The Tattoo Artist (21 page)

I lifted my head. The light was funerary gray. On the far side of a glass opening in the face of a concrete mountain, snow was falling. The dark windows reflected nothing but me in a strange room, on a strange sofa. The clock on the end table read 6:05. Morning or evening, I couldn’t say. All three phones were ringing at once. I picked up the closest one. “Hello? Hello?”

“Did you have a good rest, Sara?” Brooke asked. “Do you see the snow? It’s your first evening back. Any particular place you’d like to go?”

When I failed to name a single place, she said, “Anyone other than Alice you’d like me to get a phone number for? Anyone you’d like me to call tonight to let them know that you’re here? Back?”

I said I wasn’t yet sure where I was, that I would see her in the morning. I set the receiver back in its plastic cradle and crossed the carpet. I turned on the bathroom light, then quickly shut it again. I wasn’t yet ready to see my life’s work reflected back at me. I filled the tub and bathed by moonlight or street-light, I couldn’t tell which through the curtains. I found a robe and slippers and stood by the living room window, my wet hand starfished against the glass, over the city’s tireless glow. There was no moon, no stars, no planets, no sense of eternity. How had I lived here? How had I not?

I went to the closet, intending to get dressed and go out alone. Uptown, downtown, it didn’t matter. I would just keep walking. After all, it wasn’t yet seven in the evening. New York was only now coming alive. In my old bohemian life, Philip and I might just be waking up.

The dresses looked like hanging skins. I tried to imagine myself slipping into one, then pulling on stockings and shoes, then buttoning up the fur coat, then tying a scarf around my mouth to mask my face, and striding across the lobby, past the curious concierge, into the frigid New York night. The blood began banging in my ears. I had to sit down on the edge of the bed. What was I so afraid of? The cold? The hubbub? The stares? Negotiating an icy curb? Getting lost in my own home-town? Or was I afraid that the moment I stepped outside I would feel at home here, and then what would all those years on Ta’un’uu have meant?

I shut the closet, then picked up the note with Alice’s number on it. I needed to talk to someone who knew me as I once was. I wanted to tell her how sorry I was about Julien, wanted her to know that Philip had died, too. I pushed the buttons on the telephone and heard unearthly, musical tones, then the drone of a ringing line.

A hoarse, shaky voice answered, “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?”

The voice sounded so old, I hung up.

The phone book sat next to the phone. I started turning pages. Had the print gotten so much smaller or the city so much larger? I wasn’t even sure who I was looking for. I simply needed to know who was still alive. I ran my finger down a column until I thought I recognized a name. Alex Auffenberg. Wasn’t he the Dadaist poet who wrote without ink in his pen? What would I say to him if it really turned out to be him, if the old poet picked up the phone? Are you still writing? Or would I just hang up on him as I had Alice? What had prompted me to come back at my age?

I opened the wet bar. Miniature bottles lined the shelves. Bourbon. Brandy. Vodka. Scotch. Rye. Cognac. Why switch now? I uncapped the Hennessy, drank it right from the spout. Aside from the hum of the little refrigerator and the thumping pulse of my irrepressible existence, the suite was tomb-silent. I’d forgotten how deafening an empty room can be. I turned on what I thought was a radio in a big wooden cabinet, just for the company, and a moving picture appeared. In color. A close-up of a pretty actress. I watched with complete fascination. They’d found a way to bring motion pictures into the home. They’d sent a man to the moon. What other wonders have they come up with? The actress touched her fingers to her temples in the universal gesture for “I can’t go on.” It turned out to be an advertisement for Bayer aspirin. I turned off the picture and stared at the glass screen, a mirror really. I switched on a lamp and picked up the
Life
magazine. I so needed to be with people who know me as I am now. The table of contents read
Mrs.
Crusoe Among a Lost South Seas Tribe.
I opened to a centerfold of the Great Tapestry. Even without the natural billowing of swaying bodies to animate the design, it looked remarkable, exquisite. I’m the only one on Ta’un’uu who has ever witnessed the full display of the Great Tapestry from without. I must ask
Life
for enough copies to bring back with me as gifts.

I turned the page to a photographic montage of island life—gardening, fishing, feasting, the final shot, a portrait of the elders. Cast in the light of an incandescent bulb, they look so very far away. I tried to imagine my return, the Great Tapestry coming apart as everyone runs to greet me, as everyone insists on pressing their forehead against mine. A sow will be sacrificed and sung about, then eaten. The youngsters will all want tattoos from my world. But after a day or two, the village will return to its old routine as if none of this had ever happened, and my world will once again fold shut.

What if I don’t want to go back? What if I choose to stay? It’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility. It’s not as if I have to make a decision tonight. I’m not foolish enough to think that I even know where I am . . . but still.
Life
must have a contingency plan in case I should ask to stay. They could hardly just abandon me. They’d be under some obligation to help, if not legally, at least in the public’s eye. Perhaps I could parlay my notoriety into a modest living for a time? One of my paintings is, after all, hanging in the Modern. Alice might even know a gallery dealer willing to set me up in a small studio, nothing special, a garret, say, in the Village. The Village wouldn’t be as frightening as Midtown. I could take up painting again. Unlike skin, one never runs out of canvas. Eventually, I would feel at home here. I came to feel at home on Ta’un’uu, didn’t I? What would my days be like? Wake up early to a wintry dawn. Fix myself a cup of coffee with two teaspoons of sugar and real cream. Sip it while opening my paints. I could still call up the smell of turpentine. I would lunch out at a coffee shop, Chock full o’Nuts if need be. I’d buy my smokes at a newspaper kiosk, perhaps even flirt with the old guy inside. “Hey Mrs. E., got your picture in the paper lately?” “Not lately,” I’d say.

Then, one afternoon, I’d fail to show up for my cigarettes, and someone would be sent to my door only to find me cold and dead in a crypt-silent studio. I’d rank a photograph with my obituary. How could they not include a picture of
my
face? And perhaps a retrospective at a museum. I’d be buried beside my mother and father in the city of coffins with nobody to remove my skin, my art, before I have to face all my dead loved ones.

I looked up from my copy of
Life.
Staring back at me from the center of the glass-radio-motion-picture-screen—backlit, ethereal—sat an old tattooed ghost in a hotel robe.

Brooke rapped on my door first thing the next morning.

I was just finishing breakfast—coffee with real cream and two sugars, a one-minute egg, another scrambled with lox, and a bagel with cream cheese. And I’d managed to get myself into a dress. In the light of day, the task hadn’t seemed so formidable. I’d even put on silk stockings. They’d done away with girdles! But when I’d tried to slip on shoes, I couldn’t make myself do it. It was as if last night’s panic now resided in a pair of shoes. If I put them on, I would put on the panic itself.

“May I come in? Did you sleep well?” Brooke asked, looking around to see how I’d spent my first night. Was the wet bar open? Was the wet bar empty? Had I discovered the motion-picture machine? Did I forgo the pillows? Did I sleep on the floor? She noticed my stocking feet.

“I couldn’t find any shoes that fit,” I lied.

She headed for the closet, brought back a pair of brown oxfords, knelt before me, eased my feet into them, laced them up, then had me stand and take a few steps. I could no longer feel the world underfoot. I walked over to the window.

“How do they feel?”

With my back to her, I pretended to test the fit, but all I really wanted was a moment of privacy to comprehend
and
appreciate the impossible fact that I was wearing shoes again.

“Are they comfortable?”

“They’ll do.”

She came up behind me, offered me a Chesterfield, then lit one for herself. “You must have thought about what you want to do while you’re here, Sara. Who you’d like to visit? Would you like to start by seeing your painting at the Modern?”

I closed my eyes for a moment, but try as I did, I could no more envision
Self-Portrait Without Vanishing Point
than I could the dead’s faces. “I’d prefer to wait to see my old work,” I said, “until I’m a little more used to the present.”

“Of course.” She took another puff of her cigarette, then left it to smolder away in an ashtray. “Would you like to just drive around for a while, Sara? Orient yourself? We could go to the top of the Empire State Building, let you get a bird’s-eye view of all the changes that have taken place.”

“I’ve never been,” I admitted.

She smiled. “Neither have I. Shall we?”

“Would you give me a moment,” I said.

“Take all the time you need. I’ll be waiting in the lobby with Jack.” She shut the door behind her. I slipped the fur coat on, then retrieved the hat, gloves, and scarf left for me on the vanity. I set the hat atop my white hair, buttoned up my coat, then pulled on the gloves. It took a rattled moment or two for me to grasp what I saw in the center panel of the vanity’s mirror: my mother, dressed as she had always dreamed, in a fur coat from Saks. Ishmael’s black had faded over the years, but the line was as commanding as ever.

Would I face New York masked or unmasked? I left the scarf on the vanity.

Brooke, Jack, and I shared an elevator up to the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building with a tour group from Kansas and a guide who seemed beside himself that he might appear in
Life.
When he thought no one was looking, he primped in the elevator’s mirrored panel.

We exited as a group and were herded onto a blowing, snowy deck. For a moment, everyone fell mute, dumbstruck by the view. New York no longer looked like a mere island metropolis from up here, it looked like a man-made cosmos. As far as the eye could see, human enterprise and edifices. Planes crossed the sky, ships the harbor. Horns, clanging steel, and human clamor rose out of the grid of streets, borne on icy updrafts. How had I believed, even for only a minute or two last night, that I could make my way out there? Where do the old people rest?

As soon as the initial awe had passed, and the tourists had taken their pictures of the view, I noticed a few of the cameras stray my way.

“Opening day, when Governor-soon-to-be-President Roosevelt stood where you’re standing now,” the guide intoned, “he said, ‘I’ve got an entirely new conception of things in the city of New York!’ ”

I overheard one lady whisper to her husband, “Do you think they rub off?”

“Built in nineteen-thirty-one, out of fifty-seven tons of steel, at a cost of forty-one million—that’s ninety-eight million in today’s dollars—the Empire State Building is still the tallest building in the world. We are standing twelve hundred and fifty feet above Fifth Avenue, atop two million square feet of office space. If you’ll look up, you can see another two hundred and twenty-two feet of television antenna added in nineteenfifty at an additional cost of four-point-eight million. To our north is Rockefeller Center. Its base takes up sixteen square blocks of the most valuable real estate in the world . . .”

The guide was shouting out New York’s history,
my
history, as dollars and change. As the crowd pressed against the balustrade to get a better view of the world’s most pricey acreage, I ventured up to the snowy edge, too. From this omnipotent height, Rockefeller Plaza didn’t appear much bigger than a tiny vale in a mountain range. Philip, Alice, and Julien, our comrades from the Artists’ Union, the sad Jewish couple with their horror tales from Germany, even Diego Rivera himself must have looked so infinitesimal marching down Fifth Avenue with our little red banners of protest to anyone standing on the observation deck that day.

“Oh my God, Sara, you must be freezing!” Brooke said, staring aghast at my shoes.

I looked down. I was ankle-deep in snow melt. I couldn’t sense whether my shoes had taken on ice water, or whether my dead loved ones had finally gotten ahold of my feet.

“The oxfords don’t seem to be waterproof,” I said.

I was immediately chauffeured to Saks Fifth Avenue to pick out a new pair of shoes, boots if I preferred, and warm heavy socks. The department manager himself welcomed me to Saks’s shoe “gallery,” then escorted me through the exhibits—a pair of gold lamé high heels pedestaled on a sculpture stand, a single red thigh-high boot lit by a hot white spotlight, a salon-style presentation of pointy-toed flats made from every imaginable animal skin. He had me sit down on a chair so that he could personally measure my feet for a proper fit.

Behind bins of sale shoes, carousels of stockings, shoppers stared at me. Undoing my frozen laces, he helped me out of the wet oxfords, then placed my chilled foot onto a measuring implement, the same kind they’d used when I was a girl. I’d grown one full size and widened to a triple E. Apologizing that Saks didn’t carry a fuller selection in my size, he went to see what he could find.