The Unbeard-able Lightness of Being

Last week my husband walked into the living room and looked at me rather sheepishly.

I scrutinized him for a half-second before my heart dropped.

"You shaved your beard?"

He nodded slowly. "The razor slipped."

Right. After two days in Manhattan, my partner had yet to sight one hipster with facial hair. His growing self-doubt, along with his increasingly unruly beard, had him stroking his sparsely haired chin with growing apprehension.

And then it was gone.

When I was a kid I arrived home after school one day to discover my dad had shaved his mustache. I remember feeling profoundly uncomfortable, as if I had walked in on him without pants on and discovered the door locked behind me.

That's sort of how I felt looking at my husband. I mean, I am used to seeing him nude...just not that nude. I was suddenly looking at skin that hadn't been hairless in four years, almost the entirety of our relationship.

It was like walking in on my husband and finding him peeling his face off like the lizard queen Diana in the V Miniseries. Disturbing. And again, the echoes of a helplessness and discomfort I haven't felt since the '80s.

How is it that a thin and poorly groomed beard came to represent my life partner? Perhaps because its temperamental, burly, masculine, over-striving and yet doesn't look like it's even trying attitude was the perfect cosmetic signifier for my hubby.

Clean-cut, baby-soft, hyper-sensitive nicked skin... who is this stranger leaving shavings in my sink?

I've often thought I could identify any body part of my partner in a photo line-up but now, seeing his head in context and not recognizing it, I've got my doubts.

And maybe that's the real impact of lost facial hair: the phenomenological schism it creates between your experience of someone you love and your present witnessing of them. Knowledge and observation disconnect, which, surprise surprise, pretty much sums up my childhood.

So it seems my husband's clean-shaven face has erased years for both of us.