Tuesday Nights in 1980 Read online

  BLUE: He had not told Engales about his affair with Lucy, for obvious reasons. He wanted to bask in him, and write about him, and drink up his color, and if Engales knew about Lucy all of that would end. He was really starting to like Engales, to care about him in a way that he rarely cared about anyone. If his lie were revealed he’d not only lose his colors, he’d also lose a real friend. But he couldn’t stop. He kept visiting him every day at noon. He kept digging deeper. He kept growing richer with colors. Sucking them from Engales as if they were a very addictive elixir.

  RED: The worst and most prominent betrayal, of course, was lying, repeatedly, to Marge. He had not told her—both because it felt too close to the realm of his affair and because Marge had developed a serious distaste for even the name Raul Engales due to the painting that symbolized James’s fucking up—about his visits to the Rising Sun. Instead, he created an artist out of thin air from a name he’d seen on the buzzer at Lucy’s apartment. François Bellamy. He was writing a piece on François Bellamy. That’s what he was doing in his study, late into the night. And Marge bought it, because why wouldn’t she? Believing in François Bellamy gave Marge a reason to believe in James.

  The lies, in short, were working. And James was having his colors and eating them, too. He prayed the spheres would continue to drift from one another, like continents that would eventually break completely apart. He prayed that all of this was not going to blow up in his face. But for now the lies were working and he was okay. He was here with his red wife in their cold house, his hands tucked snugly in her armpits.

  “I guess I have to close this eventually,” Marge said as she pulled up the oven’s door. “But I don’t want to.”

  “I’ll keep you warm,” James said. He turned her around and hugged her tightly. As he did he had a wonderful picture in his mind: of Marge on the top of Mount Etna, on their honeymoon to Sicily, in a pair of ugly cargo shorts and a floppy hat, yelling down to him from her higher perch on the path. He had realized then that she was fundamentally better than him. She was higher on the mountain. She was real and wonderful and he didn’t deserve her. And look at him now: he had been right.

  “Let’s have wine,” Marge said, breaking free from his hug and getting a bottle from the cupboard.

  “Let’s,” James said.

  “And then let’s eat,” Marge said.

  “Let’s,” James said.

  “And then let’s baby-make,” Marge said in her baby voice that she used to talk about sex.

  “Let’s,” said James, though the idea made him nervous; he worried Lucy’s stench still clung to him. He knew that saying he didn’t feel like having sex would hurt her, or mean something that it shouldn’t, and they had been on such shaky ground so recently, and he had to abide by her baby clock. He couldn’t ruin the night, it had been so pleasant, and so he let her undo his belt, and then unzip his zipper, praying for some cosmic interruption that would save him from sleeping with his own wife.

  The cosmic interruption came, in the form of the doorbell’s deep whale song. Relief washed over him.

  “I’ll get it!” he said, probably too readily, buttoning his pants as he headed for the door.

  “Who could that possibly be?” Marge said, her voice streaked with annoyance.

  “Who knows!” James called, just when he realized he did know, because coming through the stained glass was a cloud of yellow.

  James felt like a Richard Hambleton painting he had seen on Bleecker Street a few days ago: a black shadow, frozen in midleap, shot in the chest with a red splatter of blood. How was she here? And how was she yellow? He had been so sure that he was rid of her, so proud of his discovery that he could get the same sensations—better sensations—simply by seeing Raul Engales every day. He didn’t need her. But now she was here and she was bright and he was paralyzed. He couldn’t very well open the door and let Lucy in, and he couldn’t not open the door, and have Marge ask him who it had been. He could lie and say it was a saleslady, but did salesladies even exist anymore? And if he knew Lucy, which he felt he was starting to, he knew she was not going to give up; she was not one with much care for the world outside of herself, and she would ring the bell again.

  Not knowing what else to do, he opened the door quickly, let a whoosh of cold air into the house, closed the door behind him. Nervous blood, pumping all through his veins. Lucy. Lucy with her small nose. Lucy, here even though he had renounced her for good. Lucy, standing there with a little boy.

  “What are you doing here?” James whisper-yelled.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said. Her face was white with fear and cold, and there was snot coming from her nose, glinting in the streetlights on her upper lip. “But you were the only . . . old person that I knew.”

  “Old person?” James said. “Is that how you think of me? How did you find my house? I’m having dinner with my wife. How did you find me here?”

  “There’s a thing called a phone book,” she said. “You’re in it.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can come here! What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking! How am I supposed to think?” Lucy said, too loudly, making James turn around and peer through the colored glass. “I have nowhere else to go!”

  “And why do you have a child with you?!”

  Lucy was shaking, wearing the kind of coat that wasn’t appropriate for the deep fall. Her lips were weirdly opalescent: or was that just his mind? Part of James wanted to invite her in, make her coffee, hug her. But what was he thinking? She had to leave. He had to tell her to leave right this minute, before everything was ruined beyond repair. He was just getting his life back on track, just making things right with Marge, just about to have oceans between his continents of lies. And now the biggest lie was on his stoop, toting a child.

  “Look,” he said to her. “My wife is inside. You need to go.” He looked at the boy, whose eyes were wide with fear, and whose hair was doing that thing that little boys’ hair did, tossing like a whirlpool at the crown of his head.

  “It’s not like I want to be here,” Lucy spat back. “I’m not asking you to fuck me.”

  James practically screamed Shhhhhhhhh!

  “I’m just saying I’m not trying to break up your marriage,” she went on. “I’m here because I have no one else to ask. I don’t know one responsible person in this entire city. And this lady . . . this lady I’ve never even met! Left me with this boy—”

  “Well who is he?” James said.

  “He is Raul Engales’s nephew,” Lucy whispered.

  Oh, Jesus, James thought, his head now throbbing with cold. Lucy’s eyes were becoming huge pits of yellow and blue; his own vision was clouding.

  “Some lady dropped him off,” she went on. “Flew all the way from Argentina—and I don’t know what to do. I can’t find Raul, I have no one, I don’t know how to take care of a kid . . . I have nowhere to go! I went to Jamie’s and she was with a guy in her room! I went to the squat and no one was there—the whole place had been cleared out, everything was gone, even the parrots! I didn’t know what to do!”

  Lucy began to practically hyperventilate as she relayed her plight. As she did, the young boy, as any young boy would do if his caretaker were to expose themselves as terrified and therefore untrustworthy, began to cry softly himself, and the whole scene escalated into a tizzy of tears and breath.

  James stepped down to the stair above Lucy’s. He put his arms around her and held her small, cold body. Her youth, every time he had met up with her in the apartment, had come forth in brash confidence and predatory sexuality. Now it exposed her fear, her need for attention.

  Raul Engales’s nephew. All the way from Argentina.

  He thought of what Engales had talked about that morning, about his sister, worrying that she wasn’t safe. It couldn’t be that Engales’s intuition had been right, could it? But then, here was this boy, without a mother in sight.

  He had to help, but what would he tell Mar
ge? Why had he lied to her, when he had known the only outcome was to get caught? Why did lies always breed more lies? How had that first lie turn him into a liar? He felt himself fading. He willed himself to fade all the way. Lucy standing there crying, not going anywhere anytime soon. The kid crying. His own body fading.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly, absently, to himself or to Lucy, he couldn’t tell. “It will be okay.” He bent down to hold the boy’s shoulders, to pet his head. Then he stood and hugged Lucy again. He realized as he hugged her that he had never been someone that other people asked for comfort. Now he knew why. He disappeared as he hugged her. He was not really there. He felt surprised that it seemed to be working at all, that Lucy was leaning into him, grabbing his shirt. That he could convince someone with an embrace that things would be okay, even when he did not believe that they would be. Especially not when Marge opened the door behind him to find him wrapped around a young blond woman she had never seen before.

  “What’s going on?” she said. She tossed her hair back, like she did. “Who is this?”

  James turned around to look at her, knowing his face was betraying him, like it did.

  “I’ll explain,” James said to her. Then he looked at Lucy, whose face was still dashed with tears. He felt, though he didn’t want to, a surge of love for her, for her messy bleached hair, her hopelessness. “Um, why don’t we all go inside?”

  Lucy on the couch, Marge on the big chair, the boy on Lucy’s lap, Lucy’s portrait on the mantel. James’s eyes and brain darted from one of these terrors to the next. He had ruined everything, he had gone too far; his mind was awash with all of it. Yellow whirred past him, and Marge’s red like a watercolor, and the orange that ensued from their mixing was so dizzying he thought he might faint. How would he fix this?

  “Does someone want to tell me what is going on?” Marge, to the rest of them. He was someone. He was the someone who should tell her what was going on. But he had become mute.

  To his horror and surprise, Lucy chimed in.

  “I’m Lucy,” she said, her hand extending like a turtle’s head from her plaid coat, out toward Marge.

  Stop speaking, James wanted to hiss at her. But his voice was trapped behind the layers of sensations, which had coagulated into a glass wall around him.

  To his horror and surprise, Marge chimed in.

  “I’m Marge,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I’m guessing I don’t need to tell you that you look familiar?” Marge nodded her head back toward the painting behind her. How had he forgotten this about his own wife, that her desire for pleasantness would trump any suspicion, erase any annoyance, curb any curiosity, and she would be polite to the woman who, a week ago, he had fucked standing up, against Raul Engales’s apartment wall? Almost all of the panic he had seen in Lucy on the stoop had evaporated, now that she was talking with his pleasant, perfect wife, and Marge’s face had been suddenly stripped of annoyance, and was now motherly and open.

  Lucy smiled back. Lucy smiled back! What was going on here? What was this alternate universe? Was there some kind of code between women that he did not know about, where the default was being . . . nice? Why was this happening in his living room? Why was this happening in his life?

  “And who is this?” Marge said, gesturing toward the boy.

  “This is Julian. That’s why I’m here. I just met him today. And I barely know your husband, I just met him at a gallery once, and he recognized me from the painting, so we chatted, and I didn’t mean to come over here like this, I just didn’t have anywhere to go . . . I’m brand-new in the city . . . I don’t know how to take care of kids, and this lady, Sofie, left Julian with me, and so I came here, because, well . . .”

  “So you’re in a pickle?” Marge nodded in the way that a teacher nods to a student who hasn’t passed a test: with pity and warning, but most deeply, a desire to help.

  “Yes, I guess you could say that.”

  James was still reeling, his back pressed against the back of the couch, his hands gripping the cushions near his thighs. Suddenly he heard himself speak.

  “No, she isn’t in a pickle,” he said rigidly. “She’s ready to leave now, is what she is.”

  Marge looked at James, her eyes narrowing. He knew this look. It was the look she gave when he said something off base at a party, when he was accidentally rude to a dinner guest, when he failed, as he had so many times in their years together, to be a normal and upstanding man. He decided he should not speak anymore unless absolutely necessary. Shut the fuck up, James.

  “Let’s start from the beginning, though,” Marge was saying to Lucy, having seemingly forgotten about James altogether now. “You were saying a woman left this boy with you.”

  “Yes. She was tall and blond and spoke Spanish and said she was friends with Raul’s sister, but she didn’t seem like she was from Argentina.”

  “And did she tell you where she was staying?”

  “She only said ‘middle of town,’ so she probably meant Midtown, but then she left right after that—all of a sudden. She got into a cab and left me standing in the street with this boy, and I have no idea how to find her again.”

  “And was she a relative of the boy’s?”

  “A neighbor, was what she said.”

  Marge became thoughtful. James could not bear to watch her, trying calmly to solve Lucy’s problem. But this was why Marge was so wonderful. This was why he loved her! She was so in the real world that she could look at real problems and dissect and solve them. She could be kind and gracious while she was doing it. She could be patient and forgiving.

  But could she forgive this? If she knew what this this actually was?

  “What we’ll do,” Marge concluded, “is go to Child Services. I’ll look it up, and I’ll go with you, and we can start there.”

  James felt the orange in the room press down on his eyes. It was as strong as a stoplight. He knew what he needed to do. He closed his eyes against the light. Squinted hard.

  “No,” he said with a painful wince, shaking his head. “You can’t go to Child Services. Nobody is going to Child Services.”

  “And why is that?” Marge said, calm still, but obviously frustrated.

  “Because I know who’s responsible for this boy, and if he goes to Child Services he might never get out. So no. We can’t really take him to Child Services. Nope.”

  “What?” Marge said. “What are you talking about? What do you mean you know who’s responsible for him?”

  James’s eyes were still shut; he could not bring himself to open them to reveal what was in front of him. Marge, Lucy, the boy, the painting.

  “Raul Engales is responsible for him. I have been visiting Raul Engales at a rehabilitation hospital, where he’s been since his accident. He told me about his sister today. Just today, he was worried about her.”

  The room was quiet for a second. When James opened his eyes, he saw Marge and Lucy glaring at him: Marge’s gray eyes, Lucy’s blue eyes, both sets fixated on his face. Both of their pretty mouths agape. Both of their tongues.

  “You know where he is?” Lucy suddenly gasped. “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “Since when are you visiting someone in a rehab clinic?” Marge questioned loudly.

  Lucy and Marge said these things at the exact same time, and their voices, on top of each other, combined to make a double helix of roaring sound in James’s ears, not unlike a siren. Fuck.

  “Wait,” Marge said, looking at James, who would not return her gaze. “James, why would you have told her?” She looked at Lucy. “Why would he have told you anything?”

  Lucy looked up, her eyes as frozen as arctic lakes. James could see regret in them, but it didn’t matter. He knew what he had to do now. He closed his eyes again, swam slowly into the sound.

  “I could have told her when I saw her last,” he said. “Which was last Tuesday, October seventh. I saw her for fifteen days in a row, and we had sex twenty-two times. I had an affair, Marge. It’s o
ver now; it’s done, but it doesn’t excuse it. I’m a terrible man. And I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  The screaming in his brain stopped. There was only the static hum of the orange of the two women he loved, sitting in the same room. There was only Marge’s voice, tight as a balloon, saying: “So this is François Bellamy. You lying sack of shit.”

  James had mostly expected Marge to leave right then, to get up and march out the door and head straight to her mother’s, or her friend Delilah’s, or anywhere where he wasn’t. But he should have known she wouldn’t; she wouldn’t leave for all the same reasons that she would want to, because James was a fuckup of the first degree who she could now officially refuse to trust, and without her, everything would fall apart.

  Marge’s least favorite thing was when things fell apart: piecrusts, finished jigsaw puzzles, lives. Where there was chaos, even of a moderate degree, she took action. She did the thing you were supposed to do, and would not abandon it simply because she felt angry, or because it was hard, or because it was messy. She was a cleaner-upper of messes, a fixer of things. She could not and would not leave James here alone with a child, because James would not know what to do. So she would stay. She would be the glue.

  But not before she told Lucy to leave, with a quick and tearful lecture about what having dignity meant, especially as a beautiful woman. It isn’t enough to be beautiful, James thought he heard her say, though with the ringing in his ears he couldn’t know for sure. Beautiful is for other people. You have to be something for you.

  But when Lucy cried then, in his living room, in front of his wife, James began to see that Marge was not actually mad at Lucy, and that Lucy was not mad at Marge. Even though they were completely different women, even though their only commonality was that they had slept with James, which should make them jealous, or suspicious, or angry with each other, they were on the same team. They were women who had been wronged, and he was the man who had wronged them. When Marge told Lucy that she needed to leave, and that she should leave Julian here with them, at least for the night, the seriousness in her voice was also gentle, as if she had been Lucy once.