Tuesday Nights in 1980 (23 page)

“If I tell you something,” he said. “Do you promise to maintain that I am just
odd,
and not totally crazy?”

“Okay,” she found herself saying.
Tell me,
she found her eyes saying, with their flitting lashes. This was something she knew how to do, flit her lashes to say
tell me.

“You are very yellow,” he said. He had a bald spot, Lucy saw. A shiny, ugly bald spot.

“I'm
yellow
?” she said, and she noticed that her voice was becoming playful in a way she was not intending. “I'm yellow. Hm. I think I'll have to go with crazy on this one.”

“Understood,” James said, smiling lightly. “I just thought I'd tell you anyway, though. It's very rare, at least lately, that I see such a bright color.”

Lucy found herself struggling to point her thoughts back to Engales: she was sad, remember? And yet they kept wandering back into the present moment, back to the present person, back to James. Her ache was being quickly transformed into a longing, and the lower parts of her body felt hot and tingly, against her deepest will.

“I don't like being here,” she said suddenly.

“Why's that?” James asked. “Because a crazy man is telling you that you are the color of a zucchini flower? It's that exact color—of a zucchini flower!”

“It makes me sad,” she said, ignoring James's odd joke, if it could have been called a joke. “To be around all these paintings.”

“Are you going to leave, then?” James said, with surprising seriousness.

“Are you going to come with me, then?” she said, with surprising seriousness.

It was too fast, this back-and-forth, and Lucy regretted it as soon as she said it. She watched James's face fall with indecision.

“Oh,” he said, playing with his hands.

“Oh, you don't have to,” she said. “Never mind. I mean. I just meant walking me home. That's all I meant. Because I'm going to leave. But you don't have to. I mean I don't even know you.”

“Oh, um, sure!” He brightened, thankful for her gift of a way out. “A walk sounds great. It's so cold.”

For some reason both of them laughed at this, and again, Lucy wondered why she was laughing when no joke had been told. Was she laughing
at
him? Was she laughing
at
this man, in his funny outfit, with his bumbling manner? Or at
herself
, for feeling intrigued by him, for talking to him at all?

But no, she knew as they wove through the crowd and emerged into the street, and then walked down it easily and silently, leaving everyone who was anyone behind, not caring or remembering that the people from the squat might see them leave together (and maybe, in that scary, off-limits part of herself, even wanting them to). She wanted to laugh again, so she did. She wanted to toss her arm through the triangle of James Bennett's arm, so she did. There was nothing funny and there was nothing fun about any of it, about anything. But she was just
laughing.
Like a person does. Because she
had to.
She had to be swept up, carried away. She had to disappear. She had to be alive in this moment. A moment and a mood that
just felt right
, and then, as they neared Raul Engales's apartment on the alley off Avenue A, just wrong enough to light it on fire.

H
e had only meant to walk her home.

He had only meant to walk her home.

He had only meant to walk her, the girl in his painting, home. Because it was late at night and girls like her—young girls, blond, beautiful girls, girls who have paintings made in their likeness—should not be walking through the dangerous streets of downtown New York alone.

Right?

Right?

He had only meant to walk her home. Instead, he was entering his own home with the colors of another woman all over him, the colors that had changed everything. Under the influence of the colors—which had pounced on him like predatory cats when he walked into the Winona George Gallery—
meaning
itself changed almost entirely. Under the influence of his colors,
meaning
to do something meant practically nothing, just like
meaning
to make a quiet entrance when your wife was asleep upstairs didn't make the third stair up to his bedroom lose its creak.

I didn't mean to,
he wanted to say to the stair.
But you did,
the stair whined back at him.
You did.
He had.

He had gone to Raul Engales's show that evening with a soaring heart; it was finally here, the evening he'd been waiting for. The show had been all he could think about for weeks, ever since he'd bought the Engales painting, stared at it for twenty-four hours straight (to Marge's confusion and chagrin), and then promptly called Winona to find out what she knew about this Raul Engales person, and how he could see more of his work.

“Oh, didn't you know?” Winona had said. “It was me who put it up for sale! Kind of a test, really, to see if he would sell well. I do that sometimes, at those little things Sotheby's does, where they bring in the hopefuls at the end there. Turns out he sold for
quite a lot,
as you
know
, James, but I wasn't expecting it to be
you
, of all people, I mean I thought you were
above
auctions!”

“I was. I mean, I am . . .”

“Anyway,” Winona broke in. “He's my new guy. Fabulous. The talent. The energy. Just fabulous. I'm throwing him into the ring with a solo show. Little bastard hasn't returned any of my calls, of course, but then again I'm sure he's busy painting!
Prolific,
that one.”

A solo show.
The thought thrilled James. He imagined a whole gallery full of Raul Engales paintings, a whole sea of sensations. And he imagined meeting Raul Engales finally—the man who'd conjured the butterfly wings and angelic music on New Year's—and shaking his hand; he imagined a spark, literally, flying from that hand.

“Does the fact that you spent an exorbitant amount of money on his painting mean that you will review his show?” Winona said, using her manipulative/flirtatious voice.

“You can count on it,” James said, beaming.

Yes, she could count on it. He could do this. After all, the man responsible for the show was the man responsible for the painting that now leaned so beautifully on his mantel and on his heart. The painting that had entered his consciousness and his spirit and was now sitting inside of him somewhere, like an extra rib. If the other work in the show was anything like the painting he now owned, he would have no trouble with the writing. His article would contain all the magic that the painting did, and that the show surely would. He marked the date of the show on Marge's kitchen calendar—on which she had not so long ago written things like
ovulating
, but where she now only wrote things like
rent
—with a large, ambiguous star. He watched the star grow closer as Marge ticked off the days with her
X
's (ticking off days was something Marge did, as if by living through each day, deleting it from time, she had completed a task). He couldn't wait. The piece he wrote about Raul Engales would be the pièce de résistance of his career, the piece of writing that would get him back to writing.

Are you proud of me?
he would ask Marge when the article came out, its stately columns of text dominating the front page of the Arts section.

Extremely
, she'd say. She'd read it out loud to him over Sunday eggs, like she did.

But yesterday, the Monday before the Tuesday that was the show, James had been unexpectedly nervous. The day had gained the sweaty stench of too much anticipation; it had been given the death kiss of exaggerated buildup. His Running List began to gain momentum: What if the other paintings didn't do for him what that first one did? What if he couldn't write about them at all? What if this article was bound to fail, just as all the others he'd sent in this year had? What if the Arts editor refused to even read it? What if he failed Marge again? Would it be the last time she allowed him to?

Marge made it clear, mostly with her excessive use of the
sigh,
the official sound of spousal judgment, that he was continuing to disappoint her. First he had lied about the column, then he had bought the painting without consulting her, and now he was sitting in front of it for long stretches, doing nothing but letting his eyes bulge from his head. He knew what she was thinking when she watched him from the kitchen doorway: if this painting meant
that
much to him, as much as a year's worth of rent and his wife's trust, he should probably be writing about it.

“Get any writing done today?” she'd say at dinner, her voice higher than nature had made it.

“Gestation,” James had to say. “Percolation.
Ideas.
”

“Any good ones?” she'd say. She was trying, he knew, to make the passive aggression less aggressive, to cut it with something familiar, with love perhaps. But he wanted to tell her that passive aggression, by definition, was
already
a covering-up, that you couldn't get away with covering up twice. Instead, he'd stay quiet, and Marge would sigh again and put something away in the fridge. The cold air would blow from it: another sigh.

The sighing would usually make him feel like a useless piece of crap; he'd pander to Marge, apologize. But now, with the painting in the house and in his brain, he began to resent it—and the rest of Marge's attitude—and to believe it was coming from exactly the wrong place. What Marge wanted, he felt, was for him to succeed in some understandable way, some direct way that she could tell her friends and her mother about, and that she could use to make herself feel safe and normal, when what he wanted was perhaps exactly the opposite. He wanted to succeed in a way that was not necessarily understandable. How could it be, when it was
inside of him and only him
? Marge's presence began to feel restricting, inhibiting, just as he was starting to feel free again. He felt far from her, as if she was on the other side of a lake, and the water was too cold to want to get in and swim to her. Knowing she was still furious about the painting he'd spent all their money on, he didn't even tell her about his plan to write about the show. He didn't tell her about the show at all. Instead, he watched his painting from the couch, let himself fly away on its wings. He'd surprise her with his success, in one big, lovely swoop that would flip their world back to normal. Until then, he'd have to live with the sighs.

So it surprised him when Marge interrupted his couch paralysis that morning with a shocking proposal.

“Fuck me,” she whispered, landing, front-ways, on his lap. They hadn't “tried,” in the baby-making sense, since the auction, so the proposal felt even more out of left field than it might have otherwise; Marge was not the kind of woman who used the word
fuck
when speaking about
lovemaking.

“Are you ovulating?” he had said, stupidly, trying to wrestle the newspaper he had been pretending to read out from between their bodies. It stuck.

“I don't care,” she said, her eyes like steel traps.

“Okay,” James said. “Sorry, it just hasn't seemed like you've wanted to lately. I thought you were mad at me.”

“I
am
mad at you, James. You're an idiot. But I still want to have your baby. Or
a
baby.” She smiled with one tiny corner of her mouth.

James laughed, with effort. “Very funny,” he said. He put his hands around her backside, which felt somehow novel in this position: a new fruit. She kissed his neck and he felt a rush of blood move through his body. With the painting behind her, she glowed red. He moved inside of her and kissed her wild-strawberry face. His worries melted; he suddenly felt sublimely happy. The thought of the Raul Engales show—where he'd arrive tomorrow night at six; he'd wear his white suit—made him pant with pleasure. Then his eyes landed on the eyes of the girl in the painting, on their little white sparkles of light on the black olives of her pupils, and—
holy shit that felt good—
he ejaculated into Marge without any warning at all. Marge sighed and rolled off him, her face seeming to say,
Can't you do anything right?

The answer was
no. No, he could not do anything right, not one thing. He had proven that to himself time and again, and then in a grand way tonight, at the Winona George Gallery. At the gallery, full of Engales's immaculate, outrageous portraits, James had experienced all the bright flashes, the water splashes, the music that nearly brought him to tears, all the sensual phenomena from the blue room, everything he'd hoped for. But it was not until he saw the girl in the corner—the girl in his painting whose gaze had brought him to completion against his will the day before—with her bowl of yellow hair and her almond-shaped, glinting eyes, that he felt the nucleus of all of the sensations, the most powerful of all the colors. The girl radiated a spectacular heat, as if her skin could have burned him to the touch, and she was the deepest, most beautiful
yellow.

It struck him like a fist in the face: she was the girl from the night in the park, the girl who was combing the park with her circle of light. And now she was lighting up the room with her wild, open gold. He approached her.
What in the
holy hell,
James?!
He approached her.
What in the yellow, spangly
hell
?!
He approached her and then immediately regretted doing so. Because as soon as she spoke it was as if a fire hydrant opened up inside of him; the room around him fell away; the paintings no longer mattered; the painter himself no longer mattered (in fact, James never noticed that Raul Engales himself never showed up); it was as if this girl had swallowed him, and now he was swimming around inside of her.