The Tattoo Artist (23 page)
“I haven’t got any money,” I said.
She filled up my glass to the brim anyway. “Honey, I don’t know what your story is, but you look like you’ve earned this drink.”
Slightly tipsy, I stood outside the museum. The doors were now open, but there was an admission fee. Fifty cents for seniors. A tour group of Upper East Side ladies was being ushered through the entrance by a shivering docent. No one noticed the extra fur coat. Near the coat-check room, in a glass information booth, sat an officious-looking young woman.
“Could you help me?” I asked. “Where are your paintings from the nineteen-twenties?”
“The Early Modernists?” She pointed me toward the escalators. “Second floor, make a left when you see the Brillo boxes, go straight past Abstract Expressionism, through the double doors—you’ll be in the nineteen-thirties—make another sharp left at Surrealism, and that’s where you’ll find the early part of the century.” She looked at my scarf, then down at my heavy fur. “We have a coat check if you’d like,” she added.
At the top of the escalator, just where she said they would be, Brillo boxes were stacked three high. I couldn’t tell if the museum now allowed advertising or if they were part of the exhibit. Perhaps the Ta’un’uuans were right after all to covet the beauty of the cargo shells? Perhaps the shells themselves are the gift? On the wall behind them hung a billboard-sized painting of a little girl helmeted in a hair dryer, piloting a rocket ship through spaghetti. A guard was standing next to a drawing of a two-dollar bill. The title read,
Two-Dollar Bill with Je ferson.
“The Early Modernists?” I asked.
He pointed me toward the corridor. “Make a sharp left.”
“Thank you,” I said. When I made the sharp left, I found myself in another room of billboard-sized canvases, but unlike the little girl rocketing through spaghetti, these canvases were alive with raging forces, slashes of pigment, drips of color. The drip was such a poignant way to create a living line. I wondered if I could do something like that with ink on skin.
I tried the next gallery.
American Gothic. Tornadoes in the
Heartland.
A Ben Shahn. A Diego Rivera. All Philip’s and my old friends and enemies hanging side by side—the Regionalist shared a spotlight with the Social Realist, the Anarchists flanked the Trotskyite, the Stalinist hung beside the Fascist— and all were beautifully framed and owned by the same private collectors.
And then I saw my own painting, center wall between O’Keeffe and Man Ray, a naked young woman—me—supine under a night sky, on a tar roof. I’d framed the canvas in an old tenement window sash, set it under a cracked yellow pane, and painted the roof with real tar. The young woman’s face was turned so that her eyes stared directly at the viewer: her pupils were swirls of zealous, adamant, unrelenting hope. Above her pristine body, isolated on moonlit clouds, rose utopias run by perpetual motion machines. I must have used too much medium in those days, or not enough, because my surface, unlike the other Early Modernists, was already rent with tiny cracks.
I stepped closer and tried to look directly into the eyes of the young woman I was some fifty years ago, but she wouldn’t look at me. She stared past me, through me, preoccupied, oblivious to what was standing right before her. When I’d painted those eyes, I’d intended that the naked Eve appear to be transfixed by what the viewer can’t yet see, a future in which every shopgirl gets to drink from her boss’s crystal, but what I’d really captured in those cracking, trustful eyes was me staring at my own mortality.
I read the wall text:
SELF-PORTRAIT WITHOUT VANISHING POINT,
1923
.
SARA EHRENREICH (1902–39).
he Ta’un’uuans always reserve a small patch of virgin skin, unsoiled by the needle, for any last images, any final words, so to speak, before the canvas has been completely saturated with one’s exploits. The patch is always on the palm, left if you’re right-handed, and vice versa. It’s understood by the islanders that even those unskilled with the needle, the clumsiest fisherman, say, will want to put the final touches on their story with their own hand. For a tattoo artist like myself, it’s expected.
I press zero for the Waldorf’s front desk and ask that a sewing kit with a wide assortment of needles be brought to my suite.
The last tattoo shouldn’t be more revered than any other tattoo, but how could it not be? It’s the final tattoo to be removed before the body journeys to the afterworld, the last image of vanity to be fed to the fishes.
A chambermaid arrives a few minutes later with a wide assortment of threads, but only one needle. I tip her anyway with an armful of my brand-new dresses, then shut the door behind her. I inspect the needle, hold it up to the light. The shaft is slightly bent, but the point looks solid and sharp. It will have to do.
I pick up a ballpoint pen, unscrew the plastic halves, and remove the vein of ink. Breaking off one end, I squeeze the liquid out into a glass ashtray. It’s a lovely dark color, though by no means as rich and complex as the black I mix at home.
I strike a match to sterilize the needle’s tip, then dip the red-hot point into the waiting ink.
The image I tattoo is very simple—forty pricks at most. If one doesn’t know the whole story behind it, it looks like an upside-down T or a crude anchor or an unfinished cross, the blunder of an old tattoo artist’s diminishing talents, when in fact it’s a simple stick figure atop a tiny stick raft trying to navigate a course home across my open hand.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Though
The Tattoo Artist
is a work of fiction, I am indebted to the following sources for research and guidance:
A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years,
edited by Isaac Metzker
Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia
and Beyond,
by Lamont Lindstrom
Oceanic Art,
by Nicolas Thomas
Primitive Art,
by Franz Boas
Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in
the Southern Madang District, New Guinea,
by Peter
Lawrence
Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde,
by Steven Watson
World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European
Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made,
by
Irving Howe
Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia,
by Alfred
Gell
Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and
American History,
edited by Jane Caplan
I am grateful to Jo Ann Beard, Lisa Cohen, Bernard Cooper, Amy Hempel, A. M. Homes, David Leavitt, Arnold Mesches, Lisa Michaels, Mark Mitchell, Ann Patty, and Sam Swope for their patience, suggestions, and contributions.
I especially want to thank Gail Hochman and Vicky Wilson for their generous support.
I also wish to thank the New York State Foundation for the Arts.
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2006
Copyright © 2005 by Jill Ciment
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark
of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Ciment, Jill, [date]
The tattoo artist / Jill Ciment.
p. cm.
1. Tattoo artists—Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Women travelers—Fiction.
4. Women artists—Fiction. 5. Castaways—Fiction. 6. Tattooing—Fiction.
7. Oceania—Fiction. 8. Islands—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.C499T37 2005
813’.54—dc22
2004061215
eISBN : 978-0-307-42944-5
v1.0