Cutting it off

HAIR, LIKE LIFE, IS NOT ALWAYS FAIR.

Marie held a comb between her teeth, squinting as she eyed the neon sign in the plate-glass window. She motioned to a young man with long hair the color of bing cherries, who stood holding the sign, waiting for her direction. "A little down on the right," she said finally, and smiled. Marie had a high, rosy color to her cheeks and looked almost feverish. Her straight shaggy black hair was pinned on top of her head, and she'd taken her nose ring out. Newly developed biceps bulged under her tight white T-shirt, and a tightly cinched black vinyl smock emphasized a tiny waist.

She'd been separated from Gavin for almost a year now. The last time I'd seen my hair stylist, the bank had just approved her loan to set up her own salon. Now, among sheetrock, dust and the smell of new paint, she sat me down in an old-fashioned barber's chair as we looked in the cloud-shaped mirror. After showing me around the place, we'd spent the next 15 minutes discussing why I couldn't look like Winona Ryder. "It's just not fair, Marie," I said. "Why bother with haircuts and infinite hair products that cost a fortune when all you get is the same hair you've always had?"

"Look, life is not fair. And hair most of all is not fair. I could lie and say you'll look like Winona Ryder when I'm finished. But you won't. You don't have straight, thin hair. And she doesn't have thick, curly hair. Why do clients always want the opposite of what they have? Why can't you come marching in here and tell me you want to look like Nicole Kidman? Now, that I could accommodate."

"Because I don't want to look like Nicole Kidman."

"Good for you." She kicked a little pile of shorn hair away from the chair and looked over at the new sign. "It's still a little crooked, Chuck," she called. "Did I introduce you to Chuck? We went to high school together. He's known me forever." Chuck, bored, waved at me lamely.

I settled into the chair. "Well?"

"Gavin is calling me four or five times a day," Marie said, without expression. "He wants to get back together. He says he made a horrible mistake. He says he'll do anything -- counseling, trial marriage, even Buddhism, if that's what I want." Chuck, his back to us, snorted loudly. Marie rolled her eyes. "Chuck's helping me with my sign," she said. "And he just met Brian, whose hair I cut before you. That was Brian, the one you bumped into, when you came in."

I tried to remember. "The little, um, I mean the short one? Skateboarder, right?"

"Snowboarder. He's cute, don't you think? Don't you think so, Chuck?"

"I dunno. I guess, if I swung that way." Chuck sat down heavily on the window sill and inspected his split ends.

I looked at Marie curiously as she yanked a comb through my hair. "You're not thinking of going back to Gavin, are you?" That didn't strike me as Marie's style at all. She was a no-nonsense, in-your-face, completely unsentimental person. She'd laughed her way through "Titanic." But now she seemed to be a bit giggly.

"Well," she began, actually blushing a little, "I hate him, I really do. But there's the baby. And, well, maybe he's changed."

"He hasn't changed." Chuck spoke up, examining the sole of his shoe. Marie whispered, "Chuck doesn't like Gavin."

N E X T+P A G E +| What Chuck really thinks