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

finished.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” she had said.
    â€œWell, you go to that fancy university, you wear these, what do you call them?” He flopped one of her pigtails with his fingers.
    â€œPigtails,” she said quietly.
    â€œPigtails!” He laughed. “Jesus.”
    â€œI don’t even know why my parents pay for it,” she said then, with a sort of shy defiance, propping herself up on the bed and tugging the rubber bands out of her hair. “I mean they hardly teach you anything. If my parents weren’t such assholes I’d just teach myself the same stuff. Just walk into NYU and teach myself how to draw.”
    Engales’s eyes were distant, looking at the roses on the wall, on whose two-dimensional petals two mosquitoes were courting each other spastically. He pushed the girl away—she was attempting to fondle his earlobe—and stood up. He suddenly very much disliked this person whom he was currently lying in bed with, but could she be on to something? He had no money at all to buy any paint or supplies. He had nothing, and nothing to lose. He looked at the girl’s breasts, which were large and falling down to one side, like a pair of mating walruses; he wanted to paint the walruses, give them mustaches. Could he just walk into a school full of rich kids and act like he went there? Set up shop? When the pigtailed girl went to the bathroom, he nabbed the key from her pant pocket whose brass face read STUDIO . He might as well try.
    The next day he had shaved his scruffy face and stolen a backpack from a sporting goods shop on Broadway, then walked confidently past a very fat security guard who was busy studying his own stomach. After some wandering—through poorly lit corridors that smelled like aging books and empty rooms lined with green metal cabinets—he found the painting studio, unlocked and filled with sunlight. Only two harmless-looking students were working, and he staked out the prime real estate: a corner easel with the most light, which poured onto the easel from two large windows.
    Engales was in awe of his discovery: this place was his idea of heaven. He had never had an easel before; he had never even painted on canvas. All of his painting back home had taken place inside of sticky notebooks or on butcher paper, tacked to the walls of his dead parents’ bedroom. This place had canvas you could just take, on a huge roll in the corner, and big rolls of good paper, too, and cans of turpentine, and scissors and paper cutters and wooden models of human bodies and hands whose digits moved into whatever position you wanted them to. He looked to one of the students, who was quietly painting in her own corner, for confirmation that this was indeed real, or to see if she might be as excited about all of this as he was, but she was busy getting very close to her canvas and fogging her glasses with her own breath, the same breath he would smell when he took her to bed later that week. As for the Pigtail girl, he saw her only once on campus after that; she glared at him in a way that suggested she hated him for never calling her back, then twitched her mouth in a way that suggested she’d never tell his imposter’s secret to a soul.
    Now Engales used the Pigtail Key to let Rumi, curator extraordinaire and very rare beauty, into the studio, at close to eleven on New Year’s Eve. Of course, Engales was planning on a private experience—a little tour of his work, a little taking off of clothes. But to his surprise, the lights were on and he could hear Arlene’s hippie music drifting from her back corner.
    â€œ You’re here?” he yelled back to her.
    â€œWhere the fuck else would I be?” Arlene said in the way that Arlene said everything, with unapologetic crassness. He loved Arlene’s way of speaking, which he had come to know was a distinctly New York accent: complaining vowels, absent R’s, words emerging sideways