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Claire called. The machine picked up and Claire's voice told her to leave a message.
"Let's talk," she said, "We have too much history to just stop like this. I miss, you know, the whole thing."
She hung up and I watched the phone for a long time. What would John Folsom do? John Folsom didn't talk about his past. John Folsom worked a blue collar job and kept his mouth shut. John Folsom didn't need some motivational executive with an excellent ass and an SUV full of memories to give his life meaning and order. He lived one day at a time. He appreciated the small pleasures in life — a fine cigarette, a smooth bourbon, a young librarian's tongue placed delicately but firmly on his smooth, hairless balls.
I hit delete, watched the red message light blink once and then resolve into a perfect zero.
The couch didn't smell like the dog anymore, just smelled like smoke and mildew and highway exhaust. I walked around the house until I got tired. I stared at my yellow notebook full of first sentences. I went into the bathroom, shaved my head, looked in the mirror, and then shaved my beard, too.
I sat on the couch and watched the mall parking lot. I was restless. I felt like doing something. But the money had run out. The car had no gas. My T-shirts were already arranged in chronological order.
I went into the bathroom, stared at the mirror.
The eyebrows are the hardest part. You'd think that once you stand in the shower holding a razor on your scrotum that it would be all downhill from there.
You'd be wrong.
I was writing outside on the couch when the sliding glass door opened. Claire. "Let's get back together," she said.
"Hi," I said.
"What happened to you?" she said. She ran a hand over my bald head, fingered the place where my eyebrows had been. I closed my eyes. It felt good.
"Its a monk thing," I said. I tried to put some sarcasm in my voice but it just sounded whiny.
"You're trying to get back at me," she said. "I probably deserve that."
She sat down, put a hand on my leg. "Let's get back together," she said. For the first time, I could see little wrinkles starting up around her eyes. I stared at her hair. Jesus, it looked wild. She'd let it grow out and go curly. It looked like a hive, like anything could happen in there. I wondered what
I stared at the stubble. It looked like the stalks of things.
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she'd been doing all this time, what happened to the Dockers and hair product guy, how she'd been spending her time, why I wasn't more angry, and what she was wearing under her dress pants. "You can't be ready to just throw away everything we had," she said. She pushed out her boobs. "What do you think?"
"I don't know," I said.
But I did know. I was out of money. I was tired. And Claire was so sure of herself. She had no doubt at all. It was easy to give in. Maybe I needed somebody to tell me what to do, to get me onto second sentences, full paragraphs, to outline the novel of my life.
"This will be good," she said.
I nodded and tried to convince myself that it was true. I felt like I was almost home after a long drive on unfamiliar freeways, looking forward to that final sleepy glide through my own neighborhood.
"So it's settled," she said.
Things were good for awhile. There was food in the refrigerator, gas in the car. We went to bed at 11 and woke up at 6. We went shopping at the mall. Claire helped me get my resumé together. The county came and took the couch.
But things were getting itchy. Stubble. It looked even worse than the hair had, an aggressive stand of tiny hairs colonizing my groin. It looked like a strip mine where trees were coming back, malformed and wrong.
"Let it grow back, for God's sake," Claire said. We had just finished making love, and I was staring at the stubble.
"But don't you . . . " I started.
"It's too much upkeep," she said. "You're spending an hour a day shaving all this hair. That's time you could be looking for a job. Cleaning the house."
I stared at the stubble. It looked like the stalks of things. It looked like failure.
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