Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  PART THREE

  THE ARTIST LEAPS INTO THE VOID

  Raul Engales was released from the hospital on the Tuesday that should have been the Winona George show, with an extra roll of gauze and a bottle of painkillers. They had kept him for a week, due to an infection in the stitches that held together the leaves of skin that had been stretched over the stump of his arm. Stitches that railroaded over its foreign peninsula, then halted abruptly, tied off with brackets of wire where everything—the wound and the arm—dead-ended. The infection made the surrounding skin turn black, then red, then yellow. The yellow leaked down his forearm, shored off at his elbow. The whole thing a torch of pain and uselessness.

  The irony that his release from the hospital coincided with his would-have-been release into the art world was not lost on Engales. It cut through him like a new knife. It was only two short months ago that Winona George had been popping open what he assumed to be an absurdly priced bottle of champagne in his meager living room, glugging it into mason jars—his only glasses—for him and for Lucy, while Winona rambled a list of incomprehensible attributes of Raul Engales’s that would make the art world swoon.

  “You’ve got the I-don’t-know-whats,” she had said. “You’ve got the I-was-born-with-its and the self-taughts and the something-somethings. You’re an insider outsider, do you know what I mean? Do you two pretty young things have any idea what I’m saying?”

  Engales had not had any idea what she was saying—Winona had a way of making the English language, which he took pride in being fluent in, completely unintelligible—and he also didn’t care. All he knew was that the most-talked-about gallerist in New York City, the one who had singlehandedly brought up some of the most revered (and now moneyed) artists, who had spoon-fed the art world digestible yet hearty helpings of neo-Expressionism, and who had reminded the world at large that art was and should be valuable, sometimes insanely so, was standing in his poorly lit living room serving him champagne, offering him a solo show that she claimed would drop him like an anvil into the center of everything. He couldn’t help but hate this memory now, as he was swiveled out of the hospital by a set of revolving doors that thwacked to a you’re on your own now stop when he stepped outside. And he couldn’t help but curse Winona George for dropping her anvil in exactly the wrong place.

  Though they had technically told him he could leave that morning, he had not been able to bring himself to go out into the world in such bright daylight—for people to see him in such bright daylight—and so he had sat in a corner of the waiting room, pretending to read a magazine, until he was sure it was dark. Now, outside, a stiff wind had started. Wind was the worst of all forms of weather, in Engales’s opinion, its only purpose to knock leaves from trees and create tears in people’s eyes. The wind moved up through the sleeve of his jacket and knocked on the ball of gauze the doctors had wrapped, mummy-style, around his arm, asking to be let in. Oh, of course, the gauze must have said to the wind, opening its little holes just wide enough for the cold to lick at his stitches. Be my guest at the freak show.

  That’s what he was now, he knew. A freak. A cripple. One of the people who other people looked at and thought: Poor man. The eyes of everyone he came in contact with this past week—doctors, nurses, sick patients who passed in the hall—all registered that least favorite emotion of his: pity. He already knew these eyes, and too well. These were the eyes of the adults in San Telmo, who gave him and Franca free groceries, who tilted their heads with the weight of their half-baked sorrow. The difference now was that his loss was visible. You wore dead parents inside your body. You wore a dead hand like a badge, a badge that alerted people that it was time to position their heads, eyebrows, eyes, and mouths in pity position. Tilt everything. Try not to wince.

  Lucy’s eyes—when she showed up at the hospital that first night, high on cocaine, he could tell from the way her jaw was moving—were the worst of all the eyes. He had understood this immediately upon seeing her, crouching over him in fear, her mascara smeared like Japanese ink. In Lucy’s eyes was the worst kind of pity: pity mixed with love. It was impossible to love someone—or love someone in the way she had loved him before, which was with deep reverence, as if he were king of something—and also pity him. Pity canceled out belief; you could not believe in someone you pitied. Oh, my love, she had said when he had opened his eyes. The pity had sounded in the word oh, and it made him want to hit something. Leave, he had told her. I don’t want to see you. So leave.

  She had left, but she had come back the next day, and the one after that. Ripped tights, messy hair, a face that had been up all night or crying or both. A face that he had painted and kissed so many times that he knew it by heart: eyes you could see the reflection of a room in, pupils like black universes, a nose that turned up ever so slightly, and that always reminded him of his sister’s fingernails, which, instead of curving over like an old woman’s, lifted away from her hands like concave potato chips. But all the things he had found beautiful about Lucy changed when he saw her in that hospital room. Her eyes reflected only the disgusting image of himself, lying under a blanket that looked to be made for a child, illustrated with flying pigs. Her red nose pointed up at the spongy ceiling, or toward the television, on which played the same show over and over, whose main subject seemed to be shoulder pads. When Lucy tried to press one of her stupid matchbooks in his palm—one of those things she did to be cute or relevant or intimate, and that he had once believed to be all of those things—he threw the matchbook against the hospital wall. But he had to throw it with his left hand, and it bounced awkwardly from the arm of the chair Lucy was sitting in, and this only enraged him more. For Lucy to see him like this was a complete disaster. To keep himself from crying he had set out to make her cry (he had always been the sort of person who knew how to make another person cry), by saying: Those matchbooks aren’t even your project, Lucy. You don’t have a project. You aren’t an artist, so please stop fucking trying.

  It had been cruel, he knew, but then again, so was life. Life was one huge cutting remark, one blade that cut you all the way down. Life was waking up every morning for the rest of your life to ten bright seconds when you thought you had two hands, only to face the tingling, empty terror that was losing one of them, over and over and over, every single time you opened your eyes. Life was the wind licking at your wound through the sleeve of your coat as you stepped onto Greenwich Street and vomited a week’s worth of morphine into an open manhole. Life was trying to decide, as you wiped your mouth with your floppy sleeve, where the hell you would go from here.

  The only places Engales could think to go, the places that had been the map of his life for the last six years, sounded awful if not absurd to him now. The squat would be not only freezing and loud but rich in the currency that he could no longer deal in: art and the artists, paint and glue and wire, ideas that could be turned into realities and dreams that hung on shoestrings, like the bare lightbulbs from the wood beams. The idea of seeing Toby or Selma or Regina, of relaying the dirty story of the guillotine and the morphine drip and his timely release—just when he was about to make it—made him sick to his stomach, and right then he vowed he would not go back to the squat ever again.

  There was Arlene’s place on Sullivan, filled with hundreds of plants and the smell of incense and Egyptian musk, her six cats rustling in the leaves, some African or French or Sicilian song playing on the record player. Engales had always loved Arlene’s place—it was homey in its eccentricities and always warm, and he knew Arlene would invite him in, make him yerba maté, and hold his head against her breast, sing him to sleep with some New Yorker voodoo song. But it would not be comforting; it would only make things worse. Someone who knew you as well as Arlene knew him could only reflect his pain, magnify it.

  And of course he wouldn’t dare go back to his own apartment, the place where his unfinished paintings lay in stacks and where Lucy would surely be, pouting on the bed in one of her big T-shirts, waiting for
him. Stop fucking waiting for me, he wanted to yell to her from across town, just as he had wanted to yell across the Americas to Franca so many times. Everyone stop waiting for me.

  Cigarette.

  It was four avenues to Telemondo’s, but tobacco was a dollar cheaper there than anywhere else and what did he care about time? Time was the only thing he had. He walked and time passed or didn’t pass, how could he know. He walked and his body moved or didn’t move, how could he know. He couldn’t know because he was no longer in his own body; he was above himself, watching, and what he saw was a freak on the loose, in a city that was no longer his home.

  At Broadway and Eighth: TELEMONDO’S / BEER / CIGARETTE / MAGAZINE / EGG CREAM SODA / ON SALE NOW. Bright lights and the Telemondo guy, who always said the same thing: That will be one hundred and twenty-two pennies. Engales counted on him saying the stupid penny joke; it would mean things were in some way how they had always been. But the Telemondo guy didn’t say anything. He handed Engales the pouch of tobacco sullenly, and when Engales tried to pay, he waved away the money.

  Engales stormed back out into the night, once again incensed. Was this how it would be from now on? More handouts? Free cigarettes? No jokes? The only thing that could infuriate him more was what happened next, which was that he tried to roll a cigarette and found out that, with one hand, he couldn’t. Tobacco fell like snow to the ground; the paper crinkled and stuck. He had to go back into Telemondo’s, tell the guy he wanted to exchange for prerolled cigarettes, whose taste he didn’t like. “Those ones cost more,” the Telemondo guy said. Engales glared at him, as if challenging him to ask for money from a cripple, and took the pack without paying him a cent.

  Cigarette.

  Its bad taste made him feel only very slightly better. He smoked with his left hand (which canceled out the slightly better), and kept walking toward nowhere. It was fully dark now, the sort of early dark that haunted the fall months, a thin blanket thrown over the city’s head. Pink neon buzzed above him, and then the rustle of pigeon wings, and then the rude rumble of a garbage truck, on its Tuesday-night crawl. How could one man be shoving garbage into the claws of a garbage truck and another man be showing paintings in the Winona George Gallery? Another man who had just happened to get lucky; a slot had opened up just for him, when the slotted artist lost his hand. Engales watched as the garbage man leaped from the side of the truck and grabbed four huge black bags at once. He shot Engales a toothy, genuine grin.

  One man would be grinning while the art lovers toasted in his name. Another man would never paint again.

  Without painting, transformation was not possible. Without painting, the real world was only the real world: an impossible place to exist.

  And so why did he have to exist at all? he thought, as he headed south now, down the black river of Broadway, toward a sign in the distance that read: GET BAILED OUT! When existence, from here on out, would just be one long ugly moment? Could the blade not have killed him? Could Arlene not have done what a real friend would do and snapped his neck? Could she have seen, as he did, as they careened out into the street, negotiating the streams of sewer water and arm blood, the street sign, once Mercer, which had mysteriously morphed to Mercy? And that begged her, or someone, to deliver one last morsel of that mercy? To bail him out? Could he not have bled out into the studio until he could bleed no more, so that he would not have to be existing now, on the way to nowhere, on the slow track to dying a nobody?

  At Bond Street he found himself stopping at the sight of the street sign.

  Bond Street: printed in sparse Helvetica on the postcards he’d sent out a few weeks ago, the invitations to his first real opening.

  Bond Street: where some of the best painters of the decade had shown their work, and where he was meant to have shown his work tonight.

  Bond Street: where the Winona George Gallery sat primly halfway down the block, a little beacon of white light in a tunnel of industrial dark.

  He had not meant to walk this way. He meant to walk no way, to nowhere. But then, he had. And now he could not help but be curious. Curiosity about the man who had taken his spot in the spotlight, whose paintings hung where his should have, whose beautiful girlfriend or wife was lifting her face up to his in a congratulatory kiss. And if curiosity would kill him, he would take it. He would die of curiosity right here, right now. He would step, despite himself, onto the wonky cobblestones of Bond Street. He would gravitate, despite himself, toward the voices, coming from the crescent of light that streamed from the gallery’s door. Get in here, you hussy! One hell of a show. I could give a shit about your mother’s diet, Selma. Did you live the dream down there or what? You’re just another one of those Basel bitches now, aren’t you? Don’t lie.

  Despite himself, he became moth-like, moving toward the light, thinking it was the sun. Despite himself he began to believe that the light was the only way up, no matter that the light itself would singe him.

  PORTRAIT OF AN ART SHOW BY THE ARTIST WHO IS NOT PRESENT

  EYES: A show that’s been hung by a blind man. A man who doesn’t know shape from shape, dark from light; composition eludes him. The paintings are all wrong. They’re the wrong ones and in the wrong places. What blind man had gone to Raul Engales’s apartment and fetched the wrong fucking paintings and hung them in the wrong fucking way? It is this sight—his own heinous paintings, some still unfinished, that were never meant to see the light of day, at least not like this—that makes him wish that instead of losing a hand he could have lost his eyes.

  HEART: His own. Thwup thwap. Paintings. Thwup thwap. Hanging. Thwup thwap. Here. Thwup thwap. Without. Thwup thwap. Him.

  HEADS: Bemused nodding when they’re chatting, thoughtful tilting when they gaze at the walls, crazy backward thrusting when they open their happy mouths to laugh. The heads in the gallery move with the nonchalance that comes with being empty. The heads in the gallery move with the nonchalance that comes with being whole.

  HANDS: Selma’s on Toby’s back. Toby’s on his own hips. Regina’s over her mouth when she eats the hummus dip that no one ever eats. Horatio’s around a plastic cup of red wine. Winona’s in the air, gesticulating flippantly toward the walls. Oh, darlings, she’s saying, probably, like a cartoon of someone who cares about art.

  MOUTH: Cigarette.

  BODY: A slow dissolve of his own flesh, as he watches the room of his old life breathe and laugh without him. Soon his body will be gone completely, like the smoke he exhales and like the shadows he stands in, which will disappear come morning.

  HEART: Maurizio, the butcher from Calle Brasil, holds a lamb’s heart in his hands. He isn’t supposed to be here at all—Maurizio is from another time, another part of his life and another series of paintings—and yet Engales sees a little red dot below him, the mark that means he’s been sold. The heart he holds drips blood onto the nodding head of someone blond.

  HEAD: The someone blond is the only someone blond. The head is Lucy’s head, translucent in its brightness, unmistakable in its brightness, terrible in its brightness. Lucy’s head is a siren and a scream and a stupid ball that Engales wants to throw. What the fuck is she doing here? She is talking to Winona George, whose own hair spouts from her head like a graying palm tree. Winona George and someone else. Winona George and a man whose face Engales cannot see. A man in a very ugly and somewhat familiar white suit jacket.

  NOSE: Engales presses his to the bottom corner of the gallery window. Through the fog of his breath he watches a transformation occur before him. He watches Lucy’s face morph from disinterested to interested (this he sees in her forehead, which creases between the brows when she wants something). He watches Winona retreat from the conversation and become absorbed into another (Winona is like a sponge, wringing herself out onto someone and then moving on to soak in someone else). He watches the man in the white suit jacket put his hand on Lucy’s shoulder. He watches a man put his hand on Lucy’s shoulder. And then he sees, unmistakably, this:

&nbs
p; Tilt of chin. Sparkle of half-closed eye. Half smile, no teeth. And finally—here it is—eyes all the way open, pupils floating to the top when she looks up, I’m yours, they say, she knows it, I’m yours.

  Engales remembered the look on Lucy’s face from that first night at the Eagle: the look that meant she loved him, and that he would love her. He remembered, also, how when she laughed and the laugh sparkled like her shirt did, that he hadn’t wanted to love her. Love, like luck, was for the lucky. Love was for the people who could afford to lose it, for those who had room in their lives for loss, whose quota of losses had not already been filled. “Orphans shouldn’t fall in love,” Raul remembered telling Franca once, in one of their debates about the legitimacy of her relationship with Pascal Morales. Franca had glared at him. “You’re wrong,” she had said shakily. “Orphans have to fall in love.”

  Apparently his sister had been right. Because though Engales had tried to avoid falling in love with Lucy, though he’d tried to sleep with other women in the beginning of their time together, and tried to avoid calling her his girlfriend for a number of months, it was as if there had been no choice. He was him and she was her. She was her, with her very own set of intriguing contradictions, her specific combination of deviousness and delusion and delight, of half-formed wit and fully formed wonder, with the matchbooks she left in his pocket, the hot air she breathed when she slept, her innocence and her desire to destroy that innocence. She was her and he was him. And they were them and this was love.

  But he regretted ever having met her now, ever having fallen for her trick flame, as he watched her betray him so easily. She had come here, to this show, when she knew what had happened to him. For all he knew she had even helped to orchestrate it; no one else had the key to François’s place, where all his paintings were. She had worn that same sparkling shirt. And she had tilted her head in her very special way for another man, another man who she was now following through the crowd, through the door, and out into the same night shadows Engales was hiding in.