Part 14 (1/2)

By then, Clare knew me well enough to let me listen. She didn't talk about unrelated matters during Steve Reich any more than she would have during All About Eve All About Eve . When the record was finished, I said, ”Whew.” . When the record was finished, I said, ”Whew.”

”I thought you'd like him,” she said.

”Oh, yeah. He's great. He's just, you know-”

I tried to finish the sentence by approximating the shape of the music with my hands. I don't know if she understood what I was trying to tell her.

She did shake her head and say, ”Bobby.”

”Uh-huh?”

”Nothing. You really are a fanatic, aren't you?”

I shrugged. I couldn't tell where my fanaticism placed me in her view of the world. I didn't know whether to claim it or deny it. I looked at the rug pattern between my feet.

”Do you know what I think?” she said. ”Can I be absolutely honest with you?”

”Uh-huh,” I said, curious about absolute honesty and fearing it with my whole heart.

”I think you need a new haircut, is what I think.”

It was only an outer suggestion, a question of cosmetics rather than personal insufficiency. ”Really?” I said.

”I'm talking about a little truth-in-packaging here. To be perfectly frank, you don't quite look look like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's whole life.” like yourself. And if you walk around looking like someone other than who you are, you could end up getting the wrong job, the wrong friends, who knows what-all. You could end up with somebody else's whole life.”

I shrugged again, and smiled. ”This is my life,” I said. ”It doesn't seem like the wrong one.”

”But this is just the beginning. You're not going to sit around this apartment cooking and cleaning forever.”

”Right,” I said, though truthfully I had drifted halfway into the conviction that that was exactly what I'd do.

”And, sweetie, that Bee Gees haircut is only going to mislead people. Do you know what I'm saying?”

”Uh-huh. Okay. Maybe tomorrow I'll go to a, you know, haircut place.”

My stomach crawled. Would I need clown-colored hair to have a New York life? If I let that happen, I wouldn't fit back into Cleveland, or into Ned and Alice's Arizona house. All my backup options would snap shut.

”I could do it,” she said. ”Free of charge.”

”Really?”

I could tell from her laughter that my every doubt had sounded through that single word.

”I went to hairdressing school, if you can believe that,” she said. ”I've still got my scissors, I can give you a new look right now. What do you say?”

I paused. Then I decided. It was only hair. I could grow it back to its present state and reapply for my Ohio job; I did not have to lose the thread of my old life.

”Okay,” I said. ”Sure.”

She had me take my s.h.i.+rt off, which was the first embarra.s.sment. 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 a.s.sert 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 s.h.i.+rtless 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, ”Voila . Come into the bathroom and see the result.” . Come into the bathroom and see the result.”

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 c.o.ke. We listened to Steve Reich again, and watched a rerun of Mary Tyler Moore Mary Tyler Moore . I found that my revised hair did not affect my way of sitting in a room, or percolate down into my old uncertain thoughts. I was relieved and disappointed. . I found that my revised hair did not affect my way of sitting in a room, or percolate down into my old uncertain thoughts. I was relieved and disappointed.

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 s.h.i.+rt. 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.” ”h.e.l.lo, 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 s.h.i.+mmered 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 s.h.i.+rtsleeves 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 s.h.i.+rt sway gently, six floors above the concrete.