Fiona and Jane(40)
“Don’t worry. I’m clean.” He was still pulling and snipping locks of my hair. “I got tested right away, then again three months later. I’m good.”
I tilted my head away from his hands and turned in my chair to face him. “Won. I’m sorry.” I touched his arm. “I should’ve been there—if I knew—”
“The crazy part?” He stood back and paused a moment. The hand holding the scissors dropped to his side, and with his other hand Won pinched his left earlobe and pulled on it gently a few times. The gesture reminded me suddenly of my father. I shook my head, as if to clear it of this strange connection between Won and him. “The first thing that popped into my head wasn’t even—you know, whatever—that shit is serious.” Won made a grimace, still rubbing his earlobe as he talked. “My first thought was: well, Jesse and me, we could have it together.”
Shame flooded through me. The first thought that had popped into my head was that I’d shared a straw with Won at lunch the other day—I’d wanted to taste his avocado and red bean smoothie, and I’d remembered there was a canker sore healing in my mouth. An open wound. That was the first thought I had.
“That’s how much I liked him,” he said. “I wasn’t even mad at him for lying.”
Won pulled the blow-dryer out of a drawer underneath the mirror and turned it on my head. We stopped talking for a minute. I was grateful for the break. Then ashamed, again, that I needed a break from the story Won just told me. When he finished blasting me, Won checked the length of my haircut by pulling pieces on opposite sides of my face toward my nose. Satisfied, he squirted out a dollop of hair oil and rubbed his palms together a few times, then fanned his fingers through my hair.
“Not too short, right?” He handed me a mirror and spun my chair around so I could admire the back of my new cut.
I was hardly paying attention to my reflection. Instead, I studied Won’s face and tried to see beyond it, to recall his other face: the one he had when we were in high school.
Over the last five or six years, Won had undergone a few cosmetic procedures. It started out innocently enough with the eyelid surgery. First, the surgeon snipped the outer corners to lengthen his eyes, Won had explained. Then she punctured the skin over his top lashes, stitched and knotted surgical thread to generate scar tissue that forced the lid to fold externally, instead of retreating inside.
About a year after, Won found fault with his nose. Too flat at the space between his brand-new set of eyes and too broad at its base, the nostrils indelicately formed, according to him. A different doctor, someone a salon client recommended, did his rhinoplasty. With a small incision between the nostrils and cuts along the sides, the doctor lifted the skin off his nose, loosened it from the bone, and implanted a false bridge. Seven months later, another nose job, because Won was unhappy with the results from the first. This time, the doctor shaved off more cartilage along the shaft. Lately he’s been talking about how his weak chin has held him back his whole life. He was researching the best chin-augmentation specialists in Seoul, Bangkok, and Singapore.
If you never knew him, back when I knew him, maybe you wouldn’t notice the difference. Years ago, Won was the first person to come out to me. He didn’t know it then, of course—I didn’t, either—but his words granted me permission. I remembered that boyish face, his eyes at sixteen, as dearly as I recalled my first crush on a girl: the feeling of Ping’s fingers hovering on top of mine over the piano keys, barely touching, the heat radiating from the palm of her hand while it covered my own. Back then, Won’s gaze on me seemed to telegraph a message carried by some distant future light, one that asked me to trust in the possibility of a different road than what was offered to my father, the burden of which—my mother, me, the semblance of our lives together as a family—eventually killed him.
Won untied the smock at my throat and shook it loose with a flourish. I stood from the chair and stepped aside from his station while Won swept up the pieces of my hair on the ground with a broom. I checked out my reflection, turned my head from side to side. My bob looked great, styled in an effortless way like nothing I could duplicate at home. I thanked Won and tried to tuck some bills into his jeans pocket, but he waved me off.
“Just do me a favor, Jane?” He paused, and I waited for him to go on. “Keep writing in that notebook, will you?”
“I told you,” I said. “I can’t think of anything else I hated—”
He held up a hand to stop me. “Not about Carly,” he said. “Write something else.”
“Like what?”
“Anything,” he said. “Ideas. Thoughts you have.”
I frowned.
“Write a letter to Fiona,” he said. “No time difference on paper.”
“You’re taking this life-coach thing a little too seriously.”
“Write to your dad,” he said.
“For what?” I said. “Got nothing to say.”
“I think you do, though.”
I was silent for a moment. “Maybe we should push the marriage pact to thirty-two,” I said finally. “Thirty-three. Also,” I added, “we need a provision for kids.”
“Oh hell no,” he said. “Kids? Why are you always trying to get me in bed? Hard pass—”