First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.
Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.
Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star.
First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.
Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.
Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star. To indicate your choice, press the number of the option you wish to select. Whenever you need more information about the options, press zero for help. You can interrupt these instructions at any time by pressing a key to make your selection.
68
AN EARLY THAW CAME. Brown birds alighted on branches and took in the scene. Ice gave way to slush, which chilled the sewer grates as it slipped through and iced again in the old dead leaves hidden underneath. A pregnant deer walked uncertainly through the yard, frowned in a way a deer frowns, and walked up the road. The world uncovered itself. Children who had been born in winter saw the melting world for the first time, and they were wary.
David took a long walk around the neighborhood. His neighbors were out shoveling rotten leaves. Everyone was still in their winter gear but seemed more optimistic about things.
One of the houses that had been up for sale all winter had been quietly bought. It was different from the others, single story, and set back from the road, taking advantage of the deep lot. There were five workers on the roof when David walked by. It was hard to see what they were doing and he stood at the end of the driveway, watching. Three of the workers slopped sealant from buckets while the other two spread it thin. The sun glinted off their long rakes.
There was a woman at the front window. David had not immediately seen her, because she was as large as the window itself, which seemed like an illusion with the house set back so far. She had looked like a curtain in the window, wearing a dark dress or a robe. If he were closer, he could more clearly see the expression on her face.
Before he could register that the woman had Franny’s build and height, a man opened the front door and emerged on the front step, and David saw that it was the man from the bus stop a month earlier, or three months, his direct copy, the same glasses and jacket and sneakers and stride. He held his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun, and David realized he was also holding his own hand in the same way. He lifted his other hand and waved once. A nerve ending fluttered over his lower left rib. He thought of the time he and Franny stayed in a cabin in the woods and walked until they found a pond and looked at it, not holding hands or even standing near each other, so a stranger approaching from the trail would see two additional strangers, three strangers total meeting at a pond and looking into it.
The man waved back, and the woman was gone from the window. The man walked forward and David felt himself walking back as if pushed, as if the world’s balance now required that the two men remain a precise distance apart. The man had opened his mouth and was saying something, gesturing; David was gesturing behind himself toward the road, and with no small effort he turned away from the man and walked briskly and then jogged and ran, slipping on the slush and startling another deer that had been prodding leaves with its snout, sending the deer bounding into the woods, ash trees falling away by the time David reached the road and kept on running, the wind’s chill mixing with the sun on his face and in his eyes.
69
AILEEN PUSHED the metal extractor into the face of one of her younger clients. The woman’s skin had been so clogged that she seemed to have pinpoint black freckles. Still, as she worked under the examination light, Aileen marveled at the smooth skin in the usual trouble spots, the calming sense of a flawless palette between the eyes. She directed the steam wand at the girl’s face and readied her tools while the pores bloomed.
Her extractor resembled a dentist’s device, which is to say it resembled a torture device. The sharp edge on one side was designed to slacken the skin so that the scoop on the other side could coax out the offending oil plug. With the steam wand, Aileen didn’t often need to use the sharp side on young skin. She would simply press the scoop gently and collect the emerging waste. The skin of older women tended to be more set in its ways.
She began the process of extracting the pores, wiping the waste onto a towel beside her. Her client was a regular, and Aileen knew that she had one extraction point to save for last. The woman kept a blackhead tucked at the corner of her lip, cradled by a protective layer of skin that fed and supported it. The skin folded over the concealed blackhead and hid it. The woman was largely ashamed of her skin’s texture and quality, as she well should be, but she had a strange pride in the single blackhead. Instead of treating it with the acids Aileen prescribed, the woman layered the area with oil-based makeup, nourishing it, growing it like a seedpod covered by a warm layer of earth. When Aileen birthed it into her metal scoop, the woman sighed with the effort and release of it. Aileen brushed the lancet blade of her extractor over the edge of the woman’s lip with a surgeon’s precise motion. The woman’s lip twitched at the housefly feeling of the blade caressing her vellus hair.
Aileen walked the woman to the front desk and found David standing there. The skin on his face was dull and curled up red under his nose and at the corners of his mouth. She thought of the collected years of dead and dying bacteria on the man’s face at that moment.
“We need to have a conversation,” he said.
“Come on back. I’ll give you a freebie.”
She hadn’t cleaned the room after the previous client. David climbed onto the reclined chair without removing his boots. Aileen switched on the light, and his face gleamed with clotted oil. He tipped his head back like an obedient child when she applied cleanser with a cotton round. He murmured his approval. “Franny did this at night sometimes,” he said.
She looked at the cotton round coming up black and brown in the soft light. “Your skin is filthy.”
“She took care of me.”
Aileen spread an acid enzyme mask on his face using a brush. He winced, and she knew the pain he felt. “So talk,” she said.
“I think she’s been living in a house down the street,” he said. “There is a house that looks like ours, and a man lives there. It’s possible she has been living there.”
She pointed the jet of air from a steam machine toward his forehead, which seemed to be the worst offender in terms of congealed cells. She became distinctly aware of his clothes. They were soiled to the point where the filth of his body had its own texture. She lowered her lips to his ear, where the hair curled in long ringlets and tucked over the tips of his earlobes. “I see her everywhere,” she said.
“My face stings.”
“Just a few more minutes.”
She heard another noise over the hiss of the steam machine and realized it was David sighing through his nose. He sighed until the air seemed to leave his body completely, and then he was still for a moment, and then he breathed in again, taking the moist, warm air into his body. “I don’t think she ever left,” he said.
“I saw her on the bus,” Aileen said. “I saw her walking. I thought she had decided to take a break from our friendship. I called after her, but she didn’t turn around. Her body shifted five degrees to the left. I saw her walking up a side street three blocks from where we usually walk. She stood at a wall at the end of the street and pressed it as if to move it.” Her eyes were wild. “She didn’t turn around when I called.”