Chapters (20)
A couple of hours in, the director said, ‘You’re doing great, Tom, but we’re going to change up the dog. Something doesn’t look right.’
I could have told them what the problem was. They looked too similar, Tom and the dog: same eyes, same hair, same wide open smile, the same joy in taking orders.
They replaced the labrador with a clever-eyed black and white collie, the type of dog who’d bite you just to see if she could get away with it.
Old-Fashioned
Tom used to work in a bar, an expensive one.
The night I met him, I was at that bar with a friend from work who had recently broken up with her fiancé. She was one of those people who seem to get drunk all at once; one moment she was fine, talking about the civil way in which they’d divided their books; the next she was casting her eyes cloudily around the bar for prospects, crying that she’d never find love again, striding off proud and unsteady to the restroom, and coming back with crooked lipstick and a train of toilet paper attached to one shoe.
‘Aren’t you cute,’ she said to Tom, eating the olive from her martini. ‘Buy me a drink?’
‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘but it’s against the rules.’
She leaned forward and tried to touch his arm, but wound up stroking the rich mahogany of the bar instead.
Soon after, my friend departed, suddenly wide-eyed and aware in her drunkenness. She’d left Tom a handsome tip, which he pocketed in a single smooth gesture.
He turned to me.
‘What are you drinking?’ he asked.
Hall of Mirrors
‘How old are you?’ I asked.
He’d taken me to a carnival and was concentrating hard on a stick of candy floss, licking the sugar from his lips between bites.
‘I’m seventeen to thirty-five,’ he said.
Maintenance
I was eighteen.
‘You’ll thank me for this,’ my mother said as we took our seats in front of the tall mirrors. ‘Trust me.’
A succession of ladies then spent the next several hours ‘fixing’ me. They fixed my hair; they fixed my eyebrows, shaping them into lean arcs; they fixed my body hair, buttering each leg with hot pink wax. They fixed my faint moustache by sticking a needle into each follicle and electrocuting it until it was dead.
Then my mother poked my protruding belly with a long, painted nail.
‘They can’t fix this,’ she said. ‘This you’ll have to manage on your own.’
I haven’t had a moustache since. But sometimes I catch myself staring out my office window, stroking the place where it would have been.