Leaving Lucy Pear(58)

“You barely have to touch me,” he said. “I’ll sit here, and you cut my hair. Anyway, what’s with you, all of a sudden pure? Tell me this is your first time carrying on with a man. I’ve seen your dark girl. I’m not blind.”

Emma didn’t move. “What will Susannah say?”

Josiah turned on his knees, overcome by a sudden aggression. He forced the shears into Emma’s hand, worked her fingers into position, squeezed her wrist, hard. Emma watched him. The fact that she didn’t look alarmed made him sorry. “I’m not any good at this, you’ll see,” she said. But she swatted his hand away, told him to face forward, and, from the backseat, started to cut.

“When she interrogates you,” she said, “you won’t be mentioning my name.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

A little breeze touched the back of his neck—Emma’s helpless half laughter, he knew, all nose, no sound.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Your campaign said so, in the condolence letter. I don’t want to talk about it with you.”

The scissors thwacked at his ear. Hair fell into his lap.

“Have you gone to Mrs. Cohn yet, to ask her to withdraw her endorsement?”

“I went last week. She wouldn’t come to the door.”

“You can’t blame her for that.”

He lifted his head, to check her expression in the mirror, but she grabbed him by both ears and made him look straight ahead. “So what will you do?”

“What will I do?”

“About Mrs. Cohn.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what one does.”

“Do you have to know what one does?”

Josiah fingered the fallen hair. It was all different lengths. With Susannah, the entire business took less than five minutes, but Emma was jumping around, seemingly without a system or plan. She was snipping roughly at his sideburns. Susannah used a razor for these. Josiah’s heart pummeled itself in its cage.

“You don’t think,” Emma said. “If you think, you’ll know what to do.”

“I think!” Josiah said, touching his bangs, which felt poufy, like a duckling’s.

“I haven’t gotten to those yet. But I will. I’ll be as thorough as Delilah.”

Josiah nodded. He had forgotten about Delilah, and Samson, too.

“Stop moving,” she said.

He stared at the woods in front of them. He was struck by the constant motion of the leaves and the utter stillness of the tree trunks. It was hard to believe they were attached to each other. His heart felt like the leaves today: trying to fly, flailing. “I didn’t bring you here to scold me,” he said.

“No, you brought me here to offer me a new position.”

“There is a position!” Josiah saw the scissors come for him, open, glinting. “There will be. How cometh the pears?” he asked in a swaggery voice that only made his guilt more transparent.

“They don’t,” she said. “We’ve been busy.”

“I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

“Couldn’t you renounce her or something? Mrs. Cohn, I mean.”

“What, withdraw for her?”

“No, withdraw your acceptance of her endorsement.”

“Disown her.”

“I guess. It sounds awful.”

“It does.”

They were quiet for a minute as Emma cut his bangs.

“You don’t even want to be mayor, do you?”

A wheeze came from Josiah, nothing like the laugh he intended. “I didn’t say that.”

“You probably don’t know it.”

“All I said . . . My only point . . . She gave a very nice speech, on my behalf.”

“I read about it, yes. But speeches are what she does. If you wanted to win, it wouldn’t be a question. You’d find a way out.”

At the Gilbert Club, he had watched Susannah watching him from the front row, her face so full of pride it seemed a mockery. After the speech, as he watched her exchange a beaming handshake with Beatrice Cohn, both women had looked at him and waved and he was sure they could see that his suit was in fact too big for him, see through the restrained, closed-mouth smile he’d been practicing in front of Susannah’s full-length mirror to the boy on Mason Street, regarding himself in the tiny, unvented bathroom, making his brothers wait outside, dreaming of nothing but girls, beautiful girls, cute girls, short girls, tall girls, girls with small waists and large breasts or small breasts and large bottoms, all sorts of girls, but never one who lived beyond the neighborhood. The more costumes he wore, the more exposed he felt.

“I don’t know,” he said. Susannah and Beatrice Cohn were mixed up in his mind, their way of waving with their fingers, their sheeny talk. “I don’t know what I’ll do. I expect you hate her.”

“I’m expected to.” Emma tossed the scissors into the front seat and pushed his hair around with her hand. “Done.”

He stretched to see himself, but at the first glimpse of his new bangs—trimmed so close he could see his scalp—he sighed back down onto the leather seat.

“Good choice,” said Emma. “Now. Where’s my job?”

Her voice was firm, but her hand lingered on his head, traced a path down to his neck, drew a cool circle there with her fingertips. He knew each of her calluses now, followed their journey as a record might the gramophone’s needle. He didn’t know the roil inside Emma, how she needed the job for the money, yes, but also to get her out of the house, away from Roland. Barely a week home and already he was inching back into himself, drinking again—he had yelled at Jeffrey until the boy stood on a chair and fetched the liquor from the shelf. The doctor had stopped in and said Roland’s pain should be easing, but Roland said it wasn’t and insisted on taking the nighttime pills. Emma heard him weep in bed. Once she had rolled to hold him and he had rolled to her, his chest to hers, his eyes discomfitingly close and shining in the dark. “I lost my leg,” he said. “I lost my leg, I lost my leg, I lost my leg, Emma-bee,” until, his crying done, he took Emma’s hand and led it to his prick. Now, when she heard him, Emma pretended to be asleep.