Tuesday Nights in 1980

by Molly Prentiss

  He had thought about this moment, or this series of moments—walking across town to James Bennett’s apartment, knocking on the door, meeting the boy—a million times. And yet he was still standing here on the Rising Sun’s stoop, a piece of shit with the particles of cold fog seeping into him, the suit practically drenched, unable to move. A church bell from somewhere uptown commemorated his stasis with a melancholy, distant dong. Part of him wished he could turn around and go back inside, where at least there were no decisions to be made, no end of any bargain to hold up, no looming responsibility. Be a fucking man, he tried to coach himself. But he didn’t feel like a man. He was a boy without parents. A drunk without a hand. A goon in a pin-striped suit.

  His eyes landed on the squat across the street. There was a prolonged moment where he questioned whether to cross the street and go in, but he also knew himself; he wouldn’t be able not to. Finally he took one deep breath and crossed toward it. He shoved open the huge blue door—Locks are a symbol of proprietary greed, Toby had once claimed—and entered the big, open front room. The smell overtook him: the lacquer and resin and turpentine mixed with growing mold and old food. Engales kicked a beer bottle over; it rolled jerkily, like a bagged body. In the floor’s cracks were the remnants of a party: a green feather, a miniature plastic bag, gold sequins, which distinctly reminded him of Lucy.

  Nostalgia swelled within him: these thin walls; this idealistic, bright paint; this house of youth and wonder. The place, of course, had been gutted of the bulk of its furnishings—sidewalk couches, mismatched dishes, wobbly tables, the art—but what was left was enough to make him remember the precise feeling he’d gotten when he walked in here for the first time: This is it. The space was the New York he’d come for, and embodied everything it meant to be alive. Even the smell made him ache with a wish he knew would never come true: to go backward. He let himself live inside that wish for a second, imagining Mans and Hans in the corner, taking a blowtorch to a hunk of bronze. Toby coming out from the back room, his arm around Regina, telling everyone: “This is the life, people. We fucking did it.” Selma’s singing, drifting from the makeshift bathroom with the steam. But this foray into his past life was interrupted by a voice coming from the back, saying what sounded from where Engales stood like: Failed artist! Failed artist! Failed artist! The fucking parrots.

  Engales went into the back room, which smelled like a thousand rats had died inside of it. He held his breath, kicked through a pile of trash. The bird sounded again, from somewhere in the corner: Capitalism is for suckers! When he found it, waddling under an overturned chair, it looked up at him with its creepy bird eyes, shook its matted, filthy feathers. How had it managed to stay alive in here? Engales wondered as he stuck his good arm out to pick it up. But then again, how did anyone manage to stay alive these days? They were all hanging on by a fucking feather.

  The bird climbed up Engales’s arm and onto his shoulder. Engales wanted to hate it, but for some reason the fact of it, this live thing holding on to him with its gross claws, gave him just the ounce of courage he would need for what he knew he had to do next: go back out that blue door, leave this place behind for good, give up any thought of going backward. Giddyap! the parrot screamed, which Engales translated to himself as forward. Only forward. The messy bird and the one-armed man went out into the world.

  Out on Second, the street felt eerily empty. The bars had their neon signs off and their doors locked up. When he passed Binibon, where the windows were usually fogged with the breath and coffee steam of the many regulars, he saw that the grate was down. On the grate someone had taped a note on a piece of binder paper that read: CLOSED TODAY. Then a frowny face and a peace sign. The tiny bookstore on the corner of Fifth Street was locked up, too, and the big beer hall was not crawling with drunks as it usually was. There was no cold-fingered saxophonist on Fourth, where he usually serenaded the street in any weather. There were no sirens. The city seemed to be on pause, like a ghost town after a shoot-out. The only thing open was Telemondo’s, and though Engales did not want to see the Telemondo guy, he went in, asked for a pack of cigarettes. He spotted the line of golden flasks on the back wall. “One of those, too,” he said. To his relief, the Telemondo guy didn’t acknowledge him in any special way, but only slid the cigarettes and whiskey across the counter and said with his flat, accented voice: “That will be five hundred and fifty two pennies.”

  He could do this. He was armed with booze and a bird and he was cloaked in fog and the Telemondo guy had done his joke. He’d be drunk by the time he got there, and the whole thing would just sink into him like the alcohol did, slowly and warmly. He’d do for his sister what he’d been unable to do before; he’d come through for her. He walked past a vacant lot where a man’s dress shirt was hanging on a chain-link fence, sailing in the wind like a ghost. He passed a man in a wheelchair wearing all yellow, with a sign that said something about waterskiing. He passed a woman with very smeared clown makeup. The beautiful horrors of New York, he thought as he took a big swig from the bottle. And I am among them.

  Finally he made it to Greenwich, and turned up toward Jane. He knew this route well because it was how he had walked to the Eagle to visit Lucy on her shifts, to harass her while she worked, kiss her over the bar. The thought of her stung him. He pushed her away, turned left on Jane. He had found James Bennett’s address in the Rising Sun’s probably very dated phonebook: number 24, a little wooden house crammed between two larger brick apartment buildings. In front of the wooden door, the snow-fog moved in a funny way. The snow-fog moved in a way that said, You don’t know shit.

  Suddenly, when faced with the door that would open onto Franca’s big news, he felt paralyzed. What would happen when it opened? What would be waiting behind it? Would he feel anything when he saw Franca’s son? Would he see Franca in him? Would the boy see Franca in Engales? Would he remember everything about being a boy himself? How wonderful it was to run through the streets—so much faster than his sister—and feel the wind on his face? Would he know exactly how the boy felt, alone in a strange place, with no parents to speak of? Would the boy be frightened of him? Would the boy be frightened of his hand?

  The boy would be frightened of his hand.

  No, he couldn’t do this. He walked back down the stairs of the stoop, down the block that he and Lucy had once careened down like love-drunk pinballs.

  I’ve never asked you for anything in my whole life.

  He turned around. Walked back up.

  Rug muncher! the bird spat. The bird. Oh, Jesus, the fucking bird. No way, Engales. No way was he doing this.

  Raul, please take care of my son.

  Up the stairs again, this time with force and determination and anger, he pressed the golden cat-eye of a doorbell, waited.

  No one came to the door. He rang again; still nothing. He peeked through the stained glass window, through a red triangle of glass. The walls of the tiny living room were covered in huge sheets of newsprint, decorated in a child’s drawings. James Bennett’s hideous white suit jacket was draped over a wicker chair. And there, near the coffee table, was a pair of tiny, ridiculously tiny, shoes.

  His heart spun. Franca’s son was actually here. Engales felt his chest tighten, and pressure behind his eyes. “God damn it!” he yelled, banging on the glass with the stump of his hand.

  He sat on the stoop in the cold for a moment, put his face into his one hand. Now what? Across the street, an old woman peered out at him from her first-floor window. Engales held up the middle finger of his left hand; she shut her purple curtain hastily.

  Eventually he got up, teetered down Jane, and rambled down Seventh Avenue, drinking in plain sight from his bottle. The light was fading and the air felt tough on his face. He turned east at some point, and found himself in Washington Square Park, the big arch shining like the inside of a seashell in the dusky light. As he approached he heard a low din: something between a church choir and a static television. A huge crowd of people, congre
gated in circles and clumps around the fountain and under the big white arch at the north edge. Beyond the arch, the crowd spilled into the street. They wore the merry gear of early winter: patterned scarves and colorful jackets, but their faces, universally, held expressions of pain. Everybody was hugging or had their arms around one another. Some people were sobbing, others singing.

  Engales found himself walking into the crowd. No one pushed: they moved to let him through. He saw a man with a giant dog, a dog the size of a horse. The man held his dog around the neck and wept into its silvery fur. A young blond woman, with a short haircut much like Lucy’s, was shaking a tambourine slowly, and each time she hit it against her hand, she let out a sad gasp. He came to a large circle opening in the crowd, where he stood next to two short men in plaid coats, who, he realized when they looked up at him with the exact same sad smile, were twins.

  There, across the circle on the other side of what looked to be some sort of altar, swaying in her long fish skirt and a coat that was somehow both puffy and flowy, was Arlene. He watched her kneel down and place a bouquet of daisies on top of a large black-and-white picture of John Lennon. As she put them there, the daisies tickling Lennon’s neck, a long-haired woman beside her fell to her knees, too, then put her palms on the asphalt as if in prayer. Her hair fell out over her arms and onto the ground like a drawing of a sun.

  Arlene looked up and saw Engales. Her face looked older, with more lines around the eyes, and yet also more beautiful than Engales remembered. He suddenly saw her as a woman, not the sailor-mouthed hippie who he shared a studio with, but an actual woman, with feelings and breasts and hair and all the other things a woman came with. She gave a sad smile, not unlike the one the twins had given him. It was the John-Lennon-died smile. The smile you smiled when everybody lost the same thing but still had one another. Arlene crossed the circle to stand next to him. She didn’t look up at him, which he was grateful for. But then she did an odd thing—she took her two warm hands and wrapped them around the stump of his forearm, cradled in the fabric of Darcy’s suit. He did not pull away. They stood there for a while, suspended in the sadness of everyone around them, her hands on his deformity. She only said, into the wind: Oh, Raul.

  Engales felt a flood of emotions then, ones he had not brought himself to feel while holed up at the Rising Sun but that out here, in the open air with Arlene’s hand on his arm and the entire world mourning, he let enter him. He thought of his father in his battered corduroys, smoking his pipe, his eyes the color of the pipe, his pipe the color of his corduroys, his corduroys the color of the way he made his son and daughter feel: young and brown, safe, like the wooden walls of their childhood home. He heard the record his father had put on: Little child, little child—I’m so sad and lonely. Baby, take a chance with— If you want someone— Little child, come and dance with me . . . and he heard his father saying: Raul, I’m telling you, it’s the scratches that make a life. He thought of Broken Music Composition, 1979, of Winona and her hair and the fact that she had saved his life, and what she had said that night they met: You’ll have to lose everything this year in order to make something beautiful. He thought of the way Franca’s face looked in the light of the fire across the street: half-orange, half-shadow black, and of the little boy’s shoes in James Bennett’s house. He thought of Lucy’s sequins, the way they had winked at him, the way they had promised escape. He thought of escape, and how he had attempted it, how he had failed, how he was here now, with his friend Arlene’s hands around his arm, mourning the tragedies of the world with the world. He was finally in the pavilion, he thought. Beneath the pavilion, he could finally cry. He had not cried, not once, not when he witnessed his paintings on display without him, not when he saw Lucy betraying him, not when he heard about Franca from James, not when he lay alone and crippled in the stiff bed at the Rising Sun. But now he couldn’t stop. Everything poured from him onto Arlene’s hair. The parrot, just then, leaped off Engales’s shoulder and flew out over the crowd. He looked up, wiped his eyes, watched the bird’s dirty wings spread like he hadn’t been able to imagine they could.

  Arlene turned to him, put a hand on his shoulder. “You look like you’re going to fucking church,” she said.

  “Isn’t this sort of like church?” Engales wiped at his face with his floppy sleeve.

  “Minus any god,” she said. She smiled.

  “Minus any god,” he said.

  “What do we have here?” she said.

  Arlene pulled the roll of paper from Engales’s bag, unfurled it to reveal the mostly naked woman—a woman who was supposed to be seductive and yet to Engales looked sort of rotten and overly orange. Arlene chuckled, then laid it on the ground with the rest of the makeshift altar, weighting it on its corners with four votive candles. She took the bottle of whiskey from Engales’s hand, set that down, too. “John needs it more than you,” she said, winking up at him. Engales surprised himself by not protesting. Arlene stood up, her colorful dress trailing out from the bottom of her coat and her red hair aflame against the backdrop of black hats and pale faces. She whispered something.

  “Are you going to go tonight?” she said, with an uncharacteristic mischievousness in her eyes. No curse words, no loud squawk, just a little girl who knew something secret. Their eyes locked, the first time they had brought themselves to really look at each other.

  “Go where?”

  “The show,” she said. “Didn’t you hear about it? James Bennett is selling everything he owns. It’s this big deal. Everyone’s talking about it, you know, one of those fucking big fusses.”

  “No, I didn’t hear about it.”

  “You know, I didn’t expect him to be a nice guy. I always read those reviews and thought: What does this guy know?”

  “You met him?”

  “Long story for another time, but yes. I ran into his wife, literally, then followed her home—and I know what you’re thinking but try to refrain from judgment, you little shit.”

  “And?”

  “And he’s got a black eye and a kid in the house and is selling his whole goddamned collection like an imbecile! He’s a fucking mess is what he is!”

  “Arlene, where is the show?”

  “Fun,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The show’s at Fun. Winona’s new spot. Not that I give two shits about Winona George, as you know. But you can read all about it yourself in the Times.”

  Engales was quiet, trying to comprehend what this meant to him. The man he had recently punched in the face was selling all his paintings, one of which, he knew, was his own. Did he care? Why should he care? Why was he feeling warm? And also sad? And also . . . intrigued?

  Arlene leaned in close to his chest, whispered up into his ear.

  “Your name’s in there,” she said. “Go look. Your name is in the New York Times, Raul. You’re right there. I mean, you’re there.”

  The sun was gone by the time Engales and Arlene parted. As he walked away from her, he heard her shout, in her stupid New York accent, I love you, Raul! He smiled to himself, didn’t turn around. He made his way toward the edge of the park, then bummed a New York Times off a rich-looking woman on a bench, who had tossed him the paper like a shield and scrambled to leave. Nearby, sitting in a circle on the cement, a gaggle of young girls read their horoscopes to one another from a teen magazine. “Aries? You’re all ego,” one was saying. “God, you so are,” said another. Engales shook the newspaper open with his one hand. When he got to the Arts section and found the piece: a thin article with the headline “Ex-critic Sells Off Coveted Collection.”

  Engales’s chest felt tight. He didn’t care, he told himself. He really didn’t. He didn’t even need to keep reading. He did.

  James Bennett, the article read, longtime contributor to the Arts section of this publication, has officially decided to retire—from writing, at least. The art world’s loss may also be its gain, however; Bennett is perhaps better known for his collection of artwork
s than for his contributions as a critic. Bennett owns pieces by some of the most well-known artists of our time, including Eric Fischl, Ruth Kligman, and David Hockney. In addition, the collection includes works by a merry few up-and-comers, including street art collective Avant and painter Raul Engales, whose recent show at the Winona George Gallery made a huge splash among critics and collectors alike. Bennett will show his entire collection this weekend at Fun, George’s new sister gallery on East Eleventh Street, where everything will be available for purchase. The show is called, aptly, Selling Out. It opens tonight.

  The girls next to him were laughing like monkeys. They were onto an article about embarrassing moments: a girl getting a piggyback ride when she had her period, a first kiss gone wrong due to a pesky set of braces. Engales could hardly hear them, though. A huge splash, the article had said. Among critics and collectors alike. He felt both giddy and repulsed. He, while turning the knobs of an Etch A Sketch in a rehab institution, had made a big splash. He had made a big, one-time splash, that he had been unable to be part of and that he would never be able to make again. He hated himself. He hated the idea of this show, a show that epitomized what James Bennett had always said he hated: selling out, commoditizing art, giving in to the market that was destroying the very artists it depended on. And he hated James Bennett. But it didn’t matter anymore, did it? What he hated? What he wanted? Because there was Franca’s big news. There was Franca’s little boy.

  FUN

  Regina and Toby, from the squat, called Kleindeutschland to invite Lucy to the opening of Fun. It was the second week of December, a Tuesday, and Lucy was very busy doing exactly nothing. “It just popped up,” Toby said, referring to the gallery, as if a room full of art was something that propelled itself upward, breaking through the concrete like a jack-in-the-box, greeting the city with a smiling, painted face. “It’s supposed to be really fun,” Regina said, which had not made Regina or Lucy laugh.