The Tattoo Artist (6 page)

Before embarking on our journey, what would Philip and I have placed inside? Ashes from his life’s work? A gold tooth from mine? A splinter from our beloved Mews home? Our fathers’
tefillin
? Cages unto themselves, really, holding within their tiny leather cells the words from Exodus reminding every Jew that before he was a wanderer he was a slave.

Right before New Year’s, we were awakened by the sound of hammering on the front door. By the time Philip found his robe and slippers, an eviction notice had been nailed to the jamb. We were given twenty-four hours to pay up all the back rent, or pack up. It wasn’t yet dawn. Philip shredded the notice, then raged through the house, while I started to collect what we might salvage. All the furniture—the Breuer chairs, the Le Corbusier chaise longue—had long ago been bartered for either heating oil or art supplies. The Gauguin was gone, offered at auction in ’33 for a fraction of its worth. All we had left were the Oceanic masks. I got Philip to stop ranting long enough to help me swathe them in sheets and cart them over to Julien and Alice’s.

I reminded them of their promise. I asked them to sell Philip’s masks for whatever they could get.

Then I dragged Philip back to the refurbished stable and started sorting through our belongings to see what I could fit into four suitcases, while Philip, wielding a hammer, smashed the Art Deco glass doors, cracked the marble tub. “I’m not leaving that landlord swine anything, Sara, not a shard.”

We spent the next few nights on Julien and Alice’s sofa, and when we wore out our welcome, at fleabag hotels.

Philip insisted that we sleep fully clothed. “Did you see the bed, Sara? There are pubic hairs on the sheets. Enough to make a wig.”

“We’ll shake the sheets out,” I said.

“That’s not the point. The point is they haven’t been changed in decades. The point is we don’t deserve this.”

“No one deserves this,” I said.

“Oh, Sara, don’t play the little revolutionary with me. You can’t take it any more than I can.”

He took to sleeping sitting up in a chair. He took to taking long walks by himself. He took to disappearing until midnight. Then one night, he took to not coming back till morning. I lay fully dressed on the pilly blanket and listened to the most unsettling noises coming through the walls—a man hacking, a man praying, a moaning that sounded like a hybrid between human and cat.

The next night, I followed him up to Sutton Place. He entered a townhouse. He had the key. All I could see through the cloudy windows were pinwheels of luminosity from a chandelier.

I banged on the door. Mrs. Blanche “Binky” Whiting IV, all decked out in her new widow’s garb, answered my knock.

She folded her arms, studied me, then walked back into the living room. “It’s for you, Philip.”

Philip had already taken off his coat, had already helped himself to a brandy. He wheeled around and hurried up to me, rubbing my hoarfrosted hands between his. He ushered me inside and closed the door. Helping me off with my coat, he leaned over and whispered, “I’m so happy you’re here.” And this is the remarkable part: Philip was genuinely happy I had come. “You remember Binky?”

Binky had not aged well. Her face looked pinched. The skin of her throat, once taut, could now be called “liberated.” Her gums exploded from her thin lips as she managed a strained smile. She had no choice but to invite me in for a drink.

She said, “By the way, Sara, I saw your show at Julien’s,” as one lady might say to another, “Your slip is showing.”

She took a seat on the living room sofa amid all the comfort and collectibles. Philip selected just the right glass for my brandy, then regaled himself with a sniff of the liqueur. On the wall over the marble mantle hung an early Ehrenreich, a portrait Philip must have done more than twenty years ago. It showed a young woman, probably Binky herself, ablaze in Fauvist colors, then fractured into Cubist shards, like something dropped from a balcony. Evidently, Binky hadn’t allowed her portrait, as I had mine, to be consigned to the flames.

Philip sat down beside her on the sofa and motioned for me to join them. He patted the cushion next to him, then placed his hand on my thigh with exquisite lightness. I knew it was Philip’s private way of asking me to spend the night, and I foolishly nodded yes.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to leave him alone with her. Truth be told, I didn’t want to go back to that fleabag hotel any more than he did.

He whispered something in Binky’s ear, and those jack-in-the-box gums popped out again. She trifled with her diamond necklace.

Wealth can offset even homeliness. I accompanied them up the staircase and joined them in bed. Philip and I hadn’t “collaborated” like this in years. He opted for her bottom half, while I was left with that mouth, and those tiny breasts, as yielding to the touch as sodden kitchen sponges.

Binky prattled on the whole time I tried to kiss her. She gave me explicit directions as to how and where she liked to be touched, as one gives directions to a lost motorist. Philip was his usual chivalrous self, graciously divvying up his time between Binky and me. This was Philip’s gift. If attentiveness and innovation eluded him as an artist, they did not elude him as a lover. There is no other way to put it: Philip
attended
to the female body.

The instant we were done, though, I couldn’t bear the perfumed scent of her bedsheets, couldn’t stand the porcelain figurines that adorned her nightstand. I couldn’t suffer the caricatures of our younger selves that Philip and I were calcifying into. I got up and started dressing.

“Where are you going, Sara?” Philip asked.

I picked up my clothes—a shoe, my sweater—and headed out the bedroom door, fully expecting him to trail me at least as far as Binky’s foyer, if not all the way back to our hotel, but when I turned to check, I was alone.

Philip returned to our room around nine the next morning. Before he shut the door, before he had a chance to peel off his coat, I had planned to ask him if he was leaving me for her, if he was looking forward to a lifetime of waking up beside her hideous
tchotchkelehs
every morning, but for some reason, it came out, “What the hell do you see in that ugly cunt?”

Philip was silent for a moment. He sat down on the room’s only chair and closed his eyes. He stayed like that for so long I actually thought he might have fallen asleep. “She respects me,” he said at last.

“Oh, for God’s sake, I respect you,” I said.

He didn’t even bother to open his eyes. “I meant my work, Sara.”

“You know I’ve always admired your work, Philip.” I couldn’t look at him when I said it, though.

“Then why did you let me burn it?”

“You wanted to burn it.”

“Did I?” He tilted his head back against the greasy wallpaper and opened his eyes. “You have no idea what it’s like, do you, Sara? On a whim, you decide to become an artist, and sure enough, beauty is waiting at your fingertips. You decide to dabble in the avant-garde, and sure enough, everything you touch turns new.” He lifted his head, as one might lift a piece of heavy machinery, and stared at me. “You have no idea what it is to love something, Sara, really, really love it, and not be able to pay it homage. You have no idea how humiliating mediocrity can be.”

“That’s not true,” I said. But I didn’t mean it.

I walked over to him and took his face in my hands, fully expecting him to push me away, but he didn’t.

“I can’t do this much longer. I’m exhausted. I must get away from here.”

I didn’t know if he was talking about New York, the wretched hotels, or me.

I said, “We can still go to Spain, Philip. Others are going. The Artists’ Union sent a contingent last month. At least we’d be a part of something noble—”

“We’re not going to Spain.”

“We could go out West. To Taos. There are lots of artists there.”

“And you’ll paint flowers with O’Keeffe until the Depression ends? What will I do? Farm?”

“We could go to Mexico City. The Riveras invited us.”

“And wind up in their political battles. No thank you.”

“For God’s sake, Philip, we could go to Tahiti. Do what Gauguin did.”

“Tahiti has been ruined by the French. I’ve lived with the French, you haven’t.”

“Then we’ll find our own island.”

I started to pull my hands away, but he grabbed me by the forearms and kissed my wrists with such a ferocity of tenderness, I would have begged his forgiveness if I’d only known what I’d done.

“Please don’t fall in love with somebody else,” I whispered.

“I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, Sara.”

Someone once said that art is arrested attention in the midst of distraction, a definition no less true for the Ta’un’uuans than it is for us. When we stand before a Gauguin or a Goya and experience its beauty, we say, “It took my breath away.” For my islanders, to whom breath is the soul, that same moment of rapture is a literal death: art takes their souls away.

The Ta’un’uuan mask is a beacon for the soul. The mask’s features are the coordinates for the soul’s departure and its return: they serve as a map so that the soul can’t lose its way. There are no eye slits, no ear or mouth holes in the Ta’un’uuan mask, only painted facsimiles of eyes and ears and mouths: the dead have no need for the senses; the corporeal world can’t reach them any longer, except in song. The artist wakes up the soul in each mask by singing to it.

One week after our “collaboration” with Binky, Julien and Alice sold Philip’s mask collection.

Philip, true to form, insisted on being introduced to the collector. When he returned from the meeting, his whole demeanor had changed: he carried himself with his old verve, even going so far as to toss back his hair.

“I’ve just spent the evening with a man named Richter,” he told me, “an industrialist who can buy out the Rockefellers and not even feel it. He calls himself Swiss, but my guess is he’s Bavarian. In any case, he’s planning to retire to the Swiss side of Lake Como—‘the neutral end,’ as he puts it—and build a primitive art museum to end all primitive art museums. He wants my collection in it. He says my Ta’un’uuan masks are the best examples of death masks he’s seen outside the Musée de l’Homme. He thinks I have superlative taste. He wants to back me, Sara.”

“To curate a mask collection in Switzerland?”

“No, to represent him in the South Seas. He wants me to collect for him.”

“Does he know you’ve never been there? That you bought the masks at a shop in Paris?”

“First of all, it wasn’t a shop, it was a vast flea market. And it was packed with junk. Every retired legionnaire was trying to get rid of his African curios, his Tahitian souvenirs. I spent years rifling through those piles of tourist crap until I found my treasures. Collecting requires the same degree of genius that painting does and that’s what Richter understands.”

“But you don’t know anything about that part of the world, Philip.”

“I’m not planning on going native. I’m planning on you and me spending a few months of this interminable Depression in the South Seas making money. After all, aren’t you the one who wanted to run off and live like Gauguin?”

“Richter’s willing to pay for all this?”

“He’s willing to pay a generous commission.”

“But nothing up front?”

“Just
all
our expenses and two steamship tickets. First-class.”

“Isn’t Richter a German name? Does he know you’re Jewish?”

“What does that have to do with anything? Can’t you believe that someone would be willing to back me for once?”

He brushed past me and stood by the window, pushing aside the gray curtain. Our room faced an air shaft: the view was an identical room.

“Just meet him, Sara.”

Richter was nothing like the rotund industrialists Rivera had depicted in his mural. He was thin to the point of daintiness and not much taller than I was.

He greeted us himself at the door of his pied-à-terre, a marble mansionette not too far from Binky’s. He kissed my bare ring finger with a refinement that bordered on menace and called me “Frau Ehrenreich.” He wore a maroon smoking jacket and Moroccan slippers. He offered us champagne, Philip a box of blond cigars. I plucked out one for myself. He said he had a surprise for us. Taking us each by an arm, he led us into his library, a room bricked solid with leather tomes. A steamship brochure lay on his desk,
Pearl of the East.
A giant pink hibiscus bloomed on the cover. A tiny bare-breasted hula girl cavorted on the flower’s lengthy pistil.

Richter unfolded the pamphlet. The top half was a map of the South Pacific with a white ocean liner silhouetted in the corner. The ship’s route, a red line, zigzagged through the islands—the Friendly Isles, the New Hebrides, the Solomons. The bottom half was a wide-angle photograph of a first-class stateroom, all teak and plush.

“It’s a remarkable voyage,” Richter said. “I believe the ship crosses the equator three separate times. You see the mark there?” His fingernail tapped on what looked like a printer’s error, an ink dot in the middle of nowhere. “That’s Ta’un’uu.”

Philip and I both leaned closer. Cigar ash spilled onto the brochure. Philip carefully brushed it off.

“It’s a Japanese shipping line, a merchant vessel,” Richter explained, “but as you can see, no expense is spared for the lucky few passengers who tour with it. The Japanese are extraordinary hosts, and of late, they’ve become rather enchanted by the South Seas. The ship is calling at every major port, and where it’s not officially calling, arrangements can be made. For a collector like Philip it’s the chance of a lifetime.” He slipped the brochure into Philip’s breast pocket, then replenished our champagne flutes. “When you finally get to Tokyo, if you’d both like, you can return by land. The Trans-Siberian sleeping cars are said to be from the tzar’s time, true Victorian carriages. We can rendezvous at Lake Como.”