I was sure they’d found a way to describe it. And unlike the rest of my appearance it was one thing I could easily change. I wondered briefly if they had any hair dye around here—but it was a spa, not a salon, and with a principally male clientele, I couldn’t imagine they’d have much demand for it. Then I remembered the man who’d exited the steam room when I’d been getting my tour, the one with the shaved head.
Well, if I wanted to look different.
I found Lisa, back in the meditation room. I asked her if they had any scissors, made scissor gestures with my hands. She returned a minute later with two pairs, one a miniature from a manicure set, the other a pair of barber’s shears, the sort with the extra curved bit that hooks onto your pinky. I took them both.
Standing in front of the mirror, I lifted my hair in fist-fuls, cut it off as close to the scalp as I could. When I was done, I looked like a cancer survivor halfway through chemo. I hid the patchwork clumps of stubble under a thick layer of shaving cream, unwrapped a new razor, and went at it with slow, careful strokes.
I’d never shaved my head before. You can say all you like about Michael Jordan making it sexy, and before him Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas, but on me it looked terrible, and not just because I kept nicking myself. Halfway through, I wished I’d never started. But it was a little late to back out then.
I stuck my head under the shower, washed off, looked in the mirror and attacked the few spots I’d missed. When it was done, I toweled off, slapped on some lotion, and turned away from my reflection. This wasn’t about beauty. This was about survival.
I looked at the clock again. Half past two. Still lots of time to kill.
I went into the steam room. My lenses fogged up immediately and when I took my glasses off it was no better—I couldn’t see anything through the thick white mist. But that was good. It meant no one else who might happen to walk in at three or four or five in the morning could see me either.
I settled in. I’d stay as long as they’d let me. I wasn’t bothering anyone, they had more than two hundred dollars of my money, the place was empty—they had no reason to kick me out anytime soon. And when they finally did, I thought, running my palm along my strange, naked scalp, when I showed my face on the street again, I wouldn’t be showing the same face the cops were looking for. It’d take two looks, not one, to recognize me.
It wasn’t much. But it would have to do.
The Food Emporium was where I’d been told to expect it. I looked around at all the buildings along Second Avenue as the cab pulled up to the corner. Lots of three-and four- and five-story holdovers from the turn of the century—the previous century—when this whole area, the east fifties near the river, had been an Irish slum. Back before the El came down, back before John D. Rockefeller bought up 17 acres of land that had once held slaughterhouses and, with no sense of irony whatsoever, donated it to the United Nations to use for their headquarters, certainly long before Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn and Kurt Vonnegut had decided the little buildings would make quaint and comfortable private residences, they’d been home to brawling generations of workingmen and their mates. Hints of this history still lingered—on this one block alone, a man with a taste for whiskey could bend an elbow at Jameson’s or Murphy’s or Clancy’s or the St. James Gate Publick House. Or he could buy microgreens and ten flavors of mustard at Food Emporium. You pick your poison.
I was wearing a new shirt—two new shirts, actually, a button-down in white polyester over a cotton wifebeater, each only $4.99 at the import/export store closest to Vivacia. I’d dropped my old shirt in a cardboard vegetable box that was waiting for garbage pickup at the curb and stepped out into the street to flag down the first cab I’d seen. It was just past noon. I’d managed to stay at Vivacia till the lunch-hour crowd began showing up; by the time the staff had started hinting I’d overstayed my welcome it had been time for me to leave anyway. I’d snatched a bit more sleep in the meditation room in the early hours of the morning, and though I wasn’t well rested, exactly, I felt as though I ought to be able to face the day.
But the first thing I saw when I stepped out of the cab shot that all to hell.
It was a newspaper vending box, the front page of today’s
The
I dropped a quarter in the
At least, I told myself, I’d had a full head of hair in the photos they’d run. And my old glasses, with the thicker, darker plastic frames. Now I wore sleek little wire rims and had a shaved head, and nobody could possibly tell I was the same person they’d read about over their corn flakes and toast. Jesus.
The sidewalk was packed, swarming with office workers on lunchtime errands, and every face I looked in looked back at me with what I was suddenly sure was a knowing stare, as if they were all mentally comparing me to the mugshot they’d seen in the paper. I tried to keep my face averted; but how, in a crowd like this? A woman walked past, talking furtively into her cell phone, and I couldn’t help the paranoid impression that she was talking about me, telling an eager 911 operator where I could be found. I ducked into a payphone, grateful for the small degree of privacy its narrow metal walls afforded, and dialed the phone number I’d gotten from Rodeo the night before. It rang three times before a woman said, “Hello?”
I struggled to remember the name I’d given last night. I couldn’t. “I have an appointment with Sharon at one,” I said.
“Is this Douglas?” Douglas. That was it.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“Right here,” I said. “At the Food Emporium. Where the woman I spoke to said I should—”
“On the payphone?”
“That’s right.”
“I need you to turn around, honey.”
I turned, reluctantly. The building across the way had sixteen windows. No telling which one she was in. No telling who might be looking out the others.
“All right,” she said after a pause that probably lasted less no more than a few seconds but felt endless. “You’ll go to 260 East 51st, ring the bell for 1FW.”
“1FW,” I said.
“See you,” she said and hung up.
For a moment I thought about whether I should go, whether it was too risky. What if she had read the paper this morning? But it didn’t take me long to realize that the risks were much worse for me out here. If nothing else, given what she did for a living, she’d be less likely to call the cops than the people around me now.
I found the building and she buzzed me in. She was waiting just inside, standing in the doorway of the front, west apartment. She was about my height, slim, with brown hair tied back in a tight ponytail and a spray of freckles across her cheeks. She looked like she was in her late thirties—maybe even early forties, though that could just have been the toll the job had taken on her. She had on a thin summer dress and her nipples were tenting the fabric thanks to the cold air I’d let in from the street.
I waited for a moment of recognition, a sign of fear, some indication of danger, but I didn’t see any.
“Sharon?” I said.
She held a finger to her lips and didn’t say anything till she’d ushered me inside and closed the door behind me. Even then she spoke softly. “Sorry, I just don’t want to bother the neighbors. We’ve had some complaints.”
