Tuesday Nights in 1980 (3 page)

James and Marge laughed for Winona until she got pulled away by a woman in a very puffy white dress. “It's almost time for the countdown!” the woman squealed. Winona looked back toward James and Marge and said over her shoulder: “Get ready for the first Tuesday of the year!” And then to her puffy friend: “I've always found Tuesdays so
charming,
haven't you? I do everything on Tuesdays”—her voice trailing away—“I take my shower on Tuesdays; I have my shows on Tuesdays . . . how
fortuitous
that the first day of the decade will fall . . .” Her monologue was out of range now, and she ducked back under the surface of the party as if it were a lake. In the relative quiet of her wake, James found a little bracket of time to delve into his Running List of Worries.

On James's Running List of Worries: baby food, and would it smell bad?; the Claes Oldenburg in Winona's fireplace (Was it being given enough space to breathe? Because it was making his throat close up a little bit); the wrinkle, shaped like a witch's nose, on the cuff of his pant leg, despite Marge's diligent ironing; his suit itself (Was white
out
?); would his child, if she were a girl, shove a man against the library stacks and kiss him like Marge had done to him, and at such a young age?; would his child, if he were a boy, have a small penis?; did
he
have a small penis?; and what had Winona just said a moment ago?
You're on fire, James.
But what would happen if his fire burned out?

It was true, he knew, that his brain—a brain in which a word was transformed into a color, where an image was manufactured into a bodily sensation, where applesauce tasted like sadness and winter was the color blue—was the reason he was on any front page of anything, on anyone's lips, at any party like this one. His
synesthesia,
as they had finally diagnosed it when he was sixteen—too old for it to have not fucked up his childhood—had unlocked a key to a world of art he would never have been invited into otherwise. But the way Winona had said it gave him pause, and through his happy mood he felt the Running List of Worries gather enough speed to hop the fence onto the Existential Track, where the profoundest worries—worries that came all the way from the past—ran a relay of sorts, passing the baton through the race of James's life, landing him, of all places,
here.

ONE: MOTHER/ORANGE

James was born
different
. Or at least that's what they called it, the doctors and the nurses, when he came out floppy and smaller than average, on November 17, 1946, in a low-ceilinged hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on a morning marked only by an ambivalent drizzle. A certain anxiety had been bred into him—he screamed more than any other baby in the maternity ward, as if he already had something to say. His parents, a shifty banker (James Senior, who slept with his eyes open) and a lazy housewife (Sandy Bennett, formerly Sandy Woods, who hailed from the South, loved piña coladas, and specialized in making her son feel as different as they said he was, and not in a good way), misunderstood him from the start. His early childhood characteristics—seriousness, tenacity, anxiety surrounding food, a squeaky yet sincere laugh—made it so everyone else did, too. He didn't talk until age four, and when he did, it was in full, existential sentences.

“How old are we when we die?” was the first question he asked his mother, who swatted at him with a peach-colored flyswatter, looked at him incredulously, and said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No,” James said, already computing his next question in his mind, which was, “Why was I born?”

James was shorter than average, large-eared, eager to be at the center of a play group, quick to ditch the play group to study something more interesting than other humans: a caterpillar, a melting ice cube, a book. When he was eight years old he discovered his secret powers; he caught his finger in a screen door and yelled the word
Mother
, and he distinctly smelled oranges. His mother was busy painting her toenails the same pink as her pillbox, and so he sat on the front steps of his house all afternoon, saying
Mother, Mother, Mother
and breathing in deeply through his nose in between, awaiting the flash aroma of citrus.

TWO: BEIGE/DOOM

Soon after came the realization that his secret powers—the smells he smelled, the colors he saw—were not “normal.” This realization came to him not as a sudden surprise but rather as a slow, steady amassing of minor incidents that made him feel crazy: Georgie called him a dumb-ass when he answered a math equation with the word
beige
; Miss Moose, his overly optimistic third-grade teacher, made notes on the margins of his homework that said things like
Inventive! But still incorrect!
; his mother began forcing him to drink a chalky powder that she mixed into glasses of water, which the pediatrician had told her would
keep her son regular
. At the young age of ten, James sensed that he was not regular even a little bit, not even at all.

Parents and teachers saw James's condition as an oddity or a lie; he was pegged with having a “vivid imagination” or a “tendency toward exaggeration,” and was twice made to see school psychologists because of something he wrote in a paper or said in class.

“Your boy says he is seeing colors,” he overheard a teacher tell his parents when they picked him up one day. “And . . . today he said he felt fireworks behind his eyes.”

Was it a problem with his vision? Was he seeking attention? Whatever it was, Mr. and Mrs. Bennett were not pleased about it.

“No more of this crap,” his father had said on the car ride home. James just looked out the window, away from the angry gray of his father's words. He would get a spanking tonight, he knew, a series of very hard spankings, probably, but he couldn't help what he had felt that day in class. The numbers had made him feel sick—the way Miss Ryder had colored them had been all wrong. Nines were blue! Tens were dark blue! And she had assigned them pinks and reds. Miss Ryder, his father, all the booger-nosed kids in his classes—everyone, including him, knew that he was doomed.

THREE: BLUE/GRACE

High school was the beginning of his blue period. James was all acne, ears, and quadratic equations. Once he stepped through the doors of Old Forge High, his whole scope of vision was taken up by a pale, grisly blue. The green chalkboards were blue; the hair of the other kids was blue; the grass where the cheerleaders practiced was blue. This made him incredibly depressed and difficult to relate to; the other kids, he knew, saw high school as a new and exciting rainbow. When, out of nowhere, Rachel Renolds, the generously endowed junior prom queen, singled him out in the hall to see if he wanted to join the Literary Lowlifes, the club she was starting so she could have something to put on her college applications, and James, stunned, nodded enthusiastically, the following conversation went something like this:

Rachel: “Hahahahahahaha!”

James: “What?”

Rachel: “You think there's
actually
a club called the Literary Lowlifes?”

James: “I don't see why there couldn't be.”

Rachel: “Hahahahaha! That's the
point.
You
are
a lowlife, so of
course
you'd think it's real.”

James: “Your hair.”

Rachel: “What
about
my hair?”

James: “It's glaucous.”

Rachel: “What on
earth
are you taking about, you freak?”

James: “It's a kind of blue.”

Rachel: “You're simply the
Worst. Nerd. In. The. School.”

The saving grace? Grace. A girl with long, silky dark hair, who, overhearing this terrible conversation, pulled James away and hid him behind the shield of her locker door.

“Rachel's a vacuous cunt,” she said, surprising James to the point of breathlessness with each of those words.
Vacuous
meant she had a brain, and
cunt
meant she had an edge, two things that James coveted immediately. Even though she was popular, Grace ate lunch with him in the glasses-and-suspenders section of the quad that day, and for the rest of the year, and they maintained the kind of coed friendship where the male's unrequited romantic interest in the female was both blatant and unimportant; all that mattered was that they were
around each other
. And because Grace's father was a college professor, and because she asked him to come along when her father let her sit in on one of his night classes (Intro to Composition at U Penn), James discovered college.

Even more than the subject matter (they were doing a lesson on visual analysis, during which the professor asked the class to “have an intellectual argument with an image”), it was the
sensation
of that class that captivated James—the burgundy, regal feeling of the room, the round globes outside the windows that lit the pathways to the dormitories, the books the students spread dutifully on the desks. Driving home that night in the backseat of Grace's father's smooth, black car, James felt a new hope.

“I loved it,” he whispered to Grace in the back of the car.

“I know,” she whispered back, and she kissed the tip of his nose.

There was a place for him on this earth, he knew then. A place where learning was paramount and strange viewpoints were encouraged; a place where one's worth was measured by their ideas rather than height (or ear size); a place where parents didn't putter and pout and drink until one of them hit the other one, where showers and meals were communal, where brunette women wore their hair short, where good boys were made into great men, where golden lights lit pathways to the truth, and where acceptance happened before you even arrived . . . and that place was college.

FOUR: SEX/GENIUS

In college, James discovered art and sex. His first semester at Columbia, while in line for overcooked pasta at the student cafeteria, he spotted a girl whose red hair made his bladder tingle the way Grace's green eyes had, and whose face—perhaps due to the tense wrinkle in her forehead—looked like the most intelligent face he'd ever seen. Too embarrassed to talk to her while eating soggy noodles, he waited until they finished lunch and followed her out into the quad, and then across the quad, and then into a dark lecture hall.

The room was filled with students of a different breed than he had in
his
classes, as he was a history major, and this—he found out as a vibrant slide show erupted from a projector onto the front wall of the room—was an
art
class. A
graduate
art class, he discovered from the header on the leaflet that was handed out, titled
Marc Chagall's Nostalgia
. As the angular, colorful,
nostalgic
images flashed across the back wall, James felt the same tingling in his groin he had felt in the spaghetti line; Chagall had literally given him a hard-on. The redhead, who he had stupidly chosen to sit next to, giggled when she looked over at his bulging pants when the lights came on. But then, to his great surprise, she grabbed his hand and led him back through the evening air to her dorm room, where she pulled down his pants and finished him off. It was not until after this glorious, completely novel experience that James noticed that her roommate was in attendance, listening to James's first gasp of female-induced pleasure when he finally came.

He never saw the redheaded graduate student again, but he did see Chagall, in the art classes he signed up for every semester thereafter. Eventually his counselor told him he'd have to switch majors if he wanted to keep avoiding his history requirements, so he did—to art history—and never looked back. In a course titled
Paradox: Embracing the Postmodern Paradigm
he discovered Duchamp toilets, mysterious “happenings,” and art as essence rather than object. In John Cage's four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, played during the seminar by an animated professor with Einsteinian hair, James saw the exact same speckled light he saw when listening to classical music, and tasted, quite distinctly, black pepper, which even made him sneeze. Here it was, he thought while sitting in the bright, silent room, the collisions that happened in his own brain, bursting out before him like explosions.

He called Grace from his dorm room.

“I found out what I need to do!” he blurted, unable to contain his excitement.

“And what's that, dear James?” Grace said. She had taken on a motherly quality since they'd parted after high school, and was prone to using words like
dear
and
darling.

“I need to make
art,
” James said, his mind flying.

Grace was smiling on the other end of the phone. James could hear it.

He explained to Grace what he had discovered in Painting 2B, that Kandinsky had synesthesia, and, as he had found out in English 1A, so did Nabokov—he could see colors in letters just as James did!—and they were geniuses of metaphor and color and ideas!

“You'll be great,” Grace said, and James thought:
Grace is never wrong.

So invigorated by the possibility of being or becoming a genius, James then plunged into art like it was the blue lake of the letter
O
, hardly ever rising for air.

FIVE: BAD ART/GOOD KISS

Despite fervent passion and excessive diligence, James couldn't make good art. He couldn't seem to re-create what was happening in his mind with his hands; his paintings were muddy, his sculptures made no sense, and his teachers cocked their heads during his critiques in a way that suggested confusion as to why he was here in the first place. But James didn't need their opinions to know: the art was not inside him. He loved
looking
at art. He loved
thinking about
art. But this love didn't come out of his hands—it came out of his mind.