Read Online Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall - Free Book Online

living room. With scissors I cut great clumps of hair from my chin and cheeks, depositing handfuls in the wastebasket. Careful not to dig a hole in my face, I removed the bulk of my hair. The tufts left behind were like a hayfield ill cut, ragged clumps sprouting here and there. I lathered and applied the razor. Every inch I scraped, the razor filled up and clogged. I cleaned it under the faucet. My flesh appeared as it had before “The First Eight Days of the Beard”—with a new sag of chin.
    Into the living room I walked. Philippa screamed. Jane and her mother ran from the kitchen horrified, ready to dial 911. Hubbub rattled the plaster on the walls. My mother stared with her mouth open, then grinned. Only Andrew smiled calmly, enjoying my trick on the family world. Through turkey and stuffing, I was aware of eyes that kept looking up to confirm the new face. After three pies on a warm Christmas afternoon, Andrew sat me down on the porch and trimmed away the remaining fuzz. In the days following, responses from the local world were mostly bewilderment, followed by laughter. The farrier who had repaired the range, however, refused to believe it was me. I was pulling out my license, in the store down the street, before Bob Thornley convinced him. My uncle Dick, on the other hand, didn’t notice the alteration. He thought I looked different but wasn’t sure why.
    My face remained naked as long as Jane was alive. We were photographed together, and Bill Moyers did a show called
A Life Together
. Occasionally today the film is shown in my presence, and I need to proclaim that I am not an imposter.
    Â 
    Jane died at forty-seven after fifteen months of leukemia. I mourned her deeply, I wrote nothing but elegy, I wailed her loss, but—as I excused myself in a poem—“Lust is grief / that has turned over in bed / to look the other way.” Among spousal survivors, many cannot bear the thought of another lover. Some cannot do without. In
Ulysses
, Leopold Bloom thinks of a graveyard as a place to pick up a grieving widow. Thus I found myself in the pleasant company of a young woman who worked for a magazine—a slim, pretty blonde who was funny, sharp, and promiscuous. (We never spoke of
love
.) I will call her Pearl. After dinner, we sat in my living room drinking Madeira and talking. I pulled out a cigarette and asked her if she would mind . . . “I was going crazy,” she said, and pulled out her own. She told me about her father’s suicide. I spoke of Jane’s death. When she left the room to pee, I waited by the bathroom door for her to emerge. I led her unprotesting to the bedroom, and a few moments later, gaily engaged, she said, “I want to put my legs around your head.” (It was perfect iambic pentameter.) When we woke in the morning we became friends. We drank coffee and smoked. When I spoke again of Jane, Pearl said that perhaps I felt a bit happier this morning.
    After seven weeks Pearl ended things. Before I received my dismissal, we lay in the backyard sunning, and she suggested I grow a beard. She had seen book jackets. “You’ll look Mephistophelian,” she said. That’s all I needed. It suited me again to change the way I looked because the world had utterly changed. I mourned Jane all day every day, and acknowledged her death by the third beard and the girlfriends. Some entanglements ended because I was needy, others because of adultery or my gradual physical disability. A California friend and I commuted to visit each other for more than a year. She diminished my beard by trimming it into a goatee, getting me to smooth my cheeks from sideburns to mustache and chin. After dozens of assignations amassing airline mileage, we decided we had had enough. I grew the big beard back.
    A dozen years ago I found Linda and love again. We live an hour apart but spend two or three nights a week together. She is an Old Lady of the Mountain in her bone