by Jill Ciment
I was sitting in front of my own shell, a plain cardboard box of old Life magazines, and a second photograph of Philip and me. The reporter was seated across from me, her photographer fifty feet away, as if to give me my privacy, but I recognized a telephoto lens.
“We couldn’t carry the whole library, Sara. There were more than fifteen hundred magazines. We brought mostly covers, as you can see, but I did go through the stacks to select a few issues I thought might interest you.”
I picked up the second photograph: Philip and me marching down Fifth Avenue, our mouths open in song, our fists raised, our stride so confident. It almost looks as if our side had won. It was taken during the Rockefeller protest. I recognized the placards. But when I looked more closely at Philip—I couldn’t tear my eyes off him—I noticed white dust from the plaster ruins of Rivera’s mural on his threadbare overcoat and a cast of exhaustion in his eyes.
“I found them in the archive at the Museum of Modern Art. Did you know the museum has one of your paintings hanging in its collection?” She checked her notes. “Self-Portrait Without Vanishing Point, 1923.”
So they prefer my early work.
I put the photograph back in the box, under the magazines. I had no intention of weathering the deluge of memories that image was about to unleash with that camera pointed at my face. When the reporter saw her photographer wasn’t going to get a picture of the old castaway breaking down, she lifted out one of the magazines and placed it in my hands.
“We thought it might be easier on you to begin at the beginning. Isn’t that the month you and Philip disappeared?”
Rosalind Russell was on the cover. The price was 10 cents. The date read September 4, 1939.
“I found records of your passage, old copies of Philip’s and your passport applications, a bank draft in Philip’s name from the Swiss banker, Richter. Weren’t you traveling on a Japanese ocean liner?”
I lifted out a handful of covers and caught the scent of old paper. I hadn’t smelled that particular must in so long. I laid them in my lap. They were very fragile. The paper had aged even faster than my skin. Gingerly, I begin leafing through them. A tiny submarine. German U-boat, the title read. Mussolini. Summer Fashions. The Military Look. Claudette Colbert in a sailor cap. I turned over Claudette Colbert. A Viceroy cigarette ad was on the back. It featured a tuxedoed man and a woman in furs smoking Viceroys in a hansom cab on Fifth Avenue. For a moment, this silly ad almost unleashed what the photograph of Philip and me hadn’t, but I held myself in check.
“How did you end up here, Sara? Why did you stay?”
Betty Grable. Skating Fashions for Winter. Kids’ Football. German Plane. French Sentry.
“When did the war begin?” I asked.
“For us?” She leaned over the box and grabbed another handful of images. She hadn’t even been born. The war was ancient history to her. I noticed this stack included pages. An American flag was on the top cover. The caption read, U.S. Goes to War. The date, December 10, 1941.
One by one the elders came over to see what my shell contained. They squatted behind me at a respectful distance, peering over my shoulder, careful not to let their shadows be cast on the images. It was impolite for someone’s shadow to darken a tattoo before it was completely healed, and they didn’t know how fresh these images were.
Sunken Battleships. Nursing Shortage. Coastal Defense. U.S. Warplanes. USO Singer. Barrage Balloons. Ginger Rogers.
When the elders saw that the ink wasn’t coming off on my hands, that there was no blood on my fingertips, they moved closer and formed a half circle around me, picking through the magazine covers themselves, careful not to tear the friable paper. They didn’t know there was an order to the covers, and even if I’d told them, I’m not sure Western dates would have made much sense to them. Besides, they weren’t interested in the latest movie star, they were studying images of the war. Torpedoed Ship. War Glider. Soldier in the Snow. Captured Nazis. Bombs exploding. A soldier making a victory sign in front of a giant marble swastika. And photographs of skeletons. Skeletons staring through barbwire. Skeletons looking out from dark shelves. Skeletons watching the machinations of the living with dazed, sunken eyes. A burly American soldier, spade in hand, kneeling before an enormous pit of charred human remains that he and his unit had just unearthed.
The elders asked me whose death was being avenged, and why did so many lives need to be sacrificed for it? And who would treat the human dead like this? And how did the bones at the bottom of the pile make it to the sanctuary of their ancestors? Is this the world you come from, Sara?
One by one, they pressed their foreheads against mine and walked back to the village, leaving me alone with my dead. A Ta’un’uuan never wants to be alone, especially in times of grief, but they knew me so well.
The reporter placed her hand lightly on mine. “You don’t have to go through them all now,” she said. “They’re yours to keep, Sara. You must have so many questions. You must feel so . . . overwhelmed. ”
I wasn’t sure what I was experiencing at that moment, but I certainly didn’t want this young lady with her blank, unmarked face to name it for me.
When she finally realized I wasn’t going to confide in her, she patted my hand again, then signaled her photographer to stop shooting and slowly backed away.
MacArthur in Japan. Welcome Home, Navy. When had the war ended? Couldn’t someone have come for me then? Winston Churchill, cigar in mouth, paintbrush in hand. He took up painting? Hope and Crosby. Party Season. Spring Fashions. Homesteads for Vets. Occupied Germany. Co-ed Clothes. The Russian People. Summer Hats. Broadway Beauties. Palestine. An Arab on a camel, no sight of a Zionist. Greta Garbo. Mid-Century Issue. Spring Fashions. The hems are going up. Another and another pretty face. I must have crossed the date where the movie stars were still recognizable to me. Natural Childbirth. Winter Hats. Atomic War. A colossal waterspout mushrooming over the ocean. Ice Skating Beauties. Best Bird Dogs. Astro Chimp, a monkey in a space suit. Citizen Ike. Alan Shepard, a man in a space suit. Clark Gable, looking so old, in a cowboy hat. But at least I recognized him. Princess Margaret’s Wedding. Trampoliners. Alaska’s Animals. Soviet Race to Space. Cancer Surgeon. Pope John XXIII. Battleships—or are they cargo ships?— on a horizon. Cuban Missile Crisis. China Invades India. More pretty faces. Ann-Margret. Jean Seberg. The Beauty of Food. Sid Caesar in Little Me. Nelson and Happy Rockefeller. Special Issue: A Long Visit with the Soviet People. Special Issue: 16 Pages of Fantastic Color: The Space Walk. I turned the page, so curious to see the pictures, but the reporter had failed to select it as an issue that “might” interest me. Navy Patrol in the Mekong Delta. China’s Red Guards. Bathing Suits in Fashion at Acapulco. Elizabeth Taylor. Leonardo da Vinci Sketch. U.S. Paratroopers in Vietnam. Montreal’s Expo ’67. Mia Farrow. Israeli Soldier Cools Off in the Suez Canal. Remembering Stalin. Human Heart Recipient. Special Issue: Moon Walk. A flag and footprints in what looked to me like a desert. Spring Fashions. And the last one, Ballet Dancer. November 3, 1969. 40 cents. I did the arithmetic. Thirty years, two months, and eight days.
I left the covers where they lay strewn on the beach, picked up the photographs of Philip and me, and started for home. My house is one of the oldest stilt structures in the village. The huts are arranged in concentric circles, and mine is in the inner ring. I climbed the ladder, crawled under the low straw doorway, sat in a patch of daylight, and studied the photographs again. Philip was still leading the procession, hair flying. I was at his elbow. He looked so brazen and so broken. I ran the pad of my fingertip over his hair, his throat, his chest, his mouth open in song. Try as I did, I couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like, and this, above all else, is what finally undid me.
An hour or so later, the reporter and the photographer stood at the foot of my ladder. “Sara, are you up there?” she called. “A fisherman was kind enough to show us where you live.”
I heard her mount the bottom rung.
“I have another p
hotograph, a gift from an old friend of yours.”
She continued climbing the rungs until her kerchiefed head cleared the balcony. I was seated under the straw eaves on my only chair, a bamboo rocker. She held out the picture and I took it. This one showed a wall of my paintings hung salon-style.
“Alice Bronsky, Julien’s widow, wanted you to have it if I should ever find you. She spoke so fondly of you and Philip. May I come up? I’m not used to ladders.”
I offered her my hand and she nervously ascended the last rungs in her red sandals. She crawled away from the ledge. “I never introduced myself. Brooke. Brooke Wilson. And that’s Jack,” she said. Jack waited at the foot of the ladder, changing lenses.
“When did Julien die?” I asked.
She reached back into her purse, took out her notebook and a kind of pen I’d never seen before (ballpoint, I later learned). “Nineteen fifty-two. Alice told me how he never stopped championing your work.” She reached out and patted my hand once again. The touch was clumsy and officious compared to a Ta’un’uuan’s. “You must have many other questions, Sara. I’ll try to answer what I can.”
Her face assumed an expression so earnest and uninformed that I doubt that blank oval could have answered any questions I had.
“We don’t have to talk about the past,” she said finally. She looked around at my scant possessions—the bamboo rocker, the mats, the cooking pots, and my inks and needles. She picked up a six-inch ivory one adorned with figurines. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it used for weaving?”
“It’s a tattoo needle.”
She quickly put it down, practically dropped it, then lifted a corner of a mat and pretended to admire the weaving, but I saw her eyes make quick forays back to my needles—bamboo, turtle shell, pig tusk, wood, iron, and a human bone for the deep punctures.
Her eyes returned to my face, then strayed down to my old, flaccid left breast. “It’s a portrait of Philip, isn’t it?”
I looked down at the faded tattoo. I spent half my life trying to live with him, and the other half trying to live without him.
“May I invite Jack to come up here?” she asked. “May we take some pictures?” I could see that mix of fascination and revulsion return to her guileless face. “Your tattoos are extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like them. Others should see them, too. Wouldn’t you like us to photograph them for posterity?”
I knew that to her I was but a cross between Mrs. Crusoe, a shipwrecked Gauguin, and a sideshow freak—Tattooed White Lady Artist Found Among Savages. But my tattoos are my very finest work, the closest I’ll ever come to genius. As native as I’d become, I still clung to the Western illusion that if my art was any good, it would enter the ranks of art history and outlast my mortal body.
I hadn’t yet learned what the dead had to teach me.
I agreed to be photographed.
That evening, the villagers graciously prepared a feast for our guests on the beach. We sacrificed one of our most beloved sows, and sang about her many accomplishments, her twenty-six children, fifty grandchildren, and ninety-eight great-grandchildren. Then we roasted her body and ate it.
The children kept dashing up to Jack, trying to get his camera to focus on them. They had no idea what a camera did, let alone what a lens was, but they intuited that if they curried favor from that cyclopean eye, it might bestow power on them.
The feast lasted all night. The sow was over three hundred pounds. When the sun finally crested the treetops, Brooke asked, “Do you think they might line up again for us, Sara, the way they did when we landed?” She smiled at the chief and his brother to my right, at the eleven old ladies to my left. “It was glorious to see the full display yesterday. May we take some more pictures?”
The elders took counsel among themselves, then turned to me. “We understand what the camera does, Sara, that the whites have found a way to acquire tattoos without suffering the pain on their own skin. Should we let them own our likenesses with no sacrifice on their part?”
The youngsters must have overheard Brooke’s request to form the Great Tapestry because they were already taking their places in the grand design. I would be a liar not to confess how much I wanted all of my art properly documented for posterity. After all, I’d been working on the Tapestry for thirty years.
I rose to my feet and the whole left fringe followed.
When they finally got their pictures, Brooke asked me to join her for a stroll along the shore.
She opened her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes. Chesterfields. My old brand. She offered me one, then lit one for herself. “Thanks for your help back there,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper of blue smoke. “We wouldn’t have gotten the shots without you.”
She waited until the last of the villagers were out of earshot, then reached back into her purse for a white envelope. “They’re the only personal effects of yours I could find, aside from the photographs. There’s a letter of yours to Julien and Alice, copies of your old art reviews. I also put in a manifesto that Philip wrote and you signed in 1922. Alice gave them to me. I thought you might want them.”
I took the envelope, but I didn’t open it.
“We don’t have to talk about your past, Sara. I understand. We can talk about the here and now. I’ll write only what you want me to.” She reached for her notebook and pen.
“May I see that?” I asked, pointing to the pen. I held it up to the sun. A single blue vein ran the length of its shaft. I lightly jabbed the metal nib against my fingertip. It was too dull for penetration. I asked for a piece of paper, then ran the point across it—fluent, effortless, very fast, but so unvarying, so passionless.
I returned the pen, but I asked if I could have the Chesterfields.
“We’re leaving at noon. A storm’s coming. Jack waded out to the plane last night and checked the radio. It’s going to last for days. We have to get back. We’re on a deadline.” She glanced at the darkening horizon, then threw down her cigarette and crushed it with the toe of her sandal. It still had a good inch of tobacco left. She suddenly reeled around and took my hand once again, sandwiched it between hers. “Why don’t you come back to New York with us, Sara?”
The pivot was so calculated, the touch so synthetic. She must have planned this all along. Tattooed White Lady Artist Found Among Savages doesn’t sell as many magazines as Tattooed White Lady Artist Found Among Savages Comes Home After Thirty Years: 16 Pages of Fantastic Color. Why had she waited until the last hour to ask me? Did she think I could just drop everything here at a moment’s notice?
“It doesn’t mean forever. Two, three weeks. Life will pay all expenses. Aren’t you curious to see what’s become of your world?”
“Curious” didn’t even share the same synonyms with what I felt.
“You’ll be in New York City by tomorrow night.”
Less time than it takes to paddle to the next island.
“Don’t you want to see your home again?”
I tried to imagine standing on a New York street corner, flagging down a taxi. The last Life cover had read November. It was late autumn. If the idea astounded me, it also saddened me, as if going home after all these years was just another variation on grief.
I withdrew my hand.
“Please promise me you’ll think about it, Sara. We won’t be leaving for another hour or so.”
As if I would think about anything else. She walked back to the feast site. I finished my cigarette. There would be smoke shops on every block. Matches free for the taking. How many other chances would I have to go home at my age?
Brooke started folding up tripods, collecting the bags. Jack was taking some last shots of the elders. The chief and his brother were fashioning a bark coffin. Laadah’s daughter and the women scoured the cold fire pit for the sow’s bones.
Who besides Alice Bronsky would remember me? Who was still alive? After three decades, what could two weeks possibly reveal? The latest fashions? The newest ism?
&nbs
p; Laadah’s daughter called me to help them prepare the sow for the next world. The elders were now arranging the charred bones in the bark coffin. Thunderheads were piling up over the cliffs. The surf was growing wilder. The plane tugged on its anchor. Soon the sea would be too rough for it to take off, let alone for the elders to launch the coffin.
The elders lifted up the bark canoe and ferried it toward the shoreline. The tide was coming in fast. Laadah’s daughter called for my help again.
Brooke and Jack conferred. He started wading out to the plane, while she turned and shouted, “We have to leave right now, Sara.”
A breaker exploded against the cliff. Another crested the reef. Brooke came up behind me. “We can’t wait any longer, we won’t be able to take off. Are you coming?”
The elders wouldn’t launch the coffin without me. If the coffin didn’t start out right now, the sow’s bones would never clear the reef. They’d be left to drift back and forth with the tide for all eternity. I walked to the water’s edge and picked up my share of the coffin.
The moment the plane took off, I experienced profound relief, then growing apprehension, then dire longing for what I had so impulsively turned down. After all, I could have insisted that Brooke ignore her deadline and wait out the storm for me. Over the next few days, I consoled myself that my art could speak for itself, that it didn’t matter if my mortal body had chosen to remain here. But then an ache for home I thought I’d long ago extinguished would rage over me like a fever.
The elders became concerned. They may not have understood what homesickness was, but they certainly recognized loss. They sent their best paddler, Laadah’s great-nephew, north to another island where their distant cousins lived with a white missionary couple. The fishermen said the missionaries had a machine that could talk to the afterworld, that they would know how to beckon the seaplane back for me.
The paddler returned four days later with a note from the missionaries. They had reached a ham radio operator in Salt Lake City who, in turn, promised to relay the message on to Life.
