“You giving massages or tattoos back here?”
“I told you I was a professional,” he said, demonstrating the working of a chair that reclined and moved up and down like one at a dentist’s office. When he finished he stood straight and found her eyes with his, waiting first in silence as she continued to look around the room. “Can I ask you something?”
“In my experience, if you need to ask permission to ask a question, it’s not a question the person wants to be asked. Plus, I can’t really say okay until I know what you’re going to ask, right, so I can’t really give you permission to ask what you’re going to ask until it’s too late.”
He looked amused: head slightly tilted, mouth just starting to smile.
She suppressed her own small smile. “But go ahead.”
“You’re already a bunch of things, right? I mean you wear a lot of hats. An artist and a massage therapist and a bartender.”
Not telling him there was yet another job, she simply nodded.
“So why would you want to add a new hat? But that’s not really my question. My question is this — which thing are you most? You don’t have to tell me, but my advice, if you were to ask for it, would be to concentrate on that thing. If you have to do one of the others for money, then you do that but think of it as a day job. Put your real time and energy into the thing you most are. For me, this is what I wanted, to have my own tattoo place and give people beautiful images. I think of it as a vocation.”
“You mean to tell me that when you were a little boy, you looked up at your mama and said, ‘I want to be a tattoo artist and move to New Orleans and have a tattoo parlor’?”
He laughed without smiling. “Not quite like that, no. When I was four, five, and six, I wanted to be a baseball player. Then I read too much National Geographic—my aunt gave me a subscription — and I wanted to be an archaeologist or an anthropologist and go to Olduvai Gorge or discover a place like that that no one knew about yet. That was middle school or thereabouts, which is when I started drawing a lot. And in high school I thought briefly about comics or even going into fine art, but when I thought about materials, I kept thinking about skin.”
“You were at that age.”
“Impressionable, yes, and it’s true that there was this very pretty older girl that lived near us, and who I sometimes saw at the community pool, who had a dolphin drawn on the back of her calf. I would watch her swim laps under the water, and she could make the dolphin on her leg look like it was swimming.”
“So you chose your career based on a hard-on?”
This time he smiled when he laughed and said, “Don’t we all? But, seriously, what I started thinking was that an artist’s work is usually only seen by a few people. Whoever comes to the gallery or the museum. Please don’t take offense, because that’s a very cool thing, but it didn’t fit with my vision of my life. Books and comics, they reach more people because they can be reproduced, but then people aren’t seeing the original. With skin, it’s different. When I give someone a tattoo, my original work goes everywhere they go and is seen by everyone who sees that person. All them tatted-up girls you work with? Every tourist in this city sees their ink. Even better, though, is the motion, like you seemed to understand when I met you and you drew that squid. I get to see my work in motion. It becomes something more than what I drew because of that. It goes into another dimension.”
Marion began to feel self-conscious because of the sincerity of his observations, which she would have otherwise dismissed as deluded or at least cheesy. His intense eye contact also made her more aware of herself and the position of her body than she was comfortable with. It seemed aggressive to stare at someone’s eyes the way he did, at least outside scripted scene, but she liked him anyway.
“I hope this place works out for you,” she said. “I used to think I was an artist who worked as a massage therapist to make money. Now I seem to be a massage therapist who works as a bartender for money. Mostly I’m just a bartender.” Again she didn’t mention her other source of income, though she wanted to, perhaps because she thought he might tell her something that would help her understand why she did it. For the money, she reminded herself, at least on the lucrative end of the belt.
“Nothing wrong with being a bartender by vocation, but if you’re an artist, that’s where you should be putting your time and your passion.”
She looked down at her flat canvas shoes, which were relatively new but already filthy from walking and biking everywhere she went. “So you’re telling me you aren’t going to give me a job.”
“That’s not the only thing I’m telling you.” He reached across the reclining chair for her, settling his hand lightly on her shoulder. “I think you should go out with me instead of work for me. Like I said, you’re a weird girl. I like weird girls.”
Now she looked back at Eddie and tried to hold his gaze the way he’d held hers, though it was not a natural gesture for her. “I’m seeing someone,” she said, “but I don’t know if it will work out, if it can work out. I’ll let you know if it doesn’t?”
“You aren’t supposed to be thinking that way going in, right? If you are thinking it won’t work out, then it won’t work out.”
“This is an unusual relationship.”
“Fair enough.” He withdrew his hand and smiled at her again. “The offer stands for now.”
“Got it,” Marion said. “So I’ll have to let you know about a date later, when I see how things go, but meanwhile I might let you ink me. If you had carte blanche, what would you do?”
“I would ask to see your paintings and maybe take something from that, or at least inspired from it. Otherwise I would turn your back into part of a tree, half the trunk disappearing around your waist and one branch reaching across the back of your shoulder. I would call it ‘Druid’ or something like that.”
Marion liked the idea that he titled his work. “What if you were on a smaller budget?”
“Then I’d show you a book of choices and make you choose your own image and location.”
She pulled her lips to one side and nodded slowly. “Okay, then, let me count my money and think about it.”
A gutter-punk couple who didn’t look like they had room on their bodies for any more ink — much less money to pay for more — peeked around the screen from the foyer, and Marion broke away, waving to Eddie as she left.
At home, her bike parked safely in her living room, Marion flipped through the small stacks of paintings leaning against the walls, at once surveying the damage and looking for an image that might transfer to skin. Most of her paintings were of scenes from the Gulf Coast, from around Biloxi. Occasionally a human figure, most often some local character, such as the old man who’d chewed tobacco all day long on a bench outside the Biloxi Diner, regardless of the weather.
The idea came to her that she need not start completely over if some of her paintings could be saved. If even a few could be restored, she might be brave enough to pick up her brushes and mix a palette. Then she’d be building on an existing foundation instead of starting from scratch with no promise that she wouldn’t have to do so again and again and again. Eddie was right: She was floundering around looking for something new to do instead of doing what she’d always wanted.
Another idea seeped in, one that made the space around her solar plexus quiver, almost as if with an electric current. Most of what she had painted — the trees and houses and commercial buildings and perhaps even the people — no longer existed. She had made a record of them, maybe not one as useful as photographs, but at least her vision of the place she’d grown up in, which she now understood was a place where most people had never been and never would go.