The Shaving Ritual

Mister Euemer, rhymes with tumor, lay on his side of the great white bed and, with all his poor heart, hated his sleeping wife who faintly snored a warm foot away. He frankly hoped that she would choke to death with the next heave of her formless, silk-covered bosom. He even recited a short silent prayer to that effect but, before he could seal it with a silent amen, she adjusted her body suddenly and frightened him out of it. The autumn moon cast a silver eye into the modern room so full of sleep and hate. The perfectly shaven arm of his wife gleamed above the white comforter. He could not help thinking that it looked like a smooth, enchanted eel, or a scaleless snake, milky, rare, and dangerous. And the damn comforter. Oh, no, she couldn’t have blankets like everyone else.

“Blankets are too bristly, they hurt,” she had complained successfully a few months ago in their first week of marriage.

Then his heavy Harris Tweed suit had disappeared. He loved it because it made him look so British, even though the pants chafed his thighs.

His wife said: “You must have left it at the hotel in Bermuda.”

That was impossible. He knew he couldn’t have taken a tweed suit on a tropical honeymoon. Other things had disappeared. A rabbit’s foot from his key chain. The brown stag’s foot letter opener from the desk. A cactus plant that one of his best friends had sent them.

“It died,” she said simply.

She almost had become hysterical when he brought home the puppy.

“You can’t bring that in here!”

“What do you mean? Here, take the little fellow. Just put your cheek against his—”

She pushed his hands away violently and retreated backwards into the room.

“It won’t bite, darling.”

She had begun to shudder, moving her hands over her breasts and shoulders as if she were washing in a shower.

“Agh agh agh,” was her soft intense gurgle.

Mister Euemer, puzzled, took the innocent beast out of the house and gave it to a neighbor. His wife was perfectly composed when he returned, but she wouldn’t let him kiss her until he had washed his hands.

That night, when they were lying in that tight uncomfortable embrace young lovers have for each other, she said unexpectedly, breaking the usual silence of their intimacy: “There would have been hairs over everything.”

Mister Euemer stared at his wife in the moonlight. He studied her naked arm. He’d been cheated. He’d been taken in. He was the worst thing an American could be, a sucker. He surrendered himself to a flush of shame. He should have been suspicious that first night she had given herself to him, a week before the marriage ceremony. Mister Euemer had never been exactly proud of his body. He always felt inferior on the beach because of the paucity of hair on his chest and limbs. As he undressed, he saw his future wife looking at him with obvious pleasure in her devouring gaze. It filled him with delight and confidence and he loved her more than adequately.

“I’m so happy your body is smooth, not covered with hair like some kind of ape.”

And he thought how kind she was, and they laughed and renewed their embraces. The Shaving Ritual (Mister Euemer capitalized it in his mind) began during the honeymoon. He was waiting for her in bed when he heard the bath running.

“Just to cool off,” she called.

“I envy the water,” he returned gallantly.

For a while he listened with satisfaction and anticipation to the music of her splashing.

“Can I watch you?” he petitioned at the closed door.

“All right,” she agreed in a shy, proper bride’s voice.

“You’re very beautiful, Mrs. Euemer,” he said, standing in admiration above her.

He loved the way she replied: “I try my best, Mister Euemer.”

She was shaving her legs, a pleasant enough activity to observe, but there was something wrong. She was shaving her thighs. He was disturbed on two accounts. First of all, it struck him as unnatural. The women he had observed, and that included his sister and two loose ladies with whom he had had adventures, all the women he could remember, and he racked his brain, none of them had ever shaved above the knee. Secondly, and more important, he had come to love those orchards of tiny brown hairs on her thighs. And in as tactful a voice as possible, this is exactly what he told her. She did not try to disguise the contempt which his remark invoked in her.

“Try not to be disgusting, will you, dear,” she commanded through a hard mouth.

A bridegroom’s passion prevented him from recognizing the intensity of the rebuke. Nevertheless, he knew now that it had been the beginning of the end. Each night after that, before retiring, Mister Euemer listened to his wife splashing in the tub. The Ritual began to take longer and longer. Sometimes, Mister Euemer fell asleep waiting. Quite naturally, this had a bad effect on his day at the office.

“Do you have to do it every night?”

“You wouldn’t ask me that if you knew anything about how fast hair grows.”

She seemed almost hurt by the question. It did no good to remind her that he himself got by with shaving every second morning. A few days later, she included her arms in the Shaving Ritual. He tried to put his foot down.

“I’ve never heard of a woman shaving her arms. It’s a beautiful thing to see a hint of down on a woman’s arms. I remember how it went gold on the cruise.”

“Are you trying to make me sick?” she demanded.

Her limbs were smooth as porcelain, even if stroked the wrong way, but he got fewer and fewer opportunities to stroke them. She stayed in the bath as long as three hours, drawing the silver razor back and forth over her soaped limbs. One night, he could bear it no longer. He stormed into the bathroom and seized her wrist.

“This has gone too far,” he nearly shouted. “You’re my lawful wife and you’re coming to bed with me.”

She did not resist. She rose Venus-like from the water and allowed herself to be dried briskly. In the morning, she had her revenge. He awakened horrified to see her naked before the bathroom mirror. She was shaving her face, shaving that faint, faint moustache, which he loved so much, shaving the nearly invisible brown hairs of her chin, which he had charted on his passion’s map.

“Oh, my God! What are you doing?”

“You don’t want to be married to the Bearded Lady, do you?”

She grinned through the lather. He couldn’t find a voice to reply. He watched the razor wielded through the lather like a silver plough on a field of snow. So, the Shaving Ritual developed a morning chapter. And, in truth, Mister Euemer was not entirely disgusted with his wife’s bizarre performance each a.m. He accustomed himself to it. It titillated him somewhat. It aroused him. The Shaving Ritual was his secret, deep, delicious, evil, and dangerous, a Black Mass, which he recited to himself during the working day. It filled him with that sense of superiority, which he who had debauched himself felt toward the conventional and uninitiated. He wondered if Mrs. Euemer was not an extremely clever woman, planning these devices to keep him interested and excited. He asked her to keep the door open, so he could observe the rites. He learned to wait patiently for her fragrant body, smooth from the steel, warm from the bath. Of course, he was often disturbed. Stabs of guilt tore into the glimmering fabric of pleasure. Were they wrong, were they unhealthy? An ugly word like pervert crossed his mind. But all he had to do was recall her perfect, incredible body, so carefully attended, so lovingly prepared, and the fabric restored itself in all its brightness. He came to understand that, for him, passion was a delicate balance of attraction and revulsion. He congratulated himself on his unusual distinguished sensibility. But tonight, she had gone too far. She had shaved the downy triangle where once he had laid his burning cheek. She shaved that place and insisted that he do the same.

“Your armpits, too,” she added firmly.

She had upset the delicate balance. He protested vigorously. He would do no such thing. Even the suggestion was humiliating. He thought of eunuchs and castratos and appendicitis patients. Hair was the history-old mark of manhood. He didn’t care what she did with hers but, by Jesus, he was keeping his.

“Very well,” she replied, with that sound of contempt the pure have for the impure, whatever words they use. “Just refrain from handling me until you revise your opinions.”

She checked his inquiring hand by tugging the sheets and comforter around her body, armoring herself in a silk and linen cocoon. Mister Euemer, rhymes with tumor, lay on his side of the great white bed and, with all his poor heart, hated his sleeping wife who faintly snored a warm foot away. He wondered when she would discover the tiny hairs in her nostrils and how she would eliminate them. She wasn’t snoring now, how could he have thought she ever snored? He studied her body in the moonlight. Her bosom wasn’t formless at all. He watched her and imperceptibly, as the moon moves, his feelings moved from hatred into passion, from disgust and outrage into a desperate need for the enjoyment and possession of her. He peeled away the bedclothes. She awakened for a moment, he caught the glare in her eyes and she gathered the bedclothes angrily to repair the cocoon around herself. It was something more than instinct and less than thought that catapulted him out of the bed toward the bathroom. He threw off his pajamas, turned on the shower, grabbed his razor and pressurized lather, and stepped under the water.

“If that’s what she wants, what difference does it make to me?” he muttered to himself.

He aimed and squirted the thick cream over his body and began to apply the razor, his mind still lost with the sleeping woman in the next room. Then he saw naked Mrs. Euemer beside the sink. She was putting a new blade in her razor. She stepped into the shower with him and went to work under his left arm. Soon, they were laughing and kissing and singing. Both were covered with soap and they were drawing their razors over each other. In their joy, they were careless, and their bodies were soon bleeding from dozens of small painless slashes. They squirted and slashed and hugged and, when they finally turned off the water and sank to the gleaming bottom of the porcelain tub in a sexual embrace, they looked like crazy writhing barber poles.

“You are so beautiful,” she moaned, “and so good to me.”

He buried his face in her fragrant, dripping hair. The tiny cuts on his shoulders were beginning to sting, not that it mattered.