Tuesday Nights in 1980 (14 page)

“This is the ice,” he said. “And here are the wells. And the glasses rack up like so. And you want to be sure not to use the Coke button here. 'Cause Sprite comes out.”

Lucy took the soda gun in her hand. She tested the sprayer tentatively, coaxing a foam of Coke from its mouth, which landed in a stainless-steel sink.

“And here are Jamie's matchbooks,” Randy said, pulling one of the white squares from a candy jar and tossing it to Lucy. She carefully fingered the little booklet, and when Randy told her to, opened it. On the inside was a message:
DON'T BE CRAZY. BE WILD.

Lucy laughed once but then didn't know if she should be laughing, so she stopped. “What are these?”

“One of Jamie's projects,” Randy said. “She writes down the things that the guys say to her, the guys she sleeps with. She's one of those creative types, you know? Not like me. I'm just . . . regular.”

“Oh, you're not regular, Randy.”

“It's fine,” Randy said. “I don't mind. I don't need to be an artist. There are enough of those in this city, I'll tell you that.”

“So Jamie is an artist?”

“Let's just say she's not sleeping with those guys for the money. Although there's that, too, I guess. I'm not one to explain it, but it's all part of some big art project. She tapes them. Sets up a camera. Then she sort of leads them into things. Put on my lingerie, do a dance, cry like a baby. She's got these miserable Wall Street guys on tape, acting like fools.”

“Isn't that sort of . . . fucked up?”

“Isn't life sort of fucked up?”

Lucy smiled down at her matchbook, then tucked it into her pocket. So Jamie was an artist. She lived with an artist. The thought made her heart quicken.

“But don't bring it up with her,” Randy said, now sounding tentative, rubbing the part between his nose and his mouth. “She's not into talking about it. I guess you could say she's not really into the whole artist
thing,
you know? She's more of a lone wolf. Says she wants someone to find the tapes when she dies.”

Lucy was quiet; she watched Randy suck in a batch of stale air and raise his arms to stretch.

“That's about it for the tour, really!” Randy said. “If you don't know what's in a drink? Ask your customer. Your customer always knows.”

But there were no customers yet, at four in the afternoon, and Lucy stood behind the sink wondering if this was indeed her fate: an empty bar with dust shimmering in the sunlight, an empty life.

But quickly the empty life began to fill with bar regulars (Sandy the shoe-repair guy and Pat the failed writer and Gabby the hickey-boasting hooker), and Jamie's crew of men friends, and bits of toxic white powder and slices of the moon, spotted in the valleys between the buildings after her shifts, close to 4:00
A.M.
She began to know the streets (Sullivan, Delancey, Mott) and the subways (
screech, ding, swoosh, spark
) and the outfits (big boots, big shirts, small pants or small boots, small shirts, big pants). And with her post at the Eagle came extraordinarily easy access to one of the things New York had in as much abundance as pretzels:
men.

Bret with one
t.
Large loft, small penis, too many candles, who cared, she liked him. Small penis or not, he didn't like her enough not to move to California three days after their meeting, for a job at a computer company that had been started in someone's garage.

Tom with no shirt on, offered to help her carry a mattress up to her apartment. Fell onto the mattress and fucked; when Lucy woke up, he had migrated to Jamie's bed.

A woodworker whose name she didn't know who took her to pancakes at Pearl Diner and kissed her in the subway, who when she asked him his name at the end of the night said:
married.

And on and on; the men adored and then disposed of her. With each of them she felt briefly and tightly tethered, hopeful that they would deliver her to that place that she craved: the deep dark cavern of love and lust, the place where longing stopped. But none of them did, and in between her encounters with them, and usually even during, she felt deeply alone. And besides, when she thought about it hard enough, from the part of her that craved something beyond just a body in the bed, she knew they did not interest her. She briefly tried to turn her experiences with them into a project, like Jamie had, but she knew it wasn't hers. What
was
hers? She didn't know. For now it was the twelve-foot expanse of mahogany that she wiped a hundred times a night, behind which she had started to feel almost, if not totally, at home; by December the smell of the old limes didn't bother her anymore.

As the months grew colder (cold was something that she
knew,
from the endless, deep winters in Ketchum) she actually began to feel a tinge of comfort in the chaos that was her new life—the street fights and the snow trudging and the late nights—and to take a sort of young-person solace in her loneliness, floating nicely in her melancholy, which was reminiscent of her teenage years in Idaho, the sad mountains, the ease of getting caught up in her own plight. This was part of the waiting, she knew. She knew if she waited long enough it would happen. The big bang, the cosmic crash, the delightful disturbance that would determine her true city fate.

Of course that was back when Lucy still believed in fate at all. When she still held superstitions—if she said things out loud, she felt they wouldn't come true, and if she wished for things hard enough, she thought they might. First stars, worry dolls, lucky pennies, matchbooks—she had alternately believed in these as things that might alter her entire course in the world. That postcard on the side of the road was one of these things. Jamie's red lipstick was one of these things. And Randy, who randomly invited her to be a bartender at the Eagle on Bleecker Street, he was one, too. She let herself believe that all of this—coming to this city, taking this job—was all a part of a cosmic plan for something big to happen in her very small life. She just had to wait. She had to wait until she had mixed a million drinks. Until the matchbook she pulled from the jar read:
KISS ME HARDER.
Until time tipped past midnight and it was technically Tuesday and officially 1980. She just had to wait until the crowd died down and parted and the noise around her silenced and the red chili pepper lights were the only lights left in the world—for something, or someone, to change her life.

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?
The song was still playing in Lucy's head when the black mole—which stood like a monument paying homage to the idea of beauty—began its journey toward her face. In this suspended moment lived all of the questions: Would he be like all the others? Would he kiss her over the bar and then disappear off the planet? Or would he, like her deep stomach was telling her he would,
love her
?

His lips! His lips! His lips! Due to his lips, she knew that this would
not
be like all the others. Due to his lips, she knew that he was darker, deeper: that thing she had been looking for. Due to his lips, her old acquaintances would be forgot forever, and there would be only him.

When he pulled away she reached into her pocket for one of Jamie's matchbooks that she'd nabbed earlier that day, slid it across the bar to the man.
KISS ME HARDER
, it read. He did.

He stayed with her while she closed down the bar, following her like an eager dog while she scrubbed the counters, kissing her incrementally while she counted the tips. Then he carried her, literally on his back, across town to the squat, as he called it, where the latest part of a huge party was still going on. He introduced her to everyone—Boss the African jazzman and Horatio
—Horatio, get low!
Engales yelled to him—in his white underwear, held high with yellow suspenders. And Selma, with her newly cropped, exotically spiky head of hair, a voice like a cocoon—
ohhhhhh, Saint Selma
—and her small saggy breasts, which were displayed in plaster casts all over the room. (“See those?” Selma said, pointing to one of the sculptures. “Those are my titties. Take one home if you want.”)
So this was where they were,
Lucy thought. All the artists she had been searching for, who, unlike Jamie, were not cloaking their projects but parading them around in this insane, deteriorating, divine palace of messy, outrageous
art.

Lucy spotted a small man painting himself, literally, into one of the corners of the room. Her heart leaped. She knew that man! It was the man from the subway station! Those were his lines—so sure, so graphic, so magical; she pulled at Engales's hand.

“I know him!” she said giddily.

“You know Keith?” Engales said.

“Yes!” Lucy said, bouncing. “I saw him painting in the subway. He was painting a penis.”

She felt embarrassed right after she said it, both for the word
penis
and for the fact that she had claimed to know someone from having seen him across the subway tracks. But Engales found it charming, apparently, and smiled, kissed her on the forehead.

“You are very adorable, Spot, do you know that?” he said. He then led her down a darkened hallway and into an empty, cement-floored room where he pressed her up against the drywall, looked into her eyes with a crazy, almost capitalistic determination, and said: “
Spot, you are the American dream.”
And all she could do was laugh the very particular laugh of a girl in love. Tilt of chin. Sparkle of half-closed eyes. Half smile, no teeth. Then—here it was—eyes all the way open, pupils floating to the top when she looked up,
I'm yours
, they said, she knew it,
I'm yours.

As the squat's
party faded, he tugged her out into the street and up the five black blocks to his apartment, which was filled with nothing but his reckless, wonderful paintings. He set her down on the bed and told her to: “Hold still, I'm going to paint you.”

There was this: him reaching like a madman for paint and brushes, a long spell of sitting still when her body was aching for more of him, the scratchy collar of her sequined shirt, the resulting picture—herself as a giant, mystical thing, a beautiful monster.

And then there was this: him leaving the painting and climbing onto the bed with her and grabbing her head with his two hands.

They devoured each other. And surely (his tongue in her ear), most definitely (his sticky body on top of hers), undeniably (his eyes like he loved her), he would change her fate. She woke up the next morning to see the still-wet picture of herself, knowing forever had started, if forever were what forever felt like, which was a year in New York City when you were in love.

U
nder normal circumstances, James and Marge would not be uptown on a Tuesday night. They would especially not be at Sotheby's auction house, a place where James had personally vowed never to set foot. But James was not operating under normal circumstances tonight. He was operating under the circumstances of the worst day of his life, if he had to cast a judgment, a day within a series of days, encased within a series of months, during which he saw no color besides the color that was
actually
there, heard no sound besides the annoying racket of reality. And so the night was not yellow, as it should have been, and Marge was not red, as she should have been, and Marge was not holding a small baby, as she should have been, but was instead holding her arms around her waist, as depressed as he was to be here. They were here to sell James's beloved Richard Estes painting, the one of the storefront window on Thirty-fourth Street, a favorite in his personal collection that he had promised himself he'd never sell.

The auction room was vast, filled with the tinkling sound of hypothesis and worry and excitement.
Who would buy what?
The black curtains scalloped like a tide.
How much would it sell for?
Someone's dress caught the light.
Who would surprise them tonight, and how would they do it?
The room handled the murmur expertly, parsing it and folding it into the very architecture of the space, into the cuffs of the men's shirtsleeves, the soft curls of women's hair; into the chandeliers, which tentacled around the ceiling like crystal-studded octopi, working flecks of anxious light around the room.

James waited impatiently for the larger quiet to settle in, the quiet he imagined expressed the essence of an event like this, a quiet that spoke of refinery and nervous patience. In the meantime he scanned the room, wondering who might purchase the Estes. A woman with a beak for a nose. A man with a choke-making bow tie. He doubted anyone would find in his painting what he once did: the smell of doughnuts; the taste of rain; the color of his wife's nylons.

What he had once found.
What he had seen and felt, and smelled, and
lived by
his whole adult life. It had gone missing in what felt like the flash of a camera: one white bulb breaks, and a life is captured and frozen in however it existed in that moment.

That moment: midnight on Winona George's balcony, a cold sea of hair and diamonds. A collective chanting of the countdown—
five, four, three—
and snow begins to fall, and then the old year breaks into the new one and the sky breaks open with confetti, and there is sloppy kissing and loud
hurrahs!
And James and Marge are kissing and the world is spinning with all its spangled bravado. A drunken man with a mustache and his drunken redheaded companion make their merry rounds, tangoing across the balcony. Glitter falls. The redheaded companion in her off-base bohemian dress falls, clutched in the mustache's besuited arms. And they fall right into and on top of Marge.
Holy fuck!
says the bohemian girlfriend with a laugh, too old to be a girlfriend, James now sees, and
Oopsy daisy!
yells her suited suitor. And this is the moment—Marge on the ground saying,
I'm okay, I'm okay
, trying to laugh, James saying frantically,
It's just that she's . . . pregnant
—when everything breaks.