Tuesday Nights in 1980 Page 19

  Engales realized this bust was an opportunity for relief: finally the squat would stop taunting him from across the street. Finally he’d be able to sleep without imagining what might be happening over there, wondering what he was missing. For three weeks he’d been listening to the sounds of his old life seeping through the window’s crack—Selma’s cosmic howling, parties raging until the aching hours of the night, an experimental poetry reading during which everyone had yelled in unison: “VERY UNNERVING. VERY UNNERVING. VERY UNNERVING INDEED!” And now he could be free of that; if not peace of mind, there would at least be silence.

  But he didn’t feel relief now, as he waited for his friends to be escorted out of the place they’d spent the last years turning into a manifestation of their dreams. He felt only deep, unexpected sadness, if not for their loss than for the fact that he could not partake in it. He had helped make the squat during the time he’d spent there—the kitchen shelves, the handwoven hammock, the studio walls—and so he should be there when it got destroyed. He should be there, mouthing off to the cops with Toby, standing in front of Selma so they wouldn’t cuff her. Instead, he was here, in his own private hell across the street, trapped with a bunch of drunks and lunatics and people with giant limps or missing limbs, watching his old life like a voyeur with an obsessive failed writer. How had this become him? How was this his life? Why, and how, was he here?

  Because of Winona George.

  Because of Winona George, Raul Engales had not died by way of painkiller overdose three weeks ago, on the night of the show that would have been his artistic debut. Instead, Winona had found him passed out and drooling on a stoop on Bond Street, while stiletto-stepping toward a yellow cab. She’d dragged him into the car herself and instructed the cabbie to drive with meteoric speed to St. Vincent’s.

  “That cabbie didn’t have the slightest idea what meteoric meant,” Winona relayed after Engales’s stomach had been forcefully pumped at the same hospital where they had sewn up his arm. (Practically a regular here, one nurse tried to joke.) “But he still drove like hell,” Winona went on. “And thank god for that, or you would have been a dead man.”

  “If only,” Engales had said.

  “Oh, don’t say that,” Winona had said. “Things got bad there for a second, I know, darling. But there’s still a life to be lived. And you’re in good hands now.”

  Whose good hands? Engales wanted to say. The hands of the handsome hospital doctors, whose capableness was a threat to Engales’s very being? Winona’s, whose mauve manicure made him actually nauseous? Some god’s? Who had already proved himself either nonexistent or evil? Good hands, Engales thought while gazing up into the hollow caves of Winona’s cheekbones from the hospital bed, did not exist anymore.

  But Winona had disagreed. There was hope for Raul Engales yet—more life to be lived and more fame to be had, if only he got some help. She was adamant: he would be admitted somewhere where he could recover and rehabilitate; she would foot the bill.

  And so it was because of Winona George that Engales was not sent home to François’s apartment but to the Rising Sun (or as the people at the squat had called it, the Rubber Room, both because it housed the neighborhood’s crazier set and because the clinic on the first floor gave out condoms for free). Here he was to endure the depressing aesthetic blend of homespun hospitality and medical sterility that he expected was common in New York City wellness institutions: peppy construction paper signage (IF IT’S YELLOW LET IT MELLOW, read one, in the communal bathroom), hospital-blue sheets, jail-thin mattresses, glass mobiles that reflected colorful light onto his face in the morning. He was to share a small room with an ex-alcoholic roommate named Darcy, who sang gospel before going to bed every night and shined his shoes after every time he wore them. He was to take orders and pills from a fantastically bitchy nurse named Lupa, whose Mexican Spanish was both lazy and lippy and whose nose was almost as wide as her face. And he was to attend therapy of all kinds: talk therapy with a man named Germond Germond, who had told Engales, absurdly, you can just call me Germond; art therapy (it couldn’t get more ironic) with Carmen Rose, who never once spoke but did an incredible amount of nodding and tempera paint mixing; and physical therapy with Debbie, a peppy blond sports trainer who attempted to train his left hand into a one-man show by making him turn the knobs of an Etch A Sketch. “It’s different with everyone,” Debbie said sweetly when Engales asked her how fucking long this was going to take. “We need to retrain your mind to understand your new body. It’s a process.”

  But Engales didn’t want to understand his new body, or his new life, or undergo any process at all. He did not want to hear the sounds of a party at the squat while he tried to fall asleep. He did not want to do therapy, of any kind. And he especially did not want to be cooped up in a little room for hours with the awful images that triangled around in his mind: the terror of the white suit jacket, leading Lucy off into the night; his childhood house, empty on the other end of the phreak-tapped pay phone; the silver blade of the guillotine, slamming down onto his arm; Franca’s eggs, their bleeding yolk. And so he’d shut his eyes with force, but under the lids he’d just get a more jumbled version of the images that haunted him. Jacket, ringing, yolk/blood. Germond, Germond, yolk, jacket. Lupa’s nose, jacket, Etch A Sketch, blood. Meet me at the squat, midnight at the squat, four in the morning at the squat, never again at the squat. Hallelujah, white yolk, red yolk, THIS IS UNNERVING, Lupa’s cigarette smell, ringing, ringing, ringing, gone.

  But then, on the Tuesday of his second week there, the hellish rhythm of his rehabilitation was interrupted, when a man showed up toward the end of visiting hours, covered in rain. Something about him was familiar, but Engales couldn’t place him at first. Around the cuffs of the man’s slacks, little moats formed.

  “Sorry about this,” the man said, motioning at the dripping. “I lost my umbrella. Maybe I never had one? I never know with umbrellas.”

  Lupa tucked her head into the room. “Thees is Meester James Bennett,” she said in her I’m-a-hard-ass voice. “Miss George lady sends him. Be nice.”

  Engales’s heart flapped ever so slightly. James Bennett. That’s why the man looked familiar: Engales flashed on the New Year’s Eve party, when Rumi had listed off the important people on the balcony. He remembered Bennett’s slumped silhouette, his shiny head. He thought of Winona’s promise: an article in the Times, by the most revered art writer, all about his show. Engales bristled, first with the sort of hope he felt when he woke up in the morning: ten bright seconds during which a writer from the New York Times was here to write an article about him.

  Engales reached for a towel that hung on the doorknob of the closet, threw it at the man. He caught it, rubbed it over his shoulders, down his legs. Then the ten bright seconds faded, as quickly as they’d arrived. James Bennett could only be here to write about one thing: the accident, the hand. He imagined headlines—“Failed Painter Lands in Loony Bin.” “Crippled Artist Never to Paint Again.” “Hand and Career Severed.” Read all about it. He then imagined Lucy picking up the paper and seeing his sob story on the front page. There would be a close-up of his wrinkled arm, the black notches of the stitches appalling and obvious, Frankensteinian. He suddenly felt violated—the same way he had felt when the Telemondo guy didn’t tell his penny joke. The world would forever treat him differently, look at him differently; the hand would define him from here on out. The hand would be his only story.

  “I’m not doing interviews,” Engales said quickly then, averting James Bennett’s gaze.

  “Me neither,” said James, taking off his tiny round glasses to rub the water from his face.

  “Then what are you doing here?” Engales said.

  “Well,” James Bennett said breathlessly, as if he had just climbed many flights of stairs. “To tell you the truth, I’m trying to figure out the meaning of my life.”

  Just then, when James Bennett returned his glasses to his face, Engales saw it: the telltale regist
ering of the missing hand, which was laid out on the arm of Engales’s chair like a pink dick. This was the pattern: normal face, wide-eyed frightened face, rejiggered fake normal face, then sinking face. James Bennett had not known about the accident. He wasn’t here to write about the accident.

  Usually there was a final resting stage: the eyebrow-tilt of pity. But James Bennett’s face didn’t move into the final stage. Instead, it shifted into a wide-eyed, slack-mouthed expression of what could only be considered awe.

  “Shit,” James said.

  Engales watched skeptically as James Bennett’s pale face contorted into a sort of euphoric mess: all eye-bulging and nostril-flaring and cheek-scrunching.

  “It’s happening,” James said.

  “What’s happening?” Engales asked; he was too curious not to.

  “Um,” James managed, screeching a chair around next to Engales’s, padding his wet loafers across the linoleum, sitting, the whole time keeping his buggy eyes on Raul Engales’s face. Engales could feel the tug of the stitches in his arm, like they could burst.

  “It’s like a crown,” James said, his head tilting. “Or kind of a halo. It’s sort of a golden color. It’s beautiful. It’s like the blue room. I knew it!”

  Engales scooted his chair away a bit; the linoleum screamed. “You’re officially freaking me out,” he said. “So unless you tell me what the hell you’re talking about, I’m going to call Lupa back in.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” James said, taking off his glasses again to rub his eyes. “I’m being odd, aren’t I? I can’t help it. I just feel so much. You’re making me feel so much.”

  “Lupa!” Engales yelled to the door, but Lupa didn’t come.

  James jumped into an explanation: He had a sort of disability, he explained. No, an ability. He had an ability to see things that weren’t there, to hear things and to feel things and to smell things that did not exist in the real world. His wires were crossed, he explained. Like a switchboard operator who hooked the wrong two people up for conversation, and those two people ended up hitting it off.

  Engales watched him, still highly skeptical. Rumi had been right on New Year’s when she had called James Bennett an odd duck. And yet Engales felt something he hadn’t felt in a while. He felt warm. Ever since the accident, he had been cold, as if his wound were an open window out of which all his body heat escaped. Now, in James Bennett’s presence, he felt his blood heating.

  Just then Lupa blasted in, flared her nose and declared that visiting hours ended at precisely one o’clock and it was now one oh five and Mary Spinoza was going to fry her ass like a chicharrón if Bennett didn’t get out on the double. James stood, leaving a little puddle of rain where his ass had been, and reached out to shake Engales’s hand.

  “Nice try,” Engales said. James Bennett looked down at his hand—he had defaulted to his right—and was overcome with what looked to be real shame.

  “Shit,” James said.

  “That’s what you have to say?” Engales said. “Shit?” He could feel the warmth leaving him.

  “I’d like to leave something here if I could,” James had said, searching a bulky messenger bag Engales had not noticed before. He pulled a heavy brown leather book from the bag, dumped it onto Engales’s lap.

  “What the fuck is this?” Engales said.

  “What used to be the meaning of my life,” James Bennett said. “Let me know what you find.”

  When Darcy left to play poker in the common room, Engales, curious, had explored the leather binder. On its edge, on a sticker, there was a cryptic scrawl: HUNGER / SUN YELLOW / RAUL ENGALES. What kind of psychotic labeling system was this? And why was Engales’s name involved? When he opened it, it was full of the tiny white squares of slides meant for projectors. Engales ran his left hand over the satisfyingly smooth plastic, then pulled one of the slides out of its little sleeve. He lifted it toward the window. In the little square he saw a face. He tilted the slide so the light worked its way into the face: it was Francis Bacon’s, the portrait of him by Lucian Freud. The same portrait Arlene had showed him on that first day in the studio, as the counterpoint to his own piece of shit.

  The coincidence was eerie, just like the binder itself. Just like James Bennett himself, who had showed up out of nowhere for no reason Engales could understand, said some very weird shit, then left him with a bunch of slides and no projector. Or was there a projector? He recalled that he had seen one in the physical-therapy room, which Debbie used to give her Body and Soul lectures: a picture of a lean woman on a beach, a picture of a bowl of oatmeal, a picture of all the muscles in a hand. Luckily Debbie had a little thing for Engales—the way she massaged his arm during their lessons was nothing short of erotic—and so when he asked her to borrow the projector and the room she flirtatiously agreed, with a caveat: Only if I can stay and watch.

  “Fine,” Engales said, pulling up two chairs and shutting the door of the physical-therapy room. He loaded a page of slides, and flicked on the projector. A vibrant picture appeared on the wall behind the robotic-looking shadows of the workout machines. It was another painting Engales knew: an untitled work by Francesco Clemente, of a woman flanked by two naked men. The woman had a wide red mouth and a thick braid coming down over one of her shoulders. The men stood in individual pools of blue, holding their hands over their heads, posing for her.

  “I feel a ménage à trois coming on,” Debbie said, as if the painting were a television show of the sort he assumed she watched, where the girls wore jean jackets and chewed gum, just like she did.

  Engales ignored her and let the image sink into him. He had loved the painting the moment he first saw it, at a show at one of the bigger galleries a couple years ago; he loved it still. He loved the frank fear that inhabited the woman’s face, and he loved the question the painting posed: Could one love two people? Or would so much love make them drown, as this woman’s pained face suggested? He thought of Lucy, loving some other man in his apartment. A bell rang inside him: perhaps she was drowning. Perhaps, even if she did love that man in the white suit, she also still loved him. The brilliance of the painting soothed him, the fact that it was making him think in so many layers. Two for two.

  Engales clicked through the page of slides, and when it was done, the page after that, and by the third page it became clear that things were only getting eerier. The works in James Bennett’s HUNGER / SUN YELLOW / RAUL ENGALES binder were almost all works that he himself had fallen in love with at various points in his life. There were Hockney’s winter trees, Jean-Michel’s monstrous figures, Matisse’s cutouts, and Avant’s street scrawls. There was even one of Horatio’s action paintings that Engales had watched him make at a midnight performance in an empty building in the Meatpacking District, one of his boxing glove pieces. Even the paintings Engales had never seen before moved him, vibrated within him, and the whole thing made the backs of his eyes tight with held-back tears.

  “We could get you back there,” Debbie said suddenly, when the wall went black. “You’re making strides with your left flexors. The palmar interossei are what need work, but we can get there.”

  “Thank you, Debbie,” he said, pulling himself up from his chair with some effort. He felt exhausted. “But no thank you, Debbie.”

  His mind, anyway, was not on his own hand or his own painting, or on Debbie, but on the slides, and on James Bennett. His heart was aflutter with the speed and love and color that the slides held. He had not felt this speed or love or color since the accident, and looking at this collection of slides only confirmed a suspicion Engales had had when James Bennett was in his room: James Bennett held a hand of cards that Engales wanted to see, and to know. Then Engales’s mind went totally blank, because Debbie was at work at the button of his jeans.

  “Physical therapy?” she said from below him, her lashes twittering.

  James returned the next day at the same time, and again the day after that, and quickly he became the kind of visitor one needed in a rehab cl
inic: the kind who kept coming back. In exchange for agreeing to the Rising Sun at all, Engales had made Winona promise not to tell any of his friends—especially Lucy, he’d said with a clenched jaw—where he was. She’d eventually agreed, but had reasoned that Bennett was not Engales’s friend and therefore did not count; Winona loved a good loophole. But Engales didn’t begrudge her for sending James. In a place where there was nothing to look forward to except for Sunday movie night or Friday pizza night or Tuesday oatmeal bar, James’s presence, if strange, was actually a welcome distraction.

  On the second day James came to visit, perhaps because Engales had been moved by the paintings in the book of slides, Engales had felt open, ready to talk. And they did talk, in a way that Engales had not talked to anyone for as long as he could remember, about people they both knew (Jean-Michel, Selma Saint Regis) and artists with ego problems (Toby), and projects they’d seen that lit them up (James Turrell’s light and space works) and projects that left them cold (Jeff Koons, the vacuums). Engales’s staunch conviction that he was finished with art, thinking about it even, faded to the background during these conversations, as they took unexpected turns (James spoke of getting a hard-on when he saw a Matisse, for one), or went unexpectedly deep (Engales told James about his parents: I painted people because I had no people). They talked at length about the slides in the binder, and at special length about the Freud.