“He jumped in the shower with me!” Stavros is practically giddy with glee as he takes a seat. “And last night, he slept with me!”
The cat jumps up on the table and then settles down, tucking his paws beneath his chest and blinking at us.
“I think he looks like a proud lion,” Stavros says. “Do you think he looks like a proud lion?”
“Most definitely.”
Turns out we finished the last of the eggs for dinner last night.
“It’s still early,” Stavros says.
He’s telling me? If there were still milkmen in the world, they wouldn’t even be up yet.
“Maybe,” Stavros suggests, “you could take me grocery shopping now?”
So I get dressed and we do that. I take him to Super Stop & Shop, but I’m still half asleep, so I just push the cart and don’t really pay attention as he throws stuff into it. I do notice that not much of what he grabs looks terribly familiar, but hey, if he’s willing to cook…
He’s also willing to pay.
“I’m not a freeloader, Johnny,” he tells me. “I got plenty of cash.”
Back home, Helen’s up and she sits at the table with me as Stavros makes us breakfast, which turns out to be oranges drizzled with honey and feta-filled croissants.
“Tomorrow, I’ll make tiganites,” Stavros says, “Greek pancakes. You can put syrup on them but I prefer preserves. You got any brandy in the house?”
Helen smiles, content, as she pops a final orange slice into her mouth. “I could get used to this,” she says.
Before Helen and I leave for the day, Stavros asks if there’s anything special he should do while we’re gone.
I can’t think of anything, so I show him where I keep Fluffy’s leash. “Maybe walk the cat?”
Driving to work with Sam, I am once again reluctant for some reason to tell her about Helen’s failing to come to Big John’s with me. But I do tell her about Stavros.
“And Helen’s OK with this?” she asks.
“Well, yeah. She even insisted on giving him our bedroom when he got upset about the bathroom being on the wrong side of the hall.”
This is enough to make her put down the giant sticky thing she’s been eating.
“Do you realize how extraordinary this is?” Sam asks.
“What?”
“Helen agreeing to take in your barber.”
“Well,” I say, feeling unaccountably stung, “I took him in too. I even took him in first.”
“Yeah, but he’s your barber. Besides, you’re crazy like that—you do that sort of thing. But Helen?” I glance away from traffic long enough to see her shake her head. “Look, don’t get pissed, but there are times I’m not too thrilled with some of the shit you tell me she does. And don’t get me wrong, I like her well enough, but I never could have pictured her doing something like this.”
“Yes, it’s a nice thing for her to do.”
“Nice?” Sam says. “Nice is I hold the door open for the person behind me.”
“Actually, that’s just good manners.”
“Whatever. But this? This is extraordinary.”
I guess, I don’t know, maybe.
“I wouldn’t do it for your barber, Johnny,” Sam continues. “I’m not sure I’d do it for you. And I’d never expect anyone to do it for me. When the time comes that I start losing my shit, just put me on an ice floe and send me out to sea.”
“I am not going to put you on an ice floe.”
The conversation degenerates into squabbling about what we would/wouldn’t do with each other when we get old and a debate about global warming in general, but Sam has set me thinking.
And what I’m thinking is how truly extraordinary my wife is.
When we arrive home in time for GH, the whole place smells like lemons. True, Helen gave the place a good cleaning prior to Carla’s visit on Saturday, but in the way of two people who don’t generally like to spend their free time housekeeping, we’d let it deteriorate to its usual messy state on Sunday. But now the hardwood areas are shined to a high polish, the carpeting has vacuum tracks in it, and when Sam and I enter the living room, we find Stavros folding laundry. To be specific, he’s got a pair of Helen’s underpants in his hands.
“What’re you doing?” I ask, after introducing him to Sam.
“I’ve got to make myself useful, don’t I?”
“Not really.”
“OK, then. I want to make myself useful. Besides, after taking the cat for three walks, I needed something else to do with my time, didn’t I?”
As we settle down to watch GH, at first Stavros isn’t too into it. He has trouble keeping all the characters straight but that’s hardly a sign of dementia; soaps can be confusing. But then I remember what Billy once told me about watching soaps before I was into it, about how if you treat it like another sport and lay bets on things, it can seem like more of a sport. So we lay short-term bets on whether any real progress will be made on the baby-snatching storyline by episode’s end or if it’ll just be a retread of old information; medium-term bets on how many episodes the characters wear the same clothes, because a day can last a really long time in Port Charles; and long-term bets on who the next woman will be that Sonny gets pregnant. I bet on Elizabeth because I’m pretty sure she’s the only female, not a relative, that he still hasn’t slept with.
And so the time passes.
At one point, Stavros goes into the kitchen to get us all another beer and freshen the snacks.
“You know,” Sam says, “even though Alice was only with us a week, I kind of got used to her. I even missed her a bit when she stopped coming. But this could work.”
So Sam’s happy.
And when Helen comes home from work to warm gyros in soft pita bread with yogurt sauce, she’s happy too.
As the week goes on, everybody’s happy, although Helen and I are both disturbed one early morning to hear sounds coming from Stavros’s room, only to realize he’s got a guest in there, his mistress Magda—red beehive hairdo, harlequin glasses, on the slightly less pleasing side of plump. At first, we’re nonplussed but then we realize the guy’s not dead yet—he’s got a right to conjugal visits, although it might be nice to have a little warning.
But then Friday comes and I arrive home from work with Sam to realize that, no, not everybody is happy.
Stavros isn’t happy.
“Um,” I tactfully ask Stavros, who’s looking a little sheepish, as I circle Fluffy, “what happened to the cat?”
“I gave him a little trim.”
“A little trim? He’s bald!”
“No, Johnny,” Stavros is quick to reassure as he fluffs what remains of the cat’s hair. “It’s a crew cut—in this summer heat, he’ll love it!”
If the cat looked ridiculously hairy before, this is even worse, and I suppose I don’t do a good job of hiding my dismay.
“I’m sorry, Johnny.” Stavros is crestfallen. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do with myself. The cooking, the cleaning—I like taking care of you and the lazy housekeeper, but it’s not enough. I like watching the catsom—etimes, he watches the giant praying mantis outside the window, so I watch the cat and then I wonder: does the praying mantis watch me? Is this what you call a vicious circle? Even philosophical considerations like that are not enough.” He sighs, an incredibly sad sigh. “I miss cutting hair, Johnny. I know I can’t run the shop anymore, I no longer have the head for managing a business, but I don’t know who I am without cutting hair.”
This, I can understand. For a long time now I’ve been known to say: Paint—it’s who I am.
“We’ll work something out,” I tell Stavros, although I don’t know what that might be. “In the meantime, I think I could use a trim.”
“Are you sure? I mean, your show…”
“I’m sure. Why don’t you get your stuff and we’ll do it in the kitchen? Sam can call out the good parts from the living room.”
A few minutes later, Stavros is snipping
away when a thought occurs to me.
“Hey, how’d you get the cat to sit still for you to cut his hair like that? I have enough trouble when all I want to do is clip his nails.”
“It was easy. I just gave him a treat occasionally.”
“A treat? What kind of treat?”
Stavros stops what he’s doing long enough to open the fridge and pull out the canister of Indoor Adventures, the chicken-flavored treats Fluffy loves.
“Have you seen these things?” He waves the canister at me. “It’s like an indoor adventure!”
At the sound of the rattling treats, Fluffy comes running like he always does; really, for a cat, he’s very Pavlovian.
“Here, you give it to him.” Stavros hands me the canister. “I’m kind of busy cutting hair here.”
When I take off the lid, I realize there are only a few left and I could swear it was nearly full last time I checked.
“Stavros,” I say in an even voice, “how many of these did you give him?”
“I didn’t count.” Snip, snip. “At least one between every snip.” Snip, snip. “How else’re you going to get a cat to sit still for so long?”
He gave him a whole can practically? The cat’s bald, he’s going to get fat, next stop stupid and he can hit for the trifecta.
“You’re not supposed to—” I start to inform Stavros but then I stop.
Stavros is whistling, he’s happy again, at least for the time being—I can’t bring myself to spoil that.
A few hours later, Stavros is ecstatic. We’re all playing poker in the basement. No, Stavros isn’t playing with us (“too much to remember with all those cards, Johnny”) and he does have trouble remembering everybody’s names, even though Big John was the one who first started taking me to see him when I was just a little guy. What Stavros is ecstatic about is having a lot to do: keeping the cat entertained and off the table, making sure everybody’s got enough beer, replenishing the snack supplies. And those snack supplies! They go beyond my classic, Chips In A Bowl.
Stuffed grape leaves; saganaki, which is a fried Greek cheese; batter-fried zucchini strips.
Really, the food is so good, there’s hardly any point in paying attention to the card game.
The others are a little puzzled by Stavros, this non-playing presence at the weekly game. So while he’s out of the room, I explain.
I expect Big John to be, I don’t know, maybe a little competitive with Stavros; we Smiths have been known to be small-minded that way. But he’s fine with it, looks proud even.
“How’s it going?” Billy asks, casting a glance at Helen. “I don’t think Alice would be too pleased about something like this.”
“It’s fine,” Helen says. “Look at the place: we don’t have to do a thing for ourselves anymore.”
I agree with her that it’s working out fine, for us, but I do mention Stavros being upset earlier about not cutting hair anymore.
“Aw,” she says. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“You got home kind of late.” I shrug. “I didn’t have time. I take it you haven’t seen the cat?”
“No, why?”
“Trust me. When you see the cat, you’ll know we’ve got a problem on our hands.”
“That’s got to be hard on a man,” Big John says, “not being able to do the things he defines himself by anymore.”
There are a lot of things Big John can’t do anymore that he used to define himself by and that’s too sad to think about, so we go back to our cards. But when Stavros comes in a few minutes later to check if anyone needs more beer, Drew says, “Hey, um, Stavros. I hear you can cut hair?”
“Oh,” Stavros says, “the heads of hair I have cut in my day, you should’ve seen them. But that’s in the past now.”
“No kidding?” Drew says; then, not waiting for an answer, he adds, “That can’t be true.” He runs his hand down the back of his head. “I’m getting a bit long here. You think you could do something about this for me?”
“When?”
Drew shrugs. “Now’s good. We could do it right here.”
“Really?” Stavros doesn’t wait for an answer, instead heading upstairs to get his gear.
We all stare at Drew.
“What?” he says.
“That was so…nice,” Sam says.
“I can’t be nice?”
Well, no, I don’t think anyone would go that far. But Drew’s the guy who always brings Budweiser—unironically, I might add—so it’s not like he’s exactly known as the soul of generosity.
“Besides,” Drew says, throwing his cards on the table, “my hand sucks.”
When Stavros returns, in addition to his hair-cutting tools, he’s also got some newspaper to put on the floor to catch the clippings.
“I don’t want to make a mess.” He looks at me meaningfully. “You know, just in case ‘the housekeeper’ doesn’t come this week.”
Soon, not to be outdone by skinflint Drew, Billy’s asking Stavros for a trim, Steve Miller too.
I look at my friends like: I can’t believe you guys are doing this.
“Ah, it’s no big deal,” Steve tells me. “And it kind of beats being fleeced by your wife,” he adds in an undertone, but there’s no malice in it.
Big John’s hair has been mostly gone for a long time now, meaning he hasn’t needed a professional cut in years. But, not to be outdone, he finds a single strand and extends it in Stavros’s direction. “Hey, Stavros, when you finish with those guys, can you do something about this here? It’s just the one, but it’s been bugging the crap out of me.”
Stavros, needless to say, is over the moon at all this.
My family. My friends. Are they doing it for Stavros, who they don’t really know, or are they doing it for me? Who really cares?
“I guess that’s everybody,” Stavros says with a sigh, once he’s dispensed with Big John’s lone troubling hair. The look on Stavros’s face is like Fluffy when I’ve been petting him and then I stop, like he was hoping it could go on forever.
“What about Helen?” Sam suggests.
“Me?” Helen actually points at her own chest. Then she turns that pointer right at Sam. “What about you?”
“Hey.” Sam holds her palms up. “Your house, your barber.”
Helen looks reluctant, but Stavros seems so hopeful again, standing there with his scissors, she relents.
“OK,” she says, assuming the chair, “but just one of those minor trim things, like you gave the other guys.”
Stavros studies her head from all angles but, unlike with the men, he doesn’t get right down to work.
“Maybe,” Stavros suggests, “you got one of those ladies’ magazines hanging around here somewhere with a picture of how you’d like it to be?”
“Really, I just want—”
“I’ll find something,” Sam offers, tearing up the stairs.
We wait.
Sam returns with a magazine I didn’t even know we had and then she’s flipping through the pages, making faces at a lot of what she’s seeing. “Nah…Nah…Nah.” Then: “This!” She stabs the page with her finger.
“Let me see,” Helen says, but Sam hands the open page to Stavros, pointing.
“Oh, yeah!” Stavros says. “I better get started.”
He sprays the back of Helen’s head to get it wet, runs a comb through it.
“You know,” Stavros says, “I never cut a woman’s hair before.”
“You never—” Helen tries to rise but Stavros puts a staying hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” he tells her. Then to Sam, “Hey, girlie, can you hold that magazine steady in front of me?”
It takes Stavros more time to cut Helen’s hair than it did everyone else’s put together. When he’s done, we all stare at Helen, who gives us a trepid look.
“So?” She smiles stiffly. “How is it?”
Billy: “Amazing.”
Steve Miller: “Very unbuttoned-down.”
Big John:
“Lovely.”
Drew: “Yowza.”
“You guys are kidding, right?” Helen says, clearly convinced they’re lying. She turns to Sam for help. “Do you have a mirror on you?”
“Do I look like the kind of woman who carries a mirror?”
And that, my friends, is what is called a rhetorical question.
“But,” Sam adds, “everything they’re saying is true.”
Obviously not trusting anyone, it’s Helen’s turn to go tearing up the stairs and soon we hear a shriek from the main-floor bathroom, followed by, “I look fucking beautiful!”
And she does, or at least she did when she was still in the room. Helen has never been anything less than gorgeous. But now? The cut is angular, geometric, I don’t know the right words for it. All I know is it makes all the various shades in her auburn hair—from honey gold to wine red—stand out in relief and it is all just so, so beautiful.
Now Helen’s back, she’s giving Stavros a loud smack on the cheek with her lips, and then her arms are around me and she’s kissing me too; only, you know, it’s hot.
“We,” she says between kisses, “have the best wife in the world.”
Tick
Time goes on as time will do, no matter how much we humans may do to try to change it.
The months fly by—July, August, September, the first half of an October that does not include the Mets making it into the World Series, not even close – and we settle into married life together.
The joint poker games on Friday night continue, with Stavros, who is still living with us, providing snacks and haircuts.
Saturdays, we have Helen’s people over. I almost never know in advance who I’m going to find at my dining room table, but that’s OK, since mostly it’s her parents or one of her brothers and a spouse or Carla. Some might think it odd, me never knowing who I’m going to find on the other side of the door, but I enjoy the mystery of it all; you know, unless it’s Carla. That is the least enjoyable, for me at least, but it’s also the only times Stavros joins us for these dinners. When it’s Helen’s family, he says he doesn’t feel right about it—“I don’t want to be a fifth wheel,” he says, adding that he thinks Helen and me should be able to have a social life that doesn’t include him; plus, he likes spending quality time, just him and Fluffy. But with Carla, he says that he’s a fourth wheel so that’s OK, and, wonder of wonders, he and Carla get along well. Part of that could be that he gave her a killer haircut that she attributes to being the single thing that’s scored her more dates in the last three months than she’s had in the last three years. So that’s our Saturdays taken care of.
Isn't It Bro-Mantic? Page 23
