The Art of the Kiss

by Holly Schindler

  Standing there on the sidewalk, enveloped by a strange mix of history and facts and memories and old times and new times that did not look really so much different, I felt myself spiraling through one emotion after another, each one increasingly deeper than the last.

  Finally, at the end of it, the feeling at the root of it all lay exposed. Underneath the aching quiet and the agonizing small talk, beneath the feelings of being ignored or left out, beneath the sadness of having seen my own youth cool and fade like a sunset, beneath the hurt of watching her give our magic away—there it was: I missed Sharon.

  Simple as that. I missed her. And I missed who we’d been to each other.

  I stumbled a little closer to the door, pausing long enough to glance over my shoulder, toward the radio station where I had recorded a piece earlier that day, to be played during Murio’s birthday party.

  Tony wasn’t on air at this time of day. Another DJ was currently seated at the microphone.

  “No way he won’t play it. Not if it’s yours,” Tony’d tried to assure me.

  I’d hoped that was true. But this DJ certainly didn’t have to. All it had been was a request. A suggestion. A Post-it note on a desk, easily ignored.

  Even after all the messages, the emails, the calls to the station, I half-expected interest in my tales to dry up at any moment, leave as quickly as it had arrived. I’d seen it happen.

  I tried to shake it off. It was Murio’s birthday, after all. It was a night for celebrations. I’d come to wish him well.

  I didn’t just come for Murio. The words popped into my head, and I slipped my hand into my pocket, where I found the note Sharon had left on the kitchen table.

  Was she already here? I’d taken a shortcut. Had I gotten there first? Where was she? Already inside?

  Cody the Wolf was getting really worked up. Boasting, “…and remember, if you have any problems in there, you come find me.” He offered this crop of vulnerable Riding Hoods an almost vulgar, toothy grin.

  I waited in line for a chatting twosome to slip their IDs back into their purses and make their way inside the bar. Mostly, tonight’s girls came in clumps. Except for one, who appeared to be on her own. She leaned down to gather something at her feet.

  A camera box. A familiar one at that.

  There she was. Heather. With bulky bags of camera gear over both shoulders. She almost looked like an unsure new parent, carrying too many just-in-case bags. But in that split second, seeing her move through the entrance, I was hit with a wave of anger. I wanted to make her vanish with the twirl of a magic wand, the innocent-looking villain who had dragged Sharon father away from me than she’d ever been before.

  Once Heather disappeared inside, Cody nodded at me. No need for an ID, not with my shock of white hair and six million or so wrinkles.

  I stepped inside to find the bar completely packed. So many people—all ages, all sizes—and interwoven so tightly, like threads making up a piece of cloth.

  Where had Heather gone? I didn’t want to lose her.

  I pushed my glasses up my nose and wormed my way through the crowd. Was I a mere spectator at this ball?

  I didn’t want to be.

  No—I wasn’t going to be. Once, I’d been a Prince Charming. On a quest for the perfect girl. Making sure that I charmed her enough to ride into the sunset.

  Now?

  Enough of the stale, boring Prince Charming routine, I told myself. Enough of the moping and the blaming.

  Once, I’d gone after what I wanted.

  I was going to do it again.

  I was going to get that camera back.

  Which was to say, I was out to get my magic back.

  The same magic Sharon and I had created together.

  ~Sharon~

  In fifty years with Michael, I’d never left a note for him, not like the one I’d placed on the kitchen table before stepping out to Murio’s birthday.

  Ever since I’d seen the notice of the celebration in the paper, I hadn’t been able to get it out of my mind.

  I wasn’t telling Michael I needed to be on my own. I’d left him that note hoping he would follow.

  Which was a little strange. I wanted Michael to follow me. To join me. When we already lived together.

  I just didn’t want the two of us to keep looking at each other in the same way. We needed a different backdrop.

  At the bar, I handed over my cover charge, the old faded-to-blue ink in my tattoo visible in the glow from the nearby streetlight.

  I paused to glance around the square, hoping to see him.

  And tried not to hang on to disappointment when I didn’t. Plenty of night left, I had to assure myself.

  Oh, but the worries stopped pummeling me in the moment I stepped inside. Because it was like stepping into my old skin, especially as I removed the lens cap. The walls had aged, but the atmosphere hadn’t changed. Different faces, an entirely new crop of them, were still painted up as brightly as they’d been decades ago. The same familiar dreams made the air feel muggy and dense with hope.

  What did they see in me? A woman in a bar by herself.

  Ah, but I was old this time. No old woman is up to no good. No old woman is bad. Old women are done. They have had their happy ending.

  I was simply here to revisit mine. A reunion with my past.

  That’s what they thought, anyway.

  In part, they were right. My beginning really was there. It danced and pulsed around me. Back then, my life had seemed like little more than a prologue. I’d tapped my fingernails impatiently, anxious for the rest of my story—the real meat of it—to get going. Not enough time had elapsed yet for drama to kick in. Or so I’d thought. But that was so wrong. Beginnings are loaded with uncertainty. What’s more dramatic than uncertainty?

  Murio’s bubbled with firsts: first dates, first time being introduced to a friend of a friend. First time in a long time seeing Murio. First time seeing what Murio’s son had done with the place. First time to be back inside the old bar in ages.

  I understood firsts differently from this spot, a good distance from any first of my own. I wanted to capture it all. I snapped. And snapped.

  I told myself I wouldn’t be distracted. Not by the heat in the room. Not by voices and shouts and bumps.

  I wasn’t done yet.

  But my early determination splintered when I found myself distracted by a familiar face.

  Mostly familiar, anyway.

  I lowered my camera and headed back toward the bar.

  “Should I have brought another permission form?” I shouted at Murio, now as white-headed and wrinkled as I was.

  He rolled his eyes. “Get real, kid. Don’t get schmaltzy on me. Get out there and do what you do best.”

  Smiling, I pushed myself away, like a swimmer pushing herself from the side of the pool, ready for another lap. I raised my camera, letting the crowd draw me from one direction to the next.

  Until I saw them, through my viewfinder. My pictures. My night shots. They were back.

  Oh, sure, the article about Murio’s party had said something about old pictures. But I certainly didn’t suspect they’d be mine.

  Every single wall was filled with the photographs that had been displayed during my exhibit years ago. Copies I’d given to Murio as a thank you. He’d framed them, hung them again.

  I stood on my toes, looking over the crowd.

  Back at the bar, Murio shrugged, held his hands out to the side, then waved me on in a go on, get going kind of gesture.

  He’d remembered.

  It did something to me. Just being remembered. Do what you do best. It shook and strengthened me all at the same time.

  But saying that sounds flimsy. That’s not enough. How can I describe it? To be remembered, you had to have really been seen in the first place. Someone had to take the time to develop your image in the darkroom of their own mind. They had to think enough to frame you, preserve you.

  I didn’t think I had been. Suddenly, I was
surrounded by proof I’d gotten that all wrong.

  I didn’t want to shake off the surprise. I wanted to let tears prickle in my eyes. I wanted the lump in my throat. I wanted to be rattled.

  Staggering forward I few steps, I found it. Near the stage, there it was, my favorite nightlife image: the woman dancing alone, out in the middle of the floor.

  It was so good to see her again. The woman still daring the world to come at her with their suspicions and their prejudices, their rules and their standards.

  At that moment, while I was buzzing with the past and staring at my work and realizing I wasn’t quite as forgotten as I’d thought, it happened. Like something out of one of Michael’s storybooks. A woman walked up to my picture and made the exact same pose. Stuck her face up, her leg out, and hiked her long, gauzy skirt slightly, imitating the pose.

  Was she teasing? Tipsy? Playing some sort of game?

  The shape of her upturned face, the smirk...I took her picture immediately. Then lowered my camera to ask, “That’s you, isn’t it?” as I pointed at the fifty-year-old black and white photo.

  She let go of her skirt, covering a leg dotted with a few unmistakable markers of time. The veins, the sun-thickened skin.

  We exchanged names for the second time in half a century. We shook hands. I gathered her address, in exchange for a print.

  “I remember that night,” she agreed. “I’d come to visit my sister here in Fairyland. What else could I do? My life felt like it was falling apart. I was on a losing streak. And then, out of nowhere, the man who said I wasn’t enough changed his mind. Came after me. Followed me straight to this place. Murio’s. That night, for the first time in my life, I said, ‘Too late. You’re not enough for me.’”

  “He was there?” I asked, my head swimming. Why hadn’t I asked about her story all those years ago?

  She nodded, her eyes growing hazy beneath her thick white bangs. And she told me about the long upswing that followed the night I’d taken her picture. My chest warmed as she shared the details of her story.

  When she was gone, all I could think was that I’d done her a disservice with that picture. I’d zoomed in too close. If I’d pulled back, I could have told the story of the crowd’s reaction. Surely, the onlookers would have revealed shock, pity, admiration.

  And I could have captured him, too, there in the throngs. The man she was standing up to. Just watch me. I’ll show you.

  By shooting the bigger picture, I wouldn’t have diminished the woman’s importance. Just the opposite. Including other faces would have said more about her.

  If I were to take the same picture again, it’d be different.

  What else would I take differently? My thoughts zipped through those years of photos, all those nighttime images.

  Until I came back to Michael. He’d been there, too, while I was doing my own dancing, of sorts. He’d been beside me through all those years when I had the spotlight on my face.

  He’d seen me. The way the woman in the center of the dance floor wanted to be seen.

  But that wasn’t all. It wasn’t simply that he’d let me dance. He hadn’t watched from the fringes of a crowd. He’d been part of it. All of it. From the very beginning. We’d been dancing together in Dad’s basement, the night I took The Art of the Kiss.

  If I hadn’t had what it took, The Art of the Kiss would have never had a follow-up. No exhibits, no editorial work. The shop would have closed shortly after opening.

  I’d followed my own dream. And we’d been in it together. At the same time. It had been there all along, but I was finally seeing it. The big picture.

  I needed to tell him.

  Where was he?

  I turned, bumping into another familiar face.

  Heather. Here to take her shots of her ex-boyfriend’s band.

  I’d seen my camera in her hands before, but this was different. Here, in Murio’s, surrounded by the photos the Nikon and I had taken together. Here, engulfed by everything the Nikon and I had shared with Michael: passion and purpose and a partnership and a best friend and a wealth of genuine affection.

  It was a hard sight to see, that camera in Heather’s hands. Almost as hard as looking at an old love—one you never quite got over—in the arms of another.

  ~July 5, 1969~

  Michael’s uncle had spent his working years as a watch repairman in a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop, the kind of little bitty place that was once all a man needed to keep his family in new shoes and living beneath a roof that didn’t leak.

  He had shown his curious nephew the ins and outs of his craft—the delicate little structures, the tiny gears and moving pieces. “Like miniature hearts,” his uncle had whispered. A timekeeper, that was what Michael’s own mother had called him. Michael grew up believing his uncle to be a wizard of sorts—a man who created and kept control of the time.

  Uncle Vincent, father of three girls, seemed to enjoy Michael’s company. He’d helped Vincent with the watch repair starting when he was still small enough to fit on his lap. It was easy for him, what with his little fingers. And his abundance of patience, which was unusual for a child.

  But why wouldn’t Michael be patient? He and his uncle were keeping time. Without them, horrible things could happen. Why, Saturday, the most deliciously lazy of all the week’s days, might disappear forever.

  He learned to love all things intricate. By the time he was ten, he was taking apart anything with screws: the toaster, a radio, a vacuum, the lawn mower motor.

  So it wasn’t unusual that after the Fourth of July fiasco, he had gathered the pieces of Sharon’s camera, bid her and her father goodbye a good three hours before the start of the fireworks, and taken a city bus to the edge of the Graysons’ neighborhood, where he could pick up his Pontiac then head straight to the offices of The Fairyland Times. The paper had a room in the basement full of not-completely-busted typewriters and rotary phones and, yes, cameras. The Graveyard, everyone on staff called it. Only, the castoffs weren’t completely dead. Some pieces were still in decent condition. Kept around in case. Everyone knew replacement pieces could help you out in a jam—say, if a reporter happened to find himself wedged between a rapidly approaching deadline and a suddenly malfunctioning typewriter return bar.

  Michael had begun work early in the evening, stopping only to curl up on The Graveyard’s couch with the broken springs somewhere around one in the morning. A vicious crick in his neck had roused him less than two hours later. He’d splashed water on his face, his beard like a Brillo pad beneath his fingers, and dashed off his latest column, about the pre-fireworks Independence Day picnic, only to return immediately to his most important task at hand.

  At a quarter after six in the morning, he flinched against the door flying open at the top of the stairs.

  “Minyard, what in the Sam Hill are you doing down here?” thundered Reed, his editor.

  “Already turned my story in, boss,” Michael said, still sifting through the boxes.

  “You’d better. News doesn’t stop for a holiday.”

  And still, he clomped closer.

  But Michael was lost in his work. In the salvage and restoration of Sharon’s Nikon. He had disassembled another camera just to see how it all went together, laying the pieces out across an old desktop strategically, so that he could keep track of the order in which he’d removed the parts. It was different from working on watches, but also not so different. Tiny little pieces, screws.

  Even with Michael’s experience, though, it should not have been easy. It should have frustrated him. Doubt should have crept into the process. He should have, at some point, shaken his head at himself, wondered out loud, “How could I have ever thought I’d fix this?”

  And yet, he didn’t.

  He’d launched into the task with hope and joy and excitement in his heart. Those feelings had never lessened. Now that he was fully enmeshed, he had started to feel it all absolutely clicking. Sliding into place. Somehow he could dig through a box of part
s for the next needed piece, and it would come to him, like his fingertips were magnets.

  He would not quite be able to explain it when his editor got close enough to demand some sort of answer.

  All he knew was that he felt certain this was it. A fixed camera was his way to show Sharon how much he cared, even though they barely knew each other. Sharon had made it clear, more than once, that she wasn’t interested. He knew he was riding a fine line, at this point, between being a man with a crush and man who just might be in the bushes watching through a woman’s bedroom window while she phoned the Fairyland sheriff. Without the camera, any remaining time with Sharon could disappear.

  That, he knew, would be far worse than the disappearance of Saturdays.

  Reed reached the desk Michael had commandeered, slamming his hands down on the top. His tie was loosened, his sleeves rolled up. But Michael had long assumed he actually dressed that way each morning, sliding the Windsor knot only part of the way up and never once making use of cufflinks.

  “Minyard,” Reed barked. “Didn’t you hear me? I said what in the Sam Hill are you doing?”

  He had often used the same tone on Michael at a quarter to five, when he broke out his bottom-drawer bottle of scotch. “You stay away from the skirts,” Reed would warn, dragging his feet about going home to wife number three. Michael would accept the bottle Reed offered, take a sip, and he would nod. Yes, he would agree, a bachelor’s life forever. That’ll be me.

  But he didn’t feel that way anymore—if he ever really had to begin with. He needed to ready his face. He needed it to show Reed how different this woman was. Sharon was a single moment in time, the kind that could drift up to you and waft away before you really had a chance to even recognize it. And if he didn’t do this one thing to show her everything he felt for her, everything he’d been daydreaming about, she really would slip right on by. She’d forever be this wonderful thing that had almost happened to him.

  He couldn’t let that be the story. He had to pause this moment just long enough for her to see him. To stop dismissing him.