Bad Boy (21 page)

“Look, this is just about hooking ’em. After you’re together, you can do whatever you like. But in the beginning, they need to feel that you are special, that they are special, and that they have to be very special to get you. That’s why you’re not going to call them back.”

Jon’s eyes almost popped out of his head. “After I finally get someone to sleep with me? What are you talking about? If I don’t call them back, how will I get to sleep with them again?”

“You don’t need to sleep with them again. Sleep with someone else. Right now, for you, it’s about wide experience.”

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“So I’m supposed to behave like a bastard?” he asked. “That’s what women want? Bastards with the right pants?”

“No. Do you think we’re stupid? We’re complex. What we want is someone who behaves like a bastard but we can tame, or at least we think we can tame. We want someone who’s tough
‌
—but who has a deeply tender heart we can conquer. A panther who obeys our commands. It’s sort of the female equivalent of that old-fashioned guy thing.”

“What? Mental illness?”

“No. You know, the thing where men didn’t want girls who are easy, ’cause then anyone had them.” She paused. “I once liked this guy Earl
‌
—”

“You’d like Earl Grey tea?” Molly asked sweetly, coming up behind Tracie. “I’ll brew some up fresh.” What was with this woman? Tracie actually preferred her as a bitch.

“No, I don’t want any tea,” Tracie said, and gripped the edge of the table to restrain herself from slapping Molly. “I’ll let you know if I want something else.” Molly nodded and left them again. Tracie shot Jon a look.

“Oh, let her be,” he said. “She just wants you to say something good about this place. Now, who’s Earl? I don’t remember him.”

“That’s because it was before I met you. And because he didn’t last very long,” Tracie said. “Earl was smart, and nice-looking. But he kept telling me how beautiful I was. That I was as beautiful as his ex-fiancée. The fascinating woman who broke his heart.”

_p. 206
“Yeah, so?”

“So, after hearing about her and being really jealous, I’m over at his place, and on a bookshelf, lying facedown, is this picture of a fat, ugly girl. I ask him if it’s his sister or cousin or something, and he tells me it’s Jennifer, his ex-fiancée. If he thought
she
was beautiful, then whatever he thought about me wasn’t valid. I broke up with him.”

“Tracie, you are crazy. I always suspected it, but now I’m sure.”

“Jon, I am imparting secrets to you that men would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to know. These are the things women discuss in ladies’ rooms when they go off together. These are the things that will help you to seduce and abandon beautiful girls all over the country. Maybe all over the world,” Tracie told him.

“So you’re asking me to hurt women on purpose.”

“Oh, Jon, it’s just part of the bigger picture,” she explained. “It’s what they’re looking for. Then someday a woman grows up and realizes she wants a man who knows how to treat her well.”

Tracie wondered when that time would come for her. Then she thought again about her planned discussion of oral sex and other sensitive things, but she just couldn’t go there. This had been enough for her. Who knows? Maybe Jon could be okay in bed. At least he was a sensitive guy. The problem was that he probably hadn’t lost his virginity until a few
_p. 207
years ago. Maybe she should just ask about that. She took the last forkful of meat loaf. “Umm” she paused, chewed, and swallowed a final time
‌
—“let me ask you something,” she said. “Who was your first girlfriend?”

“You mean a real lover or the first girl I liked?”

“A real lover,” she explained.

“Myra Fisher.”

Now she echoed him. “Myra Fisher? I don’t remember any Myra Fisher.”

“Well, you didn’t know me then. Myra was back in eighth grade.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Eighth grade!” He must have misunderstood. “No, I mean the first girl you actually slept with.”

“Well, I didn’t get to sleep with Myra until the ninth-grade class trip. But we were having sex at her house all through eighth grade. And in the summer between eighth and ninth.”

“You never told me about that!”

“Well, I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about what
you
might call ‘my conquests,’ ” he said. “It’s very personal. I just don’t really talk about it.”

“Not with anyone?” she asked.

“Not really. I mean, you don’t, do you?”

“Uh, not really.” She hoped her nose wasn’t growing. She looked at Jon and began to wonder about him in a whole new way. “Wait a minute,” she said. “That really tall girl back in college, the one with the really long hair . . .”

“Hazel,” he said. “Hazel Flagler.”

_p. 208
“Yeah. Did you and she . . .”

“Of course,” he said.

“You never told me!” Now Tracie was truly shocked.

“Well, what do you think I was doing with her? She wasn’t a chess player!” Jon said.

“You never told me,” she repeated. Tracie wondered what other relationships he’d had that he’d never spoken to her about.

“Tracie, I grew up listening to women complaining about how badly men behave. I watched my father do it. Do you think after all that I was going to kiss and tell?”

“Kiss and tell? Jon, this isn’t some Victorian novel. This is the twenty-first century. Don’t you watch
Friends?
Or reruns of
Seinfeld
? People on
Jerry Springer
talk about sleeping with their brothers!”

“I have never been on
Jerry Springer
,” Jon said with dignity. And for the first time, Tracie looked at him and imagined that there might be a lot of water running deep under the stillness of his dark brown eyes.

_p. 209
The next week, Wednesday, Jon met Tracie for the much-discussed haircut. They swung open the salon door, the music blasted from inside, and instinctively Jon stepped back. “Come on,” Tracie told him. “Avant-garde hair care is not for the fainthearted.” She took his hand and pulled him through the portal. “Don’t worry,” she said blithely. “Stefan will take care of you.”

For the first time in his life, Jon really doubted her. He didn’t think so, unless she was implying the mafioso meaning of “taking care of.” Well, what the hell. He felt half-dead already.

Was all of this really necessary to get a girl? It took so much time, thought, and energy. Wasn’t the relationship supposed to require maintenance, not his wardrobe and hairline? As he was dragged through the reception area
‌
—a room filled with bright lights, incredibly loud technorock, and something that seemed like the decor from a very bad gameshow set
‌
—he felt himself flinch. There was a point at which a man had to put his foot down, and he figured this was it . . . until the woman with endless legs and silvery gold hair down to her waist walked by. She nodded to Tracie and smiled
‌
—actually smiled
‌
—at him.
_p. 210
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “Hi, Ellen,” Tracie said casually, as if the goddess of love had not just walked among them.

“Who is that?” he whispered.

“What?” Tracie asked at higher than full volume, continuing to pull him along.

“Who is that?” he asked, this time shouting. He had fallen deeply in love. She was a dream. She was paradise. If not for the hellish music, he could imagine paradise with her. “Who?” he shouted.

“Ellen? That’s Ellen,” Tracie repeated, as if that clarified anything.

They’d crossed the reception area, walked through a bustling room of chairs and mirrors, and now Tracie led him down a much emptier hallway, though the music continued full blast. All the walking was taking him farther away from his goddess. Two other women walked by. Neither one was quite up to Ellen’s standard, but both were truly, deeply beautiful. Wow! They nodded at either Tracie or him, and on the blind chance that he had been included, he nodded back. Neither one giggled or pointed. It seemed he was expected to nod back, just as they were expected to nod at him. Maybe, he thought, maybe Tracie
did
know something about all this after all. But he would not let Ellen drop. “Who is Ellen?” he repeated once the other two nymphs were safely gone.

“She’s Stefan’s wife,” Tracie shouted casually, as if that didn’t mean his entire world had
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just crumbled. They passed a dozen doors, until Tracie opened yet another one
‌
—into what had to be the Holy of Holies in this temple of beauty.

“Isn’t Stefan gay?” Jon shouted, still reacting to the technorock. But as the door swung closed behind them, the noise ended abruptly. He was standing in a small, square, perfectly silent white room furnished with only a Star Wars-type barber’s chair in the center of it. A tall man stood beside the chair, looking at him.

The guy was tall, six foot five or six, and fair, with very short hair and a scar across one blond eyebrow. Tough-looking. Jon broke the silence. “Hi,” he said, his voice almost squeaking. “You must be Stefan.”

“You don’t realize the sacrifice I’m making here for you,” Tracie said as she sat Jon down in a chair. “Just look at me. I’m the one that really needs a haircut, but just remember, you owe me big for this.” She stepped back and leaned against the counter. Then Jon was approached by Stefan, who was like Edward Scissorhands crossed with Riverdance. He kept snipping and stamping his feet and jumping. Jon wondered if it was safe for Stefan to move that way with the scissors so close to his eyes, but he guessed Stefan knew what he was doing. After all, Tracie just sat there calmly through all the snips and jumps and didn’t seem to notice that there was no
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mirror, no noise, and no people. Just Stefan and his heavy breathing and his crazy jumping around. It was the strangest haircut Jon had ever experienced.

Jon sat for nearly an hour with a man he had just insulted. Meanwhile, Tracie, who apparently didn’t realize the terrible danger he was in, sat on a tiny stool near his feet, chattering away. Jon only wanted to dart out of the seat, out of the room, past the fatal Ellen, wife of this Balkan madman, and perhaps leave Seattle forever. But he was afraid to move because of the very sharp scissors that kept flicking around his head.

“. . . and the bicycle,” he heard Tracie saying. What was she going on about?

He was afraid to turn his head to Tracie, so he merely twitched his eyes toward her. It hurt to put his eyeballs so far into the corner of his eyes for very long. “What about my bicycle?” he asked. He would have liked to put his hand up to his head, but he was sure that Stefan would snip off a finger. Bits of his hair had been flying around the room for a long time.

“I said we still have to do something about your backpack and the bicycle,” Tracie repeated calmly.

“What about my backpack?” he asked. “And nothing’s wrong with my bicycle. What do you mean we have to ‘do something’ about my bicycle?”

“It’s just that a bicycle is so uncool,” Tracie told him. “I mean, how are you going to take
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a girl back to your place? Put her on the handlebars?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to take them back to my place,” he said, reminding her of her tutelage.

“Okay. Okay. So how are you going to take them back to
their
place?”

They were going to get into this now, and do it in front of Stefan?

“In their car?” he asked hopefully.

“And how do you get home from there?” She shook her head. “You know, if you didn’t have a Schwinn, you’d own a Pacer.” Jon didn’t know for sure what a Pacer was, but he could tell it wasn’t good, because Stefan laughed. “It’s hard to date without a car.”

“We can go in hers,” he said. Jon had to admit he was beginning to see the difficulty, but he pushed on. “Or call a cab?” he asked weakly, knowing it wasn’t a good gambit. He heard a little derisive snort behind him and wished that for just one moment he could have those scissors in his own hands. “Look. You know how I feel. A bicycle is safe, convenient, and has very low ecological impact. If I power a bicycle, I don’t need to use any nonrenewable fossil fuel to get where I’m going.”

“But you’re not getting anyvhere. Not vith vomen,” Stefan said, speaking for the first time.

Jon tried not to grit his teeth. When he watched
Rebel Without a Cause
and
East of Eden,
he could always see James Dean’s jawline stiffen when he got mad. Now he didn’t want the Demon Barber of Fleet Street to
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do him in. Stefan wouldn’t hesitate to cut his carotid artery. Jon decided to ignore him. “Are you telling me I have to buy a car to get dates?” he asked, outraged. Tracie knew how opposed to automobiles he was. They were ruining the Pacific Northwest and tearing the hell out of the environment. How could she even propose the idea?

“Then how about reconsidering a motorcycle?” Tracie asked brightly.

“A motorcycle? I already told you that I’d be a danger to myself and others.”

“But they’re so cool,” Tracie said, almost bouncing off the stool in her enthusiasm. “And girls really like guys who ride motorcycles.”

“How do they feel about guys who’ve had an entire side of their face abraded by pavement?” he snapped.

“Temper, temper!” Stefan cautioned.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Tracie told him.

“No, we won’t,” Jon answered her sourly, and then he was spun around to face Stefan. Light glinted off the hairdresser’s straight razor. For a moment, Jon thought Stefan was going to wield it, Sweeney Todd-like, but this nut was only holding up a mirror.

Jon looked into it. Oh God! He’d become Sonic the Hedgehog. His hair stood in spikes. The Demon Barber should have just killed me, he thought, and he put his hands over his skull protectively. Stefan, the albino Edward Scissorhands, took the last couple of snippets from Jon’s new, totally renovated head.

_p. 215
“Unbelievable,” Tracie said.