#undershirt

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is revised from its original version - before, Robert hated the mustache and was prepared to apologize to his girlfriend for what happened. I changed the story to end on a note where he's like "huh, not bad." Perhaps this one change could snowball into other life changes for Robert? I added a short video and one more pic showing his more positive emotional journey. ********

Robert only stopped at the mall because the good jewelry counter closed at nine and it was already 6:40.

Anniversary — well, not anniversary, but the eight-month mark, which Dana counted, so Robert counted. He'd settled on the little gold bar necklace he'd screenshotted three weeks ago, and he had a clean shot at being in and out in twenty minutes if nothing went wrong. He was still in his work clothes, the white shirt and the blue striped tie, the tie clip Dana had given him at month four. He looked, he thought, catching himself in a storefront, like a man with his life together. Beard neat. Glasses on. A guy who got things done.

Then the man with the clipboard stepped into his path.

"Sir — quick question, you've got a great look, has anyone ever told you that?"

Robert had, in fact, been told that, and this was his first mistake: he slowed down.

The man was maybe thirty, business-casual, checked shirt, the friendly practiced energy of someone who did this all day. "We're a grooming startup, doing a product study, right here in the mall today. Takes twenty minutes. We're testing a new shave system and honestly" — he looked Robert up and down, appraising, flattering — "you're exactly the demographic."

"I've actually got somewhere to—"

"A thousand dollars. Cash. Today."

Robert stopped.

Here is the thing about one thousand dollars in cash: it is not a number, it is a feeling. It arrives in the body before the brain. A thousand dollars was the necklace, and dinner, and the tank of gas, and the vague debt-shaped anxiety that lived behind Robert's sternum going quiet for a month. Twenty minutes. He was already here.

"Sure," Robert said, and did a little half-shrug, one shoulder, the universal gesture of a man talking himself into something. "Why not. I'll try it."

The clipboard man was already writing.

The study was not in the mall, exactly. It was off the mall — down a service corridor, through a door marked only with a paper sign, into a rented office suite that a company had very obviously moved into that week. Folding tables. Cardboard boxes stacked to the drop ceiling, all printed with a shaving-cream logo Robert didn't recognize. A couple of other guys in the back, quiet, sorting product, not looking up. Fluorescent light with that faint back-office hum.

It read as temporary in a way Robert couldn't name and didn't like.

But the clipboard man — "call me the coordinator," he'd said, which was not a name — sat him down, produced a manila envelope, and counted ten hundred-dollar bills onto the folding table one at a time, turning each one so Robert could see the face. Then he swept them back into the envelope and set it just out of reach, by the mirror.

"Yours on completion," he said pleasantly. "Standard for paid studies. Now. Let's get your baseline."

Robert signed three forms he didn't read. This was his second mistake, though by now the mistakes had stopped being discrete events and started being a single continuous condition.

The photographs came first.

They walked him to a corner where a white backdrop had been clamped to a stand, makeshift, one corner drooping. A camera on a tripod. "Before photo," the coordinator said. "For the study. Just relax, natural smile."

Robert relaxed. Robert gave a natural smile. He was, at this point, still fine — still a man in a shirt and tie who'd made a slightly odd but lucrative decision on his way to buy a necklace. The flash popped. He looked, he was sure, great.

"Perfect. Now — we'll need the shirt and tie off for the shave portion. Cream gets everywhere."

Reasonable. Robert loosened the tie he'd knotted that morning, slid it off with the tie clip still attached, unbuttoned the good white shirt. The coordinator held out a plastic bin and Robert set them in it, and then — because the coordinator was still holding the bin there, waiting, with the patient expression of a man who had all evening — the shirt was followed by the belt, and the watch, and his glasses, and then the pants, which meant the shoes, which is where it got undignified.

There is no graceful way for a grown man to take off dress shoes while standing up. Robert tried anyway — balanced on one foot, tugging at the heel, and when that failed he had to bend and work the knots, which he'd double-knotted that morning like an idiot, like a man who trusted the day. He got the first one loose and toed it off and it clunked over on its side. Then the other. Then he peeled the pants off standing on the cold tile in his socks, folded them because he was not an animal, and set them in the bin, and the bin now held the entire outward architecture of Robert — shirt, tie, clip, watch, pants, shoes — and Robert held nothing.

And this was the part he would remember: he was extremely aware of the room.

There were other men in it. Three, maybe four, fully dressed, moving product around the folding tables at the back — cardboard boxes, packing tape, the ordinary business of a business. None of them were looking at him. That was somehow the entire problem. He was standing in a rented office suite in his undershirt and boxers and black dress socks, undressing in front of strangers, and the strangers were not staring, were pointedly, professionally incurious, the way you don't stare at the guy getting the consult in the next curtain over. Their not-looking was a kind of etiquette, and the etiquette confirmed that there was something here worth not-looking-at. Robert had never in his life been so conscious of his own knees. He resisted the urge to cover himself, because covering himself would have been admitting it was the kind of situation where a man might want to, and he was still, at this point, trying very hard to believe it wasn't.

The envelope with the thousand dollars sat on the table by the mirror where he could see it.

He could just leave. He knew he could just leave.

He thought about the necklace. He thought about the quiet behind his sternum. He thought about picking his pants back out of the bin in front of the four not-looking men and hopping into them and lacing his stupid double-knotted shoes and walking out. Somehow that was the more humiliating picture. He stayed.

"The product," the coordinator said, uncapping a can, "is a shaving cream. We're testing whether it holds up when guys use it to shave a beard down to just the mustache. That's the study."

"The— down to the mustache?"

"Yeah. You're going to shave. We watch, we take notes, we photograph the result. Industry's moving toward a mustache-only look and we want the data. Twenty minutes."

Robert's hand went to his jaw. He'd had the beard for six years. Dana had never seen him without it. He had barely seen him without it. "I don't— can we do just a trim, or—"

"The study's the study, Robert." The coordinator said his name for the first time, gently, the way you'd say it to someone standing on a ledge. "You're already prepped. You've been paid." A small nod toward the envelope. "It's twenty minutes. Then you're out of here with a thousand dollars in your pocket and a great story."

And that — you've been paid — was the sentence that closed the door. Not a threat. Just a fact, laid on the folding table next to the cash. He had taken the money. The money made it real. A man who backed out now was a man who'd have to hand ten hundred-dollar bills back across a table to a stranger, and Robert understood, with a sinking clarity, that he was not going to do that. He was going to shave his beard off, in his underwear, in front of strangers, in a sketchy backroom of a mall instead. That was somehow the easier thing.

They stood him at a mirror propped against the wall, a plastic basin beneath it. He lathered up. In the mirror his own face looked back, half-covered in white foam, and beside his reflection, small, the coordinator's — head down, writing, always writing.

Robert raised the razor with both hands, the way you do, and began.

The beard came off in strips. Six years, rinsed pink into a mall basin. He kept the upper lip clean, per protocol, and with every pass the man in the mirror got stranger — younger, more exposed, less him. Halfway through he caught the coordinator's eyes in the glass and gave him a look, a help-me look, an is-this-really-happening look. The coordinator did not look up from the clipboard.

"You're doing great," he said, to the clipboard.

When it was done, Robert wiped his face with a thin white towel and looked at what remained.

A mustache. Alone, unaccompanied, adrift on a bare face. It sat on his lip like a houseguest who has realized, too late, that the party ended hours ago and everyone else has gone home. He touched it. It was, technically, a very good mustache. It was also the only thing left, and it made the rest of his face look like a rented office — recently vacated, still humming, waiting for someone to explain what it was for.

He looked dubious. He looked, in fact, exactly as dubious as a man can look while being asked to smile.

Because there was one more photograph.

They walked him back to the drooping white backdrop, in his undershirt and his boxers and his knee socks, and stood him where he'd stood twenty minutes and a lifetime ago. "After photo," the coordinator said, lifting the camera. "Big smile. This is the money shot."

Robert tried. He really did. But the smile that arrived was thin and uncertain and did not reach his eyes, and his gaze slid helplessly off to the side, away from the lens, toward the door, toward the mall, toward the version of himself that had walked in here bearded and knowing how the world supposedly worked. That guy was in the bin now, folded, under the watch.

The flash popped.

"Perfect," said the coordinator, and handed him the envelope.

Robert got dressed in a hurry, not bothering to re-tie the tie or button his shirt all the way. When he caught a glimpse of himself in a store window or mirror, he saw a stranger with a lonely mustache and the wide, faintly haunted eyes of someone who has learned something about himself he cannot yet articulate.

He made the jewelry counter at 8:52. Bought the necklace with two of the hundreds. In the car he flipped down the visor mirror and looked, one more time, at the mustache.

His phone buzzed. Dana: how'd it go, you almost here?? 🥰

Robert looked at the mustache. The mustache looked at Robert.

He typed almost, put the car in reverse, and tried to decide, in the four miles between the mall and Dana's apartment, how a person explains that he is now, for reasons involving a thousand dollars and a clipboard, a man with a mustache. He had eight months of goodwill and a gold necklace and no beard.

He figured he'd lead with the necklace.

Somewhere on the 405, between the mall and Dana's apartment, Robert stopped rehearsing.

He didn't decide to. It just went quiet — the little internal press conference where he'd been drafting the explanation, workshopping the opening line, imagining her face, imagining the version of her face that would tell him how much of the evening he still had. All of it went off the air, and in the silence something else came up. It wasn't a thought exactly. It was more like the aftertaste of the storefront glass, that last mirror on the way out, when he'd caught himself in it and his own reflection had, for a second, looked good.

Not familiar. That was the thing. Good but not familiar. A man he didn't know, wearing his clothes badly, walking his walk, and Robert had thought — with an alarm that surprised him — huh. He'd looked at the stranger and the stranger had looked back and something in the exchange had been, weirdly, fine.

He'd carried it out of the mall without noticing. It was only now, on the freeway, that he noticed he was carrying it.

The mustache in the visor mirror was still ridiculous. That hadn't changed. But under the ridiculousness was a face he had not made and had not chosen and had not, therefore, spent thirty-four years being careful with. It was just a face. It was his now, apparently. He tried, tentatively, a small private smile at it, and the mustache smiled back, unembarrassed. It was, he thought, at least committed to being what it was.

He thought about Dana.

He thought about what he'd been about to do: walk in, produce the necklace like a shield, deflect, apologize, explain, spend the rest of the evening earning back ground he wasn't sure he'd actually lost. That version of the night was still available to him. It was two exits away. The script was written and rehearsed and would probably work.

But there was another version, and it sat there on the passenger seat next to the little jewelry bag, quieter, patient: the version where he walked in and didn't apologize. Just handed her the necklace, said I did something weird tonight, I think I like it, and let her react however she reacted. And if her reaction was that she couldn't get past it — that the man she'd been dating for eight months came home a different man, and the different man didn't fit — well, that would be information. It would be sad. It would also, he suspected, be survivable, in a way he hadn't quite believed anything was survivable an hour ago.

He wasn't going to break up with her. He wasn't even going to think about breaking up with her. He was going to give her the necklace and see her face and find out what was true. But for the first time in eight months of counting the months, he understood, in a way he could feel behind his sternum where the debt-anxiety used to live, that finding out what was true was better than performing what he hoped.

The mustache would probably grow out. Or he'd shave it off. Or — and here was the strange new thought, arriving without permission — or he'd keep it. He'd keep it and see who kept walking around with it and what that guy turned out to be like.

He took the exit for Dana's. The jewelry bag rustled on the seat.

Almost there, he thought, and this time when he thought it, the almost was doing a different job.