“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”
She had me take my shirt off, which was the first embarrassment. I was not in trim or imposing shape. I looked exactly like someone who’d worked in a bakery. But Clare had already switched over to a crisp hairdresser’s manner, and did not let her attention stray below my collarbone. She told me in a firmly professional voice to soak my head under the kitchen faucet. Then she put a towel over my shoulders and sat me in a chair in the middle of the living-room floor.
I told her, “The barber at home always just trimmed a little off the sides.”
“Well, I’m preparing to do major surgery,” she said. “Do you trust me?”
“No,” I said, before the instinct to tell cooperative lies could assert itself.
She laughed. “Well, why should you? But just try and relax, okay? Let Momma take care of it.”
“Okay,” I said. I tried to make myself stop caring about what I looked like. As she started in with the scissors, I reminded myself that our lives are made of changes we can’t control. Letting little things happen is good practice. The scissors snipped close to my ear. Wet clumps of my hair, surprisingly dead and separate-looking, fell on the floor around me.
“Just keep going until you’re finished, okay?” I said. “I mean, I’m not going to look until you’re all through.”
“Perfect,” she said. She stopped cutting for a minute and put Van Morrison on, to help keep me calm.
She spent almost forty-five minutes on my haircut. I felt the warmth and the faint jasmine smell of her, the quick competent fingers on my scalp. I felt the tickle of her breath. Once it was started I’d have been glad to have the haircut go on all night—to never see my transformed head but just sit shirtless amid a growing pile of my own shed hair, with the crackle of Clare’s scented concentration hovering around me.
But then, finally, she was through. With a deep exhalation and a last snip at my temple she said, “
I let her lead me, though I knew the way well enough. I wanted to stay a little longer in the cooperative mode, with the state of my hair and my future taken out of my hands. She led me into the bathroom, stood me in front of the mirror, and turned on the overhead fixture.
“Ta-da,” she said. And there I was, blinking in the light.
She’d given me a crew cut. The sides were so short my scalp shone through, and the top was a single bristly shelf. Seeing my own face under that haircut, I got my first good look at myself from the outside. I had ears that were small and stingy, curled up on themselves. I had narrow glittering eyes, and a big nose that split at the tip, as if it were meant to be two smaller noses. Those features had always seemed inevitable. Now I saw how particular they were. Seeing my face in the harsh light, backed by white tiles, I might have been a relative called in to identify a body. If we have spirits that fly out when the system shuts down, this may be how we see our own vacated selves—with the same interest and horror we bring to an accident victim.
“Yow,” I said.
“You look wonderful,” she told me. “Give it a little time. I know it’s a shock at first. But trust me. You’re going to start turning heads around here.”
I just kept staring at the face in the mirror. If this was who I was supposed to be, I didn’t know how to do it. Clare might as well have taken me to a pay phone and told me to dial Jupiter.
She said we had to wait up for Jonathan, to show him the new me. I didn’t much like the idea of showing myself to Jonathan. I felt too foolish in my exposed vanity, my own willingness to be remade. Still, I agreed. As I’ve said, Clare had a musical effect on me. She entered my brain. I found myself not only doing what she wanted but losing track of where my desires ended and hers began.
While waiting for Jonathan, we did what had become our usual things. We made popcorn and worked our way through a six-pack of Diet Coke. We listened to Steve Reich again, and watched a rerun of
Jonathan got home after one. When we heard his key, Clare made me hide in the kitchen. “I’m going to sit here very normally,” she whispered. “I’ll keep him in the living room. After a few minutes, you just walk casually out.”
I was reluctant to perform that way. To spotlight my self-concern. But Clare was too big and bright-haired for me. I had a dim recollection of a birthday party at which an old man in a red nose and lettuce-colored wig plucked quarters from my ears and pulled a paper bouquet from inside my shirt. Yes, I’d pretended unhumiliated astonishment and delight.
So I went to the dark kitchen as Jonathan came through the door. I heard the porcine squeak of the hinges, and his simple conversation with Clare. “Hi, honey.” “Hello, dear.” “How’d it go?” “Cataclysmic. The usual.” They could sound more perfectly like a husband and wife than any couple I’d met. I understood how having a baby could come to seem like their logical next step.
I listened to them. Weak air-shaft light floated in through the window like fog. Clare’s mason jars full of herbs put out a dull grandmotherly gleam on the sill. They bore their names on paper labels, in her small spiky handwriting: foolscap, star anise, nettle.
I heard Jonathan ask, “Where’s Bobby?”
“Oh, he’s around somewhere,” she answered.
That would have been my cue. It was time to walk out as if nothing unusual had happened. What I did, though, was stay in the kitchen. I got distracted by the pale darkness, the refrigerator’s hum and the jars of spices meant to cure headaches, insomnia, and bad luck. I might have been a body buried in a brick wall, eavesdropping on the simple business of the living. It came to me that death itself could be a more distant form of participation in the continuing history of the world. Death could be like this, a simultaneous presence and absence while your friends continued to chat among the lamps and furniture about someone who was no longer you. For the first time in years I felt my brother’s presence. I felt it, unmistakably—the purpose and somethingness of him, the Carlton quality that lingered after voice and flesh and all other bodily consequences were gone. I felt him in that kitchen as surely as I’d felt him one cold white afternoon in the graveyard, years ago, when a brilliant future shimmered beyond the headstones, beyond the curve of the earth. He’s here, I said to myself, and I knew it was true. I had worked up a habit of not thinking about him; of treating myself as if I’d been born into Ned and Alice’s house after our father died. Now I thought of them all, dead in Cleveland. Right now there would be wild daisies on their graves, and dandelions gone to fluff. My harmonica, which I’d tucked into Carlton’s breast pocket at the funeral home, would have slipped through his ribs and clunked onto the coffin boards. I was living my own future and my brother’s lost one as well. I represented him here just as he represented me there, in some unguessable other place. His move from life to death might resemble my stepping into the kitchen—into its soft nowhere quality and foggy hum. I breathed the dark air. If I had at that moment a sense of calm kindly death while my heart beat and my lungs expanded, he might know a similar sense of life in the middle of his ongoing death. Outside, a line of laundry hung in the air shaft. Empty shirtsleeves dangled. I saw that as myself and my brother combined—in both our names—I could pursue a life and a surprising future. I could feed him in his other world by being both myself and him in this one. I stood in that kitchen while Clare threw me one entrance line after another. I watched a white dress shirt sway gently, six floors above the concrete.
Finally, she came for me. She asked if I was all right, and I told her I was fine. I told her I was wonderful. When she asked what was going on, I gestured helplessly in the direction of the hanging clothes. She made a clucking noise, thinking I’d suffered a simple attack of shyness, and led me out by the hand.
Jonathan shrieked at the sight of my hair. He said I looked dangerous. “A Bobby for the eighties,” Clare proudly announced, and I didn’t disagree with her. Although Jonathan was exhausted, we took my hair out for a walk in the Village. We had drinks at a gay place on St. Marks and danced together, all three of us. I might have broken through a pane of glass and reached the party, after years of sitting in a graveyard thinking I was alive. When we got tired of dancing I insisted on walking down to the pier on the Hudson, to watch the neon coffee drip from the big neon cup. Then Clare and Jonathan got in a cab for home and I kept walking. I walked all over New York. I went down to Battery Park, where Miss Liberty raised her small light from the harbor, and I walked up to the line of horse carriages waiting hopefully for extravagant drunks and romantics outside the Plaza. I was on Fifth Avenue in the Twenties when the sky started to lighten. A bakery truck rolled by, the driver singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” in a loud off-key voice, and I sang along with him for half a block. I suppose at heart it was the haircut that did it; that exploded the ordinary order of things and showed me the possibilities that had been there all along,
