He’d attempted to finish the work at the apartment, where he’d been doing most of his work of late. François’s apartment, since Lucy had moved in, had become a den of art and sex, each fueling the other, improving the other, depending on the other to reach its maximum potential. Mouth on neck, brush to canvas, hands on breasts, color on paper — the summer had been one of the most productive, painting-wise, that he’d ever had. Lucy sat in the bedroom with him while he sketched and smoked. She sometimes sketched, too, in a notebook he had gotten her at Pearl Paint. Sometimes she just sat in the corner with a green Popsicle, watching him, which he surprisingly didn’t mind at all. Usually someone watching him would annoy him, but it was as if her love of the paintings, the way she looked at them and studied them and talked about them, brought them to life. With her eyes on them, the paintings suddenly became real. No longer were they something that existed only in his mind or heart, but in the mind and heart of someone he loved.
Yes, loved; Engales had transformed rather quickly from a ladies’ man into a man in love. Unlike any other woman he’d dealt with, Lucy didn’t detract from his art, she added. She was not separate from the painting, but a part of it. That there was someone in existence who could inspire him to be better at what he loved, and to love it even more, was perhaps one of the most stellar of the many stellar reasons to be around the bright creature of Lucy every day and all the time. On a stoop with a cigarette, on an overturned tire with a beer, on Bleecker Street at midnight, kissing in a darkened doorway. She came with him to shows — she’d boldly told Jeff Koons she didn’t understand the point of his vacuums, to which Koons had replied lightly: Are you bored? Yes? Then you understand—and she came with him to the squat, where she wove herself into the tapestry of artists quite gracefully, asking intelligent questions about Toby’s latest project (blindfolding himself for a week, in an exploration of total darkness, about which Lucy had queried, How will you present something so intangible to the public?). She’d get as drunk and delightful as any of them, and was game for joining in on whatever performance or experiment they were getting up to that night, be it a sing-along to one of Selma’s melancholy guitar melodies or a work session where they improved on sections of the building with stolen hammers and borrowed saws and recycled nails. Occasionally Engales felt like Lucy’s teacher, explaining why a conceptual artist had chosen to cut holes in the floor of abandoned buildings, or rejigger a typewriter as a critique on the media, but at other times he felt like her student. Lucy was not burdened by the scene yet, the hype or the desire for fame or the jaded conversations or the endless critical dialogue. Whatever innocence she had (if easily stolen) was matched with intelligence (if naive), and she often saw things in a nuanced, surprising, and, in Engales’s mind, brilliant way. She’d stand in front of a sculpture and tweak her head and pout her mouth and say something like, It’s ugly, but that’s why it’s good.
Lucy gave everything new energy, a new perspective. The sour-smelling herbs of Chinatown, the sweat on the subway, the sirens at night: the grossest of sensations became appealing to him, with her there to give them meaning. The all-night excursions to the Mudd Club or Max’s became rife with stolen moments of pleasure; they’d find each other in a crowd and somehow it would feel new each time, like they’d just met right then. (I found a blade of grass tacked to the bathroom wall, she’d say. It was so beautiful.) They’d escape together back to his apartment, where she’d lie in bed and watch an enormous moth in the upper corner of the room — they’d named him Max, after the venue where they had just spent the night gawking over at Andy Warhol’s table, then not caring about Andy Warhol because they had each other. And then he’d start painting. It could be midnight or morning when they got home, but he’d always start painting. You’re a maniac, she’d say. You’re a mouse, he’d say with a grin. The paintings piled up around them, their own little fort.
Something would happen with the paintings, this much was clear. Both of them could feel it: the pressure that the paintings built, the inevitability of their success; it was only a matter of when. The idea of fame hovered over him. Lucy stroked that idea, cradled it and kissed it; her belief in him was total. And when Winona George called, the idea of fame consolidating into a mass and then landing, they leaped around the apartment like children, their hands wrapped around each other’s forearms, their blood so bubbly they felt drunk.
But as the show grew nearer, Engales had become frazzled and undone, and Lucy’s presence, her eyes on the paintings and her body in the room, became a reminder that her love for the paintings was possibly not enough. There was a whole world in which he could fail, and if he did, she would be witness to that failure. He imagined this James Bennett person reviewing the show, what he might say. If he panned it, could Engales handle it? And if he glorified it, could he handle that, either? Painting had been his salvation through everything, and now it was going to be judged, potentially wrecked, by a public he didn’t necessarily trust. The apartment had become full of these humming doubts. Flies buzzed around and got caught in mounds of paint. Lucy buzzed around, too, annoying him now. Suddenly, under the stress of the world outside their bubble, Lucy’s presence had become a liability.
“I’ll miss you too much,” she’d said before he’d left for the studio this morning, still lying naked in the bed, draped in the sheet of early fall light.
“Don’t,” he’d said.
The studio smelled like it always did, turpentine and cleaning fluid, plus Arlene: her signature combination of body odor, Egyptian musk, and yerba maté, which, inspired by Engales’s Argentineanism, she had started drinking out of a gourd. Arlene had been acting different since New Year’s, unsettled and easily annoyed, and she had developed a new antagonism toward Engales that he was pretty sure had to do with Lucy. He was spending too much time with that girl, she’d said more than once. And not enough time in the studio.
“I’m painting more than ever,” he told her calmly each time, but she shook her head.
“I’m just saying nothing great ever came from being in love,” she’d said.
Engales had given her a skeptical look and she had yelled, “It’s true! Name one genius thing that came out of someone fucking their way into oblivion!”
“Human life?” he had said, with as much actual annoyance as humor.
“Human life is crap,” she had said, and then she had mumbled something under her breath, and Engales could have sworn it had the tone of a confession, though he couldn’t be sure.
Now Arlene stood wide-legged on her wobbly ladder, holding her gourd in one hand and her brush in the other. Her underarm hair spurted out in a shock of orange, and Engales imagined painting that hair — a spiky orange scribble with a dry-bristled brush. He felt a softness for her even as he ignored her; he probably always would. He pulled a painting of a limp-faced Chinese woman, holding a head of bok choy like a trophy, from the back of his unfinished stack.
He had seen the Chinese woman on his first week in New York City, and though that was years ago now, he still remembered her face almost perfectly. One part of the face was drooping, as if the skin that covered it had lost all elasticity, and the fat of the cheek had migrated down into the hammock of loose skin. He had stared at her for probably too long, until she looked up from her bok choy and directly at him. He saw in her eyes the sort of pain that he guessed was reserved for the deformed; the eyes seemed to say, This is how it is, how it will always be, and there’s nothing I can do about it except keep living. He pitied her. He remembered the pity just as well as he remembered the face. He also remembered how he had felt the urge to smile at her because of this pity, but had then forced himself to revoke the pity and the smile, which seemed to satisfy her: she had toasted him with her leafy greens. It was then, on his very first day, that he knew he had found his place in New York, a place for the deranged and wrecked and bold, a place where pity couldn’t exist if it wanted to because there would have to be too much of it. The woman had wobbled away with her cloth bags, and as she did, he thought he heard her begin to sing.