Tuesday Nights in 1980 (27 page)

“Is that why you came here?”

“It's my fault,” Engales said. His voice had gotten low and dark, as black as the coffee in his hand.

“What's your fault?”

“I left her there. Even when I fucking
knew what would happen.
”

“What would happen?”

“I had a dream about her on the morning of my accident. And then I saw her, right when it happened, when the blade was in my arm I saw her.”

“So you don't
know
something happened. Have you called her?”

“You don't get what I'm saying, do you? You have no idea what I'm talking about. I left her alone with a man who can't take care of her. Something's happened. The country's fucked and something happened, I just know it.”

“But you haven't talked to anybody yet and—”

“Just shut up,” Engales said, his face suddenly enflamed. “Just stop telling me things you know nothing about. And also? So you know? I'm not going to paint again. Never a-fucking-gain. Do you hear me? Can your associative brain comprehend that? So stop trying to act like you know anything about my life. Like it's all so fucking clear to you.”

“I'm sorry, I . . . I shouldn't have said anything,” James said, taken aback by Engales's sudden hostile outburst. “I just get confused. Because it seems clear. When I'm around you, everything seems clear.”

“Well, it's not,” Engales said, his heart still trampling over his lungs in his chest. He wanted to show Franca his arm right then. She was the only one who would understand its scar.

The two men went quiet and looked back out the window, where a white plastic bag had gotten caught in the nearest tree. When the wind freed it, its message was revealed:
I
NEW YORK.
It soared into the white sky until the sky swallowed it. Below, switches were flicked and sirens started. Then the artists were gone.

L
ucy woke from a whiskey-soaked sleep to the unsettling sound of sirens and a loud knocking on the apartment door. A siren in the morning was like a drink before noon: it was a signal that things were getting bad. The sound of knocking, however, was a relief.
James had come back.

She wobbled up into a sitting position, rolled her legs off the bed. Her head china-dolled to one side, too heavy for its own neck. The floor of the apartment was betraying her, tilting this way and that, and she had the distinct feeling that she couldn't place herself in time. Was it actually October? Had the last month of her life actually happened? Had Engales actually lost his hand? And disappeared? And had James Bennett actually taken his place in the bed for two whole weeks after the show, then abruptly disappeared himself, without so much as a call? Also: last night. Was she, could she possibly be,
twenty-three?

She stumbled to the door, the idea of James's warm body under his ugly trench coat pulling her forward. She'd sink into him. She'd ask him where he'd been all week, but then she'd tell him she understood. She knew he had a life. She knew he couldn't come every day.
Still,
she'd say.
I missed you.
Which was only true within the confines of the thing they'd created together, which was, of course, a big old lie. Still: a soothing lie. A lie she wouldn't mind right now; at least there was another human involved.

No,
said the cruel, pulsing world of the worst hangover of all time.
You shan't be wrecking any homes today.
It was not James at the door. At the door, when Lucy yanked open the rusty deadbolt and pulled it open, was a tall, blond woman in a gray overcoat, holding the hand of a very small boy.

The missing boy,
Lucy thought, just before she felt a hand grab her insides and twist. She ran to the bathroom, emptied herself of last night.

Last night had
been a mess of lipstick and whiskey: the kind of night a girl has when the men she counts on to save her do not. It had been her twenty-third birthday, and there had been no one to celebrate with, and nothing worth celebrating. There was no Engales—she'd tried in vain to track him down, but
nothing—
and there was no James; he'd stopped showing up at the apartment a week ago, without any explanation. She spent the morning feeling sorry for herself, remembering her last birthday, when Jamie and the R boys had made her a lumpy cake and, when it proved to be inedible, took her out to the Mudd Club, where they'd spun around and around on the dance floor, spilling their drinks, just one in a million groups of friends in New York, out to feed on the city together. Now there was no together, there was no one, and when a birthday alone became too much for her to fathom, she'd finally decided to take things into her own hands; she would call James's house, ask him where he'd been, convince him to come over, kiss him until he adored her again.

This call called for the steely nerves that could only be achieved through alcohol, so she'd gone to Telemondo's for a flask. She chose Jim Beam, held the bottle to her chest like a comforting teddy bear, humble in its little brown bag. As she was leaving, she had paused to flip through a magazine on the rack near the door. It flapped open to an ad for lipstick that read:
Does any man really understand you?

No
, she had thought as she scanned the image of a busty brunette, whose lips were laced with risky iridescence. The ad was for Revlon's Cherries in the Snow, another of the lipstick colors that Jamie swore by.
Nobody really does.

Nobody knew that she had a flat silver washer from Mason & Mick's tucked in her front pocket at all times; they probably assumed it was the presumptuous outline of an unused condom. Nobody knew what she really smelled like, which was soil and manure and honeysuckle from the garden; they knew her smell as stale cigarettes, knock-off perfume from Chinatown, cherry lip gloss, sex. Nobody knew what her mother called her:
girlywog;
here she was
Raul's chick
or
Ida
or
'Tender.
Nobody knew that as soon as it got dark she went out into the city with a flashlight to look for a missing child, or that she slept surrounded by milk cartons with that child's face on it; if they did, they'd think that it was a
project,
some foray into their artistic world, rather than what it actually was, which was girlish superstition, lonely reaching. They didn't want to talk about superstition in New York. They wanted cold, hard facts: like if you are or are not fucking a married man in your newly crippled boyfriend's bed.

Revlon understands you as you really are . . . Oh-so-warm and a little reckless
.

Okay, then, Revlon. Okay, then, New York.
One tube of Cherries in the Snow from the pharmacy across the street, placed slyly in the pocket of her lumberjack coat that used to be her dad's. One smear of the stuff on her cracking lips, using the pay phone's grimy silver surface as a mirror. One—no, two—swigs of the Jim Beam, for the steeling of nerves. One quick scan of the soft, flimsy pages of the pay phone's phonebook, to find one James Bennett's phone number. But look, here's something even better. James Bennett's
address.

She could steal her mother's turquoise; she could determine her own fate; she could walk across town to 24 Jane Street and look into James Bennett's smaller-than-average window.

This was where he lived, where he
actually
lived, with his
wife,
who was standing now at the kitchen counter, working at something with a knife. Lucy stood there, wobbly with whiskey, looking in on this woman. A woman with soft brown hair and a purple shirt. A woman with a casserole pan. A woman who had probably gone to college. In other words, the very opposite of Lucy. Then there was James, who came through to the kitchen to wrap his arms around her. The arms said:
I have known how to wrap my arms around this person for my whole life.
The arms said:
You, Lucy Marie Olliason, are a terrible fucking person.

She had burst into Jim Beam tears.
Since when do you drink Jim Beam? Since I realized it could make me burst into tears at any given moment.
James did not love her; Engales did not love her; neither of them even knew her; nobody fucking knew her. She rubbed the iridescent lipstick from her mouth with her wrist. She fled down Jane and back across town, but not before making stops at every bar she saw along the way. In each of them, she made some version of the same sloppy scene. At the Eagle, she put Blondie on the jukebox and danced alone (if you could call it dancing; it was mostly arms); Random Randy watched on sadly. At the Aztec Lounge she pulled a fat man's tie and kissed his rosy, blubbery face. At Eileen's Reno Bar, where plastic plants hung from the ceiling and the men wore blue, sparkly shadow, she pounded her fist on the bar and tried to recount to the bartender her plight.

“We were
just here,
” she whined. “Me and Raul. We were dancing, and Winona had just called. He was so happy. ‘Winona George
loves me
,' he said. I told him everybody loved him. ‘Like who?' he said. ‘Like me,' I said. It was the first time I told him. That I loved him, I mean.”

The bartender didn't care about this story, or the ones she recounted after that, about his hand, about James, about James's wife in the window. No one cared. In the end, Devereux, a transvestite who was often at the squat, had walked her home, whispering,
Darling daffodil, darling rose,
over and over in her sweet, deliberately pitched voice, until Lucy threw up onto Devereux's sparkly shoes.

Male. Hispanic.
Six years old. 40 inches. Dark hair, brown eyes
.

It's
him
, Lucy thought as she splashed her face with water in the bathroom, in whose sink a water cockroach had taken up residence, not to be drowned for anything. The boy at the door had to be Jacob Rey. He met all the descriptions on the milk cartons, and hadn't he been carrying a backpack? Jacob Rey had a backpack. She thought of the night of the accident, the searching, ghostly faces of the mothers. She had known then that she had entered into the fate of the boy, and here he was. Here was the missing boy, right here at the door. Here was fate, coming for her.

No,
said the cruel, pulsing world of the worst hangover of all time, when she went back out to find him at the door.
You shan't be saving any lost boys today.

It wasn't Jacob Rey, she saw now. The eyes were different. They were not Jacob Rey's eyes, and yet they were still familiar. She knew the boy in some other way. In some other way that involved his eyes.

“Are you the wife?” the blond woman said, in halting English, before Lucy could place the boy's eyes into the library of eyes she knew.

“Excuse me?” Lucy said, reorienting herself toward the woman, whose cheeks were like two pink cherries.
Cherries in the Snow.
The thought of the lipstick made her want to vomit again. She sucked in her breath.

“Raul Engales's wife?” the woman said.

Whether it was because she wished it to be true or because she couldn't think straight, Lucy didn't know, but she nodded.

“Good then,” the tall woman said. She extracted an orange envelope from her wide purse, pulled out a white sheet of paper, and pressed it into Lucy's hands. It was a letter, written in beautiful, unsmudged script. The words were written in Spanish.

“Oh, I don't read Spanish,” Lucy said apologetically.

The woman tapped at the paper, to an indented section.

Raul Engales (hermano)

265 Avenue A, Apartment 6

New York, New York 10009

Lucy looked up at the woman, whose pale face held no answers. Lucy was thoroughly confused.
Hermano.
This much she knew in Spanish. But Engales had never mentioned a brother or sister. He had always said he had no family—they were all dead.

“Sorry,” Lucy said, holding her own forehead, which felt hot. “I'm not understanding. Who are you?”

“I am Sofie,” the blond woman said, in halting, mechanical English. “The neighbor of Raul's sister, Franca.”

“I don't think Raul has a sister,” she said. Lucy for some reason thought of the water cockroach she'd seen in the sink a moment ago, its sickening shiny head, gasping for air from the drain.

Another, smaller piece of paper was pulled from the envelope by Sofie and placed on top of the first. It was a postcard of the New York City skyline, in all its black-and-white jagged glory. It was strikingly similar to the postcard Lucy had found in the grass in Ketchum, and when she saw it her heart stopped. All the lines of fate were crossing, though she could not understand how, or why. When she flipped the postcard over she saw a few Spanish words in Engales's handwriting, then his big, beautiful initials,
R. E.