Summer Blowout

by Claire Cook

  “Shh,” I said. I kept razoring, staying loose and working with his hair so the best shape could emerge. A great haircut is like a work of art, and like all true artists, the best stylists know enough to relax and go with the flow. You’re trying to find the essence of your subject and elevate it to a whole new level. I mean, art is art, and I felt like if Picasso walked into the salon for a haircut, we’d really have a lot to say to each other. Unless he turned out to be a pretentious jerk, of course. Then I’d just keep my mouth shut and cut his hair.

  I put my razor down and shook up a container of Paul Mitchell Extra-Body Sculpting Foam. “Okay,” I said. “Just squirt about this much into your palm, rub it between your hands, and work it all the way through your hair, starting at the roots.”

  Sean Ryan raised an eyebrow. “I’m not a Neanderthal, you know. I have used hair gunk before.”

  “Sor-ry,” I said. I handed him the container. “Here, you can keep the rest of it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Okay, close your eyes, and I’ll be right back.”

  “Here, Cannoli,” I called, just to practice saying it. She followed me into the treatment room, and I dipped a Popsicle stick into hot wax and jogged back to Sean Ryan so it would stay hot.

  “Wow,” he said. “That feels great. I’ve never had a facial before.”

  I pressed the cloth strip down and let it cool a bit, then I pulled his skin taut with one hand. “Quick like a Band Aid,” I said. Then I pulled off the strip.

  He yelped. “What the hell was that? And thanks for the warning, by the way.”

  I smiled. “Hey, you were the one who said you weren’t a Neanderthal. So you shouldn’t have a unibrow.”

  He leaned forward in the chair and squinted at himself in the mirror. “I can’t believe you did that to me. And no way did I have a unibrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “A borderline unibrow. See how much better you look now? It really opens up your eyes.”

  “Wow, look how red it’s getting. I hope you’re happy now.”

  “Delirious,” I said.

  Everything was fine until I leaned over him to dab on some Wax Off, a gel that not only gets rid of any residual stickiness from the wax, but also soothes the skin. I was massaging it in, and suddenly he opened his eyes. We looked at each other. One of his hands somehow ended up on the small of my back.

  We looked at each other some more. I knew whenever I smelled Paul Mitchell Extra-Body Sculpting Foam from then on, I’d think of him. One of my hands found its way to his shoulder.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He put his other hand on my back. “Hey,” he said.

  The salon door opened, and Cannoli went crazy.

  18

  “I SAW THE LIGHT ON DOWN HERE AND THOUGHT IT might be you,” Craig said. “Sophia told me you told her at your father’s Salon de Lucio meeting yesterday that you wanted to talk….”

  Sean Ryan opened his eyes wide. “Your father owns Salon de Lucio?” he asked. Since it didn’t seem like the best time to review my father’s business portfolio, I just nodded.

  “Oh, boy,” he said.

  Cannoli made a flying leap and started circling around Craig, nipping at the air around his ankles with eight pounds of pure ferocity.

  “Whoa,” Craig said. “Do you think you can call that thing off? What is it, anyway? A black Brillo pad?”

  It probably said something about my former husband that he hadn’t yet noticed that I was leaning over another man and that our arms and legs had arranged themselves a little bit like a pretzel. Interest in other people had never been his strong suit.

  Sean Ryan untangled himself from me and pushed his way out of the chair. He took off his Salon de Paolo cape while I walked over to pick up Cannoli. She leaned out over my arms and snarled at Craig, exposing her tiny pointy teeth.

  Craig looked past me. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize you had a customer.”

  I don’t know why I hesitated. I guess I was trying to figure out what to say. Should I introduce Sean Ryan as my business acquaintance? My fellow kit person? My co-dog dyer? The man who was coming to my nephew’s wedding with me to make it easier to deal with the fact that you’d be there with my half sister? The guy I was just about to kiss before you so rudely interrupted us?

  Sean Ryan reached into his pocket and threw some bills on my tabletop.

  “Thanks for the haircut,” he said as he passed me.

  He walked between the Corinthian columns and out the salon door without looking back.

  “SO, ARE YOU GOING TO INVITE ME upstairs?” Craig asked. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and he looked like he could use a good night’s sleep.

  “Nope,” I said. I kept Cannoli in my arms and walked over and sat down in the chair Sean Ryan had just vacated. It was still warm, and I took a moment to breathe in the lingering coconut smell of his Paul Mitchell Extra-Body Sculpting Foam. I was happy to see he hadn’t forgotten to take the rest of it with him.

  Craig shrugged and sat down in the next chair over.

  “So,” I said. I twisted my chair a quarter turn in his direction. “How about those Red Sox?”

  “Listen,” Craig said. “Let’s not play games. What’s this about Lizzie?”

  I wanted to say, What’s what about Lizzie? just to make him nuts, but I resisted. “She asked me to talk to you.”

  He glared at me. I waited.

  “About what?” he finally had to ask.

  “Don’t use that tone of voice with me,” I said.

  “Don’t make me use it then,” he said.

  Cannoli licked my face. I stood up. “Never mind,” I said. “You can go back to your girlfriend now.”

  Craig leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. “Were you always this much of a bitch?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Were you always this much of an asshole?”

  His eyes were still closed. He smiled. “Probably. You just didn’t notice, because I was so hot.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. In your dreams.”

  He opened his eyes. They had big, not-so-hot circles under them. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what I’d seen in him. I couldn’t even manage to remember much about our marriage. It seemed two-dimensional in hindsight, like looking back at a series of old-fashioned black-and-white snapshots. We both worked a lot. We spent a lot of time taking care of his kids. He played a lot of golf. I hung out with my family a lot.

  He told me his ex-wife was a bitch a lot, too. I wondered if she was still a bitch now that I was a bitch, or if my moving up to the title somehow debitched her. He wasn’t too crazy about my family, with the exception of Sophia, notable in hindsight, and the feeling was mutual. He only remembered to bring me flowers after a fight. Had we ever been happy?

  “Come on, Bella. What’s going on with Lizzie?”

  I put Precious, I mean Cannoli, on the floor, and she bared her teeth at Craig, then turned her back on him and headed over to drink from the bottom tier of the fountain. We used to drink out of that fountain as kids, so I figured it was probably as safe now as it was then. “She called me,” I said. “She wants to change her major to culinary arts so she can have her own show on the Food Network.”

  “I hope you stayed out of it,” he said.

  Until that very moment, I’d planned to. “What’s wrong with it?” I said. “It’s her life.”

  “She got a perfect score on her SAT subject test in chemistry.”

  “She did not. She got a seven twenty. And there’s tons of chemistry in cooking. That’s probably why she likes it so much.”

  Craig crossed his arms over his chest. “Some of us dream bigger than that, Bella.”

  “Did you think that up before or after you slept with my sister?”

  Craig shut his eyes again. “Half sister. We were separated. Come on, do we have to go there again? Can’t we just get past the drama and move on?”

  “But how could you do that to
me?” I heard myself asking, like a soap star who needed better dialogue.

  “I didn’t do it to you. It just happened. I guess I just thought I’d get away with it.”

  I couldn’t listen to this sitting down, so I jumped up. “What? What do you mean, you thought you’d get away with it? You didn’t think I’d recognize you at the dinner table at Christmas?”

  Craig was actually looking at me now. He ran his hands through his thinning hair and shook his head. “I guess I didn’t think it would happen more than once. I don’t know, I thought she’d be more like you, and not so, I don’t know, clingy.”

  This was a whole new category of overshare. I wanted to cover my ears and close my eyes for as long as it took for Craig to go away and for me to forget what he’d just said. But I knew, no matter what I did, I’d remember this one.

  “What?” I finally yelled. “You took my sister away from me and now you don’t even want her?”

  Things might have been different if the ceiling hadn’t started dripping on Craig’s head. But it did. He looked up, and a second drop landed right in his eye. I had a knee-jerk urge to laugh, and it was halfway out of my mouth before I kind of swallowed it back.

  Craig wiped his eye with the back of his hand. “Geez, Bella, you didn’t leave the toilet running, did you?”

  “Ohmigod,” I said. I’d been meaning to call a plumber since Craig left about a year ago. For as long as I could remember, if you didn’t jiggle the handle just right, the toilet would keep running. The next time you’d walk into the bathroom, there’d be a shallow puddle working its way out toward the door. Craig was convinced he’d fixed it every time it happened. He replaced the handle. He replaced some round rubber ball thing and probably some other things, too. But it always happened again eventually.

  Craig was already jogging toward the door. “Come on,” he said. “This can’t be good.”

  THE WATER IN THE BATHROOM was ankle deep and rising. “Get some towels,” Craig yelled as he started untying his shoes.

  “They’re in the bathroom,” I said.

  Craig gave me a look, as if the towels had only started being kept in the bathroom linen closet after he moved out. I didn’t want to deal with all that water alone, so I let it go.

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll get some dish towels.”

  Of course, when I got to the kitchen I remembered I only had two, and neither of them was all that absorbent. So I grabbed two plastic bowls to bail out the water.

  I went into the bedroom fast. I kicked off my shoes, pulled off my socks, and switched out my black pants for a ratty old pair of gym shorts. I made it back to the bathroom in time to see Craig wading through the water in the direction of the toilet.

  “Ahoy, Matey,” I said.

  One of the legs of Craig’s jeans came unrolled and landed in the water with a plop. “Shit,” he said.

  “Hope not,” I said. He made a face.

  Craig jiggled the handle. The toilet stopped running, and the room was suddenly quiet. I handed Craig a bowl. I scooped up some water with my bowl and dumped it into the sink.

  Craig scooped some water with his bowl. “You’re going to have to call a plumber,” he said.

  “Ya think?” I said. “Sorry,” I added.

  “That’s okay. We probably should have called one years ago.”

  We bailed in silence for a few moments. The water made a little lapping sound around our ankles.

  “Hey,” Craig said. “Remember that time we were in Punta Cana, and the sailboat sprang a leak?”

  “And the bailing bucket had a huge crack in it?”

  “And we kept waving to everyone onshore for help, and they kept smiling and waving back?”

  “That was so funny,” I said. “Well, not at the time, but after.” I poured out a bowl full and bent to scoop another one. “I was thinking about the time Lizzie was taking her sailing lesson in Marshbury Harbor, and the boat tipped over. You jumped off the side of that pier so fast.”

  “I thought she was going to kill me. But I mean, how was I supposed to know it was part of the lesson?” He squatted down in the water. “Hey, do you really think she should try culinary arts? I mean, she’s such a creative kid. Her mother—”

  “That bitch,” I said.

  Craig actually smiled. “God,” he said. “Who knew life could get so complicated.”

  After we bailed out as much water as we could, we opened the bathroom closet and used the towels to wipe up the rest. Then I put the sopping towels in the washer while Craig set up an old fan in the hallway outside the bathroom door.

  “Thanks,” I said when he came into the kitchen, holding his shoes in one hand.

  “No problem,” he said.

  The legs of his jeans had both come unrolled. They’d soaked up the water like a wick, and they were wet all the way up to his knees. I looked at them, then nodded at the dryer. “Do you want to put those in there?”

  “So I don’t catch my death of cold?” Craig’s mother always worried about everybody catching their death of cold, and it used to be one of our favorite lines after leaving her house.

  We stared at each other. “Boyohboy,” I said. “You really messed things up.”

  “We both did. You barely talked to me that whole last year.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I just kept thinking, Is this all there is?”

  Craig shook his head. “I couldn’t stop thinking about how every day when I woke up I was older than the day before. I still hate that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Poor baby.”

  I don’t know exactly how it happened, but suddenly our arms were around each other, and then we were kissing. It felt both wrong and right at the same time, which actually might have worked as kind of a definition of our entire marriage.

  I heard the sound of one of his shoes hitting the ground behind me. He started yanking at my clothes. I started yanking at his. It was like a throwback to the frantic excitement of when we were first dating, but it was also kind of angry, maybe even a little bit competitive, too. Whatever it was, it was hot, and by the time I heard the sound of the other shoe dropping, we were already halfway to the bedroom.

  19

  HAVING SEX WITH MY EX-HUSBAND TURNED OUT TO be a lot like eating a hot fudge sundae. I really, really wanted it. The anticipation leading up to it was so heavenly it was almost painful. The first bite or two even lived up to my expectations.

  Then, just as quickly, I was so over it. But what do you do? You’ve already bought it. And here the similarity fades, since it’s a lot easier to dump an uneaten hot fudge sundae in the trash than it is to kick your ex-husband out of bed prematurely.

  So, basically, I did what every red-blooded woman in America, or anywhere else for that matter, would do. I hung in there long enough to have a seriously overdue orgasm, and then I faked the rest of it. I made the right sounds and motions, but it was all I could do not to turn Craig’s thrusts into a counting game, some twisted version of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

  I’d once had a boyfriend back in my college days who swore he could do astral projection. I thought I might be doing it now. My body was on my bed screwing my former husband, and the rest of me was floating somewhere up by the ceiling, looking down at us and thinking, “Uh-oh.”

  I’d forgotten what a big racket Craig made when he came, but at least he finally did. I resisted the urge to ricochet out of bed and head for the hills. I shut one eye and kissed him beneath his ear.

  He ran a finger between my breasts and down to circle my navel. “That was great,” he whispered. “How was it for you?”

  I’d completely forgotten until just this second. I kicked the covers off. “Precious,” I said. “Cannoli.”

  Craig smiled. “That’s new,” he said.

  I jumped out of bed and started looking for my clothes. “Hey,” Craig said. “You look great. Have you been working out?”

  I found my T-shi
rt. It was almost dark out, so I decided to just throw it on without taking the time to hunt for my bra, which was probably hanging from a chandelier somewhere. A cell phone rang down by my feet, and I picked it up.

  “Don’t,” Craig said.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hello?” Sophia’s voice said.

  I tossed the phone at Craig. “It’s your girlfriend,” I said.

  CANNOLI HAD HER NOSE PRESSED against the glass door of the salon. Her tail started wagging a mile a minute when she saw me.

  I opened the door and scooped her up into a hug. “I can’t believe I forgot about you,” I said. When Myles was first born, Tulia left him at the pediatrician’s office one day. She put him down on the floor in his baby seat to write a check, then grabbed Mack and Maggie by the hands and headed out to the car. When she got home, there was a message from the receptionist telling her to count her kids again. Everybody had laughed for weeks about what a flake she was, but I was horrified.

  Now I knew how easily it could happen. For the first time I wondered if I really could offer this sweet little dog a better home than the Silly Siren bride could. I put on a jacket and grabbed Cannoli’s new jeweled leash and hooked it onto her collar. “Come on,” I said. “I think we could both use a walk.”

  I held the leash in one hand and fished in my jacket pocket for something to soothe my ravaged lips. I pulled out a tube of Estee Lauder Hot Kiss. “Not really,” I said out loud, but I smeared it on anyway.

  We were way down the street when Craig drove up beside us. He rolled down the window of his stupid leased Lexus. His hair was wet, so he must have taken a quick shower and used a washcloth to dry himself, since all the towels were in the washer.

  He gave me a worried look. “Any ideas?” he actually asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. Cannoli and I picked up our pace, and I gave my ex-husband the finger over my shoulder. I couldn’t believe he was actually asking me for advice. I couldn’t believe I’d slept with him.