The Tattoo Artist (22 page)

Two teenage girls wandered by, so engrossed in the extravaganza of footwear that they failed to notice the old, cold tattooed feet sharing the aisle.

The department manager returned with a short stack of boxes. “Let’s see if one of these has your name on it,” he said. Opening the top lid, he took out a pair of fleece-lined, square-toed ankle boots, then slipped them on my feet. “It’s one of our most popular styles this winter. Very comfortable and very warm. It also comes in dark brown, burgundy, and black.”

Jack’s camera whirred and clicked.

“Do you like them?” Brooke asked.

Nothing rubbed, nothing pinched. They seemed fine, perfectly adequate. I rose to test the fit, but it wasn’t necessary: five minutes in the company of all this bounty and the remarkable-ness of wearing shoes again was gone.

“I’ll take them,” I said.

“You don’t want to try on
any
others?” Brooke asked, shaking her head in wonder. “I can’t go three days without shopping, Sara. How did you manage thirty years?”

The manager started to put my old oxfords into a shopping bag, but Brooke whispered, “No.” He discreetly dropped them into a trash pail behind the counter. It took everything in my power not to retrieve them.

“Would you like to look around Saks a little longer?” Brooke asked. “You could choose gifts for everyone back home.” She drew my attention to a display of iridescent scarves: the dyes looked as if they’d been mixed with neon. I’d never seen color like that before.

“If I picked one out for the chief’s wife,” Brooke asked, “would you give it to her for me when you get home, Sara?”

So it never crossed her mind that I might not go back, that after my two weeks were up, after
Life
had wined and dined me, I might not be able to return to an islet in the middle of the ocean where a pair of shoes is treasured for generations.

“Perhaps we can shop for gifts later,” I said, but I didn’t promise to bring the scarf back with me.

Saks’s front doors sprang open without my even touching them. Fresh snow powdered the sidewalk. Brooke, Jack, and I hurried into the warm, waiting limousine. Only when the line of taxis behind us wouldn’t quit honking did it occur to me that the reason we weren’t moving was that everyone was waiting for me to tell the chauffeur where
I
wanted to go.

“There must be some special place you’d like to see again?” Brooke asked, ignoring the horns.

Philip’s and my house on Washington Mews? The tenement I grew up in? My parents’ graves? I couldn’t bear to visit the city of coffins on my very first day back. “I’m not used to so many options,” I said. “Is there someplace I could just sit quietly and watch?”

“Watch?” She thought for a moment. “Would you like to see the moon landing?
Life
has a private screening room. It’s about as quiet as New York gets, and you can just sit and watch.”

“They made a newsreel of the moon landing?”

“Sara, the whole world watched from their living rooms.” She tapped on the chauffeur’s partition. “Downtown. Take the West Side, it’s faster at this hour.”

Somewhere on Tenth Avenue near Pennsylvania Station, I spotted a tattoo parlor shoehorned between two peep show theaters.

“I’d like to stop,” I said.

“It’s not a safe neighborhood,” Brooke cautioned, as if naked breasts and tattoos would intimidate me at this late juncture in my journey.

“Just for a minute,” I said.

The proprietor, twenty years my junior, and almost as tattooed, glanced up from a barber chair in which he was napping. “No photographs,” he warned Jack. Then he blinked at my face, my silk-stockinged legs, the designs on my throat, the exposed swatch of skin between my gloved wrists and my fur cuffs, then at my face again. “All hand done?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The wall behind him was papered with skulls, serpents, hula girls, chutes-and-boots, a “tea” leaf, a mushroom, a raised fist, MOM, DEATH, SAT CONG, FUCK WAR, American flags.

“Would it be all right if I looked around?”

He stood, making way for me, all the while studying Ishmael’s work on my face. An electric needle hung from a hook, attached to a motor by a long, black cable.

“I’ve never seen one in action before,” I said.

He demonstrated it for me by tattooing a line on an orange rind. The motor was so loud, I thought, he must not be able to hear himself singing.

“May I see?” I asked, pointing to his forearm. He rolled up his sleeve for me. NO REMORSE was tattooed on the biceps.

“I’d do you one for free,” he said as I turned to leave, “but it looks as if your dance card is already full.”

In a dark, two-row theater, along with Brooke, Jack, and Brooke’s editor, a very tall, very concave gentleman, I watched a spaceman climb down a gangplank and set one foot, then the other, on the moon. In a voice breaking apart with reverence and static, he said something I couldn’t make out.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” the editor said. “Would you like to see and hear it again, Mrs. Ehrenreich? We can rewind the tape.”

“I’d like to keep going,” I said.

At three paces, the spaceman turned around to face what must have been a camera mounted on his rocket ship. I couldn’t read his expression. His visage was a mirror. Reflected in it, a tiny blue and green earth rose over the moon’s horizon. I couldn’t quite believe that I was seeing home from such a wondrous, unthinkable distance. He must have been as dumbstruck as I, and as terrified. More than anyone on earth, he must have considered what would happen if he became marooned up there, if he had to live out what remained of his life in such an alien world. I watched with apprehension until he and his two companions were safe on earth again, bobbing on a piece of their spaceship in the middle of the ocean. I so hoped a ship would rescue them soon.

The lights came on. I was back. Here. Wherever here was.

“It’s a little after one o’clock,” Brooke said as she climbed into the limousine behind me. “Where would you like to go for lunch, Sara? A lot of the old restaurants are still around.”

I tried to remember where Philip and I, in our better days, used to have lunch, but an earlier memory begged my attention: my father and I sharing a sandwich at Katz’s. Why was the promise of food so invariably tethered to the wrench of childhood nostalgia?

“Is Katz’s still around?” I asked.

“I think so,” Brooke said. “Do you know where it is?” she asked the driver.

“On Ludlow and Houston,” I said.

The decor hadn’t changed. Aged salamis still hung from hooks, perhaps the very same salamis that had hung when I was a girl. Most of the patrons looked as old as me.

The woman manning the cash register pointed me out to her customer, and a moment later the whole restaurant was gaping at me over their half-eaten sandwiches. Finally, a counterman shouted to his hard-of-hearing customers, “That’s Mrs. Ehrenreich, the tattooed lady from
Life.
Am I right, Mrs. Ehrenreich?”

I nodded, and everyone resumed eating.

“What can I get you today?” he asked.

“I’d like a pastrami on rye with mustard,” I said.

He speared a hunk of pastrami from a steaming pot, carved off a portion, then fixed me an impossibly thick sandwich, slavering the top slice with mustard.
“Du vilst essen a zour
pickle
mit unst?”

“Half-sour, please.”

I ferried my sandwich to an empty table. Brooke ordered soup, then sat opposite me. Jack reloaded his camera.

“Put the camera away,” I said. “I’m eating.” But I didn’t touch my sandwich. I kept looking around at the other diners. There must be old union boys and girls among them, if not from my Waist Makers’ Union, then from the Buttonhole Makers’ Union. That wizened thing at the next table might have run the sewing machine beside mine, she might have shared a bench with me in Washington Square. She looked so stubbornly familiar. Even if she didn’t know me, she might still recognize me as the counterman had, as a long-lost member of the tribe.

“Is something wrong with your sandwich?” Brooke asked at last.

“It’s a little more challenging to eat then I remember,” I said, lifting up the heavy brick of pastrami. I took a small, messy bite, then wiped my tattooed lips with a paper napkin. The bus-boys let loose Bronx whistles. Despite the racket, I overheard the old shopgirl whisper to her friend, “They’ll never allow her to be buried as a Jew.”

The temperature had dropped again by the time we left, or perhaps it only felt like that after the torpid heat of Katz’s. We dashed into the waiting limousine.

“How’re you holding up?” Brooke asked, glancing at her watch as she slid in behind me. It flashed 2:14. Watches no longer had faces. “We still have the whole afternoon, Sara. Would you like to go to the Met, or the galleries?”

Was it only two o’clock in the afternoon? We hadn’t been driving around for days, weeks, months, just a handful of hours? “I must lie down,” I said, “I’m exhausted.”

“The Waldorf,” she told the driver. “Sara, I’m sorry. How thoughtless of me. You must be so overwhelmed. And on top of everything, you have jet lag.”

“I’ve never heard the term,” I said.

“It means your body’s clock is still on island time. It’s early dawn in the village. You’d just be waking up.”

For a fraction of a second, Schimmel’s Knishes, Russ & Daughters Smoked Fish, the Yiddish newspaper stand, the bus, the endless torrents of yellow taxis were blotted out by a particularly tender pink tropical dawn.

“There’s a fifteen-hour difference between Ta’un’uu and New York,” she added.

I waited for the irony of what Brooke had just said to occur to her, but her face remained as innocent as ever. Did she actually believe fifteen hours could register beside thirty years?

I fell asleep on top of the covers, too tired to undress, though I managed to pull off my new boots. When I finally awoke, I raised my head to see where in the world I was. In which hemisphere? On what island? The window was dark. The skyline had been extinguished while I’d been sleeping. It was the middle of the night, and here I was, once again, fully, mercilessly wide awake in an empty hotel room with nothing but panic for company.

What a foolish old woman I was to have come back after all this time, no different from any other sentimental old immigrant spending her last wish to see home again. Wasn’t it better that my father never got to witness what had become of his little singing
yeshiva
on the Russian steppes?

I turned on the light. In the mirror opposite the bed, I saw the bottom of my tattooed feet. I’d never before seen them from such a fresh, unimaginable angle. Etched in raw umber on my right sole was my empty, open coffin, and on my left, in red oxide, was Philip’s closed one. I’d always meant for them to be viewed as a diptych. When I leave here, I’ll never get to see them again. Not from this angle. Wasn’t that alone worth the journey? Maybe I should go home right now. Really, what else is left for me to see here? Alice? She’s in her late eighties. Why make her suffer an appearance from a ghost. My parents’ graves? I never bothered when I lived here. The newest technology? I’d already witnessed a man on the moon. My old painting hanging in the Modern? I couldn’t even remember what it looked like.

If I could have gotten into the museum then and there, I would have run the five blocks in my bare feet, on my tattooed coffins. How could I go home without seeing my old work?

I waited for the sun to break over the rooftops before putting on my hat and coat. In the elevator, I wound my scarf around my face until only my eyes were visible. I so needed this to be a private viewing.

I walked the icy sidewalks to Fifth Avenue. The museum used to be in the old Heckscher Building, up on the twelfth floor, but according to the young doorman, those suites were now a law firm. He pointed me four blocks south. Tilting into the wind, I trudged to the corner of Fifty-third. When I finally reached the museum’s glass entrance, the guard wouldn’t let me inside. The museum didn’t open for another two hours.

Across the street, in a steamy window, a neon sign promised HOT COFFEE, HOT DOUGHNUTS, HOT BAGELS. I got as far as the coffee shop door before it occurred to me that I was penniless.
Life
hadn’t given me any spending money, and I had forgotten to ask. I hadn’t given money a thought in three decades.

I couldn’t remain outdoors much longer. Where do the penniless go to keep warm? I walked to Grand Central and pushed open the doors against a tide of commuters. The pace was dizzying. More people were arriving by train. I needed to sit down, but every bench I approached was already occupied by the penniless. No one cared to move over for a lady in a fur coat.

I fled by the south entrance. A sign in the window of a bar across the street read OPEN. The sign looked older than me. I wove between bumpers frozen at a red light and stepped inside. The only other customer was asleep, his cheek on the counter. The old proprietress was washing a glass. She studied me curiously, but it wasn’t my face that piqued her interest. The scarf was still in place. It was the fur coat in her establishment at eight-thirty in the morning.

I took a seat at the bar. “Hennessy, a double please,” I said. I pulled off my gloves, then unwound the scarf from around my mouth and throat. I thought she was going to drop the cognac bottle, but she managed to pour me a shot without taking her eyes off my face. She didn’t appear to recognize me, though. I guess her
Life
subscription had lapsed a long time ago.