The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Dmitri laughed crudely. “Maybe AIDS. From sucking too many cocks.”

  Dmitri frowned at Alma’s information, though. She knew, Mr. Seigl was a favorite customer of Dmitri’s at The Café. Dmitri was mad as hell if another waiter waited on him. The Jew left big tips, he was a big friendly guy, it went against what you were led to believe of the race but maybe that was the point. Some kind of playacting.

  “See? He paid me for the day. Cash.”

  Her hand trembled held out for Dmitri to see. To take.

  The bills she’d counted in the taxi. Fifty-dollar bills, twenty-dollar bills, she’d laughed in childish excitement. Seigl had given her money after just the first day’s work. The first day of the week.

  Dmitri shrugged. His eyes hooded like a snake’s but he was looking, she had his attention now.

  “Why tell me? What the fuck do I care?”

  Alma said, hearing her voice beg, “But it’s for you, honey, see? I want you to have it.”

  “Chump change.”

  Dmitri snatched the bills from her hand. His squeezed-together handsome face beat hot with resentful blood. The Tattooed Girl was his to sell across the river, and she’d eluded him.

  Carelessly he counted the bills. Peeled off two twenties to toss at Alma and pocketed the rest. There was a certain swagger in his gesture for the benefit of his friends, one of them a gray-haired ponytailed ex–drug dealer now a parolee from Attica, mending his ways and hoping to “break into” the restaurant business like Dmitri.

  Seeing this, sensing a shift in mood, Alma rejoiced that Dmitri loved her again or anyway would allow her to stay the night. And she would be friendly to his friends, that was understood.

  Drawing near him now radiant-faced and sexy like a big slinky cat, where he lay sprawled on the sofa smoking a joint.

  One of Dmitri’s stinky Moroccan joints, he called them.

  Alma said, in her scratchy pleading voice, “Know what I could do, honey?”

  Dmitri shrugged, exhaling smoke.

  “I could get him to like me. The Jew.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I could! I know I could.”

  “Baby, you’re not Seigl’s type.”

  “What’s his type?”

  “He wouldn’t even fuck you.”

  “Why not? What’s his type?”

  “A woman with class. Money.”

  “A Jewess? You think he’d only fuck a Jew-ess?”

  Alma spat the word “Jew-ess.” It was a word she’d never before uttered in her lifetime.

  Dmitri and his friends laughed, the Tattooed Girl had become, so suddenly, so incensed.

  “No,” Dmitri said. “But she’d have to have class. He wouldn’t screw around with anybody on a lower level.”

  “I could make him like me. I can make any man like me.”

  Wanting to say, He feels sorry for me. That’s my way in.

  The men were laughing at this. Not derisively but, Alma wished to think, appreciatively. Dmitri allowed her to tug at his hand, to bring the joint to her lips. She sucked deep, and held the smoke. Smiled to think of it seeping into her brain, her blood. The sweetest sensation, like love.

  Alma said, “See, I could make him trust me. He trusts me now, he doesn’t know me. He’s smart, but stupid. I could steal things from that house of his, he’d never know.”

  Suddenly it was clear to her: all she might accomplish.

  Dmitri said derisively, “Hell, you’d get caught. Seigl is a Jew, he’s got eyes in the back of his head.”

  “Maybe for other people. But not ‘Alma.’ ”

  Alma fumbled through her shoulder bag for something she’d brought for Dmitri. Folded and slipped into her bag and how could Seigl know it was gone? Never.

  Dmitri snatched it from her hand and opened it.

  Dear Joshua Seigl,

  Thank you.

  The Shadows is a book of beauty and terror. My mother’s people died in Treblinka. You have told their story though you never knew them. You touch our hearts. Such memories belong to us all.

  Dmitri said, disgusted, “Jews! More Jews. Always the same Jew bullshit. It’s old.”

  He crumpled the note-card and tossed it onto the floor.

  Alma licked her lips that felt parched. Slyly she said, “It’s just to show you. He has so much he doesn’t know of.”

  4

  IN EARLY DECEMBER the call came, that Seigl had been dreading for weeks. His sister’s intimate, accusing, near-hysterical voice in his ear. “Joshua! Do you have—anything to tell me?”

  These were Jet’s first words. Not “hello”—not “how are you”—not “am I disturbing you?” Seigl cursed himself for answering the ringing phone; he’d been expecting a call from his neurologist’s office.

  “Is this Jet?”

  “Who else! Who else but your sister! Your sister you have banished from your life out of—guilt? Shame?”

  Seigl shut his eyes. Already he could feel his temples throb.

  Steroid rage: now it would hit him.

  Jet must have been calling from Palm Beach, Florida. More than a thousand miles away yet Seigl would swear, the woman was crouched beside him clawing at his arm.

  As, as a girl, she’d tugged at him, whispered in his ear, dared to flaunt herself partly dressed (in panties and bra, an unbuttoned shirt flapping open) in the doorway of his room he’d hoped to block against her.

  “Josh? Don’t you dare hang up! I need to know: do you have anything to tell me?”

  Seigl tried to speak calmly. Damned if he was going to be drawn into a quarrel with his sister, at such a time. (Midday. A chilly light flooding the dining room where Seigl was working with books and papers spread out luxuriantly before him. How good he’d been feeling, blissful in his slow dogged translating while in another part of the house his sweet girl-assistant Alma Busch labored to put his life in order.)

  “ ‘Anything to t-tell you’—that’s an unusually aggressive way of initiating a conversation even for you, Jet, isn’t it?”

  There. Seigl had managed to speak coolly, though under duress.

  It was his public manner: taking questions from an audience after he’d given a reading or a lecture. Polite, but giving not an iota to any challenger.

  But Jet fired back, immediately. Jet, too, was quick with one-liners, honed in a lifetime of zestful vengeful repartee and quarrel.

  “Oh? ‘Passive-aggressive’ is more your mode, yes? That favored strategy of brilliant neurotic males.”

  Seigl sighed. Wouldn’t defend himself. His mouth twisted softly in imitation of his dead father.

  Jet spoke rapidly, passionately. Oh, she was angry with him: and she was right to be angry. Seigl could envision his sister’s golden basilisk eyes. The madness shining like liquid flame in those eyes. Yet her primly sculpted mouth was controlled, even rigid. She would hold herself taut and erect as a cobra maneuvering to strike. “I can’t sleep for worrying why you haven’t called, Joshua. Why you’ve been so distant. A love affair maybe, I’d been thinking: ‘Another of Josh’s futile romances, with starry-eyed women he leaves broken by the wayside, like discarded bottles.’ I’ve been dreaming about you, as I know you know. But now I’ve heard from”—Jet named an older female relative who lived in Rochester, hardly the informant Seigl might have guessed—“that you’re in an ‘emergency situation.’ You need help. And I had better fly up there to be with you.”

  Seigl’s heart clenched. God damn.

  All he’d been dreading for weeks, Jet was pouring into his ear like molten lead.

  “ ‘Emergency situation’? Jet, what the hell—?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I—don’t know.”

  Guiltily Seigl thought: my illness.

  No: it must be Alma.

  To Seigl’s dismay, news of his unlikely young female assistant had spread through Carmel Heights. Seigl knew that Scanlon, infuriated that Seigl had stolen Alma from him, was telling customers at his store, wi
th an air of incredulity and reproach, for some of these crude remarks had made their way back to Seigl. Stupid but sexy. No brains but a great body. Frankly I’m disillusioned with Seigl. I expected better of that man. Some of Seigl’s male friends, calling him about other matters, had made allusions to his “new assistant” and asked after his “new project” with heavy-handed emphasis. There was an ongoing mythology of Seigl as a Don Juan, on a reduced scale, since it did seem to be the case that women fell in love with him, and now these remarks embarrassed and incensed him, and he could only stammer that there was nothing to such ridiculous rumors, and hang up the phone. Seigl hated it that people talked of him behind his back, and dealt with the predicament as he dealt with most predicaments: by banishing the thought from his mind.

  Even Sondra Blumenthal had called. Innocently, inquiring after Seigl’s “progress” with Virgil.

  Seigl said, in his driest voice, “Jet, there’s nothing remotely wrong here. It’s been a quiet morning until now, I’m working on Book II of the Aeneid. I’m thirty-eight years old, not eighteen. My private life is my own business. I assure you that I’m not in the habit of leaving women by the wayside like broken bottles, any more than I’m in the habit of leaving broken bottles by the wayside. And it really isn’t an ideal time for you to visit.” Seeing with curiosity that his left hand was trembling as if minute electric currents were running through it.

  Jet said, suddenly pleading, “But I could help you, Joshua. I could put myself in your service. For the sake of the family.”

  Seigl ground his teeth. The family! Here was the old blackmail tactic, old as Time. And how perverse that his sister who’d behaved selfishly through much of her life should make such claims now.

  Seigl said, “It’s very kind of you, Jet. You’ve made that offer in the past.” My brother the literary genius. When will the second great novel appear, all the world is awaiting! “But you have your own life, too. Your own responsibilities.”

  Was this so? Seigl had long given up trying to calculate his sister’s operatic personal life.

  All he was reasonably certain of was that she hadn’t married a multi-millionaire Cuban-American to whom she’d been engaged, or almost-engaged, for several years; and she was living in a “palatial” Palm Beach residence, with an older female relative, a rich widow for whom Jet was something of a companion.

  Well, maybe Seigl wasn’t certain even of this. With Jet, you never knew.

  She said, “Joshua, no. Nothing in my life matters in the slightest compared to you. You’re Joshua Moses Seigl. Mother made me promise . . . I mean, I promised Mother, voluntarily. We’ve had our disagreements, Josh, but you are my only brother, in fact you’re the only person in the world I really care about. You’ve been critical of my life, I know, I too am critical of my life, but my therapies have taught me to confront the truth, however painful, and this is what I know, I put my faith in you. Especially since—”

  Since their parents’ deaths, Jet was going to say. Seigl knew.

  It was the singular hold his sister had on him: his guilt.

  For Seigl hadn’t been able to grieve much for his parents. Not as you’d expect a normal son to grieve. Nor was he a hypocrite, to have pretended. While Jet, formerly Mary Beth, who’d caused both their parents heartbreak, was devastated by their father’s death, and plunged into a serious, suicidal depression by their mother’s death; a showy sort of grief that had involved a brief hospitalization and prolonged visits with relatives, yet, Seigl was inclined to think, sincere enough. For even narcissists grieve: perhaps narcissists grieve most profoundly, losing those who’d existed to love them and to mirror their exaggerated sense of self-worth.

  Seigl missed his parents, often. Especially his father. He’d loved them both. Especially the reticent, mysterious Karl Seigl who’d been sent as a child to the New World, to escape the Old World, but in the journey seemed to have lost his childhood, as he’d lost his family for whom there could be no recompense. But Seigl, by temperament a Stoic, couldn’t escape the conviction that when elderly parents die natural deaths after prolonged illnesses, no one has cause to feel that injustice has been done.

  Karl Seigl had insisted as much, during the final weeks of his decline. Almost, he’d seemed happy. To live to be eighty-one, a miracle. To be granted life at all.

  Still, Seigl felt guilty, often. He should have mourned more: he should have made his parents happier while they’d been alive.

  Jet said, “You owe it to them, Joshua. To all of us. Your legacy. Our future. I’ll come help you. You’re too proud to admit how weak you are, how you need help.”

  The cobra in her unerring strike. Seigl cringed.

  “Jet, please. This is very upsetting. This is emotional blackmail, I refuse to be blackmailed by you. I refuse—”

  “What you can’t accept, Joshua, is that your sister loves you. I’m the only living person now who loves you. Maybe you can delude yourself, women are attracted to you, very likely you have a woman now, or women, those pathetic Ph.D.s mooning after Joshua Seigl, their own husbands have long ago left them for younger women, but these affairs come to nothing, as I certainly know.” Jet paused, drawing breath for the final line of her aria. “My plane, from Miami, arrives at the airport there tomorrow at 1:08 P.M.”

  Before Seigl could howl in protest, Jet hung up.

  “MR. SEIGL?”

  Hesitantly, Alma stood in the doorway.

  Seigl was sitting with his head in his hands. His shoulders felt massive to him, muscle-locked with rage. How long he’d been here hunched forward at the dining room table since Jet had hung up the phone, trying to think what he would do, how he would deal with this invasion, Seigl couldn’t have said.

  Someone was speaking in a hushed scratchy voice. He looked up, frowning. There was his assistant Alma Busch informing him that she’d prepared lunch . . .

  Thank God, Seigl hadn’t yet asked Alma to answer his phone for him. The collision of Jet and Alma was too painful to contemplate.

  “Not for me, Alma. Thank you. But please stop for lunch yourself, you’ve been working for hours.” Seigl pushed himself to his feet. He wasn’t feeling so blissful now. Some of his scrawled-upon work sheets had fallen to the floor, but it was too much effort to retrieve them. Without explanation he lurched from the dining room leaving his assistant to stare after him, perplexed.

  What he’d do: call Jet back, and order her to cancel her flight.

  God damn if he’d allow her to interfere with his life when his life, at last, was going so well.

  NEXT DAY, there was Seigl driving to the airport to meet his sister’s flight. Had she said 1:08 P.M.?

  Somehow, during the night, in his exhausting parched-mouth dreams of guilt, anxiety, and elation, Seigl must have had a change of heart.

  This was like him: God damn!

  Thinking it over he’d been touched by Jet’s concern. True, his sister was morbidly possessive of him; as she’d been, intermittently through her life, of numerous other individuals, most of them men. Hadn’t one of Jet’s lovers, years ago, been so desperate to escape her he’d fled to—was it Tangier? (Where he’d died in mysterious circumstances, stabbed to death in a drug deal gone wrong.) But Jet was probably right. I’m the only living person now who loves you.

  The remark was subtly insulting, but it was like Jet to insult even as she meant to flatter.

  Seigl understood: life was careening past Jet, suddenly. She’d had love affairs but had never married, and had no child. Always she’d been young: now she was middle-aged. Always she’d been spoiled, vain, seductive, strikingly beautiful, charismatic. In adolescence, she’d been considered brighter than Joshua, only just too restless and “temperamental” to do well in school. And she’d gone to several schools, each of them an expensive private school where she’d gotten into trouble, and gotten others into trouble. More times than Seigl could recall, Jet had been deeply—tragically?—in love. Always there was something wrong with her lovers. They
loved her too much, or not enough; they were as mercurial and unreliable as she was, or deadly dull, predictable. They were married, and refused to leave their families; they were married, and overly eager to leave their families. At least one had had a chronic illness. (Seigl wondered now if it had been, ominously, a nerve disease.) One had allegedly beaten and raped Jet when she’d tried to break up with him, causing Jet to fight him back in self-defense, stabbing him eleven times and inflicting “shallow, non-life-threatening” wounds; eventually, charges against both parties were dropped. (This alarming incident had occurred when Jet was in her mid-twenties, living in a loft on Varick Street, Manhattan, with the lover, a cabaret performer; Seigl had been traveling in Europe.) Apart from the lover whom Jet had stalked and caused to flee to Tangier to die, there’d been at least one suicide.

  Seigl smiled uneasily, thinking of these matters. He wasn’t one to think about family problems, he wasn’t one to have felt himself much involved. A bachelor, by temperament. Yet there was the bond between himself and Jet. They were soul mates, Jet had claimed. Some observers had believed them twins, in childhood; by the age of ten, Joshua was the size of his sister, who was two years older; certain of their facial features were similar, their mannerisms and dark springy hair. But Jet had grown into a willowy, sulkily beautiful girl while Joshua had become a plumpish, good-natured and affable boy, easily dominated by his sister. As a young adolescent, Joshua had seemed middle-aged; now in middle age, he seemed boyish, naive. Ridiculous to think that he and Jet were soul mates, still more that they’d ever been mistaken for twins.

  . . . the only living person now who loves you.

  Seigl thought, in protest: but there is Alma.

  That is, there is the possibility of Alma.

  The last time he’d picked Jet up at the Rochester airport had been nearly six years ago, when their mother was hospitalized and dying. Jet had made up her quarrel with their mother but after the funeral she’d quarreled with Seigl, bitterly. She had wanted to remain in Carmel Heights with him, living in his house on the Hill and acting as his caretaker, hostess, literary assistant, muse. Joshua, you can’t live alone. No more than Daddy could have: You have a tragic soul.