Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss

Author:Molly Prentiss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery/Scout Press

Engales remembered the look on Lucy’s face from that first night at the Eagle: the look that meant she loved him, and that he would love her. He remembered, also, how when she laughed and the laugh sparkled like her shirt did, that he hadn’t wanted to love her. Love, like luck, was for the lucky. Love was for the people who could afford to lose it, for those who had room in their lives for loss, whose quota of losses had not already been filled. “Orphans shouldn’t fall in love,” Raul remembered telling Franca once, in one of their debates about the legitimacy of her relationship with Pascal Morales. Franca had glared at him. “You’re wrong,” she had said shakily. “Orphans have to fall in love.”

Apparently his sister had been right. Because though Engales had tried to avoid falling in love with Lucy, though he’d tried to sleep with other women in the beginning of their time together, and tried to avoid calling her his girlfriend for a number of months, it was as if there had been no choice. He was him and she was her. She was her, with her very own set of intriguing contradictions, her specific combination of deviousness and delusion and delight, of half-formed wit and fully formed wonder, with the matchbooks she left in his pocket, the hot air she breathed when she slept, her innocence and her desire to destroy that innocence. She was her and he was him. And they were them and this was love.

But he regretted ever having met her now, ever having fallen for her trick flame, as he watched her betray him so easily. She had come here, to this show, when she knew what had happened to him. For all he knew she had even helped to orchestrate it; no one else had the key to François’s place, where all his paintings were. She had worn that same sparkling shirt. And she had tilted her head in her very special way for another man, another man who she was now following through the crowd, through the door, and out into the same night shadows Engales was hiding in.

He ducked back into his corner. His skin grew hot and his head slammed with barbaric thoughts: run after her; smack her with the stump of his arm; find a knife somehow, put it in the back of the white suit. But instead, he followed them. In the shadows, like a creepy, crippled spy. They were walking in synch and talking and laughing. The man—Engales had still not seen his face—was telling some sort of story, gesticulating with his pale hands. On the back of the white suit jacket, Engales noted a black stain, as if the man had sat in paint. Slob, Engales thought. And to take the judgment a step further: Nobody wears a white suit anymore. They were on Second Avenue now. And they were at East Tenth now. And then they were in front of Engales’s own apartment now.

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