The Electric Michelangelo (36 page)

It was an eye. In the centre of Grace’s page there was an eye, immaculately open, static, unblinking. It looked almost hieroglyphic, black-rimmed, black-lashed, there was a lot of black ink to it in fact, and it was scrolled in a helix at the corners. He might have known there would be no birds or butterflies or delicate posies for her. Nor portraits of the presidents on her thighs or religious symbols, which four decades earlier the carnival women had first stunned the public with. The bar at Varga was crowded that night. He sat at the counter, and moved the empty glasses on the bar away from the piece of paper that was laid out in front of him like an after-school study, simplifying the clutter and chaos around the page.

– Scotch tonight?

– Thanks.

Valerie attended to him with her usual perfunctory duty and he returned to the image in front of him. The iris was green, green, the most mysterious of pigments, and it contained a substantial amount of non-detail, which gave the image an amulet appearance at its centre. There were no divisions like the true human eye contained or faint irregular spokes, quantitative information, flecks, inflections, broken sections, and percentages. Only a pure green sphere like a jewel or an old curse. It was unremitting, unforgiving. His head hurt just looking at the thing.

Riley’s voice joined him at the bar, swaggering into its most natural arena, telling him they were all witches, the women of the world. With their ability to manage pain, their smell of fresh and salt waters. And she was no different, his little Grace, his bold little poppit. No different at all. Some hereditary mange or vindictive spore or kinked strand of blood they shared made them wild, made them want to buck and nip and scratch. That’s why they would roll you over and climb on top when you were so far gone in lust you couldn’t defend yourself and they would look down with open eyes like they were taking something from you, like they were about to commit slaughter. His swarthy ghost here now, wanting to start a bitter conversation as ever with Cy that would make him seem clever and be validated just from provoking argument, from flicking an already twitchy nerve to make it jump. Cy was damned if he’d comply with him tonight, the old bugger.

– Go away, Eliot Riley. Go on, sling your hook.

– What’s that, hon?

Mary was watching him while her sister poured his drink from a dusty bottle into a tumbler. He shook his head and held up an apologetic hand. The whisky arrived in its glass over ice. He could not recall when exactly he had taken solely to hard liquor. But there were times that it seemed an appropriate drink, the only possible retort to the place in which he worked and his profession. He thought back to his first ever beverage, under the stewardship of Riley in the Dog and Partridge. Ale for junior. It seemed like such a long time ago. Varga was busy, bodies kept moving past him, knocking him gently from side to side. The door of the bar was open but there was no kind movement of air. It felt humid tonight, as if the atmosphere was preparing for one of the tremendous early-summer thunderstorms that New York often received, with purple spears of lightning and loud booming and crashing above as if some deity were spring-cleaning. His shirt was sticking to his lower back, he had been sweating with concentration all day. He sensed something on the way, a troublesome front, and he thought of the fishermen of Morecambe who could predict the weather patterns, who could taste the foreshadow of rain coming in off the Atlantic and who could say to land-lubbers that it was only an hour behind them in the great bay. Until an unforeseen storm rose up like the spastic finger of Poseidon and they simply disappeared, that is.

Cy leaned back on his stool and peered into the gaming room. It was too full and too smoky to see if Grace was playing yet tonight. Grubby, crumpled money was being passed between hands. He rubbed his face, took a long drink and felt the liquid burn his gums and throat. Valerie poured more whisky into his glass and set the bottle on the counter next to him, tapped it with a red fingernail. He must have had that look to him, the expression of a swimmer far out at sea in need of a life-ring or an exhausted miner groping for a canister of oil in the obsidian blackness as his lamp flickers out, for Valerie was not one for any kind of compromised distress, hers was not a half-way house. He returned his attention to the page. Yes, he could easily copy this design. It was not difficult. He could tell Grace he would tattoo her. And of course he would be happy to work on her, to have her company in his booth, get to know her and her body a little better. But at the heart of the matter, he did not understand Grace’s eye. Why on earth did she want it? What was the point of one image repeated? Why not mix it up a bit? Partly it was too simple, ridiculously simple, and he knew he must be missing the point of it all. Or she was doing it merely for her act in the circus perhaps, but it seemed a far length to go to. Again he had the sense that he must concentrate hard, double-clutch the gears in his brain because of her. He lit a cigarette, parked it in the corner of his mouth and set about finishing off a generous glass of whisky. An eye, over and over. How many times would she want it done? How much would he charge? He had wished to impress her with feathery detail and delicate shading, to give her body flight. He liked the idea of women and winged creations. Like angels or harpies, these designs always looked suitable on them, their bodies housed the compositions so well, along breastbones, on shoulders, along their backs which had perhaps once already contained the stub and stem of wings, depending on how you might regard them. He had wanted to show off his skills, have her select some of his own designs, and he had wanted to have some kind of personal artistic partnership with her, like Arturas and Claudia.

He leaned back out from the bar and looked into the gaming room again. The bodies within were shifting like pieces of sand in an egg-timer and finally they emptied to one side. And there was Grace, sitting across from someone Cy could not see, the first opponent of the evening. She was wearing the same kick-pleated skirt and blouse as the night he had first met her. But her hair was down, it reached to the edge of her back’s curve and a little beyond, so that an inch or two of it hung above the depression and curled in the air. They had not begun playing the match, she always wore her hair back when she played, he knew this irrelevancy to be true of her, if not much else. She looked beautiful from this far away, in profile, her strong features amended by smoky light. Before Cy realized that he was staring at her indulgently she met his gaze. He put up his hand in a small diplomatic wave, Grace nodded her head. She did not smile fondly at him as she had earlier in the day, and he thought perhaps she had not recognized him. Then, refuting this assumption and still looking his way, she held up her hands in a flamboyant European gesture, the palms tipped up, and she shrugged, as if saying she did not know the answer to some question that had been recently posed, or she was asking for his comment. He understood. He smiled so that she would know her idea was good, plausible, logistical. So she would come to see him tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe, it would be their beginning.

By three in the afternoon the next day it was apparent that she was not going to show up at the booth. He had waited all morning with growing anticipation and nervousness for her arrival, missing his lunch break because he did not want to risk leaving the vicinity in case she took it upon herself to choose that exact moment to come. Nor did he dash across to the hotdog vendor for quick, convenient sustenance, conscious as he was that the flavour of onion and spicy meat on his tongue might carry and impose itself upon her. Between customers he would stand and try to spy the tall black head of the horse moving down the alleyway as Grace led him. She had said she would be working at three. And now it was past that. The day had trickled away and with it the chance of seeing her privately. Disappointment sat in him like wet coal in a grate, resilient and cold, and it would do nothing but extinguish any flame of optimism he tried to pass over it – that she might have had an emergency, that she might have forgotten a pre-existing appointment, she might not have changed her mind about the work but instead some kind of prosaic if nefarious conspiracy had ensnared her, kept her from him. And at any moment she might appear in her purple circus costume with plimsoll slippers on her arched feet and apologies in her so-dark, sloe-dark eyes. No. No. She simply wasn’t coming.

At around about the same post-meridian hour as of the previous night, and with a dangerously empty belly, Cyril Parks was occupying the very same stool in Varga Oyster Bar that his backside had collaborated with twenty four hours earlier, drinking the rest of his bottle of whisky. On this occasion he had removed the vessel from Valerie’s hand as she first began to pour and set a wad of notes on the counter top. He would not have minded the presence of a friend or two that night, somebody to pass conversation with, Turo, Henry, one of the alley vendors perhaps, just so that he would not be left alone with the voice of Eliot Riley in his head and the urge to drink it quiet. There were one or two familiar faces in the bar, no one he particularly cared to invite to join him for company’s sake. He may as well settle in with the rough stuff for another harangued and haunted evening, hastening the point at which the phantom presence of his former employer was annulled to the best of his drinking abilities. Grace’s piece of paper was still in his pocket, he had carried it with him since she set it next to his equipment as if it were some precious treaty. He couldn’t help feeling that there was a riddle to it he was compelled or obliged to solve. And perhaps the solving of it would bear her to him, in reward, ridiculously enchanted though that notion seemed.

What was she thinking with this damnable green and black eye? How would Riley have strutted into her psyche and found that out? What personality-picking remark would he have selected to open her up? And how would she have responded? He could suddenly see the two of them in his mind clearly, Grace and Riley, squaring up against each other, eyes straining open and wearing expressions like fighting cocks about to strut and peck and sever the ligaments in each other’s necks. It was a horrible image. Thankfully, he could console himself that while he found occasional similarities between them in temperament – the blowhard singularity, the egoism, the jingo – he was sure each would have tolerated the other not one jot. No, Riley couldn’t have cracked her if ever he’d have cared to set about it. Not even the great correspondent to human messages as Riley had entitled himself, with his provocative commentary and his manipulative conversations with people that led them to disrobe all their secrets, not even he could have unscrambled her code. And what did Eliot Riley know of women anyway, with his crude ballads mocking their names and his references to their tusses and their sagging tits, trawling his deep-sea nets through the murkier levels of their equanimity and dredging up primordial rage and banshee curses the like of which they had never before issued nor knew they could, and their tempers and their tears? And what of his curious relationship with Reeda Parks, which proved enduringly affectionate but was never converted into proper courtship, instead it was left eternally void? Who did he think he was to have once asked if he’d have to apprentice Cy in the ways of women as well as the trade?