The Last Beach Bungalow (8 page)

“That’s the Buddha of long life,” she said.

“I’ll take it.”

“Is it a gift?” she asked. It was testimony to my state of mind that I thought—
What business is it of yours?
— before realizing that she was probably seeking simple information on a box, a bag, a bow, and then realizing, further, that the only Christmas gift I’d purchased was a digital camera for my mother.

“No,” I said, trying hard to make sure I sounded pleasant. “It’s for me.”

"Would you like a book on Buddhism?” she asked. “We have some excellent introductory guides. Some people also like these cards.” She pointed to a sturdy little box with a flip-open top and handed it to me, but I didn’t want to do anything that smacked of effort. I wanted my prayers to be essential, easy and organic.
Long life.
That was all I felt I could pray for right now—the simple act of breathing in and out over time.

“Just the Buddha is fine,” I said.

I paid for the little statue, then slipped it into the pocket of my purse. While I walked through Borders, I reached in three separate times to make sure it was still there. I found the magazine right away, then went to stand in line. It was a long line. Stacked on tables next to us were the books being touted as perfect gifts that holiday season. There was Mitch Albom’s new book,
The Five People You’ll Meet in Heaven
; a novel called
The Lovely Bones
that I’d been told by three separate people I had to read;
Atkins for Life
; a little red book of advice by Fred Rogers, who had recently died; and Michael Moore’s diatribe,
Dude, Where’s My Country?
I picked up a copy of the novel, and stepped forward in line. Now I was next to the sale books—a Crock-Pot cookbook, a book of crossword puzzles, a coffee-table book on neon road signs. I picked up a book called
Feng Shui: Harmonizing Your Inner and Outer Space.

I opened it and flipped to the introduction. “For the ancient Chinese,” it said, “luck was not synonymous with chance. Luck was opportunity. Of course, even if presented with opportunity, many of us do not act and grasp it with both hands.”

“Next!” the cashier called. I slammed shut the book on feng shui, tossed it back onto the sale table, and made my way past the Mary Engelbreit display to the counter.

The cashier was a young woman with hair that seemed as if it had been dipped in ink. I imagined that she was a seasonal employee. A college student, perhaps, earning money for a trip home. “Busy today, isn’t it?” I asked.

“I guess,” she said. She swiped my novel across her scanner, shoved it in a bag.

“That’s supposed to be an amazing book,” I said.

She thrust my receipt toward me to sign. “No returns without a receipt,” she said, “and all returns have to be within thirty days.”

“OK,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Next!” she called out.

“Happy Holidays,” I said as I walked away, but I knew she hadn’t heard me.

This Old House
is a fantastic magazine. It’s printed on beautiful, thick paper, for one thing, and on every page you get the feeling that all things are possible. It is possible to clean your gutters, to re-plane a sticky door frame, to scrape off four layers of paint to reveal the original hardwood under the floor of a farmhouse kitchen. For their holiday issue, the magazine had a gift-giving guide featuring laser levels, push-button measuring tapes, and circular saws. The photographs made the tools look as enticing as fine chocolates or cashmere sweaters the color of sorbet. I turned down a page featuring a laser measuring tape that I thought Rick would love, and thought I could probably get one for my brother, as well. I read the column on how to caulk around the windows and lay in extra insulation during the chill of January and pored over a feature story on a hacienda in Arizona that was being restored for a family who had inherited the original property from the wife’s great-grandfather, who had been a ranch hand during the Depression.

I was reading about old houses and the people who loved them, but I couldn’t get Vanessa’s comment out of my head.
You don’t have a cynical bone in your body.
That was the way I used to be and it amazed me that the world could see me as unchanged. When the plastic surgeon removed my breast and replaced it with a fake one made from the fat and skin from my tummy, I was only focused on what I’d gained: a breast, a body that was balanced and free of disease. I never concerned myself with what I had lost—my innocence, my faith, the frivolous lightness of being. I had been cancer-free for five years now. That was a joyous landmark, devoutly to be wished, and while I could revel in a good story or in the blessing of being able to witness my daughter growing into such a fine young woman, the fact of the matter was that cancer had made me feel mortal, and it’s hard to be optimistic when you feel so damn mortal. It’s hard to believe in God, it’s hard to feel excited about a new house, it’s hard to let your husband love you.

In the beginning, I was grateful and smug, because most of the women in my support group said their husbands were too repulsed to touch them and they were convinced that no one ever would again, except out of pity. Rick, however, never flinched in the face of the wounds I sustained when I lost a breast. He cleaned those wounds, cared for them, then kissed them in a seamless progression of love and desire. But as the years passed and the mammograms came back clean, it began to be more difficult—the whole messy business of love and life.

It’s hard to say why this is so, but the further away we got from the event itself, the more tenuous my grip on survival became. I felt more and more mortal as time went by. I felt more and more the risk there was in loving other mortals, in making alliances, in staking a place on this fragile earth. At these times I couldn’t stand my husband’s touch. My right breast was completely numb because it was completely fake. I appeared balanced and whole and I mostly felt balanced and whole—except when he touched me. He’d put his lips on my left, live, nipple, and all I could feel was the nonresponse of the one on the right. He’d move to the right one and all I could feel was his sense of duty, like a soldier following the protocol he knew to be right. I wanted to yell, “It doesn’t work!” but I never did. Was it possible he actually enjoyed it?

As our fourteenth anniversary approached—which was a year and a half ago—guilt overwhelmed me. Rick didn’t deserve a wife who had been sick, and he didn’t deserve a wife who had grown so cold. I wanted to do something to show him how grateful I was for his compassion and constancy, and what I did was this: I had my fake breast tattooed. The idea came to me when I overheard a conversation where a mother was expressing her outrage that her daughter had gone to a place called Art & Soul. The girl had just waltzed in and gotten a shamrock tattooed on her ankle because her boyfriend was an Irishman. I was taken with that concept—of outrageous spontaneity, of permanent adornment for an audience of just one. I was certain Rick would be taken with it, too.

Not long after the thought first came to me, I was in line at the grocery store behind a small, fit woman with an elaborate dragon tattooed on her shoulder blade. The tail snaked down her arm and the body covered most of the rounded knob of her shoulder. She was wearing a white spaghetti-strap tank, and I could clearly see the whole beast—its tail, its wings, its scales.

“That’s beautiful,” I ventured, pointing.

She turned her head, and registered no surprise that a slightly heavy, apricot-haired mother wearing plain black flip-flops, a denim skirt that hit below her knees, and an expression of extreme exhaustion, was interested in her tattoo.

“It’s Cold Drake Dragon from
Lord of the Rings
,” she said. “Erika Stanley did it at Art and Soul. I had to wait six months to get an appointment with her.”

“Art and Soul,” I repeated. “I’ve heard of it.”

The next day, I drove half an hour on the freeway to the studio on Robertson Boulevard. I was stunned to find that it was more like an art gallery than a sleazy bar. The walls were white and the space was open. There were large, colorful posters on the wall of various tattoos, framed award certificates and row upon row of black binders filled with tattoo designs.

“Can I help you?” a man behind the counter asked. He had heavily gelled hair and a small goatee. I couldn’t detect a tattoo anywhere on him.

“I’d like a tattoo,” I said. “On my breast. I only have three hours. I want to do it before I lose my nerve.”

“Tattoos are permanent art,” he said, as if I were a sixteen-year-old rebel. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to take some time to browse through our designs, and then come back when you’re certain you’re ready? We don’t normally recommend tattooing on impulse.”

“I’m certain,” I said, surprised and reassured by his conservative kindness. “Just nervous.”

“Do you know what design you want?”

“A butterfly. Just a small one.”

He got up, reached for a binder, flipped it open and revealed a dozen butterfly designs. “That’s only the start of what we have, and we can do custom work, too, though that’s more expensive and takes longer.” The colors of the butterflies were rich and earthy. There were creatures that looked like specimens from a science book and ones that looked as if they’d flown right off the page of a fantasy novel. I didn’t want to turn the page and get lost in consideration. I pointed to a blue butterfly about as big as my thumbnail, with radiant flecks of green. You could see the shadow of the wings, which made it look like it was flying, like it could be captured in the mouth of the man who might go to kiss it, and then be swallowed whole.

“That one,” I said.

I signed all the waivers and legal agreements, then sat down and read
Details
magazine while I waited for one of the artists to be free. I kept glancing over the top of the pages at a man whose forearm was completely covered in tattoos. There were words and various animals included among the designs, but I couldn’t make any of them out. There were so many tattoos that the whole effect was just one of ink. After about fifteen minutes, my name was called.

The man with the goatee led me back to a small room and handed me a black cotton gown.

“Shirt off, bra off,” he said. “Leave the opening of the gown to the front. Jerry will be with you in a minute.”

He closed the door and I quickly took off my clothes and put on the gown. I thought about how many times I’d been in a small room in a gown waiting for an expert to come in an do something to my breast—poke it with a needle, squeeze it for an X-ray, cut it, sew it, clean it, measure it, burn it. I was an expert at having things done to my breast. I could whip my clothes off in an instant. I could carry on a conversation as serious as the possibility of life and death or as frivolous as the desirability of having a deep décolletage without giving a thought to the indignity of wearing a thin cotton gown tied loosely across my body. People could poke and prod at any part of my anatomy they were trained to treat and I wouldn’t flinch. I wouldn’t even blink.

I looked around the little room and noticed a diploma on the wall. Jerry Steiner, it seemed, was a graduate of the Chicago School of Art. While I was still marveling at this fact, Jerry himself walked in and introduced himself. He was a thin man with a tattoo like a braided rope around his left wrist.

“I’m going to numb you up,” he said, then stopped because I was shaking my head.

“It’s already numb. I had a mastectomy. It’s completely fake.”

“Ahh,” he replied, and the way he said it made me wonder if he knew what a mastectomy even was. Perhaps he thought I had just told him that I’d had breast enhancement surgery. Maybe this was why he acted as if it were nothing. “Well, I’m going to numb you up anyway, ” he said.

Even after the shots, I could feel the vibration of the machine that punched the needle and a kind of concentrated electric energy on that part of my body. It was uncomfortable. I lay on the table and tried not to move, or even breathe, so as not to disturb Jerry while he worked. When he was done, he instructed me in how to care for the scab that would form over the tattoo, and gave me some paperwork that answered any questions I might have.

I dressed, thanked the man with the goatee and went to pick up Jackie from school.

The butterfly was a pretty design, executed in clear, fine lines, and it floated there on my breast, but much like the breast itself, it didn’t feel like mine. I’d done it for Rick. I had to tell him about it to keep him from touching the tattoo, or brushing against it as it healed, but I told him he couldn’t see it until I was ready. I dressed in the dark and turned away from him when I pulled on my nightgown. This sent him into a frenzy of desire, which I found more gratifying than anything else; at least I hadn’t miscalculated.

I revealed the little piece of art to Rick in a dark Jacuzzi at a swank hotel in La Jolla. We were alone in the pool in the dark. I slipped into the water across from him, slipped the strap off my bathing suit—a standard mother’s black one-piece, so tight it was guaranteed to make you look ten pounds thinner—and pulled the fabric down just enough to let him see. He lunged across the pool and traced it with his finger, took my breast in his hand, and bowed his head to kiss it. I slipped out of his grasp and climbed out of the pool. He trailed after me back to our room like a puppy dog.

I thought the jolt of excitement would jolt me, too. I thought there would be an automatic reciprocal reaction—my frank ploy to rouse him bouncing back to rouse me, too—but it didn’t work. Even then, when I offered myself to him as a gift, I didn’t enjoy having sex with my husband. I
did
it, and my body did what it was supposed to do, but my mind never shut down, never gave in. The whole time, I was wholly conscious—a scarred middle-aged mother at a hotel by the beach navigating the logistics of copulation. There was no moment of abandonment, no moment when I gave myself over to pleasure. I missed Jackie. Even in the very midst of it, I missed Jackie. And with every touch, with every glance, death was in bed with me, too—the death that I didn’t die, the death I one day would, the death of all of us, eventually.