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Yoni Gelernter
Allegory of Hands On the day Astrid came home with her hair immoderately bobbed, Peter remembered that her face had first been her mother’s: it was inherited. The fake-seeming outlines of the eyelids, which looked like they’d been stamped in clay, spacious for the extra emotional bandwidth; the flat, black eyes between them; the ambivalent tenderness in the expression – all were Mama Astrid’s in origin. And to Astrid it was sometimes a sorrow or a burden, maybe, since her mother, still more-or-less alive somewhere, had been beaten by the face problem. That mother, once the greatest billboard model in Michigan, had married a gin-soaked ex-fireman ten years her senior, a specimen in late decay who spent his forced retirement transforming old cigar boxes into unplayable ukuleles from the family’s garage. So, Mama Astrid had misused the face. Or she’d been destroyed by it. No wonder, then, if Astrid had no sense of its value. It should have been no surprise that she would squander the borrowed face with such a stupid haircut, which made her look like a kid.
She stood in the door. Her head looked big, and her body looked small. Meanwhile, behind her, there was a matte-painted night in blue and gold with stars competing to peek past her shoulder.
Since Peter had been reading a grim and detailed account of the Katyn massacre, he knew he could escape any obligation to notice the haircut. Giving his eyes a far-away quality, he said: “Hello, Dumpling.” Then he resumed reading as if nothing had registered at all, only re-angling his book so that she could see its title from across their little room. He regretted sitting in the armchair that vaguely faced the front door. It had left him exposed. He’d seen her. He’d seen the haircut. He couldn’t have done otherwise.
On the kitchen counter two fillets of raw salmon basked in a marinade of peanut sauce. Next to the salmon there was Astrid’s keyring, which she had forgotten.
Meanwhile, Astrid across their little room – wasn’t even thinking about the haircut. The cool night against her neck was too gentle; it did not scratch, as the coat against her shoulders did. She was younger than he was. She was older than she looked. The trench made her seem, and feel, small. She was surprised to realise that, for the moment, she disliked that feeling.
She wondered for the first time if she had gone too far.
Standing in the open doorway dressed only in lingerie and the trenchcoat, her hair freshly shaped in a way that made her look different from her mother, she asked herself how she had made so many bad mistakes so quickly. Except, she didn’t realise what a mistake the haircut had been.
Things now felt a little off, but this, she knew, was not her fault. He hadn’t answered the door. And it was that that had confused everything. Because it had all depended on his answering the door. So, she had knocked. She had knocked – and he, she had imagined, he would open the door, and she would shrug, the raincoat would fall away, she would be a little almond-dusted cakelet in an amberly warm shop window. All ribbons and bright, coloured stripes against the skin.
But he hadn’t answered. She’d knocked a second time, more urgently. If he thought she was stuck out there, he would come to the door. Then she would get the thing she wanted. The moment of surprise and delight: the pious, hungering expression. And she had left her keys behind, as if forgotten, to add to the illusion. It wasn’t that she’d expected him to notice them, exactly. But if he wondered about it, there they were. She was stuck outside, needed to be let in, because she’d left her keys behind that morning. But he had only called, “Come in, it’s not locked.” Then, there had even been love in his voice.
Because, at the time he had said it, he had loved her. A servant of the inherited face, he’d known (while wishing otherwise) that it was in possession of him just as surely as she was in possession of it. Cornered, he had several times scoured the inherited features for imperfections. Finding them – a crescent of subtly coarsened flesh below the left cheekbone, where the teenage Astrid had had zits; the left upper dogtooth misaligned, turning a little in the gum – he tried to forget them. They had only multiplied her charms. Or, they had multiplied the face’s charms. It was like the way, he had thought – he thought – that the missing arms or heads in antique statues magnified rather than undermined their aesthetic effects, because they alluded to a more complete majesty than bare matter could attain. The fact that Astrid’s face referred to her mother’s, though it had a lesser elegance, implied a perfect version of the mother’s face which wasn’t here but could yet be elsewhere.
But now, everything was different. The hairstyle which had so generously framed her inheritance before was gone. So now what was there?
And why did she love him? That was what she wondered, while she stood in the door and he carried on with his book about the Katyn massacre, fuzzy in the dimness. Could it really have been only hisheight and cinema-quality sound system?
She wondered.
And why hadn’t she worn her stilettos?
Would he have been disgusted or aroused by their bowling-shoe synthetic material which, like salmon-flesh, rainbowfied the light?
If he had been disgusted, would that mean necessarily that he would not be aroused?
If he was disgusted, would the disgust be with the shoes, or with her?
If he was disgusted with her, should she abandon her love for him?
Was it too late? Had she already gone too far? Had she finally gone too far?
Their books, their armchairs, their stove, and their turntable were silent; they didn’t answer.
After a few seconds of this, she spoke.
“Hi, baby,” she said, in her mother’s voice. It was a low voice, and it had a decadent rasp.
He looked up.
The room was lit dimly by the orange reading lamp between them, to his left and her right. It glowed like a torch in an enemy camp. Astrid, he saw, was wearing his trenchcoat.
Then he understood. She had wanted to surprise him at the door. He felt responsibility. Probably she was undressed, underneath. Oh – and he had been prepared to begrudge her the work put into dinner, which consisted not only of salmon but caramelised Brussels sprouts, a bottle of gas station wine, brown rice boiled with rosemary.
She would want him to make love to her.
But if he did, he could never say that he disliked the haircut, because that would make whatever passion he summoned appear mercenary when considered in retrospect. No. To have sex tonight would place criticism of the haircut permanently beyond his reach.
Maybe, he speculated, it had been precisely in order to make it impossible for him to comment on the haircut that she had planned her big erotic surprise in the first place.
“Baby, baby, little Dump-ling,” he said, putting the open book on his armrest, page-side down so she would know he intended to pick it up again later.
Conspiratorially, he continued: “Shut the door behind you.”
She did. While her back was turned he stood up and went towards her in a cartoon tiptoe, hands held above the waist, fingers spread like Elmer Fudd hunting.
Then, his low-jawed face was looking down at her. Simultaneously, she felt her smallness in two very unlike ways. She felt like a person reading in the feathered shade of a coconut tree. She felt afraid of falling coconuts.
Astrid shivered out of the coat which then curled around her feet like a person who begs for help. In her flats, she came closer to Peter, who was already very close.
“Do you like my haircut?” she said, having remembered it. “Yes,” he said.
“Why didn’t you say anything about it?” she said. “My mind was on other things,” he said.
He had a hand on her waist. He imagined sometimes that her skin would give off dust at a touch, like the wing of a moth.
“You mean,” she said, “like Katyn?”
Because she studied neoclassical macro, Astrid could be arch about Katyn. Besides, she wanted him to prefer her to massacres.
“Nah. The salmon,” he whispered into the hair above her left ear. She moved under his hands with a creaturely delight, even laughing softly.
At that moment she was nuzzling his armpit, and it was as if she had no face. In the absence of the face they both laughed, nuzzled, and played. They nuzzled, played, and laughed, as if they didn’t know that, inevitably, the face would come back. He was grateful that its enchantment had been broken by her ill-chosen haircut. But he couldn’t be sure the effect would persist. He would need to strike quickly.
After a little bit of this she said, in her own voice – higher-pitched than before – “Why don’t we put on a little music, baby?” She said baby after she asked him to put on a little music so that he would understand that she still loved him: she didn’t want the music as a distraction. Instead, she wanted the music to heighten the mood by engaging that part of her mind which would otherwise be at work manufacturing difficult questions throughout the sex act, such as, Does this feel good for me?, or, Have I gone too far?, or, Does this feel good for him? He was kissing her scalp.
But it occurred to him that, if he chose exactly the wrong music, he might succeed in beginning a conversation, as if by accident, which would end with them side-by-side in bed too spent by serious dialogue even to think of sex. If that went on long enough, he might even be able, gently, to tell her what a poor choice of haircut he thought she had made, why he thought it was so unflattering; and then, a couple weeks down the line, when it was time to break her heart, since he no longer loved her, when the time came to heartbreak her, she would be – heartbroken, yes, but she would have something to point to, a hinge in what would be, by then, their history. Something like Khrushchev’s secret speech: a moment to mark the climatological change in his attitude. Even better, she could attribute that change to the haircut alone; there would be an alien in their midst – her haircut – upon which she could heap the blame, much as Khrushchev had heaped the blame for everything on Stalin, even though Stalin had been operating under unprecedented conditions, and Khrushchev himself would likely have behaved similarly (or have just been whacked by revisionists before the collectivisation of agriculture). It was naturally not certain that the wrong music would bring this about, but it was certain that the right music would not.
Taking care not to make the mistake of looking at her face, which could become itself again at any moment, he went to the record bin and began, with a slightly affected precision of the fingers – imitating someone who has been to a lot of music stores – to examine his offerings.
This while Astrid stood with her eyes half-closed and enjoyed the movement of the warm indoor air against her. As Peter had walked to the turntable she had felt his gaze drawn down over her like it was a nitrile glove she was peeling off her hand. She had noticed, also, that he hadn’t looked her in the eyes. She suspected he was lying about the haircut. He didn’t like it. He didn’t dislike it, exactly, either. He just didn’t know what to do about it.
And for her part, she didn’t really think that he was in love with her mother. Anyway the face wasn’t hers, either. No one could guess where or when it had first got started.
Trying to peek out at him from underneath the face was like trying to catch her own profile in a mirror. It didn’t matter how fast or smart she was – her reflection, her image would always precede her. And so she had shorn her hair, thinking maybe to slur the message from the past by blasting its rhythm and colour into nothing. On top of this, she had shaved last night, elsewhere and intimately, knowing that, even if there she was no more original than anywhere else, she was at least imitating no one and, for all practical purposes, resembled only herself. She knew that if she could show it to him, he would forget about the other haircut. But everything depended on a fullness of effect.
He put on Bach, The Art of the Fugue as played by Glenn Gould, music which, though aspiring to high vaults, cold and open spaces, wasn’t so obviously hostile that she would see through his intentions right away. Her hands hesitated at the front clasp of her bra.
She let her hands fall to her sides. They hung there, not knowing what to do.
Peter watched while this happened. He wondered for the first time if he’d gone too far.
But she, he reminded himself, was the one who had gone too far. And hadn’t he done precisely what she’d asked? Hadn’t he always done precisely what she’d asked, and no less – and no more?
He saw a decision move across her face.
She opened her mouth, hesitated, then opened it again. He knew that the next thing she said would be a lie.
“Kelvin,” her ex, a statistician from New Orleans, “Kelvin used to like to listen to Gould when we had sex.”
“Oh,” Peter said.
Though he was satisfied that the record had had the intended effect (downregulating her libido), he also resented this obviously bullshit pretext for criticising his music. First of all, as she knew he knew, Kelvin had been barely functional, erection-wise, which was part of why they’d broken up. The idea that he even could have a go-to for sex music was preposterous, when, at their absolute peak, Kelvin and Astrid had been fucking once every couple of weeks. And Astrid had been obligated to remind Kelvin that she needed it or she would go crazy.
But also, Peter knew Kelvin to be basically without taste in anything. Once, a couple years ago, he’d ridden home from a beach party in Kelvin’s car. Dead drunk, Peter had lain on his side in the backseat. He’d seen from there the dozens of business know-how paperbacks left like empty bottles on the baseboard, creases on their spines and everything. On top of this, Kelvin had an obscene sticker on his fuel cap.
The idea that a man could combine in himself a love of Bach, self-help books, and filthy decals was not exactly unentertainable to Peter, but neither did it seem likely. Since Peter did not himself like or understand Bach, it seemed to him that someone who did must have a soul of an unusually refined quality.
He would have been surprised to learn that Astrid, though she didn’t have the same compulsive drive he did to articulate constantly her penchants, did like Bach and even understood him; she only found Gould’s interpretations to be too drily intellectual, even for Bach, who seemed to have preferred form to feeling. This wasn’t a sign of any refinement of soul in Astrid’s case. Astrid’s soul wasn’t refined, only unusually energetic, having grown more and more plangent within her as it strove without success to become visible from behind the forceful glamour of the face, just as the youngest in a big family learns to be the loudest at dinner.
Though it didn’t occur to her that Peter would ever spoil sex on purpose, she knew that the hope she felt of recapturing him depended on the full visual effect of her nudity. The male is a visual animal. Music that reminded Peter of church ran the risk of destroying any chance of the total effect. “Please change it,” she said. And she bid her hands to return to the front clasp of her bra. “Something romantic,” she continued, “as in mood, not era.” Her hands stood perfectly still above her chest. They would be set into motion again when the music was right.
And that was enough. Just the expectation – the perfect faith – that he would change the music. It hurt him to think of disappointing her now, of leaving the hands to hang in the air like high and weak voices. He went to look for another album while The Art of the Fugue still played.
Then he felt her wrap her arms around him, the small, smart hands moving below his navel, undoing with dexterity the buckle of his belt. She was pressing her nose into the space between his shoulder blades. He could tell, as she rolled herself against him, that, even if she had already gone too far, she was going further. There was no time.
“Never mind the music,” came the voice, with its decadent rasp.
“Let’s just go to bed.”
“No,” he said, while she handled him. “I can find the right record.”
“Then find it,” she said, in her own voice this time. But he didn’t find anything.
He didn’t find anything and soon she became impatient. “Just turn it up,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind. I like it.”
“But Kelvin,” he said.
“I’ve forgotten about Kelvin,” she said. “It’s only us here. Kiss me.”
But how could he make love to her, now that he didn’t love her?
He thought about the Poles in Katyn and followed her into the bedroom with a hand on her shoulder. As she got ready, he stepped out of his pants with big, heavy gestures, like a fisherman shaking the silt off his boots. Then he unbuttoned his shirt, and she reclined on her back in the queen-sized bed, the face in shadow. With the face in shadow, the haircut was in shadow too. Since she was supine in bed, almost completely undressed and the haircut hidden, some residual force returned to the face, an echo of its effect, just as it was itself the echo of an ancestral glamour. He felt sorry for the Poles in Katyn but nevertheless was sympathetic to Stalin’s predicament: he could easily see both sides of it: it was horrible. Horrible, yes, but he saw both sides of it.
The blinds were up on the window behind the bed. He hurried to close them, to shoo out the stars and the low-hanging crescent moon. Meanwhile The Art of the Fugue went by in front of him, each note. She flicked their reading lamp on, and it caused her to glow gently like a deep-sea bioluminescent object.
She looked fragile. The haircut made her seem so small. How could he ever tell her? It was already too late, too far. He would never tell her.
Then, with his teeth, he was dragging her bottoms down her legs. His eyelids were heavy; they covered his eyes. She was looking at the crown of his head, his bowed head where the hair was black and curly while he pulled, a subtle zigzag motion in the neck. She drew her legs together a little to make things easier, and also so that he could feel her strength against his shoulders, to remind him she was there, too, there were three of them present, or four or five, there was she and the music and the mother and the face and the father and the book and the salmon and the keys and the apartment and herself here and herself there in the armchair watching and there was even he. He wasn’t looking up.
It was taking forever for him to make his way down her legs. She would have helped him but that would’ve cost her some of his surprise and delight. There could be no way of doing it that wouldn’t give him an incomplete perspective on her absolute nudity, her nudity divested of everything. This incomplete view would cause anticipation to build. He would know what she had done. Then he’d imagine it, before he had a chance to see it. Then, beside his imagination, the real thing would disappoint him. So she just let him work, slowly, like a dog with a toy that is too big for him.
The truth was that he must have noticed something, though, no? The cloth flatter against her pubis? She noticed it. As she had many times before, she wished that it were not him down there, but she herself between the legs, between her legs, because she did not know, and never would, quite what it was like to look at herself that way. She would never know the way that sight acted on a person.
But in fact, even better than that would be the power to walk away from her body altogether. Where would she sit? There was the dresser, but it would be hard to get comfortable there. No, she’d tell them both to stop while she went into the other room for a chair. Then she would sit and conduct. Maybe wielding a baton. Or an instrument for punishing. Or maybe just the old-fashioned conical megaphone, the kind used by movie directors in the days of the studio system.
Then she saw that she had missed the moment. He was looking up. He had seen everything.
Astrid was disappointed, of course, because she’d hoped to watch his expression change. But also she realised that, much as she had hoped to confront him with the utterness of it all in a moment, a moment in which everything would rush at him uncontrolled, because she was afraid that he would imagine something even better than what really existed if given the opportunity – so she realised, also, that in allowing her mind to wander, to think of herself at the side of the room, she had also allowed his expression of excitement and delight – the expression for which she had done everything, all of this – to enter the domain of fantasy, of fantastic objects.
She shut her eyes and while he lowered himself to her she saw in the dark field of her inner sight the blank mask of his face; she emptied its shaded side utterly. A ceramic mask, for the Nō theatre, maybe – eye-holes lightless and its grimace fixed, struck stupid by her power of obscenity which annihilated everything and even reversed the movement of time, so that he was only her own tall, animate shadow.
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