Arlene stood up from her chair. “I have to go home now,” she stated, more to the room than to Lucy. “Or else I’ll drive myself mad.”
But then she surprised Lucy: she clasped her thin arms around her, nuzzled her musky red hair into her neck. She squeezed, and Lucy felt the calming sensation of being held still by another person’s tight grasp.
“Honest to fucking god,” Arlene whispered into Lucy’s neck. “Honest to fucking god I’ll drive myself mad.”
Engales slept for hours, or what felt like hours. Lucy took over Arlene’s post in the plastic-covered chair next to the bed, which squeaked like a dying animal when she moved at all. The hospital room shifted and spun. Nurses hovered, moth-like, but when Lucy asked them questions—When will he wake up? Can it be fixed? What’s the next step? — they flew away. Time was passing — it should have been very late by now — but it all felt like one suspended second, the time before a clock’s hand gathers enough momentum to tick forward. Lucy stood up, sat down, stood up, sat down again. Kissed her lover’s forehead, which was as sticky and warm as an overripe fruit. As hours passed, a singular worry solidified and grew heavy: What would he be like when he woke up? She suddenly longed for Arlene to come back, if only to be a buffer if he were terribly angry.
Lucy had seen Engales angry once since she’d known him, and she never wanted to see it again. It had been an especially wild night at the squat, and they had stayed late, as they often did; they knew that the after-hours were the best hours, when everyone who didn’t matter left, when Chinese food was ordered from Kim’s Lucky Good Food on First Avenue, when a joint materialized from someone’s breast pocket and was lit, when the Dobro guitar with the Hawaiian scene painted on it was picked up and played, when the conversations took on a wavy, fluid, often existential quality. That night, Toby had gotten onto one of his favorite subjects of late, the commercialization of art, or, as he liked to call it, the butt-raping of the creative class. He had stated alternately (and quite drunkenly) that said butt-raping was the artist’s fault — they should not give it up so easily by selling to those rich-prick galleries at the drop of a hat — and that it was said rich pricks’ fault — their own lack of taste meant that they needed to preen the artists for theirs.
“They’ll stick their dick somewhere interesting for once,” he’d ranted. “Just to see what it feels like. And when it feels good, better than anything they’ve ever felt because their lives are boring as hell, they’ll buy it, because they can.”
Lucy had known that this would be a sensitive topic for Engales; he had just signed on with Winona, and had been defending the decision, which he knew would be considered selling out to the artists at the squat, to her and to himself, though no one had voiced any judgment. Until right then, when Toby said: “Well, why don’t we just ask Mr. Golden Boy over here? What does it feel like, Mr. Golden Boy, to have sold your artistic integrity to a woman with a poodle for hair?”
Engales had started off calmly. “In what world”—he had countered, smoke rising from his cigarette like a scarf being tugged out of a magician’s sleeve—“should someone be blamed for taking money for something they make? And likewise, why should someone be blamed for wanting to spend their money on something that someone else made? This is our work, Toby. This is the thing we do instead of sitting in a desk chair. Shouldn’t it allow us to survive?”
“We are surviving,” Toby said. “And on our own terms!”
“Are we, though? You live in an empty factory where you freeze your ass off every night and that you could get kicked out of at any moment. I haven’t eaten anything but beef jerky sticks today. Personally I want to sell the shit out of my paintings. I want a fucking steak and a side salad. With that kind of fancy lettuce that tastes like air.”
“Oh come on,” Toby had said flamboyantly. “That Winona woman’s got your dick on a string! But what she’s telling you? That you’re going to be some star now? It’s all a load of crap. Nobody’s going to remember you, just like they won’t remember the next Joe Schmo who sells a million-dollar painting to a rich dude. They’ll remember us for the way we live, for how we stayed true to ourselves. That’s what they’ll remember. Not how we sold out to make a buck.”
Engales had gotten the coldest look in his eyes then, one that Lucy had never seen. “The reason people come to America is to sell out, you privileged piece of shit. That’s what America is for.”
“Well America can suck my cock,” Toby said as he got up to fetch one of his art projects (a rug he had woven out of parking tickets he’d gotten on his VW van) and held a lighter to its corner. It ignited instantly, creating a glow that made his face look like a cartoon devil. Then the Swedes joined in — when there was fire involved, they couldn’t not—committing a series of pyrotechnic crimes that included burning one of Selma’s booby sculptures (“Not one of my busts!” Selma cried, but with a laugh). When Toby took the match to one of Engales’s drawings, which he had made that summer with Lucy watching on, Engales threw himself on top of him, pinning his shoulders to the cement floor.
“That’s not yours,” he said in a voice that Lucy had not heard before, and that terrified her. The terror was not so much because she thought Engales would hurt her, or hurt anyone, but because she couldn’t see him. Right then she had had the distinct feeling that she didn’t know the man she loved at all. And even after Engales had gotten off Toby, and calmed down fairly quickly by way of a Budweiser and half of the communal joint, remnants of the feeling remained; Raul Engales had an unknowable shadow inside of him.
She felt the same way now, as she waited for Engales’s eyes to open; she couldn’t see him, and she didn’t know what he’d do when he woke up. If he had been so angry when one of his drawings was destroyed, how would he feel when his whole practice, the whole thing of making art was taken from him? She simultaneously wanted to be close to him when he woke and to be far away: Idaho far, in her mother’s arms. Searching for anything familiar, she grabbed for his plaid shirt on the back of the chair, brought it to her face to smell it, at which point she realized it was covered in the stiff crust of brown blood. As she threw it down she noticed a piece of paper in its pocket, pulled it out. But just as she was about to open it, she felt his eyes on her.
His eyes on her in the back of a cab as they flew through the city at 5:00 A.M.: filled with adoration. His eyes on her as they danced at Eileen’s Reno Bar: filled with lust. His eyes on her as he painted her: filled with curiosity. His eyes on her now: filled with hate.
Pure, unfettered hate, coming from the eyes of the man in whose apartment her suitcase lived now, in whose bed she slept now, in whose life she lived now.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said, his voice made of gravel, those eyes — shining metallic with morphine — slicing into her. “Where’s Arlene?”
Lucy’s heart clenched like a fist; he wanted Arlene, not her.
“Arlene called me,” she said, but everything was a dream again, and in a dream one’s own voice did not matter, and she choked on the words.
“I want you to leave,” he said, suddenly turning his head to face the dirty hospital wall. “And I don’t want you to come back. I don’t want to see you again.”