The nick of all time

      

     “You cut yourself shaving.”
     Yes, yes I did. Six hours earlier, getting ready to go to the big get-to-know-each-other party for the Sun-Times and WBEZ staffs. I knew it was bad when I saw the blood running down my face and dripping into the sink.
     “So it’s noticeable, huh?” I said sheepishly. Was it ever. A triangular divot an inch long high on my right cheek. Vivisected during the deft, almost unconscious motions of plying the razor. I can truly say, in 45 years of shaving, I’d never managed a gash of that proportions. It wasn’t a nick; it was a wound.
     “You have lipstick on your cheek,” a friend said at the party said, floating the bright spin.
     Funny, my first thought had been of cosmetics. A few pats of my wife’s base and I’d be good to go. But she stopped wearing that years ago. And even if I found an old compact, people might notice. “Did you see Steinberg? Is he wearing makeup? He looks like Raggedy Andy.” They’ll assume I’m trying to seem young, like Gustav von Aschenbach in "Death in Venice," rouged and dyed, tripping down the Lido after Tadzio, his fading heart all aflutter.  No makeup.
     Next thought: maybe I should just stay home. Too soon to socialize anyway. Blame COVID.
     No, that's the coward's way. This could be repaired. Pressure, that’s the thing. I swabbed the raw skin with rubbing alcohol, then pressed a folded up pad of toilet paper against it, daubing the blood.
     “Is that a shaving cut?”
     “No, Jenn Kho kissed me,” I said, sarcastically, thinking: go with the lipstick notion. Then immediately feared the comment would come off, not as a glib party quip, but the sort of oblivious sexist remark that gets a man fired. Not joviality, but harassment of our executive editor. A harmless (I thought) face-saving jest morphing into some career-killing Hitchcockian nightmare. I’d end up running through a corn field while being strafed by a crop duster.
    “Just a shaving cut,” I said, quickly correcting myself, hoping it was not too late.

     At least it isn't just me. "Everyone’s just kind of rusty," New York Magazine concluded recently, surveying our current social mores. Public interaction is a skill and like most skills, you use it or lose it.
     Why do people go to parties? It certainly wasn’t convenient. Put myself in presentable shape, or try to. Take the 4:33 Metra downtown. Grab an Uber to Bronzeville. Here my plan hit a bump. Uber wanted $44. I had time. Preferring to spend $2.75 for the same journey, I hopped on the No. 1 bus at Canal and Jackson. Hopped off at 11th Street. Grabbed the Red Line at Roosevelt Road. Got off at 47th and leapt aboard a waiting 43rd Street bus.
     I'll be honest. Rumbling along 43rd Street, a certain out-of-placeness occurred to me. Maybe because it was dark outside. Perhaps, I wondered, this was not the best idea. At such moments I reassure myself by thinking of all those readers in Florida who get some kind of contact fear high from whiffing the vapors of crime wafting southward from Chicago. So afraid of the city, still, they’re ululating in fear, snug in their sunwashed deluxe senior living unit down in Margaritaville a thousand miles away. While I’m on a CTA bus crossing Indiana Avenue at night, safe as a clam. I read a book. Nobody on the bus mentioned my face. Nobody seemed to even look at me.
     “You could tell someone you fell and cut yourself,” someone at the party suggested. I shook my head. How is that better? I did not keep count how many pointed it out. Between five and 10. It wasn’t that every colleague said that. One broke away for the bar with, “Can I get you a drink?”
     “No thanks, I’m fine,” I said, and his face darkened as the realization struck him.
     “Oh gee, I’m sorry...” he said. “I mean, I forgot that you...”
     “No problem,” I said. “I’m good.”
     “A Coke. I could get you a Coke...” He continued in this vein for some time until I finally explained, “There’s nothing wrong with the offer. It’s all this stuff afterward that I could live without.” Which seemed almost harsh, so I added, soothingly: “I learned a long time ago you can’t stay sober because you don’t know how to get booze.” We both laughed at this and he fled from me like I was on fire. I took two steps and greeted a young reporter whom I hadn’t seen in three years.
     “I’m going to the bar," he replied. "Can I get you a drink?”
     “No thanks, I’m fine.”
     “Oh gee, I'm sorry....” he began, but I cut him off, practically grabbing him by the elbow and dragging him to the bar.
     “No, let me buy you a drink,” I said. “The big ass columnist buy the drinks...”
     On the bar was a large hexagonal glass urn dispensing lemon ice water, and I asked the bartender for a cup. She gave me one, and I held it under the spigot. A few drops dribbled out. A round slice of lemon had floated against the spigot, blocking the water. I shook the urn, without effect, then looked at the reporter, observing my struggles with a pitying eye, sucking his beer.
     "My whole life has been this way," I said. The bartender went to get a long wooden stick to nudge the lemon aside.
     Later, I circled around and noticed the friend who had imagined that gash could be lipstick. She was entertaining a group of young staffers and I slid over to join them. She was telling a funny story about some doofus who managed to pull a 7-foot tall bookshelf over onto himself, sending the whole newsroom running over to dig him out from under all the tumbled books.
     “And here he is now!” she exulted, or words to that effect, welcoming me into the grinning crowd with a sweep of her hand.

     If this all seems an unexpected combination of the trivial and personal, I should underline the moral of the story. In post COVID, while some people race to socialize, others hold back, and I figured, it’s good for you to know that, no matter how awkward a situation turns out to be, it could be worse, and you survive. I didn't get sick, nor crushed with shame. In fact, as you see here, managed to view it as amusing, eventually, which is key. Going to the party was worth the two trains and two buses needed to get there. I showed up, which is important in business. The night wasn’t a total loss. I mingled, ate a couple chicken tacos and half a slice of Portillo's chocolate cake, delivered several long diatribes to various bosses that I’m sure embarrassed me in ways no shaving mishap ever could approach. We all got bags of Dark Matter coffee heading out the door.
     My wife was asleep when I got home at 10:30. The next morning I thought I’d keep quiet — I can do that — and run an experiment and see if she noticed anything odd about my appearance.
     “You cut yourself shaving, dollie,” she said, as we both got ready for the train. “At least you’re going to be on the radio.” The “where no one can see you” was unvoiced.
     I told her the cut happened yesterday, before that party, and wondered why everybody feels the need to point it out. I certainly know it's there.
     “It’s what people say,” she said. “It’s on your face.”
     Yes, yes it is.
     I told her I hadn’t mentioned the cut to see if she noticed. She started to laugh.
     “I noticed it across the room!”