I had decided to get a haircut. Naturally – at the hair salon of my former colleague Maya, who was also the best woman at my wedding. After the haircut we went to the bistro nearby, where we ordered a beer and some chips each and got carried away with memories and funny stories from work. At one point I made her laugh till she cried and, trying to fix her smudged eyes with her hands, she said:
“You idiot! As if it weren’t enough that I put my coil in today because of you, and look what you’ve done to me – I must look like a clown to you!”
It was as if an alarm bell started ringing in my head after her words that she had put her coil in today because of me.
Some thirty years ago I had hoped for something more with her, but she had a boyfriend doing his military service and she had made it clear to me that I didn’t stand a chance. The two of them got married, and quite a while later they were best man and best woman at my wedding to my new wife. I liked Maya, but we had been just friends for so many years that it seemed downright absurd to me that she should be offering me sex this way, and only now at that – I was already 64, and she over 55. The questions in my head came thick and fast:
– Would I be able to see her as a lover?
– How could I “go behind the back” of her husband, who is also a friend of mine? Had he perhaps hurt her somehow, and she wanted to get back at him through me?
– And even if I went for it, would I be up to the job as a man?
I remembered her as rather measured and tolerant. True, we hadn’t seen each other for at least the last five years, but could she have gone through such a metamorphosis? I fixed my eyes on the table. She took out a little mirror and began fixing her make-up. After a while I plucked up the courage to question her a bit, to get my bearings and also to play for time:
“How are things with your husband?”
“So-so. He’s really deflated since he retired and he isn’t what he used to be. We used to go to the mountains, to the cinema and the theatre, and now – nowhere. He hardly goes out, he stares at his laptop all day and smokes.”
“And you’re trying to adapt?”
“Not very successfully. His apathy gets on my nerves.”
“He’ll pull himself together. It’s all a matter of time.”
“To be honest, I can barely stand him like this any more.”
My suspicions were being confirmed, but I still wasn’t entirely clear:
“Hang on, but what do you need a coil for?”
“What, you want me to go around without my coil?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe hair salons now offered sex in some little back room too. No wonder, given today’s general moral collapse. If this had happened to me with some other woman, I wouldn’t have been all that surprised, but Maya was something very different and unconventional. I remembered that at work she had sometimes surprised us by not knowing things everyone knew, and we, her colleagues, had great fun “enlightening her”. Perhaps she, being the way she was – “above it all” – thought she still needed to protect herself? I decided it would be good to inform her on the matter, just in case.
“You’re getting on a bit, you know, and you don’t need a coil any more.”
“So I should stop caring about how I look?”
“You look very good.”
“Thank you, but the coil helps us women feel calmer and more confident. Are you telling me to sit at home and turn into an old granny? Thanks, but I still want to live, even more than before!”
That last bit completely confirmed my suspicions, but it had also sounded a little rude. Perhaps she was hinting that today she had wasted her time on me, the old granny. Even so, I decided at least to finish my lecture:
“Maya dear, believe me, you have to accept the fact, even if it’s hard for you, that you really don’t need a coil any more!”
“So in your opinion my lashes are attractive and completely natural? That may be true for your wife, but not for me!”
Now this I hadn’t understood at all. What did lashes and my wife have to do with anything? I was considering a pretext to leave – an important meeting, or that I was feeling unwell.
“Why are you looking like that, as if you’d been poisoned?”
“And how would you look in my place?”
“You mean you’re embarrassed to sit next to a woman with smudged make-up?”
“No, you’re just surprising me and I need time to take it all in.”
“All right, all right, I’ll finish tidying myself up in a minute! I didn’t know you had standards for the looks of the ladies sitting next to you in a café.”
“I’m not the one with the standards!”
“You’re very strange today! First you make me cry with laughter, then you sit there silent as a post. Then you start interrogating me and, out of the blue, you explain to me that the menopause is practically an illness. And finally you declare that I’m the one with standards! I’m starting to worry about you! Are you feeling unwell?”
Good thing I didn’t seize on that line and leave.
“No, I’m fine, but today you told me something I really hadn’t expected and I still don’t know how to react.”
“What’s so unexpected about what I said? You men love making out you’re much more complicated. I can’t work out what’s going on in your head, why you’re beating about the bush so much, as if we hadn’t known each other for ages.”
Women always put their questions point-blank. For them things are black or white, yes or no. I said nothing. There was no way I could explain everything that had gone through my head, and I carried on silently poking at my chips, and she suggested:
“All right then, put up with me like this a little longer! I can’t go back to work looking like this. And in the meantime, why don’t you finally spit it out!”
I struggled to make sense of it all, but I couldn’t. At one point, perhaps because of the awkward silence, she said slowly and indignantly:
“This coil,” she pointed at the thing she was putting the mascara on her lashes with, “is almost finished, and it costs a whole 11 leva, can you imagine? My last one was 6 leva and lasted a lot longer!”
I took quite a while to digest what I had just heard, and then I burst out laughing uncontrollably:
“God, how thick we men are sometimes!”
“What’s got into you now? I don’t find your joke that men are thick, but only sometimes, funny at all. Don’t you dare blurt out that your sometimes is when you see me! Still, your laugh itself is very contagious. If you’re cackling like that just to smudge my lashes and make-up again, I’ll take you to the nearest shop to buy me a new coil, but the old brand! And one for your wife too. Now let me “enlighten you”, but keep it between us: her lashes need a coil too by now, even though she may still be stubbornly refusing. You men think you’re cleverer, but if you ask me, that’s only sometimes, and when it comes to women you’re stupid a lot more often than you think!”
