Tuesday Nights in 1980

He loved the flaws; they were invariably the most interesting parts of people's faces and bodies, the parts that held the straightest lines, the most beautiful shadows. Wounds and deformities and cracks and boils and stomachs: this was the stuff that moved Engales. Usually while he detailed the broken nose or sketched a lumpy body he felt as if he was zeroing in on what it meant to be alive. He could hear his father saying: The scratches are what makes a life.

He had dragged something sharp through her heart when he went; Raul’s presence was like electricity, lighting up her world when it flicked on for her, darkening everything when it was shut off. It was dark when he left,

It isn't enough to be beautiful, James thought he heard her say, though with the ringing in his ears he couldn't know for sure. Beautiful is for other people. You have to be something for you.

Now she is thirty-two and she runs the place and she still can’t help thinking that making cakes for people with extra money to spend on cakes is not necessarily the life that she was meant for.

when you start doubting, you stop painting. You eat a sandwich, walk around the block, do jumping jacks, make sketches. Anything to circumnavigate the doubt, change its course. Doubt was the fucking enemy, Arlene said. Of all good art.

What he saw was a freak on the loose, in a city that was no longer his home.

If curiosity would kill him, he would take it.

The difference now was that his loss was visible. You wore dead parents inside your body. You wore a dead hand like a badge...

…it occurred to him now that art was about making yourself visible and making yourself disappear all at once.

November is the color of the outside of an eggplant. It smells like the inside of an old woman’s jewelry box. Get outta bed, you’d want to tell November if you saw it. Do something. Winter nudges at the city with its cold shoulder. The edges of windows become shores of chill. Cashmere emerges. Wool, not yet. The month lumbers, as if half-asleep. It’s waiting. It knows. November is a month that knows. It knows that hearts everywhere are about to break; happens this time every year.

Pity canceled out belief; you could not believe in someone you pitied.

This is how New York began. A willingness, and then a pause. An attitude, a confidence, and then this: cracked walls and huge bugs, your first cigarette, the taste of your own fear.

Listen to this beautiful thing a human made!" "But it's scratched," Engales or his sister would have said. "But thats the point," his father would have said back. "The imperfections, the time that's passed, the hiccups... that's the wear of the world on it. Thats the life.

She could actively, viciously, if necessary, follow her heart, and in doing so, affect the hearts of others.

And all she could do was laugh the very particular laugh of a girl in love. Tilt of chin. Sparkle of half-closed eyes. Half smile, no teeth. Then-here it was-eyes all the way open, pupils floating to the top when she looked up, I'm yours, they said, she knew it, I'm yours.

And it was precisely this intersection of reality and miracle that kept James in awe of his life: a life thay was indeed built with equal parts biology and beauty.

(Never trust anyone who wants to be in charge, his father had often said). Also, a US passport for Raul; they had had him during a

Despire himself he began to believe that the light was the only way up, no matter that the light itself would singe him.

One man would be grinning while the art lovers toasted in his name. another man would never paint again.