I tried the door into the building but it was locked. I patted my jacket, and then my pants, and was shocked to find my keys and wallet still in their rightful places. Okay, good, things were not totally out of control. I was home, I hadn’t been mugged, this could all be handled. I unlocked the door, pushed it open, fell forward through the doorway.
My apartment, two flights up, was in as disastrous shape as was I. The cushions of the couch were slashed, the walls defaced, the shade of each lamp distended and torn. Atop a large television, with its screen smashed, sat another television, a small portable, with one of its rabbit-ear antennae bent like a defective straw. You might surmise that this was all fallout from my wild night, but you would be wrong. It had been like this for months, the by-product of a rage expressed toward me by an overzealous dental hygienist. The less said about her the better, yet the telling point is not that it happened but that, in the time since it happened, I hadn’t done anything about it other than applying a few rolls of duct tape to the slashed fabric. What it said about the state of my life could fill volumes, but it wasn’t volumes I was interested just then in filling as I burst through my door and staggered to the bathroom.
In front of the mirror, as the back of my hand wiped my dripping mouth, I recoiled from a ghastly sight. Lon Chaney was starring in the story of my life, and it was definitely a B movie. Turning my attention to my costume, I quickly realized that the only thing salvageable was my tie, an indestructible piece of red synthetic fabric that was a miracle of modern science. You want to know where all the money thrown at the space program went? It went into my tie.
As quickly as I could, I pulled off the tie, then my suit jacket, my shoes and my pants. But when I unbuttoned my shirt, something stopped me.
Taped to my left breast was a wide piece of gauze. The pain in my chest was apparently not just metaphysical. And, to my horror, I noticed that leaking through the gauze was blood.
My blood.
I ripped off the tape and slowly peeled away the gauze bandage. There was blood and an oily ointment, as if I had suffered through some sort of medical operation, and, beneath that, something strange seemingly pasted onto a patch of my skin just above the nipple.
I started wiping away the ooze, but it hurt too much, my skin was for some reason too raw. With a little bit of water and soap, I gently washed away the ointment and blood. Gradually, bit by bit, the thing underneath became clear.
A heart, bright red, with two small flowers peeking out from behind either side and a fluttering banner across it all, a banner with a name inscribed that I had to read backward in the mirror: Chantal Adair.
I just stared at it for a moment, unable to process what it was. When it came to me, I started rubbing at it, I started scrubbing it, as hard as the pain would allow. But nothing happened. It wasn’t pasted on at all. There it was, and there it would stay. For the rest of my life.
Damn. I had gotten myself tattooed.
AFTER I showered and shaved, I put on a pair of jeans but no shirt. I sat on my ruined couch, with a lamp on and a mirror in my hand. Through the mirror I stared at the tattoo on my chest.
Chantal Adair.
I struggled to remember who she was and why I thought her important enough to inscribe her name atop my left breast for all eternity. I struggled to remember her and I failed. The entire night, after I stumbled out the door of Chaucer’s, was a total blank. Anything could have happened. Was she the motorcycle blonde who had started my engine to running that evening? Most likely. But maybe she was someone else, some mysterious woman I met in the course of a long, bleary tour through the darkness. And was my attempt to immortalize her on the skin above my heart a terrible drunken mistake, or was it something else?
Chantal Adair.
The name tripped sweetly off my tongue. A pair of iambs bracketing a mystery.
Chantal Adair.
The tattoo itself was peculiar. There was something outdated about it. The heart was boldly red, the flowers yellow and blue, the banner carefully shaded about the slope of its curves. It was not the type of tattoo you would see on the young students showing off their skin art in the parks on summer afternoons. It belonged instead on the forearm of an old sailor man called “Pappy,” with the name of a prostitute in Shanghai scrawled across the banner. It was, to put a word on it, romantic.
Chantal Adair.
As I stared at the tattoo and said the name out loud, as I tried to dredge her image from the rubble of my memory, all I found was a sharp spurt of emotion that I was unable to identify. But the whole thing made me wonder. Sure, tattooing a stranger’s name on my breast was most likely the product of an inebriated whimsy I regretted even as the buzzing needle slid the ink between the layers of my skin. But I couldn’t stop thinking, couldn’t stop hoping, that maybe it was something else.
Maybe, in the course of the long night, I had slipped through my weariness and drunkenness into something approaching a state of grace. Maybe only then, with my defenses down and my craven heart open to the full beauty of the world, had I been able to find a connection with a woman untainted by irony or calculation. And maybe I had chosen to scar my breast with her name so I wouldn’t forget.
Chantal Adair.
Sure, she was most likely nothing more than a drunken folly, but maybe she was something else. Maybe, just maybe, she was the love of my life.
There I sat, in the wreckage of my apartment, in the wreckage of my life – no love, no prospects, a gnawing sense of existential futility along with the certainty that a better life was being lived by everyone else – there I sat, staring at a name writ in ink within the skin of my chest and thinking the name might save me. The human capacity for self-delusion is beyond measure.
And yet there was no question but that with her name on my chest I was going to find her. The case that had me in the papers and on the news was a case of grand theft, of high stakes and lost souls, of an overbearing Greek matriarch, of a strange little man who smelled of flowers and spice, and of a Hollywood producer selling all the wrong fantasies. It was a case of failed dreams and great successes and murder, yes murder, more than one. And in the middle of that case, as it all swirled about me, there I sat, thinking that a name on my chest, thinking that Chantal Adair, could somehow save my life.
It might have been a pathetic fantasy of the lowest order, but in her own strange way she did.
2
The tattoo appeared on my chest at a rather inopportune time. I was just then in the middle of a delicate negotiation that had exploded in my face, hence the media storm and dire threats. But I should have known that trouble was brewing, what with the ominous way the whole thing started, a deathbed visit to an old Greek widow with gnarled hands and breath like pestilence itself.
“Come closer, Mr. Carl,” said Zanita Kalakos, a withered stalk of a woman, propped up by the pillows on her bed, whose every raspy exhale held the real threat of being her last. Her skin was parchment thin, her accent thick as the stubble on her jaw.
“Call me Victor,” I said.
“Victor, then. I can’t see you. Come closer.”
She couldn’t see me because the lights were off in her small bedroom, the shades pulled, the curtains drawn. Only a candle flickering by her bedside and a glowing stick of incense provided illumination.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Come to me.”
Standing at the edge of the room, I took a step toward her.
“Closer,” she said.
Another step.
“Closer still. Bring over chair. Let me touch your face, let me feel what is in your heart.”