Tuesday Nights in 1980 (7 page)

Now, though it was hardly nine, Engales could already feel an energetic fuss in the room: the frenetic vibrations of people trying to place themselves in proximity to the right lips before midnight, so that when the time came to enter into the future they would not have to do it alone. But lips did not concern him just now; he had his pick of two pairs, and neither was appealing. The two women, whose sentences were all spoken like questions, were not holding his attention. He scanned the crowded room for something that might, and though many things were attention-
grabbing
—Selma painting her nipples with glow-in-the-dark paint, one of the Swedes lighting a clear liquid on fire in a small glass—none of it was attention-
holding.
Raul itched for something novel, something
revelatory.
It didn't have to be a woman. It was the brink of a New Year, and he longed to cross over into it a new man. A man people knew about, paid attention to. Not only a
ladies'
man, but a
people's
man. Someone who mattered. A real artist.

At the edge of the room, just near the door, he saw the top of a hedge of hair, floating into the crowd. He recognized the hair: huge and effervescent, dominating. It was Rumi Gibraltar, who he had met outside a party last summer; she had been lounging on the stoop outside the building as if it were a daybed, in a shirt that looked to have been made from lacy napkins. Rumi, the curator who had promised him she'd come to his studio to see his paintings. Rumi, who had not kept that promise. Rumi, whose lips he would put himself in proximity to sometime before midnight, if not for pleasure then for business: he needed her to get him a show.

The woman on his right reached her face up toward his, lips first. He ignored her and shed both of the women as if they were clothing, making his way toward Rumi. She was taller than him and regal. Her hair was a masterpiece.

“Well hello, Ms. No-Show,” he said when her eyes found his.

“Well hello, Mr. Delaroche,” she said. She was referencing the night when they had met, when Engales had professed to her that he was a painter, and she had said to him flatly, “Don't you know that painting is dead?”

When he appeared confused she had gone on: Didn't he know Delaroche? No? Well he should look him up, because painting has been dead since 1839! When Engales had looked it up, in an encyclopedia at the NYU library the following week, he had found that Paul Delaroche had declared the whole form of painting obsolete after the invention of an early form of photography.

“I found his old ass in the encyclopedia,” Engales said now.

“A studious one,” she said.

“His argument doesn't hold up.”

“Doesn't it?”

“There are two kinds of painters. The painter who paints to decorate, and the painter who paints to paint. Photography would only make any sort of problem for the first kind of painter.”

“A studious and
actually smart
one. Good combination.”

“Why haven't you come to see me?”

“I am a very busy woman,” she said, her eyes leveling into him, filled with what looked like lusty promise.

“I like busy women,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said.

“I have a good idea,” Engales said impulsively.

“Artists always think they have good ideas.”

“Come see my paintings now. Come to my studio.”

“It's New Year's Eve,” she said.

“An observant one,” he said.

“We're at a party,” she said.

“Don't you know that parties are dead?” he said.

Rumi smiled with one half of her mouth: her first concession.

Before she could protest, Engales grabbed her thin arm, took her out into the icy night. Rats pitched from their path as they made their way across town on East Seventh. The cops were out in packs, scanning arrogantly, braced for the worst after what had happened last year: mobs in Times Square, a few murders, even. A woman on Broadway called to a man she was separating from regretfully, “Midnight! The Eagle! Find me! You promise?” Up Broadway to Washington Place, where it crossed with Mercer, through the locked door and up the dark stairwell to the studio Engales had come to call his own.

Engales had learned
of the NYU studios from a woman he'd slept with on his third day in New York, an art student with a thick pout and a set of inappropriate pigtails, whom he had met at the Laundromat That Never Sleeps. The concept of the Laundromat had eluded him, and he had fumbled with the quarters, the locks on the washers, the darks, the lights, the little packets of soap they sold in vending machines.

“Why are you so bad at laundry?” the girl had asked, while folding a shirt that looked to belong to a baby.

“Laundry is boring,” Engales had replied, knowing immediately upon looking her over—lanky limbs, a miniature skirt, the long dark pigtails framing her long young face—that they would sleep together.

“Everything's boring,” she had said with a tone that showed she might mean it. When you were as young as she was—probably eighteen or nineteen, he guessed, when time seemed endless and unbreakable and empty—you still had the potential to be so bored. Though he was only twenty-three himself at that point, the girl made Engales feel old. He had perhaps become old, in spirit at least, much earlier: when your parents die, so does the idea of infinite time on the planet. Instead, you are forced into becoming weirdly wise, gaining too soon the knowledge that life is both precious and perfectly meaningless, neither philosophy leaving much room for boredom.

“Not everything,” he had said, pressing her up against a spinning dryer. They left their laundry in the moldy baskets meant for transporting it from washer to dryer and went upstairs to his hotel room. The walls were papered with roses and the air was musty, and from the next room, as they had the hasty sort of sex you have with people you don't respect, they could hear the occasional scream.

“So what's it like being a rich kid?” he had asked the girl after they had finished.

“What do you mean?” she had said.

“Well, you go to that fancy university, you wear these, what do you call them?” He flopped one of her pigtails with his fingers.

“Pigtails,” she said quietly.

“Pigtails!” He laughed. “Jesus.”

“I don't even know why my parents pay for it,” she said then, with a sort of shy defiance, propping herself up on the bed and tugging the rubber bands out of her hair. “I mean they hardly teach you anything. If my parents weren't such assholes I'd just teach myself the same stuff. Just walk into NYU and teach
myself
how to draw.”

Engales's eyes were distant, looking at the roses on the wall, on whose two-dimensional petals two mosquitoes were courting each other spastically. He pushed the girl away—she was attempting to fondle his earlobe—and stood up. He suddenly very much disliked this person whom he was currently lying in bed with, but could she be on to something? He had no money at all to buy any paint or supplies. He had nothing, and nothing to lose. He looked at the girl's breasts, which were large and falling down to one side, like a pair of mating walruses; he wanted to paint the walruses, give them mustaches. Could he just walk into a school full of rich kids and act like he went there? Set up shop? When the pigtailed girl went to the bathroom, he nabbed the key from her pant pocket whose brass face read
STUDIO
. He might as well try.

The next day he had shaved his scruffy face and stolen a backpack from a sporting goods shop on Broadway, then walked confidently past a very fat security guard who was busy studying his own stomach. After some wandering—through poorly lit corridors that smelled like aging books and empty rooms lined with green metal cabinets—he found the painting studio, unlocked and filled with sunlight. Only two harmless-looking students were working, and he staked out the prime real estate: a corner easel with the most light, which poured onto the easel from two large windows.

Engales was in awe of his discovery: this place was his idea of heaven. He had never had an easel before; he had never even painted on canvas. All of his painting back home had taken place inside of sticky notebooks or on butcher paper, tacked to the walls of his dead parents' bedroom. This place had canvas you could just
take,
on a huge roll in the corner, and big rolls of good paper, too, and cans of turpentine, and scissors and paper cutters and wooden models of human bodies and hands whose digits moved into whatever position you wanted them to. He looked to one of the students, who was quietly painting in her own corner, for confirmation that this was indeed real, or to see if she might be as excited about all of this as he was, but she was busy getting very close to her canvas and fogging her glasses with her own breath, the same breath he would smell when he took her to bed later that week. As for the Pigtail girl, he saw her only once on campus after that; she glared at him in a way that suggested she hated him for never calling her back, then twitched her mouth in a way that suggested she'd never tell his imposter's secret to a soul.

Now Engales used
the Pigtail Key to let Rumi, curator extraordinaire and very rare beauty, into the studio, at close to eleven on New Year's Eve. Of course, Engales was planning on a private experience—a little tour of his work, a little taking off of clothes. But to his surprise, the lights were on and he could hear Arlene's hippie music drifting from her back corner.

“
You're
here?” he yelled back to her.

“Where the fuck else would I be?” Arlene said in the way that Arlene said everything, with unapologetic crassness. He loved Arlene's way of speaking, which he had come to know was a distinctly
New York
accent: complaining vowels, absent R's, words emerging sideways from somewhere in her bottom jaw.

“At a party? Being a normal person? It's New Year's!”

“It's a real shame that I'm not a normal person,” she said, tossing her fat brush into a tin canister. “A serious fucking shame.”

Engales had met Arlene on his second day in the studio, and they had become fast, if unexpected, friends. He had guessed that she was in her late forties, from the single gray streak in her red hair and the shallow lines forking out around her eyes, and he had worried that she was the boss of the studio, ready to kick him out of his newfound art mecca.

“The boss?” Arlene had yelled. “Oh fuck no! Excuse my French. Are you French? No you couldn't be French, too rough around the edges. But no, I'm not the boss. Name's Arlene. I'm a painter.”

She had said this with a proud extension of her arms and a glance down to her paint-covered dress, which was shaped like a tent and emblazoned with squiggly lines and abstract fish. The dress swung out into a circle when she wheeled around to examine the canvas that Engales had been working on.

“Well I can see that,” Engales had said. “But aren't you a little . . . old? I mean, to be a student here?”

“Old? Go fuck yourself,” she had said, thrusting a shoulder toward him. Then, with a little lift of her nose: “I'm what they call a
visiting artist.
Which is really quite hilarious, since technically I've been
visiting
for thirteen years. They'd never kick me out. I'm like those ugly sculptures in parks that you know were important once but are now just eyesores. Anyway, they've learned to ignore me.”

Engales raised his eyebrows and gave her a nod of approval. “So you're working the system,” he said.

“Well that makes two of us, doesn't it?” she said. She gave him a maternal wink, which he didn't know whether to return or ignore.

“They invited me back when I mattered,” she continued. “I was one of those blips on the radar, you know? Famous for ten seconds? Now they're stuck with me. Their gain, if you ask me! Ha! Oh. And by the way? Just so you know: that painting you're working on is a piece of shit.”

Then she shoved a book into Engales's chest, earmarked at a Lucian Freud painting.

“Study it,” she said. “That's how you paint a fucking face.”

No one had ever cared enough to tell Engales that something he was making was a piece of shit before, and he coveted it. He had protested for show, but then had studied the Freud painting deliberately, running his finger over the smooth page, noting the way the unfinished background eclipsed the face itself, and how the shadows hung so haphazardly on the skin. It was unclear whether the painting was even finished, but Engales felt that it was the white negative space that made the painting wonderful. It was the world threatening to obliterate the painting's subject, the universe licking at the subject's face, about to swallow him whole. An understanding swept through Engales, and not unhappily: he was not yet great, but greatness was out there; it was available. He had then thrown his own canvas—the first real
canvas
he had ever painted on—into the studio's big trash bin and started over. From across the room he had heard Arlene say, “Atta boy.”

After that, Arlene quickly became the sort of friend one needed in New York: the friend who told you things how they were, not how you wanted them to be, but only did so because she actually respected you—otherwise, it wouldn't have been worth her time. (In New York, Engales soon learned, time was a currency potentially more valuable than actual money; everybody claimed they needed more of it.) Arlene informed him of all the times when the studio was not being used for classes (“ 'Cause Lord knows you don't wanna get tangled up with that whole gang of little shits,” she said). She swore a lot: she swore at her canvases and swore at Engales and swore she'd never paint again. But she was always back the next day, toting ham sandwiches for the both of them, so they'd never have to stop working. They painted alongside each other for insanely long stretches, sometimes until the edges of the morning.