The Tattooed Girl

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She waited for Seigl to call for her, to ask, “Where is Alma? My assistant Alma?” But he never did.

  Of that humiliating evening Alma would keenly recall peering through the doorway into the dining room as Madame Zee and her tightassed assistants brushed past her. There was Seigl at the head of the table which had been transformed, flowers, candles, gleaming glassware and silverware, a white linen tablecloth; there was the Blumenthal woman, baring her gums like a barracuda, seated to his right. Seigl was wearing a dark suit that looked expensive, that Alma had never seen before, and a patterned necktie, and his face was clean-shaven and glowing, he was so happy. You would not guess that this was a man anxious about his health. You would not guess that this was a man who moaned and bitched to himself how he was a failure. Nor would you guess that Seigl was thirty-nine, and not twenty-nine. Alma stared. There was that dark Jewish look, Alma supposed that was how you’d describe it, a kind of Arab look, sexy, but also shrewd, smart, the heavy dark eyebrows and striking eyes, the red fleshy mouth. Alma felt the attraction powerfully.

  Alma was dismayed, her employer had so many friends. And they were women as well as men, some of them older, a few younger. Some were very attractive individuals but others were plain and dumpy and some were homely. Why’d anyone like them, much? Who were they? Now some of them were standing, one by one, raising their glasses, making toasts to Seigl, like people on TV. You would swear they had prepared words. Must be reading their words! For how could they make up such words, so fluently, as Seigl did, too? All this mystified Alma. She hated it, she was made to feel so stupid. Her very tongue was fat and sluggish in her mouth. She supposed that Seigl’s guests were people like him, writers, professors, maybe lawyers, well-to-do neighbors. But there were younger people who looked like college students. Why did they like one another so much, and why did Seigl like them? All that evening Alma had been hearing them talking and laughing together, it was like they spoke a language foreign to her, though their words were meant to be English, like hers. She was sick with jealousy. She could not grasp this mystery. The ugly tattoo on her cheek pulsed with chagrin. She picked at it with her nails, smearing the powder, not caring if she drew blood.

  Why did people care for one another, where there was no sex connection? That was the mystery. Except that she was crazy for Dmitri Meatte, Alma feared and disliked him, and could never be a friend to him. If he ceased utterly to want her, she would wish him dead.

  “Out of the way, miss.”

  “You’re blocking the way, miss.”

  Alma shoved blindly at someone’s arm. “Fuck you.”

  She stalked out of the kitchen and ran down the back stairs to her room.

  GUESTS BEGAN LEAVING around midnight. The caterer’s van departed around 2 A.M. By this time the Tattooed Girl was sleeping a dull stuporous sleep beneath layers of bedclothes, knees drawn up to her breasts and breasts sprawling loose inside her flannel nightie. If that woman slept in Joshua Seigl’s bedroom that night, the Jewess with the barracuda gums, the Tattooed Girl was spared knowing.

  4

  Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. “Warum?” I asked him in my poor German. “Hier ist kein warum” (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.

  This passage from Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz had long haunted Seigl. Hier ist kein warum. A profound insight though spoken by a brute. Yet we must ask Warum?

  “So long as we are human, we must ask.”

  5

  AND ANOTHER GERMAN QUOTATION Seigl liked:

  Der Herr Gott ist raffiniert aber boshaft ist Er nicht.

  Was it true? “God is subtle but not malicious.”

  This was a quotation beloved of Albert Einstein. Seigl was struck by it though hardly believing in God, still less in Einstein’s austere rationalist God. He supposed that the remark was purely wishful thinking. You would wish that Der Herr Gott wasn’t malicious, therefore you flatter Him by claiming He is not.

  Saying one thing, meaning its reverse. It was a season of such strategems.

  “OF COURSE I love you, Sondra. It’s only just . . . At this uncertain time in my life . . .”

  They were wiping tears from their eyes in the bright cold wind on Seigl’s terrace overlooking the river. In the hazy distance, like an Impressionist painting, blue-gray Lake Ontario. It was mid-March, you wanted badly to believe that spring was near. Snow remained, but each day the sun rose higher in the sky, and waned a little later.

  A season of hope. Seigl had hope! God damn, yes.

  “. . . I don’t want to hurt you. Or Ethan. I’ve been . . . thinking about that, about you, and wondering . . .”

  Here was why Seigl was hopeful: he wasn’t in a wheelchair (yet) and his new medication seemed to be helping (to a degree) and he was working again after a spell of despair.

  He was hopeful that he could keep Sondra Blumenthal as a friend. A dear friend. Even as a lover . . .

  Sondra said, with her usual enthusiasm, as if she’d never before seen this view from Seigl’s terrace, “It’s mesmerizing here. You could watch the river for hours. If I lived here . . .”

  Seigl felt an impulse to say: Come live with me, then! You and Ethan.

  The impulse passed. The moment was passing. Shortly now Sondra would say she had to leave to pick up Ethan from school and take him to his music lesson.

  Piano? Violin. Seigl kept forgetting.

  In the eye-smarting wind Seigl was holding his friend’s gloveless hand. They stood near the railing without leaning against it since Seigl wasn’t certain the damned thing was safe. He would have it repaired as soon as the weather turned warmer. And other repairs the old house needed. He’d have his assistant look into them. This past winter he’d let many things slide, he’d been distracted and not himself as the expression has it.

  If not myself then who am I?

  The lies we tell. Even to ourselves.

  As lovers he and Sondra Blumenthal were tender with each other. They were friends who’d become lovers and were uncertain of their deepest allegiance: to this new, sometimes awkward tenderness, or to their older companionableness? And then there was sex: always stark, tyrannical. To think of an old friend in sexual terms is a radical act of the imagination.

  Sondra wanted him to marry her, Seigl knew. She was a woman of too much pride and natural dignity to acknowledge anything so conventional, so mundane. And she was no longer young: nearly Seigl’s age. He couldn’t blame her. He did not blame her. He wished . . . To be married. Not to marry. He would have liked to have been married to Sondra from a time when they’d both been young, in their early twenties, and so by now they’d have had the experience of growing up together. Become adults together. Wry, droll, wounded and wise adults. And Sondra’s son, Ethan, for whom Seigl felt a complex sort of emotion: Seigl would have liked to be the boy’s father in more than just by name, adoption.

  Most of their friends were long married and settled in their lives. Even the divorced had remarried, and were settled in their new marriages. Their children were beyond childhood. Seigl would have wished this, or told himself so. He saw himself, in this matter of marrying at thirty-nine, as a man running, limping-running, beside a train as it pulls out of the station. Will he catch the train? Will he miss it? Comic suspense as he grabs at the rail of the caboose and tries to swing himself up onto the steps . . .

  Seigl played chess frequently with Ethan Blumenthal. He was touched by the boy’s earnestness and impressed with his intelligence. So like himself at that age—eager to learn the games of adults. As if chess were a way in. Seigl would have been astounded to be told that, thirty years later, he was still looking for that way in.

  Seigl commended Ethan when he played well. But Seigl wouldn’t allow Ethan to win, not even a single game, because he knew the boy would understand he’
d let him win, and the winning would have no meaning. “I guess I’m pretty stupid,” Ethan said frequently, “—I guess you think I’m pretty stupid, Mr. Seigl.” “Not at all,” Seigl said, warmly. “I think you’re damned smart. Call me ‘Josh.’ ” He saw Ethan blink away tears. He saw Ethan’s delicate mouth harden, in an expression of hurt, disappointment. He heard the boy’s quickened breathing. And another time Ethan would say, wiping his nose with an angry gesture of his hand, “I really am stupid!” as if they’d been arguing this issue, as if this, and not the game, were somehow the point of the game; and Seigl knew he must repeat no, no Ethan wasn’t stupid, he shouldn’t be discouraged because . . . Seigl liked it that the games were between Ethan and himself, and Sondra kept her distance, but he didn’t like it that chess was beginning to mean too much to the eleven-year-old. Uneasily Seigl thought He’s telling himself if he plays chess well, this man who has barged into his life will marry his mother and become his father.

  The logic of fairy tales. Yet Seigl understood: his sense of his own father was blurred, uncertain. Sometimes he believed that everything he’d ever written, every effort of his imagination, had been an attempt to pay homage to Karl Seigl, who had eluded him.

  Ethan never spoke of his father to Seigl, even when the subject might have come up naturally. Sondra had said ambiguously that the boy’s relationship with this absent father “wasn’t ideal.”

  Of Ethan, Sondra said to Seigl in a light tone, though her meaning was unmistakable, “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Joshua. Promise?”

  Seigl promised.

  Sondra said now, glancing at her watch, “It’s late. I must leave.”

  They stepped from the windy terrace back inside the house. Seigl’s eyes smarted from the strong bright light. Sometimes, the vividness and vibrancy of the outer world, including too the world of other people, assaulted his brain like pelting needles.

  He told himself: It’s been a good day. You’re on your feet.

  It was Seigl’s study they were stepping into, a large room with windows on three sides, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and tables upon which papers and manuscripts had been neatly placed. This room, Sondra had often seen in its earlier, pre-Alma state of disarray.

  Sondra said, “She has made a difference in your life, Joshua. This ‘Alma.’ At least visibly.”

  Seigl said tersely, “She’s invaluable.”

  He would say no more. He understood that Sondra disliked and disapproved of Alma Busch, as other friends of his did. But he didn’t discuss the subject.

  Seigl walked Sondra to the front door. He was grateful to be able to walk, capably, with his cane. If his right leg ached and tingled, if there was a curious shimmering of his vision intensified by the several minutes outside on the terrace, Sondra needn’t know. She was in the habit of exclaiming how well he was looking. Especially when they were intimate, lying together in a darkened room, she would have liked to know every fact about her lover’s yet-unnamed nerve disorder. She would have liked to speak with him on the phone several times a day, to be informed of every nuance of every symptom of his, the fever chart of his emotions through the length of a day and how well, or ill, he slept each night, but Seigl was hardly one to share such confidences. Never!

  Often Sondra said he was very brave. Seigl’s droll response was, he’d rather not have to be.

  Almost shyly she said now, lifting her eyes to his, “I’ll see you tomorrow evening, then? The usual time?”

  “If you still want me.”

  “Oh, Joshua. What a thing to say.”

  She leaned quickly to him, to kiss him. She didn’t want him to see the alarm in her face. Her kisses were like exclamations. Seigl gripped her shoulders and kissed her more forcibly.

  Seigl watched Sondra descend the nineteen stone steps to the sidewalk, turning to wave back at him, smiling. Sondra Blumenthal was an attractive woman past the bloom of heedless youth and Seigl loved her, his heart was deeply moved by her. Again he felt the impulse to call her back . . .

  He shut the door. Somewhere upstairs in his house was the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

  6

  INVALUABLE.”

  He wasn’t sure that this was so. The irony of the remark pleased him, though.

  On a wall of his study where he’d affixed postcards from friends there was a reproduction of a Henry Moore sculpture: a voluptuous sprawling female figure with an egg-sized featureless head. Long before Alma Busch had entered his life he would gaze at this, revulsed, yet fascinated. I am I such figures seem to declare.

  He stood listening: Alma was thumping about upstairs. Like a girls’ gym class she sounded, graceless, heavy-footed, yet earnest. Even Alma’s blunders were well intentioned. Always the girl meant well. To let her go would be impossible.

  Alma kept Seigl’s house in order. There was no need for a cleaning woman to come once a week. Simple repetitive household tasks that would have been maddening to Seigl seemed to be consoling to her. Sometimes he would swear she was blind, making her way through the rooms of his house by touch and smell. Her face was blank as an aboriginal mask. Her eyes were narrowed to slits. She held objects as if needing to grasp, to grope, before knowing what an object was. Often he caught a glimpse of her, through a doorway, frowning, her lips moving as if she were talking to herself, urgently. At such times she was oblivious of Seigl as if he had no existence. Almost, he was made to wonder if he’d drifted into a stranger’s dream: if Alma Busch suddenly wakened, he would vanish.

  Vacuuming was one of Alma’s favorite household chores. Furniture and floor polishing, sink scrubbing with Brillo pads or brushes. She liked to “run” the laundry as she called it. She’d taken over most of the ironing, that Seigl had always sent out. “See, Mr. Seigl, it’s a lot cheaper. And I’m good at it.” She was never so happy as when she charged about the house with a roll of paper towels and Windex in hand. In Seigl’s study she was less confident, never taking the initiative but waiting to be instructed what to do. In the kitchen she was even less assured, and seemed always to be breaking things, or stymied by their operation. She’d never learned to cook, she claimed. Or, she was “no good” at cooking. In that distant world from which she’d come, Seigl guessed, men had been served by women, men had harshly judged the food prepared for them by women, and Alma had grown up with such knowledge. She behaved as if every meal prepared for her employer was a sacred ritual at which, talentless as she was, she must fail. Most of Seigl’s dinners continued to be delivered by one or another of the food shops in the vicinity, though Alma was now the one to order them.

  “Alma, come sit with me. Have your dinner with me tonight.”

  In his euphoric mood Seigl had been feeling magnanimous, yes and he’d been feeling lonely, so he’d invited his assistant to join him, and the way Alma had gaped blinking at him, you’d think he’d uttered something obscene. She’d backed off stammering she could not, there was “too much to do” in the kitchen.

  He guessed she had a boyfriend. And she had difficulties with the boyfriend. For sometimes she was avid for her evenings and days off, and stayed away for an entire weekend, Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, but other times more recently she said with a sullen shrug she’d be staying in.

  She went to church sometimes. Seigl was touched: Alma Busch believed in God!

  Yet this was typical of her class, her type. An irony of history. Those in whom God does not believe, believe in God.

  Seigl had never questioned her about her beliefs, though he wanted to. Nor had he dared to ask her about the strangely shaped mark on her cheek. The smudged-looking marks on the backs of her hands, like ragged gloves. Birthmarks, probably. He was sure that Jet must be wrong. (Jet was wrong about everything. That was Jet!) More than once it had crossed Seigl’s mind, gazing at his assistant as a lepidopterist might gaze at an exotic butterfly, that he might offer Alma the possibility of cosmetic surgery to have the marks removed or at least lightened. Your beauty shouldn’t be defaced,
Alma.

  But how could he find the words, Christ! he could not.

  BEFORE SONDRA BLUMENTHAL had left, Seigl gave her a folder of new Virgil translations. He was both eager and anxious to hear her response. He’d been working so long in the dark. He hadn’t told Sondra that somehow in his “manic” state he had lost or destroyed a portion of the Aeneid manuscript as, evidently, he’d lost or destroyed pages of his novel and his play.

  Seigl tried to remember: had he been disgusted with what he’d reread, or had he simply, accidentally, lost it?

  At first, he couldn’t believe the missing pages were missing. He looked repeatedly through the same mess of papers, with the gape-mouthed compulsion of a zombie. “No. No. No. No. No.” At last he’d enlisted his assistant in the desperate search. Alma had been diligent, going through drawers and files in his study where, obviously, the lost papers could not be, unless Seigl had hidden them away in a fit of total madness. On her hands and knees she’d peered into the backs of closets. She’d gone through every wastebasket in the house and braved the cold of the day to retrieve the contents of the trash cans she’d set out at the curb, in search of Joshua Seigl’s scribbled pages. As if they were pure gold, and not very likely dross! Even after Seigl had given up, Alma doggedly continued. “I feel so bad, Mr. S-Seigl, that time I . . .” Alma was trying to speak of the farcical episode in the dining room when Seigl had grabbed for a plate of hot food and Alma had dropped it onto his things. Seigl had screamed at her, terrible wounding words he couldn’t believe that he of all people had uttered. (He hadn’t apologized. Couldn’t bring himself to relive any of that ludicrous scene.) The defaced pages, Alma had wiped clean of the gluey mess and laid out neatly to dry on the dining room table, and these Seigl had been able to read, so none of these had been lost. But other pages, older material, seemed to be gone, and Seigl knew he had only himself to blame.