Curled in the Bed of Love (24 page)

I giggle. He snickers. The urge to laugh becomes so strong that it's like a spasm. Soon both of us are shaking with the effort to stifle our laughter.

We beat a hasty retreat, shutting the door quietly behind us, and once we are outside, we yield to the irresistible impulse to hoot and howl.

We sit on the back bumper of my car while we decide where to go. Hassan says he would really like a drink. He holds out his hand, level and steady. “I am not shaking or anything. So I cannot be addicted. Which means I
can
have a drink.”

He sits so that his shoulder touches mine. “This
AA
,” he says. “This indoctrination. I can't stomach it.”

I wonder if he is even conscious of his mania for contact. When I closed my eyes to kiss that salesman, I felt careful, vigilant, the way I am in surgery, where it's my job, not the surgeon's, to preserve the sterile field. “You don't have to come to these meetings,” I say. “You don't even have to quit drinking.”

“I just jumped off that cliff—sure, sure, I would promise this woman the moon, and they'll stop nagging me at work into the bargain. What did I do this for? I must be a crazy alcoholic. I act like one.”

He takes my hand, and my fingers grip his instinctively.

I am so intently focused on his hand in mine that it hurts. As if I'm a new wife, not one accustomed to this habit.

Hassan kicks at the bumper of the car. “You know, she doesn't eat, all day. So many opera singers are fat; maybe it's an edge for her if she can starve herself. And I hate this in her.”

My patience, my forbearance, has finally been rewarded. I am a new wife. I am again stealing off to the garden to indulge my delirium. Here are the roses, the salvia, the vine that cunningly, effortlessly routes its growth toward the light.

“I can't stop myself from trying to tempt her,” Hassan says. “Eat, eat, eat! It's myself I'm trying to encourage. I'm not so greedy as I thought.”

I did not worry when Hassan curled up into a silent mourning after his mother died. It was in his nature. No half-measures. He reread all her letters, thin onionskin pages saved for years in a fat manila envelope. One night I sat with him while he read. He said, “We should have had children.” He never said it to me again. He didn't really mean it. He was grieving.

Hassan makes a sound that is not quite a laugh, not quite a moan. “Why have I done this to you? Behaving like an idiot! And what for?”

He lifts an arm, but something catches at the gesture, and he lets his hand drop heavily in his lap.

When I want him to flow like water over stone.

I watch his face for a moment. I begin the story for him. I tell him, “You fell in love.”

He seems to gather himself. And then he's off. “It's terrible, this kind of love. Always butting heads. Always struggling.”

I let him lean against me. Soon all those
AA
people will come out of their meeting and give us dirty looks. I've been afraid too long to register so small a threat. Only I didn't know enough to be frightened all those years ago, when those men were marching in the street, flogging their bodies, driving themselves forward.

I cannot match what my hands are doing to any intention until I look in the mirror. When I look there, I meet my client's eyes and we talk at each other's reflection. Should the layers blend more gradually? Should we take more off at the sides? I check the mirror again when I drag my fanned fingers through her hair to see how it falls. In one realm, my job is piecemeal, merely manual labor, snipping the difficult material of wet hair, tugging a comb through tangles, rolling strands of hair over a brush to blow-dry it, and in the other realm, these parts are so strangely merged into our mutual anticipation. When she gets up from the chair, we'll pretend it hasn't happened, this conspiracy of unreasonable wishes. A lot of my clients don't even recognize me when I see them on the street.

After I finish with my client, I sit in the chair and wait for Molly to finish her last customer of the day so she can color my hair. So many times I've fixed people up for weddings, retirement parties, awards banquets, and tomorrow it's my turn.

Anyone can write in to get on the Family Secrets segment of Vivian Woods's talk show. I used to believe they staged all of it—the man who screamed at his wife when she told him their youngest
child wasn't his, the sister who forgave her brother for stealing from her when he was on drugs. The spectacle was just as thrilling whether someone flew into a fury or burst into tears. Then I saw this teenage girl on there. She said her parents got divorced when she was twelve. She and her mother were always fighting, and she wanted to live with her father. One day her mother slapped her, and the girl dug her fingers into her arm till she had a bruise she could show her teacher. Child Protective Services came to evaluate her mother, and the girl got to go and live with her father.

Her mother's face was projected on a video screen behind the girl, because they always sequester the surprised party in a booth offstage—I guess the show's producers worry about getting sued if an actual fistfight breaks out. The girl had to repeat the story she'd told the audience. And there was her mother crying on the video screen, and I started to cry. They were both hurting so much, together. The girl kept begging her, but the mother said she couldn't forgive her. It was real.

My secret would be run-of-the-mill if the man I'd slept with hadn't been my cousin's fiancé. She's gotten over the breakup with Peter, finally married a nice guy, has a kid. She's happy now, like she deserves to be. Anna Marie pulls me next to her for pictures at family picnics and wonders why I don't want to go out on Fridays with her and Roger, when I might meet someone, and it's been so long. I've been spoiled by what happened with Peter, by what I was willing to do to have him.

My client comes back with a tip, a dollar bill folded up small as shame in her hand. At the better salons, customers leave tips in a tiny envelope and write your name on it, but here at SuperShears we still press palms when we take our tips.

Molly waltzes over and whips a plastic poncho over my shoulders. We debate whether to use bleach or a gentler tint to highlight my hair. Molly says the bleach will be too brassy and chooses a honey-colored tint. “You want soft highlights, like Princess Di had.”

“Let's not get carried away,” I say. But the wish rises in me like fish to the bait.

“You don't want to look like a slut,” Molly says. “Even if you acted like one.”

Princess Di had that trick of tucking her chin and looking up at people, at the camera, so that in all the pictures her eyes look wide and innocent. Look what she did, fooling around with her bodyguard, and she's still the world's darling, even dead.

Molly gives me a slap on the shoulder to remind me to laugh. I don't know why I told her, when I have told no one else for four years, when we're not that close. She teases me about it the way she teases me about the way I lay out my station every morning, lining up my tools in specific order, rinsing the combs twice in sterilizing solution.
Why all the fuss?
She says she has her own married man or two—
but he wasn't married,
I say, and she says,
same difference
—and what you've got to realize is you're a chump if you fall for one of them.

Molly puts on plastic gloves and begins separating strands of my hair. She paints them with coloring solution and wraps them in foil. The smell of the solution is as disturbing as the intimate smells of a body, the sweet, almost fruity smell of Peter's sweaty crotch, the faintly metallic odor of his armpits, the astonishing sourness of digestion on his breath. These are secrets I have no right to know about Anna Marie.

“Well, you've inspired me,” Molly says. “I've always wanted to get on Letterman. With my stupid dog trick. When I play the recorder, my dog howls along—in key! I figure if you can get on
TV
for something like this, I've got a chance.”

“This isn't for fun,” I say.

“Sure. Beneath that quiet exterior, you're just an exhibitionist at heart.”

When the letter came from Vivian Woods's producer, I was scared—how could I do this to Anna Marie?—and I kept taking the letter from its envelope to reread it, to feel the thick, expensive
paper. On my Mondays off I've watched plenty of people tell their story to Vivian Woods and Oprah Winfrey and Sally Jessie Raphael. Their own story shakes each of them furiously in its teeth, a last chance far more potent than Oprah nodding her head or Sally rolling her eyes or Vivian scolding.

Molly leans down and puts her face close to mine. “How on earth did you talk your cousin into this?”

It's all I can do not to flinch at this breach of safe distance. I won't ride crowded buses or stay in line if people step close enough to brush against me, and I always stand behind the client in the chair. But still I didn't see it coming, that day in the grocery store. I was reaching for apples to put in a plastic bag, and the man just sneaked a hand under my arm and squeezed my breast. He was gone before I could clutch my arms to my chest. I found a clerk, a teenage boy. I was shaking and yelling, and the clerk looked at me like I was the one who'd done something.

“Anna Marie's going to hate me,” I say. I hadn't gotten up the nerve yet to ask her to go on
TV
when that man grabbed me. He knew. Even the clerk staring at me knew, had scented it on me, or seen it in me, that openness to violation that doesn't distinguish who's on which end of the kick.

“Then you should have let sleeping dogs lie,” Molly says.

My mother always said this when we had to smuggle some wish past my father. When I was a kid, I even thought of him as a dog, a big muscled mastiff stretched out in his armchair, his fury a thing we could escape if we tiptoed around him. If I wanted new clothes or money to go on a Girl Scout trip or permission to go to my first dance, we maneuvered, and he remained still as the axis of the planet.

My mother worried about me her last few years because I never brought home a boyfriend. She worried as if there were only a slender chance that I might get lucky and slip past the fanged dog that stood between us and all our wishes. I couldn't help feeling
relief last year when she died: she won't ever know. She'd never say
slut.
She'd say
whore.
Some strange kind of creature that she wouldn't recognize if she saw it in the flesh.

“It's the guilt,” I say. “I can't keep living with it.”

Molly snorts. “Don't give me that Catholic line of bull. You can cure obsessive thinking if you want to. That's how I quit smoking. I went to this therapy group, and they taught us how to change our thinking patterns. See, whenever you want a cigarette, really crave one, you're supposed to visualize this red stop sign in your head. And you can't go past it. Your thoughts have to stop right there. It works.”

Molly tugs at another strand of my hair, and I let my head bob under her hand. This could hypnotize you, this rhythmic touch. Usually I do my own hair and so am deprived of the luxury of having my body ministered to by another. The body's pleasures all pool in one place, and Molly's gentle tugs sink there to become Peter's hands, touching me, coaxing me. I can't stop this any more than I can stop the sick feeling I get when I think of Anna Marie. I see myself, my own body in its intricate connections to Peter's, as if I stood to the side and watched while we were together. I am sitting cross-legged on my bed, naked, and his fingers are tracing in order every knot of bone along my spine, reading this code. Sometimes when I am alone on an elevator, I will press my fingers to the bumps of Braille lettering beside the buttons for each floor, and just like now, when Molly's tug recalls for me the liquid possibilities of my spine, I'll be under Peter's hands again, miraculously being taught the word that my body is, the pleading speech.

I couldn't get out of flying down to Los Angeles with Anna Marie. We sit stuffed into our economy-class seats, and Anna Marie pulls down the tray so she can empty her old wallet into the new wallet she's just bought. She's pleased to have a chore she can cross off her list while we're flying.

“Maybe this afternoon, after the show, we can go out to lunch,” Anna Marie says. “Window-shop on Rodeo Drive, just like the ladies of the manor.”

I'd hoped they'd fly us down the night before, put us up in hotel rooms, sequester me from Anna Marie, but the shuttle flight from San Francisco takes only an hour, and Vivian Woods's operation is run economically. Anna Marie naturally wanted to travel together—she's always apologizing to me because she doesn't have as much time for me as she used to before she had Eli. She thinks it's her fault we don't see each other so much anymore. What I imagine will happen after I tell her is a kind of gray wash, vague and obscuring as fog, but I know there won't be any giggling shopping trip this afternoon.

She sighs. “I wish I'd thought of having my hair done like you did.”

I went shopping too, looking for the right clothes to wear to play Mary Magdalene. Couldn't wear red. I tried on so many clothes. A black leather jacket. A flowing flowered dress, so cloaking. The harder I looked at myself in the dressing room mirror, the more I could see the swell of my nakedness beneath the dress, the plump arms and rolling thighs. I left outfits piled on the floors of dressing rooms till I found a knit skirt and a long, fitted cardigan. I wanted to look like someone who would not have to stoop to calculation to pull a man away from another woman, someone who couldn't help her power.

“Well, you look good too,” I say. “Your scarf picks up the color of your eyes.”

She shrugs. “I've been dieting. I haven't really gotten my figure back since I had Eli, and they say the
TV
cameras make you look fatter.”