“Seventeen months in New York City?” Jamie said. “You’re fucking ancient. Not to mention you’re counting.”
“Come with,” Lucy said, going to Jamie and tugging on her arm. “There’s an opening.”
“Not a chance,” said Jamie. “You know I hate those things.”
“No you don’t,” Lucy said, not knowing exactly why she felt emboldened to bring this up to Jamie now, after all this time, during which she had never broached the subject of Jamie as an artist. “I know about your projects, Jame,” she said.
“Oh, Little Lucy,” Jamie said with a laugh. “No you don’t. You really don’t.”
“But I do. I found one of your matchbooks at Binibon. I kept it. I keep them all. And I gave one to this art critic I know, and he said he was going to frame it. They’re art, Jamie. They are. And so are your videos. Randy showed me some of them. They’re good, Jamie.”
Jamie smiled sadly. “It’s just what I do,” she said. “It’s how I get through the other things I do. It doesn’t need to be written about by some critic. It doesn’t need to be framed.”
“I actually know what you mean,” Lucy said.
“Good,” Jamie said. “Now let me do your makeup.”
Regina and Toby were waiting outside of the bodega on the corner, smoking cigarettes. They were wearing matching ski jackets, of the sort that said: I am cool because I’m uncool—part of a thing fashionable people were doing: attempting to look normal as a way to be anything but. They looked like the people who ran the ski lifts at the lodges Lucy had gone to as a kid, only there was an important distinction. They were not those people, who spent their winters pulling levers and drinking Coors Light on chairlifts; they were Toby and Regina, artists and philosophers of the East Village, with no connection to the slopes besides the diamond-shaped designs on their chests.
“Got cold again,” Regina said, as if to justify the absurdity of their outerwear. She grabbed Lucy around the shoulders and shook her, then kissed her on the cheek.
“Gorgeous woman,” Toby said, looking Lucy too sincerely in the eyes. “Gorgeous women,” he said, coming between Lucy and Regina and wrapping his big conceptual artist arms around them both. “Andiamo, gorgeous women! Andiamo a Fun!”
When they were only a block down the street, they heard the clip-clopping of high heels and a sexy, breathless voice.
“Wait up,” said Jamie, who had thrown an enormous fur coat over her negligee and apparently decided it was an outfit.
“I thought you didn’t believe in galleries,” Regina said, almost smugly.
“I don’t,” Jamie said. She winked at Lucy.
“Women!” Toby shouted out to the street. “Gorgeous women!”
There was no sign at Fun, and the title of the show wasn’t apparent until they were inside, where it was written in pencil on the white walclass="underline" Selling Out. The first piece of art, just next to the title, stopped both Lucy and Jamie in their tracks: it was two of Jamie’s matchbooks, positioned in the center of a huge blank white square in the middle of a frame. The first said: IS THIS SOME KIND OF ART PROJECT? The second: THIS IS UNHOLY. The second was the matchbook Lucy had given to James, as a kind of sexy admission of her own regret, a way to acknowledge the wrongness of their affair and also revel in it. Now, the matchbook made her heart stop. How had it gotten here? To this gallery? And why was Jamie, who had so actively negated the idea of presenting her work to an audience, staring almost lovingly at the matchbooks and saying, “I didn’t know it would feel like this.”
“Jamie, I think we’ve got to get out of here,” Lucy said, tugging at her fur-clad roommate.
But Jamie wasn’t listening. “You know what? Maybe your milk cartons are something,” she was saying. “If this is a project, then maybe your milk cartons are a project.”
“Jamie, I’m telling you we need to leave. I think this is—”
But now they were being interrupted by a guy Jamie knew who made working sculptures of trains, who immediately launched into a lecture about pneumatic pressure, and how it was what was used to power the first New York City subways. “So basically a giant fucking fan,” he was saying, though Lucy couldn’t really hear him. Her heart was bounding like a fast dog in her chest as she scanned the room; she had seen these paintings, all together as they were now, before. They were definitely James Bennett’s paintings. The ones in his little house on Jane Street, where she had sat so embarrassingly and cried in front of his wife. And there, on the far wall in a huge cone of white light, was the portrait of her.
Don’t move, Engales had said while she sat for him. Don’t move or I’ll kiss you till you die. It seemed so long ago now. A whole lifetime ago.
“So you’re the girl in The American Dream,” someone said suddenly, putting an arm around her. It was someone she didn’t know, wearing a fedora that she decided immediately was ugly.
“No,” she said absently, to the hat. “I’m not anything. I don’t even know what I want to be.”
“Well you’re pretty enough,” said the hat.
“It isn’t enough to be beautiful,” Lucy said. She turned away from the hat and saw, on the back wall, the painting of herself, the smooth pink strokes of her skin. In the painting her eyelids were tilted just so, and a spark of white paint hovered just outside her pupil. That’s what was different about her, she saw now. It was the sparkle. The sparkle was gone.
She had lost herself. She had completely disappeared. She was no longer the girl in that painting, so hopeful, so new. She was old. She was ancient. She turned to go; she wouldn’t be wanted here, at a show put on by the man whose life she’d ruined. She’d leave the gallery and go back to Jamie’s, where she’d spend the night with Sartre and a glass of bad wine from Jamie’s jug of bad wine. She’d forget about the night, the painting, James, Raul. She would never see or think of Raul Engales again, until he was right there in front of her, standing in the gallery’s cold door in an uncharacteristically sharp suit.
“It’s him,” she said breathlessly to herself, as if Raul Engales were a rock star, or a god, or a man she had admired from afar but never met.
Engales stood in the shadows outside of Fun, dreading his entrance. There was a low drone of dull chatter coming from inside. He could already hear snippets of inevitable conversations: this new sculptor who was building caves for homeless people to live in; Reynard performing at the Kitchen; this space is amaaaazing, isn’t it?; Winona always has her shows on Tuesdays. He didn’t know what people would be saying about James, if they would find the gesture of this show inspiring or crude, worthy of the good or the bad sort of gallery gossip. Either way, all of it sounded awful in his imagination.
Cigarette.
He followed the orange dot of another smoker’s ash and lit up one of his own. In the light of the match, he realized the owner of the other glowing butt was Horatio from the squat. He thought of Horatio’s pure physical force when he made his paintings, the lack of intellectualism in them, the heart. For some reason Horatio did not feel threatening but comforting, someone he had always trusted, and who smiled at him now without an ounce of pity in his face. Engales smiled back, and that was that. They smoked in silence. Engales looked out onto the street, which was humming with life and taxis and smelling like it did, sewer and trash and smoke and tar. He remembered how much he loved that smell, these sounds, these streets, back when he was new here. The thought made him feel briefly confident in some nostalgic way. He was back out in the world, existing. Horatio had said nothing about his hand. Maybe no one would. He could do this. He could go inside. He blew out the last of the smoke, stabbed the cigarette into the wall, pressed his shoulder and hip into the metal door.