Make Me Work (23 page)

“That much, Nuong! But that's all there is!”

“Not healthy!” Nuong said. “Must go!” she declared, and scissors magically appeared in her hand, their silver lips smacking at the definitive outward sign of Anthony's remaining youth and hipness. He was an interesting, creative guy, a sound-man for TV and films, but after Nuong was done, how would soulful single women know that? How would those rare creatures tell him from the good corporate citizens gripping Cambridge and Boston like a chest infection?

“Don't do it!” he cried out.

Nuong jumped back in surprise. Up and down the sweeping mural of the big mirror, disembodied heads swiveled to look at him.

“Let me think about it for a minute, O.K.?”

“Think?”

“Yes, think, Nuong. Maybe, you know…say goodbye.”

“Oh! Goodbye! Sorry!” She laughed, and went off to check on a lady whose hair resembled, in its slick coat of red gel, the vital organs of a large animal.

He was facing the street, but watching it in the mirror behind him—reflected twice until it was right-side-out again. A college kid was skating across the four lanes of Mass. Ave. on fluorescent-blue Rollerblades, wearing electric-camouflage harem pants and a red T-shirt barking
MAKE ME WORK
in big green letters. He was bullfighting the cars, dancing with them to whatever he had on his CD player, its wires going into his head. In the present epoch kids like this were Republicans—hard to believe, until you talked to them. This one would make a fascinating corpse when he finally screwed up, but until then he was having a wonderful time. What kind of corpse would Anthony make, he wondered. He was thirty-nine years old, and lately envied the lives of surf bums and fraternity boys. If he were struck down today by a runaway truck, would his dying thought be, “Why didn't I party more?”

The kid leaped onto the sidewalk and coasted to the door of Shear Satisfaction. He was coming in for a haircut, or for something—“haircut” not really covering the situation on his head, which was dead-white and shoulder-length on the left, shoe-polish-black and buzzed to an inch or so on the right, with purple highlights like fake gorilla fur. The hieroglyphs carved into the black side were growing back. Maybe that's why he was here, to have his hieroglyphs repaired. Anthony lowered his mirror to check the kid out as he motored by. The kid checked Anthony out, too, with obvious contempt.

I
was at Woodstock, dude!
Anthony said to the kid with his mind. That's
right! Me! The old guy having his tail chopped off! I was there in the mud when it really happened, young cock!
Not
like this jive you punks are into!

He raised his mirror to look at the street again. A black Alfa-Romeo had parked in front of the shop. When the driver got out, a spear of ice entered Anthony's heart. It was, unbelievably, a man named Robert, who'd been Anthony's best friend nearly a decade ago, until Anthony started sleeping with Robert's girlfriend, Sarah.

Anthony slid down in his chair and hid his face behind the mirror. He had to brace his arm against the chair to keep it from shaking. His day had finally come. After stealing Sarah from Robert, he'd avoided his former friend, and not long after that, Robert had left town. In all these years Anthony had never seen him again.

Nuong reappeared beside his chair. “Say goodbye yet?”

He couldn't remember what she was talking about. In Anthony's six years with Sarah, Robert had rarely crossed his mind; the knife he'd put in his best friend's back had somehow entered his own brain as well, severing all memories of the man. But Sarah had left more than two years ago, and now Robert often popped into consciousness like a martyred saint, cloaked in the shimmering raiment of betrayal.

“We cut, yes?” said Nuong, tugging on Anthony's failing hair.

“Let me think a little more, Nuong. Please.”

“Think more, Anything? You think so much! Maybe go home and think, O.K.?” she said, reaching to unfasten his cape.

“No, Nuong! Just another minute!” Anthony whispered as Robert, in the mirror behind him, made straight for his chair. He had a gorgeous head of wavy brown hair—hadn't lost a strand in all these years. What was it like for Nuong to work with hair like that? Anthony wondered. Wouldn't such hair be the Venetian light of her craft, her Stradivarius, the ultimate engagement of her special gifts? He saw that he'd never been more than hackwork for her.

“Oh, hi!” Nuong said to Robert.

Robert ran a hand through his flourishing locks. “Big meeting this afternoon, Nuong. Do I look O.K.?”

“Need trim,” Nuong said.

“How soon till you're done with this one?” said Robert, and glanced into the big mirror where Anthony's reflected face floated cameolike in an oval frame. Their eyebeams met like a physics diagram. Somewhere, someplace, Anthony had seen the smile that bloomed across Robert's features.

“Can it be?” Robert said. “Is it possible?” He put a finger on Anthony's mirror and pushed it aside, as though setting back the hand of a clock. “Nuong! Do you know who this is?”

“It's Anything,” she said. “You know Robert?” she asked Anthony.

Yes
, Anthony said, but no sound came out. Instead, the smile came to him: Orson Welles in
The Third Man
, toying with Joseph Cotten on the Ferris wheel.

Nuong tried Robert. “You know Anything?”

“Oh, yes,” Robert said. “Yes, indeed. I know Anything very well.” He crouched down and clapped his hand on Anthony's knee through the barber's cape. “Anything! It's so great to
see
you! How have you
been
, old pal?”

“Been
all right,”
Anthony said, sounding like a flying insect in a paper bag. His voice box had filled up with used motor oil. “And
yourself?
”

“Oh,
very well,”
Robert said, imitating the sound Anthony was making. He straightened up. “Anything is a dear old friend of mine, Nuong.”

“Oh! I never know!”

Robert circumnavigated the barbering chair. “You've kept your long hair all this time, Anything,” he said. “There used to be so much more of it, though. You're thinning out quite dramatically on top, old friend. I'm sorry to say it doesn't look very good worn at this length.” He turned to Anthony's stylist. “What do you think, Nuong?”

“I tell him same thing!” she said.

“Is Anything a Shear Satisfaction regular?” Robert asked her. “A steady customer of our humble enterprise?”

“Good customer,” she answered, nodding her head.

The sludge drained from Anthony's vocal cords. “Our humble enterprise,” he repeated, looking back and forth between them.

Nuong smiled shyly and took Robert's arm. “My husband,” she said.

A barber's cape is strangely like a force field from science fiction—someone in charge must lift it from your body before you can move. Anthony sat without arms or the power to leave his chair, his head laid bare like a monkey offering its brains for supper.

Robert spoke to Nuong in a foreign language.

“You speak Vietnamese now?” Anthony said.

“I married a woman from Vietnam. I wouldn't bother to learn her tongue?”

“What were you saying?”

“I was offering Nuong the male perspective on your situation.”

Perspective, Anthony thought, as Nuong gathered his hair in her hands. He'd recently done the sound for a nature film, yet another documentary about eagles and hawks. The public appetite for predation was apparently insatiable. Like all such films, it was told from the predator's point of view. But what about the point of view of the prey? he wondered now. What about the rabbits and rodents into whose lives those raptors plummeted like hydrogen bombs? Wasn't their story interesting? Wasn't it noble? So why did no one ever tell it? He heard a metallic whisper behind him, like a closing door. When Robert stepped into view, he had a ponytail in his hand.

Anthony marveled over how recognizable it was, even apart from his head. Seeing his ponytail was like an out-of-body experience. It was he, but it was over there. “Put it back!” he told Robert.

Robert chuckled through his teeth. “Wonderful,” he said.

“What?”

“I said I'm afraid that won't be possible.” He started playing a rhythm against his palm with Anthony's hair, the way a drummer brushes a snare. It seemed complex and Latin—a samba or cha-cha.

Anthony raised his mirror to see the back of his head. He had the soup-bowl cut worn by deranged men in the street.

“Not finished!” said Nuong, taking the mirror away. “Not to see yet!” she said, and began her hypnotic lifting and snipping.

“So tell me, Anything,” Robert said after a moment. “How's Sarah?”

Anthony jerked his head and Nuong's scissors pierced his ear.

“Anything!” Nuong cried. “Sorry! Not move when cutting hair!” She was nearly weeping with distress, frantically dabbing the side of Anthony's head with a towel.

“Nuong, get some bandages from the back,” Robert said.

She ran off to do that. Robert folded the bloody towel into a pad, poured witch hazel on it, and put it against Anthony's ear. It stung wickedly. “It's nothing,” Robert said. “A scratch. Problem is, this part of the ear is a fairly vascular area. Unlike the lobe. Have you ever considered an earring, by the way?”

“No.”

“It might offset the disadvantage on top. Hold this for me, will you?”

Anthony held the towel against his ear. Slowly, lightly, Robert began massaging his shoulders.

“I have no idea how Sarah is, and you know it,” Anthony said.

“I know nothing of the kind,” Robert replied, amusement taking flight from his voice like the hawk that Anthony's film crew had startled off its prey. The bunny remained on the ground, mauled but alive. “You and Sarah aren't together anymore? When did that happen?”

“Two years ago.”

“You stayed together that long!”

“A second ago you were surprised we weren't together now.”

“Are you with somebody else?”

“I have dates.”

“Dates!” Robert seemed to marvel over the concept. “But no Ms. Right?”

“Not yet,” Anthony said. At the moment he had a bad crush on an assistant director he'd met doing a toothpaste commercial, a dirty-blonde from Santa Monica who wore denim shorts and hiking boots on the set and barked directions at everybody through a bullhorn. She could bark anything she wanted at Anthony, but all she'd ever told him was to get his shadow out of the shot.

His entire career consisted of concealing all evidence of himself. In a perfect job, Anthony was the man who wasn't there.

“So who left whom?” Robert asked.

“It wasn't that simple.”

“Nonsense, Anything. Of course it was.”

“She left me.”

“For another guy?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. Happy now?”

“On the contrary. I'm sad. The leopard never changes her spots, does she?” He massaged more deeply. “She'd done that before, you know.”

“I know, Robert.”

Nuong returned with gauze and adhesive tape. She and her husband bandaged Anthony up. “You look like van Gogh now,” Robert said when they were done. “Women will love that.”

Nuong spun Anthony around. His right ear was a big white nodule on his head. The right shoulder of his cape was spattered with blood. His ponytail dangled from Robert's breast pocket like the tassel on a Shriner's fez. He looked into Robert's eyes. “I hope you're satisfied.”

Nuong pulled her husband's sleeve. “I think Anything upset,” she said.

Robert strolled calmly around the chair, musing upon his old lost friend, biting his lower lip reflectively. “The haircut's too bourgeois, isn't it?”

In protest, Anthony averted his face. His gaze fell upon the kid with the skates. The kid was in one of the shampooing chairs at the rear of the shop, having his head prepped behind a portable room divider. All Anthony could see were the Rollerbladed feet and the freaky ballooning pants. The feet wiggled like giant tropical fish to the jive on his CD machine.

Robert saw Anthony looking and ambled over for a look himself; then he returned, speaking more Vietnamese to Nuong. She answered with sounds like small birds escaping her mouth. They cackled like this for a minute—the male bird and the female bird tweeting and hopping and nipping each other's breasts.

This vignette of their coupling evoked one from Anthony's life, an incident that occurred not long before Sarah left him. He had come home late one night from a difficult shoot, and knocked over a table lamp as he entered their room. Sarah sprang up in bed and screamed, “I feel like a big onion!” and then fell back into deepest slumber. Anthony, who'd been exhausted, lay awake half the night. He never mentioned the remark, but after she left, it became the crucial detail, the emblematic, haunting thing. What had it meant? That her life with him was smelly? That it made her cry? That it consisted of layers? Layers of what?

“You like that?” Robert asked, jutting his chin to indicate the kid.

“Don't be absurd,” Anthony said.

“I didn't think so.” He stepped behind the chair. “Sit still this time.”

The massage had relaxed Anthony, and now the relaxation climbed his spine and flowered in his head like fate or justice. He closed his eyes and sat still as Robert worked on his head with the clippers. With each buzzing pass of the tool, another extraneous onion layer fell away from his life. It felt good, like being loved by someone. After a long time, Robert spun Anthony around in the chair.
“Voilà,”
he said.

Anthony opened his eyes. The rest of his hair was gone. In its place was a dark, lustrous nap—his under-fur shorn of the feeble growth it had struggled in vain to nourish. He touched it and felt a thrill. It was healthy and thick. He'd forgotten the basic shape of his head; now it bodied forth, all presence and strength, the cranium of a hero. Why had he walked around all these years with that dead straw hanging from his skull?