Eyes

by William H. Gass

  Who was this bomb intended for? we Chairs as a group or just Know-it-all, who could be an enormous nuisance sometimes, but still…? perhaps the glassware?—jars and mirrors?—bottles or cloths?—of course not…only a few brilliantine bottles went pop; no, and it was not likely aimed at razors either, none of whom were injured, or any one or more of the heating irons, or the big chairs on which Walter wrote his boast, “I survived, bless God!” We first thought it had to be one or more of the human beings, but when the bomb went off all of them had gone home—we assumed—and were safe in bed. This crowd couldn’t have played poker all night; the games were over—usually—about two. When counting casualties, they were without a scratch. Maybe the bomb didn’t go off when it was intended to—but later than intended. Maybe someone—it would be Walt—was expected to see it sitting there in Know-it-all’s lap and bring it in to be admired. Maybe it was meant for a late customer. By a sore loser. I was told that gambling parlors such as Walt ran were illegal, but the cop was fixed, and the sums wagered at the table, as far as I could assess them, were not as much as the true professionals played for, though pitifully more than any of these players could afford.

  Most mysterious, most calamitous of all: we did not see any of the barbers leave for home, or stay for cards, or hear a late-in-the-day customer say, “Here! What’s this?” and bring the pot in, or yell at Walt, “Hey, you got a plant on your front porch” while walking off to other business, innocent of evil intention in every alternative. Where, in the container, was the explosive placed? Was it buried in the soil or propped against the plant? Was it a firework, or vial of nitro, piece of plaster, or a grenade? Was propelling Natty so forcibly across the street a likely direction for an explosive planted in the soil of a flowerpot parked in the seat of a folding chair? The police didn’t say much about anything, I think, because they didn’t know anything. The victims—well, they were the shop and some of its fixings—the victims were about to complain to an insurance company instead of the cops but found both were impossible because the complainers were just things. Sam and Mart were annoyed they hadn’t been hurt. Mildly maimed, mind you. Pleasantly pained…A few feigned mental fatigue but not for long; it was too tiring. Metal would have to do. The cops, for their part, picked up lots of pieces of burst dirt, blown plant, and broken glass that were reverently popped into clear plastic as they had seen themselves do on TV, protecting clues from contamination. They interviewed everybody in a human skin by asking, “What do you know about this?” Otherwise, the Law stood around shrugging its shoulders and speaking vaguely about lab work.

  Poor Natty Know-it-all could no longer fold neatly into a community stack; could no longer stand ready to sit; he was an innocent servant of happenstance, and whatever remained of him was to be borne away in the rear of a city truck like the trash it had become. What were we doing, meanwhile? We were wondering—I must say, pathetically—whether this destruction would put an end to the shop; whether we should all be out of a job, and headed for Natty’s junk pile. Oh sure, we knew that our bodies could be mashed flatter than a street, and melted like metal into metal, and thus revived for the doubtful pleasures of another life; but these conclusions were hardly palatable to us, not after our life in the barbershop—a good regular job, some appreciation, companionship, and—I would say—clean, even elegant, surroundings.

  I now remember only one other act of violence in the shop over the years. I wonder whether there was any connection. I should think not. I should hope not. Of course not. Anyway, as follows: Walt and Marty were woofing around with a client who was undergoing a trim to his beard; Marty was pretending he was about to cut his customer’s throat the way they pretend in the movies, grinning like kids up to something, drawing the blade slowly upward under the chin; when, with a noise that could only be called a growl, Archie stopped polishing Sam’s guy’s shoes, grabbed Barry Buttock by one leg, and flung him at Marty and Marty’s customer’s throat, and the razor too, I dare say. Barry banged into Sam’s raised arm instead, so the blade did graze the customer’s throat to the degree of a scratch. Perhaps. Mart’s man jerked his head and swiped away the hot cloth covering his eyes, all and each with a howl of their own; Barry tumbled to the floor near a tin of polish, and Archie bulldozed his way out the door into the street.

  I swear we never saw Archie after that. No one again polished shoes in the shop or hung up coats and lived on tips. Nothing was broken by the bashing. Nothing was said. Barry Buttock was examined and found to be sturdy enough to stand where he ordinarily belonged. Walt acted ashamed of something. He did say…he did say “geez.” The customer, forever anonymous, wiped his face and the beard that grew there, and left without paying. He walked very carefully, looking down as if checking the polish on his shoes. We never saw him again either. I had forgotten all this until just now. Oh yes, Mr. Razor boasted to me that he had dulled his own blade to prevent any real injury. I never believed him. He was a well-known credit taker.

  The way we are misused is no worse than any other. I am not like a lot of my companions, bitter about people, or despairing of my own nature, the way glass feels because it can be seen through—ha ha—nor am I surprised to have learned from knives that they have conserved their animus like juice in jam jars, waiting for dullness or—contrarily—the best time to snap, or how to hurry a finger toward the cut that awaits it. In the opinion of the barber guys, the way utensils are misused is no worse than any other treatment, however widespread, that the human species has inflicted on Mother Nature: hills are burrowed or leveled, lakes pumped dry, seas emptied of life, trees cut, forests burnt. It is no matter with men what damage they do, or their paved streets and ubiquitous cellars accomplish. They murder the very ground they walk on—it’s all right—so why should we few chairs complain about a rusty pinion, a small tear, some slight impulsive knockabout?

  After the bomb we collected our spirits as well as we could and endured the inadequate renovations that Walt could afford. Nevertheless, our reopening didn’t bring our old customers back. No one likes to chance it. After all, there was no reason and no warning. Destruction just appeared like the ghost of broken dishes does during Easter or the Christmas holidays. The light that falls on glassware now is as tepid as wash water wrung from a strangled rag. It leaves, after it hits me, no differently than before, except that it departs more the way a sigh does than a joyous whoopee from a winner. The marks on the wall where our customers’ hair once leaned will, I bet, be here long after we are removed to the scrap heap, separated from one another for the first time, and unable to feel the warm reassuring weight of a single human ass.

  So we wait as much in daylight, as in the darkness of the shop, for the end of our adventures. On her wavelength, hardly heard, a lipstick is sobbing. Know-it-all insists that we were the targets—things were aimed at and the only entities injured. Those were his last sad words to me as he was hauled away.

  If it suits him in his heart to say it went this way, why not say it went this way, say I.

  The Man

  Who Spoke

  with His

  Hands

  AN EXERCISE

  From William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890

  The man who spoke with his hands was not deaf nor did he speak with his hands because he was communicating with deaf people. The man who spoke with his hands was not noticeably shy, therefore unlikely to say much, or be inclined to wait for a passing noise behind which to hide his remarks. He engaged in conversations with average frequency and ordinary ease, and employed for these everyday purposes a voice that was mellow enough to spread on bread; neither so low as to approach a whisper nor so high as to threaten screech. It was a voice as brown as his eyes.

  The man who spoke with his hands did not gesture expansively, because he spoke with his hands not his arms and/or eyebrows. His hands tended to remain in close touch, mostly about mid-chest. His hands were made almost entirely of fingers. These were long and slim and supple. One thought of cigarett
e holders except for the supple. A cigarette holder is not supple. It is a bamboo tube with a coating of lacquer. Those who believe that smoke filtered through the stem of such a holder is less likely to sicken them are probably mistaken. According to authorities, they are being poisoned when they breathe such drugs. Smoking is a bad habit but the man who spoke with his hands did not appear to have any other habit than his hands.

  The man who spoke with his hands had cheeks that were tanned; outside of those two places—the left and right cheeks at the lower edge of the bone—his skin was pale. His fingers were exceptionally white and consequently easy to see, which is possibly one reason why he decided to speak with his hands, although nobody supposed that he actually chose his gestures; what made them so graceful and attractive was that they (his fingers for the most part) seemed to dance outside the range of their owner’s attention. It is no longer fashionable to describe anything as “unconscious.” The few who still employ the concept have probably been smoking too much Freud. Freud had a cigar habit, and we know it was bad because it killed him.

  The man who spoke with his hands would, while speaking, sometimes move the thumb of his right hand gently (one might say with circumspection) back and forth, in and out, of a hollow formed by a downward curl of the left hand’s lengthy fingers, as if they were lightly gripping a pole where the thumb slid. Professors Rinse and Paltry understood this to be a meditative moment; for instance, if he were saying that he hadn’t taken any of the students in his History of Religious Music class to hear some famous organist who had come to Columbus yet again this year (it was the sixth occasion), they would take his hands to be indicating that he had debated long and hard about it. As Professor Paltry saw the thumb glide gradually out again, he thought of the trombone. Freud would have ascribed this habit to another practice that was equally compulsive and otherwise unspeakable.

  On the whole the man who spoke with his hands created movements that were slow, as if they were distant from his words, and reluctant to leap to conclusions. Only when his forefinger, seemingly held back by the pressure of the thumb, sprang forward in that snap one uses to flick a crumb from the dining cloth did they call attention to themselves. This gesture meant—the Professors believed—that whatever it was he was discussing—an event, a meeting, a class, an opinion—was over and done with, was no longer held by him, was not to be taken up again. When he said: I just couldn’t face another long bus ride with a load of noisy kids; there was neither snick nor snip, but a gentle, almost imperceptible movement of the fingertips, the nails in full view, as if brushing something away or warding it off, pushing the imagined thing out of his purview. Then he might conclude: so I didn’t. The snip would follow this.

  A gentle brushing of a tabletop with the fingers will roll crumbs to the edge and over it onto a ready palm. There is no need to flick offending grains of salt or sugar into space where they will sand up something else—a chair seat or the floor beneath your feet. A table knife will scrape them to a corner and fancy folk or attentive waiters in hightoned restaurants employ a silver blade just for this purpose. So the flick is probably a bad habit too. The flick removes a problem from your presence but does not rid it from the world. Indeed, the cloth from which the crumbs have been so casually ushered remains stained and abused, and the gesture that removes these ashes and these cinders also signifies an intention to renew the table’s use as if it were new and its covering not in need of removal. Germs are not thusly scraped away and remain to infect the éclair and its brood.

  The fingers of the man who spoke with his hands might mesh like the tines of forks, but gently and easily, for tines may jam. Then one could watch his fingers slide between his fingers like blending fans, again very gradually, so the hands were clasped, and almost immediately moved again, separating with the silence of cream, and thereby measuring degrees of commitment or withdrawal, of coolness or ardency, agreement or disavowal. His hands often assumed a prayerlike stance when he began to speak—pardon me, your humble servant, by your leave, sir—and then the right hand would withdraw, its fingers sliding very slowly down a calm left palm until the wrist was reached when they would hesitate a moment before rising up again or continue to drop on down to the wristband of their owner’s watch.

  Yes, the man who spoke with his hands could be nervous and impatient too, the fingers of his right drumming on the back of his left. That tapping reminded Professors Paltry and Rinse of the way his long slim white fingers flew on and off the holes of the flute, whereas if the left danced a bit on the back of the right, it meant, they calculated, expectation coupled with serene acceptance. Occasionally both hands would droop from their wrists like fresh wash hung from a rope, but this was not a feminine gesture, even though Professors Rinse and Paltry judged it signified: you win, I give up, you don’t say. Unless, of course, the hands suddenly flew up again, when it meant a very firm: go away, take your topic elsewhere, little boy, run out and play.

  When the man who spoke with his hands was confronting a knotty problem, or trying to be clear about a complexity that had hold of him, he would revolve his hands around one another, slowly or quickly, quietly or forcefully, as the puzzle was pursued. The knot at last untied, the left hand, palm exposed, might fly gracefully away as if to say: there, you see, or, it consequently comes to this. I liked particularly the definite but brief pinches one pair of fingers might make on a lower arm or the upper skin of a hand, or all the subtle tweezer-style variations, since he seemed to have a special role for every digit, and Professor Paltry particularly felt those fingers were very sincere about their business, well manicured and behaved, especially during geometric gestures, small circles mostly, as if one were twining one’s hair, or unrolling an idea like a length of rug.

  Occasionally, the man who spoke with his hands would add a little flutter, or some zippy propulsion of the right indexical toward the object or person he was addressing (the way one adds “-ed” to a verb or tacks on “-ly” to an adverb or attaches an “-est” to an adjective or “-ness” to a noun of which “saintliness” could serve as an example, or “livelihood” be an attractive instance, or “implicational” at least representative), thereby altering the assumed character of a run of silent remarks.

  Rarely did the man who spoke with his hands permit them to touch his head, ears, or face, though Professor Paltry saw a forefinger brush his earlobe once in a gesture so expressive as to warrant applause. They never strayed below the belt, or roamed far or widely from his torso, or fell meekly like a coat sleeve to his sides. And despite all of this nearly continuous motion, the Professors hardly noticed them; took little heed of this habit; were not distracted as much by the fingers as by the light which rollicked from their owner’s bald head, pale as paper. He was a man, compact and even slight, whom one could nevertheless pick out of a crowd as one would the most attractive piece of fruit from a bin. His hair would have been brown had he had any. The truth was, Rinse and Paltry talked more about the man’s dark curly eyebrows and his bald pate than his shiny nails or their scintillating moves.

  When the man who spoke with his hands performed, his colleagues read his gestures as signs, and Rinse thought his fingers danced, but Paltry heard an orchestra that the man conducted to accompany his words. Paltry saw the pick, the drum, the strum, the tweak, the pluck, the rub, the damp, the trill, the run of the instruments, the strain of the strings, as the man’s nails flickered, and loose fists were formed only to relax like petals leaning back into their blooms.

  Arthur Devise was the man who spoke with his hands, and he played the flute, the piccolo, and the recorder. When the death of Clarence Carfagno created an opening in the music department, Arthur Devise arrived to fill it. Professors Morton Rinse and Joseph Paltry held it against their new colleague that he had been chosen without consulting them; they held it against him that he was a friend of Howard Muffin, the President who had hired Art (as they would later affectionately address him), and a president whom the male faculty—to a ma
n—despised; they held it against him that he was almost as old as they were and so as long a failure as they were (though they didn’t immediately put their animosity in such terms); they held it against him that, as a musician, he was quite accomplished; Professor Morton Rinse especially held it against him that he, like Rinse, played the flute, the piccolo, and the recorder; while both men held it against him that Muffin had picked Arthur Devise because the Department of Music had always—anyway in Paltry’s memory—had two members (there were three altogether) who professed the flute, the piccolo, and the recorder, and that it was proper to continue the tradition; the remainder held it against Arthur that he actually seemed a good sort and a wise choice, because they did not want to think the President ever acted wisely; Professor Joseph Paltry held it against Devise in addition that he was a widower with an attractive daughter about to become a student of music in her parent’s own college, in her parent’s department, and might enroll in her parent’s class; they jointly held it against him that Devise agreed to teach, lead, and pamper the choir and the chorus, and had them sounding splendid in no time; finally, they held it against him that he spoke with his hands, and that, at first, neither Rinse nor Paltry liked what he said.

  The man who spoke with his hands, because he spoke with his hands, was a quiet man, with a slow warm well-regulated smile, a smile hard to dislike, and he chuckled deeply in his chest to the point of an almost inaudible rumble, and the slow well-regulated shaking of his ribs made his hands, so often positioned on what would have been his stomach had he had one, rise and fall lightly like a pair of drifting leaves—motions charming in their pacifying consequences. It has been said that Saint Francis of Assisi used such gestures to charm birds who would then perch upon his extended arm and eat grain strewn artfully along it, though some say they just flew in for the grub.