Tuesday Nights in 1980 (37 page)

“Not now,” Engales said when she arrived to him.

“Then when?” she said. Her voice was her voice. What was it about her voice? Why did it move him so? How could he detest her so much and still be moved by her voice? He thought of the Clemente painting of the woman and her two men. He looked into Lucy's eyes, which were lakes of familiar, easy water, flecked with some dangerous, flesh-eating fish. Suddenly he wanted her so badly he couldn't contain himself.

“Outside,” he said gruffly, and grabbed her by the arm.

The show looked
perfect, Winona had told James before it opened that evening. Everyone who was anyone was coming, she had promised, and the whole show would sell. Winona had said all of these facts as if they were good things; she had maintained her ecstatic mood, and had told him so in all the ways, including attempting to shove her tongue down his throat in an overindulgent congratulatory kiss just as she swung open the doors to the public. And James had tried hard to believe her. But as soon as people started filing in—and they did, in proud posses and dressed-up duos—and James was forced to begin the requisite kissing of cheeks and kissing of asses, and the explaining of why he was selling the whole lot of his art, he witnessed the slow sinking of his own heart. “It was just
time,
” he kept saying over and over to the curious gallery-goers. “Just time to move on.”

But it was not time, and it never would be, to be doing the very thing he had vowed never to do: trading art for money. He had told himself it would be worth it, that it would fix everything, that it would smooth the waters with Marge, disperse of their money problems, cleanse him of his obsessions and his misdeeds. He had vowed not to be sentimental, or emotional, or, as he had proved to be over and over, impulsive. He would simply sit back and let this night wash over him, let the smooth promise of a clean, comfortable new life overshadow whatever vision he'd ever thought he'd had.

But as he watched each red dot go up as a painting sold, his heart sank further and further in his body. He thought of the quenching pinks of the Heilmann, the dizzying Germanic gray of his imported Georg Baselitz, the mirrored lake surface of the painted plate Schnabel had all but forced him to take for free as a sarcastic thank-you for a very bad review. He could not quite see the colors now—when Raul had hit him, it was as if he had beaten the colors right out of him—but he could feel the memories of them, which felt almost as distinct and powerful as the sensations themselves. Someone pulled out a checkbook and purchased his burnt orange. Someone else put their claim on his deep-sea ear popping. A woman in a jacket that looked to be adorned with shards of glass bought his foggy morning, his campfire smell, and his chartreuse flashes, all in one swoop.

He watched the people's faces as they studied and then abandoned the paintings. Did they see them as he once had? Alive and bright and wretched and perfect? Did they see them at all? Did the paintings move through them and then disappear, put out of their minds for good? Or would there be a time, years later, when they would remember an image they saw here tonight: a square inch of a painting, even, that would transport them back in time to the night James Bennett sold all his art?

He concluded that no, they would not. And yes, this evening was officially depressing. Because even worse than the selling off of the art, the giving in to the commercial hell of the art world and the contribution to the thoughtless collections of the city's richest dealers, was the fact that there was no one here to witness it. Here he was, giving up the things he had loved so much, without anyone he cared about here to care alongside him, to assuage the blow. Marge had stayed home with Julian, as they had agreed it would be too late a night for such a little boy. But James knew that's not why Marge wasn't here. She could hardly play the role of James's wife at home. How could she do it out here, with people watching? How could she present herself to a public in a way that didn't betray her real feelings? Her deep-seated resentment, her despair, her anger? Not to mention that she didn't support the idea of the show at all, despite the fact that the point of it was to win her back.

“You're being rash,” she'd told James when he'd gotten off the phone with Winona. “You're acting impulsively. Again. This isn't what you want.”

“But I'm doing this for us,” he had said. “For our family. And I want you to come.”

“We're not really a family right now,” she had said in the tone she had taken to using with him, which was robust in its bitchiness yet also very normal, as if these cutting snippets were just regular things that people said. He had nodded, as he nodded about everything; she was right about everything now, she had all upper hands. But he had secretly hoped she would show up anyway. She was all he had. Other than her, if he was even allowed to count her, he had no one. He was like a tree in a forest. No one would see or hear him fall.

In an alley
called Extra Place, against a wall that read in bulbous yellow letters FOR THE SO-CALLED AVANT GARDE, Engales and Lucy had sex. It was the sort of sex that happened in alleys: hasty and necessary, crude by design. Lucy felt tipsy, and needy, and guilty. She whispered that she missed him. She did. She missed him terribly, the whole thing of him, and his presence was making her drunker than she already was. He did not whisper back but only continued to press her against the wall with his body, her back chafing on the bricks, her face hurting. She could feel a piece of her own hair in her mouth. She could feel the stump of his arm on the side of her stomach, which made her want to cry. He smelled like him: the first good smell of New York City. Cigarette mouth, clean skin, dirty hair. In a way that felt familiar and also crass, he put his mouth on her neck. He tore at the sequins on her shirt until some of them fell, like gold snowflakes, to the ground.

“Call me Spot,” Lucy tried.

“No,” Engales countered.

When they finished, Lucy pulled down her skirt and wiped her hair out of her face. She tried to smile up at him, but found it was hard to look him in the eyes. What was she supposed to say to him? How was she supposed to tell him about everything that had happened since he'd disappeared from her life two months ago, apparently to some rehab institution on Winona's dime, but how the hell was she supposed to know that? Winona was a bitch for not telling her, not to mention James, and Engales had never called, never thought to tell her he was even
alive.
And too much had happened: the boy, his sister, James. Everything had been upended, and so much of it was her fault. What were her excuses? She bit her lip, as was her custom when she did not know what she should say.

“I like your suit,” she said, immediately regretting it.

“Did you meet him?” Engales asked. He was zipping up his pants now, not looking at her.

“What?”

“Did you meet him? The boy?”

Lucy shook her foot. She shook her head. Then she nodded.

“Well?”

Lucy shook her head again. The lip biting was starting to hurt.

“Fucking say something!” Engales screamed. It echoed through the alley and out onto First Street. Two people walking on First Street turned their heads to look down the alley, then scurried away.

“What do you want me to say?” Lucy yelled back. Again, the sound rang off the graffitied walls and was followed by a long, silent moment. Lucy was breathing hard. She felt all her anger rise in her and her body felt hot and tense with adrenaline. “Do you want me to tell you I fucked someone else? Is that what you want me to say? I did, okay? But that's because you threw me out! You told me to go away! That you never wanted to see me again!”

Engales had his hand in his pocket, and his fingers were pushing down on the cloth, digging into his leg. He said nothing as Lucy went on.

“You don't think I feel terrible?” she yelled. “You don't think I wanted to help you? You don't think I cried myself to sleep every single night since you've been gone? But you
didn't tell me where you were, Raul.
You didn't even tell me if you were
okay.
So what was I supposed to do? The last thing you told me was that you
hated
me, remember? You told the nurses to ban me. And then you disappeared!”

“Have you considered for one second that this is not about you?” he said, seething.

She got quiet, looked at her boots, which she was using to scrape at the gravel. Then she looked up at him, straight in the eyes.

“I didn't know you had a sister,” she said.

“Well, now you do,” he said.

“Why didn't you tell me about her before, though?”

“Because I failed her,” Engales said. “I abandoned her just like I abandoned you. That's what I do, Lucy. Don't you see that?”

“But you don't have to!” she pleaded. “I love you, Raul. So much! No matter what!”

“You don't even know what that means,” he said coldly.

“Why are you so angry with me?” she said. “What did I do to you? Why do I make you so, so angry?”

“You know what you do to me?” He snarled. “You
need
me.”

“Yes, I do need you!”

“But it's not just me. It's everyone. You need everyone because you have no idea how to need yourself. Or even how to
be
yourself.”

Lucy looked confused and was shaking her head from side to side slightly. A wind came through the alleyway, and she pulled her jacket tighter.

“Don't you get it, Lucy? That boy is the only member of my entire family. He is the only person who has the same blood as me, the only person on this earth. And what do you do? Drop him off with the
person you're fucking.
”

He began to walk away from her, out of the alley and toward the street. She yelled after him. “That's not true! It's not! I swear that's not true!”

At the end of the alley he turned around. “
Go home, Lucy,
” he said, and it sped toward her like an arrow and brought her, with its sharp point,
down.

The gravel dug into her knees as she fell to them. She would go home. She wouldn't let the city's lights steal what was left of her innocence, and she would go home and look for it in the grass. She would gather her childhood back out of the branches of the fir trees. She would find her silliness under a pile of old, out-of-style jeans. She would think of Raul Engales while drinking whiskey at a bonfire, and whenever she saw a man with a mole on his face. She'd think of James when she smoked cigarettes in secret on her parents' back porch: the feeling of bad pleasure. She would remember her first and only art project, Jacob Rey, when she saw the many faces of children who disappeared after him, immortalized and then thrown away on the sides of cartons of dairy. She would find Manhattan, often, right before she fell asleep: the honking of a horn, the way it opened and filled her, a blue balloon she'd seen drifting up through the skinny slice of sky between the skyscrapers. She'd hold the Big City to her chest, like a little golden locket that held something only she understood. She and a few others—red-lipped Jamie, loud-mouthed Arlene, maybe, and of course Engales, the original artist, the first one she'd ever loved. All of them were there, right up under her collarbone, lodged and safe.

Later still she would let them all fly away, like that blue balloon. She would untangle herself from the city's gray grip. She would become womanly in the hips and face. Her misdeeds would taper. She would work for Randall the lawyer, not Randy the bartender. She'd smile at a man from across a garden party, where light jazz music played; they'd have a child who couldn't say his R's. If he would have gotten to meet Raul, he would have called him
Owl.
She won't see Raul again, but she'll see his handsome photograph. Printed in a book she pulls from the Ketchum Library, called, simply,
Downtown, Volume II.

See you soon, girlywog,
she said now, through her tears, to the rat that had taken an interest in Jamie's purse. She had never given it back, though surely she had meant to.

At the gallery,
the night began to descend in the way that shows do when all the free wine is gone, though there was still a case of it, visibly available under the drink table. Even so, people started tapping one another on the shoulder and listing the names of bars nearby. Four times, James heard the phrase, “I completely forgot to eat dinner,” coming from the smarter dressed of the women and, in one case, an extra-short man in a fedora. James wanted to tell each of them that their hungry plight was not nuanced; “forgetting” to eat dinner was an urban norm. Did anyone, anywhere else in the country, even in the world,
forget
to eat dinner? Or was it just the New Yorkers who found themselves, after a night of looking at art, starving?

Sullenly he kissed them all good-bye. He didn't know them or care for them. A few of them he knew, and he didn't care for them still. Winona George, in leather pants that looked to have been applied with glue, announced: “Have to duck out of my own party, sadly, as I was not a good enough hostess to provide more than one olive per guest! But congratulations on an epic show, James. Phenomenal. Just phenomenal.”

After Winona left and every painting's tag boasted a red dot and the solitary bowl of chips that Winona had set out was empty, James saw no point in keeping up appearances, and slumped to sitting against the back wall, next to the case of wine. He pulled out an open bottle, drank from it. He wanted only to go home, but his home did not want him. He stared at the painting on the wall in front of him. It was a giant blue square. If only life could be as simple as that, he thought. Just a big blue square. But when he looked at it for long enough he began to remember all of the things that painting had once conjured for him: molasses, sand dunes, the feeling of holding hands. It was never that simple, he knew. On top of life, there was always more life.