World? Not a chance. Her mother also understood that it made Lucy uncomfortable when people talked of her beauty, which was as much a fact as her suitcase, black and too big, sitting there in the room with them. It was the kind of beauty that model scouts saw in fourteen-year-olds at the mall—and that might have happened to her if there was any mall for her to wander around in—undeniable, accessible, wholesome, and yet vaguely sad. Her hair had been white-blond when she was little, and now it was the tawny, vulnerable brown of towheads after puberty everywhere, and its lackluster color only enhanced the very noticeable smoothness, the very particular rosiness, the very recognizable symmetry of her face.

“Models don't eat, Mom,” she said, tossing a pair of sneakers into the suitcase. “I, on the other hand, am constantly starving.”

“I'm just worried,” her mother said, shifting her motherly weight onto her hand. “You know how I get.”

“I do know how you get, and it's ridiculous,” said Lucy. “I'm an adult, Mom. I'll figure it out.”

She knew it was unconvincing, because she was unconvinced herself. Was she an adult? Would she figure it out? She had no idea what she would do in New York; she only knew that she was going. She imagined an office on an eleventh floor. She imagined a skirt with pleats, something she did not have yet because you could only find it there. And then she imagined darker things, in vague spurts that excited her immensely: a nightclub with a strobe light, a man's arm with a tattoo on it, a fiery night of smashed windows and stealing; she had seen footage of the blackout on the news.

“Well you've always been different, haven't you?” her mother said. “You've always had . . . what is it? Zest. You've had zest.” Her blue eyes were clouding and Lucy didn't want it to come, though she knew it would: the story of how she was born.

“I still remember when you were born,” her mother said. Here it was. Lucy didn't want to hear the story because there was no story, and she had heard it too many times. The story about the hardware store—where she had been employed for the last six years, organizing bolts and washers and wire—on the thirteenth of October, just after the storm that had blanketed all of Idaho in a thick white that would stay for months on end. Winter had come early, and so had Lucy, apparently, pushing her way out of her mother three whole weeks before her due date, right there in the aisle of Mason & Mick's, between the lightbulbs and the light sockets. Mick, of Mason & Mick's, had cut the cord with a pair of garden shears.

Lucy didn't want to have only one story. She wanted a whole life made out of stories: momentum, propulsion, characters, change. In a small town like this there were only so many ways to feel moved by change, and they were too subtle to be interesting—a snowstorm like the one on the night she was born; a litter of puppies born in town; a boy's hand on her breast in the cab of his musty truck; the married art teacher, telling her in his soft teacher voice that he just couldn't do this anymore. Though she always tried to provoke something into happening—calling the teacher's house in the middle of the night, getting drunk on the bottle of Johnnie Walker her parents had in the cabinet, going to loud concerts and drunken bonfires in the middle of snowy fields—the stories always ended up the same. There were only, after the bonfires or fiery moments of passion were over, more wet drives to friends' houses, pale afternoons filled with rivers and waiting, gas station parking lots, excuses. Time in Ketchum moved like the shadows that cloaked her house—so slowly you couldn't see it.

“Good story, Mom,” she said with that same sarcasm, although she couldn't help but smile. She took a deep breath and scanned the dim bedroom, as if to breathe in the gymnastics trophies from the days when a cartwheel earned you your own personal statue, the framed photographs of friends making peace signs, the posters of rock bands that had never passed through Ketchum but whose records she found in free bins at the thrift stores downtown. These were all the things she would leave behind. She scanned the hundreds of faces, animals, mouths, and eyes that lived in the grain of the wooden walls. Though she had grown up in this house, knew all its creaks and cracks between planks, she had still allowed it to frighten her: the two-dimensional wood-grain animals, the vulnerability of its being in the middle of nowhere, ready to be ravaged by fire or lightning bolt, the sounds the house made, which her mother assured her was “settling”: the house getting more comfortable in itself, while she was growing less so. What she wanted was people. Potential saviors, all at arm's reach from her, so that if the animal in the wood grain jumped out of the wood she could scream, and someone would hear.

“It's almost time to leave, girlywog,” her mother said. She smelled like Lubriderm lotion and damp soil.

“I'm ready,” she had said, feeling only remotely guilty as she set
Downtown
into her suitcase, so shiny and satisfying in its library plastic.