Sweet Reason by Robert Littell

about New York, about me?”
    Boeth took a folded paper from the back pocket of his dungarees and began to read it to himself. “Yes, she says she hopes you’re okay. She says …” Boeth’s voice petered out.
    “Come on, read it.”
    “She says you confuse her. One minute you put all your emotions on the table the way a child lays out cards for agame of solitaire. The next, you hold back part of yourself as if you were keeping a jerry can of gasoline in reserve. She says when you talk about politics your sentences sound like second pressings.” Boeth looked up and shrugged. “That’s what she says.”
    Joyce avoided his eye. “She’s —”
    “Very intuitive,” Boeth supplied.
    “I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say …”
    But Boeth wasn’t listening. He was back in New York waving and saying “Be my guest” and watching Mariana and Joyce disappear into the bedroom. He was slowly grinding the phonograph needle across the grooves and creating a sound that matched his emotions.
    The Brandenburg tape ran out and Boeth got up and turned off the machine.
    Joyce asked: “What do you think of this Sweet Reason business?”
    Boeth responded too quickly, too lightly. “Whatever else he’s doing, he’s making time on this antiquated chicken-of-the-sea pass more quickly.”
    “That’s what you said about peeling eggs.”
    “You have a good memory, Poet. It’s one of the standards by which I measure things — eggshells, Sweet Reason leaflets, you name it. Every hour under the belt is another hour you don’t have to worry about again.” Boeth glanced at the clock on the bulkhead. It was five minutes to midnight. “Sometimes it seems as if all human activity is designed to make time pass more quickly.”
    “The trouble with Sweet Reason,” the Poet said, “is he’s not doing what he’s doing well.”
    Boeth said: “Did you ever think, Poet, that if something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly?”

The Ship’s Barber Sees Red
    The ship’s barber, a sour-grapes superpatriot from Detroit named Joe Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski, spotted it first. His head thrown back, his Adam’s apple bobbing against his taut neck muscles, he squinted up at the mast and poked Lustig in the ribs.
    “Is it?” he asked angrily. “Supposed to be like that?”
    Cee-Dee happened to be on the bridge as a result of a conversation he had with Lustig the night before in the barber shop, a converted paint locker back aft equipped with a used swivel barber’s chair Richardson acquired in exchange for a potato-peeling machine and the musical services of Tevepaugh at another ship’s picnic. The compartment was so cramped (Cee-Dee insisted on having some spare chairs and a small table for magazines) that there was no room to swivel in, so Cee-Dee danced around the barber’s chair like a sparring partner, ducking and squinting and lunging and nipping nervously away as he went. A mirror hung from the bulkhead, along with an American flag, copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Gettsyburg Address, a “God Is On Our Side” bumper sticker and a poster that said “Fuck Communism.”
    Arranged in a half-moon over the spare chairs — and looking like a homosexual’s rogues’ gallery — were eight framed pictures of various styles of haircuts clipped from a Barber’s World Cee-Dee had swiped from the eighteen-chair shop on the Norfolk Naval Station. Actually, the pictures were there for atmosphere; Cee-Dee himself could only give one basic cut, a rounded-off, high-necked affair that left a tuft of hair falling across the forehead like the brim of a baseball cap. “Ain’t nobody gonna take you for one of them friggin’ college faggots when I’m through wit you,” Cee-Dee would boast.
    Cee-Dee always did the sideburns last — crossing the Ts after finishing the sentence, he called it. Standing directly behind the customer and squinting into the mirror to get the right angle, he would chop away with