Marlow in the Mirror

[from THE LAST ACT OF YESTERDAY]

I knocked on the guest room door, and hearing nothing, opened it and stepped inside the room.  He was standing in front of the mirror with his back to me.  What caught my eye now was not his boots, but the back of his head.  For the first time since I had met him, he was wearing neither his hat nor his scarf.  He was completely bald.

“Is that all?” I thought.  “Lots of people are bald.”

I said, simply, “Marlow.”

He did not move.

I looked more closely and saw, at last, a large, bright bruise from his ear to the back of his neck.

“They hit you!”  I must have taken a step toward him.

“Stay where you are.”

“But you could have a concussion.” 

“Have you ever looked at your own face, Melanie?”

Something in his voice pinned me where I stood, close enough to reach out and touch him.

“Really looked at it closely,” he said.

“I think so,” I answered, confused.

“Did you know, little girl, that the human body is divided down the middle from top to bottom by an invisible line?  A meridian.  And that there are differences between one side and the other?  Little differences, unimportant differences, mostly, until you go to the shoe store to buy a pair of shoes and find out that one foot, usually the right foot, is bigger than the other, so the salesman always has you try on the right shoe first because if the right shoe fits, then the left shoe will be fine.  Most people do things with their right hands, though some are left-handed, to be sure, but we have two hands that are nearly but not exactly alike in other ways.”

“I can open bottles better with my left hand, but I write with my right,” I offered, not sure that I quite understood what he meant, my voice no more than a whisper.

“That’s because of the direction that bottle tops turn.  You get better leverage with your left thumb on top.”

“Oh.”

“But our faces, Melanie.  What about your face?  Did you know that a normal face has the same kind of differences between one side and another?”

“No.”

“Well, it does, but the differences are smaller, harder to see.  You don’t wear shoes on your face and you don’t open bottles with it so it’s harder to tell, but a normal face has lots of differences one side to the other.  One nostril is a little different from the other.  One eye, half your mouth, your ears.  Those differences are supposed to give character and beauty to your face.  You must look sometime.  Look closely.”

“I will.”

“Hold out your arm and close your eyes.  Now, imagine that someone who cares very much about you has put one hand on the front of your shoulder and one hand on the back.  Feel their hands travel down your arm in a spiral motion from shoulder to wrist.  Slowly.  Gently.  Pretend there is no muscle, sinew or bone to resist, to ache, to break.  Your arm is like clay.  Wet clay.  That is how I am made.  Consider that for a moment, then, if you would, bring me my hat.”

I opened my eyes, looked around the room for it.

“Somewhere near the bed.”

He laughed.  “It’s a good thing this isn’t my dressing room.”

“Why?”

I walked toward the bed; checked the floor around it.

“Because a hat on the bed is bad luck.”

“Why?”

“Darned if I know.”

“Well, it didn’t land on the bed.  It’s on the floor.  I…”

I picked up the hat and looked up on my way to him.  He was no longer blocking his reflection in the mirror.  He had been watching my reflection there as I proceeded across the room, hat in hand; watched me now as I stared at the mask in the mirror, knowing that the mask was Marlow, but unsure how that could be true, for in the mirror was a man with a look of surprise frozen on his face, his mouth, shaped in a perfect “O,” his eyes, wide, the place on his forehead where his eyebrows should have been – the place where there were no eyebrows at all – raised high, yet nowhere on his face was there a wrinkle or a line.  His skin was not so much pulled tight over the bones of his face from front to back as it seemed to have been pulled upward from his chin, gathered and held fast in what looked like four baby fingers like bangs that had been combed to one side of his forehead.  On that part of his throat that I could see in the mirror, the skin fell in shallow, taut folds as if he had really been made of clay and someone had pulled their fingers from the back of his neck downward to the front, leaving dark ridges behind.

“Both arms, both legs, my chest, stomach and back all look like that,” Marlow informed my reflection.  “Like my neck.  Unlike my hands, which Jones noticed are twisted so that both thumbs point left, both of my feet face forward.  What’s left of me is normal except for my face.  There is no difference between one side and the other the way there might otherwise be.  But you’ll never see any of the rest, Melanie.  Never any more than you can see now, in the mirror.  I don’t let children into my joint.  My booth.  Never.  Now can I have my hat?  My scarf is on the chair.  Your mother is waiting.”