Tuesday Nights in 1980 (22 page)

“When do you think he'll show up?” Horatio said in his blocky accent.

“Probably soon!” Lucy said, trying to be cheery, though her eyes were still on the blank spot and her stomach was hot with fear that she had done every single wrong thing.

She knew Engales wouldn't show up soon, or ever. And if he did—if by some stroke of magic they had let him out of the hospital and he happened to find out that the show had not been canceled—he would only be furious with her, even more than he already was. He would know or find out that it was her who had made this whole thing happen. That it was her who had called the number Winona had left on the message machine, set up a meeting. Who had gotten Random Randy from the bar to come over with the truck and help her haul the paintings to the gallery. He'd find out that it was her who had signed the papers agreeing to the terms of sale, whose fault it would be when all of his paintings were gone, and all that was left was a wad of cash. She thought, desperately now as she watched Winona stick a red dot on the bok choy painting:
Why on earth did I do this?

She did it
because of cereal. More specifically, she did it because of milk. She hadn't eaten anything for two whole days after seeing the bloody gauze wrapped around Engales's arm, and, while trying to buy cigarettes and beer with the vague idea that she needed some sort of sustenance, the Telemondo guy noticed the shape she was in.

“You look no good,” he said to her, and she just shook her head, put the blue package of cigarettes on the counter.

“
You
look no good,” she said back.

He ignored her and pulled a box of cereal from a shelf and a carton of milk from the fridge behind him.

“No charge,” he said, his brown eyes steady on hers. She slowly, tentatively, pulled the meager groceries from the counter, seeming to sense from the Telemondo guy's eyes that she should take them, or else.
Or else what?
she wanted to say, but instead she just left, walking like a zombie through the East Village with the cereal in one hand and the milk in the other.

It was because of these groceries that she went into the kitchen, a skinny arm of a room that she seldom entered; she wasn't much for cooking, and lately, not eating, either. And it was because she went into the kitchen and set down her miserable fare and stood there wondering if she should eat some of the cereal or not that she noticed two things. One: on the back of the milk carton was Jacob Rey's face. Two: on the bulky black answering machine was a blinking red light.

These things were surprising not only in their juxtaposition but in their novelty: Jacob Rey's face belonged on telephone poles and bulletin boards, out in the grave wide world, not here in her domestic realm. Never before had Lucy seen a missing person advertised on a household product, and Jacob Rey's face, a mascot for that terrible night, seemed to have been placed here just for her, as if his ghost had followed her into Engales's kitchen. His image both haunted and intrigued her: a family's private loss made into a public image, then sent by way of a common dairy product into people's private homes. Involuntarily she imagined her own face on the milk carton, but it was while she was doing this that she noticed the message machine—a relic of the previous tenant's, Engales had told her, that still had François's outgoing message:
Bonjour. It's François. Who are you?—
blinking for her attention like the eyes of a hopeful puppy waiting to be pet. Lucy pushed the button.

First the machine spoke in the way machines speak: a human's voice turned into a robot's, unable to make the curves of words and so piecing them together at the angles, like numbers on a digital clock.

TOOSDAY, SEPT-EM-BHER SIX-TEENTH. THREE OH FIVE PEE EM.

Last Tuesday.
The same day as the accident.

Then, in stark contrast to the robot, a husky woman's voice.

Raul. Sorry to call so late. But I have wonderful news. Sotheby's went swimmingly. More than swimmingly—you're practically rich already and we haven't even had the show! And you won't believe who bought it. Let's just say it's someone with fantastic taste. Call me back, Raul. Five five nine, oh nine four seven. It's Winona, by the way, Raul. Oh and get your ass over here with the rest of the paintings, my little star. We're about to show you off to the world.

Lucy had understood right then that the message was meant for her, just like Jacob Rey's face on the back of her milk. Just as she had been asked by the mother on Broadway to help her search for Jacob, she was being asked now, by Winona, to make sure Raul Engales's show went up next week. Her logic was perhaps skewed, she knew. But in the blur of the moment, so rife with messages, she reasoned that it was her
duty
to share Raul Engales's paintings with the world. She even went so far as to convince herself that the show, if it went as
swimmingly
as the auction, might turn Engales back toward himself, that he would witness his own success and visualize a future of possibility and prospects, rather than one of hopelessness. If Engales could see that the world loved his paintings, she thought, perhaps he could love himself again. And maybe even love her.

So she had called Winona back. And as for the milk carton, she had dumped out its contents into the sink—forgoing cereal altogether—and set it on the windowsill above Raul Engales's bed: a talisman, or an offering to no one.

Now, at the
gallery, as she deflected questions dizzily, Lucy realized she had been an idiot to think this was a good idea; it wasn't her place. If Engales were to see her now, in her sparkly shirt drinking sparkling wine, he would hate her. He would hate her more than he already seemed to hate her. (
It isn't your project,
she imagined him saying, over and over in her head.) And now all she wanted to do was leave. But Winona—who was in a tizzy, Lucy could tell by her hair: usually a pristine fountain, now teased into a Pomeranian-like pouf—would not have that. She found Lucy in the corner, by the wine, and put one of her pointy-nailed hands on Lucy's shoulder.

“So what's the deal, Miss Lucy?” she said. “Where's our guy?”

Lucy couldn't answer at first, and took large swallows of her wine.

“I mean seriously,” Winona went on. “You don't just miss this. You don't
miss
your
debut.
Not in this city. Not with Winona George.”

Did he have
stage fright
? she wanted to know.
Was he scared of all the people who are going to fall in complete love with him? Had he skipped town? Was he ill?

“I couldn't tell you,” Lucy said, avoiding Winona's eyes. But Lucy was a bad liar, and Winona was a bad person to lie to: like a predatory bird, she would peck the flesh until she hit the bone.

“An accident,” Lucy finally divulged after the pecking began to hurt, the word pushing like something spiky in her mouth. “There's been an accident.”

“What
kind
of accident?” Winona flared. “Is everything
all right?
”

“Not really,” Lucy said.

Winona George, who Lucy had imagined would be very angry with her for pulling the wool over her eyes this whole week, was instead visibly
excited
. The mystery of the artist's whereabouts would simply make everything more interesting. Tragedy was what art was
about,
Lucy could imagine Winona saying, in her high-brow, low-pitched voice. It took tragedy to be an artist in the first place, or at least a tragic heart, and anything on top of that was just a Van Gogh–style bonus, a chip off the old ear, and then eventually, when they
died,
a posthumous cash cow.

“If he
died,
though,” Winona actually did have the nerve to say, “I'll need to know. Because there's a whole other thing that goes on with that. We'll need to do the finances differently. And I'll need to know.”

“He didn't die,” Lucy said softly, looking down at her heavy black boots, which had at one point seemed so important—she had bought them because she had seen Regina from the squat wearing similarly aggressive footwear—and now felt like a burden.

“Then
what
?” Winona was saying. “What happened? Lucy, you
do
need to tell me. You know that, don't you?”

Just then a man walked up between them, his long nose inserting himself like a blinder between Winona and Lucy, blocking Winona's interrogation. Lucy saw Winona's face change, from frantic to cool, and then to mildly uncomfortable.

“Well if it isn't James Bennett,” she said. “I'm so
thrilled
you're here. And what do you think? Isn't he fabulous? Can I show you around? I am happy to give you some sound bites for your piece. . . . This one here is called
Chinatown,
you'll notice the juxtaposition of the physical and metaphysical, this deformed cheek and the unfinished piece here, this hole in the work. . . .”

The man ignored Winona and looked straight, hard, direct at Lucy. His gaze was awful and invasive, and Lucy looked away, toward the wall beside her, the way you were supposed to when a man looked at you like that.

“It's you,” the man said, still looking at her. His eyes were a clear, chaotic blue: eyes you could see through, the kind Lucy had never trusted, though she was aware that they were a direct reflection of her own.

“Ha! James!” Winona said quite loudly. “Always the odd duck, aren't you, James?” She inserted her own nose between James's and Lucy's now, a little game of noses.

“It's you!” he said again, his smile broadening to reveal a set of stained, amiable teeth. “You're the girl in my painting!”

A strange feeling rushed up into Lucy at being recognized like this. It was a double recognition, first by this man (who had called her a
girl,
that delicious little word that tinkled from the mouth, half of the word from the postcard that had brought her here), and then by Engales, who seemed so far away from her now. She thought of that first night he had painted her, how strange and exciting it had felt to have someone look at her for that long. The itchy collar of her sequin shirt, the same one she wore now. His eyes moving up and down, up and down again, as he studied her lines and her colors. Lucy now looked up at this man, this man she didn't know but who knew her, who was living with that very portrait.

“How do you have that painting?” Lucy asked, though right when she asked it she knew the answer.
And you won't believe who bought it. Let's just say it's someone with fantastic taste.

“Well because of
me
!” Winona breathed. “It was a Sotheby's situation. Absurd, really, how much of a cut those people take. If I had known how much James was going to spend on that thing I would have sold it directly to him myself!”

But Winona's voice began to dissolve into the noise of the room as the two of them, Lucy and James, looked at each other. And in that looking Lucy felt something shift inside her, though she couldn't pinpoint quite what it was.

“You know I thought I saw you one night, before,” said the man with apparently fantastic taste, his voice drifting. “In the park.”

“In the park?” she said.

“Yes, in the park.”

“Oh,” she said. “I don't remember being in the park.”

Something was definitely happening: a moment was happening. Winona, seeming to recognize it, held up her two hands, said
Jesus Christ
, and sunk away from them. But what was it? What was happening? It wasn't attraction, surely, since this James person was not handsome in any way she could define or understand. And it was not recognition, not in the sense that she knew him, because she had never laid eyes on this man before. But there was recognition of the feeling itself, it was familiar to her, the sense that the whole landscape of her life was about to change, and that she could be the one to change it.

She could steal her mother's turquoise beads from her dresser—the ones she had admired for so long and imagined swallowing like little candies or wearing them in the bath like a mermaid—and her mother would never know because she would bury them behind the house, cover them with a pile of pine needles.

She could find her high school art teacher—the one whose eyes looked right into her heart in class—at the school dance, in the bright hallway outside the bathroom. She could take him inside that bathroom, pull down his pants.

She could move to New York City, pierce her nose, bleach her hair, sleep with a painter. By sleeping with him, she could make him love her.

She could actively,
viciously, if necessary
, follow her heart, and in doing so, affect the hearts of others.

She could allow her stomach to grow hot, as this James Bennett's eyes reached into some special, dark spot inside her.

“I didn't approach you, well, because I wasn't sure it was you!” James said then. “And also because it would have been odd.”

“And this isn't?” she said, surprised to hear herself laugh quickly after she said it. She had not laughed in a week, since the accident.

“You're right,” James said. “This is odd. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be odd. I just am. I
am
odd. That's what I've been trying to tell people my whole life. I
just am
odd.”

Lucy laughed again. Why was she laughing? Who was this guy, whose hair was thin and getting thinner, whose ears were translucent and large, whose suit was dated and wrinkled and
white
? And why was he making her laugh, on a night when no one should be laughing, because a man, the man she
loved,
had gotten
hurt,
and would never do the thing he lived for again, and here they all were, celebrating in spite of that. All of it was a bad idea. She should really go, she thought, scanning the room for a clear path to the door. But then James Bennett said something, and she found herself tangled in it, unable to move her feet.