Boomtown Boudoir

The haircut stops at the chin, where it is cut longer in the front than the back. Another discernible feature of the haircut is the too-short, too-straight-across bangs that cut the forehead in half and lend a schoolgirl insouciance that, depending on its wearer, varies in degrees of irony and sincerity. The haircut has blunt lines and angles that come across as a half-assed statement unless dyed the raven-wing shade commonly imparted by Lady Clairol blue-black dye.

The fact that I’ve had the haircut since 1995 and continue to wear it in 1999 is not remarkable. Its combination of severity, playfulness, and long tradition of both political and aesthetic provocativeness have made it somewhat ubiquitous among girls in my peer group. This peer group, while difficult to pin down objectively, is composed of females between the ages of 17 and 27 who live in or near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and display ideo-aesthetic tendencies towards at least five of the following: loud sweaty soul music, gray knee-length skirts and platform maryjanes, ill-informed liberal-leaning debate, anglophilia, roommate issues, artistic inclinations and/or temperaments, the moderate alcoholism that goes hand in hand with the modest income of a job in the service industry, MDMA parties, compulsive use of the word ‘like’ as a vague emphatic, kissing boys in plaid shirts, star tattoos, obscure independent music industry magazines, vegetarianism, haughtiness, and melodrama. There are only so many haircuts in the universe. There are even fewer that appeal to a given cross-section of counterculture at a given time. It hasn’t been very difficult for the Collector to find us.

My shower doesn’t take as long as I want it to on Sunday afternoon, and I end up with half an hour to kill before I’m due at Diana’s. I pace around my small bedroom, listening to Patti Smith and folding blue towels, looking at myself in the mirror, checking the clock-alarm, applying unnecessary perfume oil and black eyeliner, running my fingers over the raised continents on the thrift-store globe I keep on my desk, picking up specks of thread and paper embedded in my carpet. I open up one of my books, flip my laptop open and turn it on, then close both and toy with the idea of walking to Diana’s apartment instead of riding my bike, but it’s impossible not to remember that I will need my bike later. My heart is pounding dry and steady in my chest, my jerky motions begin to seem ridiculous to me even in my own bedroom with the door closed, and there is absolutely nothing left to do here. I leave and resign myself to being early. When I step out of my house, a group of skateboard kids scatter from my stoop, grinning apologies and looking after me with bright, keen eyes. The thunderous crashing of their rolling wheels on the old pavement follow me down the street.

Diana lives in a midtown midrise, a once-white building now sooty and mysterious from decades of city grime. Inside, the walls are papered in flecked beige and lined with cheap mirrors that distort all that they reflect into pear-shaped monstrosities. There is a Styrofoam cup from Wendy’s spilling old coffee into the cylindrical metal ashtray that stands in front of the elevator and a dark, sticky spot on the floor. I push the elevator button and try not to look at myself in one of the warped mirror-walls beneath the flickering fluorescent lighting overhead. When the elevator reaches the ground floor, a woman wearing a down coat with fluff spilling from a tear in the sleeve steps out and looks at me with an expression decidedly furtive. Her face is deeply pockmarked and raw, her hair a marled-wool mass of salt-and-pepper frizz. When I step onto the elevator, this brief encounter registers as one of unrealized violence, and I see myself framed by an invisible camera, standing erect and unassuming as she turns and plunges a massive hypodermic needle into the side of my neck. I crumple to the floor, hitting my head on one of the gray elevator panels, dying instantly.

Diana lives on the eighth floor. When she opens her door, she says, “oh, you’re early.” Our bodies spar subtly over whether we will hug or not. She wins and I put my head on her shoulder, feeling the strong muscles flanking her spine move beneath my hand. Diana ushers me inside and I follow her into the tiny half-kitchen where she’s mixing V-8 and Tabasco Bloody Marys in an olive drab blender that sounds like a chainsaw. I hoist myself up so that I’m sitting on her counter among all the cutesy cookie tins and infomercial appliances that I bet she never uses. She pours both of us Bloody Marys in a pair of dishwasher-speckled, oversized wineglasses. Diana shoves the pitcher part of her blender into the refrigerator and slams the door shut, looking harried. She smiles at me, though, and motions towards the rest of her apartment, indicating that we should go there.

I sit on the far end of her tapestried futon, forcing my eyes to focus on something. There is a fake art deco clock on one wall, above the television. Diana’s apartment is a one-room studio with an adjacent kitchen and bathroom, and there is too much stuff on the walls of the main room, probably left over from when she moved out of a bigger place.

“So…” she begins, sitting in a worn green velvet armchair, half-burying her nose in her glass. “How are things?”

I shrug and incline my head to one side, stretching my legs. Diana peers at me, eyebrows a caricature of exacting concern. I look away. “Things are things,” I say. Diana’s black lace puffed-sleeve shirt is incongruous with both her raw-boned, small-breasted frame and the way her energy asserts itself in the presence of my criticism. She licks and prances and shakes herself out, looking up at me with big, anxious spaniel eyes for approval. The haircut looks wrong on Diana. It doesn’t swing right; it’s too redundantly blow-dried and curled under on the ends with a hot comb. The haircut clashes with her girls’-locker-room enthusiasm and abrasive healthiness, as though being perverse and decadent is a high school shot-put match that she really, really wants to win. When she tires of stylish masochism, she’ll coach tee-ball and enter bake-offs in the same spirit that sees all of us herded into her apartment once a month.

“How’s your book going?” Diana asks as we situate ourselves stiffly on our respective perches.

“Pretty good,” I say, shrugging.

“How about you?” I ask. I try to change the topic quickly whenever anyone brings up my research. I’ve learned from experience not to exert myself explaining even the first part to people who are only asking about it to make conversation. The things you love are fragile enough when they’re not subjected to the glazed eyes and stifled yawns of people who otherwise care about you. Besides, I’m here to talk with Diana about a different overspecialized pet topic.

“Not bad,” Diana says. “Better, actually. I went out on a date with some filmmaker guy and it seemed like a good thing for me to do, you know?” I nod before the words are even out of her mouth because I’m not really paying attention to them.

I met Diana when I was his girlfriend and she was just a friend. They liked to discuss existential literature, drink milkshakes and divulge the smutty minutiae of their conquests with others. I found her awful long before she called to tell me a few things I should have already guessed. They started sleeping together two Augusts ago, during a thunderstorm that made it impossible for her to leave his apartment, a thunderstorm she told me about, unprompted, in full purple detail.

“Do you want another drink?” Diana points to my empty glass. “Actually, do you want to just do a shot? Before they get here? I won’t tell if you won’t.” Diana widens her eyes at me before getting up and rushing into the kitchen in a flail of big, ungainly limbs. I follow. She hands me the vodka bottle and I take a swig. I pass it back. We drink vodka until there is a knock on the door. I stay put, wiping my mouth, until I hear Diana say, “Oh, thank God, Jess, we’re doing shots, hurry up before Sarah gets here.”

Jess’ pointed face appears in the doorway of Diana’s kitchen and she leaps up to sit beside me on the counter. She grabs the bottle out of my hand, smiling at me like I’m some figure of vague authority who needs charming.

“Oh! Wait for me!” Diana wails from the hall, her footsteps shaking the entire apartment, before there is another knock on the door. Jess snickers, taking a long pull off the bottle. “Party’s over.” She makes a face. We both step out into the hall to greet Sarah, who smiles faintly, stroking her striped cashmere scarf.

“What are you guys doing?” she asks. She wears a hat that matches her scarf, pulled all the way down over her ears.

“Oh, nothing,” singsongs Jess, brushing past Sarah into the main room of Diana’s apartment and flopping onto the futon. Sarah smiles again, first at Diana, then at me, before visibly bracing herself and following Jess. I sit on the floor this time, propped up against Diana’s bookshelf, while Jess and Sarah leave a foot-long expanse of futon between them.

Jess sits splay-legged on Diana’s musty futon, leaning back into the cushions like an imperious child who has successfully faked an illness to get out of school. It’s difficult not to think of her in these terms because Jess is seventeen years old, a senior at some South Jersey public high school, with a prom to attend in the spring and the impending threat of college to cast an autumnal melancholy on her last carefree summer. It’s difficult to take her seriously with the lines of indie band pins marching up and down the straps of her Jansport, her enthusiasm for getting stoned and riding around in other people’s cars, her total absorption in anything new and obscure, and the fact that if she wanted to put the Collector out of commission on a statutory rape charge, all she needs to do is call a lawyer. Even more disconcerting is the idea that it will never come to that; that she’ll go to school in the fall and start her real life and the Collector will diminish into a story to lend her future exploits exotic credibility. It’s difficult not to begrudge her that.

Sarah has an unobtrusively plain face, thin, graceful shoulders, and a voice so modulated that she sometimes sounds British even though she’s from Rhode Island. Our haircut is one which summons up displaced tsarinas sipping lukewarm tea in some flea-infested tenement, huddled under a mangy ermine stole. It’s a haircut out of a Chagall painting, out of seedy 1930s burlesque halls, out of silent films with tragic, syphilitic heroines, out of the working-class yearning for distinction that is bohemianism. For Sarah to wear the haircut; Sarah the Columbia graduate, Sarah the nonsmoker, Sarah the trust-fund wine critic, for her to wear her art-history lectures on her head is less of a challenge to the socioeconomic privilege of her world than one more thing she gets to have because she wants it. Her haircut looks as though she might as easily have any other without changing her fundamental appearance, as though she has superior products for it lined up along the sink in her bathroom, as though it has been not only designed, but engineered to fall the way it does, one symmetrical black point caressing each coddled cheek. Sarah’s presence among us is nettling both because she is such a recent departure from the Collector’s life and because we can hear so distinctly the way he might describe her: “She owns a pearl necklace! Her parents breed Samoyeds! She wants me inside her.”

There are, of course, more of us than we four indulging in the pathology of Diana’s meetings. He has a reputation. New girls come in from the suburbs at least twice a month, shaking out their freshly blow-dried and ironed haircuts, eyeing him across crowded parties, striking up pithy conversations in bathroom lines, driving their Cabriolets past his house nine times in an hour after skipping their classes or calling out of their jobs, watching, waiting, wanting, and learning to wait their turns. It’s only a matter of time; everyone knows it. There is an unlimited supply, for which he has a seemingly unlimited demand. Call him a sadist, a monster, an aberration of basic humanity, a freak, a hopeless weirdo. These are truths that function without delicacy, imagination, or subtlety. These are truths that exist in a world where a haircut is just a haircut, a world in which all of us would be proud to say we have never lived.

Diana speculates voluptuously on whom he is screwing. She thinks it’s this dancer at Grass who is infamous for having a pee fetish. Sarah inspects her fingernails. Jess opens her mouth in a silent shriek of glee. “He’s such a pervert!” she cries.

“I called last night,” whispers Sarah, her hoarseness effectively breaking up Diana’s just-begun diatribe on the foulness of pee fetishism. Murmured sympathy all around.

“He didn’t pick up,” Sarah admits, eyes askance.  “I could tell he deferred the call.  It was ringing and then the voice mail picked up after only two rings.”

He did defer the call, then.  We all know his cell phone rings nine times before the voice mail picks up.  Two rings are a slap in the face, particularly for Sarah who is used to getting preferential treatment. Diana pats her on the shoulder.

“Maybe it’s the pee girl? I mean, it’s something, it’s not, it’s just so…” Sarah trails off, wiping her eyes. Something in her face changes, hardens. “I told myself I was done crying about him,” she says. Sarah stands, shaking off our rueful smiles and coos of understanding.

“Look,” she says. Sarah takes off her hat. We gape.

Black dye does not bleach out easily. Sarah’s head, after several arduous applications of bleach and toner, turned white at the roots and cat-food orange throughout the rest, streaked and tipped with defiant remnants of black. It all had the texture of deep fried vermicelli. When she tried to comb through a fourth bleach application, there was a sound not unlike that of a chiffon cotillion dress being ripped open in the backseat of a pickup truck. Sarah had a pair of professional clippers beneath the sink in her bathroom that her male roommate had never reclaimed after moving out of the apartment they’d shared in Manhattan. When she came to Philadelphia, the clippers stowed away in the packing crate, padded in bubble wrap alongside the other bathroom appliances.

“I didn’t think I could do it myself so I went downstairs and asked Lonny if he’d do me a favor,” Sarah explains, the face rising from her lavender turtleneck indecipherable from the alien skull peppered with white stubble and glowing weirdly beneath the lamp. “Lonny’s my doorman.” Sarah laughs, an arpeggiated hysteria that leaves a bitter aftertaste. “He always tells me to call him if I need anything. I’m pretty sure he was talking about sex to begin with, so when I go downstairs and get him at one in the morning he got really serious all of a sudden, and he’s this huge black guy with a gold tooth and tattoos everywhere, I mean, the doorman uniform covers them up most of the time but once he showed me and they’re all like, bars on his chest because he was in jail and the Virgin Mary and about sixteen girls’ names up and down his arms and I didn’t realize until we were in the elevator going up to my apartment that, you know, maybe he thought that I thought…”

Jess shoots me a momentary set of eyebrows raised almost all the way up into the thicket of her bangs. I almost start laughing because I’d had, and immediately rejected, the same thought Jess is having, which is that this story is headed towards a steamy account of Sarah’s late-night bald sex with a huge black ex-con. “No way!” Diana says, staring openmouthed at Sarah, which means she’d been thinking it too. Jess and I crack up. All of a sudden, Sarah gets it. “But I didn’t!” she squeaks out between silent bit-lip giggles. “I probably should have,” she amends, rolling her eyes. By now, we’re all laughing so hard that there are tears in my eyes, and every time it seems I am in danger of being allowed to stop, someone sets me off again. We laugh until Diana is racked with spasms of tar-hack and Jess is holding her stomach as she yelps like a kitten that picked the wrong time to nap in a carburetor.

Sarah didn’t find it funny last night, when she pulled her desk chair into the middle of her bedroom after rolling up the Persian rug, handed Lonny the clippers, and, despite his protests, commanded him to shave her bald. He’d stood behind her, a menthol cigarette he had not asked permission to light dangling out of the side of his mouth, intermittently shaking his head and cursing under his breath. The vibration made the fillings in Sarah’s teeth rattle. When he’d finished, Lonny refused Sarah’s twenty with a snort and looked at her with such poignant reproach she was forced to wonder if this scene had been in any way racist. “Why’d you make me do that?” he demanded before closing the door behind himself, apparently not wanting an answer. Sarah picked her way across the clumps of chlorine-smelling straw that littered her parquet floors and looked in the mirror. She’d gotten such a venomous jolt of adrenaline at the sight of her reflection that she hadn’t been able to sleep yet.

Jess reaches over and runs her hand over the whispering bristles on Sarah’s scalp. “It feels nice,” she says.

“It’s such a simple solution,” Diana says, after a moment. “We should all do it.” She looks at first Jess and then me, eyebrows raised. “It would fix everything. Don’t you want him out of you?”

The urge to roll my eyes is impossible to fight off but no one sees it; they’re all lost deep in the fantasies of iconic self-effacement that got all of us into this nasty business to begin with. Shaving ourselves bald en masse would probably be the single most counterintuitive action available, if what we truly want is release from this particular man’s particular brand of icon worship. I can’t imagine anything the Collector will gloat over more than Sarah’s newly fuzzy skull. It validates everything he believes in, which is that we stop existing, for all his intents and purposes, after we’ve been captured and incorporated into the Collection. That being said, I will still ride my bike to his house directly after getting out of here.

The Collector lives in a part of town where hardly anyone ever goes, and beside the wide metal doors of the old printing press where he has carved out a second-story loft space, there is a crude intercom device that he has rigged up himself. The Collector’s voice, over this intercom, will be giggly and courteous when he answers. He will hurry out into the dim, ramshackle hallway in his stocking feet to hit the button that buzzes his haircuts inside, shivering because the cold needles into the hall through slits of light showing at the building’s seams. When I open the door, I will stomp up clouds of wintry dust from my boots when I trot heavily up the steps, making as much racket as possible. If I do that, I feel comfortable opening the door to his loft without knocking. “Come in,” he’ll say, after the fact. The Collector has a collection of tiny freckles on the bridge of his nose, a paunchy, weak-shouldered body that makes no sense to look at, and a pair of bug-eyed bifocals that would make it impossible to tell what he was thinking if it weren’t for the smile: snaggle-toothed, self-conscious, elated.

Sarah smiles in this smug, dainty way that makes it plain she’s forgotten she’s bald. She pulls from her bag the clippers she’d used on her head the night before. Diana takes the clippers from Sarah and fondles the shiny serrated edge, eyes glittering hungrily. “We could do it right now,” Diana says. Sarah nods. She scans our faces. I rearrange myself on the floor so that my knees are tucked up under my chin with my arms wrapped around them.

Jess’ lips compress into a sneer startling both for its presence on her face, which is used to smiling and sticking out its tongue, and its suddenness in this conversation. My heartbeat doubles up inside my ribcage when she twists up this sneer into a tight, bitter little smile, aimed right at Sarah. “You’ve got to be fucking crazy,” says Jess, in a low tone I wouldn’t have guessed she had in her repertoire. Sarah recoils. Jess’ eyes film up and spill over; Diana reaches for a box of pink tissues hidden under the futon and hands her one. I look at their heads bent together, shiny black nimbuses, Jess’ part crooked and too-obvious; Diana’s showing a miniscule strip of light roots. I fondle the back of my own neck, where the nape has been shaved to impart a cleaner line. Sarah sits with downcast eyes, fidgeting with a thread in the upholstery of the sofa.

“This is pathetic” she says, looking up. “I thought you were all so over him.” Sarah stares with darkened eyes that flicker back and forth over the assembled lot of us, all of whom are avoiding her eyes. Jess stops crying and leers into dead space. Diana looks at me and I shrug. She drops the clippers on the coffee table with a loud clink and a nearly inaudible, “shit.”

“It’s just a stupid haircut!” Sarah’s voice rises into something tense and strident. She picks up her perfectly distressed leather handbag and holds it in her lap, looking at the clock. “You’re all worse than he is.” Sarah stands, her bare skull picking up shiny reflections from Diana’s halogen lamps. I’m sitting very still and trying to breathe, so intensely visceral is the remembered feeling of his hand on the back of my skull, pulling my hair hard, his face against my cheek, blowing a tickly strand of it out of his eyes. I imagine the rasp of Sarah’s newly-shaved scalp against one of his nipples, the way he’d growl, writhe, bare his carnivore’s teeth at the ceiling. I wish they’d all stop fighting so I could think properly.

“I wouldn’t get righteous just yet if I were you,” Diana says. Jess snorts from her corner of the sofa, nodding. Sarah reaches across Jess to locate her hat between the futon frame and its mattress, pulling it onto her head with a precise, snippy gesture. “Are you threatening me?” she says, eyes narrowed.

“Oh God, will you please just shut up?” Jess shouts, smacking the side of the futon, more to herself than Sarah. “No, I won’t!” Sarah’s face picks up a high-spirited, clenched-teeth sheen. “Guys, don’t!” Diana’s face registers a weird sort of contemptuous panic.

“Has it not occurred to any of you yet that he’ll be totally into her shaving her head?” I ask, my voice ringing loud and shrill right through the rest of theirs, surprising even me. They all pause and look at me. I breathe quietly in my corner by the bookshelf, trying to focus on expanding my lungs as far as they can go. “It makes the whole thing even better.” I meet their eyes squarely this time. Diana looks away first, wincing. I plant my feet on the floor and sit up as straight as I can. Sarah puts a hand to her forehead and sits back down on the futon, in her old place, a puppet whose strings have been dropped.

Diana attempts to shift the conversation to Sarah’s job, Jess’ college applications, my research.  Enthusiasm dwindles.  “We have other things going on.  We have our own shit,” she says, her forehead creased.

Sarah’s head, deposited heavily on the black metal rim of the futon, begins to rise. Jess bites her nails with audible clicking sounds, eyes shut against some invisible horror.  No one listens to Diana.  My eyes settle on a point between her eyebrows as she pontificates upon the virtues of female companionship, friends, friends who know, friends who could help. She trails off, eyes fixed on the bare wall above the bookshelf. Sarah’s eyes, huge in her bare skull, light with eerie exultance that we would all smile to see were we really her friends.

We sit: Wide-eyed and so silent the walls seem to recede inwards, wrap themselves around us. The malignant camaraderie of our mutual frustration has dissolved into individual strands of consciousness, impossible to articulate. When I stand to leave, someone mutters something about a new party on Friday, a new lipstick, a test group forming for some radical new cure.

“I almost started without you,” the Collector will say, taking my coat and hanging it on a hook installed into the wall where he plugs in his hot plate. The room, with its blue-gray floorboards and blank white walls, will be pre-darkened in anticipation of my arrival. He’ll walk across the room to where the projector is situated on a cinder-block podium and fiddle with the switches, motioning for me to sit on the couch stationed in the middle of the room, facing the wall. A bright rectangle will appear on the wall, rainbowed around the edges, and move in jerks across the entire room before he locates the exact center. I’ll hear the swish of the extension cords for the slide switching device over the floor as he drags them with him towards the stereo, where he’ll put on one of his many perfect, appropriate records. He’ll light a cigarette and sit beside me on the opposite end of the couch, arm thrown over the back, legs crossed, lips parted.

In the three months since last I have seen it, the Collector’s slideshow has lengthened interminably and improved in detail, nuance, clarity of theme. The first time I saw these slides, their presentation was chronological, clunky; more the work of an amateur aficionado than an artisan. He meant it as a human cruelty, but I reacted with the imperious indignation of an object: “If you’re going to do this to me, at least have the decency to do it right.” It had been what he needed to hear.

Tonight, we begin with fresh-cheeked suburban chipmunks with Clara Bow pouts that slim down and live harder with every slide until one finds themselves looking at a different sort of woman entirely, flinty-eyed older women with tattoos, displayed genital piercings, rubber garter belts, lapdogs, their kink losing harshness and gaining poise, classicism, art-student self consciousness, furrows burrowing back out of young creamy-pale forehead as seriousness shades back into laughing, activity, overwhelming personalities and whimsical aberrations, like the photo-negative black girl with a platinum version of the haircut, the Collector’s mom with her steely-gray Cleopatra, his best male friend in a South Street wig, feeling up a set of lumpy toilet-paper breasts. Some wear street clothes, some are tied to the bed with scarves, some smile, some put their hands up in front of their face, some give the middle finger to the camera, some are wide-hipped and brazen, some ballerina-thin waifs, some pose, some are candid. The only constant is the haircut, his haircut, captured over fifty times on film, transferred onto slides during downtime at the photo lab where he works, labeled, filed into a cigar box, and arranged and rearranged as his obsession demands.

Nearly lost in the magnitude of the slideshow as a whole, there is a shot of Diana, backlit nude on his double mattress with its snow-white sheets, clutching a pillow and looking exaggeratedly coy with her legs spread wide. For this slide, the Collector has focused his lens on the play of the light on the crown of her head, almost pulling off an aesthetic bypass of her proffered vagina and bitten lower lip. Sarah is also depicted in his bed stripped of cashmere and pearls, artfully half-covered with a sheet and faking a demure smirky slumber. I can just hear her saying, “I’ll do it if you promise they’ll be tasteful,” while taking her clothes off before such a thing was even suggested. There are three photos of Jess spliced onto the same slide, in all of which she seems to be unable to sit still long enough for a portrait. In one, her head is cut off at the ears and all you can see is her black T-shirt, one thin arm, a tongue-tip, and the perky flip of her hair against her chin.

The last slide, clicked into frozen obedience by the Collector’s right thumb, fills the room with serendipitous heat and light. Ragged bucolic shadows obscure the right side of my face, but the left side laughs, mouth agape and displaying the fillings in my back molars, eyes squeezed shut, blown up on the Collector’s wall to six times larger than life. Against the trees in the background, my face is burned-out rosy-white and my eyebrows, eyelashes, and windblown bangs are contrasting snips of black silk. He took it in Fairmount Park, where we’d spent a muggy July afternoon looking for wild mushrooms with which to play domestic roulette that evening. We gave up after ten minutes and lay sprawled in the grass until it got dark, talking about all the things there are to talk about with the person one is newly in love with. It’s the only time I let him photograph me.

I can hear the Collector’s breathing catch in his chest; his foot jogs the leg of the couch where it had been resting. Something fierce and protective surges in my blood, my heartbeats synchronize with his, we are inside each other without touching as we stare at the projection on the wall and feel the massive synthesis of all our big ideas sprout wings and roar in this room, in this exact present. I close my eyes against a crushing, multilateral ecstasy, knowing that the further down I go into it, the more painstaking picking-up and putting-together I will have to do tomorrow, when I wake up alone.

He turns to look at me, eyes behind his glasses those of a lonely bookworm whose public library has inexplicably closed early. I offer in response a polite little smile, a swishing of hair, a shrug. He looks back to the wall and laughs. He gestures at the projection with his fourth cigarette before stubbing it out.

“Who’s that?” the Collector teases me in a very tender voice, reaching across the sofa for my shoulder. I let him touch me, but I won’t look at him.

“I think you’re almost done,” I say.