He takes his martini into the bathroom. He shaves. It is, he tells himself, one of those days when his face seems to be aging well. The wrinkles around his eyes make it look as if he laughs a lot. His jaw has become stronger over the years, he thinks. His hairline has receded suddenly, in the last year or so, after having held steady for a decade and a half, following an early recession in his twenties, but it doesn’t look so bad today, and he’s noticed that many men younger than he are losing their hair more quickly. Maybe it’s because they use blow dryers. He brushes his teeth with his rotary electric toothbrush, a gadget that claims to remove more than ninety percent of his dental plaque. He rinses his mouth with hydrogen peroxide; several months ago, an article about trends in cosmetic dentistry convinced him that peroxide might bleach his yellowing teeth. He rinses a couple of times, and then inspects his teeth in the mirror. He holds a scale to them, a narrow plastic card with gradations of color from white to brown printed on it. Are his teeth getting whiter? He can’t be sure, but he thinks that they might be, and he’s heartened by the thought that he’s doing something to reverse the yellowing process, fighting it, not just lying there and taking it. He undresses and places his clothes in piles for the laundry, the dry cleaner, his own washing. He inspects his body in the mirror. He’s secretly proud of his middle-aged body; he works at maintaining it at a health club, Back Bay Bodies, three mornings a week, even though he feels like an old man there, especially when one of the women hopping about in the aerobics room catches him watching her — but when he notices the globular middles and fleshy necks of men his age, he feels all right. Then I think I’m not doing so bad. Not so bad at all. He’s annoyed that hair has started growing on his back, though. It’s really getting thick. Well, not that thick, but thick enough so it’s noticeable. When he was a boy, the hair on the backs of old men disgusted him more than any other sign of aging. He was sure it would never happen to him. But I secretly feared that it would. I’m not sure how bad it is, really. I’m no judge. I try to tell myself that it isn’t as bad as I think. He has thought of going somewhere to have his back waxed. One of those places where women get their legs waxed. Or bikini waxings. Liz used to get that done. Probably still does. The woman making the sand castle, though. She didn’t. That golden hair. I can see it gleaming. The little droplets of oil on her hair, suntan oil. Or water. Salt. The sea-salt taste of her if I licked her there. Sure. He once checked the Yellow Pages for hair-removal salons and found three right in his area. He walked past each one of them but didn’t have the nerve to go in. If Liz comes back, she might be willing to go with me. How old were those men, the men with hair on their backs that I saw as a kid? I wonder. How old did I think was old then? He showers. He dries himself. He rubs styling gel into his hair. He’s not really sure whether he likes what it does to his hair or not. It seems to stiffen it, and it makes him feel affected, but it straightens those unruly white hairs, and that’s what he was after when he began using it. He sits on the toilet seat and cleans his toenails. He examines his penis for hairs. They began growing in a year or so ago. That was when I noticed them, anyway. When I started using condoms. The hairs got stuck when I was rolling the thing off. Not really painful, but they disgusted me. A hairy penis. It seemed bestial. He began plucking them. Now he checks for them after every shower.
[to be continued]
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🎧 530: He takes . . .