Tuesday Nights in 1980 (34 page)

N
ovember is the color of the outside of an eggplant. It smells like the inside of an old woman's jewelry box.
Get outta bed
, you'd want to tell November if you saw it.
Do something.
Winter nudges at the city with its cold shoulder. The edges of windows become shores of chill. Cashmere emerges. Wool, not yet. The month lumbers, as if half-asleep. It's waiting. It knows. November is a month that
knows.
It knows that hearts everywhere are about to break; happens this time every year.

Marge and James
circle each other in their little house, like animals who haven't met. James wags for attention, panders; Marge sniffs. Their voices shake when they say certain words:
Julian, strawberry, home.
Marge could leave at any minute. She doesn't. Marge will leave when Julian is gone. Or else she won't. They kiss once, after dinner, when both of them feel like crying. They sleep separately. Julian cries nightly, like a ritual. To fix it, give Julian a pen and paper; he'll quiet down, then draw forever. James tacks Julian's drawings up on the wall like substitutes for his paintings, which have been taken down, wrapped in plastic, stacked against the wall by the door. In some ways but not all, it works.

The drawing is just one of the things they've learned about Julian from the letter they'd had translated by Mrs. Consuelo the dry cleaner. Other things: he's almost six years old, with a birthday in February. Smart for his age; no English. His mother's in trouble. Raul Engales is his only hope.

They have exactly four weeks until Engales is let out of the Rising Sun. James hadn't wanted to press charges, but Spinoza had called the cops anyway; they'd let him off the hook, with good behavior, if he stayed at the Rising Sun for another month. This knowledge has been obtained via Lupa, who has thought to call James's house from her own, where, she says almost sadly, she is cooking soup for everyone. For four weeks, though, Julian is theirs.

Movies show at
8:00
P.M.
on Sundays. Engales watches romantic comedies, regular comedies, horrors. Another movie plays in his head: his sister standing above a boy. Rewind.
His sister standing above a boy.
Rewind.
His sister standing above a boy.
Back in his room, he watches the girl across the street pull off her shirt again, look directly into his eyes. She has found him. He presses his body up against the glass: his hand, his jeans, his tongue.

A group of
mothers meets in a badly lit room. There is a wilting balloon in the corner that reads
Happy One-Oh.
Someone's brought coffee in a thick thermos, but no one drinks it. They hold their hands like little personal knots in front of them on the table.
We still have everywhere east of A,
the mother in the red beret says.
We've been looking for months now,
the mother in the black, large-shouldered jacket says.
What's that supposed to mean?
says the mother in the emerald terry-cloth robe. She hasn't taken off the robe since July. She won't take it off until he's found, one year and seventeen days from now, crammed into the sideboards of a SoHo basement, his backpack the most alive thing about him.

At the Museum
of Natural History, Julian points up to the big blue whale. Marge holds his hand; James can see the tightness of her grip from the other side of the room. The light in the room is as blue as the whale, not because James's mind is making it so, but only because the museum's lit it that way: a false oceanic depth.

James thinks about how Leonardo da Vinci painted using aerial perspective, which was based on the idea that the atmosphere absorbed certain colors. Objects that were closer to the painter always had more blue in them. Objects that were farther away, less blue.

It doesn't matter, he thinks now, whether he's close or far from the things he loves most in the world. He's screwed. They all are. Marge has fallen in love with the boy. He can see it in the way she is using her arms. It's as obvious as the giant mammal that hangs above them. That's the thing about love, he thinks. There's nothing to be done about it.

At Part Deux,
the abandoned Chinese market on Grand Street where the members of the squat have taken up residence, a line has been drawn. Literally: Selma Saint Regis has drawn a chalk line, in a circle around her body, on the gnarling floorboards. “I'll sit inside this circle until they force me out,” she says. “And if Reagan wins, I'll refuse to eat.” She's practically hysterical, hasn't eaten anything real in days. “
Shhh
,” says Toby, who grabs her under the armpits, pulls her up, drags her out of the circle and into their makeshift bed. “It'll never last,” she says to Toby. “Nothing does,” says Toby. “Not this,” she says. “
Us.
” Toby nods solemnly. Nothing does, nothing does.

Lucy approaches a
tall woman with a name tag that reads:
SPINOZA
. Spinoza wags a finger that's as big as the fake dicks in the porn shop under Jamie's house. “Na ah ah!” Spinoza says: a power tattle. “Nobody sees Raul Engales anymore. Nobody can see that man at this point in time—he's got a month left at least. The law. And to think I fired one of my best nurses 'cause of him.” Spinoza smacks her jaw. Lucy drifts back out onto East Seventh Street. Across the way, the empty squat complains:
I haven't had any fun in weeks.
She knows how it feels. She goes back to Jamie's, where she's reassumed her old position as the good girl of the house. She takes a shower, runs her hands over the rusting tiles. Uses a lotion that smells like lavender. Still feels dirty. She hasn't been the good girl of the house for as long as she can remember. She touches her own hands, thinks of her mother for a long time.

“I'm pretending,” says
Marge, to her coffee.

“I know,” says James, to his bleeding eggs. The sky outside is the color of sky.

“That it's not going to end,” Marge says.

“I know,” James says.

The eggs make James think of Franca, a person he has never met and never will, whose letter Marge had translated by the lady at the Laundromat, whose translation had made him cry.

The sky, when he looks up and out the window, makes him think of the man he was supposed to be but never will.

A truck double
-parks on Jane Street, prompts honks from a line of impatient cabbies. Its mouth yawns open in lazy anticipation of a life's worth of art.

I
f there was such a thing as a mixture of snow and fog, it was what was present on the day of Engales's release from the Rising Sun: the second Tuesday in December. He had been tucked away, in one brightly colored, airless room or another, for almost two months now, which made the air out here feel even denser with moisture, as if the city itself were one giant cloud. He couldn't help wondering, as he emerged into the free, chilled universe, if this could perhaps be a dream. Or if all of it had been, his whole life, maybe.

He stood on the stoop of the Rising Sun with a small sack containing things Darcy had given him as parting gifts—a set of playing cards and a poster, rolled up, of an exotic woman in a bikini drinking a bottle of Jim Beam. He was wearing one of Darcy's suits, which he had won in a breakneck game of Loba de Menos, though Darcy would have given it to him anyway. Darcy had liked Engales from the beginning, and became even more invested in him when he heard the saga of his sister's son; he'd had a son once himself, Darcy explained, though Engales did not dare ask why he no longer did. “Go find that boy,” Darcy had said when he handed over the obsessively pressed suit: gray, with white pinstripes. “Go find that boy and look good for that boy and tell that boy he's loved.”

That had been Engales's plan, not that he had another option. He couldn't
not
find Franca's boy. He couldn't
not
take care of him. He had spent every moment of the last month thinking about him: while he attempted alphabets with his left hand—he was fairly competent with it now—and while Debbie kissed his neck in the physical-therapy room, and while he played cards with Darcy during social hour. Thoughts of the boy had become the focus of his very limited universe. What would his hair look like? Would he have Franca's teeth? Would he be shy and funny, like Franca was? Or bold and brash, like Engales was? Or worst: Would he be spineless and annoying, like Pascal? Engales had played out whole scenes in his head: Franca showing up in New York and the two of them taking the boy to Central Park, or, more realistically and yet less appealing, the same Central Park excursion with Lucy.

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.