The Tattoo Artist: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jill Ciment

  “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.

  “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

  www.vintagebooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

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