Price of the Haircut_Stories

by Brock Clarke

  “They do,” she said. “Do you want to hear mine?” And then she started to tell us before we could say whether we wanted to or not. “My guy makes me dinner, and for dessert, we do it all over the house: in the basement, in the shower, on the table, in the living room, in front of the mirror. After we christen every room, he carries me upstairs, to our bedroom, where we scream each other’s name or say things like, ‘You turn me on,’ or ‘You make me so hot.’ I try to time it so we come together. When that’s about to happen, we get into the missionary position. And then he pulls out and comes all over my stomach while we look into each other’s eyes.”

  “Wow,” we said.

  “Wow,” said the waiter, waiting for us to notice him and his tray of shrimp cocktail.

  “Baby, I’ve never told you this,” the big boss said, hooking his left arm around her waist, “but that’s my ideal moment, too.” He then started groping her, right there in front of us, but his wife fought him off.

  “Not now, you big ape. I want to hear about their ideal moments.” She hooked her thumb at us, and in doing so she got it caught in one of her thin straps of clothing, and then the big boss pretended to help her unhook it, and in doing so, undid the whole piece of fabric, and then they started laughing as they pretended to try to attach hook A to hook B. We had to turn our heads, not because we found the whole thing embarrassing, but because they were happy, and if you’re unhappy, it’s hard to look at other people being happy without wishing they weren’t, and if you start wishing someone is unhappy, it’s very hard to stop at just wishing.

  “What were we talking about?” the big boss’s wife finally said. We looked at her again and saw that she was back to being at least barely clothed, although the big boss had yet to totally untangle his hands from her straps and swaths yet.

  “Their ideal moment,” the big boss said.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t be interested,” we said.

  “I would,” she said. “Try me.”

  So we tried her: for one of us, our ideal moment was sitting in a firelit room with Mr. Wilder, reading over our scripts, talking about our characters’ motivations; for one of us, it was being in bed with her now ex-husband, making love to him, and then not thinking about Mr. Wilder immediately afterward; for another, it was the day he finally made his children understand why he’d left their mother and them and ruined their lives—because of Mr. Wilder—so that they could help him understand the same thing. We said all this not together but as individuals, talking over each other, shouting when talking wasn’t loud enough, making less and less sense the more we talked. Because this was the answer to the doctor’s wife’s question—Why do you talk that way? Individually we sounded like Babel, but together we sounded like a chorus. Individually, we were ridiculous, pathetic; but together, we were a group of ridiculous, pathetic people who—as five and not just one—had a certain amount of authority, like a club, or a focus group, or a jury. Individually, someone might feel sorry for us; but together, someone might feel scared. That was our hope, pretty much our last one. In any case, when we finally finished talking about our ideal moments, the big boss took off his glasses, as if we were an even worse cast than the ones who’d come before us and he couldn’t bear to look at us. He even untangled his hands from his wife’s thin strips of clothing, as if our ideal moments had made him forget all about his, and hers. His wife was clearly feeling the same way: she covered her mouth with her hand, and through the hand she said, “You were just babies. What did that sick man do to you?”

  “No, no. It wasn’t that way at all,” we said, because other people had also assumed it was that way, and because it wasn’t.

  “Then what way was it?”

  “It’s hard to say,” we said, because it was.

  “What’s hard to say?” the doctor said, coming up from behind us.

  We turned to face him, and we must have had that look on our face that said, Help us, You’re the only one who can help us. Please help us! because he took a step back, buttoned his jacket, and took one of his pens out of his pocket as though preparing to take notes—in other words, he’d made himself look less like a man who had his own troubles, which might make him better understand ours, and more like every other doctor who’d tried to help us and failed—and we all of a sudden felt tired, so very tired. So we excused ourselves, said we had an early rehearsal the next day and that we were worn-out from our flights, from the time change, and went below deck to our rooms and tried to get some sleep, which we could not do. We could not sleep. Because hope is the thing that keeps you from sleeping, and all we could think of was the doctor and his wife and how maybe, if we saw the doctor again with his professional guard down, then we’d see him as someone more like us than he wanted to admit, someone who really might help us. So we crept up to the top deck and saw the doctor with his professional guard down. He was standing at the far end of the deck, leaning on the railing, holding a bottle of beer by the neck, talking to Lisa. There was no one else on the deck, and the moon, which was full or close to it, shone on them, on the deck, on the river, on everything. He was clearly a happier, less worried doctor than he’d been earlier: we could tell that already he was in love with Lisa. He had a huge, toothy smile that said: I can’t believe I’m already in love with her. Lisa had the same smile on her face. We’d been introduced to her earlier, said a few strained but pleasant words to her, but all we could see of Lisa was that she wasn’t Mr. Wilder. But we could see, now, the way the doctor was seeing her, and we also saw that she was the kind of person who almost made you wish your heart hadn’t already been broken so that she could break it for you, almost made you forget the person who’d broken it in the first place. And we could see that he was just another doctor in a long line of doctors, another doctor to whom you would tell your story and hope that he could help you understand something about what you wanted and why you wanted it and how you might then get what you wanted. But in the end he couldn’t. And what do you do when you don’t get what you want? You do the only thing you can. You make sure no one else gets what they want, either.

  “OH, WE THINK you know what we mean,” we say to the doctor. This is after Lisa has told us it’s five minutes ’til curtain but before the matinee itself, before she gets drunk on champagne afterward, before she ends up dead in the river.

  “What do you mean?” the doctor says, trying so hard to act like he doesn’t know what we’re talking about, to act like whatever we’re about to tell him is someone else’s problem and he’s only there to solve it, to act like the doctor. But we don’t want him to be the doctor anymore; we want him to be scared, nervous, ashamed, defiant, weak, helpless. We want him to be everything no one wants to be. We want him to be like us. So we tell him everything—everything we know about him and Lisa, everything we’ve seen, everything we’ve heard—and while he listens, he stares at the ceiling, chews on his pen, nods a little bit. When we’re through telling him what we know, the doctor looks at us and says, “OK, so you know. Good for you. So what?”

  “It’s wrong,” we say. “That’s so what.”

  “Lisa isn’t my patient,” he says. “She’s not one of you. And I love her.”

  “It’s still wrong,” we tell him, and he doesn’t deny it.

  “Love makes you do things you shouldn’t,” he says, and it’s clear that he’s prepared, rehearsed for a moment like this. Because part of being in love is practicing the way you’ll talk about it to people who will tell you it’s wrong, or that it’s not love at all.

  “You’re married,” we tell him.

  “So were you,” he says. Because after all, he’s our doctor, and he knows a few things about us, too, and one of the things he knows is that we cheated on our wives and husbands, too, once we figured out they weren’t who we were looking for. All of us were cheaters before we were legally able to vote, divorced before we were legally able to drink. The doctor knows all of this. “All of you were married, and all of you did the same thing,” he sa
ys.

  “We didn’t love them,” we tell him, which he also knows.

  “Neither do I,” he says.

  “So you’re just like us,” we say.

  “I’m not,” he says, and here he smiles. It’s a deep, satisfied, mean smile. We know what’s coming next: every doctor we’ve ever known longs for the moment when his patients are no longer his patients, and he can either declare the patients cured or he can declare his patients hopeless and then tell them exactly what he thinks of them. “You got divorced because of some guy—an actor—who barely knew you thirty years ago. This guy doesn’t even know you exist anymore; he barely knew you existed in the first place. Why do you even want him to know? Why do you care? Even you have no idea. How many doctors later and you still have no idea. The best you can do is walk around in your sad little group, freaking everybody out, talking about your divorces. And why do you care about that? People get married and divorced all the time. Every day.”

  “Not like us,” we say. “Not for reasons like ours.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” the doctor says. “ My reasons aren’t like your reasons. I have Lisa. I’m not like you at all.”

  “Poor Lisa,” we say, because we’d rehearsed for this moment, too: we talked about it beforehand, prepared for it; because we’re actors and we know exactly what to do, what to say, whom to say it to, and when to say it.

  “Poor Lisa why?”

  “Poor Lisa told us about you.”

  “She didn’t,” the doctor says.

  “She did,” we say, even though she didn’t. “She told us how she feels, being with you.” We wait for the doctor to ask us how she feels, but he doesn’t: he just stares at us, defiantly, as if daring us to tell us something that isn’t true. So we do. “She told us that she feels like a whore.”

  “She didn’t say that,” the doctor shouts, his voice catching a little bit, and then, because maybe shouting isn’t enough, he stands up. Strangely, he has less power over us standing up than he has when he’s sitting down with his legs crossed, which is how he normally sits in group.

  “We’re sorry, but she did,” we say. “She says she feels like a whore, sleeping with a married man. Those were her very words.”

  “But I won’t be a married man,” he says. We can hear the desperation now: because you’re never more desperate when you argue with the truth, or with what you’re told is the truth. “I’m getting a divorce. I’ve told her that. She knows that.”

  “We know,” we say. “That makes her feel even more like a whore, wrecking your marriage for her. It makes her want to kill herself.”

  “She said that?” the doctor says. He’s totally given himself over to our truth by now. Because we’re good. This is exactly what Mr. Wilder said about us, once, to the director—“Those kids are good”—which is another reason we can’t forget about him: he was the first person to tell us we were good. If you want someone to forget you, never be the first person to tell them that they are good, at anything. Because if you tell them that once, they’ll keep wanting you to tell them, and if you don’t, they’ll never stop wondering why.

  “She really did,” we say. “We told her to never say it again. And then she said it again. We think she means it. We think she might really kill herself if you don’t leave your wife.”

  “But she loves me,” the doctor says.

  “Yes, she does. Very much,” we tell him. “That just makes it worse for her, you know.”

  The doctor drops his head, because he does know. He knows exactly what we’re talking about, knows the rest of the story without having to hear the rest of the story, knows exactly what the right thing is, what he has to do, what he will do. Because there are only a few stories (the Ohio River Lady Queen Players are a floating dinner-serving testament to that truth) and everyone knows them, everyone knows exactly how they go, not because they’re predictable or boring, but because they’re true, or because they so easily could be.

  Just then, we hear the big boss over the loudspeaker, telling everyone that the show will start in a minute and to please take their seats, and so we get up out of ours and head for the door. The doctor has stopped paying attention to us. He just sits there, looking blankly at the wall as though there are words on it, instructions that he can’t believe are meant for him to follow.

  “‘YOU THINK WE don’t know. But we do,’” Lisa says, mimicking us. She takes a big slug from one of the bottles of champagne, closes her eyes against the taste, then opens them again. “‘We. We. We.’ You don’t know one thing about me,” she says.

  “We know lots of things,” and then we tell her everything we told the doctor just a few hours earlier.

  “Do you know that I love him?” she says. “That he loves me, too, no matter what he says?”

  “We do know that,” we say. And then: “Why? What does he say?” Even though we know what he’s said. We know that after the matinee, before the champagne, the doctor told Lisa that it was over between them, that he couldn’t see her anymore, that it was better this way. We know this as though it were a script we’d written ourselves, know it as though we were there when it happened, know it as though Lisa tells us so herself, which she does not do. All she says is, “I love him. I just love him. That’s all I know.”

  “We know, we know,” we say. “We know all about it.”

  She nods, takes another slug from the bottle, then closes her eyes again and keeps them closed for a long time. Maybe she’s thinking what we’re thinking: about the rest of her life, about how she won’t be able to forget him, no matter what she does to forget him. We know the feeling. We know exactly how it’ll go; she’s just like us, and now that she’s just like us, we feel a little less like us ourselves. Lisa’s eyes are still closed, and she starts leaning forward, as though she’s going to fall right on her face. Her cane leans in the corner, far out of her reach. It won’t be there to catch her if she falls, and neither will we. We want her to fall. Fall, we tell her. Rise, we tell ourselves.

  Except she doesn’t fall, and we don’t rise. Just at the moment when it seems as though Lisa is going to really fall, really hurt herself, really embarrass herself, she tucks her head between her legs, executes a perfect roll, and pops up on her feet, a triumphant look lighting up her face. It’s just like Mr. Wilder’s famous tumble in the movie, except it’s better: because this isn’t a movie, because it wasn’t rehearsed, because Mr. Wilder didn’t have us there wanting him to fall and hurt himself, and because Lisa didn’t even spill a drop of champagne while doing it.

  “Life goes on,” she says. “Who wants a drink?”

  There are two famous pictures of us, both in the same magazine. One, a picture of when we all got married, and one, a few years later, after we’d announced we were getting divorced. Over the first was the headline HOLLYWOOD CHILDREN WHO MARRY! Over the second was the headline HOLLYWOOD CHILDREN WHO DIVORCE! But we looked the same in both pictures: too young; full of longing; jealous of the people who were taking our pictures and who weren’t us; jealous of anyone, everything. So jealous. One day in group, the doctor said, “You’re so jealous.”

  “Of what?” we asked.

  “Of everything,” he said. He was right, but he never did tell us what to do about it. What do you do if you’re so jealous? What do you do when a person has done in one minute—Life goes on!—what you haven’t been able to do in thirty years? Do you try to stop feeling so jealous, or do you get rid of the things you might be jealous of?

  “We do,” we tell Lisa. “We’d love a drink!” She gives us one, then another, then another, her drinking two for each of our one. When we’re all good and drunk, we tell her how much we admired her roll, how it was better even than Mr. Wilder’s, but how much better yet it would be if she could do it somewhere other than this cramped little room, somewhere with more space, like the upper deck, where no one was likely to be between shows, where she could have all the space she needed, and where we’d be her audience, the last on
e she’d ever know, the next-to-last one she’d ever have.

  THE POLICE USE a net to pull Lisa out of the river and onto the concrete landing. The people who matter most (the five of us, the big boss, the doctor) stand close to them, to her. The rest of you (the crew, the ushers and usherettes, the understudies, the people who came to the boat thinking they’d see one show and ended up seeing another one, the city itself, its houses and the people in them) are obscure in the dark behind us, watching us. Our audience. We wonder if you see Lisa as we see her: her hair is wet; her skin is chalky; her lips are as purple as Mr. Wilder’s famous purple hat. We wonder if you see Lisa as the big boss sees her: not so much his poor dead niece, but as the end of his second act and the beginning of whatever his third act might be. We wonder if you see her as the doctor sees her: as the woman he’ll never stop loving, never stop thinking about, never stop feeling guilty about. Never, ever, ever. We wonder if you see her as the police see her: as a body to take out of the net, to put in the wagon, to take to the morgue. We wonder if you see us as the police see us, as we make the police see us: as Lisa’s castmates, her confidants, five people to whom she would have told everything, five people the police can trust to tell them the things Lisa told no one else. We wonder if you see the doctor as the police see him: as Lisa’s lover, her married lover, about whom—as a married lover—everything is already known. We wonder if you feel the chills we feel when we tell the police what the doctor told us earlier, after one of the ushers spotted Lisa’s body in the river: “Oh my god, I killed her.” We wonder if you know what we know: that love makes you do things you shouldn’t, that grief and guilt make you confess to things you haven’t done. We wonder—after you’ve seen the police handcuff the doctor and haul him away, after the show is over and you assume there is nothing left to see—if you notice the five of us still standing there, waiting for something, someone. We wonder if you know that we’re waiting for one of you to come out of the audience, out of the years and years of waiting, and to call us by our names and tell us that we’ve been on your mind, in your heart, and that we’re as good as we ever were, each and every one of us.