The Stylist

by Emmons, Cai

• ISBN13: 9780060898953
• ISBN10: 006089895X
• Format: Paperback
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

As children, Hayden and her sisters ran carefree through the wilds of rural Connecticut when their father was away writing novels. But when he eventually returned, the spontaneous nature of their female household gave way to his oppressive regulation. Years later, Hayden has moved south to Hoboken, New Jersey, where she works as a hair stylist in a salon filled with the easy laughter and unfettered joy that colored the best days of her childhood. But into this paradisiacal community arrives a stranger, much like Hayden, who is also haunted by a dark secret and a troubled past. Together these two misfits will form a tentative bond that will help them overcome personal crises and pain, as they struggle to discover who they truly are and to find the strength to move on.

Excerpts

The Stylist
A Novel

Chapter One

The Pizzazz Salon where Hayden worked was located in one of the few remaining shabby sections of Hoboken, on a block where, despite the fact that some adventuring Wall Street types had moved in and contractors were a daily sight, there remained, on certain days, an overpowering scent of garbage mingled with fetid Hudson River oils. Crumpled remnants of the Hoboken Reporter, torn bits of losing lottery tickets, clear plastic collars freed of their six-packs, all periodically blew down the sidewalk past the salon's front door.

Rena, the salon's owner, a fiftyish former hippie with extravagant hair and an optimistic personality, believed the neighborhood was on the upswing, and being in her employ it was hard not to believe along with her. But in the four months since 9/11 they had all been battling a generalized ennui that passed from woman to woman like a sneaker wave. They were an urban tribe of round-the-track, stand-alone, self-supporting women who all had in common strong noses for the seeds of fascism that resided in overzealous managers. They bucked under too much authority and appreciated that Rena let them run their own businesses under her umbrella. Their clients were women of all descriptions—middle-aged moms, a young arty crowd, a handful of Wall Street go-getters, and even some blue-haired ladies who had been coming to the salon for decades, women with roiling curls and unbreakable habits of Wednesday salon visits followed by lunch at Dino's and afternoons of bridge.

Since early December there had been a vacant station, the one closest to the front door that served most of the walk-ins. They needed desperately to fill this station. From mid-October they'd been booked solid—a result of people trying to live as fully as they could for whatever time they might have left—and they had had to turn many people away. Rena had been interviewing for weeks—a series of bleach-blond, gum-chewing girls fresh from beauty school, girls with exposed navels and multiple piercings and bad attitudes to rival the Gambino family. Rena was looking for flexible people, women who had a few bones of maturity about them and would be able to service all types. As far as Hayden knew no one had been hired, so she wasn't prepared that early January Sunday when Emory Bellew made an appearance.

The weather seemed malevolent that day, the wind on a mad Machiavellian tear down the north-facing streets; the waters of the Hudson churning like sewer slop; the sky a glowering gray, regurgitating snow and hail with peristaltic regularity; the temperature dangerously low, sullen, so exposed skin was first seared then paralyzed. Staying out too long on days like that changed the whole nervous system, retarding and diluting its reactions, making the owner of those nerves feel as if she'd been aged and dumbed down.

Hayden was on her way back from Manhattan where she and Tina, one of her salon mates—a tall, tough, wry woman with a long face suggestive of an investigating aardvark—had gone for dim sum and a close-out product sale on Canal. Hayden was pleased to have found her favorite texturing gel called Chops. Afterward they had taken their ritual weepy walk through Battery Park, past Ground Zero, then up through Tribeca, ending in the West Village. They had been doing this same walk, or a version of it, every Sunday for three months now, putting their feet to the pavement in solidarity with each other and the world, taking a stance against despair, letting it be known they had not fled the city and could be counted on should they be needed. A futile effort, they knew, but one they could not relinquish.

After they parted that day Hayden had stopped for a quick coffee before heading home. As she sat in the amber light of Starbucks, her mouth filled with airy latte foam, a guy en route to his seat squeezed behind her, jostled his own elbow, and lost half his cappuccino foam on her head so it dribbled past her earlobe and covered her shoulder like a snowflake cape. Her skin was not scalded, her hair and clothing could be washed—there was nothing to do but laugh, but when she did, the man, a few years older than Hayden—perhaps thirty to Hayden's twenty-five—thick-lipped, creamy-skinned, his black-rimmed spectacles suggesting a child doing dress-up, halted his apologies and looked at her with shock or curiosity or some amalgam of the two. “You think it's funny?” he said.

She shrugged. “Is there a choice?”

He shook his head in some obscurely rueful, almost parental way and looked her up and down, his eyes like slots verifying the authenticity of dollar bills. He made much of toweling her clean with a cloth handkerchief, took a seat near hers, and gazed for a long while at his remaining foam before eventually sipping. Then he looked up, reflections winking in his glasses, and told her she interested him.

It was, she thought, a silly thing to say. She was not the least bit interesting: Her mouse-brown hair was thin and slack; her chest was flat; her tattoos, nine of them, were mostly hidden; her personality was retiring. She had schooled herself to be a professional chameleon, a watcher of others, a woman oiled to move fast to new locations, preferring not to get stuck. Nevertheless, she tried to receive his comment graciously. His name turned out to be Saterious, which made her laugh again. He smiled and didn't offer to explain. They talked for a while, flirting a bit, but Hayden was a squirrelly flirt and knew exactly when she would stop, and she felt dirty for playing along knowing things would go nowhere. Everything she understood about men until then had told her they were to be indulged but not trusted. So she drank her latte, and chatted, and acquiesced to take the card he pressed on her, and finally blurted her own number, hoping she wouldn't regret it, but then her time was up, and she headed out into the cold, tossing him the agreeable, open-mouthed, noncommittal smile of an underling primate.

The Stylist
A Novel. Copyright © by Cai Emmons. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from The Stylist by Cai Emmons
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.