Gordon Waskiewicz

Ernesto Villagrán's shop smells like steam and chalk dust, and you have been standing in it for forty seconds when you decide you are done with him.

It is not the shop's fault. The tailoring is fine work, better than fine — his hands know a hem the way other men know their own names, and there had been a strange dignity in that, the first hundred times you wore a man who was good at something with his fingers. But it is eleven at night in whatever timezone this body keeps and it is Monday morning here and you have been him less than a minute and already you can feel the whole shape of the life waiting to close around you: the shop, the small apartment above it, the sister who calls on Sundays, the knee that aches climbing the one flight of stairs. Fifty-six years old and careful with money and careful with his back and careful, always, about being touched, about closeness, in a way that makes his skin feel like a room with the shades drawn. You spun for this man last night wanting quiet after something loud, and quiet is exactly what he gave you, and now the quiet itself is the thing you cannot stand another hour of.

So before the pins are even threaded you reach for the phone that is not your phone, in the pocket that is not your pocket, and you open vessel.cards, and you spin.

—

The razor is already moving when you land, up the jaw, against the grain, and your hand — his hand — does not stop at the corner of the mouth the way it always does. It just keeps going, smooth, unbothered, foam parting clean under the blade, and somewhere underneath you a whole lifetime of hesitating at that exact spot goes past unclaimed, like a stair he always creaks skipped in the dark.

Steam fogs the mirror at the edges. Fluorescent light, too white, buzzing faintly above the medicine cabinet. Half his face is still lathered, half is bare and pink and freckled even here, even on skin that rarely sees full sun, a scatter of them across the nose and both cheeks like something spilled and never quite wiped away. The bathroom is small, tiled in a green going out of fashion twenty years ago, a shower curtain with a frayed hem, a toothbrush cup with two brushes in it.

Two.

The thought arrives before the fact does, the way they always do — feeling first, information second. A small ordinary ache, the kind you stop noticing after enough years that noticing it again nearly winds you.

The razor. Your hand on it is not smooth — it's a disposable, cheap, the kind that comes six to a bag from the drugstore because he never got used to justifying the good ones for himself — and holding it, something opens. A bathroom on a different, colder morning, decades back, teaching himself to shave in a mirror not much bigger than a shaving mirror in his childhood house, his father's voice from the hallway telling him he was doing it wrong, going too fast, and doing it too fast now anyway out of something like spite, and cutting himself, and the small triumph of it healing by dinner and nobody ever knowing.

The countertop under your other hand — cold laminate, a hairline crack near the faucet he keeps meaning to have someone look at — gives you the apartment whole: the porch two floors up where he takes his coffee most mornings when the weather allows, streetcar bell somewhere below and glass towers holding the winter light at a distance, close enough to see, far enough not to touch. Slush on Bathurst. A city he has lived in his entire life and never once thought of as remarkable, which is its own kind of love.

The plain gold band on your left hand is warm from his skin and it gives you the most, all at once, too much to take in one motion — a wedding thirty-one years old now, a wife whose name arrives like a held breath, Denise, the smell of her hair, arguments about nothing that dissolved themselves in a day, decades of Tuesday dinners and a marriage that simply worked, unglamorously, the way a well-made drawer works, sliding shut every night without complaint. No children — a decision made early and never revisited aloud, though you feel, distantly, an old grief folded so many times it has gone small and soft as cloth. And under that, further down, a name you were not looking for: Marianne, an ex from before Denise, a summer in his twenties that he has kept in a drawer of his own for thirty years, taken out sometimes, alone, put back before anyone asks what he's holding.

The t-shirt against your back, thin and often-washed, gives you this morning specifically — waking early out of habit though there's no job to wake for anymore, retirement eight months old and still fitting strangely, like a coat bought a size too big on the theory he'd grow into it. Pulling the shirt over his head one-armed, the other hand already reaching for the toothpick tin on the shelf by the sink out of a reflex older than the diabetes diagnosis that made him quit sugar in his coffee — he chews the toothpicks instead now, has for years, jaw working at nothing while he reads the paper, a habit Denise teases him about and secretly likes.

The body under all of it: fifty-seven, average through the middle in the way of a man who walks but doesn't run anymore, a mild permanent stiffness low in the back from thirty years bent over a workbench doing something with his hands you haven't found yet, blood sugar he watches now with the mild, resigned vigilance of a man checking weather he can't change. Strong forearms still. Steady hands — steadier than yours ever were, in whatever body was originally yours, back before there was a wheel to make the question meaningless.

The razor finishes the job. Water runs. He rinses his face — your face — and does not know, will never know, that anything at all took the last four inches of it away from him.

—

You look down at the hand still holding the razor, foam-flecked, the wedding band catching the bathroom light, and you turn it over slowly, like you're checking it for a manufacturer's mark.

Then you lift your eyes to the mirror instead of the sink, straight into it, straight into where a camera would be if there were one, and you say, quiet, almost amused, like a man surprising himself:

"Well — hello."