Tuesday Nights in 1980 (17 page)

He'd attempted to
finish the work at the apartment, where he'd been doing most of his work of late. François's apartment, since Lucy had moved in, had become a den of art and sex, each fueling the other, improving the other, depending on the other to reach its maximum potential. Mouth on neck, brush to canvas, hands on breasts, color on paper—the summer had been one of the most productive, painting-wise, that he'd ever had. Lucy sat in the bedroom with him while he sketched and smoked. She sometimes sketched, too, in a notebook he had gotten her at Pearl Paint. Sometimes she just sat in the corner with a green Popsicle, watching him, which he surprisingly didn't mind at all. Usually someone watching him would annoy him, but it was as if her love of the paintings, the way she looked at them and studied them and talked about them, brought them to life. With her eyes on them, the paintings suddenly became real. No longer were they something that existed only in his mind or heart, but in the mind and heart of someone he loved.

Yes,
loved
; Engales had transformed rather quickly from a ladies' man into a man in love. Unlike any other woman he'd dealt with, Lucy didn't detract from his art, she added. She was not separate from the painting, but a part of it. That there was someone in existence who could inspire him to be better at what he loved, and to love it even more, was perhaps one of the most stellar of the many stellar reasons to be around the bright creature of Lucy every day and all the time. On a stoop with a cigarette, on an overturned tire with a beer, on Bleecker Street at midnight, kissing in a darkened doorway. She came with him to shows—she'd boldly told Jeff Koons she didn't understand the point of his vacuums, to which Koons had replied lightly:
Are you bored? Yes? Then you understand—
and she came with him to the squat, where she wove herself into the tapestry of artists quite gracefully, asking intelligent questions about Toby's latest project (blindfolding himself for a week, in an exploration of total darkness, about which Lucy had queried,
How will you present something so intangible to the public?
). She'd get as drunk and delightful as any of them, and was game for joining in on whatever performance or experiment they were getting up to that night, be it a sing-along to one of Selma's melancholy guitar melodies or a work session where they improved on sections of the building with stolen hammers and borrowed saws and recycled nails. Occasionally Engales felt like Lucy's teacher, explaining why a conceptual artist had chosen to cut holes in the floor of abandoned buildings, or rejigger a typewriter as a critique on the media, but at other times he felt like her student. Lucy was not burdened by the scene yet, the hype or the desire for fame or the jaded conversations or the endless critical dialogue. Whatever innocence she had (if easily stolen) was matched with intelligence (if naive), and she often saw things in a nuanced, surprising, and, in Engales's mind, brilliant way. She'd stand in front of a sculpture and tweak her head and pout her mouth and say something like,
It's ugly, but that's why it's good.

Lucy gave everything new energy, a new perspective. The sour-smelling herbs of Chinatown, the sweat on the subway, the sirens at night: the grossest of sensations became appealing to him, with her there to give them meaning. The all-night excursions to the Mudd Club or Max's became rife with stolen moments of pleasure; they'd find each other in a crowd and somehow it would feel new each time, like they'd just met right then. (
I found a blade of grass tacked to the bathroom wall,
she'd say.
It was so beautiful
.) They'd escape together back to his apartment, where she'd lie in bed and watch an enormous moth in the upper corner of the room—they'd named him Max, after the venue where they had just spent the night gawking over at Andy Warhol's table, then not caring about Andy Warhol because they had each other. And then he'd start painting. It could be midnight or morning when they got home, but he'd always start painting.
You're a maniac
, she'd say.
You're a mouse
, he'd say with a grin. The paintings piled up around them, their own little fort.

Something
would
happen with the paintings, this much was clear. Both of them could feel it: the pressure that the paintings built, the inevitability of their success; it was only a matter of when. The idea of fame hovered over him. Lucy stroked that idea, cradled it and kissed it; her belief in him was total. And when Winona George called, the idea of fame consolidating into a mass and then landing, they leaped around the apartment like children, their hands wrapped around each other's forearms, their blood so bubbly they felt drunk.

But as the show grew nearer, Engales had become frazzled and undone, and Lucy's presence, her eyes on the paintings and her body in the room, became a reminder that her love for the paintings was possibly not enough. There was a whole world in which he could fail, and if he did, she would be witness to that failure. He imagined this James Bennett person reviewing the show, what he might say. If he panned it, could Engales handle it? And if he glorified it, could he handle that, either? Painting had been his salvation through everything, and now it was going to be judged, potentially wrecked, by a public he didn't necessarily trust. The apartment had become full of these humming doubts. Flies buzzed around and got caught in mounds of paint. Lucy buzzed around, too, annoying him now. Suddenly, under the stress of the world outside their bubble, Lucy's presence had become a liability.

“I'll miss you too much,” she'd said before he'd left for the studio this morning, still lying naked in the bed, draped in the sheet of early fall light.

“Don't,” he'd said.

The studio smelled
like it always did, turpentine and cleaning fluid, plus Arlene: her signature combination of body odor, Egyptian musk, and yerba maté, which, inspired by Engales's Argentineanism, she had started drinking out of a gourd. Arlene had been acting different since New Year's, unsettled and easily annoyed, and she had developed a new antagonism toward Engales that he was pretty sure had to do with Lucy. He was spending too much time with that
girl
, she'd said more than once. And not enough time in the studio.

“I'm painting more than ever,” he told her calmly each time, but she shook her head.

“I'm just saying nothing great ever came from being in love,” she'd said.

Engales had given her a skeptical look and she had yelled, “It's true! Name one genius thing that came out of someone fucking their way into oblivion!”

“Human life?” he had said, with as much actual annoyance as humor.

“Human life is crap,” she had said, and then she had mumbled something under her breath, and Engales could have sworn it had the tone of a confession, though he couldn't be sure.

Now Arlene stood wide-legged on her wobbly ladder, holding her gourd in one hand and her brush in the other. Her underarm hair spurted out in a shock of orange, and Engales imagined painting that hair—a spiky orange scribble with a dry-bristled brush. He felt a softness for her even as he ignored her; he probably always would. He pulled a painting of a limp-faced Chinese woman, holding a head of bok choy like a trophy, from the back of his unfinished stack.

He had seen the Chinese woman on his first week in New York City, and though that was years ago now, he still remembered her face almost perfectly. One part of the face was drooping, as if the skin that covered it had lost all elasticity, and the fat of the cheek had migrated down into the hammock of loose skin. He had stared at her for probably too long, until she looked up from her bok choy and directly at him. He saw in her eyes the sort of pain that he guessed was reserved for the deformed; the eyes seemed to say,
This is how it is, how it will always be, and there's nothing I can do about it except keep living
. He pitied her. He remembered the pity just as well as he remembered the face. He also remembered how he had felt the urge to smile at her because of this pity, but had then forced himself to revoke the pity and the smile, which seemed to satisfy her: she had toasted him with her leafy greens. It was then, on his very first day, that he knew he had found his place in New York, a place for the deranged and wrecked and bold, a place where pity couldn't exist if it wanted to because there would have to be too much of it. The woman had wobbled away with her cloth bags, and as she did, he thought he heard her begin to sing.

These were the kinds of moments that popped up again and again in Engales's artwork; these were the kinds of people who populated his life with their flaws. He loved the flaws; they were invariably the most interesting parts of people's faces and bodies, the parts that held the strangest lines, the most beautiful shadows. Wounds and deformities and cracks and boils and stomachs: this was the stuff that moved Engales. Usually while he detailed a broken nose or sketched a lumpy body he felt as if he was zeroing in on what it meant to be alive. He could hear his father saying:
The scratches are what makes a life.

He had started painting portraits the year his parents died, thanks to an obese and kind art teacher named Señor Romano. Aside from English, art was the only class he never skipped, much because Romano had taken a special liking to him that was beyond the pity that the other teachers doled out—the same pity that he hated to feel in any form now. If Romano pitied him, it had never shown; he seemed to understand that what Raul wanted was to be treated like a human, not a child who had lost his parents. In class, they did boring drawing projects and elementary color wheels, but when Señor Romano saw the way Raul engaged with the materials—his sketches of fruit became deranged faces, he cut up his color wheels and collaged them together to make an entirely new rainbow—he sent Raul home with a wooden briefcase full of half-squeezed bottles of oil paint and used brushes. “This doesn't come out with water,” Señor Romano had told him, his only piece of instruction. He also gave him a tin of turpentine and a new name; he'd call him by his last name, Engales. That would be his artist's name.

Engales had begged paper off Maurizio, the butcher down the block. Maurizio, like everyone else in the neighborhood, would give Raul or Franca most anything they wanted; he and his sister only had to blink their eyes like the orphans they were. They got free steak from Maurizio; gross, free candies from the grocer; free bread from the bakery where Franca worked. When Raul got home he taped a sheet of the butcher paper to the wall of his bedroom and squirted some of the paints onto one of his mother's china plates. Here was one perk of having dead parents: you could paint with the china, and use the walls as your easel. The first thing that came to his mind to paint was Señor Romano himself: his tomato cheeks, his puffy eyelids, his big body, which filled the huge piece of butcher paper. He started with Romano's edges, and then he found himself zooming in on small areas he had noticed: the deep lines around Romano's eyes, the handsome lips, the tie that slung down over his huge stomach and was covered in a paisley pattern that Engales remembered almost photographically. It felt so completely natural to him it was as if he wasn't even in control of his own hand, as if the hand were re-creating Romano all on its own. He could see Romano there in the room with him, and he could feel him. For the first time since his parents had died, he did not feel entirely alone.

The painting then became obsessive. He painted after school and into the night. He asked Romano for more supplies, and with his own money, Romano bought him an entire stock of brand-new paints and brushes to add to the wooden box. Engales populated his bedroom with figures: the lady in the red hat who he passed on the street on his way to school; the old man who made them lemonades at Café Crocodile, whom they called El Jefe; Maurizio, whose face was shaped like a laugh; the girl he thought was beautiful in his English class, whose top lip looked like a half-moon. He painted tens and perhaps hundreds of portraits of his sister, who was the only one who would actually sit for him: Franca in a party hat; Franca wearing their father's suit; Franca with a flower in her mouth like a tango dancer; Franca frowning, because that was how he knew her face the best. When his bedroom walls became too small to hold all the large sheets of paper, he began to store them under his bed in big stacks. One morning he woke up to see that Franca had found his stash, and that the paintings had been pinned up on every empty wall throughout the house. He found Franca herself standing in the hallway outside their parents' bedroom, touching a rendition of her own face.

The painting also did something else: it pointed toward escape. Just a month before he died, Engales's father had spent a week in New York City and had returned with an infectious enthusiasm for the place. “It's swarming with artists and musicians and writers,” Braulio had reported over dinner. “I mean, just
listen
to this!” Engales's father then put on a flamboyant jazz record that bipped and bopped and hiccupped and screeched on the player through the rest of Braulio's exotic descriptions of the far-off city: underground poetry rooms, fantastic fashion, smoke that rose like breath from the holes in the street. Taken by his father's excitement, fourteen-year-old Raul asked bluntly, “When can I go?” Braulio chuckled, leaned back, wiped steak sauce from his big face. “Whenever you want, son. Thanks to your fetal impatience, you can go to America whenever you see properly fit.” Raul had been born a month before his due date, at the tail end of his parents' stay there, and it had become one of their little family jokes: Raul was born for New York City.

And now here he was: a part of that world his father had described, or at least about to be a part of it, if he could bring himself to finish this Chinese woman's bulbous cheek. He paid special attention to the cheek, painstakingly adding wrinkles, highlighting it just right. But then he had been working on it for hours and it wasn't just right. It wasn't the woman who he remembered. The face did not feel like her face. Instead of acknowledging the viewer with forgiveness, she held a look of mistrust. Where was it coming from? Her eyes? The creases around her mouth? The cheek itself?