* * *
? ? ?
“You have one thing on your list,” Won said. I sat at his station with a black smock tied at my throat. “I think we should do a side part for you,” he added. “Do you trust me?”
“I tried my best. Honest,” I said. “I couldn’t come up with anything else.”
His hands stopped moving through my hair, and he found my eyes in the opulent salon mirror. “Did you consider writing down ‘controlling’？”
“Carly wasn’t controlling,” I said.
“Let’s see,” he said. “How many times did I see you last year? One, my birthday. Then that last haircut you thought was too short but you were wrong.”
“You were busy, too,” I said. “You were always working—your hair shows—and Korea all summer—”
“I was in Seoul for two weeks,” he said.
“Didn’t realize you were keeping score,” I muttered.
Won didn’t answer.
“I’m back,” I said. “I’m here now.” I threw up my hands and jazzed them, a halfhearted joke. “You missed me?”
“Do you want to know what happened with Jesse?” His eyes were on my hair again.
“Your Joshua Tree Klingon?”
“I didn’t tell you he was positive. He didn’t say anything until we’d already hooked up a few times.”
“What? Are you saying— Did you—”
“After that sob story about his mom losing her mind, I kind of fell for him.”
“When was this?” I said. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Don’t worry. I’m clean.” He was still pulling and snipping locks of my hair. “I got tested right away, then again three months later. I’m good.”
I tilted my head away from his hands and turned in my chair to face him. “Won. I’m sorry.” I touched his arm. “I should’ve been there—if I knew—”
“The crazy part?” He stood back and paused a moment. The hand holding the scissors dropped to his side, and with his other hand Won pinched his left earlobe and pulled on it gently a few times. The gesture reminded me suddenly of my father. I shook my head, as if to clear it of this strange connection between Won and him. “The first thing that popped into my head wasn’t even—you know, whatever—that shit is serious.” Won made a grimace, still rubbing his earlobe as he talked. “My first thought was: well, Jesse and me, we could have it together.”
Shame flooded through me. The first thought that had popped into my head was that I’d shared a straw with Won at lunch the other day—I’d wanted to taste his avocado and red bean smoothie, and I’d remembered there was a canker sore healing in my mouth. An open wound. That was the first thought I had.
“That’s how much I liked him,” he said. “I wasn’t even mad at him for lying.”
Won pulled the blow-dryer out of a drawer underneath the mirror and turned it on my head. We stopped talking for a minute. I was grateful for the break. Then ashamed, again, that I needed a break from the story Won just told me. When he finished blasting me, Won checked the length of my haircut by pulling pieces on opposite sides of my face toward my nose. Satisfied, he squirted out a dollop of hair oil and rubbed his palms together a few times, then fanned his fingers through my hair.
“Not too short, right?” He handed me a mirror and spun my chair around so I could admire the back of my new cut.
I was hardly paying attention to my reflection. Instead, I studied Won’s face and tried to see beyond it, to recall his other face: the one he had when we were in high school.
Over the last five or six years, Won had undergone a few cosmetic procedures. It started out innocently enough with the eyelid surgery. First, the surgeon snipped the outer corners to lengthen his eyes, Won had explained. Then she punctured the skin over his top lashes, stitched and knotted surgical thread to generate scar tissue that forced the lid to fold externally, instead of retreating inside.
About a year after, Won found fault with his nose. Too flat at the space between his brand-new set of eyes and too broad at its base, the nostrils indelicately formed, according to him. A different doctor, someone a salon client recommended, did his rhinoplasty. With a small incision between the nostrils and cuts along the sides, the doctor lifted the skin off his nose, loosened it from the bone, and implanted a false bridge. Seven months later, another nose job, because Won was unhappy with the results from the first. This time, the doctor shaved off more cartilage along the shaft. Lately he’s been talking about how his weak chin has held him back his whole life. He was researching the best chin-augmentation specialists in Seoul, Bangkok, and Singapore.