Visiting Professor (5 page)

The steps creak under Lemuel’s weight as he starts up. The silvery snip-snip-snip of scissors comes from behind the curtain
that has been nailed up in place of a door at the top of the stairs. Pushing through the curtain, Lemuel finds himself in
the barbershop.

The young woman who was stealing sardines in the avenue of the E-Z Mart aisle is ducking and weaving around a young man sitting
in an old-fashioned chrome-and-red-leather swivel chair. Her ponytail flailing, she leaps back to survey her work, then bounds
forward and attacks the hair over an ear. Snip-snip-snip-snip. Behind her, beams of speckled sunlight knife through a large
plate-glass window with faded letters arched across it. Lemuel sounds out the words, reading from left to right,
OT REDNET
. It dawns on him that the letters form words, and the words are meant to be read from the outside, his right to left.

“ ‘Tender …’ Ah!” he mutters. “So this is a Tender To.”

The woman cutting hair nods toward the straight-backed chairs lined up against one wall. If she recognizes Lemuel from the
E-Z Mart, she doesn’t let on. “With you in a min,” she murmurs. Turning back to her client, she plants herself behind the
chair and studies him in the mirror. “Yo, Warren? You look almost but not quite beautimous.”

“My sideburns suck.”

“You want a second opinion, they make you look sort of … Rhett Butlerish.”

“You think so?”

“Hey, you know my motto—’My haircuts grow on you.’ “

Lemuel jams his scarf into the armpit of his faded brown overcoat, folds it and his jacket over the back of a chair and settles
into a seat next to a low table piled high with copies of
Playboy
. He picks up one that has been read so often its pages have the texture of cloth. Glancing at the barber to make sure he
is not being observed, he leafs through it to the center spread. When Petersburg was still Leningrad, he had browsed through
a copy of
Playboy
in a streetcorner flea market.
It had been selling for what amounted to a week’s wages, which had not prevented him from purchasing it in order to improve
his English. He thought then, he thinks now, that the stark naked ladies smiling out from the magazine’s pages, their pubic
patches neatly trimmed into goatees, the nipples on their flawless breasts aimed like artillery at the reader, look about
as erotic as frozen fish. The nudity, in his view, is only skin-deep.

Across the room the sardine thief crouches in front of her client and, using the point of her scissors, delicately snips away
the hair protruding from his nostrils. That done, she dusts talc across the back of his neck with a soft brush, then whips
off the blue-and-white-striped sheet and shakes it out on the floor, which is covered with a thin layer of hair that swirls
around her feet as she moves.

“Yo,” she summons Lemuel.

The student hands a bill to the lady barber. “Keep the loose change, Rain. Are you signed on for the Delta Delta Phi bash
tonight? I hear they’ve booked some good flicks for the occasion.”

“Maybe.”

“What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

Suddenly defensive, she says, “ ‘Maybe’ means maybe not.”

Lemuel hefts himself into the barber chair.

“Like you must be new in town, right?” the lady barber comments. “So did you take my advice and score something to keep the
supermarket honest?”

Lemuel has been hoping she would recognize him. Flustered, he answers, “I tried to score kvass, but I could not find any on
the shelves.”

The sardine thief shrugs. “It’s a good thing I scored enough for the both of us.”

With a laugh, she deftly slips the striped sheet over his head, tucks the end under his collar. She stares at him queerly
for a moment, then leans forward and gently peels the patch of dried toilet paper away from his chin. Her face is so close
to his he can smell her lipstick. Once again he has the impression he has looked into her eyes before.

He brings up an embarrassed grunt. “I cut myself shaving.”

“I didn’t think you cut yourself dueling.” Brandishing the scissors in one hand and a comb in the other, Rain surveys the
tangle of gray hair on Lemuel’s head. “So what do you want?”

“A haircut.”

“No kidding. What kind of goddamn haircut? How do you want to come on? Intellectual? Academic? Athletic? Woody Allenish? Rhett
Butlerish? I do a Renaissance man that’ll have you beating off the Renaissance women.”

‘There is a faculty lunch,” Lemuel says stiffly. “I am supposed to look like a
Homo chaoticus
, as opposed to a
Homo sovieticus
.“

“I know what a homosexual is. But a
Homo chaoticus
…”

“It is man in his role as chaoticist, which means a professor of chaos.”

“Yo! I get it. You must be one of the suits from the goddamn Institute tucked away in that dilapidated building behind the
library. Hey, if you want to look like a professor of chaos, you ought to go and leave your hair like it is.”

Using her fingers as a comb, she struggles for several minutes to untangle his hair. At one point Lemuel winces.

“Sorry about that.” She unfurls the half-defiant, half-defensive flag of a smile he saw on her face in the E-Z Mart.

Tentatively at first, then with growing confidence, she snips away at his hair. “Like you must have a name.”

“Falk, Lemuel.”

Rain stops cutting and talks to Lemuel’s reflection in the mirror. “L. Falk. You’re the Russian dude from the talk show last
night. I remember you said something about randomness being ignorance. I wasn’t sure what you meant, but it sure sounded goddamn
cerebral. Hey, check it out—it’s a small world, right? I mean, I was the person who called in right after you.”

“You were saying about a G-spot …”

“So you heard me?”

“What in the name of God is a G-spot?”

Rain positions Lemuel’s head and continues snipping away. “I suppose it was discovered by S. Freud and Co. It’s an extremely
sensitive spot about the size of a fingerprint on the face inferior of the …” The scissors hesitate. “You’re pulling my leg,
right?”

Lemuel understands that he is not even touching her leg, which means that “pulling someone’s leg” is another idiom he has
to reckon with. He also understands that “G-spot” is a sexual term. He tries to recall if his mistress back in Petersburg
had one, decides the subject is a mine field and tiptoes around it.

“Is Rain your first name or your family name?”

“First. My family name’s Morgan. I happen to have the same name as a dude you’re probably not familiar with, you being Russian
and all. J. P. Morgan? No. I didn’t think so. He had something to do with money, which is what I want to have something to
do with.” Pursing her lips, she peers over Lemuel’s head at his reflection in the mirror. Apparently satisfied, she begins
trimming the other side.

“How did you acquire a … handle like Rain?”

“I was named after the weather the morning I was born. My full name, it’s written in on my birth certificate, is Occasional
Rain, but I only use the Occasional occasionally. I have a kid sister named Partly Cloudy. Hippie parents. Go figure.”

“And what is the significance of ‘Tender To’?”

Rain gazes at the

painted on the window. “I sublet from the Village Store. Tender To’ came with the lease. The way I see it, ‘tender to’ is
how women see themselves—we’re tender to men, in the sense that we are gentle and loving and sympathetic to them. But men
have a tendency to see us as
the
tender to—the small boat that services a big yacht.” Rain shrugs. “I try not to let men depress me. I don’t always succeed.”

Her legs spread wide, her knees flexed, Rain circumnavigates Lemuel’s scalp, chattering away as she shears his hair. “Dudes
who don’t know each other usually start off talking horoscope. You’ve heard of the zodiac in Russia, haven’t you? Personally
speaking, I don’t believe in all that Capricorn crap. It’s all right for ice-breaking, but after that what are you left with?
Ascending this, descending that. I’m a practicing Catholic, though what I practice is not Catholicism. The last time I attended
Mass it was because I was hitchhiking through Italy and needed to steal money from the collection basket to eat. I also scored
candles and sold them on streetcorners.”

“If you do not practice Catholicism, what do you practice?”

“I practice hairstyling, but only part-time—I cut hair to work my way through college. I practice the French horn in the Backwater
Marching Band even though I can’t march and I can’t read music, I play by ear. I practice safe sex, which I also play by ear,
though these days safe sex more often than not means no sex. I practice home
economics, which is my major, and motion-picture history, which is my minor. I practice …”

Gradually Lemuel finds himself tuning out. He hears her voice droning on, but no longer makes out what she is saying. It is
like watching a film without a sound track. From time to time he mutters “Uh-huh,” which is an American expression he has
never been able to locate in a dictionary, but everyone seems to understand. It occurs to him that having your hair cut by
a lady, and an attractive one at that, is a curiously intimate business. He has not been this close physically to a woman
he does not know since the KGB handcuffed him to the lady movie reviewer after his arrest for signing a petition. When Rain
leans diagonally across his chest to trim the hair falling over his eyes, he feels the air stir, he gets a whiff of female
flesh, of rose-scented toilet water that has almost but not quite worn off. Out of the corner of his eye he inspects her narrow
hips, the line of her thigh, her wrists, the shape of her fingernails, the rings she wears on almost every finger, no two
are alike. When she turns away to reach for a comb, he takes a long look at her ass, which strikes him as nothing less than
glorious, encased as it is in washed-out, skin-tight jeans. At moments her breasts are level with his eyes, and only centimeters
away. With his peripheral vision he sees the buttons straining at her shirt, catches the barest glimpse of flesh, the faintest
swell of breast between the buttons. She is obviously not wearing a brassiere, something unheard of in the workers’ paradise
he fled. Once the soft tip of her breast grazes his ear—or is he merely slipping into an agreeable fiction?

Oy.
Ta’amu ure’u
.

If only he could.

And then she is snipping away at the hair jutting from his nostrils and loosening the sheet and brushing talc on the back
of his neck and pulling the sheet free. Lemuel climbs stiffly to his feet, fixes his glasses over his eyes and studies himself
in the mirror.

“So?”

“I feel … couth.”

“Couth is the opposite of uncouth, right? So it must be a goddamn compliment.”

Lemuel threads his fingers through his hair. “I suppose I will not be mistaken for a student.” He produces a small zippered
purse, counts out five one-dollar bills and hands them to her. “I have read how you
are expected to offer gratuities in America, but I am not knowing how much.”

“The haircut’s four-fifty. Most people give me five and tell me to keep the goddamn change.”

“If you please,” he says with a faint smile, “keep the goddamn change.”

Rain bats her eyelashes. “Not many dudes say please when they tell me to keep the goddamn change.” As Lemuel starts to climb
into his overcoat, she edges closer. “Here’s the deal: I’ve never met a live Russian before. And I was invited to this frat
bash tonight. I’m not thrilled at the idea of staying home, also I’m not thrilled at the idea of turning up alone and getting
pawed, right? All those goddamn jocks casually running their hands over my back and shoulders to see if I’m wearing a bra.”
She takes a deep breath. “Like I won’t beat around the bush—”

“You are the second person I have met in America who dislikes beating around the bush.”

“Who’s the other?”

“He is a rabbi.”

“Asher Nachman, the swinging rebbe?” Rain pulls a face. “It’s me who supplies him with dope. I once asked him if there was
oral sex in the Old Testament. You know what he told me? He told me what I called the Old Testament and he called something
else, I forget exactly what, had a goddamn oral tradition. He also told me that this dude Onan, you know who I mean, right?
the one whose name is the sophisticated word for jerking off, this dude Onan was only practicing coitus interruptus, which
according to the Rebbe is what people did for birth control B.C., which means before condoms. Hey, where is it written a clean
young rabbi can’t be a dirty old man? On the other hand a rabbi who smokes dope can’t be all bad. Especially one with sideburns
teased into springs. I know girls who’d kill for sideburns like that. I offered him haircuts on the house if he’d give me
the secret, but he said no deal. Anyhow, to get back to the bush I’m not beating around: Would you be interested in being
my date?”

Lemuel does not trust his ears. “You are asking me to escort you to this fraternity party?”

“So I wouldn’t mind if you wouldn’t mind.”