The Tattoo

by Chris Mckinney

  I was enchanted. “See, you’re gonna force me to propose again.”

  “Why, because you’re attracted to idiots? Or because you’re an idiot yourself, and you can make some sense of what I just said?”

  I brushed her hair away from her face. “Well, I guess it means I’m attracted to idiots.”

  She splashed water on me and I splashed back. I thought about the laughing again. The humor. I was beginning to realize how it was a shield. All the clever dialogue just kept us from putting ourselves out there. It was like we didn’t want to show much of our real selves, because we were afraid we’d be sitting there naked, while the other was fully clothed. This kind of bothered me. I wanted to be naked with her, but I was unwilling to be the only one without clothes. I realized the big problem, even after just this half a day, was that I was in love with her. How fucking trite! But I didn’t think she was in love with me. If she had taken my proposals seriously, damn, I would have married her that day. This was beginning to worry me, too. I did not love. It was something I thought myself incapable of doing. I hated, not loved. I was beginning to feel lost at sea.

  A few seconds of silence passed. I said, “For whatever we lose, like a you or a me, it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.”

  She looked at me curiously. “What?”

  “e.e. cummings. I told you I read. Impressed yet?”

  “Not yet. For all I know, that could be the only line you know. I might have to hang out with you a bit more and see if it’s all a sham.”

  I felt like getting serious. I looked toward the horizon.“You know, it’s funny. I know some lines, but none of them are mine. They’re owned by dead haoles who I probably have nothing in common with. But sometimes, sometimes for an instant, I feel like they were talking to me. Knew my thoughts. My personal favorite is Macbeth on life. ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Man, I can think about that one for hours. Nihilism before there was nihilism. Every time I read it in my mind, I think, damn straight.”

  Right after the words had poured out, my heart cringed as if waiting for a blow. I thought I’d put way too much out there. I knew quoting lit often sounded forced. She was going to give me a crazy look and paddle as fast as she could back to shore. Instead she paddled closer to me. “Yeah, I heard that one before. But here’s the thing. I figure if you can hear the symphony in the sound and see the farce in the fury, it’s not all pointless. At least it makes it entertaining.” She laughed. “Jeez, listen to me, Plato over here. I don’t know.”

  “Look at the big brain on Claudia.”

  When she smiled, I said, “If my friends could hear me now, they’d probably disown me for talking all this crap.”

  I felt her grab my arm. “You worry, don’t you?” she said. “Worry real hard about what other people think about you. Don’t do that with me.”

  “We all worry, hon. I ain’t any different. Let’s paddle in. Let me buy you lunch.” We paddled in together, side by side, as the gentle surf pushed us toward the beach.

  We spent the rest of the day with each other. After dinner, we went to her place. It was one of the many condo apartments which Mama-san owned. The furnishings were minimal. There was a puffy-looking beige sofa which sat in front of the T.V. On the left sat a cheap, do-it-yourself, plyboard desk and a small dining room table with two chairs. The right was virtually empty except for a few of the house plants which were scattered across the room.

  She was sitting on her sofa and I was sitting on the carpet in front of her. She had broken off a spiny branch of one of her aloe plants. She rubbed aloe on the burnt ring around my neck. She stopped and touched my shoulder. “Nice tattoo,” she said. “What is it?”

  She began tracing the lines of the tattoo with her finger. “It’s my family crest,” I told her, “the paulownia.”

  She stopped and frowned. “You’re just a modern-day samurai, huh. Long hair, family crest. Where’s your swords?”

  I laughed. “They’re not mine yet, but I guess I stand to inherit them.”

  “Your father has them?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I grabbed her hand and held it. “He has them.”

  She began to trace the lines of the tattoo again. “Are they like really old?” she asked. “Passed down from generation to generation?”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “You don’t sound like you want them.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. They’re gonna be mine.”

  “You know, if they’re that old, you could sell them or something.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I pulled her in and kissed her. Her hand came off my shoulder and she kissed back. It was amazing how fast this love thing grabbed me. Usually with sex, nervousness was virtually absent in me. My feelings were closer to want, to hunger. But with Claudia, it was almost like I didn’t want her, like I didn’t want to fuck her. My nervous hand shook a little, like I was almost afraid to touch her, like I didn’t want to offend her. I remember telling myself, “C’mon dumb ass, it’s just sex, it’s just sex.” It was like a mantra. I got up on my knees and faced her. She squeezed out a gelatinous piece of aloe from the branch and put it on the tip of my nose. I took off her shirt. I gently kissed the back of her ear, digging my nose deep in her hair. She ran her hands through my long, messy hair. I almost froze, as if I didn’t know what to do next. She pulled off my shirt and joined me on the floor. We began to kiss, and slowly I felt my back approach the carpet. She was on top of me, her chest pressed against mine. We kissed each other on the lips and all over each other’s face. It seemed like we kissed for hours.

  An hour later, we made our way back to her bedroom. We both sat on her futon bed cross-legged, naked. We sat there on her ocean blue sheets. She held one pillow in her lap, and I held another. I felt the hard, wooden frame underneath the thin mattress dig into me. She touched my face. Her fingers moved against the grain of my scars. I put my head down and let out a little laugh. Her hand stopped. She tipped my head back up and stared at me. I looked away. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I looked at her. “I don’t know, this feels wrong. I don’t know why, but it does. Maybe I’m thinking what your mother will think.”

  She crinkled her brow.“Don’t worry about her, I can handle her.”

  I laughed. “You don’t know much about her, do you?”

  Her face turned serious. “I know what she is. She’s a woman obsessed with money. She’s a woman obsessed with me having money. I’m not stupid, I know this makes her dangerous. But you don’t really strike me as the kind of person who’s afraid of that.”

  “No, to tell you the truth, nothing much scares me. But this knowledge of myself, me knowing that I’m not scared, scares me a little. And, as corny as this sounds, hurting you scares me, too.” I was shocked to hear the words come out of my mouth. Schmaltz City, here I come.

  “Look at me,” she said. “Really look. Do you see someone fragile? If you do... All I can tell you is you’re wrong.” She looked me straight in the eye. “I’m tougher than you.”

  I grabbed her. I roughly pinned her to the bed and smiled. She laughed. I kissed her. We kissed and I felt my body wanting her.

  As the sun began to rise, she was in my arms. I wasn’t sleeping. But for the first time in my life, my insomnia wasn’t caused by anxiety, instead it was motivated by calm. In fact it wasn’t even insomnia. I was tired, but I forced myself to stay awake and just envelop myself in the calm. I enjoyed it. I revelled in it. I couldn’t believe I felt calm. It became a place I didn’t want to leave. So this is love, I thought. All good. I felt her stir. She entwined her long thin fingers with mine. I felt her strong hand squeeze her palm into my callused hand. She kept her eyes closed. From that moment I knew this wasn’t a one-night stand. Then suddenly she sat straight up. “Oh, shit,” she said,“what time is it?”

  I looked over at her clock. “It’s about nine.”

  She jumped out of bed and jumped into
her panties. “I gotta go to school.”

  She grabbed her keys and removed one from her keychain. She threw it to me. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I expect you to be here when I get back.” I reached over and stuffed it in my jeans pocket.

  I wanted to ask her, jokingly, who the hell she thought she was, but instead I simply nodded. After she got all her clothes on, she bent down and kissed me. She ran out of the room and I heard the door shut. I put a pillow over my head and smelled the left-over fragrance of her hair. I laughed and threw the pillow off the bed. What the fuck was happening to me? I didn’t want to need. I told myself I wouldn’t be here in a few hours. I told myself I didn’t need her, but I would if I stayed around here. I began to feel weak and stupid. I thought back on the last couple of days, and asked myself, “Who was that loser, dumb ass hitting on this chick and making all romantic?” I thought about how “touching” the day before was and it made me want to puke. I was definitely in the Schmaltz City Limits. I began to seethe as I stood up and started dressing. I tried to hate her but it was hard. So I began hating myself and it was easy. I walked out of the apartment and told myself I would never return.

  Two hours later, it dawned on me. I was sitting in front of my big T.V., vacantly watching some stupid soap, and I realized I had her key. I looked up at Musashi and yelled, “Fuck.” I took the key out of my pants pocket and looked at it closely. I rubbed the ridges of it with my finger. I looked at Musashi again and threw the key across the room. Fuck, she’d outsmarted me. I looked at the T.V. screen and saw some haole guy proposing to some haole girl. I turned it off and paced in my living room. When I began looking for the key, I couldn’t find it. For about fifteen minutes I crawled around on my carpet looking for that fucking key. Just as I was about to say, “fuck it,” I slapped one of my empty shoes across the room. I saw the key fly out of the shoe and I crawled to it.

  When Claudia got back to her apartment a little past noon, I sat waiting for her on the sofa. She opened the door and asked, “So what did you do all morning?”

  I was planning to tell her that I wouldn’t be able to see her again, but when I saw her I heard myself say,“Nothing. Just waiting for you.”

  She sat down next to me and sighed. “Let’s go in the bedroom.”

  It went on like this for a couple of months. Every time I felt strong enough to leave, she’d make me stay just by being in the same room. It drove me fucking crazy. We’d surf, dive, eat, make love. She began talking to the night security man at my building and somehow pulled some kind of deal where we were able to get another copy of my set of apartment keys. Not to mention she seemed to be that type of girl who could easily give her friends the shaft when she got involved. It was easy for me, too, considering my friends were on the other side of the mountains.

  After she got the key she was around even more, and I’d be into it whenever she was near me, but once she left, I would begin to plot my escape. I don’t think she was on to this, at least for a while, but sometimes my absences would last a few days. No phone call, no messages. Sometimes I found myself avoiding my own apartment. During these separations, I tried to immerse myself in work. I would spend hours at Mirage, looking at the strippers, hoping one would seduce and save me, in turn saving Claudia, too. But to be honest, it was all getting old. You spend enough time in a strip bar and sooner or later you find women more attractive clothed than unclothed.

  So I tried to turn my mind to the actual business side of the Club. I suggested to Mama-san that we build a kind of back room, a private party room for bachelor parties and stuff. She liked the idea, so this kept me busy for a while. But it was my only idea. Bouncing, collecting, it wasn’t brain surgery. It allowed time for my mind to drift. I’d debate whether I should call Claude (I saw her so often, I had to even shorten her name just to save energy). Sooner or later, I’d give in. I guess school kept her busy. It’s funny, she never made the effort to look for me at the Mirage, even though she knew I was there. This would make me hate her sometimes and I’d play this competition with her, this game of “Who can last without whom the longest?” I hated the game and I’d often lose. So I didn’t think anything bothered her. But I guess it did. One night, the summer after her graduation, we finally had it out.

  We took her Lexus and went night-diving out at Black Point. Behind the houses of the wealthy, we walked across the black lava rocks that separated the road from the ocean.

  When we got to the edge, we dove into the cold water with our dive lights. I felt the water pierce through my wet suit. I turned on my light and saw the particles of the sea drift with the ebb and flow of the ocean. I raised my head above the surface of the water and heard the wind whistle against the hollow of my snorkel. I looked out towards the black ocean and saw an orbit of light moving further out beneath the surface. Claude was getting ahead of me and herself. I dove back down and kicked hard to catch up with her.

  We scoured the water for spiny lobster even though it wasn’t in season. As we swam further and further out, I kept a closer eye on Claude, making sure she stayed close. I pointed my light down into the darkness and saw a lobster coasting slowly on the rocky, sand-colored surface. I signaled for her to dive down and grab it. I watched as she took the shallow ten-foot dive down and chased the lobster. She reached out and grabbed for it, but she was too slow and missed. She chased after it clumsily, but it was too late. The lobster kicked up a cloud of sand and disappeared into the darkness. We rose to the surface and took our snorkels out of our mouths. “You gotta be quicker then that, hon,” I said. “You gotta be sneakier. Try again, I know you can do it.”

  She nodded and put her snorkel back in her mouth. We swam on. She missed a couple more. I laughed, but she didn’t hear me underwater. I decided to take a dive down. I reached the bottom and swam further on. I looked under a rocky ledge and saw a huge lobster.

  Automatically, my arm shot out and I wrapped my hand around its kicking tail. I dropped my light to get a better grip on it. I put it in my netted dive bag and retrieved the light. Just as I was running out of breath, I flashed my light through the yellow mesh of the bag. The lobster was a big, ugly thing. It looked like a large prehistoric insect with its segmented, spiny armor, and its long, protruding antennas. It was an ugly, tasty scavenger. Finally I rushed to the surface, spit the water out of my snorkel, and took in a deep breath. I looked around and didn’t see Claude’s light. I spit out my snorkel and tread water in circles. I didn’t see her. I hadn’t swum very far chasing the lobster, so I figured the tide had probably pulled me even farther away from her. I flashed my light toward the shore and realized that if I didn’t have the light, I wouldn’t have known which direction the shore was. I called out for her. No answer. I called louder. When I heard splashing farther out, I swam toward it. Finally I heard her voice. “Ken!”

  When I got to her, she was crying. I flashed the light in her face and saw her face mashed up with tears flowing from her eyes. I hugged her. “What’s wrong?”

  “You left me, you fucking left me.”

  I hugged her harder. Then I felt the bump on my leg. I resisted the urge to swim toward the shore as fast as I could. I held her hand and moved my head and light below water. I waited and listened to my quick breathing resonate in my snorkel. I flashed the light in every direction. Suddenly I saw it glide out of the darkness like a spaceship. When you see a shark underwater, you know it’s a killer, and on a whim, it could kill you. I looked at its sharp, ugly teeth which stuck out of its mouth. I looked at its eye, its dull black nothingness, and watched it grow bigger and bigger. It was an expanding black disk growing closer and closer to me. I floated still. It was a tiger. Suddenly I saw my hand flash toward the eye. The ten-footer jerked its head away and in a split second it disappeared again into the darkness.

  I shot my head to the surface. I asked her if she was okay. No answer. I asked her what had happened to her light.

  “I dropped it when the shark came. It went off.”

 
I felt for her. Being stuck in the ocean without light was a scary experience. Sometimes, when I’d dive, I’d turn the light out momentarily to check my courage. The darkness would envelop me, and I’d end up turning it on sooner then I’d planned. For a second, I thought about searching for her light. Instead I grabbed Claude’s hand and we swam back to shore. We had a hard time getting back because it’s difficult for two people to share the same light. One leads while the other blindly follows. It takes trust.

  We lifted ourselves on the rocks. I suddenly realized that I’d dropped my bag with the lobster. I turned to Claude. “Don’t worry, that was my friend’s great uncle. But, just in case, remind me to buy a bang stick tomorrow.”

  Tears rolled down her cheeks. Suddenly I felt jealous of her ability to cry. I felt like if I could cry, it would make me feel a lot better, it would make my heart grow calmer, the heart that still felt like it was going to beat right out of my chest. “You fucking left me out there,” she said.

  I looked at her through the darkness. I couldn’t really see her. “I saw a lobster and went for it. I couldn’t have been gone for more than a minute.”

  She threw her mask at me. It hit me on my face. I guess she could see fine. I stepped toward her, my fear suddenly transformed to rage. She stood there waiting for me. Her tears had stopped, and she looked at me defiantly. I stopped in front of her, wanting to fucking pound the shit out of her. I wondered why she was so scared of that fucking shark but totally unafraid of me. “I cannot be wit’ you every fuckin’ second of da day,” I said.

  “I don’t expect you to. But I expect you to be there when I need you.”

  I shook my head. I began to get calm. “How da fuck was I supposed to know what was happening? And besides, when we first got here, you took off without me.”

  She shook her head. “You never should have left. But you know what? Fuck it. You want out, fine. Fuck you. Fuck off.” She walked toward her car.