The Wig Maker's Weekend

The ad said house-sitter wanted, one weekend, references required. Then under that it said the person hired must agree to feed no cats, water no plants, and under no circumstances open the magician's trunk.

I read it three times at my kitchen table with coffee going cold next to me. I'm Ron Beaumont, forty-eight years old, and I make wigs for theaters and museums for a living, which means I already spend my days around odd people. But that ad beat anything I'd seen in a while.

I emailed anyway. What the hell. Work was slow and a weekend in the Caine Valley sounded better than my apartment in Queens.

The reply came back within the hour. Come Saturday morning, it said. Ask for Lorna Rockefeller at the flea market office. Bring references. Do not bring opinions about the trunk.

Do not bring opinions about the trunk. I read that line maybe five times. Who writes like that?

Saturday I drove up in my old Corolla with a folder of references and a duffel bag, and found the flea market off Route 9 just past a dairy farm. It sprawled. Tents and folding tables and a permanent brick building for the year-round dealers, the whole thing sitting on maybe ten acres of gravel and weeds. I'd sold wigs at markets like this once, early days, so I knew the breed of the place.

The office was a trailer behind the main building. A woman sat at the desk inside writing something with a fountain pen, and she looked up before I even knocked.

"You're the wig maker," she said.

"Ron Beaumont. You'd be Lorna Rockefeller."

"I would. Fifty-eight years old, recently divorced, owner of this circus you're standing in." She stood and offered her hand. Silver hair cut short, good jewelry, reading glasses pushed up on her head. She shook my hand like she meant it. "Come walk with me. I hate interviews at desks."

We walked the gravel lane between two rows of vendors setting up for Sunday. She asked about my references, called two of them right there on her phone while I stood there sweating, and seemed satisfied.

"Good. Now the part that scares people off." She stopped walking. "The trunk."

"Right. The trunk."

"Come see it first. Then judge me."

The guesthouse sat behind the market, a tidy little building with its own garden, all of it fenced off from the vendor chaos. Inside it was a showroom, shelves of curios, brass instruments, a taxidermied owl, and in the center of the room on a low table, a trunk. Black leather, brass corners, a lock the size of my fist.

"That's it," she said.

"That's it."

"My grandfather bought it from a magician who retired upstate in the fifties. It came with the family story that it was his working trunk, the one he performed from. The lock has no key that anyone in my family ever found. My grandfather tried for thirty years." She said this like she was telling me the weather. "It stays shut. You dust around it. You admire it if you like. You do not pick at it, jiggle it, or get clever."

"Can I ask why you need a sitter at all if you're only gone two days?"

"Because last year I had a sitter, a perfectly nice art student, and I came home to find he'd spent the whole weekend trying to force the lock with a butter knife." She let that sit. "He scratched it. You can still see the marks. So now I hire grown-ups with references and boring hands."

I laughed before I could stop myself. "Boring hands. I can do boring hands. I handle hundred-year-old human hair for a living, lady. I don't get clever with anything."

"Human hair," she said, and her eyebrows went up. "Now that's a profession. Sit down, tell me about that."

So I sat on a leather bench and told her about the wig trade, how I'd left a corporate job at forty-two and apprenticed myself to an old man in Brooklyn who taught me knotting, how a good wig takes forty hours and nobody appreciates it until it's wrong. She listened the way almost nobody listens, actually asking questions, and somewhere in there the interview stopped feeling like an interview.

"You'll do," she said finally. "The rules are simple. Feed yourself, there's money in the jar and we'll settle the pay when I'm back, Sunday night. Lock the gate at nine. And the trunk stays shut."

"The trunk stays shut. Got it."

"Good. My car's already loaded." She paused at the door, keys in hand, and looked back at me. "There's a bottle of good scotch in the cabinet, Ron. If you drink it, replace it or say so. I hate finding things out."

"Noted."

Then she was gone, gravel popping under her tires, and I stood in that showroom alone with an owl, a trunk, and a weekend.

The chores were nothing. Saturday I swept the lane, hosed the front steps, checked the pipes in the little bathroom like she'd asked. I ate lunch at a diner down the road where the waitress called everybody hon. I came back and read on the bench and drank one finger of the scotch and made a note to replace the bottle, because I hate finding things out too.

But here's the honest part. Every time I crossed that room, my eyes went to the trunk.

It was a beautiful object. That was the legitimate excuse. The leather was original, the brass had that soft gold glow you only get from real age, and the lock was a piece of work, a big brass box lock with a keyhole shaped like a keyhole inside a keyhole. I know craft when I see it. I run my thumb over other people's knotting at museums when the guards aren't looking. Looking at that trunk was like looking at a wig by a master. My hands wanted to know it.

Saturday night I sat on the bench across from it with the lamp on and told myself to knock it off.

"You're a grown man with boring hands," I said out loud to the empty room. The owl did not disagree.

The thing was, she hadn't been vague about it. Not one word of the speech had been vague. And she'd paid attention to my references, treated me fair, shook my hand like a person and not a formality. The one thing you don't do to a person like that is get clever with their grandfather's trunk.

So I went to bed in the little back room, which had a clean bed and a window full of crickets, and I slept fine.

Sunday morning I did the last of the chores by ten and had the whole day hanging over me. I walked the market while the vendors set up, bought a paper, bought a coffee, came back. I dusted the shelves in the showroom, careful and slow, and when I got to the shelf nearest the trunk I found myself standing there longer than dusting requires.

Up close the lock was even better. Brass fittings around the keyhole, tiny engraved scrollwork along the plate, and a hairline seam where the hasp met the body that some smith had fitted by hand. A magician's working trunk, she'd said. His whole act came out of this box, probably. Doves, cards, whatever a man did in the fifties to make a room go quiet.

I didn't touch it. I want that understood. I stood there with my dust rag in my hand and I did not touch it.

But I noticed something, and noticing is not touching. Around the edge of the lid, where the leather met the base, there was a faint line of brighter color. Almost invisible unless the light hit low, the way the lamp hit it in the evening. Like the lid sat a hair proud of the base on one side. Like maybe, once, a long time ago, somebody had opened it and the leather had remembered.

I put the rag down and stepped back.

"Sunday night," I said to the owl. "She's back Sunday night. You keep your brass mouth shut and so will I."

The crickets started up outside around six. I fixed myself dinner in the little kitchen, washed the plate, dried it, put it away. House-sitting done proper. Then I went back to the showroom with another finger of the scotch and sat on the bench, and the lamplight came on low the way it had the night before, and that bright hairline seam caught it exactly right.

I sat there a long while, turning my glass, looking at the thing she'd told me not to look at too hard.

And that's when I heard her car on the gravel.

It was early. Not Sunday-night early, but early for a woman who'd said Sunday night, and I sat there like a grown man caught holding a glass near a trunk I'd sworn I wasn't staring at.

Her heels came across the gravel and then the door opened and Lorna Rockefeller stood in it with a coat over her arm and a paper bag in her hand.

"Don't get up," she said. "Or do. You look like someone who wants to explain something."

"There's nothing to explain," I said. "I was sitting."

"You were sitting at the angle of a man studying a lock." She set the bag on the table. "I told you not to bring opinions about the trunk."

"I haven't opened anything. I haven't touched it. I noticed a seam, that's all."

"A seam." She hung her coat on the hook by the door and came over slow, looking at the lid the way a jeweler looks at a stone. "Show me."

So I pointed. Low lamp, that hairline of brighter leather along the back edge, and she bent down and looked for a good while without saying anything.

"Well," she said finally, straightening up. "Thirty years my grandfather tried locks and picks and X-rays, and you found it in two days with a dust rag."

"I didn't find anything. I noticed a seam."

"You noticed a seam that means somebody opened it once, and the leather remembered. Sit down, Ron. I'm early on purpose. I wanted to see what you did when you thought nobody was coming."

"And what did I do?"

"You dusted. You swept. You replaced nothing and drank two fingers over two days, which I can measure, and you sat with your back straight and your hands to yourself." She went into the kitchen and came back with a teapot and two cups. "I find that rare."

"How early is early?" I asked.

"Three hours. I drove back from the city after lunch and sat in the trailer office reading vendor contracts, which is my idea of a boring evening, waiting to see if you'd get clever." She poured. "You didn't."

"I don't get clever with people's grandfather's trunks."

"Most people do. The last one used a butter knife."

"I heard about the butter knife."

"Of course you did, I told you." She handed me a cup and sat across from me, and for a minute we just drank tea like two people who had run out of tests. "Tell me about wigs," she said.

"That's an odd question."

"It's not. A man who makes hair for a living is a man who works with his hands for strangers' faces. I want to know if you love it or if you ran from something."

"Bit of both," I said. "I was in operations for a food distributor. Twenty years. Spreadsheets, trucks, people quitting on Fridays. I was good at it and it was eating me alive. At forty-two I quit and apprenticed with a fellow in the theater district who made wigs for Broadway."

"Why wigs?"

"Because my mother was a seamstress and I grew up with knotting. Net, weft, ventilating. You tie hair to lace one strand at a time with a hooked needle. A good wig takes forty, sixty hours."

"One strand at a time," she said.

"One strand at a time. You do it in front of a window with good light and you don't talk to anybody."

"That sounds like a punishment."

"It sounds like one until you do it. Then it's the opposite. I did a piece for a museum last year, a period wig for a portrait exhibit, and the curator stood there almost crying because the hairline looked like a real hairline. Forty-eight years old and I made a woman cry over lace." I shrugged. "That never happened in twenty years of spreadsheets."

"You're forty-eight," she said.