The Tattoo Artist: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jill Ciment

  The glass on my right thigh has been drained of gin and vermouth. The ice cubes have melted. The water has evaporated. All that remains is a gold tooth at the bottom.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  he accounts the refugees brought with them—rallies of robotic youth, Jews being dragged out of shops and stomped on by children—made no sense to us. Germany was, after all, the birthplace of modern philosophy. What made their accounts particularly horrific, particularly unthinkable, was the age of the perpetrators—rosy-cheeked, stalwart boys. It was as if a farmer from Iowa had appeared at your door, disheveled, dazed, with stories of the Boy Scouts of America rampaging down Main Street, hauling shopkeepers onto the sidewalk and beating them with ax handles.

  Most of the refugees stayed with us only a week or so before moving on to prearranged posts—Albers to teach at Black Mountain College, Grosz to the Art Students League. These men were, after all, the crème de la crème of German art. They didn’t just add their names to the avant-garde manifestos, as Philip and I had, they wrote them.

  With their charming accents, weary demeanors, and encyclopedic educations, they exuded worldliness. If I felt like a shopgirl in their presence, Philip acted like a schoolboy. He deferred to their opinions even when I knew he didn’t always agree. He addressed them with exquisite formality. One night, Albers and Grosz asked to see what Philip was working on. I saw him pale. He brought out a few old canvases from his Fauvist-Cubist-Futurist-Dadaist-Surrealist period, then quickly led them past the blank canvas to my side of the studio. While our guests crowded around my tiny teeth sculptures, using a magnifying glass to read the titles that I’d engraved in the gold itself, I watched Philip. By the way he craned his neck forward, the way he smoked his cigarette down to a smudge, I could see how anxious he was that Albers or Grosz or whoever admire my art, acknowledge the exalted value that he himself had placed upon it, and at the same time, I couldn’t ignore the suffering in his eyes when he finally realized that his own work, albeit ten years old, was being thoroughly ignored by his old teachers.

  Before Albers left for Black Mountain, he introduced us to his New York gallery dealers, Julien and Alice Bronsky, East Side Jews who had been passing as aristocratic Russians for years. As soon as Julien met us, he let us in on their ruse. He let all the artists in on the ruse. A barrel of a man, with eyebrows as white, stiff, and protruding as straw eaves, he used to slap his own rotund cheek when he laughed too hard. Julien and Alice were the last of the Village’s avant-garde dealers. They handled the work of Man Ray, Duchamp, de Chirico, Frida Kahlo. Or was it Mina Loy? It hardly matters at this point, now, does it? Everyone is dead but Alice and me.

  What mattered was Philip’s reaction when the Bronskys offered me, not him, a show. Diplomats of rare sagacity, Julien and Alice spent as much time appraising Philip’s work as mine. Alice called Philip’s style “eclectic,” his decade-old canvases “interesting.” Julien said Philip’s collection of masks was the most impressive private collection he’d ever seen, a truly remarkable accomplishment. If Philip ever wanted to sell it, he had just the collector. Then he and Alice turned to me and asked, as matter-of-factly as one asks for a glass of water, if I’d be ready to open the fall season. Philip’s smile became a frozen shadow of itself, but he managed to kiss me on both cheeks.

  “Mazel tov,” he whispered.

  He retreated into the kitchen for what seemed like a long time. I could hear water splashing, cupboards banging. When he returned, damp hairs clung to his forehead, and he was holding, by the throat, our last bottle of good champagne. He popped the cork, poured out four glasses, proposed a toast to the exhibit’s success, then knocked back his drink as if it were wood alcohol.

  Late that night, I awoke to the absence of his weight in our bed. The studio light was on. I got up and padded to the doorway.

  Philip was back in his folding chair, a freshly rolled cigarette burning in his fist, his hair pulled back with a piece of twine, all the while studying that same expanse of white canvas that had been hanging on the wall for months now. Scattered around his bare feet lay art books, open, faceup, their bright reproductions visible. Philip’s gods—Gauguin, Rousseau, Magritte. Now and again, he’d lean forward to stare down at them, as a man gazes into a pond in the hopes of seeing his own reflection.

  Philip was bewitched by art. He was so enamored of it that not to contribute to its creation was a betrayal of all he believed. Yet every time he opened his mouth to join in song, a hen’s chortle or a donkey’s bray came out, and he felt like a mortal punished by his gods.

  Had Philip only allowed his art a little ugliness, a little fallibility, a smidgen of human exhaustion. But he didn’t. He continued to believe, at forty-three, that art was perfection or it was nothing, and that the avant-garde artist, like the seer, felt only the eternally youthful upsurge of indestructible faith, or he was a fraud. Had Philip just permitted himself a teensy bit of capitulation, he might have realized that every time anyone opens his mouth to join in song, be it Gauguin or Albers, or even me, all we, too, hear is a hen’s chortle or a donkey’s bray.

  I worked for my exhibition with an intensity—no, intensity doesn’t convey the magnitude of my ambition. I should say that I worked for this exhibition with an ardor I had never before experienced.

  I completed fifty pieces in six months.

  And what was Philip doing while I painted? Philip was doing what Philip always did, championing my art, contacting the critics, glad-handing the collectors, sleeping with their wives. He was encouraging me to paint “from the spine,” the conduit that connected, in Philip’s Surrealist credo, the heart to the mind. He was applauding me so loudly that I finally came to understand that his incessant clapping was in itself a form of punishment.

  That fall, 1938, my exhibition opened to—how should I put it?—underwhelming applause? It closed to a barrage of harangues. My comrades on the left labeled me an “esthetic fascist,” called my paintings “another example of counterrevolutionary addition: capitalism + hallucinations = surrealism.” They went after me with the vitriol of a vicar berating a fallen woman. The conservatives, the Grant Wood realists, dismissed my work as “a hysterical woman’s take on the tribulations of marriage.”

  Am I not the height of old-lady vanity? I can barely recall a line of Shakespeare—

  Her voice was ever something,

  something, and low—an excellent thing in a woman.

  —but I can remember every petty slight. Verbatim.

  “. . . like a knickknack exhumed from your grandmother’s attic.”

  The Bronskys were only able to sell one small piece, and that was to their most ardent collector, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Nelson’s father.

  I was devastated. Philip, however, was outraged.

  After a snide review in the Times had come out, he headed down to the bar where the Times critics were said to congregate and got into fisticuffs with my naysayer, a red-faced—red as a Coca-Cola machine—proponent of Americana Regionalist painting.

  A week after his bar tussle, still sporting a black eye, Philip was thrown out of the Artists’ Union when he commandeered the microphone to rage against its card-carrying membership, who had turned their back on the avant-garde. Before a couple of burly Social Realists dragged him off the stage, he announced that he was going to burn his paintings, cremate his entire oeuvre in a ceremonial conflagration that would illuminate the death of the avant-garde, the only true revolutionary art. He invited everyone to attend. He even challenged those who still maintained a modicum of principle to offer up their own paintings and help stoke the fire.

  He borrowed Julien’s truck, filled it with his dust-encrusted dreamscapes, his faded utopian cityscapes, and drove to a vacant lot in Hoboken. Beside the rusted remnants of a hobo’s camp, he stacked the canvases into an armature for a bonfire. He returned to the truck and carried back his sketchbooks, stuffing them between the paintings. Then he stood back, wiped his face with his coat sleeve, and regarded h
is life’s work, squinting at the heap. His oeuvre barely reached his waist. Tilted this way and that, the paintings looked like a tiny house of cards silhouetted against the late afternoon sun–emblazoned skyscrapers on the other side of the gray Hudson.

  There were a dozen of us present—me, Julien, Alice, and the leftover stalwarts of Philip’s old bohemia: the ex-Dadaist poet who now wrote, on principle, without ink in the pen; the gray-haired Wobbly who still recounted his one and only talk with Joe Hill; the Futurist painter who refused to believe that Futurism was over.

  Philip soaked the tip of a stretcher bar in linseed oil, lit it, and asked me if I wanted to do the honors.

  When I wouldn’t take his torch, he poured the rest of the oil over the canvases and lit them. At first, his oeuvre just coughed and smoked. Then a blue pillar of fire rose up through the hollow center and exploded into cinders. A couple of seconds later, the flames cascaded over the images. It took less then an hour before everything Philip had ever done was reduced to ash.

  Over the next few weeks, I never mentioned his holocaust, not once, and Philip didn’t bring up my exhibit, ever.

  My own way of stanching the disappointment was to threaten to enlist in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to have Philip and me become ambulance drivers for the Spanish Republic. Aren’t avant-garde artists always ambulance drivers in wartime?

  “We’re not going to Spain,” Philip said. “There’s nothing for us there, but tsuris. Roosevelt and Chamberlain and the rest of the West have no intention of allowing Franco and his fascists to lose. All they really care about is getting rid of the communists. Besides, you can’t be an ambulance driver, Sara, because you don’t know how to drive.”

  In the middle of my chest is a palm-sized smudge of ash. It looks like a mistake I tried to blot out, or the mark of the devout, but it’s a tattoo like any other. I wanted Philip’s sacrificial fire to have a central place in my design.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Over the past thirty years, I’ve given a great deal of thought as to how an urbanite like Philip, a man for whom New Jersey was wilderness, and an East Side Jewess, a woman for whom a canary was wildlife, embarked on the voyage we did take.

  Before the Ta’un’uuans begin a journey, they dream their route, then fabricate, to the best of their waking memory, a map of their vision. These maps are three-dimensional spheres of twine and sticks. Into the map’s hollow core the islanders place venerated totems of the land that they’re leaving—a few grains of sand, a medicinal leaf, a pebble from the altar of their ancestors. No Surrealist doctrine is necessary to convince the Ta’un’uuans that their dream maps are also cages of memory.

  Before embarking on our journey, what would Philip and I have placed inside? Ashes from his life’s work? A gold tooth from mine? A splinter from our beloved Mews home? Our fathers’ tefillin? Cages unto themselves, really, holding within their tiny leather cells the words from Exodus reminding every Jew that before he was a wanderer he was a slave.

  Right before New Year’s, we were awakened by the sound of hammering on the front door. By the time Philip found his robe and slippers, an eviction notice had been nailed to the jamb. We were given twenty-four hours to pay up all the back rent, or pack up. It wasn’t yet dawn. Philip shredded the notice, then raged through the house, while I started to collect what we might salvage. All the furniture—the Breuer chairs, the Le Corbusier chaise longue—had long ago been bartered for either heating oil or art supplies. The Gauguin was gone, offered at auction in ’33 for a fraction of its worth. All we had left were the Oceanic masks. I got Philip to stop ranting long enough to help me swathe them in sheets and cart them over to Julien and Alice’s.

  I reminded them of their promise. I asked them to sell Philip’s masks for whatever they could get.

  Then I dragged Philip back to the refurbished stable and started sorting through our belongings to see what I could fit into four suitcases, while Philip, wielding a hammer, smashed the Art Deco glass doors, cracked the marble tub. “I’m not leaving that landlord swine anything, Sara, not a shard.”

  We spent the next few nights on Julien and Alice’s sofa, and when we wore out our welcome, at fleabag hotels.

  Philip insisted that we sleep fully clothed. “Did you see the bed, Sara? There are pubic hairs on the sheets. Enough to make a wig.”

  “We’ll shake the sheets out,” I said.

  “That’s not the point. The point is they haven’t been changed in decades. The point is we don’t deserve this.”

  “No one deserves this,” I said.

  “Oh, Sara, don’t play the little revolutionary with me. You can’t take it any more than I can.”

  He took to sleeping sitting up in a chair. He took to taking long walks by himself. He took to disappearing until midnight. Then one night, he took to not coming back till morning. I lay fully dressed on the pilly blanket and listened to the most unsettling noises coming through the walls—a man hacking, a man praying, a moaning that sounded like a hybrid between human and cat.

  The next night, I followed him up to Sutton Place. He entered a townhouse. He had the key. All I could see through the cloudy windows were pinwheels of luminosity from a chandelier.

  I banged on the door. Mrs. Blanche “Binky” Whiting IV, all decked out in her new widow’s garb, answered my knock.

  She folded her arms, studied me, then walked back into the living room. “It’s for you, Philip.”

  Philip had already taken off his coat, had already helped himself to a brandy. He wheeled around and hurried up to me, rubbing my hoarfrosted hands between his. He ushered me inside and closed the door. Helping me off with my coat, he leaned over and whispered, “I’m so happy you’re here.” And this is the remarkable part: Philip was genuinely happy I had come. “You remember Binky?”

  Binky had not aged well. Her face looked pinched. The skin of her throat, once taut, could now be called “liberated.” Her gums exploded from her thin lips as she managed a strained smile. She had no choice but to invite me in for a drink.

  She said, “By the way, Sara, I saw your show at Julien’s,” as one lady might say to another, “Your slip is showing.”

  She took a seat on the living room sofa amid all the comfort and collectibles. Philip selected just the right glass for my brandy, then regaled himself with a sniff of the liqueur. On the wall over the marble mantle hung an early Ehrenreich, a portrait Philip must have done more than twenty years ago. It showed a young woman, probably Binky herself, ablaze in Fauvist colors, then fractured into Cubist shards, like something dropped from a balcony. Evidently, Binky hadn’t allowed her portrait, as I had mine, to be consigned to the flames.

  Philip sat down beside her on the sofa and motioned for me to join them. He patted the cushion next to him, then placed his hand on my thigh with exquisite lightness. I knew it was Philip’s private way of asking me to spend the night, and I foolishly nodded yes.

  It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to leave him alone with her. Truth be told, I didn’t want to go back to that fleabag hotel any more than he did.

  He whispered something in Binky’s ear, and those jack-in-the-box gums popped out again. She trifled with her diamond necklace.

  Wealth can offset even homeliness. I accompanied them up the staircase and joined them in bed. Philip and I hadn’t “collaborated” like this in years. He opted for her bottom half, while I was left with that mouth, and those tiny breasts, as yielding to the touch as sodden kitchen sponges.

  Binky prattled on the whole time I tried to kiss her. She gave me explicit directions as to how and where she liked to be touched, as one gives directions to a lost motorist. Philip was his usual chivalrous self, graciously divvying up his time between Binky and me. This was Philip’s gift. If attentiveness and innovation eluded him as an artist, they did not elude him as a lover. There is no other way to put it: Philip attended to the female body.

  The instant we were done, though, I couldn’t bear the perfumed scent of her bedsheet
s, couldn’t stand the porcelain figurines that adorned her nightstand. I couldn’t suffer the caricatures of our younger selves that Philip and I were calcifying into. I got up and started dressing.

  “Where are you going, Sara?” Philip asked.

  I picked up my clothes—a shoe, my sweater—and headed out the bedroom door, fully expecting him to trail me at least as far as Binky’s foyer, if not all the way back to our hotel, but when I turned to check, I was alone.

  Philip returned to our room around nine the next morning. Before he shut the door, before he had a chance to peel off his coat, I had planned to ask him if he was leaving me for her, if he was looking forward to a lifetime of waking up beside her hideous tchotchkelehs every morning, but for some reason, it came out, “What the hell do you see in that ugly cunt?”

  Philip was silent for a moment. He sat down on the room’s only chair and closed his eyes. He stayed like that for so long I actually thought he might have fallen asleep. “She respects me,” he said at last.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I respect you,” I said.

  He didn’t even bother to open his eyes. “I meant my work, Sara.”

  “You know I’ve always admired your work, Philip.” I couldn’t look at him when I said it, though.

  “Then why did you let me burn it?”

  “You wanted to burn it.”

  “Did I?” He tilted his head back against the greasy wallpaper and opened his eyes. “You have no idea what it’s like, do you, Sara? On a whim, you decide to become an artist, and sure enough, beauty is waiting at your fingertips. You decide to dabble in the avant-garde, and sure enough, everything you touch turns new.” He lifted his head, as one might lift a piece of heavy machinery, and stared at me. “You have no idea what it is to love something, Sara, really, really love it, and not be able to pay it homage. You have no idea how humiliating mediocrity can be.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. But I didn’t mean it.