“What I think,” she said, “is that Maury Winters isn’t going to have to worry about getting paid.”
nine
It wasn’t what she’d expected.
It was an apartment, first of all, on the fifteenth floor of a thirty-story postwar apartment building on Tenth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. She’d known as much, really, but had somehow pictured the place as a ground-floor hole-in-the-wall with a hand-lettered sign over the door, T*A*T*T*O*O P*A*R*L*O*R in curlicued, over-elaborate script, and a window full of tattoo art and needles and scary-looking equipment. Inside it would be cramped and claustrophobic, with nothing more comfortable to sit on than those three-legged stools they gave you in Ethiopian restaurants.
And Medea would be a sort of cross between a pirate and a gypsy, oily and squat and swarthy, with a head scarf and a gold tooth and a trace of a mustache, perched on a stool of her own and assessing her with a cataract-clouded eye, sizing her up, deciding whether to pierce her flesh as requested or drug her and sell her into white slavery.
And of course it was nothing like that. The building had a concierge, resplendent in maroon livery, who called upstairs before directing her to an elevator. Medea, waiting in the doorway of 15-H, was about Susan’s height, with a long oval Modigliani face and almond-shaped eyes. She was wearing a simple white sleeveless shift that stopped at her knees, and she had calves like a dancer’s and arms like a tennis player’s.
“You’re Susan,” she said.
“Susan Pomerance.”
“I’m Medea.” Her voice was low, and her speech at once unaccented and foreign-sounding. An exotic creature, Susan thought, and followed her into the apartment, which turned out to be a textbook example of minimalism — eggshell walls, pale beige wall-to-wall broadloom carpet, and, along the walls, a couple of built-in ledges covered with the same carpeting as the floor and equipped — ooh, a sumptuous touch — with beige throw pillows. Overhead there was some track lighting, and, on the wall to your left as you walked in, a single monochromatic unframed canvas three feet by four feet, just one big yellow-brown rectangle. It was not artless, it had texture and tone that indicated the artist had labored over it, but the whole business was so utterly different from what she’d expected that she burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and covered her mouth with her hand.
“It’s the color,” Medea said. “Primal, wouldn’t you say? I probably smeared mine on the wall myself, but I never could have made such a neat job of it.”
“My God, it’s baby-shit brown. I hadn’t even thought of that.”
“Then why did you laugh?”
“Because I was expecting a gypsy souk,” she said, “though I don’t guess you find many of them fifteen floors up. And because I’m scared stiff, I suppose. I’ve had my ears pierced, of course, but this is different.”
“Of course it is,” Medea said, and reached out to touch Susan’s earlobe. It took her a moment to recall which earrings she was wearing. Teardrops, lapis set in gold. They’d been a gift, from and to herself, on her last birthday.
Medea’s earrings were simple gold studs. More minimalism, Susan thought.
The almond-shaped eyes — their irises, she saw now, were a vivid green, which pretty much had to be contacts, but who could say for sure with this unique specimen? The eyes took her measure, sized her up. “Scared stiff,” she said, as if the phrase were one Susan had invented. “But excited as well, I would say.”
She felt a pulse in her earlobe where Medea had touched her. Was that even possible? Was there a blood vessel there that could have a pulse?
“A little,” she said.
“You want your nipple pierced.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“And what is it you fear? The pain?”
“Is it very painful?”
“You’ll feel it,” Medea said.
Her complexion was darkly golden, though some of that might be from the sun. She looked like a woman who spent a lot of time in the sun. But there was also the suggestion of a mix of races, to the point where race disappeared. Asian, African, European, swirled in a blender.
“I think,” Medea said, “that you’d be disappointed if there were no pain. But then what exactly is pain? I’ve heard it said it’s any sensation we make wrong. Do you like hot food?”
“Hot food?”
“Spicy, not thermally hot. Picante rather than caliente. Curry, chili, three peppers in a Szechuan restaurant, five stars in a Thai one.”
Was this a test? “The hotter the better.”
“The person who insists on bland food,” Medea said, “experiences the identical sensation you do when she puts a chili pepper in her mouth. But, instead of savoring it, she finds it painful and unpleasant. She’s afraid it’s going to burn her mouth, or make her sick, or, I suppose, kill her. She makes it wrong.”
Contacts or not, the green eyes were extraordinary, their gaze compelling. They held Susan’s own eyes and kept her from glancing down at Medea’s breasts. She couldn’t help wondering if the woman’s nipples were pierced. Her ears were, of course, once each in their lobes, but she saw no nose ring, no other visible piercings.
No tattoos, either. None that showed, anyway.
Maybe she wasn’t into that. Maybe she was one who did, not one who got done. Were there tops and bottoms in the world of body piercing?
Who would pierce the piercer?
Two weeks ago her part-time assistant, Chloe, had shown up at the gallery with a loopier-than-usual expression on her face. She looked as though she knew a secret, and it was a good one.
Susan noticed right away, but had no time to waste wondering what had the girl looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. In a pinch, she could probably guess what Chloe might have swallowed, with the choices narrowed down to illegal substances and bodily fluids. Or the occasional hot fudge sundae; Chloe, while by no means fat, had clearly escaped the heartbreak of anorexia.
But she had a string of phone calls to make, and she had the photos of Emory Allgood’s work to go over, most of which were fine, but a few would have to be redone, and she made notes for the photographer, and Lois would complain, as usual, but would reshoot as requested, also as usual.
The sculptures were in storage; she’d booked an artist who owned a van and consequently doubled as a mover, and he’d rounded up a couple of auxiliary schleppers in paint-stained jeans, and somehow they’d found the house on Quincy Street just off Classon Avenue. She wasn’t sure about the neighborhood, whether they were in Fort Greene or Clinton Hill or Bed-Stuy, but the address turned out to be a fine old four-story limestone row house, a little rundown but a long way from falling apart, and the Barron family had a whole floor, and Emory Allgood, the eccentric uncle, had a large room at the rear, overlooking the garden.
It had been filled with his constructions, his sculptures, and they’d overflowed into the rest of the apartment. “I’m just glad to be getting these out of here,” Reginald’s mother had said, “except I suspect I’m gone to miss them, you know? You get used to seeing something, and then it be gone, and you miss it.”
Reginald had assured his mom that Uncle Emory would be making more, and indeed she’d barely met him, a wild-eyed, wild-haired little man, all skin and bones and knobby wrists and a bumpy forehead, who’d grinned and mumbled and then scooted past her, taking an empty laundry cart with him, and bumping down the stairs with it. Out looking for more materials, Reginald had assured her, and eager to get to work on more projects.