The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Seigl hooked the cane over his arm. His face flushed with heat.

  Politely Seigl greeted this woman (whose name he couldn’t remember, though he’d been a guest in her home) and assured her he was fine, asked after her and her husband and, before she could exclaim anything further, or invite him to a dinner party, he eased into the next aisle of books.

  Rude! Seigl was undeniably rude. His beard bristled with rudeness. Even his cane clattered.

  Blame the medication, Seigl thought. Who knew what the side effects might be, with a steroid base.

  Seigl lurched along the aisle of crammed floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, amid a smell of old books. The third, top floor of the converted Victorian house was stuffy and overheated; there were unexpected crannies and alcoves and narrow doorways through which you had to stoop, to enter; Seigl was too big and impatient for the place, yet invariably he returned. Out of revulsion at the contemporary world, Seigl had increasingly turned to the ancient world, drenched in its own species of blood, yet remote, sanctified by distance and the eloquence of its language. This was a kind of romanticism, Seigl knew. A privileged indulgence. Absurd for him to be translating the Aeneid, instead of confronting his own subjects, but what were his subjects? Many things engaged his interest but nothing sustained this interest for very long.

  Seigl examined a leatherbound set of an 1882 Oxford edition of Seneca’s Epistles. Formerly the property of a Carmel Heights physician who’d died a few months before. No doubt, these volumes hadn’t been opened in decades. Seigl liked Seneca on the subject of suicide. The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. You wanted to die before the matter of dying was taken from you; you wanted to depart before suffering a final, terrible illness.

  Or worldly disgrace, failure. Kill yourself before losing your dignity.

  Seneca, denounced by political enemies, was said to have comitted suicide “calmly.”

  Seneca, an older contemporary of Jesus who outlived Jesus by more than three decades.

  Seigl had returned chastened and frightened to Morris Friedman, M.D., who was no longer “the” neurologist but “his” neurologist. Seigl had the cheerily grim idea that Friedman would be “his” neurologist for the remainder of Seigl’s life.

  How long do I have to live, Doctor? Seigl had wanted to ask. As myself, I mean. Not crippled, incapacitated. Not in a wheelchair. Not in a bed.

  He hadn’t asked. Friedman wouldn’t have given him any kind of straight answer. Exactly what was wrong with Seigl hadn’t yet been determined but it was now likely that he was suffering, at age thirty-eight, the onslaught of one of those mysterious “nerve diseases” after all.

  Multiple sclerosis was only one of the possibilities. There were others, rarer and in some cases more deadly.

  Yet: no diagnosis had been given him. Tests were still “inconclusive.” Certain of Seigl’s symptoms seemed to point to one disorder, others to other disorders. Conversely, there were symptoms common to these disorders which Seigl didn’t (yet) have. And the symptoms from which he did suffer had so far been sporadic, unpredictable. He protested, “I can go for days without . . .”

  Stumbling, falling. Mis-stepping.

  On good days he walked, hiked, jogged (cautiously). A good day had come to be a kind of (secret) holiday.

  (For Seigl, desperate not to be found out, just yet, by the community, still more by his relatives, had become inordinately secretive. He’d never shared secrets readily, kept his private life private, but now he was becoming parenthetical: he felt like an eclipsed moon. He was still there, but you couldn’t see him.)

  Every man ought to make his life acceptable to others, but his death to himself alone. Seigl leafed through volume four of the Epistles. His hands shook, but he could disguise it by resting the heavy book against a shelf.

  He was breathing quickly. His face felt smudged, after the encounter with the woman. (But why so irritable with her, why so arrogant? She meant only well. She likes you. Why shouldn’t she like you, why react as if she wanted to sink her talons into your flesh like a harpy? There are no harpies in Carmel Heights.)

  Fifteen days since the humiliating incident in the cemetery. Since that time, Seigl’s entire sense of himself had changed. He felt that every molecule had changed. There was matter and anti-matter in the universe, and he’d taken for granted that, being an American born in 1964 of well-to-do parents, he was matter, and he mattered. Now, he understood that he was becoming anti-matter. Death rising up his legs like the cold that rose in Socrates’ legs as the old man lay dying in prison. In Mount Carmel Cemetery, Seigl had tasted that cold.

  The proud young author of The Shadows. He who’d written so “poetically” about death, others’ deaths. Somehow, even while transcribing the Holocaust, Seigl had seemed not to understand that all this applied to him, too.

  Jet had called him the other evening. Her voice breathy and husky in his ear. “Joshua? Why haven’t I heard from you in weeks? Months? Unless I call you? Why is it always up to me, to call you? It isn’t as if you have family obligations. It isn’t as if you have a demanding job.” A pause. Jet, a rich woman, yet prided herself on having just such a job: demanding. “I’ve been having premonitions lately. About you, Joshua. You were in an emergency plane landing. You were carried out in some sort of wire contraption. When I saw you, your face was so changed, like melted wax, I hardly recognized you. I woke screaming, this was just last night, and too frightened to sleep, and all day today I’ve been exhausted, my assistant said to me, ‘Jet’—I encourage Evie to call me ‘Jet’—‘are you having a migraine?’ And I said—” Their parents had died within three years of each other, in the mid-1990s, and on nearly the same date in early December. That time was rapidly drawing near. Seigl shut his eyes, listening to his sister’s monologue of accusation and angry affection, and when Jet worked herself up to her usual conclusion, that Joshua didn’t love her, nor did he love himself, otherwise he’d have nourished his talent, not scattered it promiscuously, and the only solution was for Jet to come and visit with him for a while, Seigl said curtly, “Jet, I’m fine. Everything is fine. Your dreams are about you, not me. I’m too busy to have a house guest. I’m beginning a new project. Now I must hang up. Someone’s at the door.”

  A homegrown Cassandra, Seigl’s sister Jet. It mystified Seigl how this vain, narcissistic woman could have a premonition about him, his health, at such a time.

  Seigl had told no one about his consultations with Friedman. If his condition progressed, to use the ironic medical term, his friends and relatives would find out soon enough. He’d begin by calling Sondra Blumenthal . . .

  Thank God neither of his parents was living. He had no obligation to tell them.

  Seigl’s mother, Irene Steadman, had been a very attractive, seemingly weak woman who’d controlled others with the threat of her emotions: you never wanted to make Irene cry, for Irene in tears could make you feel sick with guilt. Seigl could imagine trying to console her. Mother, I’m sorry I got sick! Hey, I didn’t mean it. A nerve disease was worse than the failure to marry, to give her a grandchild. (Years ago, Irene had given up on her daughter Mary Beth a.k.a. “Jet.” Irene had sadly acknowledged that Jet wouldn’t make a “fit mother” to any imaginable child.)

  As for Karl Seigl, his son’s illness wouldn’t have seemed to him very surprising. Shouldn’t a Jew expect the worst, for his children as for himself? Beneath the businessman’s surface, American personality, there’d been this other. Seigl shuddered to envision his father’s eyes. His look of resignation, guilt. As if he were a criminal discovered in his crime. Unstated the words would pass between them Always I knew, Joshua. Something terrible would happen to my children.

  A comedy routine! A Kafka scenario turned upside down.

  Maybe it was crude to think so, but yes, Seigl was relieved that his parents were dead.

  Somehow, Seigl had managed to make his way home from Mount Carmel Cemetery that morning, after his fall. Using a br
oken tree branch as a kind of cane, he’d made it without requiring anyone’s help. (And no one had seen him.) Almost, he could have told himself that his legs had merely cramped. Severe case of runner’s cramp on a cold morning.

  Now he was on steroids. Not a strong dose, Friedman said.

  The immediate goal was remission. Blocking the “progress” of the deterioration. Beyond that, Seigl shouldn’t think.

  Fortunately, though he sometimes walked with a cane, and, on bad mornings, had trouble swinging his legs (heavy as sacks of wet cement!) out of bed, Seigl had no trouble driving his car. Once seated, his two-hundred-pound-plus weight solidly on his buttocks, he was fine. Exerting pressure on the gas pedal, the brake, fine. (He was in terror of his driver’s license being taken from him. His father, in the last years of his life, had refused to stop driving though his vision had dimmed and his reflexes were slow as those of a man underwater.) Getting himself into the car, a not-new Volvo, was sometimes tricky, and hoisting himself out of it, that unthinking shift of balance you take for granted until you’re losing it, was trickier.

  Negotiating the nineteen stone steps to his house. Descending to the sidewalk, ascending to the front door. In wet weather it was becoming a challenge. In snow, ice, it was going to be treacherous.

  Friedman had asked Seigl tactfully if he lived alone, if he had a family close by. Yes, said Seigl. And no.

  “I thought I explained . . . I told you . . .”

  Hidden from Seigl by rows of books, a man was speaking with exaggerated patience as if to someone very young or very stupid.

  “Books in these boxes are on consignment, and should be shelved over here. See?”

  A pause, and a timid murmur, and the man said in a voice heavy with sarcasm, “ ‘Consignment’? Don’t know what ‘consignment’ means? There’re dictionaries all over this place. English, French, German, Latin.”

  This was the Book Seller owner Lee Scanlon, chewing out one of the staff. Seigl had heard such scoldings in the past, and didn’t approve. No doubt, Scanlon intended his remarks to be humorous; at times they were arias, made to be overheard. The Book Seller paid low wages, hired mostly college students who quit after a few weeks of humiliation. Often these were Asian, East Indian. This one was a girl, Seigl could hear her low, faltering, apologetic voice. Scanlon interrupted, “Never mind! Just do it.”

  When Scanlon saw Seigl, his demeanor immediately changed. He became jovial, flattering. “Dr. Seigl! Good to see you.” Scanlon’s shrewd eye took in the cane, which Seigl wasn’t using at the moment, but Scanlon understood from the tension in Seigl’s jaw that no commentary on this cane was wished. “Haven’t seen you in a while, Doctor. I suppose you’ve been busy . . .” Seigl was impatient to move on, but had to be polite; he needed to feel welcome in the Book Seller, for which he felt an unreasonable sentimental attachment, as he often felt for lost causes. Each man was wary of the other: years ago, Scanlon had cornered Seigl in the store, pressing poems upon him, identifying himself as a poet in the surreal/Ashbery tradition. (Though John Ashbery had long ago departed upstate New York, he’d been born in Rochester and had grown up on a farm in Sodus, on Lake Ontario.) Scanlon featured the poet’s books, new and old, prominently in the Book Seller, as he featured other “distinguished locals” like Joshua Seigl. Seigl had finally told Scanlon that he rarely read contemporary poetry if he could avoid it, especially poetry in the surreal/Ashbery tradition.

  Scanlon had a way of standing near Seigl, breathing on him. As a dealer eyes a rare, valuable book whose owner is clueless of its worth, so Scanlon eyed his most celebrated customer. Today, as often in the past, Scanlon alluded to Seigl’s “genius.” He’d read a “brilliant” essay of Seigl’s in, where was it, the London Review of Books, or was it TLS . . . It was a theme of Scanlon’s that Joshua Seigl had a vast audience of both gentiles and Jews eagerly awaiting his next novel. Not wanting to reply ironically, still less turn and lurch away, Seigl stood silently. This is why, he thought, so-called artists become surly and reclusive; not out of a sense of their superiority, but of their failure to be sufficiently superior. Scanlon was speaking grandly of Seigl’s “audience”: you were meant to envision a gargantuan football stadium in the American heartland crammed with these ghostly folks, all of them waiting impatiently for Joshua Seigl’s second novel.

  At last Scanlon backed off with a cheerful excuse of needing to return to work downstairs. He spoke of dropping by The Café to play chess with Seigl one of these evenings. Seigl said, “Good!”

  Seigl walked on. He saw, in the next aisle, a girl crouched over a carton of secondhand, mostly coverless books, awkwardly stacking them on the floor. She was young, perhaps twenty years old, with a very pale face and synthetic-looking ash-blond hair spilling untidily over her shoulders. She was biting her lower lip, working her mouth as if trying not to cry. When Seigl approached she glanced up nervously. Seigl saw, on her right cheek, what looked like a birthmark.

  This girl he’d seen somewhere before: where?

  Wordless, Seigl stooped to lift several books out of the carton for her. As he bent over his face flushed with blood. Man, God, and Religion in Late Medieval Europe. Science and Magic in 15th-Century France. The Origins of Demonology. “Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live”: A History of European Witchcraft. The Satanic Black Mass. Any new delivery of secondhand books to the Book Seller was of interest to Seigl, at least in theory. These were weighty, decades old, smelling of mildew. A deceased professor’s library, hastily dismantled and dispersed by his heirs. Seigl heard himself say, “Nothing so sad as unwanted books. Like spurned hearts.”

  The girl turned blank blinking eyes toward Seigl, wiping her nose with the edge of her hand. She wore a soiled lime green Book Seller smock over a cheap red turtleneck sweater, jeans that fit her fleshy hips snugly, and new-looking sneakers, without socks. Seigl set the heavy books on a nearby shelf as she rose to her feet, murmuring what sounded like “Thanks . . .” The girl was at least six inches shorter than Seigl with a childish face round as a full moon and strong-looking arms and shoulders. The mark on her cheek was unfortunate: it made her look smudged, despoiled. Your impulse was to reach out and brush the blemish away. Seigl said gently, “You’re new here, I gather. Don’t let Scanlon bully you.”

  He moved on. He didn’t want to make the girl more self-conscious than she already was. And he was hardly a man to speak to strange women in public places; he wasn’t a man who took much notice of other people, even sexually attractive young females.

  Seigl thought of himself as a connoisseur of female beauty, but at a remove. Always, with Seigl, there was this remove. Like a pane of glass between himself and the Other. He admired the females of Botticelli, Titian, Ingres, Vermeer, Manet (Olympia), Degas . . . Less so the females of twentieth-century art, where, amid the fracturing of planes and surfaces, you could actually find a female shape. Living women Seigl tended to disregard as objects of contemplation. They were too human and immediate, too much like himself. Yet he’d never had a relationship with a woman very different from himself. He’d never had relations with prostitutes, for instance.

  The fleshy young woman with her unnaturally white, soft skin and mica-glinting eyes reminded Seigl of prostitutes he’d seen in Prague a few years before. Very young, often slightly plump, glamorously made up, sulky, perhaps tired, yet childlike in a kind of stubborn innocence. He’d seen such girls off duty, so to speak, sitting in bistros with their lovers or pimps, and had wondered at their lives. He hadn’t known whether to pity them, or feel outrage or even uneasiness on their account. Did they resent their lives? Were other lives available to them? What right has an American observer to feel pity, even sympathy, for them, if they don’t feel this way about themselves?

  Seigl spent some time browsing along the shelves. He’d nearly forgotten the girl. When he approached the staircase, he saw her kneeling now on the bare floorboards, lifting books from another carton. Seigl was touched by her awkwardness. She was working wit
h methodical slowness. Clearly she was frightened of making a mistake. Seigl came by, and took a book from her hands. “This can go here, see? It’s the third volume of the series.” Seigl smiled down at the girl who was blinking up warily at him. The moth-shape on her cheek looked as if it were about to quiver into life and fly away.

  The girl said, uncertainly, “You’re a friend of his? Mr. Scanlon?”

  “No.”

  “You like books, though?” Her voice was startling: flat, nasal, scratchy, as if it must hurt her to speak.

  Seigl frowned. The girl’s naivete was both charming and annoying. Yet he knew she was sincere. One must honor such sincerity.

  “Not all books. Most books, no, I don’t.”

  This answer seemed to baffle her. She rose tentatively from the floor, brushing hair out of her eyes. Seigl heard himself asking her name, and at once she said, with a girlish, obedient little tuck of her chin, “Alma.”

  As if she had no surname. Or her surname wasn’t important, as Alma herself wasn’t important.

  Seigl now heard himself say, “My name is Seigl. Joshua.”

  “You’re a . . . doctor, I guess?”

  “No. Not a doctor.”

  “But he called you doctor.”

  “He’s mistaken.”

  Alma smiled, taken slightly aback by Seigl’s manner. She didn’t know how to read him, Seigl supposed. He was nearly forty: in her eyes, old. His untrimmed whiskers, tweed cap, professional and aloof air, his way of speaking marked him as a certain type; yet he seemed almost to be conspiring with her. Speaking so bluntly of Scanlon, as if he and Alma were in league against the bookstore owner.

  Seigl said, amending the harshness of his words, “Most people are mistaken about most things, Alma. Most adults.”

  Alma smiled doubtfully. As if thinking: but adults must be trusted, who else can I trust?

  Seigl saw a wavering part in Alma’s hair, a thin blue vein beating at her right temple. Her eyes were minutely bloodshot, yet beautiful thick-lashed eyes, moist and yearning. Her teeth were small and uneven and slightly stained. Seigl was touched by the blemish on her cheek, the disfigurement of what might have been Alma’s beauty. He was disturbed to see further blemishes, ugly birthmarks or tattoos, or scars, perhaps burn scars, like webbing on the backs of both her hands, of the color of old, dried blood.