Caressed by the rush and swirl of warm water, head cradled in Felicity’s hands, the delicate perfume of shampoo, and then the massage with Felicity’s strong fingers, and then the sweet seriousness of her voice:
“You like to part your hair on the right?”
Nachman opened the door and entered the barbershop. Four Vietnamese women barbers were at work. Felicity was free, sitting at the cash register near the door. She smiled at Nachman and stood right up. He followed her to a chair, sat down, and abandoned himself to the ritual, becoming oblivious to everyone in the barbershop except Felicity and himself; and time was abolished for Nachman. He imagined their marriage, mediated by his hair, as heavenly, an eternal condition, though he knew, when Felicity fashioned the ultimate shape of his hair with a comb and a blow dryer, the marriage was over. He also knew he wouldn’t look good. She was a terrible barber.
To know the consequences of an action is one thing. To eschew the action is another. Who would smoke cigarettes if this wasn’t true, let alone have casual sex — thought Nachman somewhat irrelevantly — Nachman who, despite his susceptibility to women, was a strict observer of limits. He didn’t fool around. For forty-five minutes every two months — you couldn’t call it fooling around — Nachman was in no danger of compromising himself. Better to burn was Nachman’s motto. A haircut was inconsequential, erotic, not sexual. Thus tumbled the thoughts of a serious being. By pleasure deranged, maybe, but no longer depressed.
In Nachman’s life, Felicity was an anomaly — a silliness — depending on how you thought about it, but should Nachman think about it? Nachman thought too much about everything; even in the throes of his abandonment he couldn’t entirely stop thinking, lest he die or cease to exist or relinquish his grip on the real. Not to think would be like an astronaut separated from his rocketship, adrift in space with nowhere to go and no means of propulsion. Nachman had seen that condition often in a person’s eyes.
When Nachman explained how he wanted his hair to look, Felicity had nodded and nodded to show that she listened carefully, and then she went to work and tried to do what Nachman wanted. Meticulous, diligent, infinitely concerned to do right and good. But Felicity had no art in her soul, no feeling for the shape of Nachman’s hair in relation to his face. The haircut “styled” by Felicity would look as if it had been inflicted, and it would bring to mind images of poor laboring men.
So?
It looked honest enough, and the point cannot be made too strongly that Nachman loved the feeling of Felicity’s hands soaping his hair, then massaging the skull behind his ears, and, with a subtle circular movement, his occipital bump. She knew how to touch a man. As for doing the actual haircut, it would have been wise to call in a different barber, or anybody passing in the street, but even so, when Felicity stepped back and tilted her head as she studied the progress of her work, Nachman saw that she considered herself a first-class barber and his heart went out — no, it rushed — to her. He would never say a word that might suggest reservations or criticism.
Near the end, Felicity would say, “You like O.K.?”
Nachman would say, “Perfect.” He would sound drowsy.
Later, he always tipped generously and smiled, saying, “Thank you,” and walked giddily home, supposing that his head might now look appropriate on a pedestal in his garden, with a grin on his lips, expressing blissful indifference to the fluttering doves and jays, lighting and asquat, shitting on his haircut. But where else, for twenty-two dollars (four for the shampoo, thirteen for the haircut, and a five-dollar tip), could Nachman get such relief from low spirits and uncomplicated satisfaction? He’d have paid more.
Regardless of Felicity’s butchery, then, Nachman could live with the result. A stupid-looking haircut didn’t make him miserable, and he soon forgot about how he looked, anyway. He had plenty else to think about, such as math problems, lectures, and politics at the Institute of Higher Mathematics, where Nachman worked in a bare office at a gray steel table with pencil and paper. The problems he dealt with were so difficult that Nachman sometimes cried. Nearly unbearable frustration attended his mathematical struggles until he suffered the piercing joy of an illumination. Sometimes he’d find himself sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, sweating and feverish, and he’d thrust out of bed and stumble to the table where he kept pencil and paper for such unpredictable moments, and he’d scrawl the solution to a problem, and then fall back into bed and was instantly asleep. In the morning, he’d find his scrawled solution. He’d then remember having awakened and, as if he were taking dictation from a nightmare, recording the solution. The look of the haircut was not important to Nachman.
Felicity, a small woman about forty years old, had a complexion slightly ruined by acne, and a figure slightly ruined by childbearing. Color photographs of her three children were pasted to the mirror. Nachman always asked about them. Felicity told him they spoke Vietnamese as well as English. Lowering her voice to a whisper, as if she feared the evil ear, she said her children were excellent students, the two boys and the girl were first in their respective classes. She also talked about her husband, who refused to let her invite friends to dinner, or attend night school to study English, or drive the family car. She walked to shopping. Walking to work took over an hour. Without a car, in Los Angeles, it was impossible for her to visit people. The few women she knew at the church, to which she walked once a week, lived too far away. Felicity said, “I hope someday I have more friends.”
Nachman wondered if Felicity hoped he would be her friend. Probably not, but the idea embarrassed him. He felt a touch of anxiety. The haircut was friendship enough. Felicity lived in a different world. She went to church, unimaginable for Nachman. They could probably never have much to say to each other. A few questions, a few answers. Felicity once asked what kind of work Nachman did. He told her he was a professor of mathematics. She once asked if he was married. He told her he was not married. Today she asked if he lived alone. He told her he lived alone. This was the furthest they had gone conversationally, and Nachman didn’t expect or want them to achieve a higher level of generalization, or deeper level of intimacy.
“No girlfriend?” said Felicity, as if the idea took her breath away.
“No.”
Did she have someone in mind for him? Nachman continued to wonder what her gasp could mean, but at the moment, Felicity’s small scissors, working about his ears, pleased him to the point of stupefaction, and he enjoyed the ripping sensation as she pulled the comb through lengths of wet hair caught between her middle and index finger before she snipped and snip-snipped, and in the shallow depths of a semi-sleep, he liked the way she then released his hair with studious and insensitive attention to its layers, mutilating it. Nachman felt no annoyance or despair, only the musical nature of the occasion. In the sound and pull of the comb drawn through his hair came the rich tones of a cello pulling against the flight and flash of scissoring violins, and spinning high and away in thought, Nachman wished he had a ton of hair so this fine delirium could last longer than forty-five minutes. Hair, he thought, is basic to erotic connections between a man and a woman, usually the woman’s hair, and, and, and — what follows? Nachman didn’t know, but he pursued the thought — no — the thought pursued Nachman as he felt a pressure against his elbow which rested on the arm of the barber chair. Felicity leaned over it, her pelvis inadvertently brushing against the bone.