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Elaine pointed the hair out during one of the many discussions she and Kathryn and I had at work, or after work, as was often the case. For about a year, Kathryn's office was next to mine, and Elaine's was next to Kathryn's, and all three of us tended to work late into the evening, and it was during these after hours that I found myself bonding with them, and with Eddie and Elizabeth and Amy and the other coworkers who were a part of Kathryn and Elaine's circle. Previously, most of my time in Fort Worth had been spent largely with the "associate editor" crowd, people in their early to mid-twenties, people a year or two younger than I, fresh out of college. Now, as an editor, I found myself among the young thirty-something and single crowd, a few years my senior. I was to turn thirty myself this year, and in that sense this new older single crowd did not bode well. I had moved from hanging out with those who were young and single and available to those who were single for the long term.
Elaine had a predilection for body parts and for miscued statements about them, and the mention of the hair was one of them. The hair was about an inch a long and was sticking out of my ear. "You have a hair sticking out of your ear," she noted, eliciting a laugh from Kathryn. Indeed, I did. What struck her as strange about it was that it was the only one--and it was long. She wanted to pluck it. I didn't let her.
For the next week, I pondered the hair. Where had it come from and how did it manage to grow so long without my ever noticing it? Hunched over page proof, I stroked it, pulling on it from the end nearest my ear outward. At the computer, one hand on my mouse, the other hand inevitably went to the hair at the ear.
At week's end, I let Elaine pluck it. She was pleased. I was relieved to have it gone. Stroking the hair had become habit forming and annoying. I couldn't have people looking at me with my fingers in my ear all day.
But the habit had been forged, the damage done. Over the next month, I found my fingers, more and more often at my ear. And within a couple of months, the hair--or a hair, maybe not the same one--had grown back. I pulled at it, tried to yank it out, but to no avail. My ear grew sore around the follicle. At home, I pulled a razor from my cabinet and shaved the little guy. Such proved difficult, as the ear is not a flat surface, is in fact a surface protected by gullies and walls.
During this time, I turned thirty. Though I have always been one to let my birthdays slip by without notice, a girl invited me out to celebrate it this year, and I took her up on it. And then, an hour before we were to go out, she canceled. It was, I guessed, not a big deal. Or maybe it was. I was thirty--and alone, again. I had never even had a girlfriend. A few hours later, my friend Claudia called me up and dragged me over to Deep Ellum; she had rented a car for the occasion, and there was no way that I could turn her down, though by this time I had every desire just to mope about at home. We had a beer at some random bar, and I stared at the outsides of the places I had heard of on the radio--the Coppertank, the Gypsy Tearoom--places that seemed hip and fun and full of available women, places for a youth I had never known. I watched people five to ten years my junior walking hand in hand. I listened to Claudia talk about the boy she currently had a crush on. And I talked a bit about the girls I'd been seeing lately, but with an understanding, even as I talked of them, that I hadn't a chance with any of them. It was my thirtieth birthday, and I felt like I'd missed the whole last decade of my life.
And then, after my birthday, there were more hairs. Two hairs at once, and then hairs in the other ear. My fingers were at my earlobe all the time now, any spare moment wherein they did not have something on which to focus--a keyboard, a pad and pen, an apple or a sandwich. Elaine no longer noted such hairs for me, for I shaved them off as they grew in. But I wondered if others were noticing, not the hairs, but my fingers feeling up my ears.
I was not the only one with a hair habit. Elaine herself tended to play with her hair, in fact, would eat it, she confessed, were she to have let it grow long enough.
All these years later, five states to the east, the ear habit is still with me, even as the hairs have become more stubborn. It is a habit that has been broken only once and only shortly--by a six-month venture with a beard, wherein my fingers found their way instead to my chin. If there is hair, I suppose, it is meant to be stroked. After a haircut, my fingers top my head, feeling the short bristles that are left. Shirt off, they find their way to my chest. It is as if, with no one else's hand to hold or shoulder to caress, my fingers find their way to my own body. I am my own lover.
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