The rich colors of the sunset were cast down on us through the skylight. The breeze had died and the leaves of the oak tree were still. The evening shadows collected under the old man’s eyes, making his smile seem a bit spooky.
The next time my boyfriend comes over, I’ll give him a haircut on the balcony. I’ll cover him with a plastic cape and put a towel around his neck. And then I’ll tie his arms and legs to the chair. Maybe this old man will lend me some straps. They’ve got plenty to spare. The ones with the fingernail tweezers would do.
And then I’ll pluck out his hair. It probably doesn’t matter where you start—behind the ears, or maybe on the top of the head. They’ll flutter down like insects with long wings. I’ll enjoy that tiny bit of resistance each time I pluck a hair, the feeling of the skin ripping, of fat popping to the surface.
Before long his scalp will appear, soft and white and delicate. Like the skin of the hamster I found in the trash can. The hair will pile up until the breeze sends it swirling around his legs. If a strand sticks to his face, he won’t be able to brush it away. He won’t be able to do anything but groan. He won’t be able to stop me doing just what I choose.
* * *
“I hope you enjoyed your visit.”
“I certainly did. Thank you for the tour,” I said, bowing. “Would you mind if I asked one last question?” He nodded. “Do you ever get the urge to try out some of the things you’ve got here?”
He put his hand to his temple and stood looking at the light in the lobby.
“Of course I do,” he said at last. His smile had disappeared. “In fact, I don’t exhibit an object unless I have the desire to use it.” He ran his hand through his hair.
“Would you mind if I came back sometime?” I asked.
“By all means,” he said, smiling once more. “Whenever you feel the need, please come to see us. We’ll be expecting you.”
THE MAN WHO SOLD BRACES
Everything my uncle touched seemed to fall apart in the end. The plastic model airplanes he helped me build when I was a boy, the braces he sold through the mail that were supposed to make you taller, and even the fur coat he left me when he died.
He was the sort of man who changed professions like other men change their socks. He worked for a while at a hat factory, and then became a photographer’s assistant. Next were the braces, followed by a stint teaching table manners. He was a butler for a while, and finally a curator at a museum—though I may have mixed up the order somewhere. In the midst of all this, he was married three times, with several affairs in between. The women came and went, but in his later years he lived alone with no one to look after him. In other words, my uncle never seemed to think twice about abandoning a job or a woman to start over from square one.
If he had one admirable quality (and I’m not sure you could call it that), it was his ability to look dispassionately at the thing that lay broken in his hands, the thing he was about to lose or discard. He never seemed glum or sulky over his losses. He just watched calmly as his treasure, whatever it might have been, vanished from sight—and in many cases there was even the hint of a smile on his face as he watched it go.
* * *
I got a call from the police telling me my uncle had died and I should come to claim the body. He had no acquaintances among his neighbors and only a very few relatives, and the police had apparently gone to some trouble to locate me. I had just got back to my dormitory and was preparing for my French class when the phone rang.
“How did he die?” I asked.
“Strangulation,” the person on the other end of the line said.
“You mean he was murdered?”
“No, I’m afraid he was crushed under the garbage that had accumulated in his apartment, the poor soul.” I took some comfort in the sympathetic tone of this unseen caller.
My uncle and I were not in fact blood relatives. We thought of him as my mother’s older brother, but he came into the family at the time of my grandmother’s second marriage and was actually the eldest son of her new husband and another woman. There was also a large age difference between my uncle and my mother, and they had apparently never lived under the same roof. This relationship was explained to me any number of times when I was a child, but I had never understood it very well.
In any event, my uncle was a frequent visitor at our house. He would appear without warning, stay a few days, and then disappear again to parts unknown.
Even as a child, I sensed that he was not a particularly welcome guest. My mother would be nervous the whole time he was there, and my father was noticeably irritable. But my uncle seemed oblivious to all this: he was quite cheerful and ate and drank with great appetite.
I, too, was largely unaffected by my parents’ attitude toward him and looked forward to my uncle’s visits with impatience—primarily because he never failed to bring me some rare and unusual present.
“Now where could it be hiding?” he would say, picking me up in his arms and rubbing his cheek against mine. “Do you think you can find it?” If I squirmed away from his prickly beard, he would rub even harder. Eventually I would manage to get free and search him for my present—a procedure that was also my opportunity to tickle him.
One time I found a bar of imported chocolate in his hat; on another occasion it was a miniature model car up the sleeve of his jacket, or a jackknife tucked in his sock. When I was very young, I believed he produced all these things by magic.
The sheath for the knife was inlaid with semiprecious stones. It was solid and heavy in my hand, and just looking at it sent shivers down my spine. But when my mother found it, she took it away from me.
“What could he have been thinking, giving a dangerous thing like that to a child? He has no common sense at all.” That was what she always said about him.
Even if he wasn’t always welcome, the menu at dinner was a bit fancier when my uncle was visiting. I would crawl into his lap as he sat cross-legged at the table and pretend not to hear when my mother scolded me for it. His legs were quite boney, but for some reason I felt comfortable seated there.
On such evenings, my uncle generally did most of the talking. My father did not drink and was, by nature, somewhat taciturn. My uncle would talk about new business prospects or some strange adventure from his travels, or he would gossip about the family. As he spoke, his voice and gestures were almost theatrical, and he would laugh merrily at his own stories. From time to time he would feed me some tidbit that had been served with his sake. My father said little and asked no questions, content to look on with a bemused smile, while my mother simply shuffled back and forth to the kitchen.
Eventually my father would make some excuse about an early start in the morning and leave us. I was told to put on my pajamas, and my mother would begin to clear away the dishes—but my uncle would linger on at the table.
And if I got up in the night to go to the bathroom, he would still be sitting there—with his whiskey, slumped over the table and mumbling incomprehensibly. But from time to time he would sit up and laugh to himself, the same laugh we’d heard all through dinner.
* * *
During the day, he would loaf about the house. Whenever my mother asked him to help with some chore that required physical strength, he would respond enthusiastically, although she would rarely ask him to do more than carrying a box of my father’s books to the second floor or opening the sticky lid of a jar. Clearly, she did not consider him very useful.
When he got bored, he would wander over to my room.
“Well then, shall we build that model?” he once proposed.
The model in question was one my father had bought me for my birthday. He and I were planning to build it the following Sunday. I was suddenly filled with anxiety; not so much over breaking the promise to my father, but because I just knew my uncle would ruin the model. He seemed completely unaware of my feelings as he tore open the box and spilled out the parts.
“Let me help,” I urged.
“No, this is pretty tricky. A bit much for a kid. You’d better let me do it.” I was not permitted to touch the propellers or the wings or even the tube of glue.
The instructions were printed in a tiny typeface, and he was constantly adjusting his glasses or moving the lamp as he worked. He spread out the pieces on the desk and fitted them together, then pulled them apart again. He would put them together another way—and then start over with a different set of pieces, muttering the whole time about how confusing it was.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, overcome with nerves.
“Be patient,” he said, nodding. “It’s going to be fantastic.” A bead of sweat dangled from the end of his nose.
Unable to stand it anymore, I went outside to play. When dinnertime came, he was still working on the model—which bore only the vaguest resemblance to an airplane.
“It’s all right if you don’t finish it,” I said, trying to be as diplomatic as I could. Unfortunately, he was not about to give up. It was sometime the next morning before he was done.
“There,” he said, coming to find me with the plane in his hands. “What do you think?”
“It’s great,” I said. It looked nothing like the photograph on the box, but I was reluctant to disappoint him. Traces of glue clung to his fingers.
The plane was oddly out of kilter, as though none of the pieces were in quite the right place. The cockpit had gaps, the wheels were askew, and, worst of all, the wings had been attached at crooked angles.
My uncle left after lunch that day. Later, as I was setting the model on top of my bookshelf, the right wing fell off. I let out a little cry and the propeller dropped to the floor, followed by one of the wheels, and finally the left wing, which came to rest at my feet.
* * *
One day my uncle appeared with an odd-looking object. It resembled a dog’s collar that had been attached to the end of a long, narrow metal plate. At the other end was a wide belt.
“This is a brace to make you grow,” he said. My parents looked skeptical but said nothing. “Let me show you how it works.”
I was chosen to be the guinea pig.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, somewhat alarmed, but my uncle just shook his head and started loosening the buckles.
“Not a bit,” he said. “You’d like to be taller, wouldn’t you? Short guys never get the girls—which is why men all over the world are going to be clamoring for these.”
The belt that looked like a collar turned out to be exactly that. My uncle buckled it tightly around my throat. The metal plate pressed against my spine, held in place by the belt around my waist.
“How does that feel?” He spread his arms and studied me with obvious satisfaction, but there was a concerned look on my mother’s face. And, indeed, I was finding it hard to breathe; my neck was being forced up, and I couldn’t turn my head to the side or bend at the waist. I was completely immobilized, with only my eyeballs free to move.
“Just thirty minutes a day for six months and you’ll be two inches taller. It stabilizes the neck and pelvis and stretches the muscles, which provides stimulation for the bones and encourages secretion of the growth hormone.”
“Thirty minutes?” I said, nearly in tears.
“And you’ll be taller. What more could you ask?”
“But it hurts,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”
“You can’t?” he said, fiddling with the buckle. “I guess I’ve got it too tight. This is just a prototype; I’m still working out the details. But I’ve decided to go into the mail-order business with these, I’m completely convinced they’ll sell. I’ve signed a contract with a factory to produce them, and I’m going to advertise in all the newspapers and men’s magazines. I’m even applying to have them licensed as a medical therapy.”
He pulled some papers out of his pocket and waved them in front of us.
“Is that so?” my father said, sounding even more skeptical than usual. My mother tapped her finger against the metal plate.
“Take it off, please! I can’t stand it anymore.” I was crying in earnest now.
Not long thereafter, true to his word, my uncle began selling the braces through the mail. I have no idea whether he ever fixed the collar, but I started seeing his advertisements in magazines: a shirtless man with well-oiled muscles in my uncle’s brace, striking a confident pose. When I’d worn it, the brace had been terribly uncomfortable, but it seemed to fit the model like a second skin, as though he had been born wearing it.
The prototype sat in the corner of my closet for some time after that, like the molted skin of some misshapen reptile, but I never put it on again. Eventually, the metal plate started to rust. When my mother went to throw it out, the screws in the plate came loose, the belt fell off, and the whole thing went to pieces.
* * *
My uncle apparently sold almost none of them at all. I’m not sure whether it was because they broke so easily or because they failed to live up to their advertising, but very soon my uncle was arrested for fraud. It seems the license he had obtained was a fake.
It was some four years later, when I was in middle school, that we next heard from him. Looking back, I suppose this was probably his most prosperous period. The clothes he wore—and the quality of his presents—improved considerably. He smoked cigars, wore French cologne, and he seemed always to arrive at our house by a hired car.
He said he had found work as the butler in a great house, though my mother said she couldn’t imagine he was anything more than a handyman. The house in question belonged to two elderly ladies, twins who had inherited a considerable sum from their father—a coal magnate of some sort. Since they spent most of their time traveling, my uncle’s duties consisted primarily of standing guard over the house.
I recall that one of my aunts spread the rumor that the two old ladies shared my uncle’s sexual services between them. At the time, I couldn’t conceive of what this might mean, but she seemed disgusted when she said it, so I knew it was nothing to be proud of.
“They’re absolutely identical,” my uncle said. “From the build and voice to their taste in clothes and makeup, even their wrinkles. Exactly the same.”
“Do you ever get them mixed up?” I asked.
“No, there’s really nothing to mix up. A or B, B or A—it makes no difference. They’re just one person.”
“But what does a butler do?”
“My job is a bit different from your average butler.” His tone was boastful as ever. “Mostly, I look after the Bengal tiger.”
“Tiger?” I blurted out.
“That’s what I said. He lives in the garden. They got him when they were traveling in India, while he was still young.”
“But he got big?”
“He got huge! So huge you can’t get your arms around him, and his legs are like iron poles. The claws could tear you apart, and the ground shakes when he walks across the yard.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“Sure I am! That’s why I have to be on my guard all the time. He could charge at any moment, but that danger is what makes him so beautiful. His fur shines and the stripes on his back ripple, and there’s this deep rumble in his throat. He’s absolutely perfect, but it’s the kind of perfection you can’t touch, even when it’s right there in front of you.”
He closed his eyes, as though trying to remember every detail of the tiger.
“To tell the truth, the biggest problem with the tiger is the odor—it’s overpowering. It gets into your pores, right down the roots of your hair. That’s why I always wear my cologne. It was a present from one of the ladies. Not sure which one. Anyway, it cost plenty.” At this point, he moved closer until his chest was almost touching my face. “Nice, isn’t it?” he said. He had apparently acquired expensive tastes from living among the wealthy, though the experience had made him no richer himself.
“But the old ladies are really more interested in all different kinds of torture,” he went on without opening his
eyes. “They go all over the world, buying anything that could be used to inflict pain, and my job is to take care of all the things they bring home.”
“That’s a pretty strange job,” I said.
“At first I thought it was torture enough being left alone with the tiger, but I have to admit that some of the devices they bring back are pretty interesting: a hatchet for breaking ankles, a stretcher to rip open your mouth, a knife for flaying human skin.”
He described these “devices” one after the other, and I found it difficult to picture what they looked like. Some of them, though, reminded me of that brace of his.
* * *
The image of my uncle that remains clearest in memory for me is of his back as he is leaving our house. No one ever knew where he was going, and no one asked. He left with little more than a “See you later.”
When he returned, he was carrying nothing. He never had a suitcase, and I wondered what he did for clean underwear and the like. Perhaps he kept these things tucked away somewhere in his pockets—like the gifts he brought me.
“I’ve had a wonderful time,” he would tell us when he was ready to go again, and he apparently meant it. And then he might tell me how important it was to study hard. “Even if something seems pointless at the time, you mustn’t take it lightly. You’ll see how useful it is later on. Nothing you study will ever turn out to be useless. That’s the way the world is.”
He would pick me up and rub his cheek against mine. Sometimes I would struggle to escape and muss his carefully combed hair in the process, but he never seemed to mind. Then he would bow and thank my parents, smoothing his hair with his hand.