Shanghai Cut

William holds his new wife’s hand in the darkness, her father’s snoring loud from the lone bedroom a floor below.

“You know, he never passed on his skill,” she tells him, the hard edges of her accent smoothed over after fifteen years in the States. “The Shanghai Cut.”

William opens his eyes. He lifts up from the misshapen air mattress they’ve endured since her father’s visit.

“The what?”

“The Shanghai Cut.”

She explains. Her father, a retired barber from Taiwan, learned his trade as a young man in Shanghai, a city reputed to have the best barbers in Asia.

“Shanghai was known for three cuts,” she says, making chopping motions with her right hand, her opaque skin slicing a light trail through the air. “Chef, tailor, and barber. You know—cut food, cut cloth, and cut hair.”

William’s nostrils flare at the imagined smells of stir-fried vegetables, treated leather, talcum powder.

“In Chinese,” she adds. “We say that scissors are like two knives together.”

The information grabs William’s attention, diverting his mind from anxious thoughts of the coming workday.

“What’s the Shanghai Cut look like?”

“It’s very conservative,” she answers. “My father says you must cut right down to the roots, so the hair will stay neat and in place, even in a typhoon.”

She pauses, draws a breath, exhales.

“But customers also get a wash, massage, facial, shave, manicure, ear-cleaning. That’s part of it, too.”

William runs a hand over his bristled scalp. A few days before, he’d gone to a hair salon, a nationwide chain charging thirty-five bucks for a shampoo and cut. A woman in her early twenties with a tattooed neck finished his hair in five minutes, snapping bubble gum the whole time she raked an electric razor over his head.

“I’d never leave your father’s chair,” he says.

“Oh, his customers loved him. He was famous in Taiwan because he had important clients: celebrities, politicians, businessmen. They never went to any other barber.”

William pulls her hand close to his lips. Her fingertips smell of fried fish and dish soap, a product of her dinner duties that night.

“He never passed it on, the Shanghai Cut?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“The style isn’t popular anymore. Young people don’t want to learn something only a few old people want. My father had to apprentice more than three years in Shanghai before he could start his business in Taiwan. Who has that much time and patience nowadays?”

William understands. He thinks of himself at work, busy and distracted, flitting from one task to the next, unable to concentrate long enough to complete any of them.

“I wish he could speak English,” he says. “He could teach me.”

They grow silent when the snoring downstairs stops, followed by hard coughing. They hear the soft creaking of floorboards, the gentle closing of the bathroom door.

“A Chinese doctor told him his prostate is weak,” she whispers. “My father’s very worried about it.”

They hear the toilet flush, the sound of feet padding back to bed. The snoring resumes after several minutes.

“I mean it,” William says. “I’d like to be a barber. Talking to people all day. Getting to know them while I cut their hair. Don’t you think it sounds nice?”

His wife doesn’t answer. He realizes she’s also fallen asleep, puffing out faint breaths from her small lips.

William closes his eyes and drifts into fantasy. He imagines owning an old-fashioned barbershop with gold-plated chairs and white porcelain sinks with smooth ivory handles. He sees smoked-glass mirrors lining the walls and a glistening parquet floor underfoot. A thick parfait glass on a polished marble shelf holds a spray of black plastic combs drowning in green-dyed antiseptic. Next to it is an opened teak carrying case holding scissors and razors, each shined and sharpened to perfection, gleaming atop the blue velvet lining.

As for him, he wears a white cotton smock over a navy dress shirt, its starched collar noosed smartly by a silken tie. His slacks are pleated and made of gray flannel, the cuffs tapering gracefully into a pair of newly buffed, brown loafers. In his lapel sprouts a single red poppy, and his lone jewelry is a sparkling, silver-banded wristwatch that clinks and clacks as he snaps a mahogany-handled whiskbroom across the spotless floor. And when the first customer of the day comes through the door, a debonair gentleman in a somber three-piece suit with matching wingtips, William bows slightly, guides him to the chair with a confident hand, calmly awaiting his request for the Shanghai Cut.