Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

So?

It looked honest enough, and the point cannot be made too strongly that Nachman loved the feeling of Felicity’s hands soaping his hair, then massaging the skull behind his ears, and, with a subtle circular movement, his occipital bump. She knew how to touch a man. As for doing the actual haircut, it would have been wise to call in a different barber, or anybody passing in the street, but even so, when Felicity stepped back and tilted her head as she studied the progress of her work, Nachman saw that she considered herself a first-class barber and his heart went out — no, it rushed — to her. He would never say a word that might suggest reservations or criticism.

Near the end, Felicity would say, “You like O.K.?”

Nachman would say, “Perfect.” He would sound drowsy.

Later, he always tipped generously and smiled, saying, “Thank you,” and walked giddily home, supposing that his head might now look appropriate on a pedestal in his garden, with a grin on his lips, expressing blissful indifference to the fluttering doves and jays, lighting and asquat, shitting on his haircut. But where else, for twenty-two dollars (four for the shampoo, thirteen for the haircut, and a five-dollar tip), could Nachman get such relief from low spirits and uncomplicated satisfaction? He’d have paid more.

Regardless of Felicity’s butchery, then, Nachman could live with the result. A stupid-looking haircut didn’t make him miserable, and he soon forgot about how he looked, anyway. He had plenty else to think about, such as math problems, lectures, and politics at the Institute of Higher Mathematics, where Nachman worked in a bare office at a gray steel table with pencil and paper. The problems he dealt with were so difficult that Nachman sometimes cried. Nearly unbearable frustration attended his mathematical struggles until he suffered the piercing joy of an illumination. Sometimes he’d find himself sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, sweating and feverish, and he’d thrust out of bed and stumble to the table where he kept pencil and paper for such unpredictable moments, and he’d scrawl the solution to a problem, and then fall back into bed and was instantly asleep. In the morning, he’d find his scrawled solution. He’d then remember having awakened and, as if he were taking dictation from a nightmare, recording the solution. The look of the haircut was not important to Nachman.

Felicity, a small woman about forty years old, had a complexion slightly ruined by acne, and a figure slightly ruined by childbearing. Color photographs of her three children were pasted to the mirror. Nachman always asked about them. Felicity told him they spoke Vietnamese as well as English. Lowering her voice to a whisper, as if she feared the evil ear, she said her children were excellent students, the two boys and the girl were first in their respective classes. She also talked about her husband, who refused to let her invite friends to dinner, or attend night school to study English, or drive the family car. She walked to shopping. Walking to work took over an hour. Without a car, in Los Angeles, it was impossible for her to visit people. The few women she knew at the church, to which she walked once a week, lived too far away. Felicity said, “I hope someday I have more friends.”

Nachman wondered if Felicity hoped he would be her friend. Probably not, but the idea embarrassed him. He felt a touch of anxiety. The haircut was friendship enough. Felicity lived in a different world. She went to church, unimaginable for Nachman. They could probably never have much to say to each other. A few questions, a few answers. Felicity once asked what kind of work Nachman did. He told her he was a professor of mathematics. She once asked if he was married. He told her he was not married. Today she asked if he lived alone. He told her he lived alone. This was the furthest they had gone conversationally, and Nachman didn’t expect or want them to achieve a higher level of generalization, or deeper level of intimacy.

“No girlfriend?” said Felicity, as if the idea took her breath away.

“No.”

Did she have someone in mind for him? Nachman continued to wonder what her gasp could mean, but at the moment, Felicity’s small scissors, working about his ears, pleased him to the point of stupefaction, and he enjoyed the ripping sensation as she pulled the comb through lengths of wet hair caught between her middle and index finger before she snipped and snip-snipped, and in the shallow depths of a semi-sleep, he liked the way she then released his hair with studious and insensitive attention to its layers, mutilating it. Nachman felt no annoyance or despair, only the musical nature of the occasion. In the sound and pull of the comb drawn through his hair came the rich tones of a cello pulling against the flight and flash of scissoring violins, and spinning high and away in thought, Nachman wished he had a ton of hair so this fine delirium could last longer than forty-five minutes. Hair, he thought, is basic to erotic connections between a man and a woman, usually the woman’s hair, and, and, and — what follows? Nachman didn’t know, but he pursued the thought — no — the thought pursued Nachman as he felt a pressure against his elbow which rested on the arm of the barber chair. Felicity leaned over it, her pelvis inadvertently brushing against the bone.

Felicity was no more than five feet four, if that tall. Her arms weren’t long. She had to lean with her whole torso as she moved about the chair. Her pelvis brushed against Nachman’s elbows, on either side of the chair. Merely inevitable given Felicity’s build, thought Nachman, but thinking about it, he wondered if there wasn’t a suggestion in her pelvis as she said, “My husband never talks to me. He comes home late. Tired. Never talks.”

Nachman’s heartbeat could be detected pulsing in the cloth that lay across his chest, and he felt himself hardening. He assumed Felicity meant that she had something in common with him: Nachman had no girl and Felicity had no man to talk to.

“Never talks?” said Nachman.

“Not touched me for many months.”

Nachman’s pleasure, which had been diffuse, suddenly concentrated. It became a feeling of urgency, as if Nachman was about to do something. He felt a rush of energy, a strong intention, a strong disposition to act. Nachman to the first power was becoming Nachman to the second, an entirely different creature, a stranger to himself, the agent of a potentiality. His hand jerked spasmodically and seized Felicity’s upper thigh, just below her crotch.

Hardly breaking the rhythm of her work, she twisted her hip to the side, and Nachman’s hand fell away. She’d experienced this before, apparently, and knew how to deal with it. There was nothing to say. She didn’t even interrupt her work. Nachman sat in the chair, rigid, vibrant, pulsing, burning with the unconsummated violence that had taken his hand, and burning with shame. In the mirror he and Felicity were all that he could see. The other chairs and customers and women didn’t exist.

Felicity said, “I could meet a friend sometimes, maybe.”

“Yes.”

“A man who would be gentle.”

Her voice was so gentle that Nachman hardly felt the reproach. He almost imagined that she was hinting, encouraging him to entertain a romantic supposition.

Soon the haircut was finished, and Felcity stood beside the chair as she had at the beginning, intently looking at Nachman’s head in the mirror.

“O.K.? Not too short?” she said cheerily.

Nachman said, “Perfect.”

He followed her to the cash register, his hand in his pants pocket feeling for bills. He felt a stick of gum, too, and pulled it out, nervously unwrapping it, and started chewing the stick of gum as he counted two tens and a five. She had appealed for a friend, and Nachman groped her. Money might make things worse, but he dropped the bills on the counter beside the cash register, and as Felicity started to give him his change, he said, “No, keep it,” and he looked at her with the face of a man chewing gum — somewhat cool, somewhat moronic — but Nachman didn’t know how to look at her, or what to do or say. His eyes were silent beggars.