Tuesday Nights in 1980 (9 page)

“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.

The music—in its brokenness and its sadness and its beauty—reminded him distinctly of home, of something his father would have put on, some scratched-up record he had bought on a trip to Italy, that he had probably found in the back of some hundred-year-old shop, or else a Beatles record he had bought in London or New York from a street vendor, not caring that it was a used, decrepit copy.

“Listen to this!” his father would have told him and his sister, Franca. “Listen to this beautiful thing that a human made!”

“But it's
scratched
,” Engales or his sister would have said.

“But that's the
point
,” his father would have said back. “The imperfections, the time that's passed, the hiccups . . . that's the wear of the
world
on it. That's the
life
.”

Engales was surprised at how moved he felt now, listening to the ruptured music in this rich person's blue room. The sound felt religious and powerful, sincere and vulnerable. It was like a discovery, of some part inside his body that released both deep pleasure and profound ache, a tugging of that part. It was a moment he would remember later for what it did to him: think about home, but
really
think about home, for the first time since he had fled it.

His sister, Franca,
had betrayed him: she had gotten married. To a spineless man named Pascal Morales, at San Pedro González Telmo church, on a rainy morning in July of 1973. She hadn't told Engales she'd done it because she'd known he'd disapprove. She'd only come home one afternoon with a gold ring on her finger and a guilty look on her face, gone straight to the kitchen and begun to make one of her cakes. It was only later that Engales would realize that his sister had been making her own wedding cake, a round, sugary thing that would sit on their kitchen counter for weeks, that no one would eat but that no one could bring themselves to throw away.

He wouldn't have admitted why he was so angry that morning, and all the mornings afterward, but both he and Franca knew. Franca was
his
, and her marriage to Pascal was a distinct threat to their siblinghood. Since their parents' death, she had been the only one who cared at all about him, and, being that he was prone to staying out late and drinking himself into oblivion, her caring was the only thing that defined them as any sort of family. She was the one who waited up when Engales came home at three in the morning, reeking of smoke. She was the one who asked him too often what he was doing and what he wanted to eat, when the answer to both of these things was always
nothing
. She was the one who listened through the walls when he brought women home, knew what lusty crimes he had committed, when he had stolen a girl's virginity or been cold to her and made her cry. He resented Franca massively, sometimes wanting to scream at her that she was
not his fucking mother
, but he knew, too, how easily he could undo her, undo
them
.

He knew that in order to survive, Franca and Engales had to maintain the precise balance of silence and understanding that could only be held by siblings who had shared as great a loss as they had. Franca saw everything, all his dark spots, all his faults, all his points of pain. Because she was the only one who had those same dark spots, different but similar faults, different but similar pain. Sometimes he could hardly look her in the eyes for fear he would witness his own despair. He would avoid her, go to another room in the house, the house too big for just the two of them, where they circled around each other like moths or cats or ghosts. At the same time he knew she was there; he could feel her care through the walls, and this is what mattered. There was someone else in the world who was witness to his sadness, and part of it.

Their parents, Eva
and Braulio Engales, had died in October 1965 when Braulio, drunk, crashed their Di Tella Magnette into a tree on the way home from a weekend at Mar del Plata. Raul was fourteen years old, Franca seventeen. It was the same day that ten Argentine explorers made it to the South Pole. Operation 90, it was called, because the South Pole was at ninety degrees south. Franca and Engales sat on the stiff floral couch in the living room with the television on, watching the explorers salute the flag in their orange uniforms. The guy who had come by the house just a few hours earlier—blue suit, clean-shaven face, hands that looked like a woman's—had told them their parents had died on impact, on the highway just outside of Miramar. Impact: like a bird hitting a glass window. But Raul and Franca would carry a different vision of their death around with them, a death that they would refer to for the rest of their time together as Operation 90. A slow thaw, a South Pole freeze, their parents laying at ninety degrees south, holding each other's hands under the Argentine flag.

To an outsider, Eva and Braulio might have struck you as the type of people who
would
die young, if only because they were in a constant state of motion that was nearly reckless. They flung themselves onto airplanes and trains, jetting to Brussels on a whim, or up to Córdoba for a meeting, then drove, as they had that fateful night, down to the beach for a weekend of cocktails and communism talk with their somehow never busy bohemian friends. What they did remained vague to Raul and Franca: something to do with international politics and, as they dubbed it,
the slow fight toward social justice.
If nothing else, their constant travels had left their children with the ability to care for themselves for long stretches (something that would come in handy when they never returned), and a vague residue of radicalism (
Never trust anyone who wants to be in charge
, his father had often said). Also, a US passport for Raul; they had had him during a six-month stint in New York City, a story they loved to tell—
our American boy,
they'd say in English at parties—and a fact that linked him to the continent above, kept Raul studying English through his teenage years, just in case he ever wanted to go north. Franca, three years old at the time, had been given only a temporary visa.

The first years after their parents' death, Raul kept expecting them to come home, to whirl through the house in their new, foreign clothes, his mother's long skirts and belled sleeves swishing over tabletops as she arranged the trinkets they had picked up: a set of brightly colored nesting dolls, an engraved wooden box lined with purple velvet, a giant cow's skull, which would hang above the fireplace until Raul, two years after they died, would stand on a chair, pull it down, and break it into pieces over his knee.

After he began to take their absence more seriously, to stop waking up expecting them to have come back, he started to feel the loss in his body. It was like a dark, lethargic mass, a blob of anger and pain that would sometimes have him drinking straight from whiskey bottles, sometimes stealing from grocery stores, and sometimes paralyzed, utterly unable to get out of bed. It was the ache that kept him from attending most of his classes at school, in favor of smoking cigarettes in the alley on the side of the building. The first time Franca discovered his hiding spot he was not surprised—she somehow always knew where he was, as if she had a sixth sense. But he was surprised when she squatted down next to him in her navy uniform and, instead of scolding him or telling him to go back to class, took the cigarette from his hand and breathed in a slow, silent drag. She looked up at the sky, which had two puffy clouds floating in it.

“Looks like tits,” Franca said.

And he had busted up laughing, and she had, too, the kind of ridiculous, necessary laughter that only siblings shared. They laughed until their stomachs hurt, and when they stopped, Engales had felt terrified. He remembered thinking, in that moment, that this would be the only time he ever laughed. That the laughter was just a small break in more endless aching, which was almost worse than having never felt relief.

In order to make enough money to afford to stay in their parents' house, both Franca and Raul had to take jobs. Raul painted houses for rich people—mostly military families—in Palermo and Recoleta; Franca worked at the bakery, which she would later take over. They created necessary habits: taking baths together—with their backs toward each other—so as to have enough warm water; lighting candles instead of turning on lights, telling each other stories alternately, so the other could fall asleep. They existed this way—parentless, but together—for eight long years, before Pascal Morales came around and cracked their delicate balance right down the middle.