Tuesday Nights in 1980 (29 page)

“I smell cabbage brains,” James said.

“Ding ding,” Marge said.

“Lovely,” James said.

“They're good for us,” Marge said. Then she turned around and grabbed his face and kissed it.

Somehow, Marge was happier with him now than she had been in a while: another, more major success. Ever since he had started visiting Raul Engales—only a week ago, but it felt like he had known him forever—everything had shifted. He had started to write again, in long, inspired spurts that lasted well into the night, and for this Marge appeared relieved, if not delighted. Perhaps her expectations had gone down now that she had seen him get so low—she did not seem worried that he had not tried to
publish
any of the work—or perhaps she was just tired of being upset. “I like to see you like this,” she said one night, resting her chin on the doorframe of his studio before she went up to bed. “I like to see
you
like this,” he had said back to her, in awe of her strawberry mouth. “I'm glad you're back,” she said before going upstairs again, her soft familiar steps as comforting as rain on a tin roof.

He was glad, too. The writing he was doing felt good in a whole new way: aside from igniting the colors (Engales, in the flesh, was the richest Yves Klein blue), there was something about Raul Engales's essence, the way he existed in the world, that had altered James's feelings about writing as a whole, its purpose, its function, its
feeling.
Here was a man who had lost the ability to create, which had previously been his sole reason for existing. Here was a man who had been robbed of the very thing that defined him. If not because of Engales, James was writing
for
him. It didn't matter if it was terrible—and most of it was, he had narrowed it down to a few sentences that he actually liked
—
it just mattered that he
did it.
Because he could. He wrote about, well, anything he felt like writing about—his visits with Engales, and about trying to connect with his mother and father, and about losing the baby, and about losing his colors and finding them again in all the strangest places. He had written about Lucy, which had felt like a release of sorts, as cleansing as a church confession, amplifying the feeling that he had done the very right thing by discontinuing their affair, and he had written about Marge, how he still loved her desperately, and could not understand how he had gotten so far from her. He had written more than a hundred pages in just a week, and the way things were going, he knew he had hundreds more in him.

Yes. It was good to be back. But it was also terrifying. Because in the Venn diagram of his life, between the circles of Lucy's yellow and Engales's blue and Marge's red—the colors, even when he wasn't around Raul, had regained their strength since meeting him
—
there were shaded zones where the circles overlapped, shaded zones full of worries, and of lies.

YELLOW:
He had not told Lucy that he knew where Engales was. Though he knew she was desperate, and that she had been searching for him, and though he had stopped seeing her himself, he could not handle the thought of them together. He'd ready himself to call her and tell her about the Rising Sun, but then he'd imagine her visiting Engales there, her lips on his, her tongue in his ear, and he would stop himself. Yes, it was jealousy, partly, but it was also fear. What if she told Engales she'd been seeing him? It would destroy everything he'd built with Engales, which at this point was his last chance.

BLUE:
He had not told Engales about his affair with Lucy, for obvious reasons. He wanted to bask in him, and write about him, and drink up his color, and if Engales knew about Lucy all of that would end. He was really starting to
like
Engales, to care about him in a way that he rarely cared about anyone. If his lie were revealed he'd not only lose his colors, he'd also lose a real friend. But he couldn't stop. He kept visiting him every day at noon. He kept digging deeper. He kept growing richer with colors. Sucking them from Engales as if they were a very addictive elixir.

RED:
The worst and most prominent betrayal, of course, was lying, repeatedly, to Marge. He had not told her—both because it felt too close to the realm of his affair and because Marge had developed a serious distaste for even the name
Raul Engales
due to the painting that symbolized James's fucking up—about his visits to the Rising Sun. Instead, he created an artist out of thin air from a name he'd seen on the buzzer at Lucy's apartment.
François Bellamy.
He was writing a piece on François Bellamy. That's what he was doing in his study, late into the night. And Marge bought it, because why wouldn't she? Believing in François Bellamy gave Marge a reason to believe in James.

The lies, in
short, were working. And James was having his colors and eating them, too. He prayed the spheres would continue to drift from one another, like continents that would eventually break completely apart. He prayed that all of this was not going to blow up in his face. But for now the lies were working and he was okay. He was here with his red wife in their cold house, his hands tucked snugly in her armpits.

“I guess I have to close this eventually,” Marge said as she pulled up the oven's door. “But I don't
want to.
”

“I'll keep you warm,” James said. He turned her around and hugged her tightly. As he did he had a wonderful picture in his mind: of Marge on the top of Mount Etna, on their honeymoon to Sicily, in a pair of ugly cargo shorts and a floppy hat, yelling down to him from her higher perch on the path. He had realized then that she was fundamentally better than him. She was higher on the mountain. She was real and wonderful and he didn't deserve her. And look at him now: he had been right.

“Let's have wine,” Marge said, breaking free from his hug and getting a bottle from the cupboard.

“Let's,” James said.

“And then let's eat,” Marge said.

“Let's,” James said.

“And then let's baby-make,” Marge said in her baby voice that she used to talk about sex.

“Let's,” said James, though the idea made him nervous; he worried Lucy's stench still clung to him. He knew that saying he didn't feel like having sex would hurt her, or mean something that it shouldn't, and they had been on such shaky ground so recently, and he had to abide by her baby clock. He couldn't ruin the night, it had been so pleasant, and so he let her undo his belt, and then unzip his zipper, praying for some cosmic interruption that would save him from sleeping with his own wife.

The cosmic interruption came, in the form of the doorbell's deep whale song. Relief washed over him.

“I'll get it!” he said, probably too readily, buttoning his pants as he headed for the door.

“Who could that possibly be?” Marge said, her voice streaked with annoyance.

“Who knows!” James called, just when he realized he
did
know, because coming through the stained glass was a cloud of yellow.

James felt like
a Richard Hambleton painting he had seen on Bleecker Street a few days ago: a black shadow, frozen in midleap, shot in the chest with a red splatter of blood. How was she
here
? And how was she
yellow
? He had been so sure that he was rid of her, so proud of his discovery that he could get the same sensations—
better
sensations—simply by seeing Raul Engales every day. He didn't need her. But now she was here and she was bright and he was paralyzed. He couldn't very well open the door and let Lucy in, and he couldn't
not
open the door, and have Marge ask him who it had been. He could lie and say it was a saleslady, but did salesladies even exist anymore? And if he knew Lucy, which he felt he was starting to, he knew she was not going to give up; she was not one with much care for the world outside of herself, and she would ring the bell again.

Not knowing what else to do, he opened the door quickly, let a whoosh of cold air into the house, closed the door behind him. Nervous blood, pumping all through his veins. Lucy. Lucy with her small nose. Lucy, here even though he had renounced her for good. Lucy, standing there with a little boy.

“What are you
doing
here?” James whisper-yelled.

“I'm sorry,” Lucy said. Her face was white with fear and cold, and there was snot coming from her nose, glinting in the streetlights on her upper lip. “But you were the only . . . old person that I knew.”

“Old person?” James said. “Is that how you think of me? How did you find my house? I'm having dinner with my
wife.
How did you find me here?”

“There's a thing called a phone book,” she said. “You're in it.”

“That doesn't mean you can come here! What are you thinking?”

“I don't know what I'm thinking! How am I supposed to think?” Lucy said, too loudly, making James turn around and peer through the colored glass. “I have nowhere else to go!”

“And why do you have a child with you?!”

Lucy was shaking, wearing the kind of coat that wasn't appropriate for the deep fall. Her lips were weirdly opalescent: or was that just his mind? Part of James wanted to invite her in, make her coffee, hug her. But what was he thinking? She had to
leave.
He had to tell her to leave right this minute, before everything was ruined beyond repair. He was just getting his life back on track, just making things right with Marge, just about to have oceans between his continents of lies. And now the biggest lie was on his stoop, toting a child.

“Look,” he said to her. “My wife is inside. You need to go.” He looked at the boy, whose eyes were wide with fear, and whose hair was doing that thing that little boys' hair did, tossing like a whirlpool at the crown of his head.

“It's not like I
want
to be here,” Lucy spat back. “I'm not asking you to fuck me.”

James practically screamed
Shhhhhhhhh!

“I'm just saying I'm not trying to break up your marriage,” she went on. “I'm here because I have no one else to ask. I don't know
one responsible person
in this
entire city.
And this lady . . . this lady I've never even met! Left me with this
boy—
”

“Well who is he?” James said.

“
He is Raul Engales's nephew
,” Lucy whispered.

Oh, Jesus
, James thought, his head now throbbing with cold. Lucy's eyes were becoming huge pits of yellow and blue; his own vision was clouding.

“Some lady dropped him off,” she went on. “Flew all the way from Argentina—and I don't know what to
do
. I can't find Raul, I have no one, I don't know how to take care of a kid . . . I have nowhere to go! I went to Jamie's and she was with a guy in her room! I went to the squat and no one was there—the whole place had been cleared out, everything was gone, even the parrots! I didn't know what to do!”

Lucy began to practically hyperventilate as she relayed her plight. As she did, the young boy, as any young boy would do if his caretaker were to expose themselves as terrified and therefore untrustworthy, began to cry softly himself, and the whole scene escalated into a tizzy of tears and breath.

James stepped down to the stair above Lucy's. He put his arms around her and held her small, cold body. Her youth, every time he had met up with her in the apartment, had come forth in brash confidence and predatory sexuality. Now it exposed her fear, her need for attention.

Raul Engales's nephew. All the way from Argentina.

He thought of what Engales had talked about that morning, about his sister, worrying that she wasn't safe. It couldn't be that Engales's intuition had been right, could it? But then, here was this boy, without a mother in sight.

He had to help, but what would he tell Marge? Why had he lied to her, when he had known the only outcome was to get caught? Why did lies always breed more lies? How had that first lie turn him into a
liar?
He felt himself fading. He willed himself to fade all the way. Lucy standing there crying, not going anywhere anytime soon. The kid crying. His own body fading.

“It's okay,” he said softly, absently, to himself or to Lucy, he couldn't tell. “It will be okay.” He bent down to hold the boy's shoulders, to pet his head. Then he stood and hugged Lucy again. He realized as he hugged her that he had never been someone that other people asked for comfort. Now he knew why. He disappeared as he hugged her. He was not really there. He felt surprised that it seemed to be working at all, that Lucy was leaning into him, grabbing his shirt. That he could convince someone with an embrace that things would be okay, even when he did not believe that they would be. Especially not when Marge opened the door behind him to find him wrapped around a young blond woman she had never seen before.

“What's going on?” she said. She tossed her hair back, like she did. “Who is this?”

James turned around to look at her, knowing his face was betraying him, like it did.

“I'll explain,” James said to her. Then he looked at Lucy, whose face was still dashed with tears. He felt, though he didn't want to, a surge of love for her, for her messy bleached hair, her hopelessness. “Um, why don't we all go inside?”

Lucy on the
couch, Marge on the big chair, the boy on Lucy's lap, Lucy's portrait on the mantel. James's eyes and brain darted from one of these terrors to the next. He had ruined everything, he had gone too far; his mind was awash with all of it. Yellow whirred past him, and Marge's red like a watercolor, and the orange that ensued from their mixing was so dizzying he thought he might faint. How would he fix this?