Base Notes, page 29
She scowled; this meant she was reliant on me again. “Fine. Text me, I guess.”
“Jane,” I said as she was zipping up her jacket. It was her name, but it was also please. It might have been stay. She had an alarming ability to wrong-foot me, to catch me by surprise; I didn’t know what I wanted to say to her until she looked up with those clear eyes and I remembered: “I have something for you.”
Before she could protest—for once I was thankful for the small span of my studio—I retrieved a white box from my bookshelf. No more than three by five, less than two inches deep. I set it on the table between us and withdrew.
Dusk turned the matte-white cardboard blue, and the oblique angle of the light showed glossy embossed letters, also white: BRIGHT HOUSE. Jane read it, touched the text. I said nothing—why mar the presentation with useless babble?
“This isn’t . . . that kind of perfume, is it?” she asked.
I shook my head, just once. Who would I have given her? Not Reg. She’d had enough of him while he was alive.
She lifted the lid, revealing glass with beveled edges, a bright metallic spray-top capped in white ceramic. This wasn’t in some cut-crystal flea-market find, like the heavy leaded and ground-glass piece I had given Pearson. This was a Bright House bottle, proper. It was sleeker, more architectural, more Jane.
She stared at it in its neatly folded cardboard nest. Touched the glass. I bit my tongue against an exhortation: try it on. My gift of Jonathan had ironically imbued this one with more meaning. I truly cared now what she thought of the perfume, not just of me. In speaking of Jonathan I had revealed enough of myself that she could make inferences about my art, and judgments too. She would smell this and she would know that I had tried. That my genius was not effortless. And that was terrifying.
The label, set slightly off center, a little more toward the lower right-hand side, told her what she was looking at. Her fingers came to rest beneath the perfume’s name where it was printed in black against silver, the typeface an imitation of imperfect letterpress.
“Vic,” she said, rereading it. “What is this?”
Now I let the words free, as though exhaling air from which I had sucked every atom of nourishing oxygen. “Just try it, Jane. Please, just try it on.”
Finally, she smiled. A small one, and not very nice, but a smile that I knew. I realized I had asked her, begged her, and had not even thought about it first. I had given way without strategy, without cunning. She had won a point. I was happy to let her have it.
For a moment she surveyed the box, and then inverted it over an open palm. I approved. Much more elegant than prying it awkwardly from its resting place, created by industrial designers to cradle the bottle so tightly that it prohibited almost any movement besides this one that Jane had chosen.
I heard it come free. The release of suction, the slap of heavy glass into her hand. The sharp sound of the ceramic cap releasing. Abortive clicks on the first two pumps, a satisfying spritz on the third.
The air filled with the scent of lilacs. Mud. Icy linen. The sound of Jane’s indrawn breath. I felt a ghost of moving air across my lips—my imagination, most likely. I followed the feeling with my tongue and tasted what I smelled.
The molecules drifted between us like a transparent curtain, scent combinations shifting with each minute movement of the air. I watched her through it, as though through sheer muslin rippling in the breeze.
The opening notes of the scent began to fade, and she said nothing. It became clear that she expected me to break the silence and explain myself.
“What do you think?” I asked, because it was less naked than asking if she liked it. Besides, what does “like” mean? “Like” is as watery as “nice.” Jane had asked me, did I like Jonathan? But the verb is meaningless to me. I do not like people, and I have never wanted to make scents that people like. I want to make scents that fascinate, that captivate, that stop people in their tracks.
She had certainly frozen on the spot. Surprise? Or something more esoteric?
Lifting a hand, she threaded her fingers through the air as if pushing aside my imagined curtain. “It’s . . . cold.” Then, rubbing the pad of her forefinger against her thumb: “It’s supposed to be me?”
There was sorrow in the words that I had not expected. It made me blush, made my heart beat fast in a panic to correct her.
“No,” I said. “No, no, Jane. It’s . . . it was for you. It’s . . .” I traced a void in the space between us—a slender shape with rounded contours, finishing with a cupped hand six inches from her chin. “It’s the space you left behind.”
She considered this a moment, then sprayed another small burst of the perfume against her wrist. She inhaled, and stared at the skin over her veins as if she were watching herself disappear. “I never thought a smell could be so sad.”
“This one is,” I said, catching the pun on its name too late.
She frowned. “I wish it weren’t.”
“You don’t smell sad. Not at all.”
Looking up from the map of vulnerable blue-green descending from her palm, she asked, “What do I smell like?”
I closed the distance between us cautiously, alert to any hesitance on her part. There was none. She stood as still as if she had a venomous snake twining round her shoulders, a tarantula on her arm. Frightened, yes, but fascinated too.
I leaned in so that my cheek very nearly brushed hers. “Let me tell you,” I said, and breathed her in.
“Have you heard from Giovanni recently?” I asked, sometime after night had fallen. She was lying beside me, not touching: a feat in that small bed. And strange, given how close we had been recently. But I let her have the inch of space. Hopelessly, I realized there were many things that I would give her, if I could. If she would take them from me.
“Not really,” she said. “He replied to a couple of my Instagram stories. Just emojis. Why?”
I sighed. “I think things ended . . . badly, between us.”
“No shit. I’m surprised you managed to wrangle him in the first place.” She turned her head. “How did you?”
Useless to pretend I hadn’t heard her, hadn’t understood: her mouth was four inches from my ear and my skin knew it. Still, I stalled with a long breath. In the quiet moment that it bought me, I contemplated the curve of her hip bone. Its silhouette softened where the streetlight caught in the fine down of her body hair, silver and diffuse.
“It was a less elegant agreement than ours,” I said.
“No convenient medical debt?”
“And no serial harasser.” I put my fingertip between her breasts, to remind her of Reg’s spit-slick cherry. “It’s harder to feel justified in murderous anger against an abstraction.”
“Is it?” she asked. “Abstractions don’t have a face. Or families.”
“You feel guilty?”
“Yes.”
“So did he. But you’re still speaking with me.”
“Only because you owed me money.”
“It’s in your backpack,” I said. “You can leave anytime. You could have left hours ago.” I tried to look into her eyes, but she kept her face turned obstinately away. “Why did you stay? Why didn’t you take the money and leave?”
She shifted and lifted her hand, quickly nipping a hangnail from the rough cuticle of her thumb. Blood welled up like a red seed bead until she swiped it away with a pass of her middle-finger pad.
“Well,” she said, staring at the streak of dilute rusty brown across her first knuckle. “You had your little science experiment. I was curious.”
“And after Jonathan? You could have left then. You could even have taken the new perfume and left. But you’re still here.” I stroked her skin for emphasis, along the ridge of her hip that had held my gaze.
She tucked her bloody hand away. In the taut silence I heard mouth sounds, the movement of her tongue in the wet tightness between her cheeks.
“It . . . God, this is going to sound stupid.” She sucked air between her two front teeth. “But that perfume . . . it was clean, Vic.”
“That’s the lilacs,” I said. “They can smell a little soapy if you aren’t careful.”
“No. I mean, yeah, it was like water, and cold rocks. Sauvignon blanc. That kind of clean. But . . . ugh.” She turned her face so it was hidden by the pillow and her hair. “This sounds so dumb.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
She let out a noisy breath. “It was . . . pure. Like you want art to be. Before you realize it’s about money, and what other people like. Before you figure out it isn’t just talent; it’s who you know, and kissing ass, and taking commissions.”
“You’re good at kissing ass,” I said. “I know.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but I kissed all the wrong ones, and now look where I am. That stuff”—she jabbed a finger across the room, to where the bottle of perfume sat by her backpack—“that’s like, when you still think you’re going to make it, even if other people don’t, because your shit is real. You didn’t owe it to me. I never asked for it. It wasn’t what I wanted. You’re right, you know? I didn’t know I . . .” She bit down on a smile. “It was just this clean expression of an idea. Just itself, doing exactly what it needed to.”
I thought of her Instagram account: the lines and planes and plays of light. The black-and-white prints on the walls of Giovanni’s shop. The photographs she didn’t take anymore, because people paid for X-rays, not for art.
“I miss that,” she said. “Just making a thing because it spoke to me.” The mattress flexed slightly, and I realized she had finally relaxed, just a moment before her skin touched mine. At last she looked up at me. “What are you going to do now that you’ve got Eisner’s money?”
She meant, Would I make art instead of trying to make a living? She also meant, Was I going to kill anyone else? Soon? Ever?
Would I? What reason had I, once I put Eisner in the ground? Which I would do, at my earliest convenience.
Jane didn’t need to know that what I did wasn’t always out of necessity. At least, not necessity of the financial sort. If my experimental scent worked on her, she would find that out soon enough. And after all, it had always been just what she described: making a thing because it spoke to me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I’ll try not to worry. For a while.”
Late that night, before Jane left, I said, “Tell me if you hear from Giovanni.”
She scowled—fondly?—and said, “I’m not doing your dirty work. If you want to talk to him, you have to talk to him.”
Rich, coming from someone who’d made her fiancé pick me up. But that was pleasure. This was business.
I paid a visit to Astor the next day and prowled among the eaux-de-vie until I found the bottle of grappa Beau and Jane had served at brunch. It was, as promised, pretty cheap. A staff pick too.
It wasn’t a long walk across town to Giovanni’s, and the weather had turned. I crossed Washington Square Park with my jacket open, dodging skateboarders, tourists, and the man with the bubble wand. In my tote bag, the bottle of grappa banged against my hip.
There was a new receptionist—I sometimes wondered if they quit or if he fired them—in the same old Bettie Page makeup. “I’m here for Giovanni,” I said.
“Um . . . I’m not sure . . .”
He was already staring at me from his station, holding a towel wrapped around his current client’s face. But he didn’t intercede.
“I don’t have an appointment,” I said.
“He’s not available for walk-ins,” she said. “I’m sorry. But Jovan or Richie could take you in about a half an hour. They’re really great.”
“I know,” I said. “They wouldn’t work here if they weren’t. But I don’t have a bottle of grappa for either of them. I do have a bottle of grappa for Giovanni.”
He lowered the towel and tossed it into the laundry bin. Pink cheeked, the man in the chair stepped down and shook his hand. The receptionist took his credit card, all the while looking nervously over her shoulder at me.
Giovanni wiped his hands on a blue bandanna from his coat pocket and came across the room slowly. It was a small space, but he made the distance last.
“Vic,” he said, “do you like scaring my girls?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “But you don’t seem to be hiring for nerves.”
The receptionist blanched and turned her attention more fully to the man checking out.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Social call.”
“I’m working.”
I looked at the man on the bench, who was reading The Cut and pretending not to listen in.
“Five minutes, Giovanni,” I said, brandishing the Astor bag. “For old times’ sake.”
He realized I was not going to go away, and rather than wilt him, the resignation stiffened his spine.
“Sorry, Kyle,” he said to his next client. “I need to take this. Do you have five minutes?”
The man nodded and flapped the covers of his magazine. Giovanni jerked his head toward the back room.
It was exactly as I had imagined it. Someone’s sandwich sat half-eaten, abandoned in a rush. An old metal fan churned the stale air. Schedules fluttered in the artificial breeze.
Giovanni shut the door. “What do you want?”
“I hadn’t heard from you,” I said.
“That was on purpose.”
I set the grappa down on the desk. “I just wanted to check on you. I was concerned.” A low blow, but: “I’ve heard from Beau and Jane.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“Have you talked to them?” Surely he had done more than just like a few of Jane’s photos? But his lips didn’t move from their tight line.
“Has Eisner’s company gotten in touch?” I asked. “Or the new owners?”
His nostrils flared, and I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then, after a little bit too long, a sharp incline of his chin.
“It’s all settled?” I asked. “You’ll keep the space?”
“They want to knock a doorway through the back wall,” he said. “Where the bathroom is.”
“So you won’t have to clean it anymore,” I said, and he glared daggers.
“Vic,” he said. “If you don’t have some reason—”
“Just to say hello,” I said. “To check that everything’s all right.”
“Bullshit.”
It wasn’t. “Giovanni, no one cuts my hair like you. I . . . I can’t go back to Astor Place. I know I joked about it but . . . not really.” No one else had ever understood what I wanted. They were too pushy. They were less skilled. They had a strange, overwrought aesthetic. They were playing at something they didn’t truly understand. They had an idea about how I should look, based on how other people thought they should look. They didn’t listen—they imposed.
At my first appointment, I tried to show Giovanni a picture of my ideal cut, which had sometimes helped confused stylists understand my requests. He waved it away and said, “No, just tell me.” It was the only place I had ever felt comfortable in the chair.
Giovanni was genuine. Just as Jane had said, Giovanni made a thing, a space, an atmosphere, because it spoke to him. He was driven not by marketing or fashion, but by a pristine vision. I wondered if Jane felt about him and his shop the way she felt about This One, if she thought he was clean and pure. What would she think of the deal I had cut? Nothing good. But she would, I thought, understand its utility. Jane and I had both looked down the barrel of artistic freedom in this economy and decided we would rather not be shot.
I wasn’t proud of it. There was something special in that kind of conviction, even if it was chronically undervalued.
“Giovanni.” It sounded more bereft than I had intended, too raw. “I . . . I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
He had never taken his hand off the doorknob, and now he jerked it open. “You can get out now,” he said. And when I didn’t move: “Get the fuck out. Right now.” All delivered in a high, tight tone of voice that wouldn’t carry. “Do you think I’m joking?”
I didn’t.
“You fucked me over, Vic,” he said. “You don’t get to come back from that.”
“Fucked you over?” I stood in the fluorescent brightness of the office, not quite able to believe what I was hearing. “I saved this place. You were going to go under. Now your rent’s going down and you’ll get more customers than you can take.” It wasn’t that pristine vision from which his shop had been born, but this iteration would at least pay the bills.
“Did I ask for that?” Now his volume jumped, and the words rang back from the white tile walls of the shop. All ambient noise dropped to zero. “I never asked you for anything. You did all the asking, and when that didn’t pan out, you dictated terms. So I did your dirty work.” That tripped him up: his voice came perilously close to breaking. He seemed to realize he had drawn the attention of his clients and staff and lowered his voice again. “Now we’re done, all right? We’re finished. You never come here again.”
When I finally took a step toward the door, he said, “And take your fucking grappa too.”
In that moment, I should have known what would come next. But I wanted to believe what he said: That we were done. That I would never come back. That this was a clean break for both of us.
I doubled back, picked up the bag, and passed him as I went out the door. He smelled like geranium and grapefruit, a hint of blade oil and Barbicide. Underneath that, his own smell: essence of angry barber. He watched me all the way out the door.
30
Notes de Tête: Cilantro, Naranja Agria
Notes de Cœur: Ambergris
Notes de Fond: Stale Cigarette, Fresh Mulch, Nighttime Leaves
Later that week I stood in the center of Beau’s atelier with my legs spread, staring down at the top of his head as he worked. The window was open again, though this time the breeze that came in was warm, and carried the sounds of the Union Square green market.
I had not told Jane I was commissioning a suit. But I loathed the revealing clothing of warmer weather, which left me feeling vulnerable as a frog’s exposed belly. Too pale, too soft, slender in all the wrong places. Beau could make me something suitably austere that would breathe well in the New York summer.
“Jane,” I said as she was zipping up her jacket. It was her name, but it was also please. It might have been stay. She had an alarming ability to wrong-foot me, to catch me by surprise; I didn’t know what I wanted to say to her until she looked up with those clear eyes and I remembered: “I have something for you.”
Before she could protest—for once I was thankful for the small span of my studio—I retrieved a white box from my bookshelf. No more than three by five, less than two inches deep. I set it on the table between us and withdrew.
Dusk turned the matte-white cardboard blue, and the oblique angle of the light showed glossy embossed letters, also white: BRIGHT HOUSE. Jane read it, touched the text. I said nothing—why mar the presentation with useless babble?
“This isn’t . . . that kind of perfume, is it?” she asked.
I shook my head, just once. Who would I have given her? Not Reg. She’d had enough of him while he was alive.
She lifted the lid, revealing glass with beveled edges, a bright metallic spray-top capped in white ceramic. This wasn’t in some cut-crystal flea-market find, like the heavy leaded and ground-glass piece I had given Pearson. This was a Bright House bottle, proper. It was sleeker, more architectural, more Jane.
She stared at it in its neatly folded cardboard nest. Touched the glass. I bit my tongue against an exhortation: try it on. My gift of Jonathan had ironically imbued this one with more meaning. I truly cared now what she thought of the perfume, not just of me. In speaking of Jonathan I had revealed enough of myself that she could make inferences about my art, and judgments too. She would smell this and she would know that I had tried. That my genius was not effortless. And that was terrifying.
The label, set slightly off center, a little more toward the lower right-hand side, told her what she was looking at. Her fingers came to rest beneath the perfume’s name where it was printed in black against silver, the typeface an imitation of imperfect letterpress.
“Vic,” she said, rereading it. “What is this?”
Now I let the words free, as though exhaling air from which I had sucked every atom of nourishing oxygen. “Just try it, Jane. Please, just try it on.”
Finally, she smiled. A small one, and not very nice, but a smile that I knew. I realized I had asked her, begged her, and had not even thought about it first. I had given way without strategy, without cunning. She had won a point. I was happy to let her have it.
For a moment she surveyed the box, and then inverted it over an open palm. I approved. Much more elegant than prying it awkwardly from its resting place, created by industrial designers to cradle the bottle so tightly that it prohibited almost any movement besides this one that Jane had chosen.
I heard it come free. The release of suction, the slap of heavy glass into her hand. The sharp sound of the ceramic cap releasing. Abortive clicks on the first two pumps, a satisfying spritz on the third.
The air filled with the scent of lilacs. Mud. Icy linen. The sound of Jane’s indrawn breath. I felt a ghost of moving air across my lips—my imagination, most likely. I followed the feeling with my tongue and tasted what I smelled.
The molecules drifted between us like a transparent curtain, scent combinations shifting with each minute movement of the air. I watched her through it, as though through sheer muslin rippling in the breeze.
The opening notes of the scent began to fade, and she said nothing. It became clear that she expected me to break the silence and explain myself.
“What do you think?” I asked, because it was less naked than asking if she liked it. Besides, what does “like” mean? “Like” is as watery as “nice.” Jane had asked me, did I like Jonathan? But the verb is meaningless to me. I do not like people, and I have never wanted to make scents that people like. I want to make scents that fascinate, that captivate, that stop people in their tracks.
She had certainly frozen on the spot. Surprise? Or something more esoteric?
Lifting a hand, she threaded her fingers through the air as if pushing aside my imagined curtain. “It’s . . . cold.” Then, rubbing the pad of her forefinger against her thumb: “It’s supposed to be me?”
There was sorrow in the words that I had not expected. It made me blush, made my heart beat fast in a panic to correct her.
“No,” I said. “No, no, Jane. It’s . . . it was for you. It’s . . .” I traced a void in the space between us—a slender shape with rounded contours, finishing with a cupped hand six inches from her chin. “It’s the space you left behind.”
She considered this a moment, then sprayed another small burst of the perfume against her wrist. She inhaled, and stared at the skin over her veins as if she were watching herself disappear. “I never thought a smell could be so sad.”
“This one is,” I said, catching the pun on its name too late.
She frowned. “I wish it weren’t.”
“You don’t smell sad. Not at all.”
Looking up from the map of vulnerable blue-green descending from her palm, she asked, “What do I smell like?”
I closed the distance between us cautiously, alert to any hesitance on her part. There was none. She stood as still as if she had a venomous snake twining round her shoulders, a tarantula on her arm. Frightened, yes, but fascinated too.
I leaned in so that my cheek very nearly brushed hers. “Let me tell you,” I said, and breathed her in.
“Have you heard from Giovanni recently?” I asked, sometime after night had fallen. She was lying beside me, not touching: a feat in that small bed. And strange, given how close we had been recently. But I let her have the inch of space. Hopelessly, I realized there were many things that I would give her, if I could. If she would take them from me.
“Not really,” she said. “He replied to a couple of my Instagram stories. Just emojis. Why?”
I sighed. “I think things ended . . . badly, between us.”
“No shit. I’m surprised you managed to wrangle him in the first place.” She turned her head. “How did you?”
Useless to pretend I hadn’t heard her, hadn’t understood: her mouth was four inches from my ear and my skin knew it. Still, I stalled with a long breath. In the quiet moment that it bought me, I contemplated the curve of her hip bone. Its silhouette softened where the streetlight caught in the fine down of her body hair, silver and diffuse.
“It was a less elegant agreement than ours,” I said.
“No convenient medical debt?”
“And no serial harasser.” I put my fingertip between her breasts, to remind her of Reg’s spit-slick cherry. “It’s harder to feel justified in murderous anger against an abstraction.”
“Is it?” she asked. “Abstractions don’t have a face. Or families.”
“You feel guilty?”
“Yes.”
“So did he. But you’re still speaking with me.”
“Only because you owed me money.”
“It’s in your backpack,” I said. “You can leave anytime. You could have left hours ago.” I tried to look into her eyes, but she kept her face turned obstinately away. “Why did you stay? Why didn’t you take the money and leave?”
She shifted and lifted her hand, quickly nipping a hangnail from the rough cuticle of her thumb. Blood welled up like a red seed bead until she swiped it away with a pass of her middle-finger pad.
“Well,” she said, staring at the streak of dilute rusty brown across her first knuckle. “You had your little science experiment. I was curious.”
“And after Jonathan? You could have left then. You could even have taken the new perfume and left. But you’re still here.” I stroked her skin for emphasis, along the ridge of her hip that had held my gaze.
She tucked her bloody hand away. In the taut silence I heard mouth sounds, the movement of her tongue in the wet tightness between her cheeks.
“It . . . God, this is going to sound stupid.” She sucked air between her two front teeth. “But that perfume . . . it was clean, Vic.”
“That’s the lilacs,” I said. “They can smell a little soapy if you aren’t careful.”
“No. I mean, yeah, it was like water, and cold rocks. Sauvignon blanc. That kind of clean. But . . . ugh.” She turned her face so it was hidden by the pillow and her hair. “This sounds so dumb.”
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”
She let out a noisy breath. “It was . . . pure. Like you want art to be. Before you realize it’s about money, and what other people like. Before you figure out it isn’t just talent; it’s who you know, and kissing ass, and taking commissions.”
“You’re good at kissing ass,” I said. “I know.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but I kissed all the wrong ones, and now look where I am. That stuff”—she jabbed a finger across the room, to where the bottle of perfume sat by her backpack—“that’s like, when you still think you’re going to make it, even if other people don’t, because your shit is real. You didn’t owe it to me. I never asked for it. It wasn’t what I wanted. You’re right, you know? I didn’t know I . . .” She bit down on a smile. “It was just this clean expression of an idea. Just itself, doing exactly what it needed to.”
I thought of her Instagram account: the lines and planes and plays of light. The black-and-white prints on the walls of Giovanni’s shop. The photographs she didn’t take anymore, because people paid for X-rays, not for art.
“I miss that,” she said. “Just making a thing because it spoke to me.” The mattress flexed slightly, and I realized she had finally relaxed, just a moment before her skin touched mine. At last she looked up at me. “What are you going to do now that you’ve got Eisner’s money?”
She meant, Would I make art instead of trying to make a living? She also meant, Was I going to kill anyone else? Soon? Ever?
Would I? What reason had I, once I put Eisner in the ground? Which I would do, at my earliest convenience.
Jane didn’t need to know that what I did wasn’t always out of necessity. At least, not necessity of the financial sort. If my experimental scent worked on her, she would find that out soon enough. And after all, it had always been just what she described: making a thing because it spoke to me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose I’ll try not to worry. For a while.”
Late that night, before Jane left, I said, “Tell me if you hear from Giovanni.”
She scowled—fondly?—and said, “I’m not doing your dirty work. If you want to talk to him, you have to talk to him.”
Rich, coming from someone who’d made her fiancé pick me up. But that was pleasure. This was business.
I paid a visit to Astor the next day and prowled among the eaux-de-vie until I found the bottle of grappa Beau and Jane had served at brunch. It was, as promised, pretty cheap. A staff pick too.
It wasn’t a long walk across town to Giovanni’s, and the weather had turned. I crossed Washington Square Park with my jacket open, dodging skateboarders, tourists, and the man with the bubble wand. In my tote bag, the bottle of grappa banged against my hip.
There was a new receptionist—I sometimes wondered if they quit or if he fired them—in the same old Bettie Page makeup. “I’m here for Giovanni,” I said.
“Um . . . I’m not sure . . .”
He was already staring at me from his station, holding a towel wrapped around his current client’s face. But he didn’t intercede.
“I don’t have an appointment,” I said.
“He’s not available for walk-ins,” she said. “I’m sorry. But Jovan or Richie could take you in about a half an hour. They’re really great.”
“I know,” I said. “They wouldn’t work here if they weren’t. But I don’t have a bottle of grappa for either of them. I do have a bottle of grappa for Giovanni.”
He lowered the towel and tossed it into the laundry bin. Pink cheeked, the man in the chair stepped down and shook his hand. The receptionist took his credit card, all the while looking nervously over her shoulder at me.
Giovanni wiped his hands on a blue bandanna from his coat pocket and came across the room slowly. It was a small space, but he made the distance last.
“Vic,” he said, “do you like scaring my girls?”
“Certainly not,” I said. “But you don’t seem to be hiring for nerves.”
The receptionist blanched and turned her attention more fully to the man checking out.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Social call.”
“I’m working.”
I looked at the man on the bench, who was reading The Cut and pretending not to listen in.
“Five minutes, Giovanni,” I said, brandishing the Astor bag. “For old times’ sake.”
He realized I was not going to go away, and rather than wilt him, the resignation stiffened his spine.
“Sorry, Kyle,” he said to his next client. “I need to take this. Do you have five minutes?”
The man nodded and flapped the covers of his magazine. Giovanni jerked his head toward the back room.
It was exactly as I had imagined it. Someone’s sandwich sat half-eaten, abandoned in a rush. An old metal fan churned the stale air. Schedules fluttered in the artificial breeze.
Giovanni shut the door. “What do you want?”
“I hadn’t heard from you,” I said.
“That was on purpose.”
I set the grappa down on the desk. “I just wanted to check on you. I was concerned.” A low blow, but: “I’ve heard from Beau and Jane.”
“I’m happy for you.”
“Have you talked to them?” Surely he had done more than just like a few of Jane’s photos? But his lips didn’t move from their tight line.
“Has Eisner’s company gotten in touch?” I asked. “Or the new owners?”
His nostrils flared, and I thought he wouldn’t answer. Then, after a little bit too long, a sharp incline of his chin.
“It’s all settled?” I asked. “You’ll keep the space?”
“They want to knock a doorway through the back wall,” he said. “Where the bathroom is.”
“So you won’t have to clean it anymore,” I said, and he glared daggers.
“Vic,” he said. “If you don’t have some reason—”
“Just to say hello,” I said. “To check that everything’s all right.”
“Bullshit.”
It wasn’t. “Giovanni, no one cuts my hair like you. I . . . I can’t go back to Astor Place. I know I joked about it but . . . not really.” No one else had ever understood what I wanted. They were too pushy. They were less skilled. They had a strange, overwrought aesthetic. They were playing at something they didn’t truly understand. They had an idea about how I should look, based on how other people thought they should look. They didn’t listen—they imposed.
At my first appointment, I tried to show Giovanni a picture of my ideal cut, which had sometimes helped confused stylists understand my requests. He waved it away and said, “No, just tell me.” It was the only place I had ever felt comfortable in the chair.
Giovanni was genuine. Just as Jane had said, Giovanni made a thing, a space, an atmosphere, because it spoke to him. He was driven not by marketing or fashion, but by a pristine vision. I wondered if Jane felt about him and his shop the way she felt about This One, if she thought he was clean and pure. What would she think of the deal I had cut? Nothing good. But she would, I thought, understand its utility. Jane and I had both looked down the barrel of artistic freedom in this economy and decided we would rather not be shot.
I wasn’t proud of it. There was something special in that kind of conviction, even if it was chronically undervalued.
“Giovanni.” It sounded more bereft than I had intended, too raw. “I . . . I don’t want to go anywhere else.”
He had never taken his hand off the doorknob, and now he jerked it open. “You can get out now,” he said. And when I didn’t move: “Get the fuck out. Right now.” All delivered in a high, tight tone of voice that wouldn’t carry. “Do you think I’m joking?”
I didn’t.
“You fucked me over, Vic,” he said. “You don’t get to come back from that.”
“Fucked you over?” I stood in the fluorescent brightness of the office, not quite able to believe what I was hearing. “I saved this place. You were going to go under. Now your rent’s going down and you’ll get more customers than you can take.” It wasn’t that pristine vision from which his shop had been born, but this iteration would at least pay the bills.
“Did I ask for that?” Now his volume jumped, and the words rang back from the white tile walls of the shop. All ambient noise dropped to zero. “I never asked you for anything. You did all the asking, and when that didn’t pan out, you dictated terms. So I did your dirty work.” That tripped him up: his voice came perilously close to breaking. He seemed to realize he had drawn the attention of his clients and staff and lowered his voice again. “Now we’re done, all right? We’re finished. You never come here again.”
When I finally took a step toward the door, he said, “And take your fucking grappa too.”
In that moment, I should have known what would come next. But I wanted to believe what he said: That we were done. That I would never come back. That this was a clean break for both of us.
I doubled back, picked up the bag, and passed him as I went out the door. He smelled like geranium and grapefruit, a hint of blade oil and Barbicide. Underneath that, his own smell: essence of angry barber. He watched me all the way out the door.
30
Notes de Tête: Cilantro, Naranja Agria
Notes de Cœur: Ambergris
Notes de Fond: Stale Cigarette, Fresh Mulch, Nighttime Leaves
Later that week I stood in the center of Beau’s atelier with my legs spread, staring down at the top of his head as he worked. The window was open again, though this time the breeze that came in was warm, and carried the sounds of the Union Square green market.
I had not told Jane I was commissioning a suit. But I loathed the revealing clothing of warmer weather, which left me feeling vulnerable as a frog’s exposed belly. Too pale, too soft, slender in all the wrong places. Beau could make me something suitably austere that would breathe well in the New York summer.
