her, “It’s degrading!” And when she snuck a glance upward, at Kate, it was hot and sharp. She’d been made to repeat herself and sound stupid; she’d been held to her own opinion by another woman. She went on: “It’s demeaning to women. To be gussied up like objects and”—her eyes glinted now with what Kate feared were tears—“fucked like animals.” And she reached for her napkin to cover her mouth, as if she were wiping away that bad word. The table seemed to shift, in sympathy, unease.
“But isn’t it possible,” Kate had said, because why stop now, “that some women might like to be fucked like animals? That they might actually want and enjoy that.”
Kate saw the eyebrows of the young man to Annabelle’s left shoot up in a show of scandalized amusement; he took a large gulp of wine to show he was stifling a smirk. And then, “Oh-KAYYY!” the boyfriend of the hostess bellowed, a broad, good-natured putting-to-bed of the entire discussion. “Who wants Eton mess?”
People laughed, relieved. Kate rushed with homicidal urges. Annabelle extricated herself from her chair and walked stiffly in the direction of the bathroom. George issued Kate a deliberate, dark look, then refilled his wineglass.
She stretched her hand across the distance of white linen, reaching for his wrist. His arm jumped at her touch, knocked the wineglass over. A vast, blood-colored puddle spread as the bowl of the glass rolled away from its severed stem.
If the look he’d shot her a moment earlier had been dark, this one was like a black hole. An unequivocal, hateful Look. What. You’ve. Done. They didn’t speak in the taxi home. He had to be the first to say something. She would hold out. He had to apologize for that look, which she had then obsessed over with some strange devotion, like a child with a freshly grazed knee. He’d flinched when she’d touched him! As though she were something toxic. She sat up against the chill of the window, the London streets blurred with rain and streetlights, and cried silently and steadily. And when they were home, in bed, they talked in quiet, truncated sentences until hopelessness silenced them and they lay there in the no-light, miserable.
She brought herself back to herself now, and to this day, to this fire escape, to the cat inside that she was supposed to be sitting, to the tiny beads of condensation sheeted over the clear plastic of the cup of iced coffee like some lovely reptile skin, to bicycle bells on the street below. To the sight of a tall woman, with short white-blond hair, strolling down the sidewalk exuding ease.
Hot hair-dryer blasts and all the giddy top notes of expensive spritzes greeted her as she entered the salon. The stylist had tattoos of roses up her arms, and Bettie Page bangs, and if she saw fear in Kate’s eyes, she was professional enough to ignore it. Buxom, grinning, she hummed along to Rihanna as she calmly twirled Kate’s hair into a ponytail at her nape, and then, with no warning, jauntily scissored through its base. Kate felt a lurch. How did hot air balloons come down? How did they land?
Bettie Page held up the rope of hair in the mirror and gave it a morbid little shake as she grinned. It looked thoroughly creepy, a thing neither dead nor alive. And then she tossed it on the floor. Kate saw the mistaken assurance in the gesture. It said, Fuck him, right? And the stylist kept working, humming, satisfied in her narrative: boy dumps gal, gal gets fierce new hair. No, that’s not it, Kate thought, that’s really not it at all. But how do you correct someone who’s said nothing?
Months ago, George had told her he thought she’d look good with . . . he didn’t have the words, had tried to describe the haircut to her, haltingly, heterosexually, and she’d frowned, picturing a TV news anchor in a royal-blue suit. It wasn’t a news anchor who’d given him the idea. It was a woman in one of his seminars. Facebook had thrown her up in a sidebar on Kate’s screen one day, announcing that George was now friends with her, and there she was, in a professional-looking photograph, with the shoulder-length bob and side-swept feathered bangs that George had failed to adequately describe.
Kate realized she’d been staring somewhere beyond herself in the mirror with an expression of contempt and she caught it, for a split second, as she came back to her reflection. Bettie Page had tenderly painted each section of her shorn head with a dye-dipped brush and wrapped each little bit in tinfoil as though preparing a series of snacks. Kate was to sit there and wait for them to marinate.
By the time the work was over, her face looked sharper, her eyes wider. She looked older, too, now that she was a white-blond woman. A little frightening, rather than a little frightened?
“Yeah?” said the stylist, and then—the final flourish—she handed Kate a mirror, spun her around, and showed her the back of her own neck. There it was, naked and strange. When was the last time she’d seen the back of her neck? Wasn’t there a sort of delicious indecency to it? She paid, tipping too much in her terror and pleasure, and once outside in the thick of the afternoon she kept reaching for it, this bare new neck with the sunlight on it, fingering the point where her short hair finished and her skin began.
5
Inez clocked them as they came in. She recognized their faces from the other week, the same pair, come to fuck with her again, all twitchy grins and limbs springy with their mission as they jounced up to the counter. They had read the café’s Yelp entries and had come here on some kind of L.O.L. pilgrimage. She’d become a notoriety. There was a whole thread, Dana had said. The commenters were calling her the Notorious B.I.T.C.H. It was a thing.
“Two iced coffees,” one of them said now. The shorter one beside him bit his fist and wheeled away and tittered. She gazed at them.
“Uh, hi? I said, two iced coffees?”
“Nah,” she sighed.
“Excuse me?”
“We’re closing.”
He looked around him. There were half a dozen patrons bent into their MacBooks, placid people with their sweating cups of cold brew.
“Uh,” he said. “You’re literally open.”
She folded her arms and let her head slowly fall to one side, frowning, pouting. She hoped that she looked thoughtful.
“Are we?” she said.
The guy spread his palms, exasperated, and Inez now tilted her head to the other side.
“So you’re just not going to serve us? Loyal customers?” he said. Then he added, under his breath, “Fucking bitch.”
“You know,” she said. “I hear they play indie rock in Starbucks now. Maybe you guys should go find a Starbucks.”
“Burrrn!” said the shorter sidekick, fist to his mouth again. He needed a bigger repertoire of responses, Inez thought.
“You know what? You’re not even hot,” the tall guy said. “You’re just a bitch.”
As they walked out the door he raised his middle finger, brandished it vigorously, and a bearded man in a Sonic Youth T-shirt looked up with mild alarm, then glanced at Inez and quickly returned to his screen. She hoped he didn’t think she needed rescuing. He looked like the sort, dadlike. Dadly.
She turned and pretended to clean the espresso machine so that no one could see her face. Her stomach felt sour and her brain ran a bitter, rapid monologue of fuck this and fuck this and fuck this.
In the stockroom, Heather was on the phone, seeming stressed.
“Yo, Heather,” she said.
Her boss’s face flickered with a frown. She indicated wait a minute as she bent into the phone, nodding.
Inez whipped off the apron. “I’m heading off early.”
And Heather mouthed No! while her eyebrows did something extraordinary under the strain of trying to listen to whoever was on the other end of the phone.
Inez flicked a peace sign at the Sonic Youth guy on the way out.
Five minutes in, she knew for certain she hated the movie.