The Mars Room(16)

It could have been the case, in the barber chair that day, that he was hypersensitive to touch, since he had been alone for months. The corner of the comb, when the girl drew it along the part of his hair, sent a shower of tingles down his head and neck. He was a wiring diagram, lighting up. The touch of this girl’s comb produced a feeling that was both terrific longing and something like longing fulfilled.

“You have nice hair,” the girl said. He had utterly normal and unexceptional hair. Straight, and brown.

It was strange to Gordon how sometimes beauty was magnificent and other times it was nothing and did not move him. Her skin was bad, and the bad skin made her even prettier, it made her real. She wore the state-issue tennis shoes, “bubblegums,” the girls called them, shoes that meant you were indigent, because if you had any hustle at all, you’d order brand-name sneakers from a mail-order catalogue. She didn’t seem to notice or care that she had no adorning marks of catalogue supply privilege, of outside help. In Gordon Hauser’s dream of her, the state-blue clothes seemed to him almost like hospital scrubs, a nurse’s clothes, not prison-issue: the uniform of a person who takes care of others, and she did take care. She trimmed his hair, touched his head with her comb.

There was something else. She was a black girl, but she spoke, to Gordon, like a white girl. She lived in the honor dorm and carried a Bible everywhere she went. That he associated her Bible reading with bookishness, maybe it was a confusion, but maybe not.

Gordon started going weekly for haircuts. One day the corpulent pig of a yard captain passed by in his club car as Gordon was walking toward cosmetology.

“You’re going over there pretty often, aren’t you, Mr. Hauser? Didn’t I just see you getting a haircut last week?”

The yard captain and the other officers, many of them too fat to walk, reminded Gordon of the obese twins in the Guinness Book of World Records, twins in cowboy hats who rode mopeds to get from the bedroom to the kitchen.

Gordon looked at the yard captain with mild contempt, and then beyond him, to the woman he was there to see, as she swept hair from the base of the last barber chair in the cosmetology school, the chair where he would sit, where she would soon be touching his head.

Too fat to walk, and most of them brought in lunch boxes the size of traveling luggage. They were containers with collapsible handles and wheels, too big to lift and carry. What business of the yard captain’s was it how often Gordon paid twelve dollars to have his head touched by this girl? It was none of his business.

He said to the yard captain that he guessed his hair must grow fast. The yard captain seemed satisfied that he had given Gordon a sufficiently hard time, made him a little nervous.

The captain rode away in his club car, his huge ass like a sideways letter B in his military pants.



* * *



Even people like Gordon’s father, who owned few books, had a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records in their home. The prison library had several copies. It was a bible for the bookless under God.

That Gordon equated the thinness of his beloved with knowledge because the fat corrections officers were stupid did not occur to him until much later. In fact, he never really felt that to be the truth. It was everything together that had resulted in his infatuation: his own snobbery, his alienation from the military culture of the place, a physical attraction to the girl. All of it built a feeling in him, a kind of hope centered on her, the promise of something, but not what actually happened.



* * *



There had been a girlfriend, Simone was her name, a teacher at the community college where he’d been an adjunct. She was nice-looking and plenty smart and didn’t talk too much. Most people talked to fill silence and didn’t know the damage they reaped. Simone spoke only when she had something to say, but he’d ended the relationship and there was sometimes no why. She’d liked him more than he wanted her to, maybe. He understood there were people who didn’t want to be the wanter, but he could not make himself feel that way. As soon as a woman turned to Gordon with a look of need, he was halfway gone. He occasionally missed Simone, but every time, right after feeling a desire to see her again, he was always relieved not to have to deal with her. If she could just appear at certain exact moments—when he was horny, or needed someone to talk to—that would have worked out fine, but people were not like that. There were hours built in where you had to hear someone express feelings about something that didn’t seem important, and you nodded and pretended that it was. You had to mask your own ambivalence and pretend to be in love one hundred percent of the time, and he’d rather swim in a lake of hellfire.

The girl acknowledged their familiarity as if she knew why he came so often to get his hair cut. But she gave him no indication of her feelings. Other women called him cutie, taunted him to flirt. This one did no such thing. She cut his hair and avoided his gaze. Answered his questions shyly, minimally. There was nothing in her body language that suggested they were flirting. This made the whole thing safe. It was limited to the feel of her comb on his scalp. Her quiet breath. The slow textured sound of scissors closing over wet hair. Her fingers brushing clippings from his shoulders.

Even despite his obsession with this girl, he sometimes wanted out of the prison job, but change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.