We Love Anderson Cooper Page 5

  Filling in another man’s receding hairline, Trey matched the shade exactly. As the customer stepped from the shop, his bangs ruffled in the wind. Trey narrowed a woman’s ankles and enlarged her eyes. Although he had once admired his subjects’ imperfections, now he imagined correcting all their flaws.

  * * *

  Standing at the kitchen counter, Nava mashed an avocado, while Trey filled a ceramic bowl with chips. “You’re so quick to change all these people,” Nava said. “But I don’t see you getting any so-called improvements.”

  Trey’s chin dropped to his chest. “I can’t tattoo myself. If I could, do you think I would still look like this?”

  The next day, though, he closed the shop early and lined up inks, caps, and needles before a full-length mirror. He shaved, washed his face and body with green soap, and wiped himself with alcohol. He began by minimizing the flesh around his eyes and erasing his moles. Slowly he worked his way down his body. As the hours passed, his back started to ache and his fingers cramped, grasping the machine, but he continued, correcting the smallest imperfections. When he finished, his skin was tan. His neck and ears appeared perfectly proportioned. He was wrinkleless and muscular. Though tattoos normally take weeks to heal, the ones Trey inked healed as soon as the needle was lifted. Trey rushed home to show Nava.

  Seeing a stranger enter her bedroom, Nava screamed, and she didn’t stop screaming until she heard Trey’s nasal voice. She demanded he undress and examined him up close and from the opposite end of the room.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “I married you, not Superman,” she said, running her nails over his pecs.

  Later, as they lay tangled and short of breath, he asked, “You’re not even tempted?”

  “You seem to find me attractive the way I am.”

  “Touché,” he said, and disappeared again between her perfect imperfect thighs.

  Grasping the coffeepot the next morning, Nava stared at him, forgetting to pour.

  “Everything okay?” Trey said, holding out his cup.

  “Keep talking,” she said. “So I know it’s you.”

  * * *

  Trey wasn’t accustomed to being attractive. He startled the first time a stranger smiled at him. It must be someone from the shop, he thought, a client or the bookkeeper, but it wasn’t anyone he knew, just someone moved by the gentleness of his eyes and the perfect slope of his forehead. He didn’t know what to say when his massage therapist refused to charge him. “Just tell people I worked on you,” she said, as she kneaded muscles he only appeared to have. It was strange and pleasant to be welcome wherever he went.

  At Fine, he installed additional chairs and hung three-way mirrors. When space opened up next door, Trey expanded. He trained apprentices, who became first-rate tattoo artists but couldn’t remake a client the way Trey could. While customers waited, cashiers explained installment and family plans and served espresso and chai.

  A framed copy of Buzzfeed’s write-up of the shop, featuring his picture and the headline, “Where Beauty Is Made,” hung behind the counter, and he never got tired of looking at it. Nava had taken it down from their bedroom wall. “Put it in the scrapbook with the others,” she said. “I know what you look like.”

  One Saturday, he found her poring over their wedding album.

  “We should redo those,” he said.

  “Never.”

  “In Chicago. You could wear your dress.”

  “You can’t rewrite history.”

  He thought he could. He pictured her with a waist as thin as a reed, a behind like a firm plum. But when he mentioned it to her a week later, she scowled and refused to look at the sketches he held out.

  * * *

  As Trey was reviewing receipts one afternoon, Melanie pushed open the door to the shop. She raked her fingers through cropped hair. “I relapsed!” The doctors’ poisons weren’t working anymore, she said. Maybe there was something Trey could do?

  Trey didn’t know what to say. He hated to tell her no. Maybe he could do it. It seemed natural after all he had done. What an accomplishment it would be! Melanie would live to play with grandchildren, undisturbed by illness. He rose light-headed from his seat. He looked around. Energy—and what was life if not energy?—pulsed through the tattoo machines. Artists bent over clients, blessing them with line and shade. He was glad Melanie had come to him.

  He led her to the back, telling the others he didn’t want to be disturbed. While he lit incense and queued up Bach choral music, she undressed and lay naked on the table, goose pimples peppering her pale skin, her arms and legs limp, hope and terror competing for her expression. He mixed dozens of colors, ones that had never been in the shop before and he hadn’t ordered, and others that were his staples. Unmindful of dwindling daylight and the silence that fell over the front of the shop, he took his time. He tattooed perfectly proportioned, radiant breasts, robust and healthy, as full of life as wailing newborn twins. He sensed an immediate improvement in his client.

  When Melanie saw the breasts, she wept and kissed his cheeks. “You saved my life.”

  She was halfway out the door when he shouted, “You should probably keep seeing your doctor.” He wasn’t sure if she heard.

  He took Nava out to dinner that night. The hostess of the five-star restaurant embraced him and led them to his regular table by the window. Above him hung mounted elk and bull moose; before him lay gilt-edged china on linen cloths.

  A diner stopped by their table, holding out a cocktail napkin and a pen. “Doc, make it out, ‘To Gerald, my best work,’” he said.

  Raising her eyebrows, Nava mouthed the word Doc. Trey ignored her.

  “What’s the occasion?” she asked when they were finally alone.

  As he adjusted his cuff links, he said: “I think I might have saved a patient’s life today.”

  She choked on her water. When she was able to talk, she asked, “How did you manage that?”

  He told her about Melanie and she stared at him, speechless.

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  Nava shook her head. “She should have gone to see her doctor.”

  * * *

  Melanie died three weeks later. When Trey heard, he slipped into bed and stayed there. All he could think about was the day he had met her and tattooed her arm in celebration. He wondered what would become of her daughter, Grace.

  A week went by. “You need a shower,” Nava said, opening windows.

  Trey rolled onto his side, facing the wall. He still could not stop thinking of Melanie, how he had taken her to the back of the shop and all but promised her life.

  “Did you really think you could cure her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You’re not a doctor. You’re a tattoo artist.” She insisted he sit in an armchair while she changed the bedding. Then she handed him fresh pajamas. “I recommend washing before you put these on.”

  He discarded his dirty pajamas on the floor but didn’t shower before returning to bed naked.

  The next day, he called Melanie’s husband to offer condolences and learned Melanie had stopped treatment after seeing him. Trey couldn’t shut out the image of Melanie’s face, looking to him for hope. When he tried to get out of bed, he could hardly move, feeling feverish, his muscles aching.

  “You helped her feel better while she was alive. That’s something,” Nava said that night, pulling off her pumps.

  “Now you’re a fan.”

  Nava ordered dinners from his favorite restaurants, setting them on a tray beside him, pea soup with ham one night, brisket another, roast chicken a third. The meats reminded him of Melanie’s flesh, and he fasted.

  She scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist, but when the day arrived, Trey refused to get in the car. What would a psychiatrist tell him that he didn’t already know? He had thought he was an angel of mercy, when in fact he was the angel of death.

  Nava entreated an acupuncturist to make a house call. The woman ar
rived around eleven, knocked on the door, and finally phoned Trey’s cell. He ignored her, because he didn’t deserve to be healed.

  * * *

  As she was leaving for work one day, Nava set a drawing pad and a mechanical pencil next to him on the wrinkled sheets. “I don’t know what else to do,” she muttered.

  When she was gone, he snatched them. He couldn’t help himself. He sat up and arranged a pillow behind his back. Without thinking, he sketched nudes, anchors, cobras, nipples, his hand moving for hours, never pausing except to turn the page, until the pad was full.

  He dressed and hurried to his studio in the barn, finding windows coated with dust and his easel toppled. He tore open boxes of paints and brushes, righted the easel, and stretched canvases. From memory, he painted Melanie, first with nipples, then without, and finally just her face, eyes hungry for life and a soft mouth. As he worked, he heard Nava’s car come up the driveway. Though the light in the studio was on, she didn’t come in, and he didn’t go out.

  At a medical center that had sent him women wanting nipples, he invited cancer patients to have their portraits done. Male and female, young and old, ambulatory and in wheelchairs, he painted them. Word spread in chemo-infusion rooms and hospital lobbies across Denver and in Cheyenne, and the sick found him. He captured them as they were, however bald or ashen, with sunken, grieving eyes or gazes full and hopeful. He changed nothing.

  Why his subjects wished to be painted, he didn’t know, and he didn’t ask. It was enough that they came. Many died before their portraits were completed.

  Canvases multiplied in his studio, leaning against walls, drying on tables, hanging from the ceiling. He gave the work to his subjects or to their families if they wanted it. He hung portraits at Fine, though clients and staff complained, and business dropped off. He rented a giant storage locker for the rest.

  Over time, Trey’s body forgot the changes he had made. The flesh around his eyes thickened, and his skin paled. A series of enormous moles, like a mountain chain, erupted on his nose and cheeks one day. He considered tattooing himself again but decided against it. Though tattoos had made him look better, he didn’t like what he’d become. He worried how Nava would feel. Perhaps she’d grown accustomed to his improved appearance. When she entered the studio that night, he turned to hide his face. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She studied him from the doorway and then came close, stroking his cheek. “For what?” He was working on a painting of a woman on a tattooing table, scars where her breasts should have been, an angel on her arm. The woman’s eyes were closed. Her flesh was tinged with blue. “She’s beautiful,” Nava said.

  “It took me forever to ink that angel. I barely knew what I was doing. She was very patient.”

  “She had no reason to be in a hurry then.”

  It was the best work he had ever done, and it would end up in the storage locker where the dead gathered, talking perhaps of failed treatments, useless vanities, a mythical tattoo artist who could cure cancer. He couldn’t say for sure, because each time he rolled up the door to add another to their number, they quieted, and all he heard was the rattle of metal and the faint vibration of a tattoo machine.

  The Infidelity of Judah Maccabee

  At forty-two, Barry Waxman no longer had to wonder why everyone he knew had gotten theirs while he was still waiting for his. His life was full. At the Great Northeastern Insurance Company, he managed a dozen actuaries in white button-down shirts. He lived with Anette, a thin woman with a Nordic nose and long fingers that were always moving, bettering his life—filleting fish, unclogging drains, debugging his computer. His cat, Mac, was short haired and gray. Vertical pupils cut his yellow eyes, black slits that emptied into an endless universe. If he wasn’t massaging Barry’s thighs with his thick paws, he was nipping the fleshy edge of Barry’s palm or sandpapering it with his tongue.

  Barry was content until looking out the window of his Brooklyn apartment one night he saw lights strung around streetlamps and a man wearing an elf hat. While he was at work the next day, Anette had a spruce tree delivered. In the three years they’d lived together, she had never done that before. She bolted the tree to a metal base, strung popcorn and tinsel, presenting him when he came home with a fait accompli: a six-foot-tall Christmas tree that dwarfed the electric menorah he had rested on the windowsill.

  Christmas confirmed Barry’s fear that as a Jew he would always be an outsider in America. Growing up, he had watched with envy while his schoolmates scribbled lists of presents, their anticipation growing as the holiday approached. But when Barry mentioned Christmas, his father exploded: “An excuse for pogroms!” Then he told Barry for the hundredth time about Cossacks who had bloodied his grandfather in Ukraine and cut off his beard. One after another, the homes on Barry’s block lit up, while his remained stubbornly dark except for a small, flickering menorah, proof to his neighbors, Barry worried, that his family didn’t belong.

  As an adult, Barry resented that Christmas overshadowed Hanukkah. Menorahs and dreidels appeared as mere afterthoughts in shops, on single shelves or in dim corners, while Christmas hijacked entire establishments and his favorite eighties rock ’n’ roll station, making it impossible for him to buy a pair of socks without considering the miracle of the birth of Jesus. The holiday intruded at Barry’s job, too, where he was expected to play Secret Santa to a woman in human resources who consistently got his 401K contributions wrong. Perhaps, he thought, he should get her a calculator.

  Anette hovered to one side of the tree. “Do you like it?” There was a tremor in her voice. He had expressed to her his reservations about the holiday. “I thought it would balance things out,” she said.

  He pressed his index finger to a ripe needle, relishing the sharp pain. “We’ve never had a tree,” he said, as if his objection were based on the details of their short life together rather than the annals of his people.

  “I always had one.”

  Mac sniffed the metal base of the tree, rubbed his back against it, and purred. “Mac likes it,” Anette said.

  Barry picked up the cat and showed him the menorah. “We’re Jewish, Mac. Got it?” But when he set Mac down, the cat darted back to the tree.

  The tree’s fragrance was out of place in his apartment, and Barry had the odd sensation he had wandered into someone else’s home. “How can I celebrate Christmas? Christians were responsible for the Crusades and the Inquisition. The Church prevents people from using birth control and oppresses gays.”

  Anette tore a strip of gold tinsel from the tree, and it floated to the floor. Mac batted it back and forth, then reared up on his hind legs before pouncing on it. “Is that how you think of me?” Anette said. “As a gay oppressor?”

  “Not you.”

  “Other Christians.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you see how prejudiced that is? My parents weren’t responsible for the Crusades or the Inquisition. And homosexuals are welcome in their congregation.”

  Barry lifted Mac into his arms and sat at the dining-room table, keeping the cat from the tree. “Your parents served ham when we visited them because their German butcher assured them a rabbi blessed it.”

  “You like ham.”

  “They didn’t know that.”

  “You asked for seconds.”

  “I was being polite.” The cat wriggled until Barry released him. Picking gray fur off his black wool pants, Barry said, “You ambushed me.”

  Anette sank into a chair next to him and stuffed a leftover roll of tinsel into a department store bag. “I knew if I asked, you’d say no. But it hardly seems fair for my ornaments to gather dust in the closet, while you light your menorah.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “I kept waiting for you to ask. Whether I missed having a tree.”

  Barry approached the spruce again and fingered the ornaments he could tell she had hung for him, the silver Stars of David, the dreidels, and the latkes that resembled plastic barf peop
le bought as gag gifts. He sighed. “Where’d you find all these?”

  “At the Jews for Jesus store in Cadman Plaza.”

  Curled at the base of the tree, Mac slept.

  * * *

  The next night was the first night of Hanukkah. Barry left work early and stopped at Gristedes to pick up latkes and applesauce. Not as good as the ones his mother had made from a Manischewitz mix, the latkes nevertheless buttressed his soul against candy canes and fruitcakes. Next to the cash register, buried at the bottom of a stack of holiday CDs, below Bing Crosby’s White Christmas and James Brown’s Funky Christmas, he found a klezmer CD and on impulse he bought that, too. Cat treats shaped like dreidels filled a bowl. He grabbed a handful for Mac and pictured the cat eating one and cleaning his whiskers.

  It was his tenth Hanukkah with Mac, a decade since he had come upon a young girl tending a litter of kittens in a torn cardboard box a few blocks from his apartment. The girl sat on a concrete stoop next to the box. “We can’t keep them.” She shoved down the flaps to give Barry a better view. “Cats don’t care if you give away their kittens.”

  Three black kittens tumbled over one another and a tiny gray shivered in a corner, head pressed to the cardboard. Barry was returning from the supermarket, a heavy bag of groceries digging into each hand. Mustard-colored high-rises loomed over the Brooklyn street. Through the window of every apartment, Barry thought he saw a Christmas tree, sparkling red and green. A giant wreath clung to every door. He dreaded returning to his empty apartment, to his simple electric menorah, no one to give him a gift and no one to receive one from him. The kittens chirped like baby birds.

  “Maybe you want two,” the girl said, shoulder-length brown hair slipping from a ponytail someone had half heartedly banded. Her pea coat, unbuttoned, flapped in wind that bustled down the hi-rise canyon.

  Consolidating his shopping bags in one hand, Barry scooped the gray kitten in his palm. Light and delicate as an egg, its fragility moved him. He cocooned it in the pocket of his black wool overcoat.