Second Skin Read Online Free PDF Page A

Then she whispered efficiently, calmly, to the oaf at the table—comatose eyes of the artist, the frustrated procurer, drinking her in—and naturally he was unable to hear even one word of her little succinct command, unable to make out her slow toy train of lovely sounds. He wore a tee-shirt, was covered—arms, neck, shoulders—with the sweaty peacock colors of his self-inflicted art.
    “There’s no need to whisper, lady,” he said. Up and down went his eyes, up and down from where he fell in a mountain on his disreputable table, watching her, not bothering to listen, flexinghis nightmare pictures as best he could, shifting and showing us, the two of us, the hair bunched and bristling in his armpits, and even that hair was electrical.
    She continued to whisper—ludicrous pantomime—without stopping, without changing the faint and formal statement of her desires, when suddenly and inexplicably the man and I, allied in helpless and incongruous competition, both heard her at the same time.
    “My boy friend is bashful,” she was saying, “do you understand? Let me have a piece of writing paper and a pencil, please.”
    “You mean he’s afraid? But I got you, lady,” and I saw him move, saw his blue tattooed hand swim like a trained seal in the slime of a drawer which he had yanked all at once into his belly.
    “Father, Cassandra, father!” I exclaimed, though softly, “Pixie’s grandfather, Cassandra!”
    “No need to worry. Skipper,” said the man—his grin, his fiendish familiarity—“I’m a friend of Uncle Sam’s.”
    Yellow and silver-tinted, prim, Cassandra was already sitting on the tattooer’s stool, had placed her purse on the table beside her, had forced the man to withdraw his fat scalloped arms, was writing with the black stub of pencil on the back a greasy envelope which still contained—how little she knew—its old-fashioned familiar cargo of prints the size of postage stamps, each one revealing, beneath a magnifying glass, its aspect of faded pubic area or instant of embarrassed love. Alone and celebrating, we were war orphans together and already I had forgiven her, wanted to put my hand on the curls pinned richly and hastily on the top of her head. I could see that she was writing something in large block letters across the envelope.
    She stood up—anything but lifeless now—and between his thumb and finger the man took the envelope and rubbed it as if he were testing the sensual quality of gold laminated cloth or trying to smear her tiny fingerprints onto his own, and then the man and I, the oaf and I, were watching her together, listening:
    “My boy friend,” she said, and I was measuring her pauses, smelling the bludwurst on the tattooer’s breath, was quiveringto each whispered word of my child courtesan, “my boy friend would like to have this name printed indelibly on his chest. Print it over his heart, please.”
    “What color, lady?” And grinning, motioning me to the stool, “You got the colors of the rainbow to choose from, lady.” So even the oaf, the brute artist was a sentimentalist and I sat down stiffly, heavily, seeing against my will his display of wet dripping rainbow, hating him for his infectious colors, and telling myself that I must not give him a single wince, not give him the pleasure of even one weak cry.
    “Green,” she said at once—had I heard her correctly?—and she took a step closer with one of her spun sugar shoes, “a nice bright green.” Then she looked up at me and added, to my confusion, my mystification, “Like the guitar.”
    And the oaf, the marker of men, was grinning, shaking his head: “Green’s a bad color”—more muscle-flexing now and the professional observation—“Green’s going to hurt, lady. Hurt like hell.”
    But I had known it, somehow, deep in the tail of my spine, deep where I was tingling and trying to hide from myself, had known all along that now I was going to submit to an atrocious pain for