‘Put that way… but why do their bites cause so much swelling and itching? Are they poisonous or something?’
‘No, they’re not poisonous!’ Murray laughed, ‘It’s just the… Damn! That drinks waiter has ignored me again! It’s as if he’s doing it on purpose. Did you see that? If you catch his eye before I do, give me the heads up, will you, or just grab him. I can only drink so much of this grape piss without getting heartburn.’
‘I will,’ Laura lied, ‘but you were just about to tell me something about how the midge isn’t poisonous.’
‘The midge isn’t poisonous, Laura. It’s the human body over-reacting to the bite that causes all the fuss. Imagine, if you will, what it would be like if the Department of Homeland Security upped the level of terrorist threat every time one of its cameras picked up a small boy dropping a piece of litter in the street? It’s the exact same thing. A bit of harmless midge saliva…’ At this point, Murray broke off his conversation and, with an indignant harrumph, went storming after the drinks waiter who had ignored him yet again.
Laura looked around the room. She knew it would only be a matter of time before someone else joined her, no doubt another man, but she didn’t wait for this to happen. She’d recognised Jack Green standing diagonally across the room from her, and decided to introduce herself.
‘Hi, I’m Laura Yandell,’ she said as she approached. ‘You may not remember me, but I knew you back in the days when you were Jack Guravitch.’
‘Sure I remember you,’ Jack smiled. Or at least, he remembered her hair.
Hair
If Jack’s first interest in life was meteorology, a close second was hair – and also the fear of losing it.
This interest was his alone. It had no family roots – and this was also the source of his fear. Until Jack came along, no male Guravitch had ever given two hoots about how their hair looked, or whether in fact they had any. They had more important things on their plates – like what to put on them, for one – than to give a damn about what they had, or had not, on their pates.
It was difficult to pinpoint the exact time hair became important to Jack. As a child it wasn’t, but some time during his teenage years it became critical. He grew unhappy with his father’s use of the family clippers and insisted on visiting one of the town’s barbers. As life progressed, Jack moved from barber to barber and from salon to salon, searching fruitlessly for the one person who could understand the idiosyncratic nature of his hair. He agonised over whether he should keep his hair parted on the left, move the parting to the middle or do away with a parting altogether. He worried whether to comb his hair backwards, forwards or allow it free rein. He wore it short and spiky for a time, medium length other times and sometimes long. Occasionally the style was dictated by the day, but mostly by his own whim.
On Saturdays he would visit drugstores and hairdressing salons in search of new shampoos, conditioners, gels, balms, mists and sprays that might have made it to market since his last visit. He read the list of ingredients printed on the sides of the plastic bottles with a magnifying glass but little understanding. He’d skim over the complicated names of the acids, chlorides, phosphates, proteins and sulphates, until he reached the more interesting names of the plants and flowers the manufacturer used; aloe, avocado, brazil nut, coconut, grapefruit, lavender, lemon, Californian meadowfoam, seeds of the African moringa tree, rosemary and wheat. Sometimes the manufacturer would identify the source of a particular ingredient, the Peruvian rainforest for instance, but most times didn’t. For birthdays and Christmas, Jack’s parents bought him hair care products he’d identified to them from such visits.
Jack looked upon hair as mankind’s last frontier, and hair salons as the New American West. He believed that people could express themselves better through the medium of hair than they could any other part of their anatomy: conformity, rebellion, allegiance, individuality – the whole caboodle. Hair allowed a person to stand out from the crowd or merge seamlessly into it; it also afforded a person the opportunity to change their life without joining a wagon train. Jack’s theory, however, only worked if a person had hair. For him, the loss of his hair would be tantamount to the loss of his very being, and a diagnosis of androgenic alopecia, the equivalent of a death sentence.
Consequently, Jack fretted about losing his hair, and from the age of eighteen checked regularly for signs of premature baldness. He would stand in front of a mirror and hold a second mirror to the back of his head, scrutinising the reflection for any change. Shortly before his twenty-first birthday, and after a particularly dissatisfying haircut, Jack found that however he brushed or combed his hair, the hair at the back of his head refused to lie down. Checking with the hand mirror, he was alarmed to see two small bald spots. The shock literally caused his legs to give way and he collapsed to the floor, cracking his forehead on the bathroom washbasin. He lay there for twenty minutes or so, simultaneously bleeding and collecting himself, and then walked unsteadily to Doc’s house.
Doc opened the door and saw before him an ashen-faced Jack with dried blood on his forehead, and rivulets of the same down the side of his right cheek.
‘What in God’s name happened to you, Jack?’ he asked.
‘Doc, this is urgent! I need your medical opinion on something.’
Doc examined the back of Jack’s head and then stepped to the front of the chair Jack was sitting on. ‘No baldness I can see,’ he said. ‘The problem, if it is a problem, is that you have two crowns at the back of your head instead of one. It’s not unusual, and certainly nothing to worry about.’
Jack was relieved and gave an audible sigh. He then took a photograph from his pocket and showed it to Doc.
‘Who’s this?’ Doc asked.
‘It’s my mother’s grandfather. I was wondering if it’s possible to X-ray it and see what his hair’s like underneath the hat.’
Doc laughed out loud. ‘Of course it’s not possible. It’s a photograph, you damn fool, not an actual head. Why are you even bothered what’s underneath it?’
‘Because if I know how his hair is, then I’ll pretty much know how mine will be when I get to his age. My mother can’t ever remember seeing him without a hat, so X-raying the photograph was my last hope. You know that baldness for a man is inherited from the maternal grandfather, don’t you?’
‘It can be,’ Doc replied. ‘But even if your great-grandfather was bald, there’s still only a fifty per cent chance of you inheriting the bald gene. Your parents are just as likely to influence any hair loss you might have – and they both have good heads of hair.’
Jack walked slowly back to his parents’ house reassured, at least for the moment, that he wasn’t going bald, but unable to rid himself of the nagging thought that one day he would go bald. It was a cross he bore alone; a monomania no one else appreciated. He was aware there were more pressing problems in the world – hunger, poverty, disease and war, to name but a few – but in his world none of them ever featured. He wondered if, in this respect, he was uniquely without social conscience or just like everyone else except for his honesty in admitting that he was self-centred. He did, however, take umbrage at his father’s assertion that he was vain, and his constant admonition that there was only the finest of lines dividing an Adonis from a donut!
If Jack was overwhelmingly attracted to women with thick and lustrous hair, which he undoubtedly was, then the women attracted to Jack were more likely to be on medication or in therapy. Laura Yandell was one such woman. After five years of therapy, she now stood on her own two feet and, apart from an open-ended prescription for small yellow pills, faced the world alone.
In truth, Laura suffered from life no more than any other woman of her generation, and despite protestations to the contrary was no more complicated or crazy. Put simply, Laura Yandell was just another of the nation’s spoilt children who looked upon therapy as a fashion accessory. Indeed, the only issue of any consequence that had arisen during the five years of therapy – and one
that seemingly explained the estrangement from her parents – was that Laura was ashamed of her family’s wealth; its origins, rather than its amount. Laura told the therapist that she would have preferred her family’s fortunes to have come from the proceeds of slavery, rather than canned spaghetti.
It was the therapist who suggested Laura stop coming to see her. She led Laura to believe that her journey was complete and further therapy unnecessary. In truth, the therapist was sick to death of Laura’s moaning and analysis-to-death of things that had little or no bearing on anyone’s life, let alone her own. She had taken particular offence at Laura’s assertion that the therapist was raping her; this after Laura had discovered that the words therapist and the rapist corresponded exactly.
‘It must be more than a coincidence!’ Laura had said to the therapist.
‘It is,’ the therapist had replied. ‘It’s Greek!’
The therapist wished Laura well, wrote her a prescription for the occasional ‘difficult day’ that might lie ahead, and then moved to Sedona.
Jack had been invited to the reception for the same reason Laura had – to bring colour to an otherwise dull evening. An alumnus of the university and now a local celebrity, he was introduced to the delegates as the city’s favourite weatherman.
Jack took the hand that Laura proffered. He vaguely remembered her working as a secretary in the Geography Department after he’d moved to the Meteorology Department, but had never known her name. The memory of her long dark hair, however, with its thick and natural waves had stayed with him, and he was pleased when she introduced herself.
Jack and Laura chatted easily, and Laura laughed at the jokes Jack never told. He was aware, however, that the day wasn’t one of his best, and started to worry that his breath had become stale. He asked Laura if she had a spare stick of gum and she answered that she did. She was about to remove the gum from her bag when the conference organiser took her by the arm and asked if he might have a quick word. She moved a short distance away, but left her opened purse in Jack’s hands. ‘Help yourself,’ she told him.
Jack felt flattered to be allowed such an unsupervised search, something that only usually happened in a relationship. He found the gum and was about to take a piece, when he caught sight of a box of Tic Tacs and opted instead for the breath candy. He clicked the mechanism twice and out popped two small mints. Having noticed their unfamiliar colour, Jack was prepared for a different Tic Tac flavour but, even so, was still surprised by their slightly metallic taste. He thought no more about it, however, and washed the taste from his mouth with a good rinse of the white wine he was drinking.
By the time Laura re-joined Jack, the delegates were already seating themselves for dinner. Laura explained that she had to sit next to Neil Murray at the organiser’s table, but asked him if they could meet for dinner the following evening. Jack was more than okay with the idea.
By the end of the first course, Jack could barely keep his eyes open and, worse still, couldn’t stop yawning. The yawns were cavernous, noisy and impossible to hide, and left other guests at the table with the impression that Jack found both them and their conversations boring and, worse still, was completely unconcerned that they know it. Between yawns, Jack tried to apologise, but eventually thought it best to excuse himself from the table, find a bathroom and splash cold water on his face. He was at a loss as to why he felt so tired.
The water, however, failed to refresh him, and the temptation to take a nap in one of the stalls proved too strong to resist. He slid the catch on the door, hung his jacket on its hook and sat down on the toilet seat. Within seconds he was fast asleep.
Jack was woken at nine-thirty the next morning by a cleaning janitor knocking on the stall door and threatening to call the police. The city’s favourite weatherman had no idea where he was.
How the two of them laughed that evening!
Laura explained that the Tic Tac box contained prescription pills. Partly because of the container’s dispensing mechanism, but largely to disguise the medication from other people, she kept the pills in the mint box. The effect of these pills on anyone not used to taking them was soporific, and as the manufacturers also warned that alcohol should be avoided when taken, their effect on Jack had consequently been even more marked.
Laura found it easy telling Jack these things, and wrongly recognised in him a strength she herself didn’t possess. She told him her life story, the death of her parents in a car accident and her work in the Faculty of Sciences. Although she had a degree in business administration, she told Jack that her real passion was writing, and that one day she hoped to make a living from it. Already in love with her hair, Jack now fell in love with her voice and, more gradually, her entirety. He felt sorry for Laura, empathised with the cruel hand life had dealt her, and made it his business to throw a couple of aces her way. Jack Guravitch had been suckered.
Laura allowed Jack to read two of her short stories. The Trail of a Snail was about a private detective who liked plants, and The Man who Broke the Internet was about a man who played the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on his computer keyboard and accidentally broke the internet. Although Jack liked the titles, he had no idea what the stories were about, or if they were supposed to have meaning. He did, however, think that Laura’s style of writing was as good as anything that came out of the station’s newsroom, and when a vacancy arose there suggested she apply for the position. Laura got the job and Ed Billings took a shine to her. Six months later he appointed her roving reporter: her articulation and good looks, Billings told everyone, were wasted in the copy room; it was time for her to get in front of the camera.
Laura and Jack moved in together shortly after Laura joined the network, and almost immediately things started to go wrong. Like most couples, they’d fallen in love listening only to the best tracks on the other’s metaphorical life album; living together, however, they got to hear all the album tracks, and most of what they heard they didn’t like.
Laura was the first to question their compatibility. She started to analyse their relationship in depth, and involve Jack in long and wearying discussions: was it right for her; was it right for him; or right for either of them? She’d dismantle their relationship like a car mechanic stripping down an engine, and place bits of him and pieces of her on a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen table. Some pieces she’d clean and others she’d discard. Each time the engine was taken apart and pieced back together again, fragments of machinery invariably remained on the table and the motor never ran as smoothly. It was only a matter of time before the engine stopped running altogether.
Conversation between the two of them also changed in nature. Once carefree and spontaneous, it now turned into pre-programmed chunks of dialogue that could have been found on the shelves of any convenience store, and spoken by anyone to anyone. Jive talk had become Java talk.
Even though Jack and Laura lived in the same house, they started to speak to each other long distance, and over a crackling line. They missed the occasional word, sometimes a whole sentence and rarely understood the other’s meaning. ‘You are so…’ Jack had once started to say to Laura. He never got the chance to finish: Laura left the room under the impression that Jack had just called her an asshole.
‘You’re such a loser,’ Laura once shouted after him as he left their apartment.
‘Maybe I am,’ Jack replied, ‘but at least I’m at the top of my game!’
It was only after the door slammed shut behind him that the asinine nature of his reply struck home. Intending to puncture her soufflé, he’d unintentionally ended up icing her cake. That he was now thinking in mixed metaphors also caused him concern.
Laura started to spend time away from Jack. She insisted on going to an old school friend’s wedding by herself, and spent weekends away from him looking after friends with cancer, or talking other friends through difficult relationship problems. Curiously, Jack realised he didn’t care that Laura went away on her own, and was a
lmost relieved to have these weekends to himself. It also registered that Laura’s hair wasn’t quite as thick as he’d once imagined it to be, but an illusion. Laura Yandell, he realised, had a big head.
It was while looking through a photograph album the two of them kept, that Jack made the decision to call a day on their relationship. All the photographs, he noticed, showed him and Laura smiling, pulling silly faces, holding hands or with their arms around each other. They showed happy times, but, Jack realised, selective happy times. For obvious reasons, there were no photographs showing the bits in-between – the unhappy moments and the times they’d been miserable together – and Jack knew there were many more of these than the former.
Jack heard the door open and braced himself for the conversation he knew they would have to have. He looked up as Laura walked into the room. She threw her purse on the couch and then unexpectedly flung her arms around him. ‘I’m pregnant, darling. You’re going to be a daddy!’
The wedding was a small and low-key affair, close family and friends only. An unexpected pleasure for Jack was meeting Laura’s dead parents for the first time. ‘We’re not taking her back,’ Laura’s mother whispered.
The Cuckold
If news of Laura’s pregnancy had been a surprise to Laura, then it was certainly a shock to Jack, who in his junior year at college had contracted mumps. An unfortunate side effect of the virus had been to diminish the size of his testes, and although Jack had never been formally pronounced infertile, it was generally assumed that he’d be welcomed with open arms if he ever applied for membership of the sub-fertility club.
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