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CLASSES
When she was younger, Lorraine hated school. The classroom setup, the confining desks, the teacher-student relationship—none of it had ever quite worked for her. Listening to someone drone on endlessly about topics they’d quite obviously bored of years before never afforded much of an education for Lorraine, who preferred the hands-on approach. And now that she was being forced to take “Guido Method” courses once a week, following an eight-hour shift, her aversion to the idea was understandable. Unlike the color class that had landed her here, this class was strictly for assistants at Guido’s.
Basically, people who wanted their hair colored for free would sign up at the front desk as models (you wouldn’t believe the waiting list), and the assistants would perform whichever hair color technique was being taught that evening. Lorraine thought she should be teaching the class, not taking it. The whole idea was ridiculous to her.
Lorraine would have been in a rotten mood at color class on Tuesday night if it weren’t for the glow of the weekend still lighting her from the inside out. Nothing could smolder the fire she’d walked around with since Friday evening. And a few things had tried. First there was Saturday afternoon. Lorraine and Tommy and Pooh-Pooh had all been starving. All the sex and wine and sex and wine had taken its toll on the couple attached by the eyes, hands, and pelvic regions. The dog had suffered from being forgotten amidst all that. Lorraine never thought she could forget about something as enormous as Pooh-Pooh, but when she was around Tommy, there was nothing else. She’d even forgotten about food for herself during all the long hours they’d been together. Something she normally reverted to in any situation, any mood, had just slipped out of her head.
And so they decided to indulge in an overpriced brunch at a bistro by the name of 92, which, though not as delicious as neighboring Sarabeth’s, offered outdoor seating and advertised itself as being pet-friendly. The showering portion of the procedure set them back another couple of hours, as one thing very sexily led to another, and then another.
Finally, though, with freshly washed and air-dried waves cascading over her shoulders, secured back from her forehead with oversize plastic sunglasses, and a form-fitting So-Low stretchy outfit complimenting her every curve, Lorraine took Tommy’s hand with her left, and Pooh-Pooh’s leash with her right. And when they turned at Eighty-ninth to make their way to Madison, Pooh-Pooh went wild with delight. He was a one-dog show of barks and curvy leaps, his groomed coat shining in the sunlight as he pulled Lorraine as quickly as possibly toward the object of his affections.
For right there in their path was his very own Lena Horne. Lorraine was less embarrassed by the dogs’ overt sexuality than she was at Tommy and Matt meeting. She was taken aback by her discomfort. Why should she care?
An older woman with elegantly up-twisted white hair and a gold-buttoned cardigan walked by, a purse dangling at her elbow, swinging in coordinated rhythm with her hips.
As he shifted toward the hand-holding pair and waved, Lorraine noticed Matt drew more familiarity from her than he had the evening before at the park. He was easy and gracious in his Saturday afternoon Adidas pants and wash-weary Yale T-shirt, his J Edgar Hoover key chain in place. It certainly didn’t seem like he was adding to the group’s discomfort. With ease, he greeted the gold-buttoned woman and she smiled wide in return, bending her fingers into a dainty wave.
The exchange did not go unnoticed by Tommy. His eyes followed in a series of twists and turns, stops and starts, seldom blinking along the way.
“Can’t take these dogs anywhere,” Matt said, shaking his head with a hint of smile.
It broke the glacier Lorraine imagined between the two men, if not the pieces of ice floating about herself. The men laughed. And when that sound faded to silence, Lorraine found herself floundering for words.
“Tommy, this is Matt,” she added. The sound seemed to emerge from outside herself. The inside of her mouth was a wad of cotton. The thing was, she wasn’t Lorraine when she was with Tommy. She was drunk and gorged, making up for all the time he’d starved her. There wasn’t room for anything else, especially the confusion she’d felt those times she’d been with Matt, the dizzyingly rapid familiarity she was faced with in his presence, the odd idea she had his car keys on her kitchen table, the strange presence he’d had in her mind as she drove his Mercedes to a place that had become—as rapidly—alien to her.
There was a silence while, presumably, Tommy matched the face with the car, sized up the situation, and assessed possible risk. He dragged a finger along the inside of Lorraine’s palm, and even amidst the confusion, she felt joined to him—one finger could do this to her.
“Ah, Mr. Mercedes,” he said, with a tinge of what could be interpreted as either jealousy or condescension—neither of which put Tommy in a good light.
She could excuse him of anything. She was the one who’d told him Matt’s father had given him the car. But she hated to think Matt had negative feelings for Tommy—the most important man in her life. Conflict seemed to meet her every mental turn. She wanted to scream out and defend Tommy, yell, “You don’t understand!” She longed to cover him with her body and protect him from anything, everything—even Matt, who she felt...well, whatever she felt about him wasn’t going to stop that instinct just then.
But at the other end of her brain, there was a new, contradictory thought tugging at her conscience. She didn’t want anyone to see Matt in a negative light either. Of anyone she currently counted as a friend, Matt was the most generous, the most intuitive and understanding. But, she did feel tension, and Lorraine was nearly positive it wasn’t merely in her head.
Still, the confusion that hazed around that chance encounter melted away in the sun-flooded delight of brunch—Bloody Mary’s and three-egg omelets and sides of bacon, generous bistro napkins and plates with sailor stripe rims. Every word spoken was broken ground, as far as Lorraine could see. The pair had been in new territory in Manhattan, with so many of Tommy’s feelings coming to his tongue, with so many pretty things surrounding them. He had pulled aside the heavy velvet curtain normally separating his heart from her. Not only that, he was someone else entirely, it seemed—someone who tried an omelet stuffed plump with feta cheese, ignoring the admittedly daunting hints of green vegetables woven through. He sipped at Lorraine’s mimosa she’d ordered after her spicy Bloody Mary.
“It’s champagne and orange juice,” she’d said.
And when he’d tasted the liquid on his tongue, at his lips, at the back of his throat, she’d barely recognized him and his childlike contemplation mixing fear and unbridled excitement. He’d thrown her for a loop with compliments and public displays of affection, his mouth at her ear, his hand down the back of her stretched waistband.
“Let’s go back upstairs, Lorraine,” he’d whispered soundlessly on her ear, each movement of his mouth tickling, telling the story of what was to come.
Sixty hours of bliss followed. A movie they didn’t watch. Art, critically praised by the pair (“The Kandinsky is painted on two sides;” he sent them laughing, repeating a line from one of thousands of movies they’d watched together) in a hushed museum of echoed whispers and the occasional cough. His cool scent—the same cologne he’d been wearing since high school—trailed around them, changing the museum forever for Lorraine, making his impression there. At the Met they attached their own rose-colored meaning onto Impressionists of the American and French varieties before boring of the indoors and the finer things. A shopping spree with Lorraine’s discount at Bendel’s, where she recognized in Tommy’s own City Transformation her now familiar arc of shock, disdain, and eventual pleasure at unfamiliar quality, all mounting. He had the salesgirl snip the tags right off a shirt, there in the dressing room, and walked out wearing it. A walk/run/scream/walk with Pooh-Pooh around Central Park and beyond. Contemplation of the zoo’s sea otter population and the proper care required for a tiger cub. Lorraine could barely remember her own plush lion then, why she’d torn his insides out, how she’d felt. She lost all of that in...a throwaway camera, a smile meant for only one woman who’d waited so long for it, and later the silence at the window, looking out, with those hands now appearing God-like on the billboard, with all that had changed beneath them.
Now, what were two hours of pointless color class to Lorraine in the face of all that? Here she had everything she’d ever thought she’d been missing in her life. So what if Guido had her sweeping floors and folding towels? She took her now familiar seat, next to the girls who looked half her age, probably were—who spent most of the class swiveling their stares competitively to see who was better, thinner, had clearer skin and nicer clothing. Lorraine preferred the boys who took care to know everyone, adding levity with their friendly, overly accommodating ways.
Lorraine watched Guido as he came in and walked directly to the chair he always used, the one where Lorraine had enjoyed her one day of professional independence since she’d moved to Manhattan.
She was far off in a corner by the window. She’d be glad to look out over the lights, the sliver of visible moon, when she finished the assignment too quickly and didn’t feel like chatting with the hair model—who’d be thrilled she wouldn’t have to complain or make adjustments to a dye job from Lorraine, who could do this all with one hand tied behind her back.
Since last week’s experience Lorraine had been, if not unfriendly, then tight-lipped with Guido. She didn’t trust herself to say more than “yes” or “no,” or at the very most, “I’ll be right back with that.” She wasn’t used to holding her tongue, having to suck up her feelings and step down graciously. By this late hour the effort required had her exhausted.
Normally, a run like the one she’d taken with Pooh-Pooh before returning to the salon for class would have her energized. But tonight it seemed to have the opposite effect. She was drained beyond belief. The soothing hot shower had only made it more difficult to leave the comfort and unconditional love of Pooh-Pooh, who watched her draw lines around her eyes and deposit powder on her cheeks as if she were one of the models in a Degas.
“Tonight, we’re practicing color correction, people,” Guido said, some of his affectedness visibly deflated from his customer-oriented day voice. Lorraine noticed Guido rarely looked her way as he addressed that group, continued on to explain the complexities of fixing botched bleach jobs, what to do if a color was too cool, too warm, or just bleached out. He tried to find words for ideas, which Lorraine knew came to an artist instinctively, the way she’d heard so many other instructors attempt before. At the end of the day, either you had an eye or you didn’t. And she did. And she was attempting with her last shred of energy not to care that this talent of hers was going unused. She credited whatever patience she exhibited to Tommy. He was all she’d ever wanted, wasn’t he? He was the reason she was here in the first place, wasn’t he?
Instantly Lorraine had assessed the problem areas of the model sitting in her chair. The girl’s color was entirely too cool for her complexion. It lent a green cast to her skin, so Lorraine warmed up the whole look, painting chestnuts and honeys and beige-blondes to offset the blue cast. She instructed the girl to use shampoo and conditioner designed for color-treated hair, so the color would not fade back right away. Lorraine lifted the color of the model’s brows a few shades, although this was not a necessary part of the lesson, or a specific request of the model.
While the girl’s color processed under the bonnet dryer, Lorraine scanned the room and noticed the others just starting to apply color, clumsily messing with unnecessary foils, many still mixing at the color bar. She let out a long sigh and set herself to pass the time at the window, as she’d expected to do.
Perched high above, she saw the same Guido Nails billboard that had affected her so deeply at her own apartment the other night with Tommy. She wrung her hands, and ran a finger over the lines of one and then the other, never looking away from the sign. She’d been gazing so intently that the hands looking back at her from across the way had started to fuzz into a sort of bridge-shaped mass when she was startled to feel anger again pierce at her chest.
Really! Those were her very own hands! That was her very own style Guido was advertising, making money from. The least he could do was to allow her to color hair. Although she hated to think poorly of him, Lorraine couldn’t help but think of Don, and how middle-of-the-road his work was. And yet, because he’d finished his training, he could have his own clients, his independence. It seemed contrary to the natural order of things. Still, she had to keep reminding herself that this was the way of the world. There were rules, steps, and she had to take the time to follow them. Why did she imagine herself to be different, somehow absolved from these duties?
Because she was good. That’s why. No, she was better than good. She was freakin’ awesome and everyone knew it. And the hands—the one with the fate and the one requiring her own will—seemed to become more meaningful with the weight of that fact. Hadn’t she already altered her fate by coming here, by influencing people like Guido, by having her own hands perched way up high over Park Avenue and Fifth? And in turn, by training the manicurists to make those skinny rounded tips, to carefully apply the B, by watching fabulous New York society girls walk out of the salon with nails fashioned after her own personal style, in her color, with her trademark bud on the right pointer?
She worked these ideas through the mill of her mind, grinding them down, polishing them, and then going through it all again as she rinsed the client into a crisp array of color, taking time to message her scalp, scratch with her Guido Nails around the ears and above the forehead, where clients always got itchy from bleach. And then, like a sign all its own, her musings were disturbed by none other than Guido himself.
“Lorraine,” he said, in an off-putting mix of haughty and exhausted, more commonplace intonations.
“Yes,” she said, not yet looking up to see the worried look on his face.
“Lorraine, would you mind covering the class for me?”
At that unexpected question, Lorraine took a second to fit all the pieces together before popping her head up, not unlike that old game of Concentration she used to play as a child—racing to get everything where it should be so you avoided a cataclysmic shakedown.
The urge to answer sarcastically, the way she would have responded if she had been Shove It Lorraine and it had been her uncle who had played three such unfair hands one after the other—giving, taking away, giving with no frame of reference as to why—was overwhelming and seeping like poison all the way to the autumn-inspired yellow ochre leaf on her Guido Nails. But she resisted. In the game of playing by the rules, you needed to hold your tongue, especially where possible advancements were concerned. She was learning this now. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. You go and scrape up whatever you’ve been given and you don’t ask questions. You can reconfigure your strategy later.
“Sure,” she said, as if this were the most natural request in the world, as if the rest of the students hadn’t suddenly been pushed far, far outside the tiny circle she was standing in with Guido.
Her model’s face was smug with pride. Lorraine saw it when she turned back to her, not wanting to give anything away from her own expression. The ecstatic model did not go unnoticed by Guido, who suddenly felt the need to qualify his statement.
“I see you have done a fabulous job on our model—” he said more grandly than he’d spoken throughout the evening, turning his head up to grab the name from a soundless prompting at Lorraine’s quick lips, “Rowena, here.”
In this business—even for those models coming in for freebies—Lorraine knew the importance of lip service, of making a girl feel important. She could be the secretary of an Elle editor, on staff at the Today show, one day she might be someone herself. And that’s the way you wanted her to remember you—as the one who treated her special all along. We all think we’re destined for greatness, but when someone else agrees without prompting, well, that’s something you can’t put a price on—unless that price is $350 for a full head of highlights, $499 plus for corrective color.
It’s how you make her feel, it’s the myth of beauty—the world women create so the real one can be tolerable. All she wants in a stylist’s chair—all any of us want when we rush over during lunch hour or at the crack of dawn before the office opens—is to be beautiful, to be the Princess we are in our own minds, whether of Park or any other avenue. A girl wants to look at herself in the mirror and think, wow, I see how unique the shape of my eye is. Just look at how my cheekbone juts out like that. And so what if Tommy or Davey or Jimmy or Jack didn’t notice? It’s there and someone else will see it.
But there was more to it. The way Lorraine saw the unique beauty of each client in the salon, the way she knew how to bring that beauty to the forefront, highlight and gloss it, that was her talent. And for a moment she knew Guido saw. Maybe he’d even seen how she’d done the same for herself since she moved here.
The students were terrible—each color job worse than the next, messy sections, over processing, under processing, general lack of matching a person’s features with the proper tones. Lorraine was deeply frustrated to be thrown in with such novices, to appear indistinguishable from them to the senior staff and clients. But she didn’t show it. Lorraine could be all business—she always could. Even back in high school, she’d go home, close her bedroom door, read her assignments, outline and write out essays in neat cursive, efficiently considering what questions might be asked of her on the final exam.
With as much “before/after” and “do this/because that” as was possible, Lorraine demonstrated to each student, with the class following along, where they could have improved upon their work and exactly how that could be achieved. But she knew even that could only take a student so far. You could give them the skills, but if they didn’t have the talent to put them to use, it would never work.
“You have a very good way of explaining yourself, Lorraine,” one of the more junior girls, Stacey, noted to her after the class was through.
“Well, I should,” Lorraine said, pulling the button-up nylon robe from her body with a snap, snap, snap. “I’ve only been doing this for thirteen years.” She balled up the robe and tossed it in the designated basket.
The girl’s shock flew over her like a tidal wave. “Thirteen years! And you’re only at the same level as I am?”
On the walk home, a man was singing “Oh, Sherry” at the top of his lungs about two feet in front of her for five blocks and two avenues. She could have taken another route, but she wasn’t in that type of mood. As far as patience went, Lorraine was plum out.
When the singer finally turned off her route, she promised herself that the next person who so much as smelled offensively was going to get it from her. The safest bet, feeling so sour, would have been to go home. Go home, get into your old sweats, and watch the super-deluxe cable lineup you were not paying one cent for (sixteen HBO channels alone!). She knew, she knew she should have done it. But she also knew she shouldn’t care about this class and this salon and all that crap, since she’d already achieved the goal she’d come here to achieve—Tommy! But none of that was stopping her from feeling like an angry bull charging toward that little red cape.
So she walked east to the only place one really could go to at a time like that, Cold Stone Creamery, for a mix of coffee ice cream, freshly crushed M&M’s, marshmallow, almonds, a heart attack’s worth of hot fudge, and five turns of whipped cream (no cherry, please). And as she did, Lorraine shot nasty looks at anyone who passed by, especially skinny little Omigods (she knew eventually they would grow up and sprout hips and more padding, but she couldn’t help herself), and lovebirds (why hadn’t Tommy called her yet today?).
The tall high school girl in the twisty ponytail behind the counter reminded Lorraine of herself, and she piled up all her own self-hatred on her, imagining she, too, would become obsessed with a boy who’d eventually drive her to insanity and a thankless position at a posh hair salon. She watched, with growing frustration, as the girl piled ingredients over the mound of sugary cream, crushed them with the efficiency she herself would have wasted on such a no-end job, and when the girl passed her over the most perfect sundae she’d ever in her life seen, she couldn’t bring herself to reach out and grab for it, to take this girl further down her wasteful journey, down the road to Nowheresville.
“Miss, do you want your sundae?” she said, with the very edge of sarcasm Lorraine herself would have used, the girl’s own Brooklyn accent highlighting the question.
When Lorraine didn’t answer, she tried once more, “Miss? Triple fudge, crushed almond, M&M’s, marshmallow, super coffee sundae?”
“Uh, hello,” a man probed sarcastically, somewhere from the serpentine line behind her, its population of pleading children driving everyone to the edge of insanity. There was no room for a Guidette having a nervous breakdown without pushing everyone off the edge.
And then the floodgates opened and her tears stung and the girl went to grab for a bunch of napkins (so resourceful!) and Lorraine turned to make a run for it.
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eBay auction block #9
Description: Matthew Richards’s Barnes & Noble receipt from the day he spoke with Lorraine in the park about her predicament of Guido’s.
Opening bid: $42
Winning bid: $598 by Ohmigod!@netzero.com
Comments: I still think Matt and I would have been perfect together. Lorraine, Schmorraine, Omigod!