Also known as: Rosie the Riveter (my comparison). Dia’s former lover (Dia’s disclosure)
Occupation: Tattoo artist at Norman. One of the very few who can execute the same design using both hand-poking and an electric machine.
First appears: Chapter 002
Status: Unchanged.
Usually seen with: Denim overalls several sizes too large, a white T-shirt, and hair so violently red that it may have been dyed in the aftermath of an industrial accident. Not a single tattoo.
Her philosophy of life, as far as I could reconstruct it
Grace moves with the economy of someone who decided long ago that unnecessary gestures are an insult to the muscles. Her patience is inexhaustible. Her endurance belongs less to human physiology than to industrial engineering; she can work for hours without showing fatigue, as though her metabolism had been subcontracted to a German manufacturer. She does not have a single tattoo. I consider this an excellent professional qualification. I have always been suspicious of people who sell suffering while displaying no evidence of having purchased any themselves.
What I think she thinks of me
Before she agreed to my second project, she made me declare, in a voice loud enough for the whole studio to hear, that Grace would execute it as she saw fit, because I, Andrei Jebeleanu, am an erotomaniac entirely devoid of imagination, with the pain tolerance of a Victorian debutante who bursts into tears at the mere sight of a needle. I complied. A few clients looked up. Grace nodded for me to continue. That, more or less, is what she thinks of me.
What I think of her
Dia had told me she was unexpected. I had imagined someone pale, angular and exquisitely undernourished, with the physique of a Gothic cathedral. Grace had considerably more in common with the cathedral’s foundations. She tattooed Dia’s design across my back in sessions of seven or eight hours, during which my nervous system discovered colors that had no business existing. When Dia disappeared, I went to Norman and asked Grace. She listened without stopping work. She knew nothing. Later, we discovered that we were compatible in other respects as well; our encounters occasionally resembled demonstrations of jiu-jitsu. It was a remarkably practical arrangement. It helped me survive the second tattoo.
Things she said, usually holding a tattoo machine
“Good. Now that you’ve frightened my clients and established, beyond reasonable doubt, the nature of your psychological difficulties, I’ll tell you what we’re doing.”
“Hey, you idiot! This is a tattoo studio, not a brothel!”
“The man’s in indescribable pain, and his underwear is hosting a merengue competition.”
“She’s imaginary, Jebeleanu.”
Andrei’s footnote: Twenty years later, Dia asked me how Grace was. “Unchanged,” I said. The word came out too quickly.
