Tuesday Nights in 1980 (16 page)

Now here he
was at Sotheby's, officially selling out. The lights in the auction house dimmed and the voices followed, the collective murmur fading into a hush: the conversations of all the rich people being grabbed up by the nets of the chandeliers. James braced himself. Felt Marge's soft hand on his thigh, which should have felt comforting but didn't. He wasn't allowed to resent her for this, he knew, but, even if it was very subtle, he could feel it. The tingly yet almost unfeelable sensation of resenting the person you loved most in the world. A warm hand on a stiff thigh.

“Welcome to Sotheby's,” a slick-haired woman said robotically, in an English accent—one of the voices you heard in an airport, telling you which terminal you were in. “You'll find the titles and estimates of each work of art in your program. There will be no need to speak your bid; a hand will do.”

Marge mumbled something about the whole thing being pretentious. He could tell she was trying to lighten things, to make the night feel like something other than what it was, which was a symbol of his general failure. James barely heard her anyway, because his mind was running through his list. Worry about seeing his painting on the chopping block of the stage. Worry that it would sell. Worry that it
wouldn't
sell. Worry that it would sell for less than what it was worth. Worry that either way it didn't matter—that nothing much mattered anymore.

The paintings that entered and exited the auction stage now felt and tasted and smelled like nothing. The first few works were straightforward and pristine: in line with the photorealist aspect of his Estes. They disappeared into the hands of big collector so-and-so, and then big collector so-and-so's friend—a network of so-and-sos that James understood were the most influential buyers in the city, or perhaps in the world. The momentum was meant to build as the auction progressed, the paintings becoming more valuable and more powerful as the evening went on, each scrolling across the stage with its worth floating above it like a kite. The auction helpers, dressed in their white-and-black auction-helper outfits, brought out paintings by Chuck Close, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol. Usually James would balk at a Warhol: the colors would smack of stage fright and sickness. Now? He felt nothing of the hospital-sadness they usually evoked.

The paintings brought a tight, hushed energy to the room as they were revealed on the stage; everyone had seen the program, they knew what was coming, but the physical presence of the work still cast its grandeur over the audience, created the kinetic jolt of proximity—like being in a room with someone you were in love with. Or was that the money, the vision of the money, the floating price tag that moved the people in this room? James couldn't tell. Things were selling for hundreds of thousands, seven hundred thousand, into the millions(!); James could feel Marge bristling beside him each time the gavel came down, with either excitement or nerves he couldn't tell, as a pile of invisible money left someone's hands. James grabbed for Marge's hand. His Estes was only three paintings away, at the precipice of the crescendo of silence, the tiptop of the hush. He bit his lip, tasting skin, and only skin.

James would wonder
later if it was fate that brought him to that auction house that night, the night that, after running through the standard big-name paintings, Sotheby's had decided to do something unprecedented: they hosted a small auction for works they had acquired by donation from an anonymous collector—paintings by promising lesser-known artists who were not even in the program. The auctioneer announced this departure from routine with a sort of subversive coolness. Didn't it have to be fate that the first of these works, a huge painting by an artist that James had never heard of, rolled onto the stage at precisely the moment when James was about to leave? And that, when he saw it, even from his perch near the back of the auction house, he saw bright, frantic, unbelievable, joyous, terrible, uncontrollable, perfect yellow flashes behind his eyes? The
same exact
bright, frantic, unbelievable, joyous, terrible, uncontrollable, perfect yellow flashes—those
butterfly wings
!—that he had seen on New Year's Eve, coming from the man in the blue room? Could it have been fate that made his heart leap upward in his chest, his brain flood with song—a symphony of sorts, complete with all the violins of the Village, all the songs of New York, the falsetto voices of every piece of art he had ever loved—the corner of his eyes wet with tears, and his right hand shoot up into the air to bid?

Marge whipped a glance in his direction; he could feel the sting of her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. “James!”

He was aware of the silent faces turning toward him like animated flowers, cheery, blissed-out Warhol flowers, electric poppies, all focused on his hand, which was rising up and up as if he had no control over it, as if it were not his hand at all.

“What are you doing!” Marge spat again, still through her teeth but louder this time, yanking at his arm.

“Shhh,” was all he said. The room held its breath. The velvet curtains creaked.

James was experiencing a color so pleasant he felt he might melt into the chair. The painting was a giant canvas boasting a larger-than-life blond woman, whose shirt sparkled like a fresh ocean, whose eyes were fishhooks, whose feet, and their largeness, made him smell the metallic grit of old pennies. His mind sparked and flashed. Zigzagged and flew. There were sprigs of fresh mint, a rebellious cigarette he had smoked when he was twenty, a night under the stars with a girl who had only wanted to be his friend. He slumped into a backseat at an all-night drive-in; he blushed; he wept.

And then it was done; a collective exhale as the gavel hit its mark. He had just
bought
a painting—he didn't even know who the artist was!—and Marge was reeling, furious, sweating; she stormed out of the auction room, scooting her backside over the knees of the New York elite, without even an angry glance back toward James.

James sat there in his chair, dumbfounded, convincing himself he had just done the right thing. It had to be a coincidence that the painting by the artist no one had ever heard of ended up costing him just over what he had made on the Estes painting moments ago, due to the fact that, from somewhere in the back, Winona George had circulated a rumor about this artist's bright future in her hands. It had to be,
certainly had to be,
fate that he had gotten the same sensations tonight as he had on New Year's, the last good sensations he'd felt before he lost them entirely. This painting would be a key, he knew. The key back into the house of his own mind.

Of course, fate was not an excuse when it came to explaining all this to Marge later. Marge, who had lost her baby. Marge, who had done so much to support him. Marge, the woman who had worked her way up from assistant art director to actual art director while he worked himself down from writer to nonwriter. Marge who had been paying all the bills since they lost the baby back in January,
nine months
ago now, and who only wanted him to be a little bit sensible, to share her dreams of even a remote amount of stability. To not do something insanely stupid like buy an absurdly expensive painting, when they could hardly afford to pay their rent.

She had left the auction house in a rage: all dark hair and snarled lips, the cleft in her chin flooding with red anger—he had been able to see the red again! Just after looking at the painting, he could see Marge's bright red again! She would not talk to him for days afterward, maybe weeks. She was going to
kill
him. But he couldn't be bothered to think about that for long. His mind, as he walked slowly home, down the wide sleeve of Eighth Avenue and under the shaded collar of the Village, was still fixated on the painting. So fixated, in fact, that he could have sworn, at one point, that he was
inside
of it. That the girl who was its central figure was floating down the sidewalk across the street from him, emitting that same yellow light from somewhere near her abdomen.

It couldn't possibly be her. He watched the light swish coolly in front of her. Not possible. A siren sang a city lullaby. But what crazy fate, if it was! A wheel made a mess out of a whiskey bottle. Should he cross the street to find out? No, he'd leave it like this: a wonderful, fateful night. A cat decided:
west.
The girl who could have been in his painting sang a name that could have been his own into the night.

T
he day of Raul Engales's accident started with a dream. His sister was reading him a list from her childhood notebook: a list of all the things he had done wrong in his life.
Broke Daisy Montez's heart. Stole cigarettes from the blind guy with the tobacco cart. Broke off Tina Camada's engagement by fucking Tina Camada in the dressing room of the clothing store she worked in and getting caught by the manager, who was cousins with Tina Camada's fiancé. Flunked school. Smoked too much. Killed a cat.
The list went on. In the dream, Engales shook his sister by the shoulders to make her stop. He shook her so hard her eyes rolled back in her head and she stopped breathing. Then he ran away, sprinting down the avenues and alleyways of Buenos Aires like a fugitive on the loose, knowing his sister was dead and that he had killed her.

The dream eventually shocked him awake. He had managed not to think of Franca at all since New Year's, after which there was Lucy, who had sufficed—by extravagant use of her tongue, nipples, voice, toes, and hands—to pull him away from his thoughts of
then
and into pure actions of
now
. She had led him through the spring and summer with the ever-present feeling that
now
was the only thing there was; with Lucy there was no Argentina, there was no Franca or Pascal, there was no black smudge of pain at the memory of the big, empty house. And so it was all the more unnerving to have seen his sister so vividly in his sleep, and to see her disappear.

With the idea that pleasure might help in erasing the dream's eerie residue, he reached an arm out and pulled Lucy toward him. He closed his eyes to the bright September light, which was coming in flat and fierce through the window, and rubbed himself against her. Soon she was awake and panting beneath him, her little body reacting to the push and pull of his.
Well aren't you feisty today?
she said after they finished, but Engales was already up and putting on his shoes.

The sex had worked, he told himself, as he pushed his way out onto Avenue A. He would not let the day be tainted by the dream. But outside, there were more disturbances: the frowning woman on the stoop of his apartment, her leg wrapped in gauze and her teeth missing, telling him,
Mister, it's painful. Mister, please.
The bird that had crashed into a glass window and lay splayed in the middle of the crosswalk on Second, barely breathing and with an injured wing. The mentally handicapped crossing guard, who held a big red stop sign for almost five whole minutes, looking into Engales's eyes as if he were daring him to cross without his blessing. On Mercer, just near the studio, the man with a blond beard who thrust a flier into Engales's hand: a boy had gone missing that morning, on his way to the bus.

Some might have taken these spectral instances to be signs, but Engales didn't believe in signs. Signs were for the superstitious, just as luck, the whole idea of it, was for the lucky. If he had thought for one second that the morning's odd composition was anything other than the average urban reminder that life was gross and strange, he would not have gone to the studio that day. But he did what any real New Yorker would: ignore the gross and strange, because in a city like this, it was the only thing there was. Plus, there was no time for signs, he thought, as he folded the missing-boy flier and stuck it in his shirt pocket. For the first time in his life, he owed something to the world.

The world meaning Winona George. As Rumi had predicted, Winona had found him. After five months of silence after New Year's, Engales had mostly given up on her, but then she showed up at the Times Square show in June (which, contrary to Rumi's predictions, had been
hugely
attended, and apparently by all the right people).
The Village Voice
, the next week, called it the “First Radical Art Show of the '80s,” and it seemed it was all anyone could talk about afterward. The next morning, Winona George called him in a tizzy.

“Pick me, Raul!” she'd said, in a voice as simultaneously regal and flighty as her hair: the sonic equivalent of commercial promise. “Everyone will be asking, but don't listen to them because they don't matter. Pick me for your gallerist; I will take you to the top, you'll see, you little young prize.”

And he had. And she had. Or she was about to: since that call there had been a buzz in the air and the buzz was about him. Overnight, thanks to Winona, his name had started to mean something, at least if you were at the right party in the right loft with the right people in the right part of town. And now he was beholden to an opening date for his first
real
show—September 23, just a week from today—a show that, Winona had revealed, would be reviewed in the
New York Times.
“Bennett has a little thing for you, it seems,” she'd said over the phone. “And I can't say I blame him.” James Bennett from the balcony. James Bennett from the
Times.
True, he hadn't seen Bennett's name in the paper for some months now, but he trusted there was a reason for that; perhaps Bennett hadn't seen anything that impressed him lately. Perhaps Engales's show would be the thing that
did,
making it all the more exciting for them both when he wrote about it. But the date of the show was descending on him with the speed of a falling brick, and Engales still had four more paintings to finish. His throat clenched at the thought.