The Tattoo Artist Read Online Free PDF

long as they could.
    Philip finally found us both work for a couple of months in a speakeasy, assisting an old academy painter with his mural, a scene of such ludicrous debauchery—Roman gods and goddesses on a Roman binge—that Philip couldn’t help substituting Hoover’s face for Bacchus’s. The Ta’un’uuans are smart enough to give their deities animal heads.
    But the job that nearly undid me, that seemed to decimate the shaky calibrations of my own self-righteous principles, was the buying and selling of old gold. Only the most desperate souls partook of my services, and only after they had tried everything else.
    I would knock on a stranger’s door, the shabbier the door the better. Usually, the people inside were too frightened to answer. After all, I could have been a bill collector or a landlady. A couple of minutes later, hope would overtake reason, and a halting voice would ask, “Who’s there?” After all, I could also be an unforeseen godsend, the representative of a raffle, say, that they’d forgotten they’d entered, or a lawyer’s errand boy delivering the will of a recently deceased relative, a cousin that they didn’t even know they had.
    Usually, it was the woman who opened the door, surrounded by any number of squalling children. The husband— or boyfriend, or lodger, or both—would be sitting at the table in his undershirt, summer or winter.
    When I stated the reason for my visit, that I’d come to buy her grandmother’s earrings, their wedding bands, his gold-plated mezuzah, the women invariably said yes and the men no.
    Sometimes, however, an elderly gentleman would answer my knock and invite me in for tea. Only after I’d finished my cup, and eaten the single cracker served on a napkin, would he slip behind the bedroom curtain to discreetly remove his gold bridges, rinse them in the sink (if he had a sink), then reappear and ask, as if as an afterthought, if I wanted to purchase his teeth.
    The jeweler for whom I worked didn’t care what form the gold came in. He melted down mezuzahs and bridges alike. I was supposed to weigh the teeth on a jeweler’s scale, but I rarely did. Too often it felt as if I were weighing the worth of the man himself, the very elements from which he was made.
    One afternoon, unbeknownst to me, I banged on the door of my first lover, the black-haired boy from the Buttonhole Makers’ Union. I didn’t recognize him at first. He looked like all the others—wan, indignant, poor. He recognized me, though. I looked, despite my circumstances, anything but poor.
    When I asked him if he had gold to sell, he shook his head in bemused impatience, then stared at me unblinking. And then, I did recognize him.
    We didn’t speak any more this time than we had the last. He pushed me down on his cot as if he was trying to fell me. He kept my arms pinned around his neck. Whatever he was clinging onto, I can only begin to guess. A woman suddenly available and in his bed? A memory? Revenge for my good fortune, though his hands were too kind for revenge, unless kindness itself is a form of reprisal?
    I stayed with my union boy until dusk.
    Unlike Philip’s dalliances, this one never made it into a painting. I have, however, tried to rectify the oversight by offering my buttonhole maker a place on my body, in the form of a sewing needle engraved at the base of my throat. If you look closely, you’ll find all my lovers inscribed on my skin.
    They started arriving in fits and starts, the refugees from Germany—Albers, Breuer, Grosz—with their incomprehensible accounts of Hitler and his Brownshirts. Philip had known the artists from his days in Berlin, and he insisted on serving as their host by providing them sanctuary until they got their footing on New York’s ungiving bedrock. Philip and I hadn’t yet lost the refurbished stable on Washington Mews. The landlord hadn’t yet had us evicted. But I’m confused. The decade’s a little jumbled up. When I picture those