Eyes closed, I felt the tissue paper hugging my neck’s nape, the shawl nestled at my Adam’s apple, the occasional pressure of a single finger adjusting the angle of my head gently, but firmly, like a pianist giving an A. I smelled the orange spice opening of hand-mixed shaving cream, the sandalwood follow-up of hand soap, the tang of Barbicide, the masculine smell of Pinaud Clubman. The shears snipped in thoughtful bursts at a moderate walking tempo. Andante, I thought. “First I do the beard,” he said. “Yes,” I murmured, not opening my eyes.

There had as yet been no electric razor’s angry buzz, no rushed swipes of a “number two” doing the thinking—it had all been done by hand. It has been decades since I’d last heard the intimate, conversational cadence of old-fashioned barbering. It made me think of the rhythm of my mother’s work sounds as she sculpted me when I was a boy.

Pausing, he asked, “Will you check my work on your beard?” I opened my eyes, reached for my glasses, performed the universal male gesture of running my thumb down one cheek, the rest of my fingers down the other, and closing them, like a prayer, below my chin while turning my head left, then right. “Perfect,” I smiled, taking off my glasses and placing them back on the shelf beneath the enormous mirror. 

His jacket was as white as his hair. About eighty, I thought. “I am finding this haircut oddly comforting,” I remarked. “That’s good,” he said. “Something about not using the razor.” “Ah,” he replied, “you noticed.” The silence for a few beats that feels so natural between a good barber or barkeep and his client. “It was not the way I was taught to cut hair, you see,” he explained. I closed my eyes again as he began trimming my sideburns.

On a hunch, I asked, “Where was that?” He stopped. “Palermo,” he said, quietly. “I learned to cut hair by apprenticing for six years in a barbershop there until, one day, my boss said, ‘now you are ready,’ gave me a pair of scissors, a manual clipper, straight razors, and a brush, and showed me the door.”

I recalled my composer friend Norman Stumpf asking Ned Rorem during a lesson in the early eighties whether Ned thought that he was “ready” to begin his career, and Ned responding, “You’re ready whenever you decide that you are.” My barber performed the customary blessing of matching the length of my sideburns with his knuckles. “Italy,” I mused. “Yes,” he said, reading my mind, “it is a shame about Venezia. Have you been there?”

The waves of emotion, followed by a simple, “Yes, many times.” “I have been only once,” he replied. “I took my wife to La Fenice, do you know it?” “Indeed I do,” I smiled, answering, “Venice’s jewel. One of the peak experiences of my life was visiting Ricordi in Milano and seeing the various performance sets for Verdi and Puccini.” His scissors stopped. “Ah.” Intense, shared emotion. “The opera.”

He worked on in silence, struggling with what to do with the thinning fistful of my hair fecklessly splayed across the exposed scalp growing like the hole in the ozone layer. “When did you come to the States?” I asked. “I was 18. My father applied when I was 13. The U.S. government would only allow him to bring one other family member. He chose me. My grandfather had to put a thousand dollars in the bank in order to show that we would be supported if we didn’t get work.” “Did you?” I asked. The scissors stopped. “I have always worked,” he replied. “Me, too,” I said, quietly. “Yes,” he said.

“You are a musician,” he observed, simply. “Of course,” I replied, gently. “My three sons all played instruments. They are in their fifties now. Music kept them out of trouble, and at home.” “Yes,” I replied, “that is good. You must be proud of them.” A caesura in which pictures were drawn down off the mirror. I pulled some snaps of my sons up on the phone. Silence. He reached for his tools. The smell of the talc, the pat-pat-pat as he worked it into my hair; the scraping of his comb; the slight twinge of pain as he hit a blemish.

I thought of an astonishingly personal, cruel, intellectually shallow, and factually inaccurate review of my memoir onto which I had recently stumbled. I had already forgotten the critic’s name. Most kinds of writing don’t require any bravery—criticism least of all—but publishing a memoir is scary; it is one of the kinds of writing that requires courage. I found mine. My book wasn’t confessional—there were no surprises in it for people who knew me—but it was intended to be a work of art that would, in Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” I had spent the first three months of 2019 finalizing the manuscript, and then correcting proofs, making an index, gathering permissions, choosing photos, and so forth. Sending off the final galleys to the publisher, I had thought of the story of the annoyed senior composer who, having just played a recording of her work for an impertinent student in a masterclass, responded to his glib vitriol with a mild, “Next time, you write it.”

I thought of yesterday’s visit to the cardiologist, who, after examining the various diagnostic tests that had been run on my heart, said, “Your heart is getting larger.” When I smiled ruefully, he replied, “That’s not a good thing.” As I do every holiday season, I reminded myself that dealing with grief and depression is not a competition; neither should it be concealed or denied; there’s plenty of anguish to go around.

I thought of my youngest, at the doctor’s office with his mother; my oldest, at school grappling with adolescence. The barber loosened the tissue paper at the nape of my neck and applied a little shaving cream. “Your boys are handsome,” I observed, handing him back the pictures as his straight razor scraped across my jugular. “We are lucky men, yes?” He accepted the snapshots, wiped my neck clean with a warm, wet cloth, spun the chair around and whipped the shawl from my shoulders. “So are yours,” he smiled, “and, yes, we are.”

I looked at the barber’s honest work in the mirror; I took in the aging, soul-weary face of the man who looked back at me, and reached for a way forward. You are not Aschenbach, and he is not the hotel barber; this visit to your barber tells a profoundly different story. I nodded affirmatively to my reflection, and said, “Right, this is how a man does it.”

“Now you are ready,” he said.