Model Home (13 page)

“He's got a house.”

“Fuck. I'd kill for that. With Charlie, it's like planning a major event.”

Shannon handed the bottle back to Lyle, who closed her eyes before taking a swig. The tequila seemed to have lost its flavor; or rather, it tasted bad as ever, but her throat was no longer interested in her mouth's opinion. When Lyle opened her eyes, she was shocked to see there wasn't any left.

Shannon appeared to be rummaging through the cabinet. Her contours, vague already, had become even fuzzier. Laughing, she pulled something out: a box of hairnets. She stretched one over her head so that Lyle was confronted with the visual oxymoron of Shannon Jarrell in a hairnet. Remarkably, she still looked beautiful.

“My cousin found one of these in his burrito once. Can you believe that? He was cutting into it and pulled out an entire hairnet with his fork.” She stuck out her tongue, which made her look like a ravishing turtle. “Someone must have, like, wanted to sabotage the place.”

“Could have been an accident,” Lyle said.

“No, sir. How could it be an accident?”

“One cook's folding up a burrito? And another's leaving at the same time? Juan and Carlos? Carlos whips off his hairnet and tosses it at the trash,
adios,
and it lands in the burrito right when Juan's looking up. To say good-bye, I mean.” She mimed Juan's oblivious folding of the tortilla. “Boom. I mean, bam. Folds it right in.”

Shannon liked this apparently. Loved it. Was maybe even getting a hernia from laughing so hard. The hairnet had slipped to one side of her head, perched jauntily like a beret. Lyle laughed, too, amazed at herself: Had she really just said Juan and Carlos?

“You're fucking funny, you know that?” Shannon said, catching her breath. She wiped her eye with one knuckle. “Why are you always, like, hanging out by yourself?”

“Maybe I'm a leper.”

Shannon closed her eyes. “Shit, I'm wasted. Bugfuck.”

The door chimed again
.
Shannon burst out laughing and pointed at her hairnet. Lyle stood up, lurching to one side before finding her balance. When she turned her head, she was aware of the wall needing to catch up with her eyes, wobbling into focus like a slide. She emerged from the back room to find a middle-aged couple huddled over the display of ice cream tubs. The woman was wearing a sweatshirt that could only be described as “deciduous”: an embroidered tree covered the front of her chest, its branches drooping suggestively down her breasts and shedding a blizzard of rainbow-colored leaves.

“How's the macadamia nut?” the woman asked, smiling.

Lyle stuck a finger in her mouth, pretending to throw up. The woman stopped smiling. She studied the other tubs uneasily and then insisted on trying it.

“Well, I think it's quite good,” she said. “Delicious.”

Lyle laughed. “Please.”

“Excuse me?”

“We call it Macadamia Butt.”

“What about the cheesecake?” her husband asked from the far end of the case.

Lyle glanced at the woman. She walked over to where the man was standing and leaned over the counter, addressing him in private. “Tastes like sperm,” she whispered.

The man looked at his wife. Lyle had no idea what sperm tasted like, only that some girls in matching sorority shirts had tried the flavor once and claimed a resemblance, nearly peeing themselves laughing. The woman dressed as a tree stared at her. Perhaps she was retarded. After struggling with the macadamia nut for several minutes, Lyle scooped some water from the little trough by the register and dumped it into the tub, smooshing some of the sludgy mess onto a cone. A trickle of sludge dripped down the side, and she bent down and licked it clean.

“You just licked my cone!” the woman exclaimed.

“I did?”

She turned to her husband. “That girl just licked my cone.”

“Oh, for Pete's sake, shut up. I'll make you a new one.”

The man's face reddened. “Is there a manager here? Someone in charge?”

“No,” Lyle said. “I mean, yes. Shannon!”

Shannon poked her head out, still wearing the hairnet like a beret. The man seemed to have lost his sense of outrage, dumbstruck by her beauty.

“This girl licked my ice cream cone,” his wife said indignantly.

Shannon turned to Lyle, her face stern and managerial. “Did you lick this woman's ice cream cone?”

“Only with my tongue.”

“Please. Take this,” Shannon said, pulling a gallon tub of mint chip from the case and offering it to the woman. “Eat yourself bulimic.”

“You're both drunk!” the woman said.

Shannon looked at her sweatshirt. “You'd better rake your tits.”

“We'll call the actual manager. The owner. What are your names?”

“Mildred,” Shannon said. “With an
M
.”

“Me too. With an
H
.”

When the couple had left, Lyle and Shannon collapsed on the floor. They hugged each other, gasping for breath. Lyle told her
about the sperm comment. She knew Shannon was as wasted as she was, that only yesterday she might have made a snide comment about Lyle's having no idea what sperm tastes like. No doubt they'd be fired; Lyle was supposed to get her two-month raise next week. Still, a voice in her head was saying:
I'm hugging Shannon Jarrell.

The hair salon was bright and barren and smelled like lathered dog. Warren wrote his name on the list at the counter and sat down in front of an intimidating display of hair products. The words “Shear Magic” were printed on every bottle. He did not like these bottles. Or perhaps it wasn't the bottles themselves so much as the fact that someone was buying them. So far, since his meeting with Larry, he'd failed to sell a single house. Six appointments, and not so much as a nibble. Warren's face was starting to break out, his first pimples in years. So far only one couple had been interested enough to ask about the machines breaking ground nearby, but Warren had not managed to tell them it was a shopping mall. Instead he'd shrugged enigmatically, hoping to seem unconcerned. But the husband had sniffed something out: he'd turned courteous and withdrawn, his interest retreating like a mirage. Warren had cursed himself the whole ride home, punching the Renault's AM radio so hard it no longer switched on.

It would not happen again. Yesterday he'd driven out to Van Nuys and lurked in front of a Century 21 office, handing his card to everyone who walked out, but had yet to receive a call.

“How would you like it?” Warren's hairdresser said, lowering his chair with a hydraulic
shunk.
The guy had large hoop earrings and a wild nest of hair, white as a dandelion puff. Aside from an Asian woman cleaning the floor, sweeping a voodooey assortment of locks into a pile, they were the only people in the salon.

“Short,” Warren managed.

“Clippers?”

“That's fine.”

“Tapered on the side?”

Warren frowned. “Whatever you think's best.”

The hairdresser—whose name was Mick—looked at him contemptuously. He wasted no time with the clippers, lifting one side of Warren's hair with a comb and shearing the brown tussock poking through its teeth. Watching this strange man clip his hair, submitting like an infant to his contempt, Warren thought how nice it would be to come to work every day knowing you'd have a steady stream of customers. Demand-side economics. No one ever got their hair cut in advance.

The phone rang, and Mick put down his clippers to answer it. His face in the mirror hardened to a scowl. “Mom,” he said angrily, “I'm not talking about it anymore. Do you understand?”

He did not mention that he had a customer. Warren's hair was half-gone, the left side shaved close enough to see the scalp. He was spending fifteen dollars on this haircut—money from Dustin's 529 account, intended for college. He spun his seat so he wouldn't have to look at himself and stared at the muted TV in the corner. They were doing a segment about Mandy Rogers. Her face filled the screen, eyes puckered into tiny slits. It was the bags under them, the dark puddingy circles, that startled Warren. They didn't belong on a fifteen-year-old girl. They belonged on a prime minister, or someone who'd survived a drought. Perhaps it was an illusion—a trick of the lighting—but the eyes seemed to zero in on him from across the room.

“Mom, you're driving a wedge between us. Capital ‘Us.'”

Warren checked his watch, hoping the hairdresser would see him. He felt the top of his head, touching the jagged frontier where the crew cut sprouted into hair. On TV Mandy Rogers had been replaced by a fleet-footed bulldog; the caption at the bottom said
I'm long for my kibbles, I'm long for my bits.

The hairdresser turned his back, his voice shrunk to a whisper. “You ungrateful bitch! How many lawn chairs did I return for you last week?”

Warren stood up. He might punch someone or break into tears. He unsnapped the nylon cape cinched around his neck and walked out of the salon, heading to the Renault without looking back. He sat in the driver's seat for a minute, catching his breath, transported for a moment to his mother's funeral. He could recall
it all perfectly: the coffin creaking in the wind; the gray snow of the cemetery seeping into his shoes; the endless skein of geese that interrupted the service, honking and honking overhead, causing the scattering of mourners to look even smaller. His mother's few acquaintances, amassed from a lifetime of work. For a long time Warren had supported her financially, but in the end he had not been able to erase the dutiful solitude of her life.

Warren glanced at the rearview mirror: if he turned to the left, where his hair still fell shaggily past his ears, he looked only slightly deranged. He flipped on the radio before remembering it was broken and then pulled out of the parking lot, ignoring the old woman in a cartwheel hat ogling him from the curb. The car was stifling. He thought about stopping somewhere to finish his haircut, but the idea of walking into another Mane Event or Wish You Were Hair filled him with dread.

Warren drove down Crenshaw Boulevard, bordered on both sides by identical mini-malls. The sun blazing off the pink and green buildings only magnified their grubbiness. The real question—the one that hounded Warren at night, disrupting his sleep—was why he'd left Wisconsin in the first place. They'd been happy there, well-off by most standards: thanks to the white flight from Milwaukee, there was no shortage of home buyers wanting a piece of lake country. And their house in Nashotah had been bright and crowded and happy, alive with the sound of acorns dribbling down the roof, the living room windows opening to the summer breeze off the lake. Warren had built the place himself. It wasn't as lavish as the vacation homes he developed, was perhaps even a bit small, but he liked the sense of warmth it conveyed, its crowded, hivelike sense of communion. The house was a minefield of shoes, and he could identify his children by the creaks they made in the floor above him. Mostly he loved the lake itself, the knowledge that he owned a small bit of shore. He liked to wake in the morning with the first streaks of sun and take the canoe out by himself, the motorboats quiet as alligators in their slips, steam curling from the water as he paddled past the dew-slick docks. His father had taken him fishing on this very lake, once a week in the summer, and they'd marveled at the rich people sleeping in their houses. They'd fished in the cattails between docks. It had felt wrong somehow, like stealing. Alone in his canoe, years later, Warren would scan the shore on his way back home and feel a jolt
of pride when he spotted their house, the windows so bright they hurt his eyes.

Somehow, though, it hadn't been enough. Ever since he was a kid, he'd imagined leaving Wisconsin: his father's illness, the smell of gas that lingered on his mother's skin, even in the mornings—they seemed to be a part of the landscape itself, as inescapable as the lakes and moraines and snow-flattened cornfields. The westerns he'd watched while his mother worked the swing shift had proffered another world, one filled with sun and dust and violence, a life of monumental dreams. He remembered the day Larry had invited him out to California. It had been the middle of a bitter winter—he'd spent the day before shoveling the driveway in zero-degree wind—and Larry had called him from the car phone in his Alfa to tell him about the “golden egg” he'd found in the desert. Warren had thought he was shouting through a blizzard before realizing the top was down. When Warren landed in L.A., groggy from an in-flight nap, he was amazed to see that the baggage handlers were wearing shorts. He had to shake his head to make sure he was truly awake. He had the same feeling touring Herradura Estates for the first time, seeing all the sprawling ranch-style houses, their corrals and barns and glacier blue pools, the horse trails twining through a canyon of scarlet flowers. For the first time Warren understood the difference between being well-off and being rich. The real estate agent showed him the cheapest house on the market, well beyond what he could afford. Warren didn't care. He raided stock intended for their retirement, a taste of the pillaging to come. That his family hadn't dreamed of such a life was further incentive to give it to them.

At home, Dustin and his friend Mark Biesterman were blocking the driveway, hosing off their surfboards. Dustin's beautiful girlfriend sat on the lawn in shorts and a bikini top. The two of them were so clearly in love that it flooded Warren with nostalgia. They blinked at him as he got out of the car. The hose drooped in Dustin's hand, a stream of water gushing down one leg.

“Wow, Mr. Ziller,” Kira said.

Mark Biesterman nodded, impressed. “I like your do. I mean, it really interrogates the whole notion of ‘hair.'”

“It was a mistake,” Warren explained.

“No sense regretting it. To thine own self be true.”