“If I tell you something,” he said. “Do you promise to maintain that I am just odd, and not totally crazy?”
“Okay,” she found herself saying. Tell me, she found her eyes saying, with their flitting lashes. This was something she knew how to do, flit her lashes to say tell me.
“You are very yellow,” he said. He had a bald spot, Lucy saw. A shiny, ugly bald spot.
“I’m yellow?” she said, and she noticed that her voice was becoming playful in a way she was not intending. “I’m yellow. Hm. I think I’ll have to go with crazy on this one.”
“Understood,” James said, smiling lightly. “I just thought I’d tell you anyway, though. It’s very rare, at least lately, that I see such a bright color.”
Lucy found herself struggling to point her thoughts back to Engales: she was sad, remember? And yet they kept wandering back into the present moment, back to the present person, back to James. Her ache was being quickly transformed into a longing, and the lower parts of her body felt hot and tingly, against her deepest will.
“I don’t like being here,” she said suddenly.
“Why’s that?” James asked. “Because a crazy man is telling you that you are the color of a zucchini flower? It’s that exact color — of a zucchini flower!”
“It makes me sad,” she said, ignoring James’s odd joke, if it could have been called a joke. “To be around all these paintings.”
“Are you going to leave, then?” James said, with surprising seriousness.
“Are you going to come with me, then?” she said, with surprising seriousness.
It was too fast, this back-and-forth, and Lucy regretted it as soon as she said it. She watched James’s face fall with indecision.
“Oh,” he said, playing with his hands.
“Oh, you don’t have to,” she said. “Never mind. I mean. I just meant walking me home. That’s all I meant. Because I’m going to leave. But you don’t have to. I mean I don’t even know you.”
“Oh, um, sure!” He brightened, thankful for her gift of a way out. “A walk sounds great. It’s so cold.”
For some reason both of them laughed at this, and again, Lucy wondered why she was laughing when no joke had been told. Was she laughing at him? Was she laughing at this man, in his funny outfit, with his bumbling manner? Or at herself, for feeling intrigued by him, for talking to him at all?
But no, she knew as they wove through the crowd and emerged into the street, and then walked down it easily and silently, leaving everyone who was anyone behind, not caring or remembering that the people from the squat might see them leave together (and maybe, in that scary, off-limits part of herself, even wanting them to). She wanted to laugh again, so she did. She wanted to toss her arm through the triangle of James Bennett’s arm, so she did. There was nothing funny and there was nothing fun about any of it, about anything. But she was just laughing. Like a person does. Because she had to. She had to be swept up, carried away. She had to disappear. She had to be alive in this moment. A moment and a mood that just felt right, and then, as they neared Raul Engales’s apartment on the alley off Avenue A, just wrong enough to light it on fire.
LUCY’S YELLOW
He had only meant to walk her home.
He had only meant to walk her home.
He had only meant to walk her, the girl in his painting, home. Because it was late at night and girls like her — young girls, blond, beautiful girls, girls who have paintings made in their likeness — should not be walking through the dangerous streets of downtown New York alone.
Right?
Right?
He had only meant to walk her home. Instead, he was entering his own home with the colors of another woman all over him, the colors that had changed everything. Under the influence of the colors — which had pounced on him like predatory cats when he walked into the Winona George Gallery—meaning itself changed almost entirely. Under the influence of his colors, meaning to do something meant practically nothing, just like meaning to make a quiet entrance when your wife was asleep upstairs didn’t make the third stair up to his bedroom lose its creak.
I didn’t mean to, he wanted to say to the stair. But you did, the stair whined back at him. You did. He had.
He had gone to Raul Engales’s show that evening with a soaring heart; it was finally here, the evening he’d been waiting for. The show had been all he could think about for weeks, ever since he’d bought the Engales painting, stared at it for twenty-four hours straight (to Marge’s confusion and chagrin), and then promptly called Winona to find out what she knew about this Raul Engales person, and how he could see more of his work.
“Oh, didn’t you know?” Winona had said. “It was me who put it up for sale! Kind of a test, really, to see if he would sell well. I do that sometimes, at those little things Sotheby’s does, where they bring in the hopefuls at the end there. Turns out he sold for quite a lot, as you know, James, but I wasn’t expecting it to be you, of all people, I mean I thought you were above auctions!”
“I was. I mean, I am…”
“Anyway,” Winona broke in. “He’s my new guy. Fabulous. The talent. The energy. Just fabulous. I’m throwing him into the ring with a solo show. Little bastard hasn’t returned any of my calls, of course, but then again I’m sure he’s busy painting! Prolific, that one.”
A solo show. The thought thrilled James. He imagined a whole gallery full of Raul Engales paintings, a whole sea of sensations. And he imagined meeting Raul Engales finally — the man who’d conjured the butterfly wings and angelic music on New Year’s — and shaking his hand; he imagined a spark, literally, flying from that hand.
“Does the fact that you spent an exorbitant amount of money on his painting mean that you will review his show?” Winona said, using her manipulative/flirtatious voice.
“You can count on it,” James said, beaming.
Yes, she could count on it. He could do this. After all, the man responsible for the show was the man responsible for the painting that now leaned so beautifully on his mantel and on his heart. The painting that had entered his consciousness and his spirit and was now sitting inside of him somewhere, like an extra rib. If the other work in the show was anything like the painting he now owned, he would have no trouble with the writing. His article would contain all the magic that the painting did, and that the show surely would. He marked the date of the show on Marge’s kitchen calendar — on which she had not so long ago written things like ovulating, but where she now only wrote things like rent—with a large, ambiguous star. He watched the star grow closer as Marge ticked off the days with her X’s (ticking off days was something Marge did, as if by living through each day, deleting it from time, she had completed a task). He couldn’t wait. The piece he wrote about Raul Engales would be the pièce de résistance of his career, the piece of writing that would get him back to writing.