Tuesday Nights in 1980 Read Free Page A

other reasons, the primary being inevitable overstimulation. It would have been overstimulating for anyone, James guessed, as places with excessive wealth and excessive art and excessive alcohol usually were, but it was especially overstimulating for James, whose mind flashed with nearly psychotic colors and sounds immediately upon entering.
    First and foremost there was the purple, which was the color of money—not one-dollar bills and loose-change money, but big money, and the people who had it. Mansions were purple, and expensive cars, and the towers made of glass that reflected the sun off the Hudson. Certain haircuts were purple, and certain names. Yvonne. Chip. Anything preceding Kennedy. Winona George herself was in the lavender family; her personal art collection included a Gaudí spire that had mysteriously been procured from the actual Sagrada Familia, and not one but two de Koonings.
    James could sense Winona’s presence almost immediately; he saw her at practically every art opening he went to, knew her color and smell by heart, though he’d rarely had to deal with her face-to-face; she always seemed so busy. Now she flew around the mahogany room like a loon in her black silk dress, coating everything and everyone with flirtatious art babble and lilac laughter. The babble itself—overwrought with intellectual tropes, heavy with important names, dripping with references that only a crowd like this one would understand ( Fluxus, metarealism, installation )—affected James in a bodily way, with the physical feeling that he was being sprayed in the face with a garden hose. The paintings and sculptures that filled Winona’s house, each with its own intense flavor or smell, flew at him from all directions; a comforting but powerful red color was being emitted by his wife; and then there was the matter of the grating chorus of violins: teeth pulling hors d’oeuvres from tiny toothpicks.
    It was indeed overwhelming, but tonight James was choosing to indulge in it. Today he had received dual pieces of good news: that he had been invited to give an important lecture—at his alma mater, Columbia, on the importance of metaphor in art writing—and that, tucked under his wife’s burgundy dress and stretched skin like a ripening fruit, there was a real, live human with a real, beating heart. Both of these things—recognition from the institution that had given shape to his life, along with the confirmation via a sixteen-week sonogram that he was really and truly about to give shape to another life—were causes to celebrate. They were finally past that precarious point of not being able to tell anyone about the baby, so why not? Why not go tell the world, and celebrate with them? There was no way to know then that it would be the last celebrating they did for a very long time, that those hours, suspended like a sack of happiness just before that happiness would dissolve, would mark that night with an X for years afterward: the night just before the morning when everything would change.
    But for now, in Winona George’s Moroccan-rugged and morosely lit convent living room, James and Marge were happy. And when Winona herself approached them, instead of recoiling as he might have on another, less buoyant evening, James was armed with confidence and charisma.
    â€œMeet my wife!” he shouted proudly to Winona, a little too loudly he knew, for he always had trouble gauging the appropriate decimal at which to speak at parties. “And our kid!” He said while stroking Marge’s barely noticeable stomach through her dress. “Meet our kid! We’re just telling people.”
    â€œOh how lovely ,” said Winona, with pursed purple lips. She had the kind of hair that was popular that year, a curtain revealing only the first act of her face: a queenly nose, confusingly colored eyes (were they violet ?), cheekbones for days. “And how far along are