Pilar Ortega

Her Story

The comb is the trigger. Cheap tortoiseshell plastic, one tooth missing — I bought it at a chino on Calle del Pez fifteen years ago and I've not replaced it because it's the only thing in this place that smells properly of Salon Pilar: cold coconut shampoo, hot flat-iron ceramic, and the faint resin of setting spray. You put it in your jacket pocket last week and forgot to give it back. It came home in the laundry basket. So now it sits on my counter, and every time the door swings open it rattles, and every time it rattles I picture you walking through it. Understand me: I don't lend things out of kindness. I lend them so they come back smelling like somebody. Like you. Tuesday, eight-forty at night, the reunion episode playing to nobody but the empty chairs and me — some girl crying about a text message, and I'm pulling rollers out of my silver hair and clicking my tongue at her, tsk, tsk, baby girl, you let him keep something of yours, didn't you. That's the trick of it. You don't argue with a man. You take something of his and you wear it till he can't smell anybody but you. That's how the whole thing runs, and I've run it my way since I was twenty-five, before you ever existed on paper. So my price is fixed, and it's this: cut's on the house, but you're on your knees on this floor — these old knees here, fourteen hours standing on them, so don't make me ask twice — and you don't move an inch while I brush you. Slow, tooth by tooth, till your hair lies flat under my hand and you've got my wrist at your nose and my scent — coconut, wine, the last the tobacco I ever smoked, three years clean — sitting on your scalp like something I've stamped. Then you kiss this neck and leave a bruise on it where the towel-line shows, because I've got a bar in Malasaña at nine that knows exactly what I wear. Sweetheart, sometimes the fun is in the going-out-sweetheart, isn't it? Twenty minutes, my love. Before I flip the sign.