He felt like a criminal, as if he were fleeing, when he saw the taxis at the curb in front of the hotel, but he stepped quickly up to one of them and jumped inside. “The airport,” he said. The taxi nudged into traffic. Minutes later it was free of city streets, passing other cars along the highway. Nachman sat with his briefcase in his lap and looked across the gleaming blue of San Francisco Bay to the tawny hills in the east. He wasn’t sorry he’d made the trip, yet his heart was fraught with regret even as it swelled and beat against the bone cage, Nachman’s chest, with triumph.
Abruptly from this beating and swelling issued a strangled cry, “Turn around, please, I must go back.”
Nachman was more embarrassed than surprised by his outburst. Would the taxi driver think he was crazy? They drove now in loud silence. Nachman sat rigidly, as if braced to receive a blow. His eyes were fixed on the back of the taxi driver’s head, expecting him to question the order, or simply to ignore it and drive on to the airport. But the driver took the first exit off the highway, smoothly reversing direction, and headed back to San Francisco. Then he said, “You forgot something at the hotel?” The voice was a gentle tenor and seemed incongruous with the man. He was big, heavy, broad-shouldered, and black.
“Yes,” said Nachman.
“Happens.”
“I’m sorry. I feel very foolish.”
“No problem. Maybe you don’t really want to leave the city.”
“I don’t always know what I want.”
“That sounds like my wife. We go out for ice cream, it’s always a crisis. I say, ‘Pick any flavor. You don’t like it, we’ll throw it away and get another. Just pick.’ But she stands at the counter having a nervous breakdown over vanilla or pistachio.”
“That’s it. I’m having a crisis,” Nachman said to himself.
At the hotel, Nachman went to the desk. He intended to phone Lindquist’s room and ask if they could meet that evening, but before he could get the clerk’s attention, Chertoff appeared.
“Nachman, you’re still here. It was my impression that you were leaving.”
“What do you want?”
“Want? Nothing. Are you angry, Nachman?”
“What do you want?”
“I believe you are angry.”
“Are you going to tell me to kill Lindquist?”
“Did I upset you?”
“Yes, you upset me.”
“I meant no harm. My way of speaking is too strong on occasion. Forgive me. What I said is only because I am your great admirer. I would like to be your friend. Let me buy you a drink. Over there is a pleasant bar.”
“I have to phone Lindquist.”
“Of course, but later. Even next week the bad news will not be too late.”
“How do you know I have bad news?”
“As a mathematician, I don’t hope to know what you will say. As a man, I know everything. Please,” said Chertoff, taking Nachman’s arm, drawing him away toward the bar. Nachman didn’t resist.
Chertoff asked what Nachman would have, then ordered. Shoulder to shoulder at the bar, with drinks before them, Nachman felt an intimacy he needed very much, and yet it seemed he was being subjected to it, somewhat like a child, as if for his own good. Neither of them spoke for a minute. Then Nachman said, “I should tell him. Do you agree?”
He turned to look directly at Chertoff’s face. Chertoff, looking with equal directness at Nachman, produced a ferocious smile, as if he’d been given permission to be fully himself. His eyes, in the smiling pressure, narrowed with catlike satisfaction. His lips swept wide over the large, thrusting teeth. He said, “Nachman, I don’t give a shit.”
“You’re some friend, Chertoff.”
“A good friend. I think only what you think — which is that you should solve the problem.”
“When I was young … maybe.”
“Do you have a better reason to live?”
“What a question! It reminds me, I dreamed during Lindquist’s lecture. Only a few seconds, but I dreamed that I was about to kill him. He begged me to spare his life. He promised me his slave girl.”
“I am touched that you are — how do you say it? — sharing this dream with me.”
Nacham shrugged. “You know what it means?”
“The spoils of war, Nachman. It is about the spoils of war. Remember the Iliad? Since childhood I have loved and yearned for Briseis. You know the poem is even more wonderful in Russian than in Homeric Greek.” Chertoff boomed the opening lines in Russian. Heads turned along the bar to stare at him. Then he whispered, “Nachman, you must take the slave girl.”
“I must?”
“And you must kill Lindquist, too.”
“It’s not in my nature.”
“You have no choice, my friend,” said Chertoff as he put an arm around Nachman’s shoulders, and drew him close, and kissed him on the cheek in the Russian manner.
Nachman Burning
NACHMAN HAD THE BLUES. Maybe it was the weather, cold and gray, unusual for Santa Monica; or maybe it was a change in Nachman’s bodily chemistry, or maybe it was a psychological problem below consciousness. Maybe it was just being over fifty, or the fact that he needed a haircut. Two months since the last one. Nachman telephoned Felicity Trang.
She said, “Felicity Hair Salon.”
Nachman said, “I want to make an appointment.”
“We have free time at noon. O.K.?”
“O.K.”
“Which girl you want?”
“I want Felicity.”
“O.K. What name?”
“Nachman.”
“How you spell?”
Nachman spelled his name.
“Oh, Dr. Nachman. How nice.”
“Not doctor. Nachman is good enough. I’ll see you at noon, Felicity.”
“Yes. Thank you, Not doctor, ha, ha, ha …”
Felicity’s laughter, excessive yet pleasing, continued to stir Nachman after he put down the phone. He already felt better. A degree of anxiety mixed with his pleasure, but there was no doubt that he felt better; hopeful. He imagined himself tipped back in the chair, surrendering his head, a hairy bundle of complexities, to Felicity’s ministrations.
There were other ways of dealing with low spirits, but Nachman wouldn’t take drugs and rarely exercised. He’d told himself more than once that Felicity cost less, for the same amount of time, than a psychiatrist. She compared well with any doctor. A haircut was a visible, tangible result, and Nachman would feel reborn. Hair grew back, but psychological problems also returned. In essence, nobody changed. Don’t think that way, he told himself, teetering at the edge of a mental hole. Walk briskly. He was almost there, and looked forward to the shampoo. He loved the shampoo. To Nachman, it was worth the price of the whole haircut. Then would come the skull massage. Before the haircut itself, before she picked up her comb and scissors, Felicity always stood beside his chair, her shoulder pressed gently to his. Together they looked at Nachman’s face in the mirror and Felicity asked how Nachman would like her to cut his hair. Her voice was sweetly deferential, her expression rapt with concern to please. She was more than a barber. Like a sister, a confidant, or even a lover, she was involved. Nachman always said the same thing, slightly choked by self-consciousness:
“Not too short.”
“This long you like?” she responded, always touching the top of his ear, and ever so lightly fingering it.
“Yes, about right there.”
“Layered?”
“Yes. Small scissors. No electric clippers.”
“Oh no, no machines. Only small scissors and comb. Comb O.K.? Ha, ha.”
Nachman felt gooseflesh along his arms, and then a general surge of pleasure, like a mass of troops racing across a field, overwhelming their enemy, anxiety, vanquishing it. The battle of such emotions, thought Nachman, is what a man feels when he is about to get married. In short, approximately every two months, Nachman married Felicity Trang for about forty-five minutes.