“Sorry,” Lucy said, holding her own forehead, which felt hot. “I’m not understanding. Who are you?”
“I am Sofie,” the blond woman said, in halting, mechanical English. “The neighbor of Raul’s sister, Franca.”
“I don’t think Raul has a sister,” she said. Lucy for some reason thought of the water cockroach she’d seen in the sink a moment ago, its sickening shiny head, gasping for air from the drain.
Another, smaller piece of paper was pulled from the envelope by Sofie and placed on top of the first. It was a postcard of the New York City skyline, in all its black-and-white jagged glory. It was strikingly similar to the postcard Lucy had found in the grass in Ketchum, and when she saw it her heart stopped. All the lines of fate were crossing, though she could not understand how, or why. When she flipped the postcard over she saw a few Spanish words in Engales’s handwriting, then his big, beautiful initials, R. E.
“What is this?” Lucy said.
“Proof,” the woman said. Her voice was like a jet plane: slick and pointed, with a whoosh of resonance trailing it.
Lucy looked at her blankly, wondering if Sofie meant this as an affront to Lucy or if something was being lost in translation; English was definitely not the woman’s first language. Was her proof meant to prove Lucy wrong, show her that Engales did have a sister, a sister who he sent postcards to? To show her that her own husband had kept things from her? Things as substantial as siblings? Lucy felt a pang in her chest, which she took as proof that she didn’t know Raul Engales as well as she thought she did. That perhaps she didn’t know him at all.
“Do you have tea?” Sofie said, filling in for Lucy’s silence. “We are quite cold. A cup of tea would be nice.”
“Sure,” Lucy said without thinking, forgetting for a second that she was not the kind of person who served tea, and that there was no tea in Raul Engales’s apartment, and never had been. The lack of tea, an epic domestic failure, made her feel suddenly guilty, like she had done something absolutely wrong. She went to the kitchen anyway, put her hands on the edges of the sink, tried to breathe. The little light on the message machine did not blink. No messages.
“Sorry,” said Lucy when she returned, her head shaking apologetically. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any tea here. We don’t really have anything here anymore.”
The word we felt like a lie. It comforted her.
“Shall we go out for some then?” the woman said. “Maybe Raul will be back when we’re finished?”
Lucy looked down at herself, realizing only now that she had been wearing only Engales’s shirt this whole time. Her husband’s shirt, Sofie would think, which buoyed her. “I’ll get dressed,” she said. “I’ll get dressed for tea.”
Outside, the sky was high and gray. The windy storm that had raged the night before had vanished and left wet streets and torn branches in its wake. Lucy led the woman and the boy down Avenue A and across Seventh Street. Though she had so many questions: What, exactly, was this woman doing in New York City? Where, exactly, was the boy’s mother, who was apparently Engales’s sister? Why, exactly, hadn’t Engales told her he had a sister? Where, exactly, should she take the woman and the boy for tea? But she couldn’t bring herself to ask any of them. Instead, they walked in silence, her mind swirling with hangover and confusion. She longed for Engales, for the sureness she had seen in him when they first met. Perhaps only men could obtain that particular brand of sureness, she thought. Or perhaps only one man. Perhaps only him. She wondered if the sureness had actually been pride. And if he had lost all of it when he had lost his hand. If that was why he’d shunned her, why he hadn’t come home.
The three of them walked down Second toward Binibon, the only place she could think of, where she and Engales had gone for many a late breakfast after many a long night of drinking at the squat. She went there often now, when she wanted to feel like he was with her. At Eighth they passed a man in a wheelchair wearing all yellow, with a sign that read BANANA MAN: WORLD’S OLDEST BAREFOOT WATER-SKIER. She watched as the small boy stared at Banana Man, his head turning to follow him as they passed. Banana Man held up one of his wrinkled hands and yelled: Welcome to New York City! Where everybody gets kicked outta their homes! In an abandoned lot on their left, a bit of chain-link fence acted as a coatrack for the homeless; Lucy watched a man’s tie smack a dirty wool coat, whose owner, Lucy imagined sadly, definitely hadn’t gotten the job.
At Binibon, a bell chimed as they entered, and they were greeted by a gust of warm air. The place was empty aside from two older men, holding hands at the back table, and Devereux—whose presence, a nod toward last night and a past life, made Lucy want to turn around and walk out. Luckily Devereux was not judgmental, and when she turned to see Lucy’s odd threesome, she just smiled and said, Hello, daffodil, like nothing had happened the night before and nothing about this—a foreign lady, a small boy, a huge men’s shirt over a pair of ripped black tights—was strange.
Lucy smiled at her quickly—she had always been fond of Devereux, whose emboldened sense of self outshined any strangeness in her appearance: the flatness of her chest, the stubble that grew through her face makeup. You got the sense that Devereux was just Devereux, that she was exactly on the outside as she was on the inside, and she wasn’t about to change for anyone—a quality that Lucy envied. Today Devereux wore purple eye shadow with sparkles in it, and severe black boots that reached her knee. Lucy led Sofie and the boy to a booth near the window: the booth, she knew, where the red leather had the fewest cracks.
Sofie looked very confused as she looked over the menu, so Lucy attempted to explain it by simply reading the options out loud. Chicken liver mushroom omelet. Ratatouille omelet. Omelet Provençal. Steak and eggs. Sofie pointed doubtfully at Provençal for her, steak and eggs for the boy. Lucy ordered only coffee, and put her hands around the hot mug when they brought it, watching the girls behind the counter put pieces of pie on plates, chat about nothing, shake their hair from their bandannas. Oh, she thought. To be one of those girls.
Besides addressing the menu, she and Sofie had still not talked at all since they had left the apartment, and Sofie’s face had become withdrawn. Lucy felt deeply worried. What would she tell this woman? That she had no idea where Engales was? That they had come all this way to see someone who could not be found? But she had already said she was his wife! Wouldn’t a wife know where her husband was? She was in too deep.
In the silver napkin holder, Lucy noticed the corner of a matchbook, tucked in with the pillow of napkins. She slowly and secretively pulled the matchbook out, opened it under the table. YOU’RE A LAMB, it read, in Jamie’s all-caps scrawl. Jamie had been here, and Lucy wished to the heavens that she’d come back right now, sweep in with her lipstick and her confidence and save Lucy from whatever this mess was. She imagined Jamie’s gross suitor, calling her a lamb. But Jamie wasn’t a lamb. Lucy was the lamb. The pathetic little sheep that needed a shepherd. She was as much of a lamb as the little boy, whose eyes were cast down at the marbled tabletop.
The food arrived on the arms of Maria José, the waitress Engales had always flirted with, telling her she was his favorite waitress, but Shhhh, don’t tell your friends behind the counter. Lucy smiled tentatively up at Maria José, whose breasts were spilling like hams out of her shirt. She was the opposite of Lucy in every way: exotically dark, voluptuous, with the sensual appeal of someone who provided food.
“Lucy,” Maria José said, sweetly but with a hint of resentment, as she lay the huge plate of steak and eggs down in front of the small boy. “Now who do we have here?”
The table was silent. She looked at Sofie for help.
Maria José, seeming to have some lingual intuition, asked the question in Spanish, and Sofie responded quickly: “Julian.”
Not Jacob Rey. Julian.
Maria José and Sofie then had an entire conversation in Spanish that Lucy couldn’t understand. Maria José spoke rapidly and tenderly, and Sofie more slowly and
squarely. Maria José with her hand on her hips, and Sofie with her hands pressed flat on the table in front of her. At one point, Maria José’s eyebrows crunched with what could only be worry, and she made a tsk-tsk sound with her tongue. While they spoke, Lucy looked at the boy. He was gazing timidly at his giant plate of food. She saw that his steak had come out in a huge, flat slab, and that he would have trouble eating it. Lucy leaned across the table and began to cut the steak into small, bite-size chunks. But the boy pulled on the sleeve of Sofie’s shirt and pointed to a glass case at the counter, filled with pastries and doughnuts.
Maria José smiled. Sofie looked guilty. “He has sweet tooth, we found out,” she said in her clunky accented English.
Lucy stopped cutting up the steak. She saw that Devereux had been eavesdropping, and now she sauntered over to their table with a platter of doughnuts she had grabbed from the case.
“Take your pick, honey child,” Devereux said, leaning over the small boy. The boy looked up at Devereux’s sparkling eyes and long, curly fake hair. He looked at Sofie for approval; she nodded.
“Go ahead,” Devereux said in her sweetest voice. “The Binibon doughnuts? They’re piping hot and coated in sugar, just like your auntie Devereux.” She giggled to the table.
“Thanks, Dev,” Lucy said to her. “For everything.”
“Anything for a friend of a friend like you,” Devereux said, prancing in her hot pants back to her stool, holding the doughnut platter like a cocktail waitress might, on the tips of her fingers, over her big shoulder. Maria José, bumping into Devereux lightly, said, “You trying to run me out of a job here, Miss Devereux?” They laughed, and Devereux said, “Girl, with as much coffee as I be drinkin’, you’ll always have a job.”
The boy was busy ripping his doughnut into tiny pieces, placing them on his tongue, letting them sit there for a moment before he swallowed. His steak got cold and hard, and Lucy picked up a piece of it with her fingers, winked at the boy when she put it in her mouth. Immediately she regretted doing it, though, and looked out the window while she swallowed.
After they ate, Lucy didn’t know what to do with them. She knew Engales wouldn’t be home if they went back there, that he’d probably never be home, but where else was there to go? She wanted to shirk herself of the responsibility she had come into, walk down the street alone, go into any of the shops she felt like, leave the blond woman and the boy to find their own way around. She wanted to go to the record store with Engales like they used to, browse the ten-cent bins. Or to be alone with James in the apartment, letting him talk to her in his strange way about her particular taste, her smell, her singular body. But instead she was here, with this woman and this child, standing outside of the restaurant in the cold, looking at the street.
“I’m not sure Raul will be home yet,” Lucy said slowly. “He said he’d be out all day.” Silently Lucy prayed Sofie had not planned on staying at Engales’s. There was no extra bed, no couch even. “Where are you staying?” she ventured.
“A hotel. Middle of town.”
Lucy nodded, shoved her hands in the pockets of her too-thin lumberjack coat. The boy was kicking a small rock around in circles below them.
“Sofie,” she said slowly, “what are you doing here? Where is Julian’s mother? Can you tell me what’s going on?”
Sofie’s eyes shifted away from Lucy and toward the street, as if they were trying to escape. Then, suddenly, she felt Sofie’s big hands on her shoulders. There was a nervous sort of force in the hands, an energy that could have been read as panic. Sofie looked at her straight in the face and her blue eyes grew big and wide.
“I am sorry to do this,” she said, her beautiful, severe face becoming clay-like, morphing into anguish or regret. She pressed Julian’s little red backpack into Lucy’s chest, along with the orange envelope. “It’s the only thing I can do,” she said. “For Franca.”
Then Sofie took off up Second Avenue, walking briskly in her gray overcoat, which Lucy saw now was of the sort cultured, wealthy women wore: crisp shoulders, probably lined with silk. She had already gotten a block away before Lucy grabbed the boy’s hand and pulled him behind her.
“Where are you going?” she called, but Sofie didn’t turn around. Lucy began to run, tugging the boy. “You can’t just leave!” Lucy yelled. Her strides lengthened in desperation; the boy struggled to keep up. Sofie, just a few paces ahead of her now, stepped into the street and held her arm up at a taxi. “No!” Lucy wailed, realizing she sounded like a child. “Where are you going?! No!!”
Sofie got into the yellow car and disappeared up the avenue.
Lucy yelled after the cab. “You can’t just leave me with a kid!” she said. “Raul isn’t here! I’m twenty-two years old!” But her voice cracked, and the car was gone, and she’d misspoken, she wasn’t twenty-two anymore, and it didn’t matter anyway, because the sound of her yelling was swept up into the wind like the sound of the mothers’ voices on the night of the missing boy.
IT ISN’T ENOUGH TO BE BEAUTIFUL
James came home after his visit to the Rising Sun to the smell of brussels sprouts and a brutally cold house. It had been a good day, he told himself as he de-scarfed and de-jacketed and de-loafered in the vestibule. Despite the fact that he had just witnessed the very depressing scene of ten artists being kicked out from their makeshift home by a crew of asshole cops, today had been a day within a series of days where things were starting to look up. Raul Engales was starting to trust him, and better still, he was starting to trust himself. He hadn’t been to see Lucy in almost a week now, and it felt good. A corner was being turned. Around it was the calm and colorful life that he had been meant to live. Fall was fiddling with the city with its windy fingers, and things were going to be okay.
Marge was standing in front of the open oven when he walked into the kitchen, holding her dress out so the hot air would come up and under it. The light surrounding her was a wonderful, soulful, warm red. Marge’s red was back from the grave ever since he’d met Raul.
“Heater’s broken again,” she said to James, her back still to him.
“Again?” he said, coming up from behind her, sliding his cold hands into her armpits. Gestures like these—the hands in the armpits, the kiss on the cheek—had been difficult for James in the past few weeks: expressions of intimacy that were actually a bunch of little lies. But he felt better about it now, like a smoker who had gone a week without a cigarette: he had kicked his habit, officially, and he could do this now, he could put his cold hands in his wife’s warm armpits. Yes!
“I smell cabbage brains,” James said.
“Ding ding,” Marge said.
“Lovely,” James said.
“They’re good for us,” Marge said. Then she turned around and grabbed his face and kissed it.
Somehow, Marge was happier with him now than she had been in a while: another, more major success. Ever since he had started visiting Raul Engales—only a week ago, but it felt like he had known him forever—everything had shifted. He had started to write again, in long, inspired spurts that lasted well into the night, and for this Marge appeared relieved, if not delighted. Perhaps her expectations had gone down now that she had seen him get so low—she did not seem worried that he had not tried to publish any of the work—or perhaps she was just tired of being upset. “I like to see you like this,” she said one night, resting her chin on the doorframe of his studio before she went up to bed. “I like to see you like this,” he had said back to her, in awe of her strawberry mouth. “I’m glad you’re back,” she said before going upstairs again, her soft familiar steps as comforting as rain on a tin roof.
He was glad, too. The writing he was doing felt good in a whole new way: aside from igniting the colors (Engales, in the flesh, was the richest Yves Klein blue), there was something about Raul Engales’s essence, the way he existed in the world, that had altered James’s feelings about writing as a whole, its purpose, its function, its feeling. Here was a man who had
lost the ability to create, which had previously been his sole reason for existing. Here was a man who had been robbed of the very thing that defined him. If not because of Engales, James was writing for him. It didn’t matter if it was terrible—and most of it was, he had narrowed it down to a few sentences that he actually liked—it just mattered that he did it. Because he could. He wrote about, well, anything he felt like writing about—his visits with Engales, and about trying to connect with his mother and father, and about losing the baby, and about losing his colors and finding them again in all the strangest places. He had written about Lucy, which had felt like a release of sorts, as cleansing as a church confession, amplifying the feeling that he had done the very right thing by discontinuing their affair, and he had written about Marge, how he still loved her desperately, and could not understand how he had gotten so far from her. He had written more than a hundred pages in just a week, and the way things were going, he knew he had hundreds more in him.
Yes. It was good to be back. But it was also terrifying. Because in the Venn diagram of his life, between the circles of Lucy’s yellow and Engales’s blue and Marge’s red—the colors, even when he wasn’t around Raul, had regained their strength since meeting him—there were shaded zones where the circles overlapped, shaded zones full of worries, and of lies.
YELLOW: He had not told Lucy that he knew where Engales was. Though he knew she was desperate, and that she had been searching for him, and though he had stopped seeing her himself, he could not handle the thought of them together. He’d ready himself to call her and tell her about the Rising Sun, but then he’d imagine her visiting Engales there, her lips on his, her tongue in his ear, and he would stop himself. Yes, it was jealousy, partly, but it was also fear. What if she told Engales she’d been seeing him? It would destroy everything he’d built with Engales, which at this point was his last chance.
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