like an old hound getting a swift kick. He almost jumped out of his seat in startled amazement, but he kept his cool. Don’t push things, just let it happen. Don’t scare it away.
Then the sisters began to sing. Oh, the raw, almost-threadbare sound of their voices mixed with the clash of instruments—these sensations met with a faculty deeper in Bennie than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy. And here was his first erection in months—prompted by Sasha, who had been too near Bennie all these years for him to really see her, like in those nineteenth-century novels he’d read in secret because only girls were supposed to like them. He seized the cowbell and stick and began whacking at it with zealous blows. He felt the music in his mouth, his ears, his ribs—or was that his own pulse? He was on fire!
And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled opening an e-mail he’d been inadvertently copied on between two colleagues and finding himself referred to as a “hairball.” God, what a feeling of liquid shame had pooled in Bennie when he’d read that word. He hadn’t been sure what it meant: That he was hairy? (True.) Unclean? (False!) Or was it literal, as in: he clogged people’s throats and made them gag, the way Stephanie’s cat, Sylph, occasionally vomited hair onto the carpet? Bennie had gone for a haircut that very day and seriously considered having his back and upper arms waxed, until Stephanie talked him out of it, running her cool hands over his shoulders that night in bed, telling him she loved him hairy—that the last thing the world needed was another waxed guy.
Music. Bennie was listening to music. The sisters were screaming, the tiny room imploding from their sound, and Bennie tried to find again the deep contentment he’d felt just a minute ago. But “hairball” had unsettled him. The room felt uncomfortably small. Bennie set down his cowbell and slipped the parking ticket from his pocket. He scribbled hairball in hopes of exorcising the memory. He took a slow inhale and rested his eyes on Chris, who was flailing the tambourine trying to match the sisters’ erratic tempo, and right away it happened again: taking his son for a haircut a couple of years ago, having his longtime barber, Stu, put down his scissors and pull Bennie aside. “There’s a problem with your son’s hair,” he’d said.
“A problem!”
Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint. “Lice,” the barber whispered. “They get it at school.”
“But he goes to private school!” Bennie had blurted. “In Crandale, New York!”
Chris’s eyes had gone wide with fear: “What is it, Daddy?” Other people were staring, and Bennie had felt responsible, with his own riotous head of hair, to the point where he sprayed OFF! in his armpits every morning to this day, and kept an extra can at the office—crazy! He knew it! Getting their coats while everyone watched, Bennie with a burning face; God, it hurt him to think of this now—hurt him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leaving gashes. He hid his face in his hands. He wanted to cover his ears, block out the cacophony of Stop/Go, but he concentrated on Sasha, just to his right, her sweet-bitter smell, and found himself remembering a girl he’d chased at a party when he first came to New York and was selling vinyl on the Lower East Side a hundred years ago, some delicious blonde—Abby, was it? In the course of keeping tabs on Abby, Bennie had done several lines of coke and been stricken with a severe instantaneous need to empty his bowels. He’d been relieving himself on the can in what must have been (although Bennie’s brain ached to recall this) a miasma of annihilating stink, when the unlockable bathroom door had jumped