HANK by Peter Gordon
It’s a tiny shop tucked away in a side street off rue St.‑Claude in the 3rd Arrondissement, the kind of establishment you’ll walk right by if you don’t know it’s there and the proprietors will be just as glad if you do. They don’t particularly crave more customers – they seem vaguely indifferent to the ones they already have – and particularly not more foreigners and surely not more Americans who come in with their hair unruly and their necks razor-burned and bumpy. If you’re unfamiliar to them and manage to procure one of the few chairs in the cramped waiting area, you can sit for over an hour before your presence in the giant gilded mirror will even register with one of the four barbers. People coming in after you get taken long before you. You garner no more notice than the wolf spiders hanging from invisible threads in the four corners of the ceiling. So you wait with very little to distract you. Tacked on the wall is one of those no-cell-phones signs with a red X superimposed over the cartoonish image of a flip phone and beneath it, just in case the universal imagery wasn’t clear, big, blocky letters spelling out the words “Absolument aucune des exceptions!” The magazines are all old Le Mondes – photos of the Louvre entrance before it was tricked up, ads for Renault models long out of production. The air is clouded with smoke, this despite the fact that you can’t see anyone actually holding a cigarette. Today’s Paris is rife with newfangled places to cut men’s hair, smoke-free spaces featuring organic fruit bars and Jura coffee presses and piped‑in jazz, but this shop isn’t the least bit interested in becoming one of them.
I’ve been here for a while now. It’s like I see the barbers but they don’t see me. Or they’ve recorded and erased me, all in a single sweeping pan. I’m trying not to look at my watch since I’m sure the more an alien customer fiddles and fusses, the less likely they are to tab him as next man up. A man sitting next to me says something to me in French and I smile and he turns away without smiling back. Maybe he said something about the interminable wait, but I can’t be sure. Back home it would have been a gripe about the shared experience of being ignored and treated shabbily and made to wait interminably, or the insufferable hardness of the chairs, or some other comment about our conjoined misery or else why bother to speak to a stranger? My French is terrible. I used to think there was goodwill to be won just for trying to speak the language but in my case the syntax is so mangled and the effort so pained that nothing good ever comes of it. Since I’ve been here some hoteliers and shopkeepers and even the funeral director who was otherwise most accommodating have actually closed their eyes during my halting annunciations, waiting impatiently for me to finish and making no great effort to decipher what I’m trying to say. Others may politely smile, but in their heart of hearts they’re wishing I’d shut up or at least have the decency to use simple hand signs to get my points across.
“Sir,” the hotel desk clerk beseeched me just this morning, holding up his hand in the middle of my bumpy, zig-zagging French sentence. “Please. I must beg you to speak it in English.”
The barbers wear white smocks with Henri stitched on the left breast. Two have beautiful hair, two have almost none. The ones with hair boast thick silver waves of it combed back in perfectly symmetrical grooves. The nearly hairless ones show off polished domes they obviously take great care to oil and buff. Bald barbers can be so vain, it doesn’t matter where you are. The barbershop’s wide-planked floor is covered with shards of hair, mostly clippings in varying shades of gray and white, almost no black or brown. It’s an old man’s den in here. Some of the patrons were probably young men when they sat down but have gone gray waiting their turn. There’s barber-patron conversation in low abstract tones and beneath that the steady snip of scissors, the lubricated ride of razors. Balm gets slapped on a face. A barber’s cape snaps as it’s unfurled and expertly spread over a reclining gentleman.
At long last a barber is beckoning, wiggling his finger in my gen-eral direction. It’s the youngest barber, one of the full-headed ones, the only one who could possibly be under the age of seventy, the one you’d figure would have the steadiest hands when he’s holding a straight razor at your throat.
I start to stand up. So does the man next to me. It’s no contest. I sit down.
The wait continues. There’s freedom, isn’t there, to be in a place where you’re practically invisible? As opposed to being somewhere your face is so familiar people can see you coming before you even decide to go there. Our mother used to drop off my brother and me at our hometown barber’s with a carefully worded set of instructions we memorized like a line of poetry or a prayer to be said over bread – Short but regular, not too much off the top. Those were our marching orders from which there was to be no deviation. She’d tell us we could make up our own minds when we grew up and would be out of her hair – we never got the joke – but it took me years to stop repeating the mantra verbatim. Long after I could get any cut I wanted I’d automatically say the nine words as soon as I sat down in the barber’s chair, like bestowing God bless you when someone sneezes, whether you believe in God or not. Later stylists started pressing me, What exactly do you mean by regular? Or Can you tell me how much is too much?
I don’t want the barbers to read anxiety on my face. Or impatience. I am trying to remain – how shall I express it – one with the furniture. I do not want to label myself as a problem. In the arrivals line at de Gaulle, for example, I was shaking so badly I expected to be yanked out of the queue at any time. Why would they want to let me in the country? What good could possibly come of it, for them or me? I’d only bring everyone down. My wife didn’t understand why I was even going to Paris. You can claim the body electronically, you know. You can give power of attorney to a French lawyer and everything will be gathered and scanned and all you do is look at photos and sign documents over email. It’s done all the time. They’ll translate everything. There’s no getting on airplanes, no walking into morgues or whatever they have over there. Stephen? Are you even listening to me?
If you’ve never tried it it’s actually quite easy to leave everything behind. All you have to do is turn your case load over to your partners in the firm, have your flight arranged, cancel a few appointments, find your passport, and pack a small black bag of essentials for a three-day stay. Your wife stands at the front door watching you climb into a cab, hugging herself in that way she has when she wants to stop something from happening but won’t allow herself the nerve to do it. She’s flanked by your two children – now full‑on teenagers, taking in your departure with equal parts skepticism and boredom. Like it’s no big deal.
The thing is, when a man leaves his family, you look back and wonder if he was planning it all along. Was he looking at my mother and brother and me at every meal, every baseball game, every school play and already thinking of us in the past tense? Is it worse for him to have had a plan or not had one, to have plotted his departure for years or to have left impetuously? My wife’s father died on a city sidewalk when she was seven, and we still debate which is worse – a dead father or one who is as good as dead. I say there was no comparison since my father left us voluntarily – he was out there somewhere, just not with us. She says I had ten more years of having a father around than she did, my being seventeen when he left as opposed to her being seven, and at least I had a clear memory of him as opposed to her fuzzy view where she’s no longer sure what’s real memory versus a rickety construct of photographs, family stories, mementos (she has his watch mounted in a glass case, cracked face and all, stuck on the time he died) and so on. She’s become her own unreliable narrator. She argues that she has all my rage and more, and in her case she doesn’t even have the small grain of hope that he might come back some day. That’s usually the stopper, when she says that. We might look at each other and burst out laughing. As if both of us didn’t know they never come back.
I am noticing how the quality of the light has changed since I came in to Henri. The day is running away. The shadows are lengthening across the countertops and staining the floor left to right, like an encroaching flood. Did I mention that my father used to come here? He was a regular. The barbershop’s no-frills, no-fuss style must have suited him, the way they would have barely noted his entrance or said a word as he took a seat and waited his turn. He wasn’t looking for fancy. He wasn’t seeking the latest style; he used to flee style like it was chasing him with a gun. Based on the last time I saw him – what else was there to base anything on? – he was getting crew cuts and straight shaves right to the end, so nothing ever needed to be artfully done. Appointments were neatly entered in military time in his small black leather-bound datebook. Henri – 9:00. Henri – 15:00. Occasionally he did one as Henri? as though he wasn’t sure of the time or of the certainty that the rendezvous would occur. At first I didn’t know who or what was Henri. When I scoured the date book that was among his few remaining possessions – his Right Bank apartment was stripped of virtually everything, right down to the cheap brown sheets on the bed – I thought Henri might be a café, a boulangerie, a friend’s pied-a-terre, but the sheer regularity of the entries puzzled me. Maybe he was going almost daily for medical treatments and Henri was a doctor, an injector of some sort of life-extending serum, or a masseuse who skillfully abated the pain for an hour. After I dismissed that notion, I dreamed up this sepia-toned image of Henri as his psychiatrist with a second floor walkup office somewhere in the general vicinity of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, a white-walled, white-carpeted room with one small window looking out on a tiny swath of the bluish-black Seine. In my fantasy there is always a point where my father breaks down and cries out that it’s too late and Henri leans forward to tell him that it is never too late.
But in the end it is only a barbershop, the word Henri etched on the plate glass window in black script so wispy you have to get fairly close in order to read it, and directly below, broken up into two words in the style favored by some but not all Paris shops, big block letters spelling out BARBER SHOP, the only scrap of English the place lets stand. My father’s last day had a solitary entry, Henri – 6:00. I looked through the entire date book over and over and could find no other time as early as that, not for Henri or anything else. Why pick a time so early in the day, even before the establishment opened for business? According to the little sign on the door, it opens daily at 7:00 except Sundays and conspicuously enough no closing times are posted, meaning they close whenever they want to. Did he make some sort of special arrangement for a pre-dawn rendezvous for a shave and a buzz cut, knowing what this particular day held in store? Had he told them what he was planning to do later in the day so a dawn appointment would be both expedient and necessary?
At the bottommost layer of my wife’s belief system is a trap door that the men in her life fall through, never to be seen or heard from again. Her father gone when she was seven. Her favorite uncle when she was twelve. Her college boyfriend. The first and second men she ever lived with, the first moving out in the middle of the day when she was at work, the second bolting town one day to become a missionary, leaving his clothes and books and even his aquarium behind. When we started to get serious, she warned me that I was entering a twilight zone where the men she loved tended to disappear, usually quite suddenly, sometimes mysteriously. I asked her, Are we talking Bermuda Triangle here? Jimmy Hoffa? Did they get kidnapped, go to jail, go live on a mountaintop in Nepal? Or they just forgot to look up one day and got run over by a bus? Just so I understand the level of risk.
She smiled. All of the above.
When her father died, she was never told what happened. No one ever sat her down and told her directly her father was dead, not only how and where it happened but that it happened at all. It was all left to inference. His clothes in the closet, untouched. His place at the table, untaken.
We’ve been married for over twenty years. Every time she looks at me, her eyes seem to ask, “You’re still here?”
Another customer gets called up. I am going to rest my eyes for just a moment.
Suddenly one of the barbers, one of the bald ones of indeterminate age, is standing in front of me, looming over me with his hands on his hips, scowling. His face is red. He’s pointing at the door.
“Dégage d’ici!”
Maybe I was asleep for five seconds, it doesn’t matter. I hold up my hands. He points at the door again. Two of the other barbers step in to see what’s going on.
S’il vous plait, I say, pointing at my head. I forget the French word for haircut.
He shakes his own head violently
S’il vous plait.
I walk around him and go sit in his unoccupied chair. He stands there studying my reflection in the mirror for a few seconds before he makes his move. He opens a drawer and removes a large, square object. I’m thinking this guy might be capable of anything. I hear a whooshing sound and a heavy white sheet falls over me. Next he lathers me up and goes at it with a long-handled razor. Up and down, up and down, too fast if you ask me. He only slows down the action as the blade moves over my throat. His hands seem in control but who knows. Then he roughly towels my face and suddenly the chair is thrust into a forward position and I’m sitting up straight. He considers a variety of clippers before choosing one and starting on my scalp. The blades are cold, the motor loud. It’s what a lawn mower must feel like to the grass, or a frigid winter wave to the sand shelf. In minutes all my hair is gone save the surface stubble and a small stiff cuff standing at attention on the ridge of my forehead.
There, the barber seems to say, are you happy now?
He turns away without giving a last passing glance at me or his handiwork. All he wants now is to be rid of me. I pay him I don’t know how much money; I hand over my whole wad of bills which he takes without comment, as though it’s the least I could do for the trouble I’ve caused him. I mumble my merci. I walk out the door.
After my wife’s father disappeared from her life, her mother hired a handyman to take care of the typical man’s work around the house – shoveling snow, fixing a leak, patching a hole. At first she was afraid whenever Hank the handyman came over; she’d stand behind a door and timidly peek out at him, or, if he was making a racket, hide under her bed until he went away. He was different than her father. He was tall, and fat, and had a beard. Slowly, surely, they became buddies. He’d let her help him with the jobs, she handing him nails or rags or whatever he needed. He let her sit behind the wheel of his truck and drive the two of them on an imaginary highway. She used to sit at the window waiting for him, making up all these special prayers for him to appear, including a prayer that something in the house would break so he’d have to come over and fix it. Once she broke a window on the garage door just so Hank would need to replace it. Weeks might go by between his visits, and those were the longest weeks she ever knew. Then, after a couple of years, he announced he was leaving the state and going to live in California. She missed him so badly it gave her stomach aches. But she still kept up her prayers, and it was Hank she prayed for, promising to give up everything in her pockets and everything in her room if only Hank would come back to her, if only she could see his face one more time.
Peter Gordon’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, and Missouri Review.