The Tattoo Artist (2 page)

By sixteen, I had become, in my father’s words, a freethinker, and by my own definition, a bohemian and an anarchist, a girl for whom religion and its trappings were irrelevant. To bring the point home to my parents, I would invariably light my after-dinner cigarette in the flame of the Sabbath candles.

I was a seamstress by day, a waist maker, the eighteenth girl in a row of twenty at the windowless end of the warehouse. Shopgirls worked their way toward the light by seniority. By week’s end, my fingers would be so scratched and marred by the needles that one can’t attribute all the abrasions on my soul to the tattoos. But on Saturday nights, I’d don my shopgirl’s version of bohemian—a felt hat with purple plumage, a Gypsy skirt, and two immoral shanks of red stocking. My destination was Greenwich Village. The cultural gulf between the Lower East Side and Washington Square was probably greater than the one my parents had encountered when they left the steppes of Russia for Avenue D. At best, I’d covet a bench at the base of Stanford White’s arch, sharing cigarettes with versions of myself, gaudily feathered shopgirls in whose discontented stares one could just make out little compressed diamonds of ambition. At worst, I’d wander the square by myself, catching glimpses of what anyone could plainly see were the real bohemians— paint-splattered artists, mustachioed socialists, regal-necked poetesses arguing away while ash spilled from the gold tips of their cigarette holders. The schism between them and me in my red stockings and cheap plumage, seemed as impossible to surmount as that between the gods and man.

For shopgirls like me, East Side Jews who spoke with guttural accents, the only lifeline out of workaday hell was the Educational Alliance, the center of Yiddish intelligentsia, a curious mix of night school, public forum, gymnasium, and revolutionary cells. The center had been a gift from a few philanthropic German Jews to their hardscrabble East European brethren. Sunday afternoons, young Zionists who could barely remember to water their mothers’ rubber plants took to the stage to call for the transformation of an arid desert into a Jewish Eden. Ex-
yeshiva
shopboys, for whom the threading of a sewing machine was a daunting task, called for a futuristic mechanized utopia on earth.

My union, the Ladies’ Waist Makers’ Union, bought blocks of tickets for the Alliance’s Sunday night lecture series: “Jews and the Graven Image”; “Is Marxism Scientific?”; “Revolution: If Not Now, When? If Not Us, Who?”; “The Jewish Themes of Ibsen.”

One evening, an artist, an American Jew who had been educated in Zurich and Berlin, who had lived in Paris and Moscow, who spoke with intimacy about Picasso, Freud, and Trotsky as I might gossip about the girl at the next sewing machine, addressed us waist makers, and the boys from the Buttonhole Makers’ and Collar Makers’ unions, on the twentieth-century collision between art, the subconscious, and revolution.

A giant of a man, he had to stoop to reach the lectern. He had shoulder-length blond hair that he tossed to make his points. In a buckskin jacket and red silk vest, he dressed, to my mind at least, like a cross between Buffalo Bill and what I assumed was a Parisian painter. He told us that the art of the future would be made by the proletariat, workers just like us, then described the squalor of our shop life in enough glorious abstraction that it actually seemed possible. He explained how our subconscious, the antechamber of our unconscious, held within its misty foyer all the symbols we’d ever need. He urged us to have faith that art, with its noble and redemptive powers, would use those symbols to provide our beleaguered souls with the metaphors by which we could transform our misery into meaning. And when the time was right, he insisted that art would even spur us into revolution.

Did I believe him? A ragtag army of seamstresses and ex
-yeshiva buchers
advancing on Park Avenue brandishing needles and Symbolist paintings? What was the alternative? Fifty more years at a sewing machine? A tiny air shaft apartment facing a teenier one, my only view my neighbor’s life? Whimpers, moans, hacks, grunts, fits of coughing, fits of prayer resounding through the thin walls? On the Lower East Side, the unconscious was not the symbol-laden fog of Freud and art. The unconscious was sleep or, if it lasted long enough, death.

Whatever doubts I had about his lecture I quickly quashed, as one might instinctively step on a dark shape in the periphery of one’s vision.

When he climbed off the podium, I and a dozen other shopgirls surrounded him. He glanced down at us with bemused curiosity and teased us that his lecture would be followed by an impromptu quiz. He reached into the fringed pocket of his jacket and plucked out a gold cigarette case. Tapping his thumbnail on the tooled casing, he asked if any of us ladies would like to try a French cigarette? I was the only one to accept. I leaned into his lit match as defiantly as I leaned into the Sabbath flame. The rumor was that when he’d lectured at the Alliance the year before, he’d bedded only the prettiest of his admirers, comely girls with dreams as fragile as soap bubbles, girls who giggled at his rarefied allusions as others might nervously guffaw at a funeral. I wasn’t particularly pretty, and I never giggled.

It would be easy to pretend that after thirty years among the islanders with their forthright sexuality, their worship of the body, I’ve lost all tolerance for the curtsies and bows, the feints and feigns of Western courtship. But even as a young woman, I detested coyness. Suffice it to say, when the other girls dispersed, it was I who followed him home, and I who seduced Philip.

His portrait graces my left breast. It is the first tattoo I engraved on myself. The portrait, however, in no way resembles the face I kissed that night; an unlined, untested face of cavalier certitude that the future would be as easy to read as a palm. The face on my left breast is desecrated, pillaged of all illusions, and though it breaks my heart to admit it, it is also the weakest part of my design—the point on my flesh where my emotions exceeded my skill—and no amount of virtuosity can disguise that weakness. The face on my left breast is a living death mask, as far removed from the young Philip as I am from the girl I was.

He lived in a refurbished livery stable on Washington Mews, refurbished with Carrara marble, Art Nouveau windows, Persian carpets, a Brancusi bronze, a gilt-framed Gauguin, and a collection of South Pacific masks. I was so ill educated, I didn’t even know enough to be impressed. I thought the masks were examples of modern art. I walked up to the Gauguin and asked if Philip had painted it. When he laughed and shook his head, his hair whipped against his throat. I was too embarrassed to ask anything else. Just to end my ungainly silence, I unbuttoned my blouse and put my own collateral on display. I could see how amused he was by my brazenness. I was hardly amused; I was astounded by my daring. I let him finish the job, undoing the buttons, eyelets, hooks, and laces that confined me. I was and I wasn’t a virgin. I’d had rudimentary sex the month before with a buttonhole maker on the Alliance’s tar roof. Afterward, the boy and I declared ourselves freethinkers and never spoke to each other again.

Philip made love to me on his Hindoo blue settee. A practiced and precise lover, he believed his sojourns into the subconscious, his experiments with what he called “Surrealism,” had led him to new levels of sensuality. I was hardly prepared to be the judge of that. I was still learning how to kiss.

I stayed with Philip for three nights and two days. He introduced me to the practice of automatic drawing after sex. With him, I tasted my first glass of champagne, my first bite of
trayf.
But what impressed me most, what trumps all my other memories despite half a century, is that Philip owned a telephone, an elegant black instrument on a fluted pedestal. I’d never seen one in a private house before. Whenever it rang, Philip grew exasperated, but I felt we were at the center of the world.

When I finally returned home, my frantic mother demanded to know where I’d been, and when I shamelessly told her, she called me a
nafka,
a whore, and wouldn’t speak to me. The logistics of our not talking in a two-room tenement were complex. We had to steal past each other without so much as our breaths mingling. I had to bear witness to her mumbled quips without so much as a snipe back. Only my father, who had begun residing more and more in the bucolic fantasy of his Russian childhood, would speak to me. And only when my mother wasn’t home.

“Sara, do you see that wall?” He had taken to believing that not only our tenement, but the sweatshop, his boss, all of America with its hurry-up life, was only a figment of his dreams. “That wall isn’t a wall. That wall is the inside of my coffin.” He took out his
tefillin
and prayer shawl, then kissed my cheek. “But you’re not to worry,
mein kint,
I’ll soon wake up.”

I packed what little I had and left him
davening
toward the east, an air shaft strung with laundry, singing what must be the most heartrending of prayers, “Thank you God for returning to me my soul, which was in Your keeping.”

I found lodging with six Litvak sisters from my union in a cellar apartment on Ludlow Street. My bed was the board that covered the kitchen tub. All night long, directly under my ear, the faucet leaked in fits and dribbles. My dreams sputtered and raced in time to that watery metronome, save for the nights that I slept beside Philip.

I wasn’t his only lover: he made that unequivocally clear. He also made the conditions of my spending the night in his bed as complicated as a wedding contract. I couldn’t stay for more than three consecutive nights. I couldn’t keep any of my possessions in his closets or drawers. I was never to answer the telephone, though when it trilled, I pined to.

He practiced what he called “free love,” the unrestrained taking of lovers, which he patiently explained to me was the logical culmination of being a freethinker. He believed that sex was one of the few connecting links of the human with the divine. He saw bourgeois marriage as the ultimate subjugation of the spirit, an economic union at best, a form of bondage at worst, having nothing to do with passion. He spoke about idyllic South Seas societies outside Western capitalism, islands of free love, where sex was a form of prayer. Of course, he granted me the same freedom to take as many lovers as I wanted, encouraged me to, in fact, though I couldn’t imagine whom I’d bring home to my tub.

Besides, I didn’t want anyone else. Watching him perform even the most workaday tasks—crushing out a cigarette, the way a tributary of blue veins appeared on his forehead when he was trying to make a point, the sheer dimensions of him as he stooped through a Victorian doorway— absorbed the whole of my attention. His shoes were as large as shoe boxes. He tasted of French tobacco and English port, whereas my buttonhole maker had tasted of herring and cheap vodka. He bought me a vermilion silk turban, which he claimed all the bohemian ladies were sporting. He automatically included me in their number. At five feet tall, even wearing my turban, I barely cleared Philip’s elbow, but he didn’t seem to mind. He had me parade naked before him at the foot of his bed. He had me lie perfectly still while he shut his eyes and touched me all over. He called it “a sexual offering.” Whenever his hands momentarily paused, I felt something within me grow taut. I was still unformed in those years, little more than romantic ectoplasm waiting to be molded, and Philip seemed eager to give me shape. I could sense how intrigued he was by the idea of transforming a shopgirl into a revolutionary, a
shtetl meydel
into a bohemian. I could feel his excitement. It was as close as I had ever come to having power over someone, and I equated it with love.

I caught a fever one night and couldn’t go home. When I tried to get up, Philip’s bedroom floor seesawed, his hallway folded up like the bellows of an accordion. I could hardly navigate my way to the bathroom, let alone through the streets of New York. Philip made me lie down again and sponged me with alcohol. He used cotton swabs to cool the whorls of my ears. He insisted I drink tea laced with whiskey.

When I started to shiver, he made love to me. He gave me pen and paper, and asked me to draw my fever dreams. Even racked with chills, even under the sway of Philip’s unshakable belief that the future of art lay with the masses, I didn’t think my shopgirl visions were worthy of depiction. So I drew my father’s visions instead. I drew a city of coffins—coffin skyscrapers, coffin sweatshops, coffin els streaking past coffin tenements— and within each and every coffin room, I drew my poor,
davening
father with shekels taped over his eyes. When I finally put away the pen, Philip looked down at my drawing with the same rapt awe he bestowed on his mask collection, on his Gauguin. He said, or I hallucinated that he said, “If I could draw like you,
mein lieb,
I’d will myself a fever every second of my life.”

My temperature spiked and troughed for a week. When it finally abated, Philip cooked me soft-boiled eggs and rice. He insisted I remain in his bed for another few days, lest my fever come roaring back. He bathed me in a concoction of rose water, lemon, and soap, then changed my damp bedding for the tenth time. I luxuriated in his fastidious caretaking. I was in no rush to recuperate. Without so much as a word spoken between us, I simply never left.

On the bottom of my right foot is tattooed a plain wooden coffin. Jews do not believe in extravagant death rites. Thou shalt not be shamed, no matter how poor, by the simplicity of the shroud or box in which thou is buried. The coffin, however, is not for my father, who died that winter in the great 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, nor is it for my bereaved mother, who followed him shortly afterward. The coffin, the plain wooden vessel of a coffin, is reserved for my own voyage home.