A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [12]
Music. Bennie was listening to music. The sisters were screaming, the tiny room imploding from their sound, and Bennie tried to find again the deep contentment he’d felt just a minute ago. But “hairball” had unsettled him. The room felt uncomfortably small. Bennie set down his cowbell and slipped the parking ticket from his pocket. He scribbled hairball in hopes of exorcising the memory. He took a slow inhale and rested his eyes on Chris, who was flailing the tambourine trying to match the sisters’ erratic tempo, and right away it happened again: taking his son for a haircut a couple of years ago, having his longtime barber, Stu, put down his scissors and pull Bennie aside. “There’s a problem with your son’s hair,” he’d said.
“A problem!”
Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint. “Lice,” the barber whispered. “They get it at school.”
“But he goes to private school!” Bennie had blurted. “In Crandale, New York!”
Chris’s eyes had gone wide with fear: “What is it, Daddy?” Other people were staring, and Bennie had felt responsible, with his own riotous head of hair, to the point where he sprayed OFF! in his armpits every morning to this day, and kept an extra can at the office—crazy! He knew it! Getting their coats while everyone watched, Bennie with a burning face; God, it hurt him to think of this now—hurt him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leaving gashes. He hid his face in his hands. He wanted to cover his ears, block out the cacophony of Stop/Go, but he concentrated on Sasha, just to his right, her sweet-bitter smell, and found himself remembering a girl he’d chased at a party when he first came to New York and was selling vinyl on the Lower East Side a hundred years ago, some delicious blonde—Abby, was it? In the course of keeping tabs on Abby, Bennie had done several lines of coke and been stricken with a severe instantaneous need to empty his bowels. He’d been relieving himself on the can in what must have been (although Bennie’s brain ached to recall this) a miasma of annihilating stink, when the unlockable bathroom door had jumped open, and there was Abby, staring down at him. There’d been a horrible, bottomless instant when their eyes met; then she’d shut the door.
Bennie had left the party with someone else—there was always someone else—and their night of fun, which he felt comfortable presuming, had erased the confrontation with Abby. But now it was back—oh, it was back, bringing waves of shame so immense they seemed to engulf whole parts of Bennie’s life and drag them away: achievements, successes, moments of pride, all of it razed to the point where there was nothing—he was nothing—a guy on a john looking up at the nauseated face of a woman he’d wanted to impress.
Bennie leaped from his stool, squashing the cowbell under one foot. Sweat stung his eyes. His hair engaged palpably with the ceiling shag.
“You okay?” Sasha asked, alarmed.
“I’m sorry,” Bennie panted, mopping his brow. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Back upstairs, he stood outside the front door, pulling fresh air into his lungs. The Stop/Go sisters and daughter clustered around him, apologizing for the airlessness of the recording studio, their father’s ongoing failure to vent it properly, reminding one another in spirited tones of the many times they themselves had grown faint, trying to work there.
“We can hum the tunes,” they said, and they did, in harmony, Olivia too, all of them standing not far from Bennie’s face, desperation quivering their smiles. A gray cat made a figure eight around Bennie’s shins, nudging him rapturously