As the months grew colder (cold was something that she knew, from the endless, deep winters in Ketchum) she actually began to feel a tinge of comfort in the chaos that was her new life — the street fights and the snow trudging and the late nights — and to take a sort of young-person solace in her loneliness, floating nicely in her melancholy, which was reminiscent of her teenage years in Idaho, the sad mountains, the ease of getting caught up in her own plight. This was part of the waiting, she knew. She knew if she waited long enough it would happen. The big bang, the cosmic crash, the delightful disturbance that would determine her true city fate.
Of course that was back when Lucy still believed in fate at all. When she still held superstitions — if she said things out loud, she felt they wouldn’t come true, and if she wished for things hard enough, she thought they might. First stars, worry dolls, lucky pennies, matchbooks — she had alternately believed in these as things that might alter her entire course in the world. That postcard on the side of the road was one of these things. Jamie’s red lipstick was one of these things. And Randy, who randomly invited her to be a bartender at the Eagle on Bleecker Street, he was one, too. She let herself believe that all of this — coming to this city, taking this job — was all a part of a cosmic plan for something big to happen in her very small life. She just had to wait. She had to wait until she had mixed a million drinks. Until the matchbook she pulled from the jar read: KISS ME HARDER. Until time tipped past midnight and it was technically Tuesday and officially 1980. She just had to wait until the crowd died down and parted and the noise around her silenced and the red chili pepper lights were the only lights left in the world — for something, or someone, to change her life.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? The song was still playing in Lucy’s head when the black mole — which stood like a monument paying homage to the idea of beauty — began its journey toward her face. In this suspended moment lived all of the questions: Would he be like all the others? Would he kiss her over the bar and then disappear off the planet? Or would he, like her deep stomach was telling her he would, love her?
His lips! His lips! His lips! Due to his lips, she knew that this would not be like all the others. Due to his lips, she knew that he was darker, deeper: that thing she had been looking for. Due to his lips, her old acquaintances would be forgot forever, and there would be only him.
When he pulled away she reached into her pocket for one of Jamie’s matchbooks that she’d nabbed earlier that day, slid it across the bar to the man. KISS ME HARDER, it read. He did.
He stayed with her while she closed down the bar, following her like an eager dog while she scrubbed the counters, kissing her incrementally while she counted the tips. Then he carried her, literally on his back, across town to the squat, as he called it, where the latest part of a huge party was still going on. He introduced her to everyone — Boss the African jazzman and Horatio—Horatio, get low! Engales yelled to him — in his white underwear, held high with yellow suspenders. And Selma, with her newly cropped, exotically spiky head of hair, a voice like a cocoon—ohhhhhh, Saint Selma—and her small saggy breasts, which were displayed in plaster casts all over the room. (“See those?” Selma said, pointing to one of the sculptures. “Those are my titties. Take one home if you want.”) So this was where they were, Lucy thought. All the artists she had been searching for, who, unlike Jamie, were not cloaking their projects but parading them around in this insane, deteriorating, divine palace of messy, outrageous art.
Lucy spotted a small man painting himself, literally, into one of the corners of the room. Her heart leaped. She knew that man! It was the man from the subway station! Those were his lines — so sure, so graphic, so magical; she pulled at Engales’s hand.
“I know him!” she said giddily.
“You know Keith?” Engales said.
“Yes!” Lucy said, bouncing. “I saw him painting in the subway. He was painting a penis.”
She felt embarrassed right after she said it, both for the word penis and for the fact that she had claimed to know someone from having seen him across the subway tracks. But Engales found it charming, apparently, and smiled, kissed her on the forehead.
“You are very adorable, Spot, do you know that?” he said. He then led her down a darkened hallway and into an empty, cement-floored room where he pressed her up against the drywall, looked into her eyes with a crazy, almost capitalistic determination, and said: “Spot, you are the American dream.” And all she could do was laugh the very particular laugh of a girl in love. Tilt of chin. Sparkle of half-closed eyes. Half smile, no teeth. Then — here it was — eyes all the way open, pupils floating to the top when she looked up, I’m yours, they said, she knew it, I’m yours.
As the squat’s party faded, he tugged her out into the street and up the five black blocks to his apartment, which was filled with nothing but his reckless, wonderful paintings. He set her down on the bed and told her to: “Hold still, I’m going to paint you.”
There was this: him reaching like a madman for paint and brushes, a long spell of sitting still when her body was aching for more of him, the scratchy collar of her sequined shirt, the resulting picture — herself as a giant, mystical thing, a beautiful monster.
And then there was this: him leaving the painting and climbing onto the bed with her and grabbing her head with his two hands.
They devoured each other. And surely (his tongue in her ear), most definitely (his sticky body on top of hers), undeniably (his eyes like he loved her), he would change her fate. She woke up the next morning to see the still-wet picture of herself, knowing forever had started, if forever were what forever felt like, which was a year in New York City when you were in love.
PART TWO
ABNORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES
Under normal circumstances, James and Marge would not be uptown on a Tuesday night. They would especially not be at Sotheby’s auction house, a place where James had personally vowed never to set foot. But James was not operating under normal circumstances tonight. He was operating under the circumstances of the worst day of his life, if he had to cast a judgment, a day within a series of days, encased within a series of months, during which he saw no color besides the color that was actually there, heard no sound besides the annoying racket of reality. And so the night was not yellow, as it should have been, and Marge was not red, as she should have been, and Marge was not holding a small baby, as she should have been, but was instead holding her arms around her waist, as depressed as he was to be here. They were here to sell James’s beloved Richard Estes painting, the one of the storefront window on Thirty-fourth Street, a favorite in his personal collection that he had promised himself he’d never sell.