by Jill Ciment
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 chauff
eured 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.
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 m
ustard,” 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.