Engales clicked through the page of slides, and when it was done, the page after that, and by the third page it became clear that things were only getting eerier. The works in James Bennett’s HUNGER / SUN YELLOW / RAUL ENGALES binder were almost all works that he himself had fallen in love with at various points in his life. There were Hockney’s winter trees, Jean-Michel’s monstrous figures, Matisse’s cutouts, and Avant’s street scrawls. There was even one of Horatio’s action paintings that Engales had watched him make at a midnight performance in an empty building in the Meatpacking District, one of his boxing glove pieces. Even the paintings Engales had never seen before moved him, vibrated within him, and the whole thing made the backs of his eyes tight with held-back tears.
“We could get you back there,” Debbie said suddenly, when the wall went black. “You’re making strides with your left flexors. The palmar interossei are what need work, but we can get there.”
“Thank you, Debbie,” he said, pulling himself up from his chair with some effort. He felt exhausted. “But no thank you, Debbie.”
His mind, anyway, was not on his own hand or his own painting, or on Debbie, but on the slides, and on James Bennett. His heart was aflutter with the speed and love and color that the slides held. He had not felt this speed or love or color since the accident, and looking at this collection of slides only confirmed a suspicion Engales had had when James Bennett was in his room: James Bennett held a hand of cards that Engales wanted to see, and to know. Then Engales’s mind went totally blank, because Debbie was at work at the button of his jeans.
“Physical therapy?” she said from below him, her lashes twittering.
James returned the next day at the same time, and again the day after that, and quickly he became the kind of visitor one needed in a rehab clinic: the kind who kept coming back. In exchange for agreeing to the Rising Sun at all, Engales had made Winona promise not to tell any of his friends — especially Lucy, he’d said with a clenched jaw — where he was. She’d eventually agreed, but had reasoned that Bennett was not Engales’s friend and therefore did not count; Winona loved a good loophole. But Engales didn’t begrudge her for sending James. In a place where there was nothing to look forward to except for Sunday movie night or Friday pizza night or Tuesday oatmeal bar, James’s presence, if strange, was actually a welcome distraction.
On the second day James came to visit, perhaps because Engales had been moved by the paintings in the book of slides, Engales had felt open, ready to talk. And they did talk, in a way that Engales had not talked to anyone for as long as he could remember, about people they both knew (Jean-Michel, Selma Saint Regis) and artists with ego problems (Toby), and projects they’d seen that lit them up (James Turrell’s light and space works) and projects that left them cold (Jeff Koons, the vacuums). Engales’s staunch conviction that he was finished with art, thinking about it even, faded to the background during these conversations, as they took unexpected turns (James spoke of getting a hard-on when he saw a Matisse, for one), or went unexpectedly deep (Engales told James about his parents: I painted people because I had no people). They talked at length about the slides in the binder, and at special length about the Freud.
“The wonderful thing is that its unclear whether it’s finished!” James had said. “That white background! You feel the entire tension of the painter’s plight in that background! His whole internal drama: Should he keep going? Or should he leave it so perfectly undone? Did he stop because he doubted himself or because he loved what he had made? It’s all there, the whole story and the whole big question!”
Engales nodded slightly. He remembered when Arlene had first showed him the painting, how he had had such a similar thought. James launched into a spirited little speech about Bacon and Freud, about their friendship and their days spent in the studio together, smoking, eating, talking, painting each other. Then their gambling, how they’d hock their cars or their paintings to pay their growing debts. How the gambling was the same as the painting, when you thought about it; art was always a hunch, a lead you followed into the dark, whose outcome you’d never know until it was all over, a game that you could lose.
“I always felt like the best artists knew what their outcome would be,” Engales said. “That they had an idea first, and then the work came out of that idea. I don’t have any ideas. I always just painted until there was a painting. I always thought I must be doing something wrong.”
“Oh, no,” said James spiritedly, his eyes widening. “You are underestimating the power of the associative brain! That’s what an artist is! Someone whose way of looking at the world — just their gaze — is already an idea in itself!”
Engales was quiet, thinking this over. He imagined Bacon and Freud, their wrinkled faces, the smell of the turpentine, the tiny bits of blue they’d add for each other’s shadows. Somehow sitting here with James Bennett, talking about two old guys and ideas and art, no matter that he could no longer make it anymore, made him feel not-so-terrible. He could feel it happening, perhaps against his own will, or perhaps because of it, so quickly and seamlessly that he couldn’t have seen it coming or articulated its trajectory: James Bennett was becoming his friend. And what, right then, did he have to lose? He’d follow this hunch into the dark. He’d maybe even bet on it.
A game: Raul Engales holds a slide from the binder up to the window. James Bennett blurts out what he feels when he looks at it. “Laundry detergent!” James says when Engales holds up a Walter Robinson slide. “Astonished gray!” he says about Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities. “What the fuck is astonished gray?” says Engales; they laugh. “My wife’s neck,” James says to a Ross Bleckner piece, of wavy lines that cascade down the tiny window like hair.
An Engales proclamation: “Fuck abstraction and fuck surrealism and fuck sunsets. Especially fuck sunsets. Give me nostrils, you know? Big ugly ones. With boogers.”
A James question: “What happened to your hand?”
An Engales answer: “I was robbed.”
A James proclamation: “It could come back. You never know. One day you could wake up and have it back. The color of the world, the beauty of it. Trust me, I know.”
An Engales rejection: “You don’t know shit.”
An Engales question: “What are you doing here again?”
A James answer: “Talking to you.”
“My bet’s on a gallery,” James Bennett said now, from his perch at the window, as they watched the cops tuck the artists into the backs of their low cop cars, one by one. “And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the great irony of capitalism. How about we kick out the artists to make room for the art?”
“There’s Regina,” Engales said. Regina, with her dishwater-blond hair stuck to her tear-stained face, had never before seemed vulnerable to Engales. Now she looked like a frightened fawn, her legs and lips wobbling. Behind her, the rest of them followed — Selma in her long black pirate’s coat; Toby in his Peruvian poncho that seemed, in the light of the day, both culturally and visually offensive; Horatio, carrying only his paint-covered boxing gloves. Engales felt the distinct tug of exclusion again; he wanted desperately to be in that line with them. But why? Why would he wish himself into this terrible scene? Why did he suddenly want back into his old life, right when it was being upended?
A memory appeared to him with so much vividness he could have painted it, and before he could realize it he was speaking the memory out loud.