Engales’s shoulders fell as his ego deflated. He felt annoyed at himself for not pushing himself harder — why had he not gone beyond painting like everyone else had? He thought of David Salle, whose show he had just seen at the Mary Boone Gallery with Selma, who had yet to pull her hair stunt and was wearing it long and untethered. Smart motherfucker, Selma had said upon seeing the work. Salle’s paintings were almost collage-like, carrying and juxtaposing multiple ideas; the paintings reeked of ideas, were ideas; Engales had wondered to himself how it was done, how Salle had managed to convey that behind his aesthetic product was an intelligent brain, one that could fuse the very paint on the canvas with deep thoughts about the essence of humans, society, art itself. Everything that the spotlight touched these days was somehow intellectualized: a deconstruction, a deliberation, a test. Engales wasn’t sure quite yet what his own idea even was; he only understood that to paint was to live, and for that reason he painted. Apparently everything he’d imagined he knew about art was all wrong.
“But fuck ’em,” Rumi said suddenly. “I love them.”
She picked up a painting of a young girl in an embroidered tunic, whose eyes looked sad and who was holding an egg in each of her hands. Behind the girl was a cow’s skull, shattering in midair, the shards of the bone so immaculately rendered that they looked as if they might cut you if you touched the canvas.
“This one here. It’s wonderful. I’ll take it. I’ll put it in Times Square.”
“What’s in Times Square?” he said.
“Wait,” she said, squinting at the floor full of paintings. “I’ll take three. We’ll do the whole little room for you.”
“What’s the little room? What’s Times Square?” he said again.
“It’s a show that I’m helping with,” she said absently, lost in the paintings. “It’s small and weird and the room I’m curating is in a former massage parlor — it will be a bunch of punk kids and people no one’s ever heard of, and it will take your career absolutely nowhere. So don’t get your panties in a bunch.”
“I don’t wear underwear,” he said. His whole body was grinning. Times Square! A show! His own little room! In a massage parlor! And this woman! This woman with a little room and a huge mound of hair and a big, wide beautiful mouth! His heart was soaring well above the studio with the city’s night birds.
“You two are fucking disgusting,” Arlene yelled across the studio. Engales laughed. He then looked back to Rumi and tried to create a moment where they looked into each other’s eyes, and even though he couldn’t catch her eyes he thought he might catch her lips, and he leaned in… but Rumi held out her arm (and her arms were long), and told him, to his disbelief, that she was in fact a lesbian, and she had a girlfriend named Susan, who was an architect.
“Well that makes me like her a little bit better,” Engales heard Arlene say from her corner.
Engales pulled away and scrunched up his nose. “Well, what am I supposed to do now?” he said. “It’s practically midnight and I’m not about to kiss Arlene.”
“Oh, don’t you wish!” Arlene said.
“Tell you what,” said Rumi. “Why don’t I take you out? We’ll have a night. Or part of a night, since you seem to have co-opted most of it for this little studio tour.”
“Does this night include meeting someone I can kiss in exactly thirty-two minutes?” Engales looked at his hairy wrist, on which he did not wear any watch.
Rumi looked Engales up and down dramatically, lingering for longer than she needed to on his big, smooth lips. “I’m sure we can find something.” She winked with both her eyes.
“Is Arlene invited?”
“Of course Arlene’s invited.”
“Arlene is busy!” Arlene yelled.
“Oh come on,” Engales yelled back. “Let’s go get you laid.”
Arlene let out a laugh and threw her brush into a coffee can. “Oh, fuck it,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“I was thinking of crashing a rich-person party,” Rumi said. She had a subversive stroke of light in her tigery eyes, which Engales still found enticing, though he was no longer allowed to be enticed.
“I hate rich people!” Arlene said. “I’m in.”
“I’m in,” Engales said with a shrug.
“Follow me,” Rumi said, her eyes flashing with promising flecks of gold.
The rich people were all standing out on the rich-person balcony by the time they arrived, so Rumi, Arlene, and Engales had the rest of the wild, expansive set of rooms to themselves. First Rumi gave them a through-the-glass-door debriefing of who was in attendance — there’s Federico Rossi, owns half of the permanent collection at MoMA; there’s James Bennett, writes for the Times, if you’re lucky you’ll get a review but you never know with Bennett, kind of an odd duck that one; and there is John Baldessari — looks like he has no idea how to dress for a New York winter, huh? Engales gazed out at the rich people. He wanted to paint each and every one of them: a woman in a burgundy dress and open gray peacoat, whose stomach held an odd shape: a sort of sloped triangle, barely noticeable, wonderfully strange; a tiny man in suspenders whose wave of hair was about to crash. And then there was the man who Rumi said wrote for the Times—the Times! — the back of his balding head poking up out of his natty overcoat: a head that Engales both wanted to render (a white stroke, for its sheen), and to get inside of (what would a writer for the New York Times see in his paintings?). Someday, he vowed right then. Mentally he tucked a snapshot of James Bennett’s shiny head into a pocket of his brain, for someday.
“Bup bup,” said Rumi, pulling Engales toward the rich-person fridge, which they ransacked, finishing a bottle of champagne in a matter of minutes, clanking their glasses and becoming louder as they drank. Then they wandered around the maze of dimly lit, insanely decorated, art-filled rooms, gushing over the de Koonings in the dining room, sniffing at the Stella behind the sofa in the living room, ogling a Claes Oldenburg sculpture of an ice-cream cone that sat sweetly and snugly in the fireplace, its melted parts seemingly made specifically for the little brick hole. The whole labyrinth of the place invited exploration and sleuthing, with its dim lights and zebra-skinned chairs and mahogany doors, and what were those? Pews? From a church? Eventually the three of them split up, each entering different rooms off the long hallway, toting their glasses of champagne like drunken detectives.
Engales found himself in a den-like room, with a writing desk lit by a low lawyer’s lamp. Unlike the other rooms, there was no art on the walls; they were empty and painted a deep royal blue. There was only the writing table, the lamp, and a circle of light that haloed a tape recorder. Engales made his way around the desk and sat in the big leather chair behind it. On the tape recorder was a small white card that read: Milan Knížák: Broken Music Composition, 1979. Engales knew the name; Arlene had talked about Knížák, a Czech performance artist who was famous for his happenings and social art in Prague. Curious, Engales pressed the play button on the recorder. A rough, scratchy music emerged, halting and starting as if a record were being pulled back and then released. But the original song still retained some of its shape: a deep, old tune with slices of singing that made Engales’s stomach flutter.