Of course, fate was not an excuse when it came to explaining all this to Marge later. Marge, who had lost her baby. Marge, who had done so much to support him. Marge, the woman who had worked her way up from assistant art director to actual art director while he worked himself down from writer to nonwriter. Marge who had been paying all the bills since they lost the baby back in January, nine months ago now, and who only wanted him to be a little bit sensible, to share her dreams of even a remote amount of stability. To not do something insanely stupid like buy an absurdly expensive painting, when they could hardly afford to pay their rent.
She had left the auction house in a rage: all dark hair and snarled lips, the cleft in her chin flooding with red anger — he had been able to see the red again! Just after looking at the painting, he could see Marge’s bright red again! She would not talk to him for days afterward, maybe weeks. She was going to kill him. But he couldn’t be bothered to think about that for long. His mind, as he walked slowly home, down the wide sleeve of Eighth Avenue and under the shaded collar of the Village, was still fixated on the painting. So fixated, in fact, that he could have sworn, at one point, that he was inside of it. That the girl who was its central figure was floating down the sidewalk across the street from him, emitting that same yellow light from somewhere near her abdomen.
It couldn’t possibly be her. He watched the light swish coolly in front of her. Not possible. A siren sang a city lullaby. But what crazy fate, if it was! A wheel made a mess out of a whiskey bottle. Should he cross the street to find out? No, he’d leave it like this: a wonderful, fateful night. A cat decided: west. The girl who could have been in his painting sang a name that could have been his own into the night.
PAINTING IS DEAD!
The day of Raul Engales’s accident started with a dream. His sister was reading him a list from her childhood notebook: a list of all the things he had done wrong in his life. Broke Daisy Montez’s heart. Stole cigarettes from the blind guy with the tobacco cart. Broke off Tina Camada’s engagement by fucking Tina Camada in the dressing room of the clothing store she worked in and getting caught by the manager, who was cousins with Tina Camada’s fiancé. Flunked school. Smoked too much. Killed a cat. The list went on. In the dream, Engales shook his sister by the shoulders to make her stop. He shook her so hard her eyes rolled back in her head and she stopped breathing. Then he ran away, sprinting down the avenues and alleyways of Buenos Aires like a fugitive on the loose, knowing his sister was dead and that he had killed her.
The dream eventually shocked him awake. He had managed not to think of Franca at all since New Year’s, after which there was Lucy, who had sufficed — by extravagant use of her tongue, nipples, voice, toes, and hands — to pull him away from his thoughts of then and into pure actions of now. She had led him through the spring and summer with the ever-present feeling that now was the only thing there was; with Lucy there was no Argentina, there was no Franca or Pascal, there was no black smudge of pain at the memory of the big, empty house. And so it was all the more unnerving to have seen his sister so vividly in his sleep, and to see her disappear.
With the idea that pleasure might help in erasing the dream’s eerie residue, he reached an arm out and pulled Lucy toward him. He closed his eyes to the bright September light, which was coming in flat and fierce through the window, and rubbed himself against her. Soon she was awake and panting beneath him, her little body reacting to the push and pull of his. Well aren’t you feisty today? she said after they finished, but Engales was already up and putting on his shoes.
The sex had worked, he told himself, as he pushed his way out onto Avenue A. He would not let the day be tainted by the dream. But outside, there were more disturbances: the frowning woman on the stoop of his apartment, her leg wrapped in gauze and her teeth missing, telling him, Mister, it’s painful. Mister, please. The bird that had crashed into a glass window and lay splayed in the middle of the crosswalk on Second, barely breathing and with an injured wing. The mentally handicapped crossing guard, who held a big red stop sign for almost five whole minutes, looking into Engales’s eyes as if he were daring him to cross without his blessing. On Mercer, just near the studio, the man with a blond beard who thrust a flier into Engales’s hand: a boy had gone missing that morning, on his way to the bus.
Some might have taken these spectral instances to be signs, but Engales didn’t believe in signs. Signs were for the superstitious, just as luck, the whole idea of it, was for the lucky. If he had thought for one second that the morning’s odd composition was anything other than the average urban reminder that life was gross and strange, he would not have gone to the studio that day. But he did what any real New Yorker would: ignore the gross and strange, because in a city like this, it was the only thing there was. Plus, there was no time for signs, he thought, as he folded the missing-boy flier and stuck it in his shirt pocket. For the first time in his life, he owed something to the world.
The world meaning Winona George. As Rumi had predicted, Winona had found him. After five months of silence after New Year’s, Engales had mostly given up on her, but then she showed up at the Times Square show in June (which, contrary to Rumi’s predictions, had been hugely attended, and apparently by all the right people). The Village Voice, the next week, called it the “First Radical Art Show of the ’80s,” and it seemed it was all anyone could talk about afterward. The next morning, Winona George called him in a tizzy.
“Pick me, Raul!” she’d said, in a voice as simultaneously regal and flighty as her hair: the sonic equivalent of commercial promise. “Everyone will be asking, but don’t listen to them because they don’t matter. Pick me for your gallerist; I will take you to the top, you’ll see, you little young prize.”
And he had. And she had. Or she was about to: since that call there had been a buzz in the air and the buzz was about him. Overnight, thanks to Winona, his name had started to mean something, at least if you were at the right party in the right loft with the right people in the right part of town. And now he was beholden to an opening date for his first real show — September 23, just a week from today — a show that, Winona had revealed, would be reviewed in the New York Times. “Bennett has a little thing for you, it seems,” she’d said over the phone. “And I can’t say I blame him.” James Bennett from the balcony. James Bennett from the Times. True, he hadn’t seen Bennett’s name in the paper for some months now, but he trusted there was a reason for that; perhaps Bennett hadn’t seen anything that impressed him lately. Perhaps Engales’s show would be the thing that did, making it all the more exciting for them both when he wrote about it. But the date of the show was descending on him with the speed of a falling brick, and Engales still had four more paintings to finish. His throat clenched at the thought.