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

from somewhere in her bottom jaw.
    â€œAt a party? Being a normal person? It’s New Year’s!”
    â€œIt’s a real shame that I’m not a normal person,” she said, tossing her fat brush into a tin canister. “A serious fucking shame.”
    Engales had met Arlene on his second day in the studio, and they had become fast, if unexpected, friends. He had guessed that she was in her late forties, from the single gray streak in her red hair and the shallow lines forking out around her eyes, and he had worried that she was the boss of the studio, ready to kick him out of his newfound art mecca.
    â€œThe boss?” Arlene had yelled. “Oh fuck no! Excuse my French. Are you French? No you couldn’t be French, too rough around the edges. But no, I’m not the boss. Name’s Arlene. I’m a painter.”
    She had said this with a proud extension of her arms and a glance down to her paint-covered dress, which was shaped like a tent and emblazoned with squiggly lines and abstract fish. The dress swung out into a circle when she wheeled around to examine the canvas that Engales had been working on.
    â€œWell I can see that,” Engales had said. “But aren’t you a little . . . old? I mean, to be a student here?”
    â€œOld? Go fuck yourself,” she had said, thrusting a shoulder toward him. Then, with a little lift of her nose: “I’m what they call a visiting artist. Which is really quite hilarious, since technically I’ve been visiting for thirteen years. They’d never kick me out. I’m like those ugly sculptures in parks that you know were important once but are now just eyesores. Anyway, they’ve learned to ignore me.”
    Engales raised his eyebrows and gave her a nod of approval. “So you’re working the system,” he said.
    â€œWell that makes two of us, doesn’t it?” she said. She gave him a maternal wink, which he didn’t know whether to return or ignore.
    â€œThey invited me back when I mattered,” she continued. “I was one of those blips on the radar, you know? Famous for ten seconds? Now they’re stuck with me. Their gain, if you ask me! Ha! Oh. And by the way? Just so you know: that painting you’re working on is a piece of shit.”
    Then she shoved a book into Engales’s chest, earmarked at a Lucian Freud painting.
    â€œStudy it,” she said. “That’s how you paint a fucking face.”
    No one had ever cared enough to tell Engales that something he was making was a piece of shit before, and he coveted it. He had protested for show, but then had studied the Freud painting deliberately, running his finger over the smooth page, noting the way the unfinished background eclipsed the face itself, and how the shadows hung so haphazardly on the skin. It was unclear whether the painting was even finished, but Engales felt that it was the white negative space that made the painting wonderful. It was the world threatening to obliterate the painting’s subject, the universe licking at the subject’s face, about to swallow him whole. An understanding swept through Engales, and not unhappily: he was not yet great, but greatness was out there; it was available. He had then thrown his own canvas—the first real canvas he had ever painted on—into the studio’s big trash bin and started over. From across the room he had heard Arlene say, “Atta boy.”
    After that, Arlene quickly became the sort of friend one needed in New York: the friend who told you things how they were, not how you wanted them to be, but only did so because she actually respected you—otherwise, it wouldn’t have been worth her time. (In New York, Engales soon learned, time was a currency potentially more valuable than actual money; everybody claimed they needed more of it.) Arlene informed him of all the times when the studio was not being used for classes