Tonight I'm Someone Else

*I wanted to write a story about a long marriage and the kind of play that keeps people alive to each other. This one was fun to imagine because the revenge is so silly and sweet. Thanks for reading, and I hope it makes you smile.*

The shop was dead on a Thursday. I was cleaning my scissors at the back counter, running the cloth between the blades, when the door chimed.

Cassy walked in.

Sixty-two years old and she still entered a room like she owned the deed to it. Arm hooked through the arm of some man I'd never seen before. Tall. Dark hair. Sure as hell not sixty.

"Well," she said. "Still hacking at heads, Randy?"

"Still breathing, Cass. Imagine that."

She smiled at me. The visit had that as its entire point, and we both knew it. She hadn't been in my salon in four years. Not since the papers. She'd been going to some place in Yonkers, her cousin's girl.

"You remember Dominick," she said, patting the young man's arm.

Dominick. Of course. The guy she left me for. I did the math in my head, the way you do when it's a knife. Fifteen years younger than her. Forty-seven. Sixteen years younger than me. Under me. Lord.

"Sure," I said. "Dominick."

"You look good," Dominick said. He meant it too, the bastard. He didn't know enough to be cruel.

"He wants to know if you do perms," Cassy said, running her fingers through her own hair. She'd been in here twice a month for thirty-some years, back when we were married, and she knew damn well I do perms. She booked one anyway. For next Thursday. For Dominick.

I wrote it in the book with a steady hand. I'm proud of that. My hand was steady.

"Four o'clock," I said. "Don't be late. I got a full book."

They left. The chime rang behind them. I put down the scissors and looked at myself in the mirror at the back station. Sixty-three. Gray at the temples, which I tell clients is distinguished. Thirty-eight years married to that woman, and she walks in with a man who probably calls her Cass.

I finished the scissors anyway. Then I closed up early and took the bus home.

* * *

Bernadette was in the kitchen when I came in, standing over the stove in her socks, stirring a pot. She's sixty-one, my Bern. Retired librarian, thirty years at the branch on Grand Concourse. She came out to me at fifty-five, over this same stove, trans and terrified and sure, and I said I know, honey, I've known, and we've been married three years.

"You're early," she said. "Good day?"

"Fabulous. Cass came in."

The spoon stopped.

"Your Cass."

"Our Cass. With the boyfriend. Booked a perm. For him. In my chair. On my Thursday."

She turned the burner down and came over to me. She took my jacket off my shoulders the way she's done ten thousand times, and she hung it on the hook, and she looked at me with those reading glasses she never takes off anymore.

"Randy."

"Bern."

"You're not jealous."

"I'm not jealous."

"You're jealous."

"I'm not jealous, I'm furious. There's a difference. Jealous is when you want what they got. Furious is when you want to flip the table."

She laughed. She went back to the pot. I got a beer out of the fridge and sat at the little table we keep crammed in the corner by the makeup station, because the kitchen counter is where I do Bernadette's hair on Sundays and there's a mirror bolted above the stove for it. Prewar apartment. Thin walls. You can hear Ravi's subwoofer downstairs clear as a radio, and the 4 train rattles by every few minutes like the building's got a heartbeat.

"So what did you say?" she asked.

"Said four o'clock, don't be late."

"Randy Bowen. That's it? The man stole your wife and you gave him customer service?"

"Professionalism is a shield, Bern."

"Professionalism is a shield," she repeated, mocking me a little, the way wives do. She stirred. She tasted. She added salt. "You know what your problem is?"

"Enlighten me."

"You spent thirty-eight years being Cassy Mullen's husband. Before that you were Christina and Anton's boy from the second floor. You have never once in your life just been a man walking into a room. Some stranger. Nobody's anything."

"That's a hell of a diagnosis for a Thursday."

"I'm serious." She turned around, spoon in hand, pointing it at me. "Say you weren't you. Say you were some guy. Some stranger she never met. What would she think of you?"

"She'd think I was a handsome son of a bitch," I said, and she snorted, and then something happened in my head. A little light went on. I sat up straight in the chair.

"Bern."

"What."

"Say that again."

"Which part?"

"The stranger part. You're a genius. You're an absolute genius and I've been sleeping next to it for three years."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she said, but she was smiling, because she always knows before I do.

* * *

Here's what I want you to understand about my wife. She's a quiet woman in most rooms. Librarian voice. Soft hands. Thirty years shushing children in the reading room. But she's got a mean streak of play in her that comes out about once a year, and when it comes out, it comes out all the way.

She turned off the stove. She went to the pile in the hall closet, the thrift-store pile we keep meaning to donate, and she dug through it, and she came out holding a black leather jacket that belonged to nobody. Some dead man's jacket from the Goodwill on Third Avenue, size wrong for both of us, which is exactly why it was perfect.

"Put this on," she said.

"Bern."

"Put it on."

I put it on. It hung off me wrong. It was magnificent.

Then she went to the bathroom and came back with the little tin from Halloween two years ago, the costume year, when we'd stayed home and handed out candy to maybe nine kids. She held up a stick-on mustache. Cheap thing. Jet black. Would fool nobody at three feet.

"That's ridiculous," I said.

"It's perfect," she said. "Nobody who looks at that mustache will ever think of Randy Bowen."

She poured two glasses of the whiskey Ravi gave us for Christmas. He's the neighbor downstairs, musician, been in the building ten years, knows everybody's business before they do. Good man. Bad taste in subwoofers. The whiskey was decent though, which is how I know he regifted it.

Then, and this is the part I'll remember, she dragged the kitchen stool out into the middle of the living room. Sat down on it. Crossed her legs. Took a sip.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Setting a scene. This is a bar. A dark one. Nice one. I'm a woman sitting alone." She fluffed her hair with her free hand. "And you're a man who just walked in."

I stood there in the dead man's jacket with the tin mustache in my hand.

"Go in the bedroom," she said. "Don't come out until you're not my husband anymore."

"That's a big ask for a two-bedroom."

"One-bedroom, Randy. Go."

I went.

* * *

The bedroom door doesn't fully close. It never has. There's a gap like a fist wide, and you can hear everything from the living room, the 4 train, Ravi's bass thumping through the floor, my wife pouring herself another whiskey and humming something.

I looked in the mirror on the closet door. Sixty-three years old. I stuck the mustache on crooked, then fixed it. I pushed my hair back off my forehead, the way I do for clients when I want their face to look longer. I rolled the jacket collar up. All of it was silly. All of it worked.

Who was this guy. That was the game, so I played it. Give him a name. Give him a walk. Give him a past that doesn't have a single Cassy in it.

Lorenzo.

Don't ask me where it came from. Somewhere deep, maybe the barbershop next to my first shop, the one run by the Italian family, forty years ago. Lorenzo. Guy named Lorenzo doesn't clean his scissors on Thursdays. Guy named Lorenzo doesn't write appointments in a book.

I heard Bernadette call out, muffled. "You ready in there?"

"Two minutes."

"Don't keep Yvonne waiting."

"Who?"

"The woman in the bar. She hates waiting."

I laughed, alone, in a leather jacket, in a mustache, at my age. Then I killed the laugh. Lorenzo doesn't giggle.

I gave it a minute. Then I pushed the door open and walked out into the living room like I'd never seen the place in my life.

Bernadette was on the stool with her legs crossed and her glasses off, and I'll tell you, without those glasses she looked like a different woman entirely. She'd put on lipstick. Red. She hasn't worn red since the nineties.

I stopped by the armchair. Kept my hands loose. Invented a whole life in about four seconds.

"Evening," I said. "Name's Lorenzo."

She looked at the mustache. She bit the inside of her cheek, fighting it, and lost, and laughed for a good ten seconds into her whiskey glass.

"I'm sorry," she managed. "Lorenzo."

"That's the name."

"The mustache is... Lorenzo, the mustache is staying on the couch cushion if we sit anywhere."

"Yvonne, was it?" I said, ignoring that, committing.

"Yvonne," she said, and she set her glass down, and something shifted in her face. The laugh drained out of her eyes and something else walked in, something I hadn't seen aimed at me since before the divorce. She looked me up and down, slow, like she was pricing me. "Yvonne. And I'm sitting here alone, and you're a stranger. So. What's a stranger's opening line, Lorenzo?"

The stool scraped. That's what did it. The stool had scraped across the floor twice already, once when she dragged it out and once when she shifted her weight, and three minutes into Lorenzo's debut there came a knock at the door. Three knocks. Polite ones.

Bernadette raised an eyebrow at me. I raised one back.

"You expecting company?" she asked.

"Not as Lorenzo."

"Then answer it as Lorenzo."

So I did. I opened the door with my collar up and my mustache crooked and there stood Ravi, forty-eight years old, holding a dish towel for no reason at all.

"Randy. Hey. Listen, the stool, the scraping, it goes right through my ceiling. I'm trying to lay down a bass track and it sounds like furniture moving in a haunted..."

He stopped. He looked at the jacket. He looked at the mustache. He looked at Bernadette on the stool in red lipstick with her legs crossed.

"Am I interrupting something?" he asked.

"You are," said Bernadette, cool as anything. "I'm Yvonne. I don't believe we've met."

Ravi's whole face changed. It took him about two seconds to figure out the entire situation, because like I said, he knows everybody's business before they do. And instead of running, the man walked in.

"Well," he said, hanging the dish towel over his arm like a waiter's cloth. "In that case. Can I get anyone anything? I make a mean old fashioned, and by mean I mean I pour whiskey in a glass and hope."

"You had a whiskey," Bernadette said, pointing at hers.

"That's yours. This is a bar now. Bars have bartenders." He went to the kitchen counter, which doubles as my makeup station, and started washing one of our good glasses like he owned the place. "Ten years I've lived under you people and this is the first interesting thing that's happened in this apartment."

"You hear everything down there?" I asked.

"Everything. The 4 train, your Sundays when Bern does your hair, you two arguing about the thermostat in March. You want a bartender or not?"

We wanted a bartender.

So that's how it went. Ravi behind the kitchen counter, dish towel over his arm, pouring the regifted whiskey into our good glasses like it was top shelf. Bernadette on her stool. Me in the armchair, playing a man I'd never met. The 4 train rattled by and nobody flinched.

"So, Lorenzo," Ravi said, leaning on the counter. "What do you do?"

"I own things," I said.

"Vague. I like it."

"Yvonne," Bernadette said, "owns nothing. She takes what she wants."

"Is that right?" Ravi said, and he turned to me and pointed with the towel. "Careful with that one. That one