This article originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine May 2, 2010.
“The Wig and I”
By Suzanne White
Today I am in love. With a wig.
I am in residence at the lovely convalescent Clinique des Esperels outside the Provençal city of Draguignan. A few Tuesdays ago, I’d been given a morning’s furlough to drive my own car to town for appointments. At 9:25 I met Jean, my hairdresser, pacing the courtyard in front of his salon, smoking and talking on his cell. He saw me, ended his phone call, and invited me inside. I sat. Jean snipped. As he did so, he nattered on about how we would deal with my problème.
“I would never shave anyone’s head,” he said. “Yes, maybe a guy, a younger gay guy, if he was cute—but you don’t shave a woman. Too brutal. Too shocking. This way it still falls out. But it’s short. So it doesn’t leave great clumps on your lover’s chest.” Jean thinks he’s funny.
He scissored my hair to half an inch everywhere—like a tondue—one of those French women they sheared bald after the war for having copulated with a handsome German. The color? Blonde and white mixed, like beer. Jean charged me twenty-one euros and urged me hurry on over to the wig salon, where I was expected at 10.
I hurried along to the Insitut Capillaire. I stepped into two and a half tiny rooms. Whipped-cream peaks of plaster held years of gritty dust on the walls. The floor was covered in clanky, loose, five hundred-year-old, six-sided red tomettes—authentic Salernes tile. “Bonjour!” I called out. “Danièle est là?”
Danièle emerged. We shook ladylike hands. She explained we would be just the two of us. The boss, Pascal, whom I had met the previous Saturday, was fitting wigs in two nearby hospitals. Danièle gestured I should precede her into one of the tiny roomlets where I sat up in a modern barber chair in front of a skew gee diamond-shaped mirror.
