Tuesday Nights in 1980 (6 page)

“You thought about it,” she said. “You thought about it, and you got it exactly right. The feminism is embodied in that precise staleness you wrote about—that
stuffy, indoor feeling—
and you
got it.
”

This conversation led to a studio visit, where James ended up doing a complete 180 on Flack's work, and leaving with one of her paintings—it depicted a shrine of sorts, incorporating Marilyn Monroe's picture, a set of ripe pears, a burning candle, and a goblet full of silvery pearls. The painting, tucked under James's arm, smelled of all of the chickens his mother had never roasted.

Slowly at first and then exponentially, James's bodies of work had started growing: both this collection of art and his writings. Like Heilmann, the artists often gifted him paintings. Any extra money he had went to buying pieces from artists he especially admired, who he felt deserved it more than he did. They were the geniuses, he always thought. He was just a genius finder.

In direct correlation to his opinion mattering, the works of art he coveted and collected began mattering more, too. Around town, James's personal collection became a topic of envy and desire. How had he procured all these works? Where did his impeccable taste come from? Who was his dealer? And why did he not sell? Dealers knocked on James's door for a quick peek; calls came in from collectors and auction houses.

“I heard you had a Ruth Kligman over there,” said one scary-sounding caller. “Mind if I come over and take a look?”

“Oh, I don't sell art,” James said shyly. “I'm sorry to have wasted your time.”

“Damn right I wasted my time,” said the voice, and the phone hung up loudly on the other end.

When it came to the collection, James operated under a strict and self-imposed ethical code, which stated that artworks were meant to provide pleasure, not income, and art was not about fame but about feeling. His modus operandi was simple: buy pieces he loved and could (at least sort of) afford. Nothing more. If they appreciated in value (and many of them had, or would), that was fine. But the not-selling part was crucial—James took to his collection as if it were a work of art itself; selling a piece could mean ruining the whole composition. He did not want to be known as a man who simply
reviewed
art or
owned
art, but as a man who
understood
it. Who
breathed
it, even.

He always felt a bit wobbly about the attention; he wasn't in this to be noticed, he was in it to be true to himself and to the artists he loved, and to fulfill his oblique yearning to leave an impression on the world. He had discovered early on that there was a smarmy nature to much of the New York art scene—the dealers who just wanted their cut; the tastemakers who wanted to shape culture into capital; the friends of the artists who followed the artists around, trying in vain to bask in their celebrity, or at least their free champagne. But there was an element of the whole thing that James secretly took pleasure in: it felt good to be noticed, to be understood. For the first time in his life, he was not the strange bird, the odd duck, the loopy man in the corner, staring at a painting until the gallery closed. Instead, inadvertently, he was becoming part of an in-crowd.
He
was one of the tastemakers.
He,
James Bennett, had actual power of influence, which he knew had to do with the very thing that used to make him
un
cool growing up: his
affliction
. What had once been his handicap was now what allowed him to communicate with art in the way he did, to see things in a way that others couldn't, to choose the right paintings for his house and to write about them in a way no one else could.

Not to mention, he saw out of the corner of his eye, the pleasure
Marge
got out of even the most moderate of his successes.

“James has a piece coming out today!” he overheard her telling her mother on the phone. This was novel, considering that for years she had avoided uttering his name to her mother, who only worried about when that son-in-law of hers was going to get a real job.

“Front page!” Marge bragged. “Keep an eye out, okay, Mom?”

Marge didn't seem to mind that she had to pick up most of the slack moneywise (art writing paid enough but never more than that, and what James earned was more than likely spent on buying more art). She believed in him, she said, and she knew doing the thing he loved would pay off eventually. In a special moment of pride (and perhaps a better understanding of personal presentation) Marge bought him a white suit at Bloomingdale's, for more formal events or openings. He began to wear it quite often, despite that looking at it in the mirror made him smell ammonia and too-strong cologne.

But occasionally, when rent was due, for example, Marge was forced to plead with him about his art habit.

“We're sort of going broke, James,” she'd say. “Do you see that we are sort of going broke?”

“I know, Marge, I know. It's just, isn't it stunning?”

That particular “it” could be anything from a miniature sketch by Richard Diebenkorn that James had ordered from California, or a mammoth spray-painted piece of cardboard by a young street artist that covered much of the living room's east wall, which James had insisted on paying the kid a thousand dollars for.

“Of course it's stunning,” Marge said. “But we have to live, you know? What good is art if we can't live to enjoy it?”

“But what good is life without art?” James said, bringing her in for a hug.

“I just get worried,” she said, letting him kiss her head. “We're in our thirties.”

“So?”

“So we're in our thirties!”

“Tell me what being in our thirties means,” James said. “Considering it is almost 1980 and we live in New York City; I don't think the suburban time line need apply to us.”

“James!” Marge said, hitting him playfully. “I want a teeny baby!”

“I'll give you a teeny baby,” he said, but in a way that referred more to their joke and less to real life.

Marge leaned back and looked at him. “I'm being serious, James. Can you tell from my eyes?”

James put his finger on her chin and squinted.

“Let me check,” he said.

And here was
their biggest real-life endeavor: Marge was now carrying four months' worth of teeny baby inside of her—the size of an avocado, according to the woman who'd administered the sonogram that morning. To Winona's party Marge had worn a burgundy dress, of the sort that hugged her shape rather than hiding it, and James, as if he were a kid again, found himself mentally aroused when he looked at her for too long. Marge's stomach was soft and low, like a pile of sloping sand. Her breasts had grown in size and confidence, seeming to dictate to the lowly citizens (her feet, her back, her butt cheeks) how to stand and how to move. Her face had widened slightly, and paled. Layers of darkness had amassed under her eyes, and the result was something . . . well,
pomegranate
. Where she had felt
strawberry
to James before—wild and small and individual—she now felt
pomegranate
: she was holding a million seeds of new, red life.

The whole pregnancy thing had felt abstract to James until just today. He had been unable to immerse himself in the pure joy of it, and had even had the private urge to
not think about it
, since when he did he only seemed to worry. He worried that he would be a bad father, or worse, that he would not feel for his son or daughter the way he should, which was totally in love and in awe. He also selfishly wondered if a baby would transform his life into something he never signed up for, that his existence would shift completely to diaper duty and stroller rolling, and that he would not have time for or the urge to write. If he were to be completely honest, though of course with Marge he was not, he might go as far to admit that he was counting down his months and days of freedom, mentally cringing as they lapsed.

But today, when the technician had showed them the grainy sonogram, James had actually cried with happiness. It was the first ultrasound that had actually revealed something that made sense to James—a hand, a nose, a beating heart—and it had physically made his own heart ache. It was visually stunning: a white smudgy bean in the deep cone of black, like a negative of a photograph. The black cone made him hear his father's mean voice, but the white bean made him taste salt, as if he had just run a marathon and was licking his lips of his own sweat. It was attachment to nature and commitment to the future. It was
real.
The baby was
real life.
And it was a miracle. And it was precisely this intersection of reality and miracle that kept James in awe of this life: a life that was indeed built with equal parts biology and beauty.

“Should we?” Marge
said now, nudging her head toward Winona's fogging glass door. Her voice was sticky and soft.

“We should,” he said.

Though it was freezing out, Winona's guests were gathering outside, on the convent's balcony, which was adorned with perilous-looking wrought-iron sculptures. James could spot the artists from a mile away: there was David Salle in his Picasso-inspired striped shirt, images of bodies projected on top of and above him, just like in his paintings. There was Baldessari, big and white-haired, who did not know how to dress for the cold; James could feel the California air radiating through his T-shirt, even from behind the glass. There was Keith Haring, whose mouse-ish size did not affect the bigness of his presence; when James looked at him, he saw entire cosmos.

What would happen to them all this year? How would 1980 change them, morph them, dictate their fates? Sometimes James worried for them, the artists he so loved and admired. The world, especially the art world, was changing; he could feel it. The city was handing out promises, dangling fame in front of even the most radical artists' noses; in turn, a sharpness was being dulled. The brilliant bohemia he'd discovered when he'd moved to the Village had been ratcheted up a notch; pop had paved the way for commercialism and plastic and shine; there was a new air of possibility and a new wave of capital coming in, which gave the scene a new edge. There was the notion, now, that one could
make it
; James had watched the luckier artists get snatched from the rubble and lifted into the cloud of success. The successful left behind them a residue of opportunity: the surreal, toxic cloud of fame and fortune that both motivated and toppled the rest of them. Even the number 8 of 1980 felt glossy and airy and shiny in his mind, like an unpoppable balloon, nothing like its bony predecessor, 7. The year ahead would either ooze with brightness or deflate with emptiness, or perhaps both. Only time—specifically
midnight—
would tell.

James followed Marge
to the coatroom—Winona had dedicated a whole nun's quarters to other people's coats—and grabbed his own. It only occurred to him after Marge had already wrenched her first arm in to help her with hers; he pulled it over her other shoulder. As they headed toward the door they passed a blue-walled room, and something caught James's eye. A white firework, the smell of smoke. The audible, wonderful flapping of
butterfly wings.
James got the quickest glimpse of a young man, standing in the blue room behind a large mahogany desk, a black mole jutting from his face and his eyes glossing with what looked to be tears, before Marge tugged on James's sleeve and pulled him toward the door to the balcony.

Outside, someone yelled, “Four minutes!” which was followed by a giddy buzz of chatter. A man in a ruler-wide red tie circled with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, topping off people's skinny glasses. Marge looked up at James. She was shivering and smiling. James felt the chill of the night on his cheeks, felt Marge's soft body leaning in against his.

“Our year,” Marge said.

“Our year,” James echoed, but his mind was back inside. Who was that man? And how could James make his way back into Winona's convent to find out? He'd bathroom-break himself away from Marge, through the crowd, the glass doors. He'd slither up to the blue room, peek his head inside. No one would be there, but the residue would have lingered: like when you close your eyes against the glare but the shape of the sun is still there. The man would be gone, but James would find him again. He would scour the party and the city until he did. But not before he kissed his beautiful wife, just as the clock moved the world into a new decade. Not before, somewhere in the distance, a ball was dropped.

J
ust hours before midnight, at the squat on East Seventh Street, Raul Engales was in the corner of the Big Room, being touched on the biceps by two barely dressed women. Some people called him a ladies' man, which he didn't mind because it was true. His looks alone—warm skin, squinted umber eyes, restless eyebrows, and a swell of jet-black hair—gave women the impression that he was as sensitive as he was serious, that his passion would outweigh his pitfalls, and that he would transport them, by way of the thick, chugging train of his shorter-than-average-but-somehow-still-dominating body, to some exotic locale that they'd never even heard of. He knew this, just as he knew the power of the mole on the right side of his face, that pointless piece of black flesh that he had once hated but had come to cherish; it seemed to have some sort of planetary pull. He kept the women who gravitated toward it in his orbit only long enough to enjoy the pleasure of them; anything beyond pleasure was not worth his time.
Women are like painting,
he had been known to say if he was drunk enough.
You want to live inside them while you are doing them. Then maybe you never want to look at them again.

It was New Year's Eve, the squat's annual blowout party. Hardly necessary to nominate it as such, Engales thought, since every night at the squat was a party, blowout or otherwise. He was here not because he especially wanted to be but because he was always here. The squat, with its seven to twelve rotating residents, had become a sort of second home for Engales. Its core inhabitants: nonmonogamous conceptual artists Toby and Regina, performance artist and chain-smoker Horatio Caldas, sculptor and throat singer and professional grower of her own hair Selma Saint Regis, Swedish twins named Mans and Hans who had immaculate bodies and a propensity for lighting things on fire, three flamboyant parrots who squawked not-your-average obscenities at newcomers (
Baby's balls sack! Mongoose! Rug muncher! Failed artist!
) . . . this was who he surrounded himself with. They were a family of misfits, and he was what they referred to as an “orphan”: one of the myriad artists whom they had agreed to take in, get drunk, talk about and make art with, but who didn't live on the premises. This was the case not only because he had been gifted a rent-free apartment by a friend-of-a-friend Frenchman, but also because he didn't believe in shitting where he ate. As with his women, he sought pleasure, not headache, and with any commitment to anyone else, such as living in a cement-floored, windowpane-less ex-factory with ten other people, headache was inevitable.