The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors (12 page)

In the afternoon, Stella sat out in the sun with a big blue hat—those fragile, puffy eyebrows—and a
Lucky
magazine, and Frank and Charlie went to hit balls at the golf range. Maggie went for a walk around the Ashokan Reservoir and spotted eight live deer. She counted.

Charlie had told her he was going to ask Frank while they hit golf balls but when they came back, she could tell he had not. She was relieved. She still wanted to talk him out of it. The more she saw of Frank and Stella, the less she wanted to be beholden to them.

She took a shower before dinner and cut herself on a jagged piece of metal in the shower-door frame. The blood welled up from her shin, again and again, forming plump red drops. She blotted with wadded-up sheets of toilet paper and threw them in the garbage, where they looked like scarlet poppies.

At dinner, they drank too much again, Frank making margaritas with the mix and tequila they had brought up with them as a gift. Maggie made a roast with garlic and blood-orange chutney. This, despite the hot weather. Again, she was not a natural host. Frank took half the slices off the plate.

“Hungry?” Maggie said.

“Starving,” he said.

Despite all this, Maggie was starting to like Stella. This happened after a third margarita and because she had spied Stella stomping, without panic, on an enormous water bug that afternoon. True, she had had flip-flops on, but it made Maggie feel calm to see her dispatch the bug without any feminine hysteria. Then they had a good exchange about mothers.

“After my mother visited,” Stella said, “she destroyed all my relationships with the local vendors. My dry cleaner wouldn't talk to me for a month.”

“What'd she do?” Maggie said, intrigued. She spooned more salad onto Stella's plate.

“The usual,” she said mildly. “Haranguing, accusing, complaining. She accused the deli of padding my charge account. She doesn't trust the New York way of doing things—she's never lived in a city.”

“What can you do?” Maggie said. She was impressed with Stella's placid face. Maggie talked to her mother once every couple of months and hadn't physically seen the woman in three years.

“Really,” Stella said. “Mothers.”

“Do you think about children?” Maggie asked.

“Almost never,” Stella said.

Frank harrumphed.

“Pretty much never,” Stella said.

Frank had been silent for a while and his quiet had become more menacing. Stella chattered on as if she didn't notice her glowering husband.

“A woman I know was diagnosed with lymphoma and after she got out of the doctor's office, she stepped off the curb and was hit by a FedEx truck,” she said to Maggie. “Dead as a doornail.”

“What's the point?” Maggie said.

“Right,” Stella said. “That's really it.”

“You know, I didn't like you,” Maggie said after a pause. She decided to go on. “When we first met. The shrimp incident.”

“What?” Stella said. “Shrimp?”

“You ordered three shrimp when you could only order six or twelve.”

“Really?” Stella said, laughing. “I did?”

“Yeah, and I thought you were really obnoxious.”

“Oh,” Stella said. “I remember now. We were at Dominico's, right? I had gone to my therapist that day and he said I needed to be more assertive and shape the world my way and not shape myself to fit the world. Plus, I was on a diet.”

“Oh,” Maggie said, overwhelmed. “Good memory.”

“Funny how it all leads to something, yes?” Stella said agreeably. “You had a different picture of me.”

“When I'm friends with someone,” Maggie said, “I like remembering how I first saw them. I'm only right about people half of the time.”

“Well, that's big of you to say,” Stella said. “I didn't like you until a few hours ago.”

Maggie was quiet.

“But I like you now,” Stella said.

“Thanks,” said Maggie. She felt abashed.

“You women are annoying me,” Frank said. His voice was so quiet that it didn't register for a half beat.

“Stop it, Frank,” Stella said.

“You're fucking yammering on and on about this
shit
,” he said. His eyes were glittering and he moved slowly and deliberately as he raised his hand up to emphasize
shit
. Maggie hadn't realized quite how drunk he was.

“Frank,” Charlie said. “Take it easy.”

“You take it easy,” Frank said. “College boy.”

“Frank is a bad drunk,” Stella said. “Aren't you, honey?”

“No, I'm not,” he said. “I am not a bad drunk. And I'm not drunk.”

“Frank,” Stella said, changing tacks. “Please don't.”

“I'll make coffee,” Maggie said, getting up.

Frank stood up too. They faced each other across the table.

“I don't need coffee,” he said. He looked at her with his bright blue eyes, and Maggie realized what a handsome man he was. His cheeks flushed as if he knew what she was thinking.

“You,” he said. “You don't like me.”

“No,” she said. “You're mistaken. It was your wife I didn't like, remember?” She fell into the condescending voice that people sometimes use with drunks.

“No,” he said. “You don't like me. I can tell. You think I can't tell?” He swayed forward, caught himself with his hands on the table, getting one partially on a plate so it clattered, loudly. “You think you're too good for me—you and Charlie and your college degrees.”

Charlie put an arm around Frank.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “Don't talk silly.”

Frank put a hand up and pushed Charlie away. His hand, covered with chutney, left a mark on Charlie's shirt that looked like blood.

“I don't need your pity, guy,” he said. “I'm a millionaire!”

“Yes, yes, good for you, honey,” Stella said. “Let's go to bed.”

Maggie went to the kitchen to make coffee. She filled the pot with cold water at the sink. When she turned around, Frank was right in front of her. He pressed up next to her, pushing her against the sink, his right hip against her left.

“Does that feel safe?” he asked. “Do you feel in danger?”

“Hey,” Charlie said evenly. “Get away from Maggie right now.”

Frank leaned her back, his hand supporting her back, and kissed her, hard. She melted, as if that might save her. When she opened her eyes he was staring at her, mean.

But it didn't come to anything. Stella appeared, quick as silver, and dragged her husband away. She was very strong, the little woman with her gold rings and her tattooed eyebrows. She dragged him away to their room, shut the door, and they didn't emerge for the rest of the night, even to get a glass of water.

They had sex because they had to. What else to fix the broken night? It was silent, fraught, awful. She looked at the ceiling. In the morning, they brushed their teeth, aware of the stillness outside. They stayed inside as long as they could.

A few months later, long after they had dropped Frank and Stella off, Stella apologizing and apologizing, after they had received a wire transfer of twenty-five thousand dollars from Frank, after they had—outrageously!—been billed by some contractor for the eventual removal of the deer, Maggie was at CVS picking up some film she had had developed from an old camera she had found at the house, one of those disposable ones. She walked outside, opening the white packet. Paging through the snapshots, an office party, a night at a bar to celebrate a friend's birthday, all of a sudden she saw Frank giving the camera the finger. She let out a short bark of surprise. He was in the living room of the summer house and he was laughing. He must have had Stella take the photo while she and Charlie were out of the room, early on in the weekend, before anything happened. It must have been earlier. She looked at the photo, shiny in the sun, already smudged with her fingerprints, Frank's face alive and vibrant, lit by the harsh light of the flash, and she couldn't say why she, of all people, felt ashamed.

The Salon

JONATHAN LETHEM

T
HE TIME
I
feel most like a spy is sitting in the hairdresser's chair—I can't be certain why that should be. I suppose it is because it is a place where I both lie about myself and watch others carefully through mirrors. The reason for my prevarications is the same reason I submit myself impulsively and too often to the shears: There is a kind of unbearable intimacy in a haircut, which for me is a kind of guilty secret. I create oversimplifications or whole diversions, falsify my career (which is in fact nonexistent), declare travel plans I never mean to enact. The talk between a stylist or barber and a client is always so insouciantly familiar, and so my response is to shroud myself within a cover story, to reserve something of myself for myself. This also probably explains my tendency to vanish after a year or two as a given hairdresser's client, then to forever avoid returning to the hairdresser in question. I'm a serial monogamist of the salon, faithful before I flee.

In some essay, the title of which I've forgotten, John Updike explored the erotic dynamics of a visit to the dental hygienist; though fascinated, I couldn't empathize. For me, it is under the hands of a hairdresser, whether a sexually ambiguous or plainly homosexual young man or, more agreeably, a young woman, that I feel myself unfold into a luxurious passivity. I myself am no longer young. Yet in my abstemious way, and due to the neatness of my dress, the precision of my carriage, and, of course, the regular upkeep of the boundary of short hairs at my neck and ears, I maintain the outlines of my youthful allure. Few heterosexual men bother, I find, with this sort of effort, making me quietly anomalous. I've observed young women glancing at me on the street at a distance of half a block, only to see their faces tighten at closer sight of the lines around my lips and eyes, unBotoxed disclosers of my vintage.

I find myself most aware of the paradoxes of age and attraction—most pleasantly aware, I should say—when a hairdresser caresses my tipped-back skull in the shampooing or rinsing phases of a visit. No one can argue the sensuality of fingers spidering through wet strands to knead the crown or temples, and I don't think I'm mistaken to detect the lingering, the pleasure-in-giving-pleasure, that invariably accompanies my shampoos. Sometimes this task is relegated to the assistants, those not yet cutting hair—often these are young but relatively unattractive women assisting women more beautiful than themselves, or dapper gay men. The shampoo or rinse, then, is their moment. What would be an unbearably mercenary transaction in the larger erotic sphere—my age traded against their homeliness—becomes charming. For an instant they are lavishing their touch on a man more elegant than would usually even glance at them. For an instant my enjoyment of their touch is undeniable, and total. At the very apex I might feel the soft blurred pressure of a breast or the firmer nudge of a hip bone as the shampooist leans over me. Then a rolled towel is placed under my ears and along my neck, and I am escorted from foamy dreams into the more sustained if less fulsome encounter, that with the murmuring scissors.

The girls at my present salon are expatriate Israelis, rendered enchantingly tough and stubborn by their kibbutz lives, yet sweetly naïve about American life even as they rightly judge their American contemporaries softer, blurrier, less courageous and forthright than themselves. My only previous experience with young Israelis had been with the men and boys who seem lately to dominate New York's intracity furniture-moving companies, and whom I've several times had tramping through my apartments, diligently duct-taping chests and armoires with thin quilts to insulate the corners and feet from damage in stairwells or from the bumping of their truck in potholes. Much like my girls', their English is impeccable and strange, their eyes full of alertness both to opportunity and to the local ironies of New York City, where the lives of the wealthy are pressed in close adjacency to those of the indigent. The young Israelis strike me almost as return émigrés from the moon or Mars, persistently amazed that we feel we can afford to sustain the old rituals back here on earth. The girls of my salon, three of them, Marina, Larissa, and Maja, in the employ of one older and rarely glimpsed whose name I've heard and forgotten, seem to wear their bustiers and makeup like soldiers off duty, on a leave from which they may at any time be recalled. I think it might be fair to say I love them. And yet I am beginning to make myself ready for farewells. I'll try to explain.

Their salon is in the West Village, where I like to stroll. Yesterday, feeling the urge for a cut, I chanced dropping in without an appointment just after eleven, while Larissa and Maja were still preparing the room for the day's first clients, sweeping yesterday's missed clippings, lining shears and clippers in their places. Larissa is the uglier duckling, so of course it was her with the broom; such pecking orders are remorseless. Marina, the star cutter and nearest to glamorous, her column in the appointment book always fullest, hadn't arrived. Maja checked for me and determined that Marina could fit me in at two thirty. Perfect, I told them; I had a lunch date at twelve thirty, and would be free just in time. In fact I sat by the river and alternated between reading Mary McCarthy's
Cast a Cold Eye
and watching Rollerbladers. I bought a hot dog and chunked the bun to toss at pigeons.

I don't know whether I'd detected a trace of pensiveness in my Israelis when I made the appointment or only felt it in retrospect. Certainly, there was no mistaking the ripple of disquiet when I returned. I received my shampoo at the hands of Larissa while Marina finished with an earlier appointment, a woman my age whose hair had of course been steeping in dye while she paged through every magazine in their supply, and now needed a bit of fluffing and teasing for the climax of what must have been nearly a two-hour visit. The other chair was empty for the moment. Placed in her care, Marina was her usual deft lovely self, able to begin turning up wet layers to snip while she commenced our typical small talk, small inquiries the replies to which she didn't attend, jokes about the frequency of my haircuts, her comb and scissors moving with unconscious grace. But when the older woman had paid and stuffed a twenty in Marina's palm for a tip, then departed, Marina took a step backward, as if needing to examine my hair strategically (surely she didn't), while Larissa slipped in with a wide broom to expertly gather the scribble of fallen hairs from around my shoes into a pad like a moist black toupee, which she then scooped off into the trash. Maja, who, without a client of her own at the moment had lingered behind the counter, studying the appointment book, was suddenly attentive too.

“Did you read in the newspaper about the woman who was killed?” asked Marina.

“No … ” I spoke absently, contemplating in the mirror a minor asymmetry in the contour of my temples, one always exposed by close cropping. “A particular woman, you mean?”

“Yes, last week. The headline of the paper called it
JANE STREET CHAIR HORROR
. She was one of Maja's clients.” Marina approached the subject with that marvelous Israeli bluntness. For these poor girls, I suppose, the New York
Daily News
was “the newspaper.”

“Ah, I'm so sorry.” I could see the three had knit into a mourning society. I didn't want to blunt their sense of injustice by pointing out how the city periodically thrilled to the death of a single woman of a certain class, milieu, whereas the attention paid would have been almost incalculably less overwrought, and therefore less vicariously interesting to them, had, say, one of them been murdered in the Greenpoint or Kew Gardens neighborhoods they called home—let alone if yet another young black man had been slain near a housing project. Ironically, that the privileges seemingly available to their well-off clients but not to themselves could be so abruptly revoked by violence was perhaps more deranging to the Israeli girls' worldview than had been the kind of everyday urban risk that had likely spurred their emigration.

Marina stepped back in and placed the scissors to one side. She lay a gentle fingertip at the bottom edge of the perfectly squared sideburns she'd created, testing their rightness as a carpenter tests a shelf with a level. “Are you happy with the length? Her name was Jessica Droory.”

Was she testing me? “Yes, the length is perfect as usual, Marina, thank you. Could you do something about—?” I waved vaguely around my ears and nose, knowing she'd understand, but also that she'd wait until I asked, never presume. I've long since shed any embarrassment at requesting the pruning of my nostrils or ear canals. In fact I look forward to this moment, another sensual treat, for me if not for Marina. Though, who knows?

“You might remember her,” said Marina lightly, or with a semblance of lightness. Was it my imagination that the others had halted their activities to listen? Well, it was a quiet day, and I was undoubtedly interesting to them, nourishment for the starved.

“Yes?”

Marina gestured at the open chair, visible in the wall of mirror before me, along with the whole tableau of Maja and Larissa, the overelaborate, trying-too-hard decor of their workplace, the counter bearing the telephone, computer, and appointment book, and a tantalizing sliver of window onto the wide world outside their door. Passing sidewalkers appear and vanish in this margin as brief, almost strobelike flashes of clothing, flesh, hair, and other clues for the visual cortex to sort in retrospect: Was that a cell phone? Or mirrored sunglasses? “Maja cut her hair right there beside you the last time I saw you.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes.”

I shrugged. “You know how often I come here. And I always reserve my attention for you, Marina.”

“I thought you might remember.”

“Sorry.”

This conversation wasn't interesting. Very much my fault; I was quashing any interest. If Marina had been pushing, she'd gone as far as she dared, and now we reverted to platitudes concerning the weather, the desirability of vacations from New York City during blazing summer months, the price of real estate, and my imaginary workdays, which evidently left plenty of time for haircuts, though this as ever went unremarked. After she'd worked a few products into my scalp and rearranged my part a dozen times until sculpted into just the effect she thought best (I always wash the gunk out as soon as I arrive at home and revert to a “dry look”), Marina declared me finished. With all the usual ritual delight at the cut's result and studied affection for Marina and the others I paid, tipped, and departed, only promising—in a mock-threatening way—that they'd sure see me two weeks from now. Thinking all the time that it was probably the last time I'd set foot in the place, or even walk down that particular block of the city.

I remembered Jessica Droory, of course I did. It is another eccentricity of salons such as that run by the Israelis that they fantasize not only about their clients but on their behalves. What I mean to say is that in a career dedicated to the vanity of others, hairdressers understandably become champions of more than hair, but of lives, of yearning bodies made more attractive and confident and then sent out into the world to entice other bodies. Jessica Droory was one who, unlike myself, was surely entirely truthful in her convivial self-revelations to hairstylists, masseurs, pedicurists, anyone. She'd gone months without an interesting date (I'm guessing here); wasn't noticing heads turning as often as previously; wondered if at thirty-seven (this I confirmed in the newspaper's reports) life's romantic parade was getting too far up the road, around some bend beyond sight of her ditched vehicle.

Jessica was healthy, thin, not unappealing—the Israeli girls liked her chances, I suspect, and felt no bad faith in being optimistic on her behalf. Did she want to marry? Where did she go to meet men? Did she use Nerve? Would she consider someone older, more serious? It took men in New York a while to grow disenchanted with the singles scene, but it happened eventually. Of course, all such talk would have been silenced by the time I walked in that afternoon and filled the second chair. Most of their discussion would anyway have been glancing, peppery, apparently incidental, in no way revealing its underlying purposefulness nor the insinuating force of the identification between the impossibly youthful Israeli women and the older New Yorker who'd begun to wonder if she teetered on the brink of the middle-aged, and had surely, yes, begun to think a man a decade or two older wasn't the worst possibility in the world. He'd only have to be appreciative. And not have a paunch, or some awful gray beard.

So, when I entered my sensorium that day, I found it altered. The girls who'd never once have considered me seriously as a prospect for themselves were more than comfortable with my sexual personhood through the proxy of Jessica Droory. Far from being possessive of the weird edgy air of flirtation that hovered around my presence in their space, the insertion of Jessica Droory as a rather more appropriate focal point relieved them of a certain anxiety, put a good solid normative footing behind it all. They were matchmakers! None of this would have been in the least enunciated, even to themselves. But framed together in that vast mirror, Jessica Droory and I found our chairs subtly angled together. Marina and Larissa were more effusive with me, the fingertips in my scalp and briefly resting on my shoulders even more lingering and enticing, as though their hands could serve in place of hers while Jessica and I, two heads tucked atop pyramidal black aprons, were efficiently serviced while we looked for a place for our eyes to rest other than on one another—and in this effort helplessly failed. I smiled. She blinked surprise, then split the difference, smiling back briefly and shifting her eyes to her hands where they bunched under her apron, or to the furry floor.