HEADS: Bemused nodding when they’re chatting, thoughtful tilting when they gaze at the walls, crazy backward thrusting when they open their happy mouths to laugh. The heads in the gallery move with the nonchalance that comes with being empty. The heads in the gallery move with the nonchalance that comes with being whole.
HANDS: Selma’s on Toby’s back. Toby’s on his own hips. Regina’s over her mouth when she eats the hummus dip that no one ever eats. Horatio’s around a plastic cup of red wine. Winona’s in the air, gesticulating flippantly toward the walls. Oh, darlings, she’s saying, probably, like a cartoon of someone who cares about art.
MOUTH: Cigarette.
BODY: A slow dissolve of his own flesh, as he watches the room of his old life breathe and laugh without him. Soon his body will be gone completely, like the smoke he exhales and like the shadows he stands in, which will disappear come morning.
HEART: Maurizio, the butcher from Calle Brasil, holds a lamb’s heart in his hands. He isn’t supposed to be here at all — Maurizio is from another time, another part of his life and another series of paintings — and yet Engales sees a little red dot below him, the mark that means he’s been sold. The heart he holds drips blood onto the nodding head of someone blond.
HEAD: The someone blond is the only someone blond. The head is Lucy’s head, translucent in its brightness, unmistakable in its brightness, terrible in its brightness. Lucy’s head is a siren and a scream and a stupid ball that Engales wants to throw. What the fuck is she doing here? She is talking to Winona George, whose own hair spouts from her head like a graying palm tree. Winona George and someone else. Winona George and a man whose face Engales cannot see. A man in a very ugly and somewhat familiar white suit jacket.
NOSE: Engales presses his to the bottom corner of the gallery window. Through the fog of his breath he watches a transformation occur before him. He watches Lucy’s face morph from disinterested to interested (this he sees in her forehead, which creases between the brows when she wants something). He watches Winona retreat from the conversation and become absorbed into another (Winona is like a sponge, wringing herself out onto someone and then moving on to soak in someone else). He watches the man in the white suit jacket put his hand on Lucy’s shoulder. He watches a man put his hand on Lucy’s shoulder. And then he sees, unmistakably, this:
Tilt of chin. Sparkle of half-closed eye. Half smile, no teeth. And finally — here it is — eyes all the way open, pupils floating to the top when she looks up, I’m yours, they say, she knows it, I’m yours.
Engales remembered the look on Lucy’s face from that first night at the Eagle: the look that meant she loved him, and that he would love her. He remembered, also, how when she laughed and the laugh sparkled like her shirt did, that he hadn’t wanted to love her. Love, like luck, was for the lucky. Love was for the people who could afford to lose it, for those who had room in their lives for loss, whose quota of losses had not already been filled. “Orphans shouldn’t fall in love,” Raul remembered telling Franca once, in one of their debates about the legitimacy of her relationship with Pascal Morales. Franca had glared at him. “You’re wrong,” she had said shakily. “Orphans have to fall in love.”
Apparently his sister had been right. Because though Engales had tried to avoid falling in love with Lucy, though he’d tried to sleep with other women in the beginning of their time together, and tried to avoid calling her his girlfriend for a number of months, it was as if there had been no choice. He was him and she was her. She was her, with her very own set of intriguing contradictions, her specific combination of deviousness and delusion and delight, of half-formed wit and fully formed wonder, with the matchbooks she left in his pocket, the hot air she breathed when she slept, her innocence and her desire to destroy that innocence. She was her and he was him. And they were them and this was love.
But he regretted ever having met her now, ever having fallen for her trick flame, as he watched her betray him so easily. She had come here, to this show, when she knew what had happened to him. For all he knew she had even helped to orchestrate it; no one else had the key to François’s place, where all his paintings were. She had worn that same sparkling shirt. And she had tilted her head in her very special way for another man, another man who she was now following through the crowd, through the door, and out into the same night shadows Engales was hiding in.
He ducked back into his corner. His skin grew hot and his head slammed with barbaric thoughts: run after her; smack her with the stump of his arm; find a knife somehow, put it in the back of the white suit. But instead, he followed them. In the shadows, like a creepy, crippled spy. They were walking in synch and talking and laughing. The man — Engales had still not seen his face — was telling some sort of story, gesticulating with his pale hands. On the back of the white suit jacket, Engales noted a black stain, as if the man had sat in paint. Slob, Engales thought. And to take the judgment a step further: Nobody wears a white suit anymore. They were on Second Avenue now. And they were at East Tenth now. And then they were in front of Engales’s own apartment now. And then they were BOTH. GOING. INSIDE.
As the heavy door of his own apartment building slammed behind them, Engales heaved out of his shadow and made a noise with his mouth that to anyone watching would have been called a roar, but to him felt like the only thing available, the last noise left in the world. He tried to conjure what he had felt in the hospitaclass="underline" He did not want her. He did not want her. He did not want her. And yet it didn’t feel that way. He suddenly wanted her desperately, hatefully, stupidly, entirely. He wanted to feel how he had felt with her before this all happened: invincible, like a comet that could only move forward and would never burn out. He wanted to dance with her at Eileen’s and have breakfast with her at Binibon, and he wanted to touch her skin with both of his hands, wrapping them around her little body with complete, satisfying control. He wanted to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge with her, like they had done only a few weeks ago, up the slow, red hill of it and into a sea of men with black hats and curls dangling from their heads like springs, men he would paint later that night. He wanted to be in the middle of the bridge again, telling her about his dream. He would rise to the top, he had said in the middle of the bridge, just as the late summer breeze had picked up. Like a piece of gold in a pan full of sand. It was something he had never said out loud before, to anyone, but she made him want to say it. He would rise to the top, he said again, this time out into the East River, to the five boroughs, to the skyline, to the sky. Like a piece of gold in a pan full of sand.
But that was not his fate, was it? And did it take something like this — a total and complete ruining — to begin to acknowledge that fate existed at all, and that a terrible one had befallen him? An image of Lucy’s armpit flashed into his head. That little hollow space: a gray, intimate shadow. He imagined her lifting her shirt. Tilting her head. Sucking a cock. He flung his hand, hard, into the building’s brick wall. He felt a rush of blood seep from his stitches, not to be contained by the world’s most pointless wad of gauze.
LIFE IS CONFUSING AT THIS POINT — SAMO