The speed of light had evolved. Fucking ridiculous. Who could live in that reality? I imagined walking on cracked downtown sidewalks and spying with my smart eye endless concrete fluctuations squirming as quickly or as slowly as need be to avoid the extinguishing tug of shifting universal truths. It was a most unsteady stroll. And I didn’t like it one fucking bit.
Acid jazz played on the radio. The music was loud. I stacked Nathalie’s scraped-clean plate and pink-frostingcoated fork under my own, turned off the radio, and retreated to the kitchen sink. By the time I’d finished washing the dishes, the palpable tension in the room was just about to kill me.
“Nat, let’s talk, okay?”
“Please drop it, Frank.”
I sat at the kitchen table, head cradled in my hands, and I stared at the thick solid dirt permanently stuck deep between our floor’s hardwood planks. Hour upon hour, I’d watched that same unchanging dirt when Nathalie had disappeared right before our anniversary. And now, as I looked at the dirt yet again, a deep well of anger I hadn’t even realized I had in me boiled over. My voice, booming and determined, ricocheted off the floor and to Nathalie: “Nat, why do
you
always get to decide when
we’re
done?”
She looked up from her mess of knitting, stunned. Clearly, she hadn’t been expecting the attack. Truth was, neither had I, but I continued anyway, venting the hurt and frustration I’d tucked away in some shadowed part of my psyche for months.
“I mean, really, how was it okay for you to leave
our
home,
our
life, without ever talking to me about it? You just up and bailed on everything for fucking three weeks like I never needed anything while you were gone and then, oh, get the baskets of rose petals to sprinkle in her path, here she is, Nathalie’s home, who knows why she left exactly or if she’s even planning to stay, but it doesn’t matter, I should be so honored to be in her presence, so let me just bow down and kiss her darling little feet, and if she wants a baby, damnit, give her a baby, if she snaps at you, let it roll off your back like water, it’s all about her, everything is about her—”
“Fuck you,” she said, her voice faint and strained.
I was shaking. Hard. My head throbbed.
We sat in silence for minutes, neither of us willing to budge.
“I’m sorry,” I eventually gave in. “It’s just, I don’t get it—no matter what I do, everything turns so fucking impossible lately.”
“Yeah, well, likewise.”
“I just want us to have a happy, normal life, you know?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, annoyed, “we don’t want to be
normal
.”
“Honestly, Nat, yeah, I think we do,” I answered with complete sincerity.
A strange smile settled on her face. She got up from the bed, sat across from me at the kitchen table, and dug through the mess of our things coating the tabletop. She found my wallet, opened it, and removed the photo of the flapper girl. Nathalie’s smile faded as she stared at the image. I watched as she slid the photo into the wallet’s dollar-bill compartment, not the plastic picture pocket. I took the wallet from her and returned the photograph to its proper place.
“Was it like that before?” Nathalie asked.
“What?” I wasn’t certain if she was referring to the way I’d repositioned the photograph or our mutual angst.
“Was it like that before?”
“Yes.”
And then:
How could this be healthy, she asked, this human need for love? Was it right to want so intensely, to feel so much? She damned me for affecting her, for her wish to have a baby. A person should be comfortable all on their own, she said, without needing anyone else to make them feel whole.
I sat and listened to Nathalie. And my neck grew stiff.
If there aren’t at least five people you can depend on and who can depend on you, you are in deep murky waters.
My father once threw this advice my direction. It was a strange ethos coming from a man who could have easily died alone, but I caught his words and clutched them tightly to my chest. In fact, I had come to imagine those words as beribboned medals—the sort awarded to Olympians for their exemplary efforts—and I wore them proudly. After my father’s death, when I tried to run far away from home and everything and everyone I knew, those medals clanged heavily around my neck.
Then I met Nathalie. For lack of other resources, I melted the medals down to sculpt a statue in her honor. I carried that statue with me wherever I went with intentions of making each moment a monument of devotion to her. So long as I had her love, I thought, I’d have everything I’d ever need. But somehow we’d fucked up. The statue slid and cracked. I feared that all that gold, all that shimmering glory we’d once been, had transformed into a shattered mess of dead weight.
My hand massaged the knot forming at the base of my skull as Nathalie spoke. I didn’t interrupt her to say that maybe I had all the same questions and fears as she did. And I refused to beg her to see it my way, because maybe if I had to beg, really beg, not just beg for play, but really beg, then maybe her love wasn’t truly meant to be mine.
Nathalie sat on my lap. Slender fingers grazing my skin, she played with the fine hairs on the back of my neck.
“I love you,” she said, and kissed my brow.
“I love you too, Nat.”
Uncertain of what I could count on for the future, I breathed in the warmth of her body.
Razzle-dazzle. Purple buttons, peachy, sexy rexy, prima ballerina, secret love, dusky maiden, show girl, Penelope, sweet vixen, Madame Bravery, whiskey mac, impatient, tiara, angel face, plum crazy, touch of class, double talk, pretty doll.
These were not the names of all the roses Nathalie had shown me earlier that night, just the ones I remembered the most. Our walk through the park had been so intensely lovely, and yet the sentiment of that moment already felt unreachably distant. If I had believed in the notion of appealing to temperamental ancient gods for favors, I would have gladly tattooed the roses’ names on my imperfect human form as a humble plea for returned happiness. I could picture the names inked in blue gothic script up my arm like a sailor’s laundry list of ports claimed. Hell, if it would have helped seal the deal any, I would have trekked to high desert mountains and plucked coccus insects off cacti blossoms to whip up a batch of holy red dye like the stuff made back in olden Aztec times. As I was thinking these thoughts, it occurred to me that, although not necessarily to please the gods but rather for my own selfish reasons, an act of devotion might not be such a bad idea. I suddenly wanted a needle tapping into my skin, searing me alive like the blood Nathalie sent flowing hot through my veins. I wanted a tattoo as reverence for love itself, for the pain of its imprint, for my healing, for the continuum of it all.
“Nat?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to get a tattoo.”
She leaned back and squinted at me.
“A ventricular heart,” I said. “On my chest. Huge …” I took a deep breath before continuing and hoped the gods were listening after all. “… with your name in a banner across the middle.”
And if the gods
were
listening, I seriously hoped they’d not confuse my optimistic banner with a banner of mourning like the embroidered funeral wreath I’d imagined in the park earlier that night.
“You’re crazy,” Nathalie said, laughed slightly, and snuggled into my shoulder.
The suddenness of my promising something so permanent for her—something that couldn’t be erased or taken back, a declaration of love so literally carved into my body—freaked her out.
The roses from the park imprinted themselves all the more vividly in my thoughts. Razzle-dazzle. What a name for a rose. I imagined vibrant violet petals and green, green, such very green leaves, silver shimmering thorns that were as much ornamentation as they were weapon. Razzle-dazzle. Nathalie. Nahui. Razzle-dazzle girls. Somehow I was certain Nahui would have loved it if someone got a tattoo for her. Hell, she’d have given her admirer the tattoo herself. And afterward she would have reveled in licking off the blood pilled on the surface of her love’s inflamed hot flesh. Tongue stained inky blue, she would have been a beautifully grotesque realization of the saying,
I’ll eat you alive.
Nathalie had whispered those words in my ear on countless occasions. Often when I fucked her. Sometimes as we fell asleep. Other times as we walked through the city. And then, always, cannibalistic little monster, she’d specify her love threat.
With mint jelly
, she’d say and lick her chops.
“Nat?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you coming with me?”
“Where?”
“I want the tattoo,” I said.
She leaned back and stared at me.
“You mean like right now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, alright then,” she said and stood. “Let’s go.”
Something shifted. I saw it happen. Nathalie smiled the most toothy and quivering sexy smile I’d ever seen.
With mint jelly.
Indeed.
I
don’t mean to complain, but Nathalie took nearly an hour to get ready. As always, I appreciated the end result, but really, making me wait like that was all power trip. Wasn’t I already submitting plenty in that I was about to get a huge tat with her name on it? Regardless, it was well past ten by the time we’d walked south of Houston to the tattoo parlor on Ludlow that every downtown hipster with ink swore by. The sign on the door said the shop was open until eleven.
When I explained exactly what I wanted to the only tattoo artist not already busy with a client, she said, “Sorry, dude, we close soon. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
“I totally understand,” I said as respectfully as possible, “but we’re going to the protest tomorrow.”
She so wasn’t impressed.
“We’re open Sunday,” she offered with a tired but polite smile.
“It’s just, I’m out of town Sunday and—”
“You are?” Nathalie interrupted.
“Estate auction. D.C. I booked the trip a month ago … ?”
“Right,” she said and shook her head, embarrassed to have forgotten.
“You can still cover the store Sunday, right?” I asked Nathalie.
“Of course, sweetie.”
Ms. Tattoo looked at Nathalie and me as if listening to us sort out our schedule was causing her physical discomfort.
“Look,” she said, probably just to shut us up, “I can outline and shade tonight, but you’ll have to come back for color.”
“I’d really love if I could get it now? All of it?”
Why the fuck was everything coming out of my mouth a question?
“Ribs hurt. You need two sessions.”
“Please?”
“Sit,” she said, clearly exasperated, and pointed to a bench near the door.
I wasn’t sure if she had just agreed to do the tattoo or not, but I could practically hear her mentally adding an extra hundred to my bill for her inconvenience. And still, I was willing to pay. The shop was the best in the city. I was lucky for any abuse she wanted to dish out. So when she said to sit, I sat. She disappeared into a back room, and when she returned nearly half an hour later she held two pieces of tracing paper.
“My name’s Kim, by the way,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, sorry—Frank,” I said by way of introduction. “And this is Nathalie.”
“Figured as much,” Kim barely smiled. “Okay, so here’s what we’ve got.”
She spread out the two pieces of paper on the counter between us. One was a black-and-white outline of the tattoo. The other was the stencil colored into a medical-textbookworthy life-size human heart with a banner wrapped around its middle,
Nathalie
emblazoned in old sailor lettering on the banner.
“It’s perfect,” I said, beaming like the tattoo was already part of me, like I had a right to feel proud.
Nathalie stood beside me, her arm wrapped around mine. She dug her fingernails into my hand as she stared at the sketch. I thought she had something to tell me, but she didn’t look up.
“So, good to go?” Kim asked.
I nodded and she led us past three barber chairs—each occupied by clients in various stages of pain and bravado— and to the back room, which consisted of a few locked supply cabinets, a drafting table, something that looked like a Xerox machine but that I didn’t think was, a rolling office chair, and a doctor’s examining table covered in white paper. All the walls in the shop were painted black and the back room’s overall effect wasn’t too unlike a dungeon, which I’m sure was meant to be part of the appeal, but considering the way the barber chairs in the front room sort of looked like dentist chairs, I kept flashing on that one scene in
Marathon Man
where the Nazi dentist tortures Dustin Hoffman by alternately drilling into healthy teeth without anesthetic and then rubbing on clove oil to kill the pain—I was a total wuss about going to the dentist. I was so fucking grateful I didn’t have to sit in a chair out in the front room with everyone else watching me squirm.
Kim taped the color sketch up on the wall, fed the black-and-white sketch into the faker Xerox machine, and made a transfer.
“Take off your shirt,” she said.
She said it bluntly, just like that—like it wasn’t one of the scariest things she could tell me to do. I had to remind myself it was just matter-of-fact business … for her, anyway. Still, reflex reaction, I must have turned forty million shades of red. Stripping down to my bare chest in front of a stranger was not a pleasant prospect, but I took a deep breath and braced myself.
“Sure,” I said, trying to play it cool.
Nathalie looked at me, her brow furrowed with protective concern.
“Really, it’s okay,” I said, and leaned over to give Nathalie the gentlest kiss ever.
Kim waited impatiently as I then removed layers of winter clothes and hunched my shoulders to peel the extra-tight white binder up off my chest, to my shoulders, and over my head. Technically, all anyone would have seen if they’d looked was slightly padded skin marked with red lines from where elasticized material had compressed just a few seconds before.
Entirely unfazed by the sight, Kim simply told me to lie down on the examining table. White butcher paper crinkling under my weight as I futilely attempted to get comfortable, I watched Kim cover a small rolling metal table in saran wrap, smear streaks of various ointments on it, fill little cups with ink, pull on a pair of latex gloves, and get her gun ready. I tried to push that Johnny Cash lyric,
Don’t take your gun to town, son,
out of my brain. I wasn’t going to end up dead on a saloon floor. Oh fuck, what was I doing?