The Tattoo Artist: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Jill Ciment

  Philip and I weren’t even the most outrageous couple. In our little clique alone, painters and poets, anarchists and Trotskyites, exchanged lovers like letters. You must understand the times. Victorian mores had been obliterated in the Great War. Revolution felt imminent. No one knew what shape it would take. A heady effervescence for all that was new bubbled in the air. Even the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven shaved her pubic hair for Man Ray’s camera.

  Philip didn’t make an appearance in any of the final paintings. All his presence manifested was effect, his effect on the women’s expressions as he made love to them, his effect on me as exhibited by my frantic brushstrokes. I painted close-ups of the women’s faces in ecstasy, ennui, grimace, self-possession, supplication, and power. I finished with a self-portrait, jealousy. Mrs. Whiting wanted to purchase her painting (ecstasy), but I said I would only sell it as part of the group.

  I could have stopped the experiments whenever I chose. I could have begged Philip to be kind, and Philip would have been kind—not faithful, but kind. I could have rerouted our love, as a river is rerouted, so that it never overwhelmed its fragile levees. But I didn’t. I was young, ambitious, untrained, naïve, and I had just been given a clue to what the islanders so profoundly understand: that art and pain are wed.

  In the spirit of the avant-garde, I took the concept as far as it would go. I made Philip’s infidelities my muse and, in turn, my muse created Philip’s infidelities.

  One evening, about three years down this well-trod path, Philip brought home a woman, a girl really, fresh from the factories. She was very Irish, very pretty, very young, but that wasn’t the point. Up until then, Philip had been seeing a Muscovite poetess, and before that, a French sculptress, and before that, the always willing Mrs. Blanche “Binky” Whiting IV. But this girl was different. This girl was from the streets. She was my potential replacement.

  I said, “Oh, Philip, you must introduce us.”

  Philip reluctantly made the introduction, and the poor girl curtsied. She called me “ma’am.”

  I asked, “Are you a union girl?” knowing full well she wasn’t, that the factory bosses had been hiring Irish scabs to break up the so-called “Jewish-Bolshevik” conspiracy.

  The girl glanced up at Philip, then shook her head no.

  I said, “Really, Philip, you’d put your prick before your politics?”

  The girl looked flummoxed, then petrified, and I hated myself and Philip for that. When she ran out the door, I had Philip follow her.

  To punish him, I cut the right sleeve off his every Italian suit, his every silk shirt, his Japanese kimono, even his infamous buckskin jacket. Why the right sleeve? Why not?

  To get back at me, he brought home another factory girl.

  In return, I went after his Breuer chair with a sculptor’s chisel.

  By the time our little melodrama was over, we were sitting on orange crates and wearing rags. There wasn’t a shred of anger left in either of us. We were too exhausted, and unnerved. Not by the loss of a shirt, a chair. We were, after all, Marxists. No, what sobered us was the indisputable knowledge that, with the slightest turn of the chisel, the tiniest snip of the scissors, we could destroy, or worse, lose each other.

  Those years can best be described by the titles of my paintings: Convulsive Beauty. Philip and Sara with Firmament. Philip and Sara with One Head. Self-Portrait Without Vanishing Point. Still Life Without Life. Varietism.

  The Ta’un’uuans never assign a name to a work of art. When the Christian missionaries told them that God’s first creation, Adam, had been given the task of naming all His other creations, they wept for Adam. To them, Adam had been given the insufferable job of robbing the world of transfiguration, of impulse, of its potential to forever change. Adam had frozen existence by naming it.

  The tattoo on my left ankle is of a stick man and a stick woman. I wanted Philip’s and my youthful indiscretions distilled to the most elementary icons. I didn’t want them taking up any more precious space than they justly deserve. The icons are very small, but size isn’t as important as location. The islanders may not assign a name to a piece of art, but they so artfully assign a scale of pain to every body part. The ankle is notoriously painful, and is usually reserved, in island tradition, for a first love, or a first battle, or both. The Ta’un’uuans know that ankles invariably swell with age. This particular tattoo (you have to look very closely now) shows a man and a woman with their lips sewn together in a kiss, or in punishment.

  It’s hard to tell.

  CHAPTER THREE

  was varnishing a painting when Philip came into the studio, took the brush out of my hands, and told me that his father had committed suicide. The year was 1929, and bankers were taking their lives with the casualness with which one takes an aspirin. Philip sank onto a paint-splattered stool, and, in a voice devoid of inflection, described how his father had showered and shaved that morning, put on a yarmulke and a formal shirt, a frock coat and silk tie—“he even put on garters with his socks, Sara”—then locked himself in his study and used a pistol from his glory days in the Hapsburg army. Philip said his mother had found him.

  The result was odious. Months later, when I entered the study to retrieve a drawing of Philip’s that Philip had given his father as a gift (the first he’d done in years), and which Mr. Ehrenreich had hung on the darkest, farthest possible wall, there was still an all-too-human stain visible on the frame.

  Philip and his father’s relationship had been based on mutual disapproval, though disapproval may be too neutral a term— disenchantment, really. When Philip was a boy, and Mr. Ehrenreich a young father, they had evidently been infatuated with each other to the exclusion of Philip’s mother. But when the boy reached surly, carping adolescence, and the father became the object of the boy’s tirades, Mr. Ehrenreich turned on his son as only a spurned lover can.

  He sent the shy gangly boy off to Europe to be indoctrinated as he had been indoctrinated—German gymnasium, officer’s commission, Swiss bank apprenticeship—fully expecting that when the young man returned, he would readily emulate his father, from his choice of claret down to the side on which he parted his hair.

  Philip came back an anarchist, an avant-garde painter, an absinthe drinker with hair to his shoulders, and the scrimmage was on.

  All this was to say that the money for the Breuer chairs, the Oceanic mask collection, the gilt-framed Gauguin, came from Philip’s mother, a nervous, frail soul badgered into bitterness by her austere, acerbic husband. The money was part of her private inheritance, untouched and untouchable by Mr. Ehrenreich according to their old-world Jewish wedding contract. In the end, it hardly mattered. When the stock market plummeted, and Philip’s father abdicated his life, her assets dwindled down to a single diamond necklace, three diamond brooches, and two gold wedding rings, which Mrs. Ehrenreich tied together with a black thread so that the larger one wouldn’t accidentally slip off her skeletal finger and diminish her estate by a sixth.

  With the biannual sale of a piece of jewelry, and a frugal lifestyle, there were just enough means for her to scrape by, but nothing left over for her son.

  It was one thing to have theorized, over a glass of port, the good riddance of wealth, to have debated, over brandy, the end of capitalism, to have known, as I knew, that having in abundance what others are in need of is wrong, and it’s quite another to find oneself suddenly putting it all into practice.

  As devastated as Philip was by his father’s suicide, he also made a point to celebrate the end of capitalism. As soon as an acceptable period of mourning had passed, he threw an “end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it” bash. The gala’s centerpiece was a four-foot-high pound cake that Philip had baked himself, then sculpted and frosted to look like the Chrysler Building. Wielding a Mexican revolutionary’s machete that he had picked up at auction years before, he ceremoniously cut the skyscraper down to size, serving slices of gargoyles and office suites on paper plates to our anarchist comrades. Then,
raising a glass overflowing with Russian vodka, Philip proposed a toast, “to the upcoming revolution,” “to the dream made real,” “to the end of opulence and greed.”

  I ate my cake and drank my vodka, but I forwent the toasts. You see, I had already known the other side of opulence, and I had no desire to go back there. In Philip’s Marxist utopia, we all drank from the same glass. In mine, we all drank from the same crystal.

  By my calculations, even if we sold the furniture and Philip’s mask collection, we’d buy ourselves a year at most. Breuer chairs and Oceanic masks were suddenly out of vogue, as were the paintings of avant-garde artists.

  I went back to the East Side to find work as a waist maker, but there wasn’t any work, not even piecemeal labor. I banged on the gated storefronts of the Chinese sweatshops, but when they saw my American skin, they shooed me away.

  For a time, I earned a pittance carving ice slugs for an ice-man on Rivington Street. The slugs sold three for a penny, and were used to feed the old tenements’ coin heaters. When the gas man came to collect, all the evidence had melted. It didn’t take long, though, for people to start carving their own.

  I took in sewing. Even our bedraggled bohemian friends had to make their eccentric wardrobes last as long as they could.

  Philip finally found us both work for a couple of months in a speakeasy, assisting an old academy painter with his mural, a scene of such ludicrous debauchery—Roman gods and goddesses on a Roman binge—that Philip couldn’t help substituting Hoover’s face for Bacchus’s. The Ta’un’uuans are smart enough to give their deities animal heads.

  But the job that nearly undid me, that seemed to decimate the shaky calibrations of my own self-righteous principles, was the buying and selling of old gold. Only the most desperate souls partook of my services, and only after they had tried everything else.

  I would knock on a stranger’s door, the shabbier the door the better. Usually, the people inside were too frightened to answer. After all, I could have been a bill collector or a landlady. A couple of minutes later, hope would overtake reason, and a halting voice would ask, “Who’s there?” After all, I could also be an unforeseen godsend, the representative of a raffle, say, that they’d forgotten they’d entered, or a lawyer’s errand boy delivering the will of a recently deceased relative, a cousin that they didn’t even know they had.

  Usually, it was the woman who opened the door, surrounded by any number of squalling children. The husband— or boyfriend, or lodger, or both—would be sitting at the table in his undershirt, summer or winter.

  When I stated the reason for my visit, that I’d come to buy her grandmother’s earrings, their wedding bands, his gold-plated mezuzah, the women invariably said yes and the men no.

  Sometimes, however, an elderly gentleman would answer my knock and invite me in for tea. Only after I’d finished my cup, and eaten the single cracker served on a napkin, would he slip behind the bedroom curtain to discreetly remove his gold bridges, rinse them in the sink (if he had a sink), then reappear and ask, as if as an afterthought, if I wanted to purchase his teeth.

  The jeweler for whom I worked didn’t care what form the gold came in. He melted down mezuzahs and bridges alike. I was supposed to weigh the teeth on a jeweler’s scale, but I rarely did. Too often it felt as if I were weighing the worth of the man himself, the very elements from which he was made.

  One afternoon, unbeknownst to me, I banged on the door of my first lover, the black-haired boy from the Buttonhole Makers’ Union. I didn’t recognize him at first. He looked like all the others—wan, indignant, poor. He recognized me, though. I looked, despite my circumstances, anything but poor.

  When I asked him if he had gold to sell, he shook his head in bemused impatience, then stared at me unblinking. And then, I did recognize him.

  We didn’t speak any more this time than we had the last. He pushed me down on his cot as if he was trying to fell me. He kept my arms pinned around his neck. Whatever he was clinging onto, I can only begin to guess. A woman suddenly available and in his bed? A memory? Revenge for my good fortune, though his hands were too kind for revenge, unless kindness itself is a form of reprisal?

  I stayed with my union boy until dusk.

  Unlike Philip’s dalliances, this one never made it into a painting. I have, however, tried to rectify the oversight by offering my buttonhole maker a place on my body, in the form of a sewing needle engraved at the base of my throat. If you look closely, you’ll find all my lovers inscribed on my skin.

  They started arriving in fits and starts, the refugees from Germany—Albers, Breuer, Grosz—with their incomprehensible accounts of Hitler and his Brownshirts. Philip had known the artists from his days in Berlin, and he insisted on serving as their host by providing them sanctuary until they got their footing on New York’s ungiving bedrock. Philip and I hadn’t yet lost the refurbished stable on Washington Mews. The landlord hadn’t yet had us evicted. But I’m confused. The decade’s a little jumbled up. When I picture those early years, it’s only Philip and me alone in the house, dreadfully alone, as only poverty can make a couple alone. Perhaps it was just the rumors of fascism that entered our home, and the men were to arrive later. Yes, now I remember, the refugees would arrive later.

  Philip retreated further and further into isolation. We rarely went out at night. We couldn’t afford to. Mostly, he’d spend his evenings on a folding chair in the studio, a hank of unwashed hair pulled back with one of my old barrettes, a smoldering cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, his overalls a virtual ashtray, all the while not taking his eyes off a blank canvas that had been hanging on the wall for weeks.

  One night, to jar him out of his lassitude, I merely asked what he was planning to paint on it. He looked as if I’d distracted him from prayer.

  I was at my end of the studio, working on a series of readymades featuring the gold teeth of my customers, the ones I’d filched from the jeweler. At the nadir of the Depression, however, using gold teeth as material, even for shock value, had begun to strike me as a gesture as tactless as Mrs. Whiting’s Charity Beggars’ Ball.

  I walked up behind him, rested my chin on the shelf of his shoulder. I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing these days any more than you do, but at least I try.”

  “Really? What a brave soldier you are.” He studied the primed expanse of empty white canvas again. “Is it your art that confuses you? Or could it be our poverty? What are we going to do, Sara?”

  “You know I don’t care about the money.”

  “Are you so very sure about that?” He stood up, took my face in his large hands and gently, authoritatively, turned me around, as one might guide a child’s gaze to witness an otherwise overlooked spectacle, a burst of fireworks, say, or a rare butterfly. He made me look at my gold-teeth sculptures. “You’ve never been confused about art a day in your life.”

  Then he disappeared into our bedroom, tore the sheet off the bed, dragged it back into the studio, and hung it from the ceiling, cleaving the space in two.

  For the next few days, the sheet hung between us like the curtain at a Jewish funeral that sequesters the widow or the widower from the rest of the mourners, though, in our case, I’m not quite sure who was grieving for whom.

  If the truth be told, Philip was right. We were both in deep and fundamental mourning for the outrageous, arrogant couple we had been, for the cockiness and confidence lost to us when we’d lost Philip’s wealth.

  Let’s just be honest about money and love. Take the defeated, bewildered laborer and his reproachful, silent wife. Take my father and mother. To speak was to argue, so silence prevailed. During Sabbath, after prayers, the rattle of a fork was enough to make you jump. Take the gregarious repartee of Philip’s old circle, the bountiful toasts to their good fortune, and the implication that a casual remark might spawn a brand-new reality. At the very least, money provides a couple with something to talk about.

  It also provides a couple with a way in which to talk, a s
elffulfilled confirmation of their beliefs: we have, therefore we are.

  I didn’t love Philip for his money, but I did fall in love with the man his money created, and as far as I could glean, that man was disappearing.

  I rallied Philip’s old comrades, and with their help got him a job assisting Diego Rivera on Rivera’s mural Man at the Cross-roads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future. I believe the upbeat theme was chosen by Nelson Rockefeller himself, patron of the project. At the height of the Depression, Rockefeller had commissioned the mural to adorn his altar to capitalism, Rockefeller Center.

  Rivera, though, had a different church in mind. In the center of the wall, he painted Lenin, with his goatee and pointing finger. Behind Lenin’s left shoulder, he depicted the United States, symbolized by Wall Street tycoons chugging martinis while mounted police clubbed and bullied unemployed workers. To Lenin’s right, he portrayed a Marxist utopia teeming with robust workers cavorting through billowing wheat.

  Could Philip and I really have been so naïve as to have been blindsided by the brouhaha the mural caused? The Times called Rockefeller Rivera’s dupe, his patsy. The Left called Rivera a turncoat, worse than a turncoat, an opportunist, for courting the enemy.

  Of course, the mural came down, had to come down. Rockefeller hired the unemployed to chip it off the wall.

  We went to the protest. Rockefeller had the plaza barricaded by police mounted on horseback. But even from where we stood, amid the chanting protesters, we could hear chunks of plaster thudding on the floor, see dust wafting out of the building’s entrance, enormous puffs of nacreous white dust. And they were standing beside us, the refugees from Germany. Yes, now I remember, an old classmate of Philip’s and his sad Jewish wife had arrived the day before. They had come, with their inconceivable accounts of wanton murders, just in time to witness our American tempest in a martini glass.