The Polish woman sometimes winces when the telephone rings, which, because she is alone in the salon, she has to answer, forcing her to abandon me, lying under a soft pink or blue blanket with cream on my face, and this affects her schedule, since there may be another customer waiting, though only once was it the lusting man, but I continue to expect him, or even hope he'll return, because the prospect is exciting, especially his presence, dark and brooding, and her response to him, whether she will allow him to have her or not, or continue to keep him waiting until it's the right time for her, since she may lust for him, or maybe she takes greater satisfaction in attenuating her rejection of him. She might be delaying, even playing with him, and I could be resting on the couch inside the walls of the salon at the moment she finally tells him. But then what would happen. Sometimes the Polish woman expels a breath fraught with resentment, addressing some of what she omits in our routine conversations, but I don't think she would refer to herself as sensitive, the way my mother wouldn't.
I might throw the tomato soup into the toilet, since, with no one here to see it, I could easily do that, though I have qualms about doing it, even alone, when no one would see me. I dislike any self-enforced prohibition, but even an unimportant act might have consequences impossible to foresee, or problems I couldn't predict, since there are always problems, and some are surprises. People have become more sensitive over the years. Obesity, allergies, and food aversions have spread like wild flowers do in spring and summer over Virginia's countryside, which has the greatest number and variety in the U.S., belying the countryside's otherwise homogeneous genetic human population, though there are always differences among people. The environment, a word I find somewhat objectionable because it's bland but whose use is endemic and impossible to ignore or avoid, has become more poisonous, or toxic, and there are new viruses and diseases dotting the human field, while old ones disappear, and allergies and sensitivities may be the onset of still unknown, more virulent plagues, as this is the time Stephen Jay Gould named "the age of bacteria," when "maximal bacterial simplicity" dominates man or humans. The unknown is conveniently, conventionally, more virulent than the known, and it is exciting, which is why some people think about the future, since it might also, in addition to what life always is, be new, though I'm not very interested in what will come after me, but I can imagine becoming less inured to it just before I die, since I won't be able to have and see it, and the inability to know it will probably provoke a profound desire to live.
People who once ate in restaurants and drank at bars with smokers now refuse to or can't-they claim to be allergic to smoke and subject to pulmonary distress as well as skin irritations-when not long ago, few were allergic to cigarettes, although a rise in asthma and emphysema might have been the harbingers of this new allergy. My skin doctor told me that in the 1960s he treated three cases of a disease, purpura, which afflicted young women only, but he has never seen a case since. The phenomenon was that blood pooled at parts of their bodies, typically at their extremities, so that great purple swollen blotches formed at their lower forearms, and though the women were tested in every conceivable way, there was no organic basis found for the occurrence, and the disease crippled them when it commenced. Just before the onset of an episode, they would have a premonitory sensation, a tingling which always preceded, by five minutes, the appearance of the purple blotches. It was characteristic of this Autoerythrocyte Sensitization Syndrome, whose diagnostic feature was that if you spun down a sample of the sufferer's blood and injected the red blood cells, characteristic hemorrhagic or bleeding lesions developed. One young woman was hospitalized, and every test given, and after some of her symptoms were alleviated and upon being told she would be released, since they could do no more for her and she'd improved, marginally, at that very instant, she became paralyzed, as her mind and body were likely stymied by this turn of events and found another route to manifest her relentless distress, and for the first and only time in my dermatologist's career, he called in a hypnotist, who put the woman in a trance during which the hypnotist suggested that she could walk, that when she awoke from the trance, she would walk, and, that very day, when she awoke, she was no longer paralyzed and walked out of the hospital. My dermatologist has never heard of her again, and has not seen a case like it since the I960s, so the disease or condition has disappeared, just as it appeared, suddenly, to represent some question or challenge, a neurosis, that a very few young women manifested in their bodies, since the mind is part of the body and changes frequently. I change my mind often, too many times to count, deciding I must walk to town, or read the history of the Empire State Building, listen restlessly to music, dance, doodle a design for a metal teapot, memorize some Zulu words, or sometimes I dwell on the faces of friends who have died or on conversations that were conclusive, ending friendships or sealing them, robbing the of certainty or teaching me trust, inconclusive and eternally titillating, the way romance is, especially an unfulfilled one, which may be why I can't concentrate as much as I want, to make headway, though the tarot card reader assured me I will overcome something that has been insurmountable, which I haven't yet recognized and that taunts me daily. When I'm in love, I am hard put to think about anything else, but I'm not in love now, in that way, though it can be said I have loved and may love again. Still, lunch is often a lonely affair, though generally I'm glad to eat it by myself, not pestered by the demanding man, whose great appetite for attention expands like a stomach, whether it's fed or empty, and if he could he'd gobble up and devour everyone's time in a banquet for himself.
If lunch includes a salad, romaine lettuce and tomato, shredded carrots and sliced cucumber, to stave off eating it, I toss the ingredients into an ugly, plastic howl and make a dressing for it in a plain water glass, but often I don't have what's necessary for a good dressing, like mustard, and then I must decide if I want to walk to the main house, barge into the kitchen, bother the kitchen helpers, especially the young man who likes to glance slyly at me, the girl who transgressed the rules, or the cook or assistant cook, who may or may not be there, and ask for the missing ingredient. I will be considered bothersome, a pest, too picky, and difficult. But to he picky necessitates putting on shoes, a jacket and scarf, switching off all the lights, and making sure the fire is out, so often I can't decide, annoyed at myself for not having remembered what I would need from the kitchen while at breakfast, but then I'm not thinking about lunch when I rush away from the bustling, often tension-ridden dining room as quickly as possible, to avoid trouble.