Visiting Professor by Robert Littell Read Free Book Online

if he were alive. High-five. Handle. Money market. Bread. Plastic. Ah, he must not forget the chest off of which you get
     things. Not to mention doorknob, which is clearly something you do not want to be. Pushing through a door into the Village
     Store, which takes up the ground floor of a worn, gray, peeling, century-old two-story clapboard building on the corner of
     Main and Sycamore, Lemuel walks up to the counter. “I am looking for the barbershop,” he tells the teenage clerk, who is tryingto pry open the drawer of an old-fashioned cash register with a screwdriver.
    The clerk jerks his head in the direction of the back of the store. Lemuel makes his way between racks of ski jackets and
     cross-country skis and track suits to a rickety wooden staircase. A large hand with its middle finger rudely extended in the
     direction of the second floor is painted on the barn-side planks of the wall next to the staircase.
    The steps creak under Lemuel’s weight as he starts up. The silvery snip-snip-snip of scissors comes from behind the curtain
     that has been nailed up in place of a door at the top of the stairs. Pushing through the curtain, Lemuel finds himself in
     the barbershop.
    The young woman who was stealing sardines in the avenue of the E-Z Mart aisle is ducking and weaving around a young man sitting
     in an old-fashioned chrome-and-red-leather swivel chair. Her ponytail flailing, she leaps back to survey her work, then bounds
     forward and attacks the hair over an ear. Snip-snip-snip-snip. Behind her, beams of speckled sunlight knife through a large
     plate-glass window with faded letters arched across it. Lemuel sounds out the words, reading from left to right, OT REDNET . It dawns on him that the letters form words, and the words are meant to be read from the outside, his right to left.
    “ ‘Tender …’ Ah!” he mutters. “So this is a Tender To.”
    The woman cutting hair nods toward the straight-backed chairs lined up against one wall. If she recognizes Lemuel from the
     E-Z Mart, she doesn’t let on. “With you in a min,” she murmurs. Turning back to her client, she plants herself behind the
     chair and studies him in the mirror. “Yo, Warren? You look almost but not quite beautimous.”
    “My sideburns suck.”
    “You want a second opinion, they make you look sort of … Rhett Butlerish.”
    “You think so?”
    “Hey, you know my motto—’My haircuts grow on you.’ “
    Lemuel jams his scarf into the armpit of his faded brown overcoat, folds it and his jacket over the back of a chair and settles
     into a seat next to a low table piled high with copies of
Playboy
. He picks up one that has been read so often its pages have the texture of cloth. Glancing at the barber to make sure he
     is not being observed, he leafs through it to the center spread. When Petersburg was still Leningrad, he had browsed through
     a copy of
Playboy
in a streetcorner flea market.It had been selling for what amounted to a week’s wages, which had not prevented him from purchasing it in order to improve
     his English. He thought then, he thinks now, that the stark naked ladies smiling out from the magazine’s pages, their pubic
     patches neatly trimmed into goatees, the nipples on their flawless breasts aimed like artillery at the reader, look about
     as erotic as frozen fish. The nudity, in his view, is only skin-deep.
    Across the room the sardine thief crouches in front of her client and, using the point of her scissors, delicately snips away
     the hair protruding from his nostrils. That done, she dusts talc across the back of his neck with a soft brush, then whips
     off the blue-and-white-striped sheet and shakes it out on the floor, which is covered with a thin layer of hair that swirls
     around her feet as she moves.
    “Yo,” she summons Lemuel.
    The student hands a bill to the lady barber. “Keep the loose change, Rain. Are you signed on for the Delta Delta Phi bash
     tonight? I hear they’ve booked some