Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss Page B

happen from here. Winona will find you. You’ve captured her interest, and once Winona George’s interest is captured, she follows. She’s like an art hawk.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” He coughed a bit of smoke out into the cold air; it looked like a flower.
    â€œJust wait,” Rumi said. “Soon you’ll get a call. A call will turn into a dinner, which will turn into a studio visit. You’ll become her pet for a while. You’ll get a show at one of her galleries. She’s pals with a few of the best critics, including Bennett; you’ll get a review before you know it. It’s done. Your fate is sealed. You’re already famous, Raul.”
    Engales laughed. “I don’t think so. She didn’t even get my name.”
    â€œJust wait,” Rumi said. “You’ll never give a shit about Times Square after what she does to you. But at least I can say I knew you when.” She winked.
    â€œSo what do we do now?” Engales said, bringing Rumi’s plastic watch up to his nose.
    â€œWe go to the best bar in New York City and we toast preemptively to your success,” said Rumi. She pushed herself up from the stoop with what looked to be a last breath of effort. “Maybe we can even find someone for you to kiss.”
    They got up to go, pausing for just a moment to watch Keith, who was painting an enormous heart on a temporary barricade across the street; inside of it he wrote in his bulbous script: 1980. When he turned around and saw them across the street, he gave them a juicy grin. You guys headed to the squat later, or what?

A GIRL IN NEW YORK IS A TERRIBLE THING
    I t was just after midnight on New Year’s Eve, in the first hours of the bubbly new decade, when Lucy Marie Olliason fell in love at first sight. She had been making a round of Manhattans for a mob of mannequin-like models, inwardly lamenting the anticlimactic climax of the night, when the Love that she First Sighted came into the bar and quickly, with the tossing of his black hair and the awkward yet charming grin he gave her, made her realize that the night had actually just begun. He forced himself to the front of the bar, through two big men she had been serving Long Island iced teas, and put his forearms on the bar like he was about to eat a plate of spaghetti. The mole on the side of his face said: Spot.
    â€œWhat?” she said. Had he said something? Or had she hallucinated? She could feel her provincial stupidity shining through her and she longed for the excellent coolness of a real local, even a dash of it. But there was no acquiring that in the amount of time she had, which was seconds, nanoseconds even, before this man said what he’d said again.
    â€œ Spot! I’m naming you that. I’ve just given you that name, right now.”
    Her heart leaped. This was the sort of thing she had believed in then, during her first winter in New York. She believed in a handsome man walking into her bar, a sort of downtown knight, a savior. She believed in the intimacy of nicknames. She believed in good luck and good looks. (And this man’s looks—hair that was dark enough to be exotic but wavy enough to be familiar, lips that bow-tied at the cleft and smiled easily, and triangular, almost sinister eyebrows—were definitely good.) She believed in this man’s eyes (warm as redwood bark) and in this man’s mole (a rubbery knob that wagged when he spoke), and she believed she could love that mole, that beautiful mole, that bounded out of his face and toward her, when he touched her earlobe over the bar. She believed in fate and destiny, and that she had stumbled upon hers, when he told her, leaning over the bar and whispering into her ear, that he was a painter. Finally, after the months that had felt like years in the Big City, in the first moments of the new decade, she had met her first artist. One of the men in her stolen library book. One of the men