Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? The song was still playing in Lucy’s head when the black mole—which stood like a monument paying homage to the idea of beauty—began its journey toward her face. In this suspended moment lived all of the questions: Would he be like all the others? Would he kiss her over the bar and then disappear off the planet? Or would he, like her deep stomach was telling her he would, love her?
His lips! His lips! His lips! Due to his lips, she knew that this would not be like all the others. Due to his lips, she knew that he was darker, deeper: that thing she had been looking for. Due to his lips, her old acquaintances would be forgot forever, and there would be only him.
When he pulled away she reached into her pocket for one of Jamie’s matchbooks that she’d nabbed earlier that day, slid it across the bar to the man. KISS ME HARDER, it read. He did.
He stayed with her while she closed down the bar, following her like an eager dog while she scrubbed the counters, kissing her incrementally while she counted the tips. Then he carried her, literally on his back, across town to the squat, as he called it, where the latest part of a huge party was still going on. He introduced her to everyone—Boss the African jazzman and Horatio—Horatio, get low! Engales yelled to him—in his white underwear, held high with yellow suspenders. And Selma, with her newly cropped, exotically spiky head of hair, a voice like a cocoon—ohhhhhh, Saint Selma—and her small saggy breasts, which were displayed in plaster casts all over the room. (“See those?” Selma said, pointing to one of the sculptures. “Those are my titties. Take one home if you want.”) So this was where they were, Lucy thought. All the artists she had been searching for, who, unlike Jamie, were not cloaking their projects but parading them around in this insane, deteriorating, divine palace of messy, outrageous art.
Lucy spotted a small man painting himself, literally, into one of the corners of the room. Her heart leaped. She knew that man! It was the man from the subway station! Those were his lines—so sure, so graphic, so magical; she pulled at Engales’s hand.
“I know him!” she said giddily.
“You know Keith?” Engales said.
“Yes!” Lucy said, bouncing. “I saw him painting in the subway. He was painting a penis.”
She felt embarrassed right after she said it, both for the word penis and for the fact that she had claimed to know someone from having seen him across the subway tracks. But Engales found it charming, apparently, and smiled, kissed her on the forehead.
“You are very adorable, Spot, do you know that?” he said. He then led her down a darkened hallway and into an empty, cement-floored room where he pressed her up against the drywall, looked into her eyes with a crazy, almost capitalistic determination, and said: “Spot, you are the American dream.” And all she could do was laugh the very particular laugh of a girl in love. Tilt of chin. Sparkle of half-closed eyes. Half smile, no teeth. Then—here it was—eyes all the way open, pupils floating to the top when she looked up, I’m yours, they said, she knew it, I’m yours.
As the squat’s party faded, he tugged her out into the street and up the five black blocks to his apartment, which was filled with nothing but his reckless, wonderful paintings. He set her down on the bed and told her to: “Hold still, I’m going to paint you.”
There was this: him reaching like a madman for paint and brushes, a long spell of sitting still when her body was aching for more of him, the scratchy collar of her sequined shirt, the resulting picture—herself as a giant, mystical thing, a beautiful monster.
And then there was this: him leaving the painting and climbing onto the bed with her and grabbing her head with his two hands.
They devoured each other. And surely (his tongue in her ear), most definitely (his sticky body on top of hers), undeniably (his eyes like he loved her), he would change her fate. She woke up the next morning to see the still-wet picture of herself, knowing forever had started, if forever were what forever felt like, which was a year in New York City when you were in love.
PART TWO
ABNORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES
Under normal circumstances, James and Marge would not be uptown on a Tuesday night. They would especially not be at Sotheby’s auction house, a place where James had personally vowed never to set foot. But James was not operating under normal circumstances tonight. He was operating under the circumstances of the worst day of his life, if he had to cast a judgment, a day within a series of days, encased within a series of months, during which he saw no color besides the color that was actually there, heard no sound besides the annoying racket of reality. And so the night was not yellow, as it should have been, and Marge was not red, as she should have been, and Marge was not holding a small baby, as she should have been, but was instead holding her arms around her waist, as depressed as he was to be here. They were here to sell James’s beloved Richard Estes painting, the one of the storefront window on Thirty-fourth Street, a favorite in his personal collection that he had promised himself he’d never sell.
The auction room was vast, filled with the tinkling sound of hypothesis and worry and excitement. Who would buy what? The black curtains scalloped like a tide. How much would it sell for? Someone’s dress caught the light. Who would surprise them tonight, and how would they do it? The room handled the murmur expertly, parsing it and folding it into the very architecture of the space, into the cuffs of the men’s shirtsleeves, the soft curls of women’s hair; into the chandeliers, which tentacled around the ceiling like crystal-studded octopi, working flecks of anxious light around the room.
James waited impatiently for the larger quiet to settle in, the quiet he imagined expressed the essence of an event like this, a quiet that spoke of refinery and nervous patience. In the meantime he scanned the room, wondering who might purchase the Estes. A woman with a beak for a nose. A man with a choke-making bow tie. He doubted anyone would find in his painting what he once did: the smell of doughnuts; the taste of rain; the color of his wife’s nylons.
What he had once found. What he had seen and felt, and smelled, and lived by his whole adult life. It had gone missing in what felt like the flash of a camera: one white bulb breaks, and a life is captured and frozen in however it existed in that moment.
That moment: midnight on Winona George’s balcony, a cold sea of hair and diamonds. A collective chanting of the countdown—five, four, three—and snow begins to fall, and then the old year breaks into the new one and the sky breaks open with confetti, and there is sloppy kissing and loud hurrahs! And James and Marge are kissing and the world is spinning with all its spangled bravado. A drunken man with a mustache and his drunken redheaded companion make their merry rounds, tangoing across the balcony. Glitter falls. The redheaded companion in her off-base bohemian dress falls, clutched in the mustache’s besuited arms. And they fall right into and on top of Marge. Holy fuck! says the bohemian girlfriend with a laugh, too old to be a girlfriend, James now sees, and Oopsy daisy! yells her suited suitor. And this is the moment—Marge on the ground saying, I’m okay, I’m okay, trying to laugh, James saying frantically, It’s just that she’s . . . pregnant—when everything breaks.
Marge, though she said she was fine when they got home, woke in the early morning to a circle of blood leaking from her and out onto the bed, spreading quickly, like a red frost.
James had panicked then. He had felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He had carried Marge down the stairs and the blood had gotten everywhere. His lungs hurt and tears came. Through his wet eyes he somehow found them a cab and somehow told the driver to take them to a hospital, and he somehow listened as the doctor told them patronizingly what they mostly already knew—this doesn’t happen very often in the second trimester, it is a very small percentage, but it can happen, and it happened to you. Neither of them thought to tell the doctor about the fall on the balcony, either because they were caught up in their panic or because they did not want to admit it had happened—as if it would have been admitting that in some way the mi
scarriage had been their fault . . . if they had only stayed home from that party . . . if they had only acted like responsible, with-child adults!
James saw behind the doctor’s words a black circle, slowly moving toward him. He felt an aching in his joints, especially in his feet. The hospital, to him, smelled of fire and smoke. He felt a surreal haze forming around him as they made their way back to the apartment, thinking: How could they be on their way back to their apartment? How would they enter the living room? How would they go to sleep? Not when so much had been lost.
But they did sleep, they slept in scary depth, the kind of sleep people sleep when they do not want to face waking life. They slept through the mean light of morning that pierced through the crack in the curtains. They slept through the middle of the day. When one of them stirred, the other held them still. Not now, they said with their arms. Not yet.
When James finally did let his lids open, though, for long enough to let in the light fully, he felt immediately that something was different. Where he usually woke to a mixture of Marge’s red and the season’s signature—light green (spring), static blue (winter), navy-blue-almost-black (fall), or warm buttery yellow (summer)—this morning he saw nothing. Nothing, that is, aside from the light that was actually gliding through the windows and onto his sleeping wife, a light that held none of the colors usually so active in the prism of his mind. Stupidly he walked over to Marge’s side of the bed and ran his hand through the slice of light that fell on her, as if by touching it it would change color. It didn’t. Just white, bright, normal January light, falling onto his wife’s pale face. He saw nothing. Felt nothing. Nothing at all.
He rushed into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror, slapped his face, threw water onto it. He opened and closed his eyes frantically, thinking if he blinked them hard enough he might spark the colors back into action. But whereas the mirror usually tinted a greenish color (James himself was the color of split-pea soup), he saw only his pale, unshaven face, puffy with tiredness, long but somehow still pudgy, sliding back into his balding forehead. No split pea: just blotchy skin. He smacked at his forehead with the heel of his hand. Nothing. He pricked his skin between a pair of tweezers: pain was usually marked by the sound of crashing waves and that black spot between his eyes. Nothing.
The final test: James brought himself to look at the Ruth Kligman painting near the mirror, the one he had bought for Marge when they were first married and that made him see bright, flashy orange snakes behind his eyes—it looked muddy and empty. How could the Ruth Kligman look empty?! He felt his breath suck into him, the pain of tears about to come. He crumpled onto the toilet and put his face in his hands. Clear, invisible, empty tears fell—they were as meaningless as his reflection in the mirror. But they poured from him in a steady, loud stream. The blood on the stairs. The sheets. The balcony. The emptiness in his mind. He cried so hard that Marge, even in her debilitated state, hobbled from her bed into the bathroom. She saw him hunched and rocking like a madman on the toilet, crying his eyes out, and came to hug and pet him.
“It’s okay,” she whispered down into his large ear. “We can try again, James. Even the doctor said, we can try again.”
But Marge began crying with him, and their two chests heaved together like the heartbeat of a broken heart.
From there things only got worse. James tried with spastic urgency to retrieve his sensibilities—he went to countless art shows, read poems that usually made his colors go wild (O’Hara’s line “how terrible orange is, and life” had once made him roller-coaster dizzy), exposed himself to extreme temperatures and odd foods—but nothing worked. O’Hara didn’t work. Rutabaga didn’t work. The Metropolitan Museum of fucking Art didn’t work.
He soon found that writing didn’t work, either, not without his sensations. He stared at blank pages and cursed his blank brain. For the immediate future, this was okay; he had enough almost-finished articles—which only needed editing and not added ideas—to keep the Times column going for a couple months. After that, he offered to curate a selection of guest columnists, to bide his time. But by April this was tired, and there was nothing left, and he began to miss his deadlines completely.
He asked for two weeks off from his column, then three. When he finally brought himself to cobble together a review, of Jeff Koons’s window installation at the New Museum, it was immediately rejected, on grounds of being, as the Arts editor’s squeaky assistant Seth had put it, vacuous.
“Well, it should be vacuous!” James yelled at Seth. “The installation is a bunch of vacuums! Form as content, Seth! Didn’t they teach you anything in journalism school?”
Seth just stuttered a half-assed apology, hung up on James.
This was only the first of many rejections that followed, from the paper that had so confidently published him for years, given him his own little corner of newsprint in which to spill his every whimsical thought. Each rejection came with a new qualifier from Seth: impersonal, unrealistic, lacking oomph. When Marge flicked through the Sunday paper to the Arts section, like she always did, James made the excuse that he was working on a more research-based piece that was taking him longer than most, and that he’d be in next week’s, don’t worry. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about the rejections; he still wanted to prove the Times, and himself, wrong. He needed to keep trying.
But another month passed without a bite from the newspaper. And then two. And then finally, in June, they gave away the column completely. To someone, according to Seth, “whose interests were more in line with the publication’s.” Seth added tentatively: “Oh, and Mr. Bennett? He asked me to tell you not to send any more submissions through.”
“Excuse me?” James said.
“He says your time at the Times is done,” Seth said. “Okay?”
Not okay. In the lead on James’s List of Running Worries: that losing his invisible powers had rendered him completely invisible. Close behind: that he was a terrible human being for not telling any of this to Marge. But he didn’t want to worry her; and how she worried! He of all people knew how unproductive and paralyzing worrying could be, and he did not want to weigh on her, like he always seemed to.
So he didn’t tell her; he couldn’t. Not in June, when Marge’s grandfather had a stroke; not in July, when he died in his sleep and she took three weeks off of work to be with her family in Connecticut; not in August, when their apartment got so hot that the slightest disturbance would surely lead to a screaming match; this was divorce weather. It wasn’t until September, when he was meant to give his metaphor lecture at Columbia, and then, fearing he would have no metaphors to talk about and would have to stand in silence in front of all those eager faces, called the program director and canceled, that he knew the problem was too big to hide. Not to mention the fact of their joint savings account, which was dipping into the red zone in a way it hadn’t before, pulling James’s confidence and heart down with it. He’d have to tell her. That he was not an upstanding American citizen / valid human / real man, and that he had been keeping this fact from her for the better part of the year.
He took her to a diner on Sixth Avenue, where they went when they wanted to feel like real New Yorkers. At the tail end of a mostly quiet breakfast, he pressed one of his hands over the smooth part of his head, inhaled as much air as was available in the stuffy, bacon-aired room.
“If I tell you something,” he said, wishing with all his might that it wasn’t fall, that so much time had not passed, “will you promise not to be angry?”
“Why would I be angry?” Marge said.
Next to Marge at the diner counter was an elderly woman with a pearl ring and puffy curls, and when Marge said this the woman chuckled, seeming to impart that of course she was going to be angry, a woman was always angry at her husband for one thing or another. For a second James imagined it was Marge as an old woman, and he was an old man, and they were sitting here under these diner lights as old people who had spent their entire lives toge
ther, living inside the bubble of all the unspoken things that being old together entailed. Suddenly James felt that there was no more time left on the planet.
“They took away my column,” he blurted.
“What do you mean? Why?”
He watched Marge’s hand press into the speckled Formica counter. The knuckles raised like a small, knotty hill. This was Marge when matters concerning real life were on the line: all knuckles.
“But it’s because,” he went on, seeing that she was unclear on how to react. “It’s because . . . well, don’t think I’m insane, but . . . the strawberries are gone.”
He looked from the hand and into his wife’s face. The face had gone pale.
“My strawberries?” she said. Her face retracted, as if she had been slapped.
“Yes,” he said. “And everything else, too.”
“And that’s why they scrapped your column?”
“I’ve tried. So hard. I’m trying so hard. I’ve sent in fifteen articles now. Maybe twenty. None stuck. Nothing is sticking. It’s like my brain was switched off or something. It’s just . . . blank.”
The old woman got up abruptly to go to the bathroom, patting her cloud of hair with her hands. James was thankful and embarrassed.
“James, I don’t even know what to say.”
“Say it will come back.”
“How could I say that? How would I know that? I’m just hearing this, James. My first time hearing this. You told me you were doing something that needed research.”
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