Tuesday Nights in 1980 (26 page)

“Nice try,” Engales said. James Bennett looked down at his hand—he had defaulted to his right—and was overcome with what looked to be real shame.

“Shit,” James said.

“That's what you have to say?” Engales said. “Shit?” He could feel the warmth leaving him.

“I'd like to leave something here if I could,” James had said, searching a bulky messenger bag Engales had not noticed before. He pulled a heavy brown leather book from the bag, dumped it onto Engales's lap.

“What the fuck is this?” Engales said.

“What used to be the meaning of my life,” James Bennett said. “Let me know what you find.”

When Darcy left
to play poker in the common room, Engales, curious, had explored the leather binder. On its edge, on a sticker, there was a cryptic scrawl:
HUNGER / SUN YELLOW / RAUL ENGALES
. What kind of psychotic labeling system was this? And why was Engales's name involved? When he opened it, it was full of the tiny white squares of slides meant for projectors. Engales ran his left hand over the satisfyingly smooth plastic, then pulled one of the slides out of its little sleeve. He lifted it toward the window. In the little square he saw a face. He tilted the slide so the light worked its way into the face: it was Francis Bacon's, the portrait of him by Lucian Freud. The same portrait Arlene had showed him on that first day in the studio, as the counterpoint to his own piece of shit.

The coincidence was eerie, just like the binder itself. Just like James Bennett himself, who had showed up out of nowhere for no reason Engales could understand, said some very weird shit, then left him with a bunch of slides and no projector. Or was there a projector? He recalled that he had seen one in the physical-therapy room, which Debbie used to give her Body and Soul lectures: a picture of a lean woman on a beach, a picture of a bowl of oatmeal, a picture of all the muscles in a hand. Luckily Debbie had a little thing for Engales—the way she massaged his arm during their lessons was nothing short of erotic—and so when he asked her to borrow the projector and the room she flirtatiously agreed, with a caveat:
Only if I can stay and watch.

“Fine,” Engales said, pulling up two chairs and shutting the door of the physical-therapy room. He loaded a page of slides, and flicked on the projector. A vibrant picture appeared on the wall behind the robotic-looking shadows of the workout machines. It was another painting Engales knew: an untitled work by Francesco Clemente, of a woman flanked by two naked men. The woman had a wide red mouth and a thick braid coming down over one of her shoulders. The men stood in individual pools of blue, holding their hands over their heads, posing for her.

“I feel a ménage à trois coming on,” Debbie said, as if the painting were a television show of the sort he assumed she watched, where the girls wore jean jackets and chewed gum, just like she did.

Engales ignored her and let the image sink into him. He had loved the painting the moment he first saw it, at a show at one of the bigger galleries a couple years ago; he loved it still. He loved the frank fear that inhabited the woman's face, and he loved the question the painting posed: Could one love two people? Or would so much love make them drown, as this woman's pained face suggested? He thought of Lucy, loving some other man in his apartment. A bell rang inside him: perhaps she was drowning. Perhaps, even if she did love that man in the white suit, she also still loved him. The brilliance of the painting soothed him, the fact that it was making him think in so many layers.
Two for two.

Engales clicked through the page of slides, and when it was done, the page after that, and by the third page it became clear that things were only getting eerier. The works in James Bennett's
HUNGER / SUN YELLOW / RAUL ENGALES
binder were almost all works that he himself had fallen in love with at various points in his life. There were Hockney's winter trees, Jean-Michel's monstrous figures, Matisse's cutouts, and Avant's street scrawls. There was even one of Horatio's action paintings that Engales had watched him make at a midnight performance in an empty building in the Meatpacking District, one of his boxing glove pieces. Even the paintings Engales had never seen before moved him, vibrated within him, and the whole thing made the backs of his eyes tight with held-back tears.

“We could get you back there,” Debbie said suddenly, when the wall went black. “You're making strides with your left flexors. The palmar interossei are what need work, but we can get there.”

“Thank you, Debbie,” he said, pulling himself up from his chair with some effort. He felt exhausted. “But no thank you, Debbie.”

His mind, anyway, was not on his own hand or his own painting, or on Debbie, but on the slides, and on James Bennett. His heart was aflutter with the speed and love and color that the slides held. He had not felt this speed or love or color since the accident, and looking at this collection of slides only confirmed a suspicion Engales had had when James Bennett was in his room: James Bennett held a hand of cards that Engales wanted to see, and to know. Then Engales's mind went totally blank, because Debbie was at work at the button of his jeans.

“Physical therapy?” she said from below him, her lashes twittering.

James returned the
next day at the same time, and again the day after that, and quickly he became the kind of visitor one needed in a rehab clinic: the kind who kept coming back. In exchange for agreeing to the Rising Sun at all, Engales had made Winona promise not to tell any of his friends—especially Lucy, he'd said with a clenched jaw—where he was. She'd eventually agreed, but had reasoned that Bennett was not Engales's friend and therefore did not count; Winona loved a good loophole. But Engales didn't begrudge her for sending James. In a place where there was nothing to look forward to except for Sunday movie night or Friday pizza night or Tuesday oatmeal bar, James's presence, if strange, was actually a welcome distraction.

On the second day James came to visit, perhaps because Engales had been moved by the paintings in the book of slides, Engales had felt open, ready to talk. And they did talk, in a way that Engales had not talked to anyone for as long as he could remember, about people they both knew (Jean-Michel, Selma Saint Regis) and artists with ego problems (Toby), and projects they'd seen that lit them up (James Turrell's light and space works) and projects that left them cold (Jeff Koons, the vacuums). Engales's staunch conviction that he was finished with art, thinking about it even, faded to the background during these conversations, as they took unexpected turns (James spoke of getting a hard-on when he saw a Matisse, for one), or went unexpectedly deep (Engales told James about his parents:
I painted people because I had no people).
They talked at length about the slides in the binder, and at special length about the Freud.

“The wonderful thing is that its unclear whether it's finished!” James had said. “That white background! You feel the entire tension of the painter's plight in that background! His whole internal drama: Should he keep going? Or should he leave it so perfectly undone? Did he stop because he doubted himself or because he loved what he had made? It's all there, the whole story and the whole big question!”

Engales nodded slightly. He remembered when Arlene had first showed him the painting, how he had had such a similar thought. James launched into a spirited little speech about Bacon and Freud, about their friendship and their days spent in the studio together, smoking, eating, talking, painting each other. Then their gambling, how they'd hock their cars or their paintings to pay their growing debts. How the gambling was the same as the painting, when you thought about it; art was always a hunch, a lead you followed into the dark, whose outcome you'd never know until it was all over, a game that you could lose.

“I always felt like the best artists knew what their outcome would be,” Engales said. “That they had an idea first, and then the work came out of that idea. I don't have any ideas. I always just painted until there was a painting. I always thought I must be doing something wrong.”

“Oh, no,” said James spiritedly, his eyes widening. “You are underestimating the power of the associative brain! That's what an artist is! Someone whose way of looking at the world—just their gaze—is already an idea in itself!”

Engales was quiet, thinking this over. He imagined Bacon and Freud, their wrinkled faces, the smell of the turpentine, the tiny bits of blue they'd add for each other's shadows. Somehow sitting here with James Bennett, talking about two old guys and ideas and art, no matter that he could no longer make it anymore, made him feel not-so-terrible. He could feel it happening, perhaps against his own will, or perhaps because of it, so quickly and seamlessly that he couldn't have seen it coming or articulated its trajectory: James Bennett was becoming his friend. And what, right then, did he have to lose? He'd follow this hunch into the dark. He'd maybe even bet on it.

A game: Raul
Engales holds a slide from the binder up to the window. James Bennett blurts out what he feels when he looks at it. “Laundry detergent!” James says when Engales holds up a Walter Robinson slide. “Astonished gray!” he says about Robert Longo's Men in the Cities. “What the fuck is
astonished gray
?” says Engales; they laugh. “My wife's neck,” James says to a Ross Bleckner piece, of wavy lines that cascade down the tiny window like hair.

An Engales proclamation: “Fuck abstraction and fuck surrealism and fuck sunsets. Especially fuck sunsets. Give me nostrils, you know? Big ugly ones. With boogers.”

A James question: “What happened to your hand?”

An Engales answer: “I was robbed.”

A James proclamation: “It could come back. You never know. One day you could wake up and have it back. The color of the world, the beauty of it. Trust me, I
know.
”

An Engales rejection: “You don't know shit.”

An Engales question: “What are you doing here again?”

A James answer: “Talking to you.”

“My bet's on
a gallery,” James Bennett said now, from his perch at the window, as they watched the cops tuck the artists into the backs of their low cop cars, one by one. “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the great irony of capitalism. How about we kick out the artists to make room for the art?”

“There's Regina,” Engales said. Regina, with her dishwater-blond hair stuck to her tear-stained face, had never before seemed vulnerable to Engales. Now she looked like a frightened fawn, her legs and lips wobbling. Behind her, the rest of them followed—Selma in her long black pirate's coat; Toby in his Peruvian poncho that seemed, in the light of the day, both culturally and visually offensive; Horatio, carrying only his paint-covered boxing gloves. Engales felt the distinct tug of exclusion again; he wanted desperately to be in that line with them. But why? Why would he wish himself into this terrible scene? Why did he suddenly want back into his old life, right when it was being upended?

A memory appeared to him with so much vividness he could have painted it, and before he could realize it he was speaking the memory out loud.

“The apartment building across from ours burned down,” Engales said. The memory, when verbalized, gained physical traction; he felt the heat from the fire on his face. “When I was fifteen, the year after my parents died. We were just teenagers, alone in this giant house, just me and my sister. I woke up because it had gotten so hot, the flames were all the way across the street but the heat was blasting through our window. Bright orange flames, like they were fake, from a movie. I woke up my sister and we ran downstairs and out into the street, where the whole neighborhood was outside watching the fire eat up this building. We stood and watched it for a while, and I knew exactly what my sister was thinking, because I was thinking it, too.”

“Which was?”

“We wanted to be the kids whose house had burned down,” he said.

James was quiet. By the looks of it, his bodega coffee had gotten cold, its cream blanketing its surface.

“All the families from the apartment building moved into a temporary pavilion in the park, all together,” Engales went on, his eyes glazing as his mind moved away from the present and into the past. “We didn't have a pavilion. We just had this huge, freezing house.”

Down on the street, they saw Selma begin to scream and try to wriggle from the cop who held her: a huge, red-faced man with a blond mustache and porky lips. With seemingly little effort, he stilled her.

“We tried to go and stand with the group of people from the fire,” Engales went on. “They were all crying, and we wanted to cry with them, but we couldn't. We knew it wasn't ours; it wasn't our tragedy. And suddenly we looked at each other and without even consulting each other, we took off running down the street. We had both known the other was going to run, and to where. We went to the cemetery and sat on top of our parents' graves. I was on Dad's and Franca was on Mom's. We had never been to the graves before—we were too scared to see them, or to imagine that our parents' bodies were actually in them. But we went that night. We had both known we had to go, at exactly the same time. We knew where our tragedy was, and we had to feel it right then.”

Why he was telling this to James Bennett now he didn't know exactly, but Engales couldn't stop talking. It was the first time he had spoken about Franca since he had arrived in New York; he hadn't even told Lucy about her. It was as if Franca had been a caged animal inside of him, and now she was thrashing around, trying to get out.

“With Franca,” he went on. “It was one of those things where we were too close. We understood too much about each other. We saw too much. It almost hurt to be around her.”