Red Running Shoes - 13. Clean Cut

I smelled coffee. Hmm…and somebody was running his fingers through my hair. "Ren…"

"Um..."

"Ren!" I sat up with a start only to be knocked against the head by something sharp and solid. "Ouch!"

"Fuck!"

"What the hell!" Rubbing my aching temple, I looked around and found Rick lying on the floor beside my bed. "What are you doing down there, looking for my cum rag or what?"

"Ha ha fucking ha….” Rick touched his chin tentatively and hissed. “I was trying to wake you lovingly, but all you can think of is fucking Ren and then you hit me with this iron head of yours."

"You tried to wake me lovingly?” I rubbed my aching forehead. “Don’t do that ever again. Say something like 'Good morning my idiot cousin, did you have a nice bad dream? Where you were cheated on and died of AIDS, because you trusted the wrong man again?' Then I won’t mistake you for Ren, although I might knock you on the head anyway."

"All right, all right, I've earned that.” Rick ducked his head. “Look, I'm sorry, okay? When I learned you slept with that cheating asshole without protection I… well, got scared.” He waved his hands about. “You know me. I can't keep my temper in check when I’m upset.” He looked at me. “I wasn’t saying that right. I-I thought of Leandro and it was as if a movie was running in my head. I was so afraid you might have…well, caught something like he did. I—” Then he buried his face in his hands. “I’m glad you listened to Ivan and didn’t send him away.”

Seeing Rick like this I couldn’t be angry with him any longer. "Hmm… I understand. Okay? I know you were concerned.” I reached for the coffee and spooned sugar into the cup. I needed to have something in my hands. “I don't believe Ren ever slept with Eric without protection. He knows what Eric does in those bars—” Rick’s head snapped up. I knew what he was about to say and shook my head. “But on the off-chance he did it anyway - I don't know, in the heat of the moment or whatever - I can see why you want me to get tested. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have slept with him without a condom.” I pointed the spoon at him. “But, next time, I don’t want to be lectured by pompous bitchy assholes. It just triggers something evil in me…"

Rick eyed me cautiously. "So, am I forgiven?"

"Hmm..."

"Look, I even brought you coffee and cornetti con cioccolata. No vanilla for you anymore I presume?"

"You’re trying to bribe me."

"Uh-huh."

I took one of those deliciously smelling cornetti, bit into the chocolaty goodness and groaned. "It worked. This time. You are forgiven."

"Thank God."

I pointed at his red chin. "Maybe you should put some ice on it; it's already starting to swell. Oh, and would you please explain to Matteo how it happened? I don't want to face his wrath because I knocked his husband out. We're not exactly in the same weight class."

"Will do.” Rick finally got up from my bed. “Come down to the kitchen when you're ready. Okay?"

Half an hour later, I found Matteo sitting alone at the kitchen table, scribbling something into his tattered recipe book. He looked up when he heard me and grinned. "Hey Rocky. I understand you knocked my husband out of your bed this morning. Did he molest you again or was he only throwing insults at you as usual?"

"More like molesting me. Do you know he actually tried to wake me lovingly to make up for yesterday? I was so shocked I sat up with a start and my head hit his chin. That's my specialty: Bad luck. Bad romance. Where is Rick by the way?" I pulled a chair out and slumped into it.

"In his office, holding an ice pack to his chin and his ego.” Matteo closed his book. “Did we run out of towels?”

“Huh? Why?”

“You're dripping water all over my floor.” He threw one of the kitchen towels at me. “Here, wrap that around your hair.”

“Sorry.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Sooo, do you feel like talking?"

I shrugged. "Uhm … sure. Why not?"

"Do you want something to drink, freshly squeezed o.j. from our own oranges? Another coffee perhaps?"

"O.j. would be nice."

Matteo poured me a glass from the fridge and put it on the table in front of me. "There you go."

I sipped at my juice and Matteo fidgeted with his pen. The silence slowly became unnerving, until he finally said, "I have some questions.”

“Okay.”

Okay?

“I don’t mean to offend you, I just want to understand what happened some more.”

Offend me?

I nodded slowly. “Sure.”

“Did you ever feel that there was something ‘off’ with Ren?"

"No?"

"You were totally unprepared for what happened? No funny gut feelings? You’d never thought there might be someone else?”

I frowned. “No.”

“No strange phone calls, which he cut short or continued in another room? Appointments at unusual hours, weekend business trips where you couldn't reach him at night?”

I started to shake my head again then I remembered that he had indeed left the room once… "Well there was this one time. He left the room for a phone call while we were watching a game…but you already know this. You read the journal.”

“Hmm… Nothing else? No unusual scents? Did he maybe come home freshly showered, wearing different clothes than he had in the morning?"

I tightened my hands around the glass. “No! Never. Why the fuck are you asking me all these things? To demonstrate what a gullible idiot I've been, or what?" I got up from my chair. I really felt like an idiot. There must have been obvious signs, only I hadn’t seen them.

"No Jonah, of course not, on the contrary actually. Usually you have such a good sense of people. For example, the other night when you wanted to demonstrate to Rick just how slutty you could be? You knew that flighty Nando was the right guy for that. Or that Eric wasn't good for Chris. That’s how I wonder you never sensed anything wrong with Ren. One might think, you should have noticed something, at least in hindsight. But nothing-–"

I went over to the window and watched a barn swallow darting around the trees. "Well, people are always saying love is blind…."

"Maybe. Ren must have been confident that he would win you over eventually if he inked a dove on his neck when you still hated him. I mean that is permanent, and it hurts to get it done. You would think nobody does something like this lightly. Under other circumstances, I would even say he made quite the statement here."

"Perhaps it was one of these semi-permanent tattoos, you know, which fade away after half-a-year or so." I was grasping at straws. I knew that.

"Did it fade away? You were together for longer than half-a-year. Right?"

"Maybe he got it re-done." What was I grasping at now?

"Well, I've never heard of that, but maybe you're right. I can’t get the picture out of my head though. He chained the dove, aka you, to himself; isn't that screaming ‘possessive’? Yet, he cheated on you. He even admitted flat out that it was planned between him and Eric and not a one-time event. Still, I don’t get this. There are some severe inconsistencies and contradictions here, some things just don’t add up. There may be more behind this. If only you had talked to him after—"

I almost had a panic attack just thinking of talking to Ren. "I could never have done that!" He would have laughed right in my face.

I’m a coward.

"Yes, yes I know that. It wasn't meant as an accusation. It's simply a missed opportunity to – I don’t know - understand the whole situation better. You were incapable of speaking with him at that time. I understand that.” Matteo came over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, let's go outside; I’m going to prepare the vegetables for the minestrone you like so much and you can let your hair dry in the sun."

"All right. I'll get my brush and comb, and then I'll come into the garden."

We sat at the old wooden table under the olive trees; it was the same place I wrote the last chapter of my journal. Matteo cut his vegetables and I tried to disentangle my fucking too-long hair.

"You have wonderful hair. Not many could grow it out so long. It must have been years since you last cut it."

I stared in the distance, running a finger over the teeth of the comb. It made a funny noise. "Eric loved to bury his hands in my hair when I er…, yeah, gave him head or when my hair caressed him when we made love. Ren loved my hair too. Some evenings he sat behind me, carefully disentangling all the knots and then buried his face in it, saying he loved the feeling and the smell of it. Vanilla and me. Funny, huh? Both of them seemed to kinda have a hair fetish or something."

Matteo quietly cut carrots, snap, snap, snap, and I tried to brush out the last knots from my hair, so I could braid it.

"Jonah, I know you're sad and upset right now. Maybe you even lost your faith in ever finding the one you want to live with the rest of your life, or at least a large part of your life. I do know exactly how you feel, because I was lost once myself, until I made a clean cut. And then I found your cousin in my old orange grove. You need to do the same, only then will you be able to move on. There is no point in bemoaning your past; it’s done. You can’t change what happened.” He winked. “And when you least expect it, you’ll be standing in front of your man, your love, in your equivalent of my orange grove."

"Clean cut, huh?" Without even thinking long, I grabbed one of Matteo's extremely sharp knives and cut my freshly braided hair directly below the tie.

"Jonah! What the...hahaha, I can't believe it! That's so Rick! Making rash decisions is a family trait, eh?” He shook his head. “He just cut his hair with my veggie knife…." After taking the knife out of my hand, he checked its sharpness.

I held the braid up and watched the hair tie falling to the ground. I had nicked it with the knife. Then I shook my head. It felt so light when the wind blew through the unconstrained hair. "And? How do I look?"

"Like a plucked chicken to be honest. I better go and call Tony to ask him if he has time for an emergency cut. He is my hairdresser.” He grinned. “Sandro'll have a cow, though. Finally you agreed to let him take pictures, and then you cut the hair he's been talking about for days."

Five minutes later Matteo came back and explained to me how to get to Tony’s salon. Apparently, Matteo had persuaded him to sacrifice his lunch break for me. I crammed what was left of my hair under Sandro's hat and hoped I didn’t meet anyone I knew on the way, especially Sandro.

What had I done?

I pushed the door open to Tony’s Barber Shop and a man whose head barely reached my shoulders shrieked, "Oh my God, you must be the emergency Matteo told me about.” He circled me like a vulture eyeing its pray. “Usually I only see something like this when a three-year-old plays hairdresser with her five-year-old brother…"

Great! Suddenly embarrassed, I ducked my head. "Yeah, what can I say…it was an act of liberation, sort of…"

"An act of liberation? What are you, fifteen? Were you trying to prove to someone that from now on you’ll live a self-determined life?"

Ouch!

The guy was starting to annoy me. "Look, can you please just give me a decent haircut and otherwise keep your mouth shut about my mental age?"

Tony raised an eyebrow. "No problem. Sandro will kill me if his pretty model doesn’t look his best.”

“What? How do you know about that?”

“Matteo told me.” He narrowed his eyes. “So…what about we make it real short on the sides and a little longer on top? This will bring out your—"

"Yes, yes do whatever you want. I really don't care as long as it's not too stylish and I have to put tons of product on it to look halfway decent."

Muttering to himself something about 'ungrateful' and 'ignorant' Tony washed my hair, and then combed it none too gently. Wielding his scissors like foils, he snipped and cut and danced around me, for what seemed like hours. When he finally grabbed the blow drier, I was more than relieved. Despite my protest, he applied some hair gel.

"All done."

I opened my eyes and carefully looked at myself in the mirror. "Oh…"

Tony had cut my hair really short but left some bangs falling over my eyes, looking just a little choppy. I looked different. Not bad, but different.

"You can either let the bangs fall over your eyes or," and with that he grabbed them and combed them out of my face, "you can apply some more gel and wear it this way. I'd prefer the latter because this shows your face and your eyes better. Your eye color is really unusual."

"Uhm … thanks, Tony.” I looked at myself in the mirror again. “You actually managed to transform my self-induced lawnmower style into something decent. It's nothing like my former hairstyle. I think I need a little time to get used to it."

"No problem. Tell Matteo I said hi and he owes me a dinner."

"He bribed you with a free dinner to get me an emergency appointment?"

"Oh yes, he did, and I'm planning to take him at his word."

"All right, I'll tell him. Anything special you want?"

"He knows exactly what I want…"

"Oh? Well, that sounds mysterious. I'll see you soon then. And, Tony, thank you again."

He waved me out of the door. "Yeah, yeah, you're welcome."

Back at the restaurant, Sandro jumped from a chair as soon as I opened the door.

"Jonah! Oh my God, what did you do? Matteo just told me… How could you—” He stopped right in front of me. “Wow! You're one of those guys who can do whatever they want with their hair and it always looks good, huh? Matteo! Rick! He’s back!"

"Sheesh Sandro, don't make such a fuss about it. It’s just a haircut."

Rick came in first. "Aww, Matteo look, my little cousin became a man."

"What?”

Matteo slapped Rick upside his head. "Really, Rick?” He rolled his eyes. “What he probably meant was, you’re looking older as in more mature.” Matteo held both his hands up. "This is good, Jonah."

Then Sandro took the hat out of my hands that I'd been holding the whole time and put it on my head. He adjusted it a few times and finally said, "You know what? This looks even better than before. It's still your hat, no, it's even more your hat with your hair like that. Perfect. I can't wait to have you over at my studio. When can we start? Tomorrow?"

I looked at Matteo. "Um…sure, if Matteo doesn't need me in the kitchen, why not."

"Matteo?"

Matteo waved his hand. "No, no, you can have him, no problem."

"Okay, it's settled then. Tomorrow at 10 at my shop. And don't forget to bring your glasses and your laptop."

"I won't."

"Gotta go. When Matteo told me what you did, I came over as fast as I could. I don't even know if I closed the door properly."

Watching Sandro hurry out of the door I asked Matteo, "You called him just to tell him I cut my hair?"

"…with my veggie knife, yes I did, I just couldn't resist." Matteo grinned. "His favorite model may have blemished himself by cutting off his greatest asset, what a disaster.” He wiped imaginary sweat off his forehead. “Well, obviously there is more to you than your hair and everyone can finally see that now."

"Well, um … thank you? Ahem …Something I should do?"

"Yeah, you could collect your dirty clothes, Marisa is here; she does the laundry for us. She can do yours too, if you want.”

"Oh, great, I'll bring it down right away." Happy to have a reason to get away from them, I ran upstairs, grabbed my laundry bag, and dumped everything on the floor. I needed to check for stuff I might have forgotten in one of the pockets. Last time I forgot a pencil and ruined my favorite shirt.

I reached for a pair of jeans and I heard something metallic falling on the floor. "Shit." Whatever it was, it rolled right under the bed, great. I got down on my knees, and finally lay flat on my belly, fumbling around in the dark to find whatever it was in the damn pocket.

Fuck! Ren's ring.

My first impulse was to throw it through the open window, like I had wanted to do back in the cab on my way to the airport.

Instead, I sat on the floor of my bedroom, staring at the ring in my hand with watery eyes. I don't know how long I'd been sitting there, when I heard Matteo yelling about Marisa needing my laundry now or never.

Where to put the ring?

I untied the leather tape around my neck, pulled it through the ring, and tied it around my neck again. I would think about what to do with it later. I needed to hurry and give Marisa my dirty clothes before she started the laundry without them.

Walking back through the kitchen, my eyes fell on the calendar. I froze. August third.

Ren's birthday.

This had to be a bad joke. The day I cut my hair, the day I found his ring again, and it’s his fucking birthday?

Was he going to celebrate with Eric? Maybe at the same restaurant I saw them that evening? Why was I even wondering? It didn’t concern me anymore. Right?

Wrong. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, staring at the calendar, I pictured them together and the aching emptiness was back. Was that even possible? Could emptiness ache? What an idiotic question! Tears welled up in my eyes, and I needed to get out of there.

"Matteo? Matteo!"

"Yeah?"

"Can I borrow your bike," I asked with a choked up voice.

He came into the kitchen with the keys. "Sure. What happened?"

I grabbed the keys out of his hand and stormed out of the house. "Later!"

I drove around for what seemed like hours, until I found myself in the historical center of Agrigento in front of the Cathedral of San Gerlando. After parking the bike, I slowly climbed the grand staircase.

Wow!

The cathedral was built on the edge of a cliff. From the terrace, I had a perfect view of the surrounding bare and open landscape of Sicily. I stood there until the light hurt my eyes and then I entered the church.

In the dark, cool, and quiet space, I felt myself slowly calming down. Churches always have that effect on me, at least when they're not some overcrowded touristy attraction.

I sat down in a pew near the entrance beside the baptistery and stared at the altar without really seeing it. And then the waterworks started again.

It hurt, it still fucking hurt. Fuck! I missed him; God I so fucking missed him. He cheated on me, he betrayed me, lead me on and here I was, sitting in a church, thousands of miles away, feeling as if a vital organ had been ripped out of my insides.

I don't know how long I’d been sitting there; but finally the constricting feeling in my chest was gone. My eyes still stung, my face was still wet from the tears, and my head ached, but somehow I was feeling better.

When I was about to leave San Gerlando, I remembered something I had read in a travel guide.

'A whisper below the entrance can be heard perfectly from the apse! The faithful would perhaps be wise to be careful when and where they make confession!'

Standing below the entrance, I touched Ren's ring and whispered "Goodbye, love. … and happy birthday."

Walking down the stairs, I put the helmet over my new short hair and I felt relieved, free.

I had to move on, make a clean cut…