“You should hire me,” she said. “Teach me what you know.”
“You wouldn’t be much of an advertisement, blank slate like you.” His voice was low in register, gentle in volume and tone. Now his accent just sounded big-city, not Southern — maybe Brooklyn or Detroit. “Afraid of the pain?”
She smirked. “It’s not that.”
“Nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s smart to be afraid of pain, right? Evolutionary. But it’s not so bad, the pain. And it’s all for gain.”
The rhyme should have put her off, but he said it like he knew it was stupid.
“Really, it’s not that.” She paused so he would hear the truth in what she said. “Not even a little. More like I’m afraid of commitment.”
“We could start you off slow, something that could change over time, make you a living work of art, a thing in flux. Not like I’d stamp you with a tacky rose or heart or some guy’s initials and send you home to live with it for the rest of your life.”
“But what if I want to be an employee and not a customer?”
“Ink’s not something you just start doing. There’s talent and training and shit.”
“An art form, I get it. But you just started doing it, back when, at the beginning. That’s how anyone starts anything, right, how people start over?”
The snake guys caught her eye, and she delivered two more longnecks and added the price to their tabs. If the new guy’s tattoos were art, theirs were cheap comics — a bad collection of individual figures, a graphic record of sloppy choices made one at a time. Some people don’t learn from their mistakes — this was something she’d seen. Empirical knowledge she trusted.
While her back was still to the new guy, he said, “What makes you think you’d be any good at what I do?”
She turned around, spoke with a speed that surprised her. “Because I know both things — I know how to draw, and I know the body. I know line and color.” She stopped short of calling herself an artist. If the show had happened, then she might have felt some claim to the word, but it hadn’t and she didn’t. “And I trained as a massage therapist — the real kind — have the certificate and everything, and I’m good. So I know skin, the shapes of muscles and how the shapes change when they flex and relax.” She was struck by her own idea: art in motion on skin.
She watched his biceps shape-shift as he helped himself to a napkin from the plastic barkeep and pushed it toward her. “Design something.”
She rummaged around the cash register and found blue and black pens and a pencil. No green, which she wanted, but maybe that was for the better since green seemed to be his color. “Just remember: I’m using a ballpoint pen and a crappy napkin.”
“No problem, I get that limitation, but the trick is you have to design something you would wear.”
Shape moving on skin. Undulating. The ocean. She wanted to draw a jellyfish, translucent, shimmering, moved by waves, with waves. Painful when touched, yet beautiful. So beautiful that you touch it anyway, knowing the pain is part of its beauty, part of all real beauty.
But with pen on a cocktail napkin, the form would be amoebic, nothing but a blob. She would be laughed at. So she drew instead a stylization of a squidlike creature she had seen in a book of photographs of animals that live in the deepest parts of the ocean.
When she looked up after — how long? minutes? more? — Robicheaux was standing at the end of the bar waving, wanting to settle. After she’d taken care of him, she avoided eye contact with the illustrated cholo, wiped down the bar with the dirty rag. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his wallet come out of his pocket, money come out of the wallet. She had no choice but to go over, see if he needed change. She made his change and set it in front of him so she wouldn’t touch his hand.
“You’re a weird girl. I like that.” He took his money, leaving a dollar on the bar — reasonable but not an overtip. “Stop by the shop sometime and I’ll show you a thing or two.”
Marion knew the value of clear statement. Once in high school a boy had asked her if she had a date to a dance and she’d mistaken his curiosity for an invitation, purchasing a dress that she never wore. When her parents bequeathed their furniture store to her brother, she learned that Take care of your sister meant Shoot the business straight into your veins and leave her with nothing.
“Are you saying you’ll hire me?” she asked.
He laughed. “Why would I hire a girl with no experience who hasn’t even bothered to ask my name? What I’m saying is that I’ll think about it. Mostly what I’m saying is what I said — stop by sometime and I’ll show you a thing or two. Decisions aren’t always something you make in one moment, right?”
“I’d think in your line of work, you’d hope that wasn’t true.” Marion thought to smile at him, but by then his back was to her, and she didn’t realize that his comment about her not asking his name meant that she was supposed to introduce herself.
That night, after she pedaled back to the Bywater, where she rented the left side of a double shotgun that had been rehalved into a duplex, Marion searched tattooing online. She combed through designs. Knowing better, she clicked on “most disgusting tattoo ever” and saw the photograph of a man’s abdomen turned into a cat, his enormous misshapen navel the cat’s vulva and anus. At least it was a design meant to be put in motion. She started to read what she could find on training, instruments, sanitary procedures, rules and codes. Like everything that has to be learned to acquire the kind of credentials that can get you paid for something, it was boring.
Without planning to, without even knowing she was about to do it, she typed in the website address she was too embarrassed to keep bookmarked even though she lived alone. She read through the posted ads, telling herself it was just because she needed the money, telling herself it was just something to do until she could get back to her real work.
She looked at ads on both sides — the ads she knew were too dangerous to answer and the ones on the side she could answer prosperously while managing her personal risk. As she read through the second batch, she stopped on the phrases resolved through abnegation and cleansed by pain. Certain she had just read the same words elsewhere, she went back to the ads for submissives, and there they were: resolved through abnegation and cleansed by pain. She wondered if it was a coincidence, a copycat, the work of a switch, or something else. When she woke in the middle of the night, those were the phrases she repeated to herself while she waited to fall back asleep.
Clay
Clay pulled the second drawer of his filing cabinet out as far as it would go and removed from the second-to-last folder in the second-to-last hanging file the neat sheet of paper with his identities and passwords typed in columns and rows. He slid the drawer halfway in and pulled from the second folder in the second hanging file his ledger dates, times, and website addresses. This was a messier affair than the typed words and codes on the other sheet. The soft graphite numbers and letters had smeared from the weight and oil of his left hand as it followed, heavily, the pencil it pushed across the paper — a technique no teacher had been able to break him of.
Outside he heard the occasional vehicle: rarely the sound of a normal car, most often the mechanical buzz of the topless Hummers driven by the private security forces still patrolling Audubon Place. Israeli tactical forces had been hired, some said, and others said no, but rather the American contractors who had misbehaved to notoriety in Iraq. He’d seen an action star riding in one — a guy he’d seen in a movie some years back but couldn’t name — bandoliers crisscrossed for show or fun or real sport. Clay knew he didn’t have to worry; his skin color made him invisible, and the address and last name on his driver’s license marked him as one of the protected.