“Is that how you would have felt, if you were me?”
“No,” Nathan said, and a sad smile appeared for an instant, an inappropriate response, yet somehow telling.
Mrs. Stramm stopped talking and had closed her eyes. It was as if she and Nathan were praying together. I could feel that, and I sensed that something else was happening between them. Something seemed to be passing out of her, a dark, palpable spirit. I could feel its presence in the room. And Nathan looked somehow different, more defined. It was the light from the lamp, no doubt, but some kind of exchange seemed to be taking place. Stolid, solid Mrs. Stramm looked softer, as if lighter, while Nathan looked as ravaged as an internee. It was as if he were becoming defined by this woman’s past.
When Nathan was finished, he put his instrument down on the cabinet, and taped some gauze over his own bleeding wrist. Then he just stared at his work on Mrs. Stramm. I couldn’t see the tattoo from where I was sitting, so I stood up and walked over. “Is it all right if I take a look?” I asked, but neither one answered me ... neither one seemed to notice me.
The tattoo was beautiful, lifelike in a way I had not thought possible for a marking on the flesh. It was the cherubic face of an angel with thin, curly hair. One of the numbers had now become the shading for the angel’s fine, straight nose. Surrounding the face were dark feathered wings that crossed each other; an impossible figure, but a hauntingly sad and beautiful one. The eyes seemed to be looking upward and out, as if contemplating a high station of paradise. The numbers were lost in the blue-blackness of lifting wings. This figure looked familiar, which was not surprising, as Nathan had studied the work of the masters. I remembered a Madonna, which was attributed to the Renaissance artist Lorenzo di Credi, that had two angels with wings such as those on the tattoo. But the tattooed wings were so dark they reminded me of death; and they were bleeding, an incongruous testament to life.
I thought about Nathan’s bleeding wrist, and wondered ...
“It’s beautiful,” Mrs. Stramm said, staring at her tattoo. “It’s the right face, it’s the way his face would have looked ... had he lived.” Then she stood up abruptly. Nathan sat where he was; he looked exhausted, which was how I suddenly felt.
“I must put a gauze wrap over it,” Nathan said.
“No, I wish to look at him.”
“Can you see the old numbers?” Nathan asked.
“No,” she said at first, then, “Yes, I can see them.”
“Good,” Nathan said.
She stood before Nathan, and I could now see that she had once been beautiful: big-boned, proud, full-bodied, with a strong chin and regal face. Her fine gray hair had probably been blond, as her eyebrows were light. And she looked relieved, released. I couldn’t help but think that she seemed now like a woman who had just given birth. The strain was gone. She no longer seemed gravid with the burden of sorrow. But the heaviness had not disappeared from the room, for I could feel the psychic closeness of grief like stale, humid air. Nathan looked wasted in the sharp, cleansing, focused light.
“Would you mind if I looked at your tattoo?” Mrs. Stramm asked.
“I’m sorry,” Nathan said.
Mrs. Stramm nodded, then picked up her handbag and took out her checkbook. She moved toward the light and began to scribble out a check. “Will you accept three hundred dollars?”
“No, I cannot. Consider it paid.”
She started to argue, but Nathan turned away from her. “Thank you,” she said, and walked to the door.
Nathan didn’t answer.
Nathan turned on the overhead light; the sudden change from darkness to light unnerved me.
“Tell me what the hell’s going on,” I said. “Why did your wrist start bleeding when you were tattooing that woman?”
“It’s part of the process,” Nathan said vaguely. “Do you want coffee?” he asked, changing the subject—Nathan had a way of talking around any subject, peeling away layers as if conversation was an onion; he eschewed directness. Perhaps it was his rabbinical heritage. At any rate, he wasn’t going to tell me anything until he was ready. I nodded, and he took a bag of ground coffee out of his freezer, and dripped a pot in the Melitta. Someone knocked at the door and demanded a tattoo, and Nathan told him that he would have to wait until tomorrow.
We sat at the table and sipped coffee. I felt an overwhelming lassitude come over me. My shoulder began to ache ... to throb. I worried that this might be the onset of another heart-attack (I try not to pay attention to my hypochondria, but those thoughts still flash through my mind, no matter how rational I try to be). Surely it was muscular, I told myself: I had been wrestling with my son last night. I needed to start swimming again at the “Y.” I was out of shape, and right now I felt more like sixty-two than forty-two. After a while, the coffee cleared my head a bit—it was a very, very strong blend, Pico, I think—but the atmosphere inside the trailer was still oppressive, even with the overhead light turned on. It was as if I could feel the shadows.
“I saw Mrs. Stramm here yesterday afternoon,” I said, trying to lead Nathan. “She seems Jewish, strange that she should be getting a tattoo. Although maybe not so strange, since she came to a Jewish tattooist.” I forced a laugh and tried not to stare at the thin webbing of scars on his neck.
“She’s not Jewish,” Nathan said. “Catholic. She was interred in the camp for political reasons. Her family was caught hiding Jews.”
“It seems odd that she’d come to you for a tattoo to cover up her numbers,” I said. “She could have had surgery. You would hardly be able to tell they’d ever been there.”
“That’s not why she came.”
“Nathan ...”
“Most of the people just want tattoos,” Nathan said. He seemed slightly defensive, and then he sighed and said, “But sometimes I get people like Mrs. Stramm. Word gets around, word-of-mouth. Sometimes I can sense things, see things about people when I’m tattooing. It’s something like automatic writing, maybe. Then the tattoo takes on a life of its own, and sometimes it changes the person I tattoo.”
“This whole thing ... it seems completely crazy,” I said, remembering his paintings, the large canvases of circus people, carny people. He had made his reputation with those melancholy, poignant oil paintings. He had traveled, followed the carnies. Ruth didn’t seem to mind. She was independent, and used to travel quite a bit by herself also; she was fond of taking grueling, long day-trips. Like Nathan, she was full of energy. I remember that Nathan had been drawn to tattooing through circus people. He visited tattoo studios, and used them for his settings. The paintings he produced then were haunted, and he became interested in the idea of living art, the relationship of art to society, the numinal, symbolic quality of primitive art. It was only natural that he’d want to try tattooing, which he did. He had even tattooed himself: a tiny raven that seemed to be forever nestled in his palm. But that had been a phase, and once he had had his big New York show, he went on to paint ordinary people in parks and shopping malls and in movies houses, and his paintings were selling at over five thousand dollars apiece. I remembered ribbing him for tattooing himself. I had told him he couldn’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery. He had said that he had already bought his plot. Money talks.
“How’s Ruth?” I asked, afraid of what he would tell me. He would never be here, he would never look like this, if everything was all right between them.
“She’s dead,” he whispered, and he took a sip of his coffee.
“What?” I asked, shocked. “How?”
“Cancer, as she was always afraid of.”
The pain in my shoulder became worse, and I started to sweat. It seemed to be getting warmer; he must have turned the heat up.
“How could all this happen without Laura or me knowing about it?” I asked. “I just can’t believe it.”
“Ruth went back to Connecticut to stay with her parents.”
“Why?”
“David,” Nathan said, “I knew she had cancer, even wh
en she went in for tests and they all turned out negative. I kept dreaming about it, and I could see it burning inside her. I thought I was going crazy ... I probably was. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t be near her. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t do anything. So I started traveling, got back into the tattoo culture. The paintings were selling, especially the tattoo stuff—I did a lot of close-up work, you wouldn’t even know it was tattoos I was painting, I got into some beautiful oriental stuff—so I stayed away.”
“And she died without you?” I asked, incredulous.
“In Stamford. The dreams got worse. It got so I couldn’t even talk to her over the phone. I could see what was happening inside her and I was helpless. And I was a coward. I’m paying for it now.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Goddammit, it was hot.
He didn’t answer.
“Tell me about the scars on your neck and your arms.”
“And my chest, everywhere,” Nathan confessed. “They’re tattoos. It started when I ran away, when I left Ruth, I started tattooing myself. I used the tattoo gun, but no ink.”
“Why?” I asked.
“At first, I guess I did it as practice, but then it became a sort of punishment. It was painful. I was painting without pigments. I was inflicting my own punishment. Sometimes I can see the tattoos, as if they were paintings. I’m a map of what I’ve done to my wife, to my family; and then around that time I discovered I could see into other people, and sort of draw their lives differently. Most people I’d just give a tattoo, good work, sometimes even great work, maybe, but every once in a while I’d see something when I was working. I could see if someone was sick, I could see what was wrong with him. I was going the carny route, and living with some gypsy people. A woman, a friend of mine, saw my “talent”—he laughed when he said that—“and helped me develop it. That’s when I started bleeding when I worked. As my friend used to tell me, “Everything has a price.”
I looked at Nathan. His life was draining away. He was turning into a ghost, or a shadow. Not even his tattoos had color.
My whole arm was aching. I couldn’t ignore it any longer. And it was so close in the trailer that I couldn’t breathe. “I’ve got to get some air,” I said as I forced myself to get up. I felt as if I hadn’t slept in days. Then I felt a burning in my neck and a stabbing pain in my chest. I tried to shout to Nathan, who was standing up, who looked shocked, who was coming toward me.
But I couldn’t move; I was as leaden as a statue.
I could only see Nathan, and it was as if he were lit by a tensor lamp. The pigments of living tattoos glowed under his shirt, and resolved themselves like paintings under a stage scrim. He was a living, radiant landscape of scenes and figures, terrestrial and heavenly and demonic. I could see a grotesque caricature of Mrs. Stramm’s tattoo on Nathan’s wrist. It was a howling, tortured, winged child. Most of the other tattoos expressed the ugly, minor sins of people Nathan had tattooed, but there were also figures of Nathan and Ruth. All of Ruth’s faces were Madonna-like, but Nathan was rendered perfectly, and terribly; he was a monster portrayed in entirely human terms, a visage of greed and cowardice and hardness. But there was a central tattoo on Nathan’s chest that looked like a Durer engraving—such was the sureness and delicacy of the work. Ruth lay upon the ground, amid grasses and plants and flowers, which seemed surreal in their juxtaposition. She had opened her arms, as if begging for Nathan, who was depicted also, to return. Her chest and stomach and neck were bleeding, and one could look into the cavities of the open wounds. And marching away, descending under the nipple of Nathan’s chest, was the figure of Nathan. He was followed by cherubs riding fabulous beasts, some of which were the skeletons of horses and dogs and goats with feathery wings ... wings such as Nathan had tattooed on Mrs. Stramm. But the figure of Nathan was running away. His face, which had always seemed askew—a large nose, deep-set engaging eyes, tousled hair, the combination of features that made him look like a seedy Puck, the very embodiment of generous friendliness—was rendered formally. His nose was straight and long, rather than crooked, as it was in real life, and his eyes were narrow and tilted, rather than wide and roundish; and his mouth, which in real life, even now, was full, was drawn as a mere line. In his hands, Nathan was carrying Ruth’s heart and other organs, while a child riding a skeleton Pegasus was waving a thighbone.
The colors were like an explosion, and the tattoos filled my entire field of vision; and then the pain took me, wrapped like a snake around my chest. My heart was pounding. It seemed to be echoing in a huge hall. It was all I could hear. The burning in my chest increased and I felt myself screaming, even if it might be soundless. I felt my entire being straining in fright, and then the colors dimmed. Fainting, falling, I caught one last glimpse of the walls and ceiling, all pulsing, glowing, all coalescing into one grand tattoo, which was all around me, and I followed those inky, pigment paths into grayness and then darkness. I thought of Laura and Ben, and I felt an overwhelming sense of sorrow for Nathan.
For once, I didn’t seem to matter, and my sense of rushing sadness became a universe in which I was suspended.
I thought I was dying, but it seemed that it would take an eternity, an eternity to think, to worry back over my life, to relive it once more, but from a higher perspective, from an aerial view. But then I felt a pressure, as if I were under water and a faraway explosion had fomented a strong current. I was being pulled away, jostled, and I felt the tearing of pain and saw a bright light and heard an electrical sparking, a sawing. And I saw Nathan’s face, as large as a continent gazing down upon me.
I woke up on his couch. My head was pounding, but I was breathing naturally, evenly. My arm and shoulder and chest no longer ached, although I felt a needle-like burning over my heart. Reflexively, I touched the spot where I had felt the tearing pain, and found it had been bandaged. “What the hell’s this?” I asked Nathan, who was sitting beside me. Although I could make out the scars on his neck, I could no longer find the outlines of the tattoos I had seen, nor could I make out the brilliant pigments that I had imagined or hallucinated. “Why do I have a bandage on?” I felt panic.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked. Nathan looked ill. Even more wasted. His face was shiny with sweat. But it wasn’t warm in here now; it was comfortable. Yet when Mrs. Stramm was sitting for her tattoo, it was stifling. I had felt the closeness of dead air like claustrophobia.
“Christ, I thought I was having a heart attack. I blacked out. I fell.”
“I caught you. You did have a heart attack.”
“Then why the hell am I here instead of in a hospital?” I asked, remembering how it felt to be completely helpless in the emergency room, machines whirring and making ticking and just audible beeping noises as they monitored vital signs.
“It could have been very bad,” Nathan said, ignoring my question.
“Then what am I doing here?” I asked again. I sat up. This was all wrong. Goddammit, it was wrong. I felt a rush in my head, and the headache became sharp and then withdrew back into dull pain.
“I took care of it,” he said.
“How?”
“How do you feel?”
“I have a headache, that’s all,” I said, “and I want to know what you did on my chest.”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t use pigment. They’ll let you into a Jewish cemetery.” Nathan smiled.
“I want to know what you did.” I started to pull off the gauze, but he stopped me.
“Let it heal for a few days. Change the bandage. That’s all.”
“And what the hell am I supposed to tell Laura?” I asked.
“That you’re alive.”
“I felt weak, yet it was as if I had sloughed something off, something heavy and deadening.
And I just walked out the door.
After I was outside, shivering, for the weather had turned unseasonably cold, I realized that I had not said goodbye. I had left, as if in a daze. Yet I could not turn around and go
back. This whole night was crazy, I told myself. I’d come back tomorrow and apologize ... and try to find out what had really happened.
I drove home, and it began to snow, a freakish wet, heavy snow that turned everything bluish-white, luminescent.
My chest began to itch under the bandage.
I didn’t get home until after twelve. Understandably, Laura was worried and anxious. We both sat down to talk in the upholstered chairs in front of the fireplace in the living room, facing each other; that was where we always sat when we were arguing or working out problems. Normally, we’d sit on the sofa and chat and watch the fire. Laura had a fire crackling in the fireplace; and, as there were only a few small lamps on downstairs, the ruddy light from the fire flickered in our large, white-carpeted living room. Laura wore a robe with large cuffs on the sleeves and her thick black hair was long and shiny, still damp from a shower. Her small face was tight, as she was upset, and she wore her glasses, another give-away that she was going to get to the bottom of this. She almost never wore her glasses, and the lenses were scratched from being tossed here and there and being banged about in various drawers; she only used them when she had to “focus her thoughts.”
I looked a sight: my once starched white shirt was wrinkled and grimy, and I smelled rancid, the particular odor of nervous sweat. My trousers were dirty, especially at the knees, where I had fallen to the floor, and I had somehow torn out the hem of my right pantleg.
I told Laura the whole story, what had happened from the time I had seen Nathan Sunday until tonight. At first she seemed relieved that I had been with Nathan—she had never been entirely sure of me, and I’m certain she thought I’d had a rendezvous with some twenty-two year old receptionist or perhaps the woman who played the french horn in the orchestra—I had once made a remark about her to Laura. But she was more upset than I had expected when I told her that Ruth had died. We were friends, certainly, although I was much closer to Nathan than she was to Ruth.
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