Small Town

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.

And all the work at the Quincy Street house was now tucked safely away in her storage locker a few blocks from the gallery, all but one piece that, finally, Mrs. Barron had decided she couldn’t bear to part with. Susan could see why the woman liked it. It was the most conventional and readily accessible piece of the lot, and for that reason it was the one she herself was most willing to leave behind.

Her uncle’s very first piece, Mae Barron had said, and Susan could believe it. The poor devil was just starting to go nuts then, or just beginning to figure out how to make something out of his craziness. He’d come a long ways since then.

She took care of business, and when she came up for air she saw that Chloe still had the same expression on her face. “All right,” she told the girl. “You’re dying to tell me something. What is it?”

“I got another one.”

“Another—?”

Chloe put thumb and forefinger together, as if gripping a needle, and thrust forward. “Another piercing,” she said.

How was anybody supposed to notice? The child already had both ears pierced to the hilt, not just the lobes but all up around the outside of the ear, with a little gold circlet for each hole. And, inevitably, there was a stud in her nose, a little gold bead, which she could only hope Chloe would live to regret. Because one fine day, barring an overdose of Ecstasy or a losing bout with some virulent new sexually transmitted disease, young Chloe would wake up and find herself a fifty-year-old woman with fallen arches and varicose veins and a fucking ring in her nose.

She studied the girl, who maintained her enigmatic-and-glad-of-it expression. What had been added? Another gold circlet? Who could tell, and how could that be such a source of impish delight? There was still just the one ring in her nose — and thank God and all the angels for that — and she couldn’t see any evidence of any further facial mutilation. Nothing in her eyebrows; she recalled one sweet young thing with multiple eyebrow piercings, each fitted with a little gold hoop, and you found yourself waiting for someone to add a little rod and hang curtains. No safety pin through the cheek and—

God, not a tongue stud? Those made her slightly sick to think about, and didn’t they thicken your speech, or get in the way when you ate?

“Not your tongue,” she said, and Chloe extended the organ in question, and no, it was whole and untouched, and, the way it stuck out, just the least bit provocative. The girl retracted it just before Susan would have had to tell her to do so.

“That’s a relief,” she said. “Okay, I give up. Whatever it is, I can’t see it.”