Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

“I have to phone Lindquist.”

“Of course, but later. Even next week the bad news will not be too late.”

“How do you know I have bad news?”

“As a mathematician, I don’t hope to know what you will say. As a man, I know everything. Please,” said Chertoff, taking Nachman’s arm, drawing him away toward the bar. Nachman didn’t resist.

Chertoff asked what Nachman would have, then ordered. Shoulder to shoulder at the bar, with drinks before them, Nachman felt an intimacy he needed very much, and yet it seemed he was being subjected to it, somewhat like a child, as if for his own good. Neither of them spoke for a minute. Then Nachman said, “I should tell him. Do you agree?”

He turned to look directly at Chertoff’s face. Chertoff, looking with equal directness at Nachman, produced a ferocious smile, as if he’d been given permission to be fully himself. His eyes, in the smiling pressure, narrowed with catlike satisfaction. His lips swept wide over the large, thrusting teeth. He said, “Nachman, I don’t give a shit.”

“You’re some friend, Chertoff.”

“A good friend. I think only what you think — which is that you should solve the problem.”

“When I was young … maybe.”

“Do you have a better reason to live?”

“What a question! It reminds me, I dreamed during Lindquist’s lecture. Only a few seconds, but I dreamed that I was about to kill him. He begged me to spare his life. He promised me his slave girl.”

“I am touched that you are — how do you say it? — sharing this dream with me.”

Nacham shrugged. “You know what it means?”

“The spoils of war, Nachman. It is about the spoils of war. Remember the Iliad? Since childhood I have loved and yearned for Briseis. You know the poem is even more wonderful in Russian than in Homeric Greek.” Chertoff boomed the opening lines in Russian. Heads turned along the bar to stare at him. Then he whispered, “Nachman, you must take the slave girl.”

“I must?”

“And you must kill Lindquist, too.”

“It’s not in my nature.”

“You have no choice, my friend,” said Chertoff as he put an arm around Nachman’s shoulders, and drew him close, and kissed him on the cheek in the Russian manner.

NACHMAN HAD THE BLUES.Maybe it was the weather, cold and gray, unusual for Santa Monica; or maybe it was a change in Nachman’s bodily chemistry, or maybe it was a psychological problem below consciousness. Maybe it was just being over fifty, or the fact that he needed a haircut. Two months since the last one. Nachman telephoned Felicity Trang.

She said, “Felicity Hair Salon.”

Nachman said, “I want to make an appointment.”

“We have free time at noon. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

“Which girl you want?”

“I want Felicity.”

“O.K. What name?”

“Nachman.”

“How you spell?”

Nachman spelled his name.

“Oh, Dr. Nachman. How nice.”

“Not doctor. Nachman is good enough. I’ll see you at noon, Felicity.”

“Yes. Thank you, Not doctor, ha, ha, ha …”

Felicity’s laughter, excessive yet pleasing, continued to stir Nachman after he put down the phone. He already felt better. A degree of anxiety mixed with his pleasure, but there was no doubt that he felt better; hopeful. He imagined himself tipped back in the chair, surrendering his head, a hairy bundle of complexities, to Felicity’s ministrations.

There were other ways of dealing with low spirits, but Nachman wouldn’t take drugs and rarely exercised. He’d told himself more than once that Felicity cost less, for the same amount of time, than a psychiatrist. She compared well with any doctor. A haircut was a visible, tangible result, and Nachman would feel reborn. Hair grew back, but psychological problems also returned. In essence, nobody changed. Don’t think that way, he told himself, teetering at the edge of a mental hole. Walk briskly. He was almost there, and looked forward to the shampoo. He loved the shampoo. To Nachman, it was worth the price of the whole haircut. Then would come the skull massage. Before the haircut itself, before she picked up her comb and scissors, Felicity always stood beside his chair, her shoulder pressed gently to his. Together they looked at Nachman’s face in the mirror and Felicity asked how Nachman would like her to cut his hair. Her voice was sweetly deferential, her expression rapt with concern to please. She was more than a barber. Like a sister, a confidant, or even a lover, she was involved. Nachman always said the same thing, slightly choked by self-consciousness:

“Not too short.”

“This long you like?” she responded, always touching the top of his ear, and ever so lightly fingering it.

“Yes, about right there.”

“Layered?”

“Yes. Small scissors. No electric clippers.”

“Oh no, no machines. Only small scissors and comb. Comb O.K.? Ha, ha.”

Nachman felt gooseflesh along his arms, and then a general surge of pleasure, like a mass of troops racing across a field, overwhelming their enemy, anxiety, vanquishing it. The battle of such emotions, thought Nachman, is what a man feels when he is about to get married. In short, approximately every two months, Nachman married Felicity Trang for about forty-five minutes.

Caressed by the rush and swirl of warm water, head cradled in Felicity’s hands, the delicate perfume of shampoo, and then the massage with Felicity’s strong fingers, and then the sweet seriousness of her voice:

“You like to part your hair on the right?”

Nachman opened the door and entered the barbershop. Four Vietnamese women barbers were at work. Felicity was free, sitting at the cash register near the door. She smiled at Nachman and stood right up. He followed her to a chair, sat down, and abandoned himself to the ritual, becoming oblivious to everyone in the barbershop except Felicity and himself; and time was abolished for Nachman. He imagined their marriage, mediated by his hair, as heavenly, an eternal condition, though he knew, when Felicity fashioned the ultimate shape of his hair with a comb and a blow dryer, the marriage was over. He also knew he wouldn’t look good. She was a terrible barber.

To know the consequences of an action is one thing. To eschew the action is another. Who would smoke cigarettes if this wasn’t true, let alone have casual sex — thought Nachman somewhat irrelevantly — Nachman who, despite his susceptibility to women, was a strict observer of limits. He didn’t fool around. For forty-five minutes every two months — you couldn’t call it fooling around — Nachman was in no danger of compromising himself. Better to burn was Nachman’s motto. A haircut was inconsequential, erotic, not sexual. Thus tumbled the thoughts of a serious being. By pleasure deranged, maybe, but no longer depressed.

In Nachman’s life, Felicity was an anomaly — a silliness — depending on how you thought about it, but should Nachman think about it? Nachman thought too much about everything; even in the throes of his abandonment he couldn’t entirely stop thinking, lest he die or cease to exist or relinquish his grip on the real. Not to think would be like an astronaut separated from his rocketship, adrift in space with nowhere to go and no means of propulsion. Nachman had seen that condition often in a person’s eyes.

When Nachman explained how he wanted his hair to look, Felicity had nodded and nodded to show that she listened carefully, and then she went to work and tried to do what Nachman wanted. Meticulous, diligent, infinitely concerned to do right and good. But Felicity had no art in her soul, no feeling for the shape of Nachman’s hair in relation to his face. The haircut “styled” by Felicity would look as if it had been inflicted, and it would bring to mind images of poor laboring men.