Orphic Paris, Part XVI

“What do you write about?” the coiffeur asked. I was sitting in his shop near the Rue Cler, with a bright sheet tied around my neck. It was the end of a long rainy day, at the end of a week of rainy days. There were rivers in the gutters. When I was a boy, I sat on a kitchen stool out on the back porch, with a towel around my neck, as my father gave me a military crew cut. I had thick, curly brown hair then and squeezed my eyes shut at the sound of the clippers, but now, in middle age, I looked in the mirror with wide-open eyes at my changing face. “And how do you write?” the haircutter asked, tapping his black comb against polished scissors to get the loose hairs out. I was embarrassed to tell him evil, suffering, death, and, occasionally, paradise.