Tuesday Nights in 1980 (18 page)

He stood back to take a look. The flaw didn't feel like a flaw, it felt planned.

The Winona George complex, Arlene had named the uneasiness he felt now, the whirlpool of doubt that had begun to circulate in the studio and in his head. He had always wanted exactly what he had now: to be able to paint for a reason. But now that he had one, he felt that the reason was arbitrary, which made the painting seem that way.

A panic swept through him, and he felt his confidence sliding down the epic slope of almost-failure toward failure itself. Quickly the panic mixed with the fear he had felt in his dream that morning, creating a spiral of things to add to Franca's list.
Left his sister with a stupid, spineless husband in a country that was practically self-destructing. Left without turning around to look at her, without saying good-bye. Never returning her letter, never finding out her big news.
Why was he thinking about her now?

From across the room, he heard Arlene yell: “
Do something else, Raul
.”

This was code for one of Arlene's earliest studio lessons: when you start doubting, you stop painting. You eat a sandwich, walk around the block, do jumping jacks, make sketches. Anything to circumnavigate the doubt, change its course. Doubt was the fucking enemy, Arlene said. Of all good art.

Though Engales was not in the mood to listen to Arlene, he knew she was right; the doubt was feeding off the strange morning, filling him quickly, sinking him. But he couldn't take a walk—he had so much to do. He had to make the sketches for his four new paintings, so he decided to cut paper. They had only bulk paper at the studio, which came in enormous sheets, which he would rip, then rip again, then stack, then cut all at once, until he had a bunch of rough-edged squares. When he had ripped the whole roll, he inserted his book-size stack into the guillotine, a paper cutter meant to cut entire volumes, in the darker corner of the studio. He slid the paper to the back edge of the cutter with his hand.

There was a flash. It was silver and slick: a mirror breaking; a window slamming shut. Franca's body went limp in his arms. His heart stopped. His sister's heart stopped. Broken music played from somewhere outside. When he looked up, his hand was lying on the counter behind the blade of the guillotine, completely severed from the rest of his body.

For an entire
minute, he glares at it. The thick, silver blade, separating one part of him from the other. The wall of the metal up against the hair and skin of his arm. Arlene's red hair is flying toward him like a fire. Her long skirt with the elephants on it. A scream from one of the students cracks through the heavy air. On the windows, fog spreads and shrinks with the collective breath of the room. His arm, cut just under the elbow, is a cross section of red and white, now bleeding out over the counter and onto the floor.

Arlene wraps the stump of his wrist in a paint rag, her mouth open with frenzied, frantic questions, but Engales cannot hear or see her. Instead, he sees Franca's face in her face: strewn with sadness because she has dropped a carton of eggs. The rag turns orange rapidly, the stain of blood blooming out to its edges. Franca watches the orange yolk bleed into the sidewalk's veins. Everything goes white, then red, then white. Engales walks on ahead of her.
Hurry up, egghead. They're just eggs.
He vomits, greenish, into the stainless-steel sink.

Arlene knots the hand itself into another rag and places the bundle into a tin canister used for paintbrushes. His dead fingers blacken in the turpentine. He opens his mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. There is his painting hand in a can full of paintbrushes. There is the gaping hole of his mouth.

I
t is a dream.
This was what Lucy told herself when she showed up at St. Vincent's hospital, coatless, still slightly high from a bump of cocaine Random Randy had given her at the bar just before she'd taken Arlene's call. The cocaine had felt necessary at the time, a little bump to lift her just a little bit above her circumstance: the front end of her regular Tuesday-night shift, where she was dealing with the 4:00
P.M.
–ers, those downtrodden enough to seek afternoon refuge in whiskey and Lucy's tits. But now the drugs only contributed to the sense that the scene she was living in could not be real. It was only dreams that rooms turned into other rooms so quickly and without transition, that the log cabin of the Eagle could transform into the stark, bright hall of St. Vincent's hospital in what felt like one seamless instant. It was only in dreams that thin, bruised men, flanked by turquoise curtains and dingy bedside lamps, looked out on you from their rooms as if their diseases were your fault: the sad, almost-ghosts of an epidemic you knew close to nothing about. And it was only in dreams—or perhaps only nightmares—when you saw something like what Lucy saw in the papery bed of room 1313: her lover, sleeping beside the bandaged stump of his own arm, its tip bright red with tenacious blood.

“Finally,” said a voice. Arlene's New Yorker voice, always adding O's in where they didn't belong.
F-O-inally.
Lucy gulped. That Arlene did not like Lucy was as much a fact as the bloody stump, which Lucy could not take her eyes off of as she approached.

“I came as fast as I could,” she said to Arlene, as if it mattered what she said to Arlene. “I ran here.”

From the foot of the bed, Lucy looked up its lumpy landscape to her lover's face: so peaceful in sleep, his deep pores filled with paint or dirt, that mouth that she had so recently kissed so carelessly, the way you kissed when you assumed there were endless kisses, a lifetime of them even. Her eyes welled and sprung with tears, which she attempted unsuccessfully to swat away with her sleeve.

“Oh, Jesus,” Arlene said from her chair by the bed. Lucy did her best to ignore Arlene, but Arlene was right. Oh, Jesus.
Oh, Jesus
was right.

A very tragic
reaction to tragedy is to think about what a short time it's been since things were
not tragic.
How
just last week
you were eating tangerines on an abandoned church pew parked outside the squat, throwing the peels onto the heap of uncollected garbage that, in the latest strike, had grown taller than you were. How
just last month
you were pulling your Goodwill suitcase, full of all your T-shirts and bras and dreams, up the stairs of your lover's apartment, its ridiculous weight less exhausting than exhilarating: a symbol of sharing a life with the man you loved. How
just a few months ago
you had basked in the neon PEEP-O-RAMAs and LIVE NUDE REVUEs and XXX's of Times Square as if they were Idaho moonlight, walked through the maze of rooms and hallways of TIMES SQUARE: ART OF THE FUTURE on the arm of your painter, an arm that felt as sturdy as the branch of a fir. How just after that you were listening to Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (
They really are magic!
your painter had yelled to you), and watching him dance in the way he danced: defying everything that already existed, making something entirely new with his body.
Somewhere in his movements: the tango. Somewhere in his movements: the nothing to lose.

How he'd stopped like he stopped, when something caught his attention and he couldn't
not
move toward it. It was a man in the corner, his head holding up a nest of dreadlocks, his face boyish and his grin beautiful. Your painter had pulled a permanent pen from the pocket of his dirty jeans. The dreadlocked man had taken the pen, pushed up your painter's sleeve, and written on his arm.
SAMO says: Never quit
, he had written. Then he drew a cigarette after the words, with the smoke reaching down onto your painter's right hand.
That's Jean-Michel
, your painter had purred afterward, the foreign name sparkling in his mouth. A charge, almost electric, had radiated off the arm afterward, a
magic
.

That moment had been as heavy as a fruit. It was a moment that
meant
something, you could tell, the kind of moment people would talk about later, when the moment itself was long since gone.

But the moment had passed, and no one was talking about it. The new moment was a severed arm, a hospital room, turquoise curtains, memories of sweet times that now felt sour. Lucy moved around to the side of the bed and crouched in front of Arlene.

“What happened?” she asked Arlene in a little whisper, though she didn't know if she wanted to know, or if she wanted Arlene to speak.

“A tragedy,” Arlene said dryly. “A fucking tragedy is what happened.”

Lucy gulped; she wished desperately that Arlene wasn't there. She wanted to be alone with Engales when he woke up, for him to see her face and find solace in it; she wanted to kiss the pain out of him. She reached up to touch the arm, which was moist and hot, like it got when he danced for too long and too hard, or when they kissed for too long and too hard. . . .

Arlene stood up from her chair. “I have to go home now,” she stated, more to the room than to Lucy. “Or else I'll drive myself mad.”

But then she surprised Lucy: she clasped her thin arms around her, nuzzled her musky red hair into her neck. She squeezed, and Lucy felt the calming sensation of being held still by another person's tight grasp.

“Honest to fucking god,” Arlene whispered into Lucy's neck. “Honest to fucking god I'll drive myself mad.”

Engales slept for
hours, or what felt like hours. Lucy took over Arlene's post in the plastic-covered chair next to the bed, which squeaked like a dying animal when she moved at all. The hospital room shifted and spun. Nurses hovered, moth-like, but when Lucy asked them questions—
When will he wake up? Can it be fixed? What's the next step?
—they flew away. Time was passing—it should have been very late by now—but it all felt like one suspended second, the time before a clock's hand gathers enough momentum to tick forward. Lucy stood up, sat down, stood up, sat down again. Kissed her lover's forehead, which was as sticky and warm as an overripe fruit. As hours passed, a singular worry solidified and grew heavy:
What would he be like when he woke up?
She suddenly longed for Arlene to come back, if only to be a buffer if he were terribly angry.

Lucy had seen Engales angry once since she'd known him, and she never wanted to see it again. It had been an especially wild night at the squat, and they had stayed late, as they often did; they knew that the after-hours were the best hours, when everyone who didn't matter left, when Chinese food was ordered from Kim's Lucky Good Food on First Avenue, when a joint materialized from someone's breast pocket and was lit, when the Dobro guitar with the Hawaiian scene painted on it was picked up and played, when the conversations took on a wavy, fluid, often existential quality. That night, Toby had gotten onto one of his favorite subjects of late,
the commercialization of art
, or, as he liked to call it,
the butt-raping of the creative class.
He had stated alternately (and quite drunkenly) that said butt-raping was the artist's fault—they should not give it up so easily by selling to those rich-prick galleries at the drop of a hat—and that it was said rich pricks' fault—their own lack of taste meant that they needed to preen the artists for theirs.

“They'll stick their dick somewhere interesting for once,” he'd ranted. “Just to see what it feels like. And when it feels good, better than anything they've ever felt because their lives are boring as hell, they'll buy it, because they
can.
”

Lucy had known that this would be a sensitive topic for Engales; he had just signed on with Winona, and had been defending the decision, which he knew would be considered
selling out
to the artists at the squat, to her and to himself, though no one had voiced any judgment. Until right then, when Toby said: “Well, why don't we just ask Mr. Golden Boy over here? What does it feel like, Mr. Golden Boy, to have sold your artistic integrity to a woman with a poodle for hair?”

Engales had started off calmly. “In what world”—he had countered, smoke rising from his cigarette like a scarf being tugged out of a magician's sleeve—“should someone be blamed for taking money for something they make? And likewise, why should someone be blamed for wanting to
spend
their money on something that someone else made? This is our
work,
Toby. This is the thing we do instead of sitting in a desk chair. Shouldn't it allow us to survive?”

“We
are surviving
,” Toby said. “And on our own terms!”

“Are we, though? You live in an empty factory where you freeze your ass off every night and that you could get kicked out of at any moment. I haven't eaten anything but beef jerky sticks today. Personally I want to sell the
shit
out of my paintings. I want a fucking steak and a side salad. With that kind of fancy lettuce that tastes like air.”

“Oh come
on,
” Toby had said flamboyantly. “That Winona woman's got your dick on a string! But what she's telling you? That you're going to be some star now? It's all a load of crap. Nobody's going to remember you, just like they won't remember the next Joe Schmo who sells a million-dollar painting to a rich dude. They'll remember us for the way we live, for how we stayed true to ourselves. That's what they'll remember. Not how we sold out to make a buck.”

Engales had gotten the coldest look in his eyes then, one that Lucy had never seen. “
The reason people come to America is to sell out, you privileged piece of shit. That's what America is for.
”

“Well America can suck my cock,” Toby said as he got up to fetch one of his art projects (a rug he had woven out of parking tickets he'd gotten on his VW van) and held a lighter to its corner. It ignited instantly, creating a glow that made his face look like a cartoon devil. Then the Swedes joined in—when there was fire involved, they couldn't
not
—committing a series of pyrotechnic crimes that included burning one of Selma's booby sculptures (“Not one of my
busts
!” Selma cried, but with a laugh). When Toby took the match to one of Engales's drawings, which he had made that summer with Lucy watching on, Engales threw himself on top of him, pinning his shoulders to the cement floor.