Tuesday Nights in 1980 (2 page)

Julian appears in Franca's mind so vividly it is as if he is in the room. Wide eyes, small hands. Too smart for a six-year-old, overly wise, since birth. Just yesterday he'd asked her in his tiny voice:
Mama, when the government gets fixed, can we visit the Brother, first thing?
Smart enough to know the country was broken, hopeful enough to think it could be fixed, astute enough to intuit his mother's secret wish: to leave for America; to find Raul.
It's not likely,
she'd said, so as not to get his hopes up. Or were they hers, these hopes?

She tries to remind herself that she's made a plan for this. Julian is at a friend's this evening, Lars's house; she has specifically set it up this way. The fact that Lars's parents, Sofie and Johan, are Danish, and are free to come and go from Argentina at their own will, is no accident. The stack of American dollars she's stashed in Julian's backpack is no accident. But the fact that there is a plan at all is the very reason she's worried. She thinks of Sofie and Johan: blond, strict, too formal. She thinks of how scared Julian will be if she does not come to pick him up, how he will not like it if he has to spend the night in their house, which is so cold and full of angles. She suddenly longs for Pascal. If only she had been better to him. Raul was wrong about him, she knows, but she had let his opinion overshadow everything, like she always had, like she was doing still, here in this basement full of radicals: each a ticking time bomb. Look where listening to Raul has gotten her: her only son is alone in a strange house; her only husband is gone. And Raul? He's gone, too. He's the most gone of anyone.

Franca attempts to speak, to ask some question or give some answer, but finds that she cannot; her whole nervous system has gathered in her mouth. Her claustrophobia intensifies, a slow pinching of the room. When she looks up it is as if the basement has shifted slightly, as if the walls are now at a diagonal. She has the sensation she gets when she visits somewhere she has been before and the layout of things seems changed, but she can still remember the way she inhabited the space before: an unfaithful déjà vu.

Wafa lets out a low moan. “What about Simon?” she suddenly blurts, as if just remembering. Franca imagines Wafa's small son, Simon: just a year older than Julian. Suddenly everything goes wavy. The smoke from Mateo's cigarette is burning her eyes. Franca's hands slacken; the cake falls to the carpeted floor with a thud. Everyone—Sergio, Mateo, Lara, Wafa—stops what they are doing to look at her, letting a silence as dense as the cake fill the room. Their eyes are frosted over with panic. Then Sergio, suddenly possessed, does something so odd that Franca wonders if it's a hallucination. He takes the binder from Lara and rips out one of the pages, crumples it, and kneels next to Franca's fallen plate. Then he rips off the sheet of foil, stuffs the paper into a piece of the soft, still-warm cake, and shoves the slice into his mouth. Lara kneels, too, grabs a list of names, stuffs them into the cake, starts to chew. Then Mateo comes, then Wafa. They swallow the names of the people who are missing. They swallow what could get them killed.

Franca feels a sudden surge of pride in the cake. A cake that's worth something, that's pulling its weight. But this feeling leaves as swiftly as it comes, because just as Mateo is finishing his slice of cake, digging in for another, she is filled with two distinct regrets. She's left the oven at the bakery turned on. She's left her little boy with no one. And all she can do now is sit here on her knees, swallow, wait for the banging on the basement door.

BODY:
A tight torso, flexing with a million muscle groups. Neighborhoods connected by taxi blood. Hefty, hard shoulders of Harlem, strong pectorals of the Upper East and West Sides, the spine of Central Park and the messy lungs of Midtown. Go farther down and find the pancreatic sack, surrounded by bile, just below Union Square, and even farther are the bowels and bladders of downtown, filled with beggars, booze, little pockets of bright. And what of the parasites that have eaten up these lower guts? Who have eaten out the insides of downtown's most wary buildings? Look harder. Ventricle streets, hydrant valves; way down here is the city's throbbing heart.

EARS:
If you had to describe this song, how would you describe it? The song of setting foot onto such dirty new concrete, the song of the soaring buildings, the song of looking upward, following a bird out of the thicket of metal and through the portal of blue sky. How would you describe this song, young, unknown man? You'd need eighteen musicians, surely. You'd need expectant, vibrating buildup. You'd need a genius composer, smart enough to capture what should not be allowed to go undocumented: this frequency of pure, unfettered hope.

FEET:
It feels like running away,
says an overheard voice, pumping to the rhythm of the music at a not yet familiar nightclub.
What does?
says another voice.
Manhattan,
says the first voice, and the island's name sounds like
wheeeeeee!

LIMBS:
From above, Manhattan is just a lonely arm, squirting and bending from the big body of Brooklyn. It is not until you are inside it that you see it is the vital appendage, the hand that squeezes at the rest of the world, the muscle where everything that's anything is made.

MOUTH:
Come on in, the water's fine! The water's not fine but there's always wine. There's always a taxi when you need one, except when you look like you need one. There's a shitload of everything for sale. HOT DOG, HOT DOG, COCA-COLA, PRETZEL. People are dancing in Tompkins Square Park. Watch their mouths turn into O's and their bodies turn into S's. Come on in, the water's fine! This is what the bouncer at Max's says, but only when you're on the list. If you're not on the list, go take a piss. The guys in the band wear skinny ties and combat boots. There's an art project on the sidewalk, on the fire escape, in the back bathroom. Somebody's crawling through a gallery on his hands and knees, moaning. This is a project. Somebody's talking shit about Schnabel. This is a project. Somebody's mouthing the words to that song everybody's listening to:
You're just a poor girl in a rich man's house, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh!
This, too, is a project.
Come on in
, mouths the bouncer's sour mouth. Someone's making a scene tonight, and you're about to be a part of it.

FACE:
No one recognizes you here. Immediately, you want them to.

W
inona George's apartment was exotic in a way that only a New Yorker would understand. A downtown New Yorker. In 1979. This is what James Bennett professed to his wife, in a spousal whisper, as they embarked on a night within the apartment's confines: Winona George's annual New Year's Eve party, their first time in attendance. Was it an old schoolhouse? Marge wanted to know. A
convent,
James said. The sleeping floor of a city convent that retained none of its convently attributes, namely humbleness, sparseness, or quiet. Winona had, in the way of so many wealthy downtowners, transformed the nontraditional space completely, both blasting it with bohemianism (rugs from Fez, lanterns, shells full of candle wax), and cutting it with classic luxury (there was a chandelier in every room). It was something old made new, made old again, which then made it new again. The effect was charming when it was not confusing.

James and Marge had gotten there quite late, and there was only an hour or so before it became 1980. It was the sort of party they usually avoided, Marge because she didn't think they
belonged
—due to such factors as gross household income and gross (as in the other kind of gross) household wardrobe options. (James's white suit, Marge had not failed to remind him before they left, still had that black stain on the back, from when he had accidentally sat on a spot of Lawrence Weiner's paint while watching him stencil onto a white wall:
LEARN TO READ ART
.) James agreed, but for other reasons, the primary being inevitable overstimulation. It would have been overstimulating for anyone, James guessed, as places with excessive wealth and excessive art and excessive alcohol usually were, but it was
especially
overstimulating for James, whose mind flashed with nearly psychotic colors and sounds immediately upon entering.

First and foremost there was the purple, which was the color of money—not one-dollar bills and loose-change money, but
big
money, and the people who had it. Mansions were purple, and expensive cars, and the towers made of glass that reflected the sun off the Hudson. Certain haircuts were purple, and certain names. Yvonne. Chip. Anything preceding Kennedy. Winona George herself was in the lavender family; her personal art collection included a Gaudí spire that had mysteriously been procured from the actual Sagrada Familia, and not one but
two
de Koonings.

James could sense Winona's presence almost immediately; he saw her at practically every art opening he went to, knew her color and smell by heart, though he'd rarely had to deal with her face-to-face; she always seemed so busy. Now she flew around the mahogany room like a loon in her black silk dress, coating everything and everyone with flirtatious art babble and lilac laughter. The babble itself—overwrought with intellectual tropes, heavy with important names, dripping with references that only a crowd like this one would understand (
Fluxus, metarealism, installation
)—affected James in a bodily way, with the physical feeling that he was being sprayed in the face with a garden hose. The paintings and sculptures that filled Winona's house, each with its own intense flavor or smell, flew at him from all directions; a comforting but powerful red color was being emitted by his wife; and then there was the matter of the grating chorus of violins: teeth pulling hors d'oeuvres from tiny toothpicks.

It was indeed overwhelming, but tonight James was choosing to indulge in it. Today he had received dual pieces of good news: that he had been invited to give an important lecture—at his alma mater, Columbia, on the importance of metaphor in art writing—and that, tucked under his wife's burgundy dress and stretched skin like a ripening fruit, there was a real, live human with a real, beating heart. Both of these things—recognition from the institution that had given shape to his life, along with the confirmation via a sixteen-week sonogram that he was really and truly about to give shape to
another
life—were causes to celebrate. They were finally past that precarious point of not being able to tell anyone about the baby, so why not? Why not go tell the world, and celebrate with them? There was no way to know then that it would be the last celebrating they did for a very long time, that those hours, suspended like a sack of happiness just before that happiness would dissolve, would mark that night with an
X
for years afterward: the night just before the morning when everything would change.

But for now, in Winona George's Moroccan-rugged and morosely lit convent living room, James and Marge were happy. And when Winona herself approached them, instead of recoiling as he might have on another, less buoyant evening, James was armed with confidence and charisma.

“Meet my wife!” he shouted proudly to Winona, a little too loudly he knew, for he always had trouble gauging the appropriate decimal at which to speak at parties. “And our kid!” He said while stroking Marge's barely noticeable stomach through her dress. “Meet our kid! We're just telling people.”

“Oh how
lovely
,” said Winona, with pursed purple lips. She had the kind of hair that was popular that year, a curtain revealing only the first act of her face: a queenly nose, confusingly colored eyes (were they
violet
?), cheekbones for days. “And how far along are you?”

“Sixteen weeks today,” Marge said. And James loved the way she said it—already living with a new mother's understanding of time, where weeks were the only measurement of time that counted—with red beams coming out of her eyes like pretty lasers.

“Well congratulations to you two,” Winona said. “You're very lucky, and your child will be, too! From what I can tell—and I
am
the littlest bit clairvoyant, you know—you're going to make wonderful parents. And do we think we'll get an artist?”

“I won't wish it on him,” Marge said with a laugh. “Well, him or her.”

Winona laughed falsely and touched Marge's shoulder. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “I almost forgot. The tradition is that I tell you the scoop on whatever artwork you're standing in front of, and then that's your painting for the year. Well not
your
painting—I'm not going to
give
it to you!—but sort of like your
spirit
painting, do you know what I mean? You hold it with you through the year. You darlings have the Frank Stella. And you see, Stella did everything backward. He started abstract when no one was being abstract! And then once everyone started going abstract, he got lush and moody and majestic. So there's your token of Winona wisdom for 1980: Be backward! Go against the tide! Do things the wrong way!” She laughed like a pretty horse.

“Won't be hard for me,” James said with an awkward chuckle. He thought of how he had gotten here or anywhere: he had only ever done anything wrong, and it was only by chance that it turned into anything right.

“Oh, you shut your mouth now!” Winona practically screamed. “Your name is on the very edge of everyone's lips! Your articles are on the very first page of the arts section! Your brain is, well, I don't know what the hell your brain is, but it sure is something. And your collection! Lord knows I've wanted to get
my
paws on that since I was covered in placenta! You're
on fire,
James. And you know it.”