Losing It

by Alan Cumyn

  And Sienna and Ricky started kissing. “Help! Help!” some boy yelled right outside their door. Sienna had a quick picture of him in her mind: two hundred and twenty pounds, on the football team, razor cut, thicker in the neck than the head, more alcohol than blood in the brain.

  “Did you lock the door?” Sienna asked Ricky.

  “You check,” Ricky said quickly, so Sienna walked to the door. As she pushed in the lock the door shook and the frame groaned. “Help! Help!” the football player yelled. “I’m being raped!”

  When Sienna turned back Ricky had drawn the drapes, was standing naked on a pile of grubby clothes, her skin almost green in the glow of the monitors. Her pubic hair was still orange, her breasts were still small and mostly chocolate nipple, she was posing like a movie star turning her profile up for a big screen kiss.

  “Your bed or mine, darling?” she asked.

  “Mine, of course,” Sienna said, and rechecked the door.

  “Would you put lipstick on?” Ricky asked, springing onto the bed in a sudden, comical charge under the covers. “I just love it when you wear lipstick.”

  22

  Night took forever to arrive. Bob plunged himself in work all afternoon, or at least he barricaded himself in his home office and pretended to be working. His computer was on, his notes were spread around him on the desk, he made a show of getting up and consulting one or more of the books on his shelf. But he had a hard time concentrating. Matthew invented a game of rapping on the window of his door with a little truck and then closing his eyes to hide, and if Bob didn’t immediately call out “Who’s there?” or “Hello? Hello?” then the boy would either rap harder or begin to cry.

  Lenore too seemed fascinated with Bob’s office door, and would wander along periodically and rattle the delicate glasshandled knob. She seemed to have lost all sense of appropriate force, would break the handle, he feared, if she continued for long. So he’d get up and open the door gently and say hello, explain patiently that he was working and didn’t want to be disturbed. She responded well to politeness, usually, and would shake his hand, gaze tenderly into the office as if looking at the forbidden kingdom. Occasionally Julia would show up and apologize. Then Bob would return to his desk, stare at his screen a few moments, and either Matthew or Lenore would be back again, rattling the door.

  He kept his Scotch bottle in his bottom drawer, had a glass on the bookshelf behind the desk. He wasn’t trying to hide anything. A moderate amount of drink was known to calm the nerves, help with the writing. Just the feel of the heavy glass in his hand was reassuring, and he was the kind of person who liked to know the glass was mostly full. So he kept it that way.

  He was composing a letter to Sienna. His monitor was well away from the door and he had a certain amount of privacy, but whenever the rattling started he would flip his computer screen over to his notes on Poe’s final days and pretend to study them for a moment before standing up and walking once again to the door. “My dear Sienna,” his letter began.

  I must tell you that nothing has seemed real since I stepped on the plane home last night. My subsequent life has been an interminable interlude before seeing you again. The memory of your remarkable eyes, the scent of your skin, just the thought that you are out there, my own, such extraordinary beauty. I do feel blessed.

  My dear Sienna, we must stay quiet. There is a jealousy in life that seeks to rob us of whatever strength we have – our youth, our wit, our beauty, our minds. You don’t feel it yet but I do, and that is why being with you is like

  That’s as far as he’d got. He had sent her e-mails before, short notes about interesting articles she might consider, when to meet for lunch, once a risqué joke he regretted almost immediately. She didn’t reply to that one; he was afraid that he’d stepped over the bounds, had been too forward too soon. But she met him at the cafeteria afterwards wearing sparkling black leggings, and though she didn’t refer to the e-mail he felt it was all right.

  He sat at his computer most of the afternoon rereading his words, dreading the next interruption, trying to finish that last thought: “being with you is like …”

  Dinner was chaotic. Matthew wouldn’t eat, but howled, sputtered, screamed whenever Julia brought a spoon near his lips. Then Lenore put her elbow in her soup, seemed to be imagining she was testing the bathwater for the baby. Julia was a hovering wreck, constantly up and down, running out for wiping cloths and retrieving cutlery from the floor. She spilled her own drink late in the meal. It was the worst moment: red wine dripping through the cracks of the table onto the hardwood floor, which hadn’t been properly urethaned because Julia didn’t want toxic poisons killing her child, so now the wood was badly stained. Julia was inconsolable. Nothing Bob did was right: trying to wipe up with a napkin, running for a towel, barking at Lenore, who started spooning the red wine into the child’s bowl.

  “Don’t you yell at her!” Julia suddenly screamed, at him, for God’s sake, when he was only trying to protect their son.

  “I didn’t yell, but I thought it might be a good idea -”

  “Go to hell!” she shrieked, but he was already there. This was hell, right in his own house, the evening hours painfully ticking by. It was diaper change and storytime, Jack and the Bloody Beanstalk, now and forever. It was Lenore blundering in flustered, rubbing her hands, announcing, “The contractions are ten minutes apart!” and Julia rushing after her, saying, “Mom, it’s all right, calm down,” in such a shrill, harried, uncalm voice that anyone would begin to hallucinate after a time. It was Matthew peeing out the side of his diaper as soon as Bob had him done up, soaking his pyjamas completely and then running away. It was Lenore breaking down in the hallway, saying, “Why, why won’t you let me go home? I never wanted to come here,” with Julia kneeling beside her, shaking with frustration.

  Bob had one little private thing he needed to do tonight. Just something on his own. But getting a baby and a grandmother to bed takes two adults three hours and counting. He just wanted to slip into the bathroom, to lock the door and be by himself for a period of time. He deserved it, he needed it. But Matthew would not go down, he was too excited, could sense his father’s impatience. “Fee fi fo fum,” the story required four consecutive readings. “I smell the blood of an Englishman.” Then endless songs and another diaper change, then Lenore, in her nightie, bent over, muttering, came and kissed the boy and pulled him out of bed and said she was going to take him to bed with her.

  “No, no, Lenore, you sleep downstairs,” Bob said, but Julia contradicted him.

  “Maybe just for now,” she said, desperately. “I’m going to call tomorrow,” she whispered to him. “They have to take her back. Let’s just get through tonight.”

  “Fine. Do what you want,” Bob said and walked into the bedroom, pulled the little plastic McIntyre’s Pharmacy bag out of his dresser drawer, and went downstairs to his office, poured himself a glass and drank it down for sanity’s sake. He refilled the glass at once and held it, circling the amber liquid soothingly. He could hear Julia’s footsteps on the stairs. He drank it down, then stepped out of his office and into the bathroom before she could stop him. He locked the door. I don’t have to do anything, he thought. My options are completely open. The door is locked, I am standing here, I have the bag in my hands, but nothing has happened yet. Nothing.

  Sometimes, he knew from some book he’d read a long time ago, actors wake up in the middle of the stage, their mouths open – words are pouring from them, but they’ve suddenly become conscious of being in the bright lights in front of hundreds of people, in someone else’s body, saying their words. Their brains lock, their eyes go huge, they become rabbits in the headlights. The trick is to avoid waking up, to burrow deeper into the situation. Then great things can be accomplished. You become whoever you want to be and people will see only what you want them to see. That’s how Niagara Falls gets crossed on a tightrope – by not looking down. Too much self-awareness is disastrous. You’ll never leave the cl
iff-edge, then, never achieve flight.

  The door was locked, he had the bag, nothing had to happen. If he thought about it too much then nothing would. So he didn’t, it was a conscious act of will. He took off his clothes and started the bathwater, then fit a new razor blade into his little plastic shaver. He looked at himself in the mirror: black curly hair everywhere, though with touches of grey now, some in his chest and underarms. None in his pubic hair yet, thank God. That would be the next degradation.

  “Bob! Are you having a bath?” Julia called from the other side of the locked door.

  “Yes!” he said, raising his voice above the sound of the falling water. “Is that okay?”

  “I guess,” she said doubtfully. He never had a bath in the evening unless he was sick. Though sometimes, in the old days before the insanity of parenthood, they used to bathe together, bring out the oil and the scented candles and wine. He could hear both questions in her voice: Are you sick? Or are you trying to be romantic – now?

  He didn’t know how long he was going to take. He was just doing what he had to do and he didn’t want to resist. He stepped in the hot water, soaped his calf thoroughly, took a clean, bold stroke with the razor. He’d never shaved his leg before, and now his skin showed a little rectangle of pink. He cleaned the twin blades in the bathwater with two brisk shakes – this will be very quick, he thought – and then stroked twice more before the blades were again clogged with hair.

  He sat on the cold edge of the tub, turned off the water when the bath was two-thirds full. The room fell immediately silent, and he became nervously aware of the slight but distinctive scraping sound of the razor. He took several more swipes, tried to be as quiet as possible, but the quieter he got, the more noticeable the sound seemed to be. And the blades kept getting stuffed with his curly black hairs. The bathwater too was turning black and hairy, even though he’d only cleared a small section on the back of his calf. He could hear Julia in the kitchen or living room now saying, “I don’t think we should call her now, Mom. It’s too late. Time for bed.”

  Bob stepped out of the bath. His leg still looked nearly untouched. If he quit now, not even Julia would notice. But she wouldn’t notice anyway, he thought. He’d leave a bit at the top of his neck, to show out of his pyjamas. He could finish the job in the morning. If worse comes to worst – which it probably would, he thought, with Lenore and Matthew – I can sleep on the couch in my office. No one would blame him in the midst of this chaos. He towelled himself lightly and took out the package of SilkenSkin Slinky Soft Hair Removal Creme with Baby Oil. The glowing, gorgeous woman on the box in the skinny towel was both looking away from him and checking him out of the corner of her eye. “Depilatory Creme,” the package said, with “Finishing Creme” and “Silkystyle Puff.” He looked in the box and saw two small tubes and a heart-shaped piece of foam. The description on the side of the package read: “Creams away hair naturally with the silken smoothness of blended baby oil, for sensational, sexy results.”

  The instructions inside the box listed five easy steps to achieving “a bare, sexy look.” Step one was to thickly smooth the depilatory creme onto areas with unwanted hair. Bob squirted creme on his right calf, the one he’d begun shaving, and spread it out with his fingers – it had a sharp, chemical smell – then squirted more and spread it until most of his leg was white and gluey, and a great deal of the tube was empty. He should have bought several packages, he realized. Step two told him to wait four to five minutes and test a small area by removing the creme with the foam puff to see if the hair came off. He didn’t have a watch, so he counted seconds. His skin felt tingly, alive, and he started to get erect when he thought about what he was doing – preparing his legs to step into silk stockings. Then he heard Julia say, “Matthew! Oh!” in a frantic tone of voice that in her current mood could mean anything: that he’d fallen out of bed and his arm was hanging lifeless out of its socket, or that he’d simply woken up and asked for a bit of nubby.

  “Bob, are you going to be long?” she asked, exasperated. She was calling from somewhere upstairs. He didn’t answer, continued to count in his head. “Because I could really use some help,” she said. The subtext was that if he didn’t drop everything and come right away then she was going to be in a horrid mood for days. But he couldn’t drop what he was doing. He didn’t call out and she didn’t say anything more.

  He counted to three hundred, then gently took the heart-shaped foam, wetted it and wiped away a bit of his leg hair. It came off like loose dirt, leaving the skin beneath smooth and pale. He rinsed the puff in the bath and took off some more hair. After several minutes of wiping and rinsing, most of his leg was bare. It looked strangely white and naked and much smaller, without the far, but still not particularly female. It was not shapely or strong, but lumpish, with underlying stringy muscles and gnarly knees and his feet were still hopelessly enormous and bony. He felt an initial sense of frustration and disappointment, and he looked at the SilkenSkin box as, he felt, so many women must review it after the operation. Why couldn’t I be curvy and voluptuous like her, he wondered, and not simply naked-looking, like a plucked chicken? Because now his leg was pimpling, like chicken skin, and turning red, and then his eyes skipped down to Step Five which said in bold letters: “Some individuals may experience skin-rash or similar negative reactions. Before initially proceeding make sure to test a small area of skin. If rash, discoloration, abrasion, irritation, blistering, or allergic reaction occurs, wash affected area gently but thoroughly with lukewarm water. Do not soap. If condition persists, consult physician.”

  Bob quickly sat in the bath and splashed water on his leg. Some of the old loose hair floating on the bathwater was now restuck to his skin, as if mocking him. He pulled the plug and watched the water drain sluggishly through the hair. He pulled a bunch of it away from the drain with his fingers but it was replaced immediately by more. He had difficulty getting it off his fingers: the only way seemed to be to wash his hand in the water, but that left the hair heading back for the drain. He got out of the bath, dripping, his bottom half newly coated now in his own discarded fur, and reached for some toilet paper, which he wet and used to wipe clean his hand and part of his leg. But that was slow too, and the hair didn’t stick to the toilet paper but drifted off. Now there were little curly black hairs on the floor and the walls, on the sides of the toilet, on the bath mat, crawling up the shower curtain. He freed the drain once more and wiped his hand, put the wet wad of toilet paper into the toilet. Hair on the tiles and the washcloths, loose hair sticking to his body, hair in the sink when he hadn’t even been close to it. Hair on the ceiling and the windowsill and on the curtains.

  Bob let the bathwater hairs go down the drain, used his fingers to force them past the little steel guard. His shorn leg was covered in stinging, itchy red dots now. Water helped for the instant it was on, but the discomfort only seemed to increase afterwards.

  “Bob. Please! What is going on in there?” Julia called through the door.

  “I’ll just be out in a bit,” he said calmly. “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine.” He took a rag from the tiny utility cupboard underneath the sink, wet it, and began wiping around the tub. In a minute he had a wet, hairy rag that itself could not be easily cleaned. He tried picking the hairs off and putting them in the toilet for flushing, but that was tedious. Julia seemed to be camped out on the other side of the door. He could hear her seething.

  “I was hoping you could be of some help,” she said with angry exactness.

  “In a minute, I said,” he snapped back. He threw the rag in the toilet and flushed. It spun round and round doubtfully, then just before he reached his hand in to retrieve it the toilet swallowed it successfully. There were no more rags, so he used more wads of wet toilet paper. He wiped the tub and the curtains, the walls and floors, the shelf where Julia kept the shampoo and conditioner, her facial scrub and bath beads. He wiped behind the toilet and he picked off individual hairs that had become stuck to
the mirror, and he flushed down wad after hairy wad. He wasn’t aware of when she went away, but at some point he realized she was no longer there. He looked ridiculous with one leg shaved and the other not, and he reasoned that Julia was going to be angry with him whether or not he spent the extra time. So he sat on the edge of the tub and ran the water and slowly, carefully soaped and shaved his other leg, pausing to clean off his razor straight under the tap rather than dealing with another tub full of hair. He soaped and shaved his thighs and then his stomach, his chest and neck and shoulders and arms. He didn’t know how to deal with the hair on his back. He tried reaching around behind him, cleared a few patches on his shoulder blades and on the back of his ribs. But he couldn’t get it all. He inserted a new set of blades to shave under his arms. That was nerve-wracking, but he was less tender than he expected, and the milky whiteness of his newborn skin made him feel suddenly female and desirable. When he lifted his arm and looked in the mirror, there he was, remade. He was flabby enough to have small breasts anyway, and the hairlessness was transforming, felt for the moment like the most delectable costume he’d ever tried on.

  If I lost some weight, he thought, if I went to the gym every day, and was careful about my food …

  He hadn’t left the top of his chest curly. He’d thought about it, but it was hard to resist the momentum of the moment.

  He took a last wad of toilet paper and carefully began a final wipe-up. There were still quite a few stray hairs. On the doorknob, even, on the funny ceramic knobs at the base of the toilet, behind the faucet and in the medicine cabinet, and still more on the mirror. He wasn’t going to get them all. But he got as many as he could and when he ran out of toilet paper the bathroom was pretty clean, as far as he could tell. The toilet was a bit over-full, but he flushed anyway. Wads of toilet paper circled sluggishly, but finally went down. He washed his hands and spread skin creme all over himself – the full tube of SilkenSkin Finishing Creme, and then quite a bit of Julia’s vitamin E skin lotion. Even his red and itchy leg felt soothed. Then he stood blushing and elated, looking quite thin already without all that hair.