Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
The next book on the shelf is another short story collection by AS Byatt, and this one is called The Matisse Stories
The first story in the collection is called “Medusa’s Ankles”, and it’s the best one in the collection. It ends with such a ka-BOOM – and I would bet that every woman who has ever gotten a terrible haircut would relate, and cheer the ending of this story. It’s horrifying – and yet … I have so wanted to take the actions that Susannah, our narrator, takes. What is it like … when you cross that line? When you stop caring what people will think? When you let the rage out? Not just the rage at a bad haircut – the bad haircut is the catalyst – but the rage at growing old, at losing your looks – and, by association, losing your power. It’s painful, and this story is all about that pain.
Our narrator is a woman in her late 40s. She has been going to the same salon for quite some time, getting her hair cut by the same guy. He is a chatty melodramatic person, who understands her hair, and takes care of her. Going to the hair salon is vaguely stressful for her … since she no longer is young and beautiful, and whatever is done to her cannot HOLD. It’s a race against time. None of this is spoken aloud, but it’s there. And one day, she walks into the salon – to find that it has been completely redecorated, revamped and restaffed … it’s now sleek, modern, and (to her) alienating.
But I’ll excerpt from the beginning of the story – before the catastrophic re-decorating and all of the tragedies that follow.
Excerpt from The Matisse Stories
She had walked in one day because she had seen the Rosy Nude through the plate glass. That was odd, she thought, to have that lavish and complex creature stretched voluptuously above the coat rack, where one might have expected the stare, silver and supercilious or jetty and frenzied, of the model girl. They were all girls now, not women. The rosy nude was pure flat colour, but suggested mass. She had huge haunches and a monumental knee, lazily propped high. She had round breasts, contemplations of the circle, reflections on flesh and its fall.
She had asked cautiously for a cut and blow-dry. He had done her himself, the owner, Lucian of ‘Lucian’s’, slender and soft-moving, resembling a balletic Hamlet with full white sleeves and tight black trousers. The first few times she came it was the trousers she remembered, better than his face, which she saw only in the mirror behind her own, and which she felt a middle-aged disinclination to study. A woman’s relation with her hairdresser is anatomically odd. Her face meets his belt, his haunches skim her breathing, his face is far away, high and behind. His face had a closed and monkish look, rather fine, she thought, under soft, straight, dark hair, bright with health, not with added fats, or so it seemed.
‘I like your Matisse,’ she said, the first time.
He looked blank.
‘The pink nude. I love her.’
‘Oh, that. I saw it in a shop. I thought it went exactly with the colour-scheme I was planning.’
Their eyes met in the mirror.
‘I thought she was wonderful,’ he said. ‘So calm, so damn sure of herself, such a lovely colour, I do think, don’t you? I fell for her, absolutely. I saw her in this shop in the Charing Cross Road and I went home, and said to my wife, I might think of placing her in the salon, and she thought nothing to it, but the next day I went back and just got her. She gives the salon a bit of class. I like things to have class.’
In those days the salon was like the interior of a rosy cloud, all pinks and creams, with creamy muslin curtains here and there, and ivory brushes and combs, and here and there – the mirror-frames, the little trollies – a kind of sky blue, a dark sky blue, the colour of the couch or bed on which the rosy nude spread herself. Music played – Susannah hated piped music – but this music was tinkling and tripping and dropping, quiet seraglio music, like sherbet. He gave her coffee in pink cups, with a pink and white wafer biscuit in the saucer. He soothed her middle-aged hair into a cunningly blown and natural windswept sweep, with escaping strands and tendrils, softening brow and chin. She remembered the hairdressing shop of her wartime childhood, with its boarded wooden cubicles, its advertisements for Amami shampoo, depicting ladies with blonde pageboys and red lips, in the forties bow which was wider than the thirties rosebud. Amami, she had always supposed, rhymed with smarmy and was somehow related to it. When she became a linguist, and could decline to verb to love in several languages, she saw suddenly one day that Amami was an erotic invitation, or command. Amami, love me, the blondes said, under their impeccably massed rolls of hair. Her mother had gone draggled under the chipped dome of the hairdryer, bristling with metal rollers, bobby-pins and pipe-cleaners. And had come out under a rigidly bouncy ‘et’, like a mountain of wax fruit, that made her seem artificial and embarrassing, drawing attention somehow to the unnatural whiteness of her false teeth.
They had seemed like some kind of electrically shocking initiation into womanhood, those clamped domes descending and engulfing. She remembered her own first ‘set’, the heat and buzzing, and afterwards a slight torn tenderness of the scalp, a slight tindery dryness to the hair.
In the sixties and seventies she had kept a natural look, had grown her hair long and straight and heavy, a chestnut-glossy curtain, had avoided places like this. And in the years of her avoidance, the cubicles had gone, everything was open and shared and above board, blow-dryers had largely replaced the hoods, plastic spikes the bristles.
She had had to come back because her hair began to grow old. The ends split, the weight of it broke, a kind of frizzed fur replaced the gloss. Lucian said that curls and waves – following the lines of the new unevenness – would dissimulate, would render natural-looking, that was, young, what was indeed natural, the death of the cells. Short and bouncy was best, Lucian said, and proved it, tactfully. He stood above her with his fine hands cupped lightly round her new bubbles and wisps, like the hands of a priest round a Grail. She looked, quickly, quickly, it was better than before, thanked him and averted her eyes.
She came to trust him with her disintegration.
