Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss Read Free Book Online

while looking at the work, no matter how nonsensical they might seem— Louise Fishman=strong smell of shampoo; Bill Rice=nocturnal mood, headache. When he got back to the house, with Marge already asleep, he would view the slides and type down his notes on his typewriter—version after version until it made some sort of sense as an art review. Every Friday he would seal one of the pieces into a manila envelope and walk it over to the New York Times building, where he dropped it in the arts editor’s mailbox. Upon releasing the envelope he always felt the same combination of convictions: that the editor would never read it and it would never see the light of day, and that it was bound to be read by someone, and that when that someone did read it, it would captivate them so completely they could not deny its publication.
    â€œI honestly can’t understand if what I’m writing is good or total shit,” he told Marge. “Which is ironic, isn’t it, considering that I’m trying to forge a career out of understanding what is good and what is total shit.”
    â€œIt’s good,” Marge assured him over and over, though in her voice there was a tinge of How long can this go on for? “The best things can take the longest to discover, right? Don’t they?”
    â€œLet’s just hope this isn’t a Van Gogh situation,” James said. “Let’s just hope I’m not dead before I can afford to be alive.”
    Finally, after five years of odd jobs and rejections, James got a call from Seth, the New York Times arts editor’s squeaky assistant, who told him his article on the painter Mary Heilmann—whose Crayola-colored works made “this reviewer’s heart feel like it was drinking water”—was going to print tomorrow.
    â€œWithout any edits?”
    â€œThere were no edits necessary, Mr. Bennett,” squeaked the assistant. “The editor said it was fresh.”
    James had hung up the phone and jumped in the air. Then he sat on the floor. Then he leaped up again and ran outside, looked up and down the street, realized he had gone out there for no reason at all and turned back around to go inside, and sat down at his desk to smile until he couldn’t anymore because his face hurt.
    He and Marge celebrated by going out to dinner at a medium-expensive place that had been recommended by “everyone”—meaning everyone at the Agency office, the sort of crowd that knew what frisée was, how to pronounce haricot vert— where Marge paid. Then they had sex twice.
    â€œYou proud of me?” he said as they lay in bed.
    â€œExtremely,” she said, nuzzling her face into his chest.
    And that was enough for him. He could have died that day and had no regrets, with Marge’s extremely lingering in his ear.
    After the article ran, James received a check in the mail and alongside it a medium-size package. The check was for a thousand dollars and the package was a Mary Heilmann painting, one of the pink-and-black ones, with a note from Heilmann herself, reading, So your heart will never be thirsty. XO, MH. James spent the thousand immediately, on a drawing by the artist and poet Joe Brainard that he had seen at a makeshift gallery in the East Village the week before—a sketch of a box of cigarettes, which made James’s eyes haze over with a moony, adventurous blue. He hung the two pieces next to each other in his study—small emblems of his small success, reminding him daily that there was beauty in the world, and that he could feel that beauty in his body, and that he could put that beauty onto a page for others to experience. This was how he was meant to engage with society, he thought: from the little ship of his study, through the magnificent portal of the New York fucking Times .
    Over the next years, as the seventies wore on and James and Marge pushed into their late twenties and then, as if it happened