The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Blood is to coagulate. That has never been one of my so-called symptoms.”

  Alma continued to blink at him. How funny she was, his straw-headed big-breasted girl-assistant who read (he’d seen her!) by moving her lips and often drew her forefinger along a line of print, like a slow but diligent child. It wasn’t just the glare of newfallen snow that dazzled her through the tall windows but Joshua Seigl himself exuding light like a two-hundred-watt bulb.

  He was walking briskly as she’d never seen him walk. This was hardly a man who required a cane. Or an assistant to help him make his way in the world. The words flew out, “I won’t be needing your services any longer, dear,” without Seigl knowing what he was saying though seeing the shock in the girl’s face he tactfully amended, “—I mean, assisting me as you were. It seems that I may not have been ill at all. It may have been some kind of misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of symptoms.”

  Seigl went away whistling, laughing to himself. You could see—certainly, gaping Alma Busch could see—how energy thrummed in this man’s heavy thighs and strong muscled arms, and in the ebullient swing of his arms.

  “DOCTOR? I’M CALLING to cancel our appointment this afternoon.”

  Seigl had insisted upon speaking with Morris Friedman in person. He’d had to be curt with Friedman’s receptionist. For he wanted to be the one to inform the neurologist that his patient was cured, and unexpectedly. And you had little to do with it, my friend.

  At the other end of the line Friedman was expressing some concern.

  Seigl laughed, though he was beginning to be annoyed.

  “Why? Why the hell do you think? Why would one of your ‘nerve disease’ cases cancel an appointment with you except there is no further need of you in his life?” Seigl felt blood pound dangerously in his temples. His heart was charged with adrenaline as if he’d initiated a sudden, good fight. He listened to Friedman for a few seconds before hanging up.

  “Asshole.”

  WHAT A RUSE it had been, what a cheat. A hoax. Four months!

  Seigl hadn’t ever been truly unwell: he’d had a fall in the cemetery, injurious to his pride, and he’d overreacted. And Friedman had compounded the confusion with his costly “imaging” equipment that picked up every hairline imperfection in the brain and nervous system and so he’d misdiagnosed, innocently or otherwise.

  Seigl’s mother had been inclined to hysteria. In fact, other females in the Steadman family had been and were so afflicted. Seigl’s sister was a prime example. (Seigl’s sister! Since that ludicrous scene in his study, Seigl tried not to think the woman’s name.) If there was a genetic weakness, Seigl would make every effort to avoid it from now on.

  Soon after, as Seigl was rooting impatiently through one of his desk drawers, seeking a portion of a novel manuscript he’d begun and set aside years before, the telephone rang with annoying insistence. He heard Alma’s flat-footed tread as she hurried to answer it in another room and as she lifted the receiver to murmur in her throaty nasal voice that always sounded breathless the rote words he’d taught her Hello Mr. Seigl’s residence who shall I say is calling please he shouted at her, “No! Hang the fuck up.” There was a shocked silence. Alma must have immediately replaced the receiver. Seigl called out to her, less stridently, “No need to answer the phone again until I tell you to, Alma. In fact, why don’t you take the remainder of the day off. The night. Wherever you go at night. Visiting your friends, I won’t be needing you.”

  Alma on her nights off. Weekends. Where?

  Can’t ask. None of my business. She has a lover of course. Or lovers.

  LOST TIME! He had to make up for four months lost time.

  “Sondra? Hello! I—need to see you.”

  In his haste he failed to identify himself. But his friend recognized his voice, of course.

  “Where have I been? I’ve been—nowhere. I mean, here. But I’ve been no one here. You know,” Seigl said, laughing louder than he intended, “—in the One-Eyed Giant’s Cave. Blind at work. I mean, hard at work.” Seigl paused breathless. What was the One-Eyed Giant’s name? Cyclops. The memory came to him unbidden of the blinding of the Cyclops and made him wince. Strange to have forgotten the name Cyclops which he knew as well as his own. “I’ve been missing you, Sondra, and I—hope you’re well?”

  Talking rapidly. As one might dance over hot coals in a simulation of exuberance. For Seigl recalled guiltily if dimly: listening to concerned messages from Sondra Blumenthal on his answering service which he’d erased in shame and despair of his medical condition and did his best to forget. And several times there had come his frowning assistant with the name SANDA BUMTHELL carefully written on a piece of paper in a large looping schoolgirl hand PLEASE CALL WHEN YOUR FREE.

  Seigl was reluctant to pause to hear what Sondra was trying to tell him for he had the impression, exceedingly disappointing as a kick in the groin, that his friend he’d been counting on wasn’t available to be taken to dinner that evening.

  “But I must see you, dear! I miss you . . .”

  His voice was young and aggrieved. Must see you. Miss you. Now.

  A man is inclined to think, fairly or unfairly, that wanting to see a woman, wanting a woman, the scales of justice have been tipped against him, in the woman’s favor.

  “Sondra, are you sure we can’t meet tonight? I really do need to see you. Why don’t I drive over there and pick you up and we can go to La Maisonette. If—”

  Still, Sondra was resistant.

  How unlike her: this evident wish to make Seigl jealous. For there was a hint of another engagement with an individual or individuals whom Seigl apparently didn’t know. For he surmised that, if he knew them, or was known to them, Sondra would readily invite him to join their party.

  Always in the past this would have been the case.

  “Sondra! Are you angry with me?”

  A pause. A near-inaudible reply.

  “I realize I’ve been remiss, dear, and I’m sorry. I’ve had a—complicated time. But now it’s past . . .” Seigl removed his glasses, which were new prescriptions, with a bifocal lens, and tossed them exuberantly down. A halo of light shimmered in his eyes. Where was he? Sprawled in a chair before a tall radiant window. During this conversation he would lose his awareness of the person to whom he was speaking though if required to identify her he would have immediately responded: Sondra Blumenthal. My friend. What was urgent was that Seigl explain himself. His work that lay ahead: a mountain to be climbed. He was confident now as he had not been in years! Since his accidental fall in the cemetery he’d been experiencing an alarming double vision at times as if he were seeing what was truly in existence that had long been obscured from him previously. But now, the blurred double vision had vanished. Seigl was seeing clearly.

  As it seemed, suddenly, Seigl could hear clearly.

  For as Sondra was awkwardly explaining why she couldn’t see him that evening—or any other evening?—Seigl heard the irresolution and hurt in her voice. It was the woman’s wish not to experience again certain emotions which she associated with Joshua Seigl, but unfairly: for at the time of those emotions he’d been ill, or had been convinced by a neurologist at the medical school that he was ill, and only this morning he’d learned that he was not ill: he was well.

  He interrupted, laughing: “But I need your help, dear. Darling! I think you promised? To look over my Virgil translations? Professor Blumen-thal: blumen. And even more I need your advice on something more imminent”—Seigl heard his voice with smiling astonishment, for this was a revelation to him “—planning my thirty-ninth birthday. I mean, planning a party to celebrate. Did you just mention La Maisonette?—we could have the party there, in that attractive back room. Or maybe here at the house? Catered, of course. My assistant Alma prepares simple meals for me but doesn’t really cook, primarily she heats things in the oven I’ve ordered from the village, she’s perfectly capable of serving but not serious cooking nor would I expect it of her. I was thinking—t
en, twelve of our closest friends? Or a few more? Will you help me with the guest list, dear, and with the menu? I know, I haven’t hosted a party here in so long, I’m ashamed. I am not a recluse! I’ve been lonely! Will you help me with the party, Sondra? I—care for you so much. I don’t want to be alone on my birthday.”

  Seigl paused, struck by his own words. Alone on my birthday echoed in his head. Why hadn’t he realized this before? Groping for his glasses which had fallen somehow beneath his foot, one of the lenses cracked. God damn.

  By degrees now the woman’s voice was softening. A contralto voice, a beautiful voice it was. Seigl felt a strong affection for that voice. (Yet: who was this woman, he kept forgetting! Had to laugh at himself. A middle-aged Don Juan he’d become, with the pummelled-looking face of an unlucky boxer.) The voice was speaking of someone named Ethan but who was Ethan, was Seigl expected to know Ethan, a male friend?—a university colleague of the woman’s?—a child?

  It came to Seigl then: “Ethan” was the name of the woman’s son whom in fact Seigl had met, yet seemed always to be forgetting.

  “Of course, Ethan is invited to dinner, too. Shall I pick you both up? Shall we say—seven? Or shall I come earlier, and teach Ethan to play chess?”

  Seigl listened anxiously. He would not be rejected!

  “Not tonight, well—tomorrow night? Not tomorrow night, then—the next night? You and ‘Ethan’ and me.”

  More than myself, a new man. So lucky!

  IT WAS SO. Twenty-four hours passed, and forty-eight hours, and beyond. And Seigl persevered strong and luminous in his newly regained body. His energy rose steadily, a fever chart.

  No longer did he require more than three hours of sleep each night. And these hours so sexually charged, his penis engorged with blood aching for release, he woke groaning, thrashing in his bed.

  He’d set aside the Virgil translations. Temporarily. He was working on poetry of his own, and on a new novel set in the future where all times were contemporaneous, simultaneous. History was no longer linear but spatial, and human beings were no longer opaque but transparent as jellyfish. Their souls visible as quivering upright flames inside the skins and intricate skeletal structures of their bodies.

  It would be a short lyric novel of less than two hundred pages. There was no model for it in any literature. Its structure was polyphonic and its language was dithyrambic. Its title was Redemption.

  “In the future we will have evolved out of brute ‘prejudice.’ The opacity of our skins has been the issue.”

  Now ideas flew at Joshua Seigl like maddened hornets. Page after page he covered in a white heat of inspiration, until his writing hand cramped. Frequently his thoughts rushed at him too quickly for his brain to net them. Help, help! he laughed like one newly in love, for whom there is no help.

  And sexual desire overcame him with the abruptness of a faucet turned heedlessly on. He was impaled upon his own sexuality.

  A woman. Any woman.

  No. Not any woman.

  Prowling the house sleepless. Eyes burning in their sockets.

  But only the second floor of his house, and the first floor, never the ground floor where his assistant, Alma Busch, slept in the corner guest room he’d provided for her. The door to which he had no reason to believe was locked against him, or unlocked. He never descended to that part of the house. Nor ever thought of doing so.

  “She’s safe under this roof. I am that girl’s protector.”

  He’d spoken more than once of “enrolling” her at a local college where she might learn “computing skills.” Or, should she wish to take any course of study, he would pay her tuition at some near-future time.

  “I—want to help you, Alma. Improve your education. And in that way, dear, your life.”

  Dear. He’d begun using this term unconsciously. Or was it half-consciously.

  (Was Alma becoming fearful these days of her fiery-eyed employer with the still reddened, swollen, now coarsely stubbled jaws? If so, the Tattooed Girl knew to chew her lower lip in silence.)

  Ideas flew at him, he had only to glance up to catch one in the eye.

  This: it was time to acquire a new car.

  A Jeep? Always, disapproving of fellow citizens swerving the streets in SUVs and minivans like gaily-colored military vehicles, Joshua Seigl had coveted something massive for himself. Away with austerity, bookish modesty. “Why not? I’m a big man.” Now that he was walking more confidently, and hadn’t (much) difficulty climbing into (and out of) a car, it was time for Seigl to purchase a new vehicle, and more than time.

  Disappearing into the city along the river and when at last he returned to the Hill he’d traded in his veteran Volvo for a new-model Volvo of essentially the same design, color. (Austere faded silvery-olive.) Nothing else he’d seen had been quite for him.

  The new Volvo steered rather tightly. The leathery smells of newness were bracing, aphrodisiac. Distracted by crude sexual thoughts (and by very young hookers, black, light-skinned, and sickly white, in gaudy fake-fur jackets, tiny miniskirts and knee-high boots drifting in clusters along desolate Union Street near the city’s waterfront, smiling and waving at passing cars in the twilight of a winter afternoon), Seigl turned a corner too sharply, jumped the curb and scraped the right front fender of the new Volvo against an already mangled stop sign. “God damn.” He felt the pain in his groin. Like a wounded beast he made his limping way home.

  Let the scraped and dented fender remain, Seigl thought. A judgment of the gods.

  For what are the gods but our ancient passions. Where the Hebrew God and the Christian God have grown weary and faded, the ancient gods are ever young.

  Instead: brooding upon good/healthy/bracing new deeds.

  Through a very long windy sleepless night.

  He would endow the Karl Seigl Memorial Fellowship in the Humanities at a major university. Two million dollars, or three, might be sufficient. No problem. He’d call what’s-his-name, his Money Manager, in the morning.

  He would marry. At last!

  He would ask Sondra Blumenthal to marry him. He would adopt her son. His heart filled with dread/joy at the prospect. If only his mother hadn’t died too soon . . .

  Rarely did he sleep in bed for the three hours’ sleep was a maddening waste of his time. “Sleep is what anyone can do. Sleep is what a sheep can do. A man with a brain and a mission does not need sleep.” He hated to succumb to such weakness! When he did sleep, it was often in his clothes. At the dining room table where he slumped forward onto the strewn pages of Redemption, mouth agape and drooling. Also he slept in the new Volvo. He slept where he lost consciousness, like a beast. Otherwise the nights were long and arduous as a Yangtze River journey. It occurred to him to worry (but he dismissed such worries as hypochondriac, and certainly he wasn’t going to creep back to Friedman) that more and more frequently he was lapsing into narcoleptic fugues at odd, unexpected times. These were bouts of intense brain-paralyzing sleep that lasted as briefly as two minutes and as long as an hour. He’d been overcome initially while rummaging through the morass of manuscripts in his study drawers, filing cabinets, and closets, undated and unidentified drafts of chapters of abandoned novels, detailed outlines of book-length projects, scenes of a second play titled Why/Warum? and countless hastily written pages of prose that gave evidence of having been written in a state of passion and yet ended abruptly, sometimes in mid-sentence. Why/Warum? was an apt title for the last several years of Seigl’s life.

  “Mr. S-Seigl?”

  It was his assistant with the scratchy nasal grating voice. Asking was he all right, he’d fallen asleep amid his papers.

  Yes he was fine! No obviously. Not.

  Stroking his jaws which startled him for they were neither bewhiskered now nor clean-shaven, and he’d meant to remain clean-shaven, Seigl told his exasperating assistant that he’d simply been taking a nap. And that she could begin sorting his manuscripts that day. “And where you can, collating pages. Or arrange things
in clusters, that seem to belong together.”

  Alma nodded vaguely. As always she nodded when her employer gave her instructions whether these instructions were comprehensible to her or not.

  “You do understand, Alma, don’t you?”

  Possibly Seigl was sounding impatient. Possibly he was glaring at her. A hooker in her former life. Peasant stock. But now I have saved her haven’t I. Redeemed her. Yes, I take pride. For Alma stammered yes she understood, she guessed.

  “I should m-make sense of all this? Like it was meant to be?”

  12

  AND STILL SEIGL was well. Very well! A spiraling flame of wellness.

  For he was working through much of the day/night. He was accomplishing more than ever he’d accomplished in his life. Working now on both Redemption and the dithyrambic play Why/Warum? which he’d abandoned in despair years before. And sometimes he returned to Virgil as a guilty son might return to his father.

  “I will redeem myself. It’s begun!”

  The massive correspondence his assistant had so capably sorted for him, Seigl hadn’t yet done much more than glance at. He was too restless for such a task. Replying to letters, explaining why he’d been so delayed, even the numerous checks for royalties, permissions fees, speaking engagements he needed to endorse and mail to his bank, how dreary, how dull, why waste precious energy? “Alma, I’ll deal with this in a few weeks. For the time being, please put it away where I don’t need to see it.”

  Alma asked where.

  Seigl said, “I said: where I don’t need to see it.”

  IT WAS EVENING, the phone rang. There came Alma breathless and apologetic saying there was “some woman wondering where you are.” Seigl continued writing, refusing to hear. “Mr. S-Seigl?” Alma mumbled, “there’s some woman—” Still Seigl continued writing, bent over the dining room table, his hand holding a cheap ballpoint pen moving furiously across a page. “She says she’s waiting for you at her house? I guess?”