Emma Francois
The Coiffeuse
Rani had been sent to the medieval French arts town of Pezenas by the airline publication she freelanced for. She declined to alert her editors to the fact that it would be difficult for her to infiltrate the hair salon’s secrets at her young age of 28, for the head trimmer, Etienne Salaz, was known for two things: her detailed tapestries of hair and her clientele—anyone with plenty of time and at least, for some reason, 63 years of age. So, she phoned her British grandmother Gigi—a retired socialite more comfortable in the company of her granddaughter than her declining friends—who hopped on the Chunnel to Rani’s flat in the outskirts of the outskirts of Paris. After a train ride spent sucking wine through croissants, the duo knocked on the door of Etienne’s salon. An old wood and stone farmhouse splashed in Riviera teal, with a hand-painted sign swinging off the windowfront bearing one wind-worn word: coiffeuse.
“The process will take ten days,” Etienne said. “You will come every day at exactly half past nine. You will sit until sixteen hours. You will be very still. You will not ask any questions or make any requests.”
Rani translated. “Very well,” Gigi agreed. She turned over her crochet scrunchie as a contract of sorts. Gigi’s white hair fell across her over-sunned decolletage.
Etienne was quietly famous; the source of sparce musings on niche cosmetics blogs and creatively-enhanced travel anecdotes. Never had she received a lengthy summation, nor international attention. Her public persona was alarmingly obscure. For this Rani was grateful and suspicious. Why did Etienne agree to let Rani sit in on an appointment, and with her notebook to boot, when it was clear no one else had gained access before, or at least followed through on a profile? Nearly every other knitter, potter, painter, or ironworker in town had at least a patchworked website or shoutout in the local weekly.
When Rani asked Etienne about her mysterious notoriety, Etienne only managed, switching to English for punctuation, to say, “Yes! That is the question!”
*
To sit for Etienne was not unlike sitting for a painted portrait. One must wear a roomy frock of beige gray, like spiced pastry cream. One must have cleansed skin. One must be present, and still, in body and mind. “The exchange of energies,” Etienne said, “is as important for the art as the exchange of body and canvas.”
Body and canvas. Spoken in the undulating tempo in which a priest might pronounce, “bread and wine.”
The sitter may not talk. The sitter must not move, either. Stillness was a medium, like primer or fixative. To make a canvas out of hair, Etienne worked meticulously and deliberately, with no sudden movements, no disturbing artifice of air. (Except, of course, when she intentionally sought the whimsy of the draft for a zhuzh of je ne sais quoi.)
*
The last time Rani was instructed to sit still in a chair was at an optometrist appointment. Nearly legally blind, Rani began wearing glasses before she could talk. The optometrist wore a blue medical mask, and sat diagonal from her, so she only ever saw one-third of the top-fourth of his head. What she did see featured black hairs, newly chopped, in that thinned, angular cut men in their thirties, even without a military background, were fond of. Too close to the scalp around the ears, with a tuft like a duck’s. The doctor playfully clicked the lenses of his hanging machine, as nonchalantly as selecting hits on a jukebox, asking Rani which slide of clarity she preferred. How do you like it? Is that feeling good? I thought so! After writing out a note for her updated prescription, he asked her, “Would you like to know what I see when I look into your eyes?”
Rani, despite her glasses, squinted.
“Through the images, I mean,” the optometrist said. “The undersides of your eye balls, behind the pupils.” On his screen, he conjured a glowing orange circle like a harvest moon, with a bright yellow center, spurting veins that crawled and stemmed around the orb. “That’s the optic nerve, the connection to your brain.” He turned his head toward her and smiled, like even without the photo he could see straight into her mind. “And all those nerves? We look for clean lines, with the endings intact. A seamless connection to the brain. Your nerves? Intact. Beautiful.” Then he patted her on the thigh.
*
Etienne worked alone, assisted only by her boy, Jean. Before Jean, it was Senna, and before Senna, it was Matthieu. When Rani asked her how she found her apprentices, Etienne said, “You search for someone wanting something bigger. Someone unhappy who needs rescue.”
“Is that like your clients?”
“Clients? No. My canvases don’t need saving, they need the framing—the memory—and the time to do it. Something constant.”
Time, intact.
An hour or two later (Rani could not be sure how long), Etienne added on to her answer; as if only a mere second had passed. “The art is about inspiring the faith, a proof of life and beauty that is beyond one person, but entirely of one person.” Jean nodded in perfect agreement. Like that explanation made all the sense in this wide, dumb world.
Etienne worked first by washing the hair, a job involving fingernails. She scratched the scalp, producing a sketching sound like the charcoal of a Degas, just like Gigi used to do for Rani when she was littler, paying close attention to the backs of the ears and the nape of the neck, the places to which a lover might attend. Rani watched her grandmother close her eyes as Etienne wound her way through the roots. Upon noticing Gigi’s head droop slightly, Jean darted over and unlaced her sandals (“So madame may sleep more comfortably”). This entire interaction passed with no more than a wink between Jean and Etienne. The pair communicated only in cues and points, like a conductor and pianist. They waltzed slowly, frightening no air, creating no wrinkles in time, moving so gradually, in fact, that after a few days Rani wondered if the two had actually discovered how to freeze one’s self in a suspended dew drop of a moment.
What was clearly a blissful experience for Gigi had become a trial of patience for Rani. A trial, she realized a few days in, no airline could possibly pay her enough to endure. And surely not one she would travel around the world on plane, train, bus, and taxi, to this remote French town, to experience.
After the first day of sitting, Rani and her grandmother kissed Etienne and Jean goodbye and rounded the cobblestone corner to the bistro with the metal and wicker coffee tables lining the street. Here they met Beaux and his little dog, humorously, Rani suspected, named Bow, the former of whom immediately recognized Gigi as the newest sitter-canvas thanks to her freshly cleansed scalp holding up a towel wrapped like a snake that hid every single one of Gigi’s fine white-yellow grays. “And how is it going for you?” Beaux asked. He spoke his French slowly, for the benefit of the foreigners, as a courtesy. It was clear, from his eavesdropping, that his English was in fact quite good.
“I feel very calm today,” Gigi said, in her British schoolgirl French. “My face is smooth. My eyes are bright, from the resting.”
“She is usually smiling riotously you see,” Rani explained, “so the day without talking has lessened some of her laugh lines, about which, contradictorily, she is pleased.”
“I am allowed to be conventional in this one way, my dear.”
“I have only seen Etienne’s work once,” Beaux said. “Years ago, in her early days.”
“And? How was it?”
“It took my breath away. I remember her weaving, for hours, picking up so few hairs at a time it looked like she was only imitating a craftsperson, or perhaps moving hair by magic. I couldn’t watch her again after that.”
“Why not?”
“Too jealous.” He tossed a bar towel over his shoulder in a swift motion. The conversation, clearly, had ended. “You have the fish, yes?”
This was another coded gesture, for there was only the one item on the menu. The ladies played along with a chorus of merci’s.
“Was I a good sitter today?”
“I doubt there’s such a thing, Gigi.”
“Oh, there’s always a ‘best.’ Just ask our quippy chef.”
Beaux returned with radish salads and braised leeks, as well as the white fish steamed with onions and carrots in a paper bag. After a bottle of sunset-colored wine, the pair trotted to their studio rental stocked with only the essentials; kettle, tub, windowed view, and a shared pullout bed. Before sleeping, Gigi whispered to Rani, “I just want Etienne to tell me I sit like nobody else.”
*
This was not the biggest story Rani had written. Her past profiles included an American sculptor who turned salvaged chairs into characters and insisted on showing her his bedroom (the rusted farm holsters and chainsaw cutters hanging from chicken wire, trawling through the ceiling like reverse seaweed). And then there was the charming British neon artist and activist, who wrote iconoclastic phrases like no thoughts, just sun in hot pink scrawling electric cursive. And Rani’s personal favorite, the profile that still made her smile, the ex-salvage diver who made his living scavenging the blackout depths of Florida’s waters, feeling for golf balls with his hands and avoiding alligators—alligators which he was not scared of as they could never hold a candle to the crocodiles of his Zambian youth.
Rani considered herself lucky to make a job teaching English, translating French poetry, and picking up novelty profiles for trade publications offering 10, 20, 70 cents a word. Though she hadn’t found herself in these profiles yet, at least not in the way other, more famous journalists spoke of.
In fact, the more profiles she wrote, the more dangerous her ego became. The more confident she became in her knack for reading people, in assessing their quirks and desires, in reaffirming how gloriously intuitive she really was, how grateful she was for her nomadic upbringings traveling at Gigi’s side, how lost she’d feel with a firm sense of home.
How lost she’d feel if she was rooted. Or known.
*
Next door to Etienne was Selange the painter. Selange and Etienne smoked cigarettes together at 9:15, 11:45, 12:15, and 4:00, plus or minus a few minutes, taking turns making the other un petit café noisette. Selange painted still lives of apples with a realism so crisp it was difficult to chew. Rani detested realism, and in a way so did Etienne. But Etienne was a woman of process, so it was not good for her to think anything other than religious admiration for Selange’s meticulous strokes from horse hair brushes and turpentine. Rani noted that, while both women completed their art with a localized precision, their persons were much breathier. Loose gray clothing, soft fabrics in natural fibers of linen, rayon, and cotton. Hair tied up with a clip or scarf, haphazardly. A smudge of mascara worn like eye shadow lined Selange’s indigo pupils. And on both: the light hold of the cigarette, the rigid-less movement of the body. Without her glasses on, Rani could have easily confused one woman for the other.
Occasionally Beaux stopped by in the late mornings with a basket of croissants. He never came inside. Neither, it occurred to Rani, did Selange. Bow however did not seem to subscribe to the same rules. The curly dog leapt through the arched doorframe and onto Jean’s lap and in return got spritzed with verbena-scented hairspray and tossed a chunk of stale baguette. Rani stole these moments to wake Gigi up with a cup of tea and ask her how she felt. Always some version of “glorious” or “heavenly,” or so “relaxed” she didn’t know whether she was “dreaming or alive.”
Day three of sitting: the snipping commenced. This, Rani suspected, was why Etienne received so few clients; she did not allow any ultimatums or input. Jean produced a fine silk lavender scarf and covered Gigi’s eyes. This was how Gigi would remain until the day’s end.
The first day of trimming unnerved Gigi, who subsequently had to be coaxed into a kind of stupor via a foot rub from the young boy. This worked like a charm—almost too well, Rani noted. After that Gigi accepted the blindfold with an autobiographical quip not suitable for immature audiences, which, Rani was thankful, Gigi had tact enough to only deliver in English.
The cutting itself was performance. Jean stood to the side with a small homemade wicker broom, at the ready. Etienne began slowly, as a violinist raises the bow at the start of the symphony, then gained in speed and confidence. Etienne focused on the mannequin of Gigi, aware of nothing beyond her eyesight, her study, her vision. Jean followed her with the broom, collecting the clippings, which fell in the smallest unit of particles, like glitter, catching light as they shimmied to the ground. This was a full body affair. Etienne circled Gigi, prancing around the salon and sometimes twirling Gigi’s chair with a flourish. She snipped in slim shards, very steadily. She moved as if flying, almost like a fairy, creating a fine pixie dust with every shiver of her wrist.
This continued for three days.
Jean, on the final day, presented the hairs to the wind, whispering something under his breath, perhaps a prayer or a promise, before tossing the ashes into the outside world where they dissolved through the town.
*
“You cannot sit still, Rani,” Etienne announced to the salon, one week in. “Your knee always is bouncing.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Your leg moving is like the tick of time. I can’t complete the final stages like this. Leave. Go to market. Come back when you can be still.”
“Bring me a tomato,” Gigi yelled to her. “I want to eat it like an apple.” Jean watched Rani leave and shook his head when she stepped outside.
The sitting had not been easy for Rani. Each day she took notes. E removes apron. E locates brush. E switches to comb. Jean seems to have no friends his age, question mark. Ask GG what she dreams about in chair. E is dyeing. J holds palette. The globs in various shades of orange and purple are spread out like paint. E works very slowly. Is there a story here? What is the purpose?? Is this ‘art’ worth it? How long will the art last, on the hair? E is on third espresso. I am hungry. I am bored.
When not taking notes, Rani tended to escape into her own mind, though her thoughts, based on her tense face in comparison, were not as happy or contented as her grandmother’s. Rani thought about craft, and how she wanted to be a writer of great writing, and how her profiles, though artful, were not likely to stand the test of time, let alone qualify, even liberally, as ‘art.’ Though the process, Rani thought, really did demand her entire body and mind, and skill and talent, not unlike Etienne’s work. Rani compared Etienne’s art to other artists she’d interviewed, which led her to compare this assignment to others, again asking herself how she ended up in that sculptor’s bedroom, and what she should have said differently, said next time, and how hard it was for her to get herself out of that interview. How hard it was to then sculpt a positive likeness of the artist she had been paid to profile. Or the eye doctor. When the optometrist patted her on the leg. How she’d yelped, how she’d scared him, how he was only being nice, how it must be so sad for her, to live in a constant fear of exploitation. To live with fear at all.
Yes, Rani was not enjoying this stillness. The quiet was not her friend.
On the prowl for tomatoes, Rani ran into Selange and Beaux sitting at the café by the market. They waved her over and pulled up a seat. They handed her an espresso, which she accepted, even though it would make her heart fritz.
“You do not look well,” Selange said.
“Her head is inside the moon,” Beaux agreed.
“Here, hold a dog,” Selange passed Bow to Rani as casually as if it were a bottle of wine.
“You should not be this sad,” Beaux said. “It’s not the last day, is it?”
“Have you started to see the picture? Is that what it is?”
“What? No, I just have been left alone to my thoughts too long. It is lonely in that studio, actually.”
“It is lonely in the head,” Selange agreed. “Especially at the moon.”
“You need to get happy before the last day,” Beaux said. “Or the reveal will tear you.”
“Don’t scare her like that! She may not be as sensitive as you.”
“Look at the way she’s holding my dog!”
“You are a writer, yes?” Selange asked. “Etienne said she finds you very internal, very hidden. She says you need to let more out, come out of yourself, perform a little for the sake of society, for Jean.”
“She said you need to find a new character.”
“I like who I am,” Rani said. “I like my work, I like my life, teaching and traveling and writing.”
“Yes, but you don’t party like the other young people. You are not ridiculous enough to be happy in the movement. You’re too practical. You need sex. Something to open you.”
“You need a re-birth. Etienne was actually thinking you might need a haircut.”
“To make you a star.”
“A star, to go with your mind. In the moon.”
The line between idiom and metaphor had been lost on Rani, but the tilted heads of her dining companions said it all.
“Excuse me,” Rani said. “I need to find a tomato. Thanks for the coffee.”
Rani selected a baguette and two lush red tomatoes with skin so tough and velvety it looked steaky or palpitating, like the cow’s heart, coeur de boeuf, it’s named for. She munched on the baguette as she walked back to the salon, thinking about process and sex, and how all the townspeople looked and sat and moved like models in a perfume ad, how jealous she was of their easiness, how thick her denim pants suddenly felt, and how her new friends had worried the final day, the big reveal, would make her sad. Why was that? She would be glad for this escapade to be in the past. Maybe the profiles weren’t worth it anymore. Having to shine a spotlight on another causes a sick glare to bounce back.
“My dear, did you taste this?” Gigi asked from her chair. “The tomato on your tongue? So lewd and fuzzy, like a furry glacier.”
“Your grandmother is a poet in rest,” Etienne laughed. “You are lucky, Rani. It means you have the language in your blood.”
Rani spent the final days in and out of the salon, giving her grandma, Jean, and Etienne a wide berth. Rani shopped around for a large wicker basket, and filled it every day with pocket game books from the magazine stand (that promised to simultaneously relax and stimulate the mind), as well as marzipan figures from the pâtissière and beads from the ceramist and larger beads from the glass-blower—so she could one day make what, she did not know, but she enjoyed roaming the medieval stone-stacked streets and pausing for a citron pressé or café gourmand or coca cola whenever she pleased. On the second-to-last day, she made a record four trips to the cursive gelato cart, earning her a fifth cone free and a proud smile from the girl with the scooper.
Etienne did not talk to Rani much after accusing her of restlessness, an unsettled spirit, and a wandering mind. Etienne did, however, start making hot water with garden mint so Rani could join her, Selange, and sometimes Beaux, outside during their espresso breaks, a magnificent kindness that Etienne pretended to be nothing of note and that Rani found to be quietly profound and surprisingly maternal. Rani resolved to buy Etienne a parting gift of noisette gelato, smeared in overlapping patches textured and presented on a cone like a wildflower. A mundane gift really, but Rani loved the thought of Etienne licking a creamy, nutty, sweet rose of gelato with a childlike lust after the relentless precision of her work.
The final day came. Gigi was giddy. She looked bright, and spoke infrequently. Every day of silence seemed to make the world around Gigi louder and fuller, so that she moved with unprecedented subtleness. “I feel like a girl,” Gigi remarked before bed on the penultimate night. “Like the girl I was, before boys and cocktails and modeling and worrying about looks and money and fame. I feel simple, and young. I think of my mother.”
Gigi took her final seat at the salon. Etienne nodded to Jean and they commenced. The towel wrap came off and the dance began, the swirling and gesturing and snipping and painting and tying and weaving of the past few days continued. Rani picked berries off a creamy fruit tart while lying down, not minding the custard droppings collecting along her white oxford shirt; she gazed at the scene above her as if the trio were stars and the salon one giant, isolated sky, only here to keep Rani tethered to her splint in the universe. E moves as quickly as a cloud. Jean is her moon. Always in orbit. GG pulls the pair together, the focus, the earth. The salon, Rani had accepted, or decided, had its own rules of time and physics, its own cosmic ripples and design. Real art seems to be the vibe created, the atmosphere moved and transferred and manipulated, as much as, or more than, the product—here, the hair—isolated. ARTIST not art. Rani slipped off her shoes. Unexpectedly, but also as if it made great sense, Jean came and gave Rani a calf massage so gentle she fell asleep.
The last time she would feel at ease.
Rani woke up sharply, to a snap from Etienne.
One second later, it was all over.
Ten days of anticipation and labor and wonder. Passed. Gone.
The art, the painting, had revealed itself, had materialized. And then, as Gigi got up to hug Etienne, the depiction disappeared. The art was a moment, an instant. Millions of hairs operated in perfect unison, intact, to create a beautiful, unimaginable creation, and after the length of a breath, the vanishing began.
Rani wished she never saw this. The image wallpapered her head. This: a ballerina on a box; a ballerina born of jewels, and dancing. A ballerina on a metal spring. A singing body tethered. A ballerina made to free-flow and move but enduring the gravitational pull of her music box home. In the skies above this ballerina, a carousel of horses pranced like clouds. They were free. For that moment, they were free. Then, as the hair fell into place or whatever moves the earth settled around Gigi’s figure and nuzzled her hair strands, the ballerina’s figure contorted, indicating movement—finally!—but collapsing. And in another flash, in another turn of the world, the dancer vanished. Dissipated like vapor off a shower head, lost to the depths of Gigi’s fine periwinkle hair. The horses, still visible above, appeared to be moving, aching, suffering, falling out of the sky, chasing the ballerina’s grace and beauty. Until they were rain. The horses, rain. The rain, atmosphere. Then it was just hair. Gray. Streaked with lily and lavender.
Gigi loved what she saw. The otherworldly shades of pansy and lilac dotting her revitalized mane, now strong and soft from the carotene and shea. Wavy from the twirling and plaiting. Gigi never knew of the picture, the meteoric beauty emanating, for one glorious second, from her head.
This broke Rani’s heart. And when she looked at Etienne, she saw not a woman capturing the last remains of her work, but a woman staring at another woman; an artist, established and confident in her trade, watching with a familiar love, ache, and knowing, of a younger artist grappling with inevitability and worth. In this, in Rani, Etienne could see herself clearly. The point was to break your heart, so that you felt what Etienne felt every day as an artist with an everlasting urge to create, and never enough time, never enough immortal mediums. Jean cried silently in the corner, clutching his broom. Etienne stood now with her face to the heavens, in waiting, for what, Rani did not know. Rani felt her eyes burning with the onset of tears, from disbelief and from feeling the earth move, the time like air between her fingers. She cried for the fragile impermanence of beauty, for the little miracle she had just witnessed, the most realistic depiction of truth in art she would ever see, she was sure. She knew Etienne led her here because she knew Rani would never be able to write this profile, that no one would ever fully replicate or depict or render her work, but seemed to admire something important in the act of trying. All the meticulous labor, the suffering, for one brief moment of beauty so magnificent it pierces you, as if a ray from the sun has shattered every part of you that was glass—that was cracked, hardened or made of sand—and lit a fire of the organic material left behind. And now Rani was a pile of ashes, fixed for nothing, but needing—yearning!—to be tossed to wind.
END
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Emma Francoisis a writer and artist whose journalism, poetry, fiction, and essays—about art, the environment, and love—have appeared in the Washington Post, Citron Review, Inquisitive Eater, Oh Reader, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from American University and currently teaches at George Washington University. You can follow her at emmajfrancois.com and on Instagram: @emmajfrancois.