The Tattoo Artist Read Online Free PDF Page B

early years, it’s only Philip and me alone in the house, dreadfully alone, as only poverty can make a couple alone. Perhaps it was just the rumors of fascism that entered our home, and the men were to arrive later. Yes, now I remember, the refugees would arrive later.
    Philip retreated further and further into isolation. We rarely went out at night. We couldn’t afford to. Mostly, he’d spend his evenings on a folding chair in the studio, a hank of unwashed hair pulled back with one of my old barrettes, a smoldering cigarette hanging from his bottom lip, his overalls a virtual ashtray, all the while not taking his eyes off a blank canvas that had been hanging on the wall for weeks.
    One night, to jar him out of his lassitude, I merely asked what he was planning to paint on it. He looked as if I’d distracted him from prayer.
    I was at my end of the studio, working on a series of readymades featuring the gold teeth of my customers, the ones I’d filched from the jeweler. At the nadir of the Depression, however, using gold teeth as material, even for shock value, had begun to strike me as a gesture as tactless as Mrs. Whiting’s Charity Beggars’ Ball.
    I walked up behind him, rested my chin on the shelf of his shoulder. I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing these days any more than you do, but at least I try.”
    “Really? What a brave soldier you are.” He studied the primed expanse of empty white canvas again. “Is it your art that confuses you? Or could it be our poverty? What are we going to do, Sara?”
    “You know I don’t care about the money.”
    “Are you so very sure about that?” He stood up, took my face in his large hands and gently, authoritatively, turned me around, as one might guide a child’s gaze to witness an otherwise overlooked spectacle, a burst of fireworks, say, or a rare butterfly. He made me look at my gold-teeth sculptures. “You’ve never been confused about art a day in your life.”
    Then he disappeared into our bedroom, tore the sheet off the bed, dragged it back into the studio, and hung it from the ceiling, cleaving the space in two.
    For the next few days, the sheet hung between us like the curtain at a Jewish funeral that sequesters the widow or the widower from the rest of the mourners, though, in our case, I’m not quite sure who was grieving for whom.
    If the truth be told, Philip was right. We were both in deep and fundamental mourning for the outrageous, arrogant couple we had been, for the cockiness and confidence lost to us when we’d lost Philip’s wealth.
    Let’s just be honest about money and love. Take the defeated, bewildered laborer and his reproachful, silent wife. Take my father and mother. To speak was to argue, so silence prevailed. During Sabbath, after prayers, the rattle of a fork was enough to make you jump. Take the gregarious repartee of Philip’s old circle, the bountiful toasts to their good fortune, and the implication that a casual remark might spawn a brand-new reality. At the very least, money provides a couple with something to talk about.
    It also provides a couple with a way in which to talk, a selffulfilled confirmation of their beliefs: we have, therefore we are.
    I didn’t love Philip for his money, but I did fall in love with the man his money created, and as far as I could glean, that man was disappearing.
    I rallied Philip’s old comrades, and with their help got him a job assisting Diego Rivera on Rivera’s mural Man at the Cross-roads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future. I believe the upbeat theme was chosen by Nelson Rockefeller himself, patron of the project. At the height of the Depression, Rockefeller had commissioned the mural to adorn his altar to capitalism, Rockefeller Center.
    Rivera, though, had a different church in mind. In the center of the wall, he painted Lenin, with his goatee and pointing finger. Behind Lenin’s left shoulder, he depicted the United States,