The Tattooed Girl Read online

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  The

  Tattooed

  Girl

  A NOVEL

  Dedication

  For Philip Roth

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  I The Tattooed Girl

  II The Assistant

  III Nemesis

  IV The Shadows

  About the Author

  Books by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In Chapter 4 of Part III, a passage from Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, translated by Stuart Woolf (1960), p. 29.

  Lines from Catullus’s “Lesbia” poem (87), quoted in Chapter 11 of Part II, are taken from the translation by Horace Gregory.

  Lines from Homer’s The Odyssey, quoted in Chapter 16 of Part III, are taken from the translation by Robert Fagles.

  Lines from Virgil’s The Aeneid, scattered through the text, are taken from the translation by Robert Fitzgerald.

  Chapter 6 of Part II appeared, in slightly different form, in Blind Spot, Spring 2002.

  I

  The Tattooed Girl

  1

  HE HAD KNOWN it must happen soon. And yet he wasn’t prepared for it happening so soon.

  “I can’t do it any longer. No more.”

  He meant, but could not bring himself to acknowledge, I can’t live alone any longer.

  2

  Easy is the way down into the Underworld: by night and by day dark Hades’ door stands open . . . He smiled at these lines of Virgil floating into consciousness like froth on a stream. He told himself he wasn’t frightened: his soul was tough as the leather of his oldest boots.

  He would hire someone to live with him. And really he did need an assistant for his translation project.

  He was a discreet man, a private man. To friends who’d known him for more than twenty years, and even to most of his relatives, an enigmatic man.

  And so his initial inquiries were discreet, made among acquaintances in the city rather than friends.

  “I need an assistant . . .”

  He disliked the sound of this. Need?

  “I’d like to hire an assistant.”

  Or, “I’m thinking of hiring an assistant.”

  Better to make it more specific, defined.

  “I’m thinking of hiring a research assistant for a few months beginning in November.”

  Adding, “Preferably a young man.”

  Women, even quite young women, had a disconcerting habit of falling in love with him. Or imagining love. He would not have minded so much if he himself were not susceptible to sexual longings as some individuals are susceptible to pollen even as others are immune.

  Seigl was sexually susceptible: less so emotionally susceptible. He’d had a number of love affairs since late adolescence but had never wanted to marry nor had he been weakened, or flattered, by another’s wish that he marry. “Intimacy, on a daily basis. Hourly! How is it accomplished?” He laughed, but it was a serious question. How is intimacy accomplished? Even while deeply involved with a woman with whom he’d shared a residence in Rochester, Seigl had kept his house in the hilly suburb of Carmel Heights and worked there much of the time.

  The love affair had ended abruptly several years ago. Seigl had never understood why, exactly. “But if you love me? Why would you shut a door against me?” he’d asked in all sincerity. For finally a door had been shut against him, disturbing as a riddle in a code Seigl couldn’t crack.

  The tyranny of convention. Marriage, “family.” Seigl hated it.

  So, a female assistant was not a good idea. And there were practical reasons for preferring a young man to live with Seigl through the winter months in this glacier-gouged upstate New York terrain where the weather could be treacherous.

  And so he began to make inquiries. Hesitantly at first, even shyly. Seigl was a large bewhiskered gregarious-seeming man who in fact prized his independence, even his aloneness. Joshua Seigl? Hiring an assistant? To live in his house . . . ? Word spread quickly in Carmel Heights, he knew. He hated to imagine himself talked-of, even without malice. Always he’d been self-sustaining, self-sufficient. As a writer he’d never applied for a grant. He had never accepted a permanent teaching position at a university because he’d felt, early on, the powerful attraction of teaching, as an emotional substitute for writing. (The curious mesmerizing intensity of teaching! A brightly lighted space to shield us from the darkness surrounding.) Seigl wasn’t a vain man and yet: he’d long taken pride in resisting the efforts of well-intentioned others to make him less alone.

  “Join you? Why?”

  A question he’d kept to himself.

  Yet now he was weakening, now a new alarming phase of his life had begun. Yes, he would hire an assistant: ideally, a graduate student in classics. Since Seigl’s project was Virgil, someone who knew Latin. The assistant might also help with household accounts, pay bills. Do secretarial work, filing, computer processing. (The computer screen had begun to dazzle Seigl’s eyes. The luminous afterimage quivered in his brain through nights of disturbed sleep.) If things worked out, the assistant might live in guest quarters on the ground floor of Seigl’s house . . .

  Seigl made discreet inquiries among his wide, casual acquaintance in the area: administrators and faculty at the University of Rochester, at the Jesuit-run College of Mount Carmel, at the Eastminister Music Conservatory where, since his father’s death, he’d taken Karl Seigl’s place as a trustee. He didn’t wish to place a formal notice in any publication that would include his unlisted phone number or e-mail address, and he was even more reluctant to make inquiries through friends.

  His parents had died several years ago. This house wasn’t theirs, but Seigl’s maternal grandfather’s, which he’d inherited by default. Seigl and his older sister Jet were trust-fund beneficiaries of a family estate. The subject of finances embarrassed Seigl, and made him restless. His Marxist sympathies aroused him to a vague self-disapproval and yet: receiving an income freed him from any obsession with money-making. There was a purely romantic, unworldly quality to Seigl, his discomfort at being paid for his writing, for any expression of his “spirit.” For wasn’t writing a spiritual endeavor, in essence? It was conceived in the privacy of a man’s heart, and therefore had to be pure, uncontaminated by greed.

  Maybe, he’d lived too long alone.

  He dreaded his sister Jet hearing of his plan to hire an assistant, knowing how possessive she was of him, her younger brother whom she’d ignored while they were growing up. Joshua! Don’t let a stranger into your life, you know I am here for you.

  Jet’s language, which grated against Seigl’s ear, was taken from pop-culture almost exclusively. Her values, her relentless “enthusiasm.” Once Joshua Seigl had become well-known in intellectual circles, Jet had turned her basilisk-eyes upon him, greedy and yearning.

  Jet was self-named: “Jet Steadman-Seigl.” In fact, she’d been baptized in their mother’s Presbyterian church as “Mary Beth Seigl.” But this bland name lacked the manic glamor of “Jet Steadman-Seigl” and had to be cast off. (Steadman was their mother’s surname, one that signaled inherited money and social position in the Rochester area since the 1880s.)

  Their parents’ marriage, intensely romantic at the start, had been what is quaintly called “mixed.” That is, Protestant, Jew. Seigl’s full name was Joshua Moses Seigl. There was a name with character! He’d been named for his father’s father who had been a rich importer of leather goods in Munich, Germany, in the 1920s and 1930s; not many miles from the small rural town with the name, at that time innocuous, Dachau.

  THE DOORBELL
RANG, the first interviewee had arrived.

  Seigl sighed. “Good luck!”

  The young man was a twenty-six-year-old classics scholar who came highly, in fact lavishly recommended by the Jesuit president of the College of Mount Carmel. He was articulate and intelligent and knew Latin, Greek, German, French, and a “smattering” of Italian. Like one with exquisite taste in food forced to swallow something very coarse, he spoke with barely concealed disdain of doing “secretarial work” when required. A young man with brattish charm who reminded Seigl of himself at that age. Seigl admired the way he dared to court him with verbal thrusts and parries and disagreements on the relative merits of English translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid. Finally Seigl said, rising, “Thank you! Your opinions are impressive. May I see you to the door?”

  The second interviewee was more promising. Initially. A graduate student in twentieth-century European history at the University of Rochester who shook Seigl’s proffered hand with just the right degree of force and modesty. As if he’d practiced for this interview he gave precise answers to Seigl’s questions, while licking his lips nervously and staring at Seigl as if memorizing him. Seigl, annoyed, saw the young man’s eyes drift to a nearby bookshelf into which Seigl’s several books, in English and in foreign translations, in hardcover and paperback, had been crammed; there were copies of the recently reissued The Shadows stacked horizontally on the topmost shelf. At last the young man said, with that simpering little smile that invariably accompanies the asinine remark, “I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books, Dr. Seigl. But—”

  Seigl heard himself say briskly, as he rose from his chair, “And I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books either, Mr.—. May I see you to the door?”

  The next interviewee, who came highly recommended by a dean at the Eastminister Conservatory, was a short, compact, smiling and capable-seeming young man in his mid-twenties, a musician and composer who shook hands forthrightly with Seigl and murmured, “I’m honored, sir!” but, to Seigl’s relief, no more along those lines. Seigl quite liked him, and decided to hire him. Except within ten minutes he himself sabotaged the interview by provoking a quarrel on the merits of “traditional” and “postmodernist” music. Seigl said with curious zest, “Well! We have a clash of temperaments, I see. But thank you for dropping by.”

  There came then a perspiring fattish boy with acne and an attitude; an ash-blond Adonis with an insinuating, seductive manner who repeatedly called Seigl “doctor”; a young man with glittery greedy eyes and a wispy goatee who declared to Seigl almost immediately that he, too, was a novelist.

  “But not in your style, Mr. Seigl. More, like, minimalist.”

  Seigl smiled. “I see.”

  Next morning there came an unremarkable but sensible-seeming young man whom Seigl made up his mind to hire, who, when Seigl excused himself to answer a ringing phone, was accidentally glimpsed by Seigl via reflecting surfaces in his study leaning over to peer at framed photographs on Seigl’s desk; these were only photographs of Seigl’s immediate family, yet Seigl reacted as if insulted. He strode to the desk and turned the photographs away from the young man’s eyes, in a gesture so abrupt and clumsy it alarmed him and left him short of breath. “I’m sorry. The interview is over. Thank you for your time. I’ll see you to the door.”

  When he returned, he put the photographs away in a desk drawer.

  It pained Seigl to expose his house, his cluttered study, his intimate life to the roving eyes of strangers. Maybe it was a mistake to hire an assistant after all . . .

  “But I must. I have no choice. It’s time.”

  Seigl didn’t want to concede, it was more than time.

  For a flawed soul yearns to be healed: in secular times, we require the stranger to complete us, where we lack the strength to complete ourselves. And so each time the doorbell rang, Seigl’s foolish heart leapt.

  There came, on the third day of interviews, a young man with the surname Essler, which Seigl knew to be the same name as that of relatives of his father, in Europe. The Esslers had been a large Munich family of the “assimilated” bourgeoisie who had, like the Seigls, mostly died at Dachau. If the young man knew this, and knew of the possible connection to Joshua Seigl, he gave no sign.

  Yet Essler introduced himself frankly as an admirer of Joshua Seigl. “I’m honored to meet you, sir, if—very nervous!” His handshake was both diffident and eager. His eyelids quivered over avid, staring eyes not unlike (Seigl supposed) his own. He was shorter than Seigl by several inches but strongly built; he looked like a hiker. He told Seigl that he was a third-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Rochester, Religious Studies, writing a dissertation on post-Holocaust literature, and that of all the material he’d encountered, both European and American, The Shadows remained to him the most haunting because it was elliptical and poetic, rarely direct. He said, “In the world you’ve created we see the shadows of things, not the things themselves. We are forced to imagine what the writer doesn’t reveal. We become collaborators in shadows . . .”

  Seigl sat stony-faced. All this, so very close to what he’d intended in that novel.

  Essler, mistaking Seigl’s silence for complicity, continued eagerly. “It’s almost as if, though we aren’t present, we are remembering that we were, once. A long time ago and yet everything seems to be happening right now. As if—”

  Seigl heard himself say, “Bullshit. Maybe the novel’s ‘poetic’ language is a willful distortion of what wasn’t poetic. Maybe the author didn’t know enough actual history. Maybe the whole thing was a mistake.”

  Essler blinked at Seigl as if he’d kicked him.

  The Shadows was Seigl’s only work of fiction, and his only book to have found a substantial readership. Through the years it had sold beyond a million copies: impressive for a densely wrought literary novel, if not very impressive in the realm of mega best-sellers. Seigl had long been deeply ambivalent about it. If a stranger had written The Shadows, he would have found it fascinating, seductive; since his younger, callow self had written it, he could hardly be deceived. No artist can deceive himself! In the years of distancing himself from his early success Seigl had blurted out startling things but he’d never actually said the novel might be a mistake, and he was red-faced now, embarrassed and annoyed at himself. For here was the most unconscionable sort of vanity.

  Somehow, Seigl was on his feet. Looming over the startled younger man who was still seated, awkwardly. Seigl was a tall bearish man with springy dark hair, untidy whiskers, and shiny slightly protuberant eyes so dark as to appear black. Friends spoke of him behind his back as Rasputin: an avalanche about to slide.

  Yet the avalanche never slid. Not yet.

  Essler got to his feet, confused. Still he smiled, like a son who has been ambiguously rebuked. Was the interview over? So suddenly? So abruptly? Had he offended the very man he so admired? How had he offended?

  Seigl said grudgingly, as if relenting, “Hell. One never knows. ‘Art’ is the easy strategy, life and history are too hard. Even the repudiation of art can be an easy way out.”

  Whatever this meant, Essler didn’t get it. He said, apologetically, “I—I didn’t mean to be so personal, Dr. Seigl. It’s just that I first read The Shadows when I was thirteen, I was extremely impressionable, and it made a powerful impression on me. I didn’t read it, I memorized it, practically! You see, I was only just becoming aware of the Holocaust, about which my parents had never spoken, and my—heritage.” (Heritage! Seigl grimaced.) “I asked my parents about relatives of my father’s family, the Esslers, who’d died in Dachau. They were upset and, at first, didn’t want to tell me much, but . . .” Seigl was staring at the floor. He said nothing to encourage more of this. Truly, he didn’t want to hear! When Essler went on to speak of Seigl’s play Counter/Mime, Seigl’s translations from Greek and Latin poetry, Seigl’s essays collected in Visions of the Apocalypse, Seigl stood frowning and somber, ominously silent. He was dismayed, liking
this young man so much. We may be distantly related. Cousins? Not impossible.

  Sure, he was falling for Essler. The kid was obviously superior morally and spiritually to the arrogant youth Joshua Seigl had been at that age. Seigl wanted badly to grip Essler’s tremulous hands to still them and assure him, Fine! You’re hired. I’m not a great man but it’s fine, I will hire you.

  Yet thinking, no. Impossible. He means to write about me. He’d devour me alive.

  Mid-sentence, Essler fell silent. He saw that the interview was over. He wouldn’t be offered the job. His boyish face stiffened, suffused with hurt.

  Seigl led him back to the front door. He could think of no banal pleasantries. He could not meet the young man’s eye. Yes, he knew he might have offered to give Essler a copy of one of his books, inscribed to him, but the possibility was repugnant, such vanity! His vision swam. On an edge of a carpet in the foyer Seigl tripped and lost his balance for a split second, and Essler caught immediately at his elbow.

  “Dr. Seigl? Are you—?”

  Seigl drew away. For certainly he was all right. He said curtly, “Will you latch the gate, Mr. Essler, on your way out?”

  Seigl tossed away Essler’s name, telephone number, address and a reprint of an essay by Essler on “post-Holocaust literature” that had appeared in an academic journal, so there would be no temptation to summon him back.

  NEXT CAME AN adjunct instructor at Genesee County Community College whose specialty was computer technology. A burly young man whom Seigl was determined to hire and yet: the way in which he enunciated “Doctor Seigl”—sounding like “Doktor See-gull”—set Seigl’s teeth on edge. You could wonder if this character was mocking him. Seigl brought the interview to an abrupt end by saying, “Excuse me. I’m afraid my ‘doctorate’ is only honorary. Especially, I am not Herr Doktor.”