— What? You thought it would be a new two dollars every week with the corner missing?
He chuckled at her insinuation. Such bills were considered lucky or seedy in this country, depending upon which circles a person moved in. They had a dubious pedigree — two dollars was the standard bordello rate in the northern states and a torn corner indicated that the prostitute in question had provided a service of lascivious excellence. He locked away the cash. Then he turned his attention to the best commission of his life.
— Ready?
— Ready. OK. On y va.
He began with her legs. He had drawn a stencil from her picture but by the fifth or sixth tattoo on her calf he felt confident he could perfect it without any preliminary tracing. His motion was better controlled if he was not a slave to a line of migration. At the back of his mind he suspected he might encounter scars on her, it seemed likely that an acrobat and an immigrant might have them, but she did not. There were moles like miniature door-handles and creases in her limbs from the repetitive hinging of joints. A sorrel birthmark stained her left hip. Past the line of her clothing the skin paled, like the bleached grass under a lifted rock — she seemed not as concerned with maintaining overall porcelain skin as many women were. With medical discretion he moved back pieces of clothing off only the area under scrutiny. When he needed to pull her underwear up over her more he asked her to do it and he turned his back until she had finished unsnapping closures. When it came to the work on her buttocks and lower abdomen, he ensured his gaze was absent as she undressed, as she lay down and stood up from the bench. She was not tall, but lying down she reached almost the full length of the booth. Its confines kept them enticingly close, always within arm’s reach. And her body moved him, it did, the scent of her was genuinely existent, elemental, occasionally fused with the overtones of a musk-based perfume, but otherwise natural, and she was intoxicating.
It would have been easy to examine her more closely while he worked, the black hairs at the side of her slip, her soft dark seam, revealed when she pushed the thin material to one side. It would have been easy to brush his hand along an area of tenderness, accidentally or with deliberation, to see if her breathing changed, or if her eyes went under the first glaze of arousal. But he held back. With more difficulty than he ever had before, and with more of a sense than ever that to fail would be contemptible, he remained professional. So it was that her body slowly became known to him, as readily as if they had been lovers, though it was expressionless, voyeuristic discovery. And he fought to keep control of that aspect, swallowing his inclinations, forcing back the longings, denying his end of it. There were erogenous areas that were so alluring and so tightly sewn together with their visual stimulation, the simply seen desire to touch or run his tongue along, that it took appalling discipline to unpick the hem and separate the two, and he wondered if he were not undoing instinct itself. Love was truly one of the oldest feelings in the world, he thought, one of the original emotions, such was its magnitude, so convincingly did it exercise its power.
— How are you managing? Need a break?
— Nope. You need a break?
— Just a quick cigarette. Helps me concentrate.
Her coat on the stool smelled faintly of the horse and sometimes outside the booth Cy could hear Maximus clopping a hoof on the alley paving as he turned to face the frothy breeze off the sea, grinding his teeth or whinnying or shaking his mane, and they might have been sharpening stone together or skinning rabbits in a peasant shack on the wild Mesolithic moor of another age, not situated at the last riotous edge of a vast modern city.
Grace was not immune to pain. It pierced her eyes and deepened the horizontal lines in her brow. For the first few minutes of every session her hand would agitate against the closest surface or the fingers would seize into fists, becoming knaggy and rigid. Her muscles quivered, protested. Her breath was now and then drawn quickly and blown out with difficulty, if in the barbed tension she had forgotten to breathe or his equipment had hit a sensitive, easily offended area of flesh, a spur of bone. It gave him imprecise satisfaction to know that she was human after all, that while she had the will and wiles to make any argument mature, demanding all-out warfare or surrender, while she spoke a dozen languages and was hard boiled with mystery, she could also be hurt. But she quickly pushed past the discomfort, making herself relax as she had herself instructed the unfortunate soldier to, letting her body absorb and dilute the pain of incursion into its skin. She endured long, long sessions. And he worked slowly, meticulously on her.
— You’re doing very well. Must have had your Bovril.
— My what?
— Never mind, it’s just an expression. It’s what they forced us to take as children telling us we wouldn’t get rickets and polio. That and cod liver oil. I just meant you are taking it well. Never mind.
— Sometimes it’s like burning. Today just nails. I prefer the nails.
This was a strange period of work for Cy. Soft. Honest. Intimate. He put away all the barking and braggery of the trade, the slapdash rhetoric, the rude commentary. It was not necessary in any case to sideshow her; she was in it for the duration. They conversed about many things, cultural, political, the new psychology of warfare, subjects which ordinarily found no relevance at his place of work. Or they remained quiet, contented to be so. Grace liked to call him by his moniker, as if she thought it was appropriate or humorous or simply more valid than his true name, and it was how she always addressed Cy. The irony was that during the hours spent with her in the booth he never felt quite so much himself as he worked.
— Look at these things on your wall. Do you think these symbols you have will always remain appropriate, Electric Michelangelo?
Grace was on her back looking up at the flash designs. They were midway through a session. Only an occasional bluster of wind made its way into the booth, lifting the corners of the papers delicately, so the walls seemed to be covered with bright, twitching-winged butterflies.
— Oh, I don’t know, I suppose so. Some are hundreds of years old, and everybody understands them. I’ve been here several years, and I’ve been doing this for a lot longer than that, and they’ve not gone out of fashion yet. I hope you aren’t trying to put me out of business, petal.
— Petal! So funny! No, but look, I’ll give an example. Lots of people do not believe in God. He’s a joke, a big hole. Almost gone. They have money now, in their lives — no need for a heaven lined with gold any more. That was just to get the poor to believe.
— People will always believe in God. They need to, especially lately. We’re all weeny in the grand scheme and unsatisfied, money or not. Besides, have you seen how many new temples are going up in Brooklyn?
— OK, yes, yes, when you are getting persecuted and killed for your faith abroad you have to make it mean something, otherwise why did you die? But what about these little girls? So silly — not like any girl I know. Who goes round with the boots of a pirate and tits out like balloons? Huh? Shouldn’t they be different? Since they have discovered that we have brains and we can vote now and work and we don’t have to marry you stinking brutes to buy a house.