by Sarah Hall
– Men will always like the girls. It’s just a basic fantasy, a bit of fun. It’s just one way of talking, that’s all.
– Oh is it? Well, what will be our fantasy? A big prick waving in the open air? Strong muscles? Shit. Are we really so simple? Things change, you know, signs change. Look at the swastika. It’s very old. Look what it’s become, goddamn it, turned on its side, they are using it to torment us. These terrible armies that have it now, who will want it any more when the Reich is done with it?
He sat back from her, shrugged, and put down his equipment. He wiped his brow on the back of his wrist. Sweat had gathered along the lines of his palms and he wiped them on his trouser leg. He was conscious from time to time that she might be on the verge of some kind of personal disclosure. Of the things he had come to know about her there was little in the way of confidences. He knew facts, she was a trained funambulist and she set up a flatrope between two trees in the park to practise, she suffered from asthma, her drink was Pernod. But nothing personal had been offered.
– No. I understand that.
– Do you? You know what they are saying now? That in these places where they are keeping the Jews they tattoo a number on to them. Tattoo them. Like branding cattle. Like stamping eggs. You cannot know how awful this is for them, for so many reasons. Some of these indignities are carefully designed, some are merely accidental. But this one, this one is both.
She said this so plainly, plain enough that it left too much room to hide the accusation. He balked. She could be, with little if any effort at all, a menace to his sobriety.
– Where on earth did you hear such a horrible thing? A spy? An informer? Who?
Her eyes swept across him, dismissive and scant. Either she did not consider it an important enough question to address or she was not going to reveal her source.
– We are just so complicated now. I just wonder why we want such simple things. A picture stops working at some point. Now you can wire money from bank to bank – not just put it in a box under the bed. It doesn’t exist, not really, it’s like a dream of money, an idea of money. Look at these abstract artists that break everything up and tell us tradition is not worth keeping. You’ve seen Braque?
– Yes.
– And?
Her bare belly was stretched across the chair like tight hemp on an easel. She had that look in her dark eyes that she always got when the conversation turned weightier, became more profound. An insulted look. The beginning of ire, a smoulder that would, if blown upon for any length of time, turn from an ember into blazing fury. Cy was not keen to have her become fervent under the needle, she moved around too much, gestured too violently in that condition, making it impossible to work so he took care not to provoke her when his hand was engaged. Then again, in these moments of respite, when he was smoking or preparing a new part of her skin, she did become rather compelling and fetching as she ranted. He shrugged again, he seemed to do that frequently in her company.
– Well. I for one do not understand this new abstract art. I don’t understand Picasso. And I don’t understand Braque. It’s too messy. Where does the picture begin and end and what does it mean? Maybe people like simplicity because everything else is so troublesome and vexing. Symbols are powerful. They convey a lot without words.
– No, no. It’s good to have such complication. I like it – sometimes I have to get up and walk around the chessboard to see all the angles at once, otherwise perhaps I’m missing a move.
– OK, steady on now, Sally-Ann. We’ve some eyes to finish up here before nightfall.
He picked the equipment back up, nipping the cord out of the way, and Grace perused the booth walls again.
– But you know, you see that one there … look now …
Cy followed her pointing finger to a red heart, levitating among many others.
– … that will probably never go out of fashion, as you say. We remain truly crazy, don’t we?
She reached behind her and unhooked her brassiere, brought the garment forward off her body, over her arms, and placed it on the floor. Cy leaned forward, spread the fingers of his right hand out along her breastplate, rubbed the area with alcohol solution and petroleum jelly, and then moved the needle to her upper body so that it was sitting directly above her own version of the red organ.
– Shall I make this eye smaller to your shoulder?
– No. I don’t think so, just until it would come to the hem of a dress. Not past the collar though. No point in paying to see the Lady of Many Eyes if you can see her tattoos on the street when she walks, is there? The people will only stare when they have paid bucks to stare and they are stared back at.
– It’s just that it may give it more beauty to be left alone on a surface, away from others – the eyes are quite close together and crowded this way.
Grace smiled patiently. She looked up at him, he was working near her collarbone. She had on a tweed skirt that was dampening with perspiration. Her upper body was naked, her breasts suspended by the air. There was a large scabby, healing tattoo exactly centre on the flesh of her stomach, already observing the world through its conjunctive, crusted eye. It looked like something deformed from one of the freak shows. Several more tattoos on her breasts and arms were still too new to have scabbed and one or two were temporarily hidden under gauze. Her arm was raised on the counter and held back, flattening the plane of skin he was currently working on. In another situation she might have been offering herself to him erotically, arching her back and eager to feel the pressure of his mouth on her breast. She had recently shaved under her arm, there was just a small, dark growth there. She continued to smile at him. Cy rolled his eyes humorously and answered his own question.
– Yes, yes. I know. More eyes the better. Yadda yadda yadda.
– Oh, dobrze, so he speaks other languages now. Welcome to Brooklyn.
He laughed.
– Hardly. Is that what you’ll call yourself, then? On the circus card, I mean. The Lady of Many Eyes?
– Perhaps. Yeah, why not?
– Sorry, I have to pull a little bit here, harder doing it freehand. I’m not … making a pass, actually.
– All right. I’m not making a pass at you either.
He was again conscious of touching her. He was conscious of the difficulty in not touching her, having to rest the side of his palm along the flesh of her breast to steady his work, otherwise the equipment was too upended and it was like leading a hopeless metal dance partner around a soft, snagging ballroom floor. He was conscious of her nipples, that they hardened and became erect if touched even slightly, and he wished they would not, but at the same time he was glad they did.
– I will make good money, better than the circus. They will pay to see me looking back at them. It will be a good joke. It will be funny, like being the invisible woman.
– I didn’t ask.
– Otherwise my body already belongs to them. I don’t care if it is not thought of as beauty. I don’t need it to be. They can think what they like, but what they cannot do is use me with their damn eyes. Not ever again. Don’t pretend you don’t understand this. Not knocking on my door in the middle of the night with your chess questions for me, all red in the face like a sunburn.
– No. Yes. I mean I think I do appreciate the idea. I’ve said so.
He paused, bit down on his lip a little. He sensed the evaporation of her blithe mood but continued anyway.
– I just don’t know why. I don’t really know much about you, you’re … no Cakewalk. What’s your story, Grace?
She was known by many in the district. And she was talked about with both affection and scorn. Since meeting her he had heard whispers and elaborate slanders about her, as Claudia hinted that he would in the gaming room of Varga the night their association was made known to him. He had heard that she had saved a life only to destroy it herself later, that she was a rich Arab’s mistress, she was the sister of Oskar Manheimer, notorious banker and loan shark, that she
had been trained by some elite intelligence force in a foreign country, that she was a Nazi espionne, that she collected the gilded jewellery of famous murderesses, and even that she lay with her own horse for pleasure. And while he did not pay much heed to the scandalous wake that followed her, he may have inadvertently assimilated some of it. He was once certain he had seen her in the East Village, in a third-storey window above a café, threatening a man with a blade, pulling on his hair. But she had been on his mind that day, and he might have seen her anywhere, in any guise, under the contours of any dark-haired woman. He wanted to say to her now that he didn’t care what people thought of her when she rode Maximus bareback down through the borough on the dirt roads, when she cursed and argued and sat with her legs apart as she played chess in Varga, when she drank clear anise alcohol that turned milky green as she added water, like an old apothecary. And if people thought her attitude wasn’t becoming of a lady, Cy didn’t care to vouch for that presumption. Reeda Parks had smoked her dead husband’s pipe in public when she fancied to. Women she did not know had growled at his mother for sticking her principled neck out for them. She had blistered the political sensibilities of many about Morecambe town with her coal-stoked courage, her divergences, the proverbial brass balls of her. And through it all he was not sure his mother failed to qualify for the title of lady. He wanted to tell Grace those things but thought she would laugh or become angry at the insinuation that she was abrasive, or a goon. She was staring off into space, a small vein in her throat palpitating. He tried to keep his tone light, while he dug deeper into the sealed layers of her.
– They will still look at you. Is it that you want them not to look at you lecherously and won’t you still have to take your clothes off, mostly, for these doo-dads to show, and doesn’t that defeat the purpose? I mean, if you don’t want to be looked at like … a woman of … of certain reputation. If it’s about exposing your body and being judged, then I don’t see why you’d do it.
Two marble black eyes on Grace’s face suddenly gleamed at him, livid, impersonal, and even the tattooed eyes on her body seemed to swivel in his direction like possessed cadaver parts in order to apprehend and intimidate him.
– Nie? Nie? Och, Idiota! It will always be about body! Always for us! I don’t see a time when it won’t. I can’t say you can’t have my body, that’s already decided, it’s already obtained. If I had fired the first shot it would have been on a different field – in the mind. All I can do is interfere with what they think is theirs, how it is supposed to look, the rules. I can interrupt like a rude person in a conversation. I can be rude. Isn’t that so? This is America, we can all be fucking rude.
– Listen, I’m sorry.
He shrank back, attempted to smooth things over. Apologies had gone a long way since his arrival in this country. They were considered largely unnecessary and dated. Even his accent implied apology, that he had manners over and above those he was currently demonstrating. It was the universal trick of the English. And people were often charmed by that here, and thought him less unsavoury, regardless of his trade and his appearance.
– Sorry, sorry, he’s sorry. OK, all but Electric Michelangelo can be rude. I see it now.
She was not angry. Her eyes were passionate actors playing their part. Her voice had come out for effect and emphasis, performance, the way that the Greeks drinking in Varga shouted to their families down the telephone receiver, or the mayor of the city heralded his agenda through a megaphone. He was getting used to her outbursts, recognizing them as tools she employed to toil harder for her cause. And her ambushes never seemed to strip anything vital from him, rather they seemed designed purely to warn him of the presence of dangerous bandits in the territory through which he travelled. In truth he admired more than feared her passion. But there were instances, like now, with her breasts lighting up the air before her and her face in a state of flushed excitement, when he just could not take her being nude and zealous and so close by. It made him ache. He did not know how long he could go on not reaching for her.
– I’m almost done with this section. But I won’t finish it today. Can you come back tomorrow?
And then, when he had all but perfected the repressive art of self-restraint, Grace threw another flaming tenpin into the fiery arc of urges he was juggling. She put her hands on him. As if to seduce him. As if to begin what he was having difficulty beginning. The trouble occurred one not so very unusual afternoon in the run of things when her eccentric new body was nearly finished and they were once more cooped up tight together like birds inside an aviary. He had been talking about Eliot Riley, talking shallowly, for he did not want to get maudlin or bitter, nor mawkish, telling her anecdotes about the apprenticeship that had left him heavily printed, telling her about the Nivea lotion preservation he had inherited, and Riley’s unhappy relationship with alcohol. He had mentioned the events of his life that had led to his chosen tattoos and how he had written his mother’s name on himself reversed in a mirror because his master would not do it. He was working on her back as he talked when she snapped her fingers in order to stop him. She stood up. Her breasts had made creases in the flat skin on her sternum as she lay on her stomach. She looked freshly pressed and laundered.
– Show them to me.
– Oh, really no, ask me another time. Buy me a soda. We’ll see what we can do.
She lifted his shirt out of his breeches, through the braces, opened the buttons, as if she had every right to do it, and then placed her hands on the flanks of his stomach. She did not ask permission and he did not grant it, she simply took up his garment and addressed his skin with her cool hands, more gently than any communication he had ever known to leave her. Under her fingers was the tall black galleon leaning into a gale, its sails full, with names tangled into the rigging like Columbus’s memories, and under that was the deeper dermis, and under that, a crackling electric head of nerves that gathered energy and held it, as if he were a copper coil in a fuse.
– Who is Stanley? Don’t you want to tell to me? Cy tried speaking.
– He was my father. Er, that’s an old motif of a clipper, one of … Sailor Jackie’s original designs, my father was … Well, he was a fisherman … who died at sea … just before I was born … only a day or so before in fact …
His voice melted away. Her fingers were redrawing the ship, too soft to be idle, too precise to be misinterpreted. He felt his chest rise and then fall heavily. She followed the line of the mainmast up along the cavity of his chest to the left side, increasing the pressure of her fingernail as she moved it so that the sensation became a scratch. Her hand rested for a moment and then she began to stroke his body again, quietly.
– Ah. Then you must be superstitious. You must think you were unfairly treated and this strange coincidence has set a pattern in your whole life that nothing can be done about. You must throw a pinch of salt over your shoulder when it spills, and crush up eggshells after you’ve cracked them open, always waiting for somebody to tell you a good bright thing to take away the darkness. A szerencsecsillag vezessen utudon. Yeah, I think this is what you want. At some point you’ll have to forgive him, won’t you, the man who taught you this art and disappointed you? He could not ever have satisfied. You’re forgiving him in Varga every night already when you drink.
Her hands were like emollient even as her words seemed to pull open the corners of his old wounds. He sighed, moaned, he could not help it. The words she spoke and her touching him felt like two separate lovers working at his body. So long as he was in a position of checked propriety and ethical administration he was in no danger of abandoning restraint. But he knew he could not take her coming to him like this. It was too thrilling a concept, too powerful a stimulant. And if she kept speaking, he thought, if she used her words like a second intrigue, allied with that first contact of touch behind his fabric barriers, the battle would be lost and he may as well throw her down. All this time Cyril Parks had commended himself on his propriety and manners
as she sat in her undergarments or without them, her small redcurrant nipples hardening when he coloured them into black pupils, dislocated from desire, so that their tips might have been scorched by the sun, not touched by a laden, motorized quill and a human hand.
She wasn’t watching his body now. Her eyes were closed and she was done talking. The tattoos seemed dead on her, stony, inanimate as mineral lode bound tight into the rock face. Looking down, he sensed the true arrival of a different weather system settling around her, the absence of disturbance. It had come without warning or forecast, as with everything else that was immediate and unforeseen about her, the eruption of rage, the hiss of defiance, laughter, that which she could turn her mind to, the turning of games and tables and opinions. There had been no indication from her that day as she arrived that she would soon deliver a response to his unassuming romantic notions. There had been no suggestion that she wanted to give him this gift. He sighed again as her fingertips swept along the waistband of his breeches. All the languages and conveyances she knew and this dialogue of touch might have been her most natural. He wanted to put his hands in her hair, or on her breasts, there was nothing separating him from that, but he kept them gripped tight on the dresser behind him. He might have said her name, he did not know. He might have made love to her and meant it, hunting out her preferences, slaughtering them with generosity, but that he was sure afterwards she would walk away, casually. Her hands were almost too light on him now as she moved them, making him tense and lock his muscles together so as not to convulse and jerk as new nerve endings sparked under her caress. He found he was biting down hard on his lip. Blood was tricking along his pelvic bone and he had the unmistakable sensation of becoming heavier, fuller, firmer. He knew if he drew Grace in towards him now, so that their skin met, her body would feel a fraction colder than his own, and the state of her would tell him her mood was made of vapour. It would be like touching a soft white effluent, like that quiet portion of the northern lights, the last, most obscurely hidden element of the atmospheric wonder, the humble white pulse of illumination almost lost behind the seeping blood of the sky. And his hands would move right through her. Like Aurora Borealis, he knew he just had to let her be, in all her loveliness, not knowing how much of herself she would disclose, how much she would come to him, until she was gone.