The Good Life (4 page)

 

Over dinner three weeks later, Pat told them about the phone call from the show's producer. The girls were cheering as if they'd just discovered a new life form. Frederick said to Pat, “You could have hung up.”

“This is the answer to my prayers,” Tina kept saying, although she did not, as far as Frederick knew, pray.

Bett's chatter rattled on like a telegraph machine. “They have designer clothes, or close, anyway, and real hair professionals, not just the Supercuts morons. I'd die for this.”

“So we're on the same page,” said Frederick.

“Don't be a party pooper, Dad.”

“I'm not going on TV. Your mother and I aren't. Isn't that what you told the producer, Pat?”

“I indicated some problems would have to be addressed,” she said. Dinner was tabouli, and she was working a shred of parsley from between her teeth. While he waited, she presented him with a smile that told him nothing.

“Look, Dad.” Laura was using her clear, logical voice, which he knew was an imitation of his. “You say you don't think that appearance is important. Well, there you go. This isn't important, so you can just do it. For fun.”

“A person who goes on the show says that these things
do
matter. I'm not going to make that statement.” He imagined his Citizen Action Committee colleagues watching the show—not that they would—and felt the quick sheen of heat.

“But Mom wants it! And she promised the producer!” wailed Tina, whose tears were always nearby.

“This isn't the kind of thing Mom wants,” Frederick said lightly, still trying to catch a glance from his wife. “I'll bet she didn't make any promises.”

“Naturally not,” she said. Her smile was beginning to frighten him. “They are nice people and didn't ask me to make any commitments. I just answered their nice questionnaire over the phone. Nothing was invasive or personal. Things like
Do the people have duplicates of the same items in their wardrobe?
and
Has either person changed hairstyle in the past year?
”

“Invasive
and
personal,” Frederick said.

“Nothing that anybody with eyes couldn't tell her,” said Bett.

“She said we'd make fine candidates,” Pat said.

“You cannot want this,” Frederick said. He didn't say the word
betrayal
, but he would later, in the bedroom.

“She got me thinking about change. I've made this tabouli exactly the same way for twenty years.” As usual, her voice was mild. Thick and soft as a snowbank, it barely revealed the shape of what might be beneath it, whether a fallow garden or a scythe. “Dinner when you want it. The sideboard covered with your pamphlets. The newspapers you want, the radio shows you like.”

“You make me sound like a dictator.”

“Well, no. Not that.” Pat finally let go of her smile. “Don't you ever get tired of casting exactly the same shadow?”

“Do you think it's easy for me to keep our standards high?” Too late he heard the self-approval in his voice, and he wasn't surprised when Pat said yes. He would have done the same.

“So you want me to go on TV and get dolled up with new clothes and haircut and eyebrows plucked just to prove that I'm not stuck in the past. To show you that I'm worth keeping up with,” he said. The girls, now that he would have appreciated the protective cover of their clamor, had shut up.

“You can be a whole new man,” she said.

“I don't need to be new.”

“And I'll get a new dress, a manicure. Sometimes a girl likes to look pretty.”

In twenty-two years he had never heard her call herself a girl. He said, a shade desperately, “I think you're beautiful.”

“Well,” she said, standing to clear the plates. “That's one.”

 

The show was taped in Chicago, fifty miles away. At first Frederick expected he and Pat would return home that night, but then he heard about the dinner and hotel, the night on the town. Pat's eyes sparkled when she told him, and all he had to do was remain silent.

When they got to the studio, they met the two other couples who would share the stage with them—a welder and his wife, each of them easily fifty pounds overweight, and two dog groomers who kept making jokes about coming in for the puppy clip. Frederick let himself make one crack to Pat about bread and circuses, then he closed his mouth.

The studio was not as glossy as he had expected. In fact, it was shabby, with paper coffee cups heaped in the trash cans and snakes of cable held in place on the floor with duct tape. In the harshly lit mirrors of the white-painted “green room” (he hadn't expected it actually to be green; he wasn't a complete rube) his face looked truly dreadful, every wrinkle like a crevice. The other two couples pretended to be scared of their reflections, the welder solemnly saying, “Sow's ear.” On Frederick's other side Pat was silent. She leaned toward the mirror and touched the skin around her eyes—dry, the color of weak tea. He watched his wife finger her skin until one of the show's subproducers came in and arranged the couples in the order they would go on stage.

The show would be made up of two parts—the morning taping, designed to show off the guests' lackluster attempts to claim a personal style, and then the live broadcast in the afternoon, when six Cinderellas would float across the stage. During the morning segment the host—lustrous shirt and tie, huge hair—asked, “Aren't you excited?” The dog groomers squealed, the welder and his wife spread their hands and laughed, and Frederick looked at Pat, who was looking at the light blue carpet. The heavy moment pooled around them. Then the cameras stopped, the handlers stepped forward, and Frederick was separated from his wife. He felt slightly panicky, as if he were bidding her farewell from a dock, a feeling not helped by her flirtatious wave as a man with a tight goatee led her away.

But no one was going far. Backstage, cubicles were set up, each with a barber chair. The guests were escorted to their chairs, the curtains then discreetly drawn. “I'm Faïence,” said the black-haired woman who slipped into Frederick's cubicle. She was wearing a sleeveless dress, so he could see how her shoulders, under the skin's dewy sheen, were sculpted like fists.

“Isn't that a kind of china?”

“Not many people know that. We'll get you on
Jeopardy!
after you're finished here.” She stood with her head cocked, and Frederick could guess at her checklist: hair, beard, T-shirt. He'd heard the litany from his girls often enough. Only when he imagined similar narrow, assessing eyes trained on Pat did his chest grow hollow.

“Women tend to do this kind of thing better than the men, right?” he said.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. People will surprise you. Now come with me and we'll work on losing ten pounds of hair.”

Frederick was only mildly nervous, which pleased him. The worst he felt was a ripple across his stomach, some small trouble breathing. Faïence chattered about how much simpler he would find life with his new hair, the short length such a breeze to wash and dry. “What do you like to do with your time?”

“I'm an activist,” he said.

“Should have guessed. Well, you'll have more time to be active. You'll wonder why you waited so long. You're going to meet a whole new you.”

“It's just a haircut,” he said. He probably should have said more, but his lungs felt squeezed.

He had read about prisoners of war who survived their ordeal by focusing on whatever was directly in front of them. One man had counted the bricks on the wall he faced. After he counted them, he named them—U.S. presidents, British monarchy, state capitals. Frederick would have liked a task so specific. For three hours, he concentrated on the slap of heavy creams across his face, the cold blade of the scissors snicking against his neck, the lapful of coarse wool as his beard was cut. “This isn't even trimming,” Faïence said. “This is shearing. When was the last time you shaved?”

“1841.”

“You could have an AK-47 hidden in here.”

“I don't believe in guns.”

“Right. You could have a
MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
sign hidden in here.”

“My daughters would like you,” he said. Faïence was rubbing a silky lotion into his stinging cheeks and jaw. The lotion was green and smelled like honey. “They're the reason I'm here, in case you wondered. I wouldn't have come on my own.”

“I don't want to shock you, but every guy who comes on the show has a wife or daughters or girlfriend behind him, shoving. We had a guy in his sixties come in—beard like yours, bald at the top and then a yard of fuzzy hair. The whole hippie toot. His mother sat out there in the audience, eighty-four years old. When he came on stage with a haircut and a sports coat she yelled, ‘Thank you, Jesus.' They tried to dub her out, but you could still hear her.”

“So I'm a type?”

Faïence shrugged. “There are a lot of guys making your fashion statement.”

Frederick nearly started to explain the difference between statement and fashion statement, but Faïence said, “Hold still. I'm layering.”

Frederick fixed his eyes on the green cape draped over his knees. Perhaps Pat would appear with her hair arranged in the curly bubble that suburban housewives had worn when he was a boy. He had never touched hair like that and couldn't even guess how it might feel. Most nights he fell asleep with his hands wrapped in sections of Pat's hair, which had certainly been cut off by now. Trembling briefly overtook him. “Sorry,” he said, before Faïence could chide him.

“We're done,” she said, whipping the chair around so that he could see the mirror. He had to watch himself raising his hand to his cheek to recognize the reflection as his own. Without its brushy beard, the face looked squared off and purposeful: “Colonel,” he first thought with disdain, and then, despairingly, “President.” The hair rose in a crest from his straight forehead, and he needed a moment to take in the streaks of deep auburn Faïence had applied, and the etched layers that made his formerly no-color hair look as abundant and rich as loam.

“This is the part where you compliment the stylist,” Faïence said.

“You're good at your job.”

“You haven't sold your soul here.”

“I know. I left my soul at home.” He gazed at the square face before him, which would look comfortable with the suit and tie that were waiting in the dressing room. He had seen this man all his life, on the opposite side of podiums and picket lines. The trembling became a shudder, which Faïence either didn't see or ignored.

“You've gone for too long without a change. A person can lose track of all that he's capable of.”

“I haven't done
anything
,” he said too fiercely. He kept his eyes on the mirror, looking first at her attractive face, then at his own unrecognizable one. Nearly unrecognizable. In their new context, his familiar wrinkles looked full of character. “Have you ever changed yourself this much?”

“Honey, last week I was a blonde. Now, quit ogling yourself or you'll be late for your own show. You don't want to disappoint your wife.”

He also didn't want to be disappointed by her, a thought that shamed him as soon as it appeared. It was a thought that belonged to this man in the mirror—this corporate superstar, this mover and shaker, who found in his dressing room a suit in three parts, with pinstripes. The shirt had French cuffs, and on the little dressing table sat gold cuff links the size of dimes. “You can't be serious,” Frederick said.

“It's Corbin,” said the woman assigned to his clothes. She wore black glasses, black skirt, black stockings. He worked on a joke about mourning, although a woman with a face like this wouldn't laugh.

“It looks like you're making me the president of Chase Manhattan.”

“Bank presidents dress a lot better than this.”

“I teach college. The most formal event I go to is dinner when my daughters talk me into Long John Silver's. Where in the world would I wear a suit?”

“On television.” She pushed her heavy black glasses up her nose. He waited for her to step back before he took off Faïence's smock and put on the shirt, whose crispness felt foreign but not unpleasant. He would remember to tell Pat that.

He had supposed himself finished after he put on the shoes—formal and shining, “cap toed,” according to the handler, in for a dollar—but then she made him stand on a small dais and rotate before her. Pulling straight pins from a cushion on her wrist, she tightened the seat of his pants and the shoulders of the suit coat, and Frederick felt his tiny store of patience give out. When she fussily tugged on his cuff, he actually slapped at her, though he missed. “Jesus
Christ
, that's enough.”

From the other side of the green curtain a woman said, “Oh!” His handler pulled down his cuff again, and then again. Again.

 

At the cued music, action swooped down in a rush. The audience applauded and the trumpets repeated their flourish and the host said that no one would ever believe the changes. He'd said so three times already. Then Frederick was on the stage, feeling an embarrassed smile strain at his mouth while the women in the audience—there seemed to be only women—cheered. The host drew him to the edge of the stage and made him turn around, showing off the suit. Audience members stamped the floor. Somebody catcalled, and to Frederick's horror his eyes dampened. Where was Pat?

The host wanted to chat. How did Frederick like his new hair? Wasn't that a fine suit? Did he feel like a whole new man?

“Yes,” Frederick said, and hoped that the host could overlook the acid that filled his tone. “I'm eager to see my wife.”

“Pat,” said the host, sliding his eyes to the TelePrompTer. “She's had quite a day.”

“Is she all right?”