The Art of the Kiss

by Holly Schindler

  She wanted to create a new portrait of the studio. At least, that was the original idea. A portrait, she thought at first, like the studio was a person. She wanted to say something about its chapters. The same way she’d wanted to depict the chapters in the faces of the men in Fairyland’s tattoo parlor all those decades ago.

  But she quickly realized it was more than that. She wanted to say something about emptiness and time gone by. About her own burst of recognition and subsequent loss of relevance. She wanted to show how, without warning—as quickly as a summer breeze could die—it had suddenly become so easy for anyone to take a snapshot. How the residents of Fairyland had decided they no longer needed her.

  She wanted to show, with insight, what that felt like. She wanted to draw viewers into that world, make them feel it too.

  But how could she show the passage of time in a single image? With a collage, somehow incorporating all the old images in with the new? Wasn’t that too easy? Would a viewer even feel anything staring at a collage?

  She wasn’t there yet. This image on her screen wasn’t right.

  Sharon sighed, turning away from her computer and glancing up at her mural of photographs. She’d stopped framing and showcasing her new work right about the time her customers had dried up. Why? Did she think she had less to say? Did the lack of a crowd mean she felt her work wasn’t quite worthwhile? Not worth showcasing?

  Or was it simply that she was scared? Afraid to show Michael a new photo and see it in his eyes—confirmation that she’d lost something?

  That’s what happened to old women. Wasn’t it? They lost what had once made them special. Sharon rubbed at the inside of her wrist, the spot that held her tattoo.

  Who was this villain invading Sharon’s mind? The fickle audiences who no longer applauded? Michael?

  Or was it herself?

  ~Sharon~

  Michael was on the radio constantly.

  Really—every time I turned it on. The station had started playing reruns of his clips, making sure that everyone in Fairyland heard him.

  At the sound of his voice, my jaw would tighten and my frown would deepen, digging all the wrinkles deeper into my skin.

  I couldn’t escape his words.

  Not even when I flicked to a different station. Or turned the radio off completely. Because his words would still be there bouncing through my head. Once those echoes would finally begin to settle down, I’d wind up letting my eyes shoot up toward the ceiling, even as I was trying not to. And I’d see it: The Art of the Kiss.

  The image I’d taken of us. Our beginning.

  The echoes would start in all over again. All those long-winded metaphors—fairy tales and boredom. The station had played the first bit often enough that I nearly had it memorized.

  Look, I wasn’t mad. Not by then. I was hurt, which is kind of how we feel once anger gives way, isn’t it? Almost like we’ve scorched ourselves on the inside.

  (Really, though, while I’m at it, isn’t anger little more than a front? A disguise? Isn’t it something you can stand behind when you’re terrified and need to appear steely and resilient?)

  I’d fallen for him despite my efforts not to. When falling happened that way, it was overpowering. It engulfed you. And believe me, my love for him may have changed shape—love just does as time goes on—but it hadn’t left. It beat on, like a second heart.

  I still wasn’t sure what to do with any of it. Not with what he was saying on the radio. Not with the way I felt. Maybe Michael made sense out of confusion with words, but that wasn’t me. I made sense of the world with pictures.

  So I’d flip the “Closed” sign to face the street, grab my camera, and head out.

  But it wasn’t like I could get away from it. Clear my head. Because—this is the truly cruel part—his voice would bleed through open car windows, or waitresses would be listening to him at the diner on the corner, or he’d be playing in the grocery store instead of Muzak.

  He was everywhere.

  I mean it.

  Everywhere.

  Even if I managed to find a spot where his actual words weren’t filling the air, talk of him was.

  “You know, he sounds exactly like my uncle,” one of the two women at the convenience store off the square was proclaiming when I stopped in for a cold drink.

  “Nah,” the other said. “I bet it’s my ex. That man fancied himself quite the poet when we first met. Used to write me these hoity-toity love letters all the time. Would be just like me to cut a man loose right before he came to something.”

  The two fell into a round of hysterical laughter.

  I heard it all in my treks across town: The voice belonged to the high school principal, or the local nightly newscaster. It was somebody’s doctor, their preacher, their neighbor. It had become a game, a challenge: Who is that man hiding behind the curtain of his words? Like somehow, he’d become the Great and Powerful Oz.

  I don’t think anybody in Fairyland had ever really listened much to that station. Nobody but me. Now, all this word-of-mouth was drawing them in. Making them think about what he was saying.

  He was the literal talk of the town. No wonder the station was replaying his short segments so often.

  Michael had moved them. Nearly every single adult in Fairyland. Anybody who had ever been in a boring relationship. He got it. He understood. He was inside their heads, saying all the things they’d never had the guts to say out loud themselves. That was why they seemed so determined to find out who he was.

  But I was his target—the one person who was supposed to be moved more than anyone. Wasn’t I? Wasn’t that the point?

  Or was it?

  I had no idea how to bring it up in a way that wasn’t offensive or accusatory or…

  Was he hurt? Was he saying I’d hurt him? Was that what he’d been scribbling in his notebooks all this time?

  How did it make him feel to finally say it all out loud? Wasn’t it embarrassing? Or did it feel, somehow, like a little slice of revenge? Was he really trying to punish me? Not being able to see his face as he read his words meant I had no clue.

  I was the visual one. I had to see him to understand him.

  Why in the world was he on the radio?

  After a while, I’d wander back to the old studio, where our picture still hung.

  The picture no one came by to stare at anymore.

  I was glaring at it one afternoon when a knock exploded against the shop entrance.

  Mind still spinning, I realized I’d failed to turn the “Open” sign to face the street again. That’s why Heather was knocking.

  She was back. And jumping up and down in pure excitement as I swung the door open.

  ~Heather~

  You’ll never believe what just happened, Sharon. I was in Charles Liu’s office building. And as soon as I walked in, I swear all I could think was, Oh, my.

  His building—you know, the new one off Commercial Street—it’s not a high-rise, exactly. Maybe more like medium-rise. But I’m a ground-floor kind of girl. This place has all kinds of businesses in it—lawyers, architects, even one of those financial adviser places.

  Liu’s agency was way up on the fifth floor, and it had this giant plaque above the reception desk: Liu Marketing and Advertising. Or maybe it was Liu Marketing Inc. No. Liu Strategies...

  I can’t even remember now, I’m so flummoxed. Anyway. You get the idea.

  Liu’s receptionist was busy—flicking her manicured fingers across her phone, moving swiftly from one call straight to another, ignoring me the whole time.

  I was getting the feeling that I was the least important person ever to dare to step inside the place. I was also getting the urge to run, to tell you the truth. So I tried to distract myself by staring at the plaque that hung above the receptionist’s head. Really memorizing the thing, like I’d once memorized European geography of the Middle Ages in school. There was plenty to go over, let me tell you. The thing had to measure at least three feet long and was
made to look like a giant chunk of antique ivory. Then again, maybe it didn’t resemble at all. Maybe Liu’s was the kind of high-end place that could afford ivory signs. It seemed to me that there was some kind of law against importing the stuff, but maybe this chunk had been in the family forever, passed down from one Liu to another.

  I started to gnaw my bottom lip as I stared at the pretentious monstrosity. For some reason—probably because I was craving a little slice of comfort—the longer I stared, the more it reminded me of another piece of ivory: a carved piece of scrimshaw I’d inherited when Mom died. A pipe, which I put away in a safe deposit box. I didn’t know what else to do with it. Anyway, remembering its history—and the pipe’s original owner—seemed to temporarily tamp down my nerves.

  My great-grandfather had been the original owner of the pipe. I think he said it was walrus tusk. The bowl had been carved into a pirate head. Where he’d picked it up had been a mystery. He’d used it every day, even after it got old enough to be valuable. He was ancient by the time I’d known him, a squiggle of a man, the same shape as the curl of smoke twirling out the pipe.

  The smoke itself smelled kind of pleasant and toasty, but the carved pirate head had scared me, made even my weary, age-weakened great-grandfather seem formidable, tough, intimidating. He’d been a sailor for a time—that was what Mom had always told me. Probably one of those family stories that exaggerated the details of the past, growing like a fish tale with each retelling over the course of three generations. But back then, I’d truly believed that he had been a regular Blackbeard or a Dread Pirate Roberts in his youth, a plunderer who’d sailed the seven seas and even taken a few secret islands for his own.

  When he passed away, I didn’t imagine him going to heaven. Instead, I pictured him on his boat, white sails drawn tight with a never-ending gust of wind. I saw him drifting off toward one of his stolen islands, a young man again with long black hair and an eye patch and a ruffly poet’s shirt, puffing on his scrimshaw pipe all the way.

  That probably sounds really strange. But those are the things you think about when you want to run. Your head pings around in all these strange directions. The awful part was, the longer I stood there, the less thinking about that old pipe brought me comfort. Instead, it kind of all got twisted around. Staring at the giant, towering Liu business plaque, I started to feel small. Weak. Conquerable. Like a kid. No—like I was waiting to walk the plank.

  I became aware that additional carvings surrounded the name of Liu’s business in that showy ivory slab. What was that design?

  Sharks! A warning, surely. What did I know of swimming with sharks?

  What if these were cruel people—the kind they make movies about? The kind my mother warned me about?

  I’d never worked in an office. I’d never filed anything. I’d never worn a power suit. I’d never negotiated.

  I was in over my head.

  And Sharon, let me tell you, I took a step backward, ready to bolt for the elevator.

  But the receptionist started rapping one of her long nails against her desktop in this annoyed way. Apparently, she’d finished answering her calls for the time being, and was ready for me to speak up. Impatience seemed to have found her the moment she’d replaced the receiver.

  I fought to remember how to make my mouth work. It’s you guys’ fault, I wanted to say, a phrase I’d heard Darth Billy use on other neighborhood children roughly nineteen billion times. Come on! I could have added. Ivory towers, swimming with sharks? These are not exactly subtle hints.

  I sighed, shrugging helplessly at the receptionist. After I finally squeaked out Charles’s name and something about my one o’clock appointment, the receptionist motioned with one of her long nails for me to follow.

  But my fears didn’t cool off now that we were wading deeper into the massive office suite. If anything, they were worse. I felt like I really had jumped straight into dangerous, choppy waters, filled with hungry sharks and nasty pirates looking to take photographers hostage.

  I muttered, “Quit it” at myself. But not as quietly as I’d wanted to. The receptionist tossed a rather haughty look over her right shoulder.

  The office assistants and fellow advertising gurus (I was at a total loss regarding their official titles) were all dressed to the absolute nines. Even the women in what appeared to be the art department wore five-inch heels. They’d had their hair professionally styled. Everybody smelled of perfume. Real perfume, not that Eau de Watery Stuff I’d received a time or two for Christmas.

  It occurred to me that any person who worked in Liu’s suite would be used to perfection: three-hundred-dollar jeans and makeup counters and fancy cars. They did not have to put up with cold fingers in the winter or washing machines with semi-busted agitators. They’d never pinched their cheeks instead of buying blush or spit on a mascara wand to make it last longer or fought with a heater named The Creature who made it a habit to cough soot all over their T-shirts when they tried to relight the pilot. They had never taken the city bus because they did not know what it was like to turn an ignition key and have their car shrug in return.

  A person in my position puts up with just about everything. I’m used to self-manicures and purses with Super Glued handles. My venetian blinds are repaired with mailing tape, and my twin bedspread has unicorns on it because it was on sale (discounted to nearly free) at Walmart, and if my flip-flops last more than a week, I’m impressed.

  I figured these people had never had to say, after trying some cheap solution, “That works,” or “That’s good enough.” Maybe, as a result, little imperfections stuck out to them.

  And maybe—no, more like probably—that was all Charles Liu would see in my work. The flaws.

  I tugged nervously at the lapel of the boyfriend jacket I’d discovered at—yes, where else—Goodwill, and hugged my framed photo a little closer to my chest.

  I was regretting showing up at all, at that point. Charles Liu was going to laugh at me. If I was lucky, he would laugh. Most likely, he would become enraged and kick me out.

  When his own assistant—yet another woman in a tailored suit that cost the same amount I’d spent on last month’s rent—reached for his door, I imagined Charles sitting in a large leather chair, overstuffed with wings, that smelled like thousand-dollar bills. I was already betting he had taxidermied heads—not of animals, but of conquered business adversaries—on the wall above him.

  The door finally opened all the way. Charles Liu was not, in fact, sitting at a giant carved Presidential English oak Oval Office-style monstrosity. And there were no heads mounted on his walls. Instead, he had a very basic metal workspace for a desk, with clean beige walls and no drawers or cabinets anywhere. Obviously, he ran a paperless work environment.

  He did have a small indoor fountain in the corner. The sounds of water trickling over a stack of marble stones instantly allowed me to relax. A little, anyway.

  (It also kind of made me want to pee. Then again, that was surely my nerves too.)

  “Heather,” he bellowed, greeting me warmly. Had he always been warm? Had I been too worried about myself to notice it at the park?

  Or was he being nice in front of his assistant? Acting like he was Mr. Jolly Good Guy, and then, when she was gone and he finally got a chance to see what I’d brought him—what he’d paid me for—his eyes would turn red and fangs would grow out of his mouth, and I’d wind up being his first official taxidermied head?

  “Have a seat,” he invited. “How are you?”

  But I didn’t want to chitchat—I wanted to get this thing over with.

  I handed him my photo. And I took a breath. The last clean breath I’d take before his anger began to incinerate the walls, filling the atmosphere with smoke.

  Charles accepted the frame. His face first looked slightly surprised, then confused, then amused.

  Here we go, I thought. Here we go, here we go…

  “Look, if it’s not what you had in mind,” I began, “we can certainly schedu
le a more traditional reshoot. For no extra charge, of course. I didn’t mention it at the park, but I had…” I paused to lean on one leg and chuckle a bit. “You know, it’s kind of a funny story. You won’t believe it. I had a real snafu with my camera. To give you the full picture of how it all happened, I should really start by telling you about this kid I call Darth Billy…”

  Charles held up his hand.

  I widened my lips with a grimace, exposing my clenched teeth. If I could have clenched my ears, I would have. I was ready for the shout. Humiliation. Two security guards. A citizen’s arrest. Couldn’t a girl be arrested for inciting one man’s outrage?

  I took a step backward, toward his door.

  “I’d never reshoot this. This—it’s amazing,” Charles announced, his voice mirroring the happy surprise on his face.

  My head turned a somersault. Actually, my head was doing an Olympic tumbling routine. “It—is?”

  “I don’t know how you did this. I was told you were talented, but this is astounding. What you captured. It’s—it’s us.”

  ~Sharon~

  “Can you believe it?” Heather screeched.

  “Told you he’d like it,” I said. I was trying to smile. But in reality, her words made me feel like she’d torn all ten of my fingernails in the quick.

  Because I was remembering that old professor of mine. That first photography class, and being told that I had something. His words had made me feel like I had some sort of power. Enough to make something really wonderful happen for myself.

  It was all so far away. The scene was, anyway. What did that say about the power?

  “Mr. Liu told me to bring him more of my stuff. Said that if it was what he was looking for, he’d send some work my way. He does marketing and ad campaigns. Social media stuff. I guess that was obvious from the name of his business, wasn’t it? Which I mostly got wrong, I think, but still.” She shrugged, flustered and thrilled to the point of seeming kid-like.

  She sighed with happiness, tilting her head back. The photo caught her attention again—the one of me and Michael. Her face turned serious as she admitted, “The funniest thing happened.” But it was like she was talking to the photo, not to me. “I got this urge to celebrate. And to tell Ryan, you know, how important that ride turned out to be, because things feel like they might finally be starting to take off. And he…” Her voice trailed.