Price of the Haircut_Stories

by Brock Clarke

  “Well?” I said.

  “I’ve got a hole,” she said, breathing hard and trying not to. “In my heart.” More audible breathing, and then she started to cry—big, ragged, heavy sobs, like a tragic Darth Vader weeping into his ventilator. “A big one.”

  I forgot all about Fuji and the plausible upper limits of high-speed film and drove right home, where I found Catrine sitting on the couch, watching one of the smart, bighearted single-mother-and-daughter-going-it-alone comedy dramas she can’t ever not look at. I rushed right to her side and held her hand, which is what you naturally do with sickly people, I guess, and she let me hold it. But it was strange: Catrine’s face wasn’t blue; her breathing was even and normal, the way it hadn’t been for a week. She didn’t look like someone with a big hole in her heart, didn’t act like it, either, and when I asked her to tell me what the doctor said, she wouldn’t tell me until her show was over. So I sat beside her and didn’t watch the television and loved the things about Catrine that I always have and still do: the way she makes a soft, gentle humming sound right before she laughs; the way she’ll suddenly and violently recline on the couch and fling her legs over mine, as if she couldn’t bear not to do so any longer. I loved these things until after the credits rolled, when Catrine turned to me and said that she had a congenital heart defect. She said this calmly, with notable disinterest, as if telling me she’d eaten fried ravioli for lunch in the Mercy High cafeteria again.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like I told you on the phone. I have a big hole in my heart,” she said. “It’s probably going to get bigger.”

  This is what happens when you hear the words “big,” “hole,” and “heart” applied to your wife, your true and only love: you think immediately of the corresponding hole in your own heart, about it getting bigger and bigger and never closing, and how you will eventually want to die from it but can’t and won’t. But I didn’t tell Catrine this—because as mentioned, she’s an English teacher, with strong opinions about metaphors and the way we abuse them, and she would not have been impressed by the way the literal hole in her heart was giving me a figurative hole in mine. Instead, I asked, trying to be positive, “OK. What can we do about it?” which is one of things Kodak teaches us to ask when we’ve run out of better, more intelligent questions.

  “We can use this,” Catrine said, and held up an inhaler. “No more blue face. No more breathing problems.”

  “Will it make the hole in your heart smaller?”

  “Nope,” she said, and before I could continue the line of inquiry, she said, “It’s nothing, Eric. Forget about it.”

  This I did not do. Instead, I went out and purchased a Merck Manual of Medical Information and learned that Catrine had now what she’d always had—the hole had been there from birth, small and harmless at first, and had grown bigger and bigger, and you couldn’t close it, and she would eventually die from it, and it was impossible for the Merck to tell when, but it probably would be sooner and not later. When I read this, the world divided in two: between the life I had lived up until now with Catrine, and the life to come, without her, the life I couldn’t imagine and didn’t want. And so I kept researching, beyond the Merck and into the relevant case studies, which gave me some hope, and so I tried to give Catrine some hope, too, even though she didn’t ask for any, didn’t seem to need any, either. I told her about the woman in Wichita who’d had a hole in her heart, too, a big hole, and she lived until she was ninety-two. I told her about the man in Marblehead who’d done a triathlon a year, for twenty years, after he’d learned about the hole in his heart, and died only because one day he was biking too early in the morning in too-dark clothing and was hit by a car. “If you don’t bike too early in the morning, or if you wear light-colored clothes if you do,” I told her, “you could live forever.”

  “Could, could, could,” Catrine said, then put her inhaler to her mouth, aimed it at me like a weapon, and sucked.

  I knew where this was headed, or should have. Because this is what I did and do, at Kodak and elsewhere: I researched. For instance, Catrine is from Montreal, and when I met her ten years ago and fell in love, I did heavy research on the city: its history, its customs, its civic institutions and festivals, its restaurants, its average high temperature and snowfall, its biggest employers, and its general feeling about the Quebec question and whether or not to separate from the rest of Canada. I walked around, citing obscure facts about Catrine’s hometown, facts she didn’t care about and was unimpressed by, and one day, when I was telling her about the origin of Montreal bagels and how they’re different from what we, as Americans, know bagels to be, she said, “Eric, why are you doing this?”

  “Because I love you. Because I want to know everything about you.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “But cut it out.”

  And this is what she told me, more or less, two weeks before we ended up going to the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, too. It was a Saturday, in the afternoon, and Catrine was taking a nap, was sleeping soundly, too soundly as far as I was concerned, and I thought, Oh Jesus, has it happened? Has it happened already? Because I knew from my research that people with this hole in their heart often died in their sleep, and I leaned over Catrine’s body, desperate to hear her heart beating, desperate to hear and feel the flutter of her breath, and I must have gotten too close, because Catrine said, without opening her eyes, “I’m still alive.”

  “Of course you are,” I said.

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “If you love me, you’ll leave me alone.”

  “I can do that,” I said.

  Except I couldn’t. Because at night, when I was trying to sleep next to her—and when I was at work, trying to test the prototype developing solution I was supposed to be testing—all I could think of was this big hole in Catrine’s heart; all I could hear was the big hole talking to me, saying, “She will die, and you will never forget about her. You will never love anyone as much as you love her. You will never stop missing her.” And the big hole in Catrine’s heart also told me, “Do not leave her alone. Bad things will happen if you leave her alone.” Soon, I was following her everywhere—around the house, in the yard; I even took a sick day or two so that I could follow her in my car when she ran errands and such. And on the Friday Catrine kicked me out, I’d followed her to the grocery store, I was tailing her down the frozen foodstuffs aisle, and she wheeled her and her half-full cart around and said, “Get out.”

  “Of the grocery store?” I asked.

  “Of the house,” she said. “Do it. Now.”

  Which was how and why I ended up staying at the Budget Inn on Alexander for six days. The Budget Inn was a mile or so from my house, but even there, I could hear the big hole in Catrine’s heart talking to me, and it wouldn’t shut up, and I called Catrine every night, begging her to let me come home, and each night she said, “Not yet, not yet,” until finally she called and asked me to come with her to the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, and I agreed.

  AFTER AN HOUR, we have gone through the parlor, the sitting room, the dining room, the kitchen, and Mr. and Mrs. Borden’s downstairs bedroom. I have an idea why the chain-smoker is here: because she knows everything possible about the case and wants confirmation of what she already knows. I know why Mr. and Mrs. Ohio are here: because they visit every historical home that they can, because historical homes are more boring then they are, and this makes them feel better and interesting in comparison. I know why the fraternity boys are here: they’ve been duped. I know why the tour guide is here: it’s her job. But I still have no idea why Catrine and I are here; she’s by my side now again, with her hand in my back pocket, the way they do in jeans commercials, the way she hasn’t done ever, and I have no idea why she’s doing that, either.

  “Concerning Mr. Borden,” the tour guide tells us, “he was notoriously stingy with his considerable fortune. He gave Lizzie—his grown daughter—a small allowance. A very small allowance.” Here she loo
ks at us meaningfully, over her bifocals, as if the cheapskates among us should adopt more high-rolling ways before, we, too, get our whacks with the axe. The Ohio woman glances knowingly at her husband, who looks away sheepishly. I think I know why: we’ve paid two hundred and fifty dollars for one night in the Andrew and Abby Suite, which is basically two small rooms—one room with a double bed and a musty comforter, and one with a rickety antique desk and a mannequin dressed like Lizzie in period dress and a fragile-looking fainting couch, which, if someone were to faint on it, might itself suffer a serious collapse—and no private bathroom, and if my wife had wanted me to go to this place and I weren’t trying to get into her good graces and she weren’t dying, I might have complained about how expensive it was, too.

  “Tell us about the number of whacks with an axe Lizzie actually gave her father,” the lesbian chain-smoker says. She’s calmed down considerably, and her hatred for the fraternity boys has become noticeably low-grade, like a cold you get used to. As for the boys themselves, they know now that they are not in the childhood home of their favorite lesbian porn star, but they also know that they are in the home of a possible lesbian axe murder, and this has taken some of the sting out of their disappointment.

  “Concerning the famous forty whacks with an axe,” the tour guide says, “this, of course, is what the famous rhyme tells us.” And here she recites the famous rhyme, which says, basically, that Mr. Borden was killed by forty whacks with an axe, and then adds: “Mr. Borden, in reality, only received twenty-eight whacks . . .”

  “Still,” the fat fraternity boy says. “Ouch.”

  “. . . but for the sake of the rhyme, twenty-eight became forty.”

  “But hey,” the thin fraternity boy says, “it’s ‘whacks’ that rhymes with ‘axe.’ The number of whacks doesn’t matter.” Everyone looks at him in huge surprise, even his buddy, which makes me realize I wasn’t the only one thinking ungenerous thoughts about him paying attention in his English class. “What?” he says. “They don’t.”

  The tour guide stares at him down her beakish nose for an extra beat and then returns to the automatic pilot of her tour guiding. “Concerning the famous picture of Lizzie at the trial,” she says, and then moves to the next room, the living room, where, on the wall, next to the pictures of the half dozen not-exactly-famous actresses who have portrayed Lizzie in the movies, on TV, and in the theater, is the artistic rendering of Lizzie at her trial—grim-faced, defiant, strong. She looks strong; that’s the thing I really notice, and maybe this is why we’re here: because Catrine wants to be inspired by the example of a strong woman who faced adversity and survived, even if the woman is an axe murderer and the adversity is her axe-murdering. Even if this is the case, I am all for it, and we can spend the rest of our lives going to the historical homes of other famously strong women who faced adversity and survived—Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Annie Oakley. If strong women are what Catrine wants, then strong women are what she’ll get.

  Except she doesn’t. Catrine looks at the picture for a second and says, “Huh,” then lets go of my hand and walks out of the living room and back to the parlor, where we’ve already spent a long half hour, and where there is only the couch where they found Mr. Borden’s bloody and perforated body. This is what Catrine has been doing throughout the entire tour: she keeps floating in and out of the rooms, the way the tour guide said the ghost of Lizzie did during the filming of an upcoming episode of Unsolved Mysteries. Catrine seems to be everywhere the rest of the tour is not, and now I can hear her in the parlor, sucking on her inhaler, sucking on it hard, maybe too hard, and maybe something is wrong. I take a step to follow her, but then I hear her voice saying, “Leave me alone,” and “Get out,” and that voice is as scary as the voice of her heart’s hole, saying, “She will die, she will die.”

  So I leave her alone, in the parlor, and stay where I am, in the living room. The tour guide and the chain-smoker are still talking about the famous trial—the tour guide has told us nothing about the trial except that it was famous, and thus far the tour has been composed of random conjectures beginning with the word “concerning”—but the fraternity boys, they’ve disengaged themselves from the subject of Lizzie and Lezzie Borden, and have engaged the Ohioans in a conversation about weight loss and gain, and in specifically, Mrs. Ohio’s long history of failed diets.

  “I’ve tried everything,” she said. “All meat, no meat. Full fructose saturation. You name it.”

  “Everything except exercise,” Mr. Ohio mutters. He must realize what he’s said and how awful it sounds, because immediately his albino-blue eyes get watery and he bites his lip ruefully and adds, “Because of her hip.”

  “What about your hip?” the fat fraternity boy says.

  “It’s bad,” she says. “Arthritic. I’ll have to replace it. But first, the doctor says I have to lose some weight, which is difficult to do because I can’t exercise, because of my hip.”

  “Now that,” the thin fraternity boy says, “is a quandary.”

  “It makes you think,” the husband says, and shakes his head wisely, and you know he’s the sort of man who gets philosophical after visiting aged relatives in nursing homes and makes big statements about how some things are worse than death and how, if he ever gets like Great-Aunt So-and-So, to just kill him. “I mean it,” I can hear him saying. Earlier I saw his wife eyeing Lizzie’s famous axe head in its glass case, and so maybe she was anticipating his request and the way she might honor it.

  “I’m on this diet that you should try,” the fat boy says to Mrs. Ohio, and suddenly he becomes the very sincere, caring boy his mother probably raised him to be and loved. “I don’t eat anything that begins with the letter C.”

  “Dude,” his buddy says. “That diet is bullshit.”

  The tour guide hears this, interrupts the chain-smoker’s theory about Lizzie Borden’s guilt in the court of popular opinion, and says, “Concerning Mr. Borden and obscenity, he had quite a . . .” And here she pauses, as if searching for the right word, although you have the sense this pause, too, is a rehearsed part of her tour-guiding, to make it seem less rehearsed. “Mouth,” she finally says. “But he would not tolerate cursing on the part of his daughters. Simply would not tolerate it.”

  “Simply would not tolerate it,” the chain-smoker repeats.

  “Concerning Lizzie and cursing,” the tour guide says, “once, when she was twenty-three, she used a curse word—no one knows which one—and Mr. Borden paddled her.”

  “With a paddle?” the thin boy asks.

  “Bad move, Dad,” the fat one says.

  “Concerning the paddle,” the tour guide says, “rumor has it, Lizzie took the paddle afterward and threw it into the central fireplace, which, as we know, was used to heat the entire house and so was very hot. She did this right in front of Mr. Borden.”

  “Threw it in the central fireplace,” the chain-smoker says.

  “That should have been a red signal to old Dad,” the fat frat boy says.

  “Red light,” the thin one says.

  “Dad should have done his research,” I say, surprising myself and everyone else, too. They all look at me in complete confusion, and so I add, “He should have done his research on daughters.” At this, Catrine pops her head into the living room. She has a funny, satisfied-but-tired look on her face—somewhere between fatigue and love—but before I can tell what she’s learned in the parlor and what she hasn’t, what sort of research she’s done in there and whether it has made her happy or unhappy, before I can yell, “Come back, come back. I miss you,” she disappears from the doorway again, and the tour guide takes us upstairs, to where Lizzie’s stepmother slept those many years ago and where we’re sleeping tonight.

  CONCERNING RESEARCH, WHEN Catrine told me that she wanted to go the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts, I didn’t ask her why, per her request. Instead, I went to work, got on the computer, and researched Fall River itself, its main immigrant group
s (Portuguese) and industry (shipping), and of course I also researched Lizzie Borden, her birth mother (who died when she was a girl), who she was accused of murdering (her father and stepmother), whether the axe used to murder them was ever found (the handle was not, but the axe head was), whether she was found guilty or innocent (the latter), and why the case continues to attract the attracted (because no one knows whether she really did do it or not, because there was never any other suspect, because the case is as mysterious now as it was then).

  Why did I do this? Because at Kodak, at our new employee training seminar, they taught us that if you look hard enough, you will find something you are looking for, sometimes without even knowing you’re looking for it. If you look hard enough, you will find something that is useful, something that will help you, and thus something that will help Kodak.