Raul, please take care of my son.
Up the stairs again, this time with force and determination and anger, he pressed the golden cat-eye of a doorbell, waited.
No one came to the door. He rang again; still nothing. He peeked through the stained glass window, through a red triangle of glass. The walls of the tiny living room were covered in huge sheets of newsprint, decorated in a child’s drawings. James Bennett’s hideous white suit jacket was draped over a wicker chair. And there, near the coffee table, was a pair of tiny, ridiculously tiny, shoes.
His heart spun. Franca’s son was actually here. Engales felt his chest tighten, and pressure behind his eyes. “God damn it!” he yelled, banging on the glass with the stump of his hand.
He sat on the stoop in the cold for a moment, put his face into his one hand. Now what? Across the street, an old woman peered out at him from her first-floor window. Engales held up the middle finger of his left hand; she shut her purple curtain hastily.
Eventually he got up, teetered down Jane, and rambled down Seventh Avenue, drinking in plain sight from his bottle. The light was fading and the air felt tough on his face. He turned east at some point, and found himself in Washington Square Park, the big arch shining like the inside of a seashell in the dusky light. As he approached he heard a low din: something between a church choir and a static television. A huge crowd of people, congregated in circles and clumps around the fountain and under the big white arch at the north edge. Beyond the arch, the crowd spilled into the street. They wore the merry gear of early winter: patterned scarves and colorful jackets, but their faces, universally, held expressions of pain. Everybody was hugging or had their arms around one another. Some people were sobbing, others singing.
Engales found himself walking into the crowd. No one pushed: they moved to let him through. He saw a man with a giant dog, a dog the size of a horse. The man held his dog around the neck and wept into its silvery fur. A young blond woman, with a short haircut much like Lucy’s, was shaking a tambourine slowly, and each time she hit it against her hand, she let out a sad gasp. He came to a large circle opening in the crowd, where he stood next to two short men in plaid coats, who, he realized when they looked up at him with the exact same sad smile, were twins.
There, across the circle on the other side of what looked to be some sort of altar, swaying in her long fish skirt and a coat that was somehow both puffy and flowy, was Arlene. He watched her kneel down and place a bouquet of daisies on top of a large black-and-white picture of John Lennon. As she put them there, the daisies tickling Lennon’s neck, a long-haired woman beside her fell to her knees, too, then put her palms on the asphalt as if in prayer. Her hair fell out over her arms and onto the ground like a drawing of a sun.
Arlene looked up and saw Engales. Her face looked older, with more lines around the eyes, and yet also more beautiful than Engales remembered. He suddenly saw her as a woman, not the sailor-mouthed hippie who he shared a studio with, but an actual woman, with feelings and breasts and hair and all the other things a woman came with. She gave a sad smile, not unlike the one the twins had given him. It was the John-Lennon-died smile. The smile you smiled when everybody lost the same thing but still had one another. Arlene crossed the circle to stand next to him. She didn’t look up at him, which he was grateful for. But then she did an odd thing — she took her two warm hands and wrapped them around the stump of his forearm, cradled in the fabric of Darcy’s suit. He did not pull away. They stood there for a while, suspended in the sadness of everyone around them, her hands on his deformity. She only said, into the wind: Oh, Raul.
Engales felt a flood of emotions then, ones he had not brought himself to feel while holed up at the Rising Sun but that out here, in the open air with Arlene’s hand on his arm and the entire world mourning, he let enter him. He thought of his father in his battered corduroys, smoking his pipe, his eyes the color of the pipe, his pipe the color of his corduroys, his corduroys the color of the way he made his son and daughter feeclass="underline" young and brown, safe, like the wooden walls of their childhood home. He heard the record his father had put on: Little child, little child — I’m so sad and lonely. Baby, take a chance with— If you want someone— Little child, come and dance with me… and he heard his father saying: Raul, I’m telling you, it’s the scratches that make a life. He thought of Broken Music Composition, 1979, of Winona and her hair and the fact that she had saved his life, and what she had said that night they met: You’ll have to lose everything this year in order to make something beautiful. He thought of the way Franca’s face looked in the light of the fire across the street: half-orange, half-shadow black, and of the little boy’s shoes in James Bennett’s house. He thought of Lucy’s sequins, the way they had winked at him, the way they had promised escape. He thought of escape, and how he had attempted it, how he had failed, how he was here now, with his friend Arlene’s hands around his arm, mourning the tragedies of the world with the world. He was finally in the pavilion, he thought. Beneath the pavilion, he could finally cry. He had not cried, not once, not when he witnessed his paintings on display without him, not when he saw Lucy betraying him, not when he heard about Franca from James, not when he lay alone and crippled in the stiff bed at the Rising Sun. But now he couldn’t stop. Everything poured from him onto Arlene’s hair. The parrot, just then, leaped off Engales’s shoulder and flew out over the crowd. He looked up, wiped his eyes, watched the bird’s dirty wings spread like he hadn’t been able to imagine they could.
Arlene turned to him, put a hand on his shoulder. “You look like you’re going to fucking church,” she said.
“Isn’t this sort of like church?” Engales wiped at his face with his floppy sleeve.
“Minus any god,” she said. She smiled.
“Minus any god,” he said.
“What do we have here?” she said.
Arlene pulled the roll of paper from Engales’s bag, unfurled it to reveal the mostly naked woman — a woman who was supposed to be seductive and yet to Engales looked sort of rotten and overly orange. Arlene chuckled, then laid it on the ground with the rest of the makeshift altar, weighting it on its corners with four votive candles. She took the bottle of whiskey from Engales’s hand, set that down, too. “John needs it more than you,” she said, winking up at him. Engales surprised himself by not protesting. Arlene stood up, her colorful dress trailing out from the bottom of her coat and her red hair aflame against the backdrop of black hats and pale faces. She whispered something.
“Are you going to go tonight?” she said, with an uncharacteristic mischievousness in her eyes. No curse words, no loud squawk, just a little girl who knew something secret. Their eyes locked, the first time they had brought themselves to really look at each other.
“Go where?”
“The show,” she said. “Didn’t you hear about it? James Bennett is selling everything he owns. It’s this big deal. Everyone’s talking about it, you know, one of those fucking big fusses.”
“No, I didn’t hear about it.”
“You know, I didn’t expect him to be a nice guy. I always read those reviews and thought: What does this guy know?”
“You met him?”
“Long story for another time, but yes. I ran into his wife, literally, then followed her home — and I know what you’re thinking but try to refrain from judgment, you little shit.”