French Kiss Chapter 14 Hair

I nestled in Frédéric’s embrace at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, the cacophony of travelers’ voices, loudspeakers, and the squeaky wheels of dragged luggage fading as I tucked my head beneath his chin, willing his pulse to sync with mine, pretending I was breathing life into the cells he had dispatched against the cancer. He was thinner. The wig fit him like an inside-out fur cap without the ear flaps, more fur-hair than he ever had, more than his gaunt face needed. It was cut professionally, like some mirage of normalcy. His sooty eyelashes were gone, but the chemo and radiation had not completely erased his five o’clock shadow and caterpillar brows, now pencil lines above his doe eyes.

The October morning was unseasonably warm. Frédéric had undone the top three buttons of his starched white shirt and rolled up the sleeves. His ribs stuck out of his hairless chest, and his arms were icy white with blue veins snaking under the skin. But the prognosis was good. I wanted to hold him and tell him it would be all right. I breathed him in, a hint of Dior aftershave and something warm and slightly chemical, perhaps the magic elixir the doctors had zapped into his veins to kill the cancer. I wanted him to hold me and tell me it would be all right.

“Ma cherie,” he whispered. “I’m okay. A little skinny, but you could fatten me up with a pot or two of your mom’s beef stew. And having no hair on my body will be good for my tennis game.”

I tried but knew my eyes had widened and gotten away from me, flitting over his face to find a familiar perch when there was none. Once-plump cheeks and lips, dimpled chin, patrician nose, every angle sunk slightly, like a beach boulder in a rising tide. “I haven’t missed any time at my work,” he said.

I splayed my fingers through his hair, wondering if it would feel like a doll’s, carefully tied in knots beneath the surface, or animal fur soft as mink. It was human, shorn from someone else’s head to cover what Frédéric wished to hide. I pulled him to me for another kiss and asked if anyone at work had noticed his hair. “Only one person has asked,” he said, “but I just said I thought I’d try it. I don’t want anyone to know I’ve been ill. Not even my boss or my sister or my parents know. Only you and Berthe. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” I fibbed. “It makes you look very young with lots of hair. But I am positive I will love your bald head more because that’s the real you until it grows again. I wish you would tell your parents and Nadine, though. I’m sure they would be supportive, and then you would have more people who love you to rely on.” I knew it would be easy for Frédéric to fool them. His parents lived in Olivet and Nadine in Orleans, two hours away from Meaux. Although he talked to them at least a couple times a month, he didn’t visit often.

“My parents are retired and plan to travel. I don’t want them, or Nadine, to worry about me when I know I’ll be well when my treatment ends. Mutti especially would be quite upset and even cry. I told them I have a stomach malady and lost some weight. That’s all they need to know.”

“I understand, although I would be spilling my guts to my parents because I would feel they could fix things and comfort me like they did when I was a kid. And I’ll do my best to be your secret support.

“Spilling your guts? That sounds rather bloody.”

“It’s slang for telling someone everything you want to say. So, what does Berthe say about your wig?” I had been trying to relegate Berthe to an imaginary manilla folder of people I once wanted to know more about but had lost interest in. The kind of folder you come across years later and fleetingly wonder, what happened to those people? Occasionally I thought what it would be like to meet her, and if we would like each other, considering her arrangement with Frédéric to part ways when her husband retired, leaving him to find a new lover. I didn’t think she could blame him for beginning the search a little early and finding me.

Frédéric told me she was the mother of twin sons in their late thirties, one of whom had committed suicide in his teens. Although her wealthy husband provided a comfortable life, she had never worked, I felt sorry for her and understood her desire to be important to someone else, knowing her husband also had a mistress. I wondered which woman he would give up or if he would try to keep them both. I wondered why women always seem to measure our worth by men who want us or don’t.

“She didn’t like the idea of my bald head. She suggested I buy this wig before all my hair fell out so people wouldn’t know.”

“But what if you look totally handsome bald? Like Zidane, or Vin Diesel, or Dwayne Johnson?”

“Musclemen don’t need hair. Bald skinny guys look like skeletons,” he said.

“Well, I will think you look like a movie star.”

“You must humor me, Darling. I don’t wish to show you my head yet,” he said.

The gravity of our situation was not lost on me, our months apart and now cancer. He had never been shy about his hair, just beginning to thin and grey before the diagnosis. He often joked that the signs of age were on his outside, not in his heart, sometimes referring to himself as the boy in khaki and me as his girl in lace, like children playing dress-up. But I had just lost my mom and faced losing him, too. I didn’t want to think about that. “Making me wait to see will cost you one hundred kisses,” I said.

We reached the underground garage, the overhead and wall-mounted lights biting through the shadows, illuminating Frédéric as he loaded my heavy luggage into the Renault, three bags since I was staying until December 26. I watched for signs of breathlessness or weakness but there were none. “I have been resting so I am prepared to pay as many kisses as you wish to charge me,” he joked. He opened the passenger door and once more pulled me to him. He kissed like a well man, my early awkwardness finally vanishing beneath his touch.

We held hands during the drive to Meaux, Frédéric periodically lifting them to kiss my fingers. He told me he had lost some hearing in one ear, but the doctors believed with the treatment ending it would come back.

“And now that you’re with me, we’ll talk only of our future. Too much talk about maladies, too many hospital stays and doctors with opinions. Let’s be done with that,” he said.

I wanted to believe him; that he endured hearing loss and baldness after chemo and radiation in some cold, pine-scented room, and now he was almost through with it. But he looked fragile, a piece of porcelain that would break if I were careless. I had never been an integral part of someone’s life as he battled cancer. The stakes were high and although the doctors said he was doing well, they couldn’t know absolutely, since cancer is a wily challenge.

***

The apartment was unchanged, brightened by a huge bouquet of lavender roses next to my side of the king-sized bed, covered with a straw-colored comforter, like a tiny island floating in the great expanse of sea-blue carpeting. I liked the idea of being stranded on this island with him; that maybe we could live there forever and pretend the bigger world did not exist. A package wrapped in gilt paper sat on the pile of neatly ordered pillows, fluffed in their plain, masculine cases. I had never received lavender roses. “Do you know what they mean?” Frédéric asked. I shook my head and said I only knew red ones signified romance. “They mean I adore you and when you first came to me it was le coup de foudre. Love at first sight.”

I didn’t want to say it before I was ready. Long years of emotional bankruptcy had made me weary and wary. I didn’t quite trust myself to love him, although by now I knew I did. I looked out the big window over the cobblestone courtyard still brightly lit from the late sun. The window boxes were filled with early fall geraniums. Someone had added a metal statue of a horse pulling a cart filled with pots of live orange and copper blooms I didn’t recognize. I turned and ran into his arms. “Me too,” I said.

“Now open your present.”

I ripped the paper and held a La Perla silk chiffon lounging gown in front of me, bias-cut and leopard-printed to my toes. Frédéric had been attentive enough to know I would love it. I wanted a bath and to wear it all evening; during our candlelit dinner of smoked salmon and salad, while we cuddled on the sofa until he shepherded me to the island bed, undressed me, and held me naked against him.

We did not take the time to turn down the comforter, stranded lovers on our little island, the blue sea dimly lit by a milky half-moon and spidery stars. I could barely see the courtyard horse or Frédéric in the wig, holding me in his sleep as if his very life depended on it. The horse reminded me that I saw Frédéric as my fairy tale knight bearing gifts and flowers because I wanted to be rescued from all my stupid choices: bad marriages, a sleazy job out of law school, and lonely years ahead clucking and flapping over my turkey neck and bat wings.

Wasn’t that my pattern, like many women, trying to find a man to validate me? My first husband insisted on making choices for me that I rejected: a part-time job selling stockings at JC Penney until he determined I should quit to raise the houseful of children I told him I didn’t want. My second marriage to a sexy firefighter lasted until he made sure I knew his affection would be tied to how good I looked, and a woman in her thirties had to try extra hard. I left him after he socked me in the eye. My third husband, the drunken sot, let me know the weight I gained when I turned forty was not attractive, with no mention about how unattractive his drunken diarrhea was to me. Frédéric had put no conditions on our relationship. He asked only that I let him love me. I suddenly realized I was just as capable of rescuing him as I hoped he would rescue me. I knew I wasn’t his fling, a lark, a half-person without a man to say I mattered. He needed me, too.

For five days, he did not remove his wig in front of me. When the smell of coffee woke me in the morning, he was wearing it. When we fell asleep in each other’s arms, he was wearing it. When we made love, he was wearing it. Once in the night I awoke to find him wearing a dark knit cap, and I assumed the night breeze drifting through the open window had chilled his bald head. The wig I learned topped a Styrofoam bust on a shelf in his study.

“Honeybee, if you come to me, I’ll show you something,” he called to the kitchen one morning as I doctored my coffee with goat’s milk and maple syrup. I padded barefoot to his study where, bewigged, he was clicking through the pictures on his computer. I hugged him from behind. He asked if I would like to see a picture of his hairless head. Click, click, he surfed through the picture directory. And then he stopped. He had posed without his glasses, using the delayed timer on his camera, the familiar bemused look short of a smile, his head shiny and smooth.

“Grasshopper!” I blurted. I got a quizzical look. I told him he looked just like David Carradine in “Kung Fu,” a television show from my childhood. Carradine’s character, a peaceful monk in America’s Old West who often had to resort to fighting, had been nicknamed Grasshopper. “You see, I knew you would look like a movie star,” I said.

“I watched that show too, dubbed for French. The name Grasshopper was translated to Little Beetle,” Frédéric said. “But you can call me Ringo.” We finally laughed at the absurdity of hair and cancer and fragile expectations. That night, he still slept wearing the wig.

Silence invaded my dreams the next morning, finally startling me awake when I realized the shower was not running, the radio was not talking, and the coffee was not perking. Frédéric’s side of the bed was still warm but empty. “Darling?” I called. He did not answer. I slipped the leopard gown over my head and prowled the hall in search of him, the smell of burning candles growing stronger. His prognosis was good, but what if? I found him prone on the living room floor. He had kneeled and fallen forward in a downward dog yoga pose. He wore a bedsheet he had draped over his shoulders and secured with a gold curtain sash in a makeshift toga. The chrome end table was set before him, four vanilla-scented candles flickering, a hand-lettered placard standing in front of that:

GRASSHOPPER WORSHIPS AT THE TEMPLE OF HIS GODDESS LACY

He resumed a Lotus position and then rose to take me in his arms. “Je t’aime,” he said. “Everything will be all right.”

I rubbed his bald head for luck. “I love you, too. Everything will be all right.”