Read Online Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss - Free Book Online

No? Well he should look him up, because painting has been dead since 1839! When Engales had looked it up, in an encyclopedia at the NYU library the following week, he had found that Paul Delaroche had declared the whole form of painting obsolete after the invention of an early form of photography.
    â€œI found his old ass in the encyclopedia,” Engales said now.
    â€œA studious one,” she said.
    â€œHis argument doesn’t hold up.”
    â€œDoesn’t it?”
    â€œThere are two kinds of painters. The painter who paints to decorate, and the painter who paints to paint. Photography would only make any sort of problem for the first kind of painter.”
    â€œA studious and actually smart one. Good combination.”
    â€œWhy haven’t you come to see me?”
    â€œI am a very busy woman,” she said, her eyes leveling into him, filled with what looked like lusty promise.
    â€œI like busy women,” he said.
    â€œMe, too,” she said.
    â€œI have a good idea,” Engales said impulsively.
    â€œArtists always think they have good ideas.”
    â€œCome see my paintings now. Come to my studio.”
    â€œIt’s New Year’s Eve,” she said.
    â€œAn observant one,” he said.
    â€œWe’re at a party,” she said.
    â€œDon’t you know that parties are dead?” he said.
    Rumi smiled with one half of her mouth: her first concession.
    Before she could protest, Engales grabbed her thin arm, took her out into the icy night. Rats pitched from their path as they made their way across town on East Seventh. The cops were out in packs, scanning arrogantly, braced for the worst after what had happened last year: mobs in Times Square, a few murders, even. A woman on Broadway called to a man she was separating from regretfully, “Midnight! The Eagle! Find me! You promise?” Up Broadway to Washington Place, where it crossed with Mercer, through the locked door and up the dark stairwell to the studio Engales had come to call his own.
    Engales had learned of the NYU studios from a woman he’d slept with on his third day in New York, an art student with a thick pout and a set of inappropriate pigtails, whom he had met at the Laundromat That Never Sleeps. The concept of the Laundromat had eluded him, and he had fumbled with the quarters, the locks on the washers, the darks, the lights, the little packets of soap they sold in vending machines.
    â€œWhy are you so bad at laundry?” the girl had asked, while folding a shirt that looked to belong to a baby.
    â€œLaundry is boring,” Engales had replied, knowing immediately upon looking her over—lanky limbs, a miniature skirt, the long dark pigtails framing her long young face—that they would sleep together.
    â€œEverything’s boring,” she had said with a tone that showed she might mean it. When you were as young as she was—probably eighteen or nineteen, he guessed, when time seemed endless and unbreakable and empty—you still had the potential to be so bored. Though he was only twenty-three himself at that point, the girl made Engales feel old. He had perhaps become old, in spirit at least, much earlier: when your parents die, so does the idea of infinite time on the planet. Instead, you are forced into becoming weirdly wise, gaining too soon the knowledge that life is both precious and perfectly meaningless, neither philosophy leaving much room for boredom.
    â€œNot everything,” he had said, pressing her up against a spinning dryer. They left their laundry in the moldy baskets meant for transporting it from washer to dryer and went upstairs to his hotel room. The walls were papered with roses and the air was musty, and from the next room, as they had the hasty sort of sex you have with people you don’t respect, they could hear the occasional scream.
    â€œSo what’s it like being a rich kid?” he had asked the girl after they had