Tuesday Nights in 1980 (38 page)

He wanted to cry into the blue square. He wanted to call his mother, whom he had not talked to in close to two years, and tell her about his night. All of them sold, Mom, he would say. Each and every one of them. I've earned millions of dollars, Mom. Are you proud of me? Are you proud of your son? Of course she wouldn't be. Pride wasn't part of her emotional vocabulary. And why was he thinking of his mother? He never thought of his mother; it depressed him. His leg itched with what felt like a fly landing on it, but there was nothing. When he looked up, there were Marge and Julian.

He felt filled with emotion when he saw them walking across the room in their puffy coats, overcome with elation and thankfulness, and for one quick second, he thought he saw Marge's deep red. Or was it the memory of her red? He couldn't tell and it didn't matter. She had come! She had changed her mind and she had come! He didn't care if the red stayed or faded; it didn't matter. He didn't care that he had sold all of his paintings; it didn't matter. She mattered. She was the only thing that mattered.

But when she came closer, James saw the unmistakable signs that she had just been crying. Her gray eyes were glazed over, the lines around her mouth pronounced and shadowed.

He went to her. “You came,” he said, putting his hands on her arms.

“Just quickly,” she said.

“Why quickly?” he said. “There's wine.”

“I see that,” she said. “What, the rich people weren't thirsty?”

They both tried to laugh, failed.

“And don't you look like a big kid,” James said to Julian. He rustled his hair. No response, of course—Julian had not spoken a single word to them since he arrived—but the fact that he was not crying was enough for the rustling of the hair to feel heart-wrenchingly intimate. He looked back up at Marge.

“What's the matter?” he said.

“I'm tired,” she said.

“Me, too,” he said.

“But I'm really tired,” she said. “Of everything.”

“You're tired of me.”

“Yes, James. I'm tired of you.”

“I know,” he said. He looked down at Julian and gave him what he hoped was a kind look. His heart broke.

“I read your book,” she said.

James's face tightened; Marge's red flared.
Stay there,
he willed the color, but he couldn't hold on to it, and it smudged away.

“What book?” he said.

“The pages in your study.”

“That? Marge. Marge, you read
that
? That's just a bunch of crap I've been writing. Not a book. No, there's no book.”

“There is,” she said.

James couldn't bring himself to say anything more about what he had written: a document full of ramblings that Marge never should have read in the first place for all the sad, gross, probably poorly written truths it exposed. He remembered his very first review in
Art Forum
: Marge, kissing his white stomach, telling him:
It's ready, James. But are you?
Marge knew. She knew what things were. And her eyes were steady and perfect. And she was tired, and he did not want to tire her more. Instead, he wanted to take care of her. Rock her in safety. Give her things. Give her everything, because she deserved it.

“I sold it all,” he said.

“I knew you would,” she said.

“Are you proud?” he said.

“Extremely,” she said. Then she bent in and hugged him. Into the collar of his shirt, she whispered: “
He's out.
”

“Oh,” James said. He put his hand on the back of her head. At the very
thought
of Raul Engales, his pupils flooded with blue. The paintings in the gallery sprung toward him: a rap song, the smell of late-spring gardens, the word
caesura.
Marge's red gathered and swelled around her, and his heart chimed and swung.

“He came to the house,” Marge said, pulling away slightly, which felt like a window opening, letting in a gust of too-cold air. James wanted to hug her for always. “I saw him at the door,” she said. “Through the glass. I couldn't bring myself to open it.”

“Okay,” said James, nodding.

“I need your help with this one.”

“Okay,” said James, continuing to nod as if the gesture would somehow bring him confidence, but the colors were swirling around him and Marge, and he wasn't quite sure what he was agreeing to, he just was. He was just agreeing. To Marge. To helping. To the colors. To all of this.

“Good night, James,” she said. She blinked, then turned, then began to walk off, her little white triangle heels clacking on the smooth cement floors. The red that had occurred around her followed her like a cloud, and James noted something different about it . . . some multitudinous quality . . . was it . . . pomegranate? Was it, could it possibly be, the same seed-filled red she had embodied when she was pregnant last year? Could Marge possibly be . . . no, she couldn't leave him here now!

“Wait!” said James, uselessly. “Where are you going? Marge, Julian's here!”

“I trust you, James,” he heard her say. She did not turn around. James watched his wife tuck out the door and disappear. His heart was somewhere near his ankles, pounding. He grabbed for Julian's hand just as the boy started to cry.

“Gonna close up soon!” yelled a fat security guard at the front entrance. “Everybody's gone!”

Everybody was gone. James's colors gradually faded again: fabric that had been out in the sun too long. The edges on everything blurred, but that was just the water gathering in his eyes.

Engales ran across
the street and grabbed the security guard's giant arm. “Are you closing?” he said breathlessly. “I need to get back in.” Upon closer inspection, Engales realized it was José, from the arts building at NYU.

“Hey, I know you,” said José. “You're that fucker that is always sneaking in over at the school!

“You look different now, though,” José was saying, looking Engales up and down. “Something change?”

Engales held up his arm. José said: “Oh, shit.”

“That's right,
oh, shit
. Now would you mind letting me in there? It's important.”

“Always trying to get into places you don't belong!” José said. “It's closed. No more show.”

“José,” Engales said, in Spanish now. “I lost my fucking hand. I have one person in my family, and he's inside. Let me in, José.”

“Jesus,” José said, holding his hands up. “Five minutes, then I'm going out drinking and finding a lady.” He wagged his lips.

“Fine,” Engales said, unamused. Would there have been a time when he would have given José a high five?

Where the room had been brightly lit and bubbly when he was here last, now many of the tracks of bulbs had been turned off, and there was only one rectangle of light toward the back of the room. In it, sitting against the wall in a row, were James and a little boy. James was petting the boy's hair in a way that was unflattering for both of them: Julian's hair was becoming matted to his forehead; James's face was growing bleak with desperation. Julian cried harder.

Engales went toward them, his nervousness eclipsed by intention. He knew they couldn't see him; he was in the shadowy dark area. “It's okay, Juli,” James was saying in his pandering, desperate James voice. Engales felt a proprietary pull—hearing that name aloud, his grandfather's name, a name that was so like Franca to have chosen—and here was James, uttering it in nickname form. He coughed, announcing himself.

“Holy shit, Raul! You scared me.”

Engales ignored James now; he could see the little boy's face, splotchy with tears but already so familiar. The boy hiccupped from the last gulps of his crying. Small head, small body, small shoes, huge eyes. Franca's eyes. Franca's everything. James set him down on the floor. With a sudden, awkward movement Engales crouched down to the boy's level. He grabbed him by the arm with his good hand and the stump of his bad one. He searched him. The world stopped when he pulled the boy's small body tightly to his, wrapping his one arm around his tiny body. The world stopped when he smelled the wet crackers and warm milk and the laundry detergent everyone used in Argentina. He let go quickly and the world spun. The boy looked at him with his big Franca eyes. Engales felt stupid, like he shouldn't have hugged him. The boy would have no idea who he was, he would be frightened, probably—Engales flushed with shame. But then the boy said, through his hiccups, with his little mouse's mouth:

“Are you the Brother?”

It was the first thing he had said in weeks, and though Engales couldn't know this, he felt the weight of it, the newness of it: a voice that had been cooped up and preserved, until now. He looked to James for affirmation, or for something, but James just shrugged, his eyes also moist, his mouth pressed into a straight line. Engales realized that James had probably not understood what Julian had said—it was in Spanish—and that
he
was the only one who could. Because
he
was the brother. He was meant to be responsible now.

Suddenly everything became as clear as a freezing night sky. He was the brother. He was the brother who left the egg yolks to fry in the sun. He was the brother who left his sister at the tops of fire escapes, who wouldn't swim out to her if she were caught in the waves at Mar del Plata, who left her to the spineless men and the kidnappers, while he fled toward high ground.
He can't save you,
Engales had said to his sister about Pascal. But hadn't he meant it about himself? He was the brother who couldn't save his sister, and who would surely not be able to save her son.

He was the brother who
left,
just when he was supposed to stay.

His missing hand clenched and stung as he wheeled around to do what he had already done so many times before: beg New York City for an escape. Beg New York City for a chance in hell.

HAND:
In the shop windows, you're a blur when you run away. The streaky reflection of the swinging arm: only one. The other, without the pendulum of the hand, stays tighter at the side, its arc narrowed permanently. The shop windows reflect the cadence of your heart. There's a beat missing, a lurching, a missing weight on one side, and you deserve this. You are an uneven man. A man who's leaned so far to one side and then fallen, away from everything that ever loved you.

MOUTH:
One, two, three cups of whiskey, four, five, Mexican beers, six, seven in the morning, and you can't go home, oh no, you can't go home yet, because this is as close as you'll get to home in this city: the bar on Second Avenue with the neon clock in the corner that's never told the right time, not ever in its life, not even when you were younger, and you'd just arrived, and time mattered not at all anyway; you were just a boy. Now, there's your face, in the mirror behind the bar. It's heavy, dark, ancient. It's counting: an eyebrow twitch. One, two, three—he must be five or six years old by now, if your own clock is right, five years since you got that letter from your sister with her big news, five years since you'd refused to write back, five years lost and nothing gained, only a body full of alcohol and the sun's coming up already and there's your stupid face, all full of shame and that dumb mole, something you want to pry off with a bottle opener, to distract yourself from the pain with more of it.

ARM:
Telemondo's for cigarettes, and there's Jean-Michel in the back of the store, buying the most expensive bottle of whatever he's buying; he's just had his first huge sale. Best to look away from the mirror of Jean-Michel, a mirror that had once reflected your own potential and now reflects your failure, your missing parts. Hold your arm behind you, so Jean-Michel doesn't see. When he does see, try to leave. When he holds you back,
let him.
Let him pull your sleeve up. Let him give you the only gift he's got: his goofy smile, so warm, then a scribble on what's left of your arm.
SAMO is dead
, he writes, blowing a stray dreadlock from his face.
Let him.
Let him tell you with his goofy smile that the world has not ended. That you haven't lost everything. That nothing is everything. That without things there are still more things. There are still the eyes of another human looking at you, seeing you. There is still writing on an arm. There are still things to take care of, things to be done, things to save. “Go get it,” he says. And you have to, and you will.

EYES:
Because they were just like yours, weren't they? The eyes of that little boy.

J
ulian can't find his pen and therefore cannot fall asleep. It's imaginary, he
knows,
but he also knows that knowing things doesn't always help. For example, his mother knows everything. So why the heck isn't she here?

This is the ceiling: red and blue lights, twisting, like a kaleidoscope he had tried out at the market back home. This is a kaleidoscope: you pick up the skinny pole and look into it and there will be a circle full of colored shapes that shift and spin when you move the pole around. His pen is hiding somewhere in his brain and his heart is clomping like a horse on the loose. His eyes are open as if toothpicks are holding them up.

This is the cat that Julian can hear crying outside: lost. Cats don't sound lost unless they're lost. He wishes there was a certain cry for boys to make when they were lost, but there isn't.

This is who's next to him on the bed: the Brother. It's the Brother from his mother's story, and Julian knows for sure because he did a quiz.

“If you're really the Brother,” he had made sure to ask when the Brother came to pick him up that morning at James's house, “what color is our door at home?” “Red,” the Brother had answered. Good. “If you're the Brother, what's my mom's favorite food?” “Butter.” Good.