Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  “Men are brutes,” said Kim gently. She petted Rally’s neck, rubbed Rally’s back. “You don’t have to do this.”

  Rally held herself archly, staring straight ahead. “Cut it off. Make it short and funky and whatever, but cut it off.”

  “Shhhh.” Kim fought to make her voice soothing. She was trying to save something rare, something beautiful. “Just because some jerk liked your hair one way doesn’t mean you have to—”

  “Cut it off,” shrieked Rally.

  Rally went to Beaujolais, France. She walked down quaint, ancient streets, visited wine masters, tasted what they offered, floated from one vineyard to another. She sat on stone fences and gazed at sheep. She wore sturdy, roomy American blue jeans and baggy sweaters that didn’t accentuate her figure. Her hair was cropped at the neck in a fashion that required no tending or thought. She spent each night in the restaurant of one inn or another, eating chicken and beef entrées, prepared with simple sauces. As she wrote and drank Beaujolais, Rally jotted down observations about the land and the wine. When it came time to write about the people, Rally did something she never had. She ignored the truth she saw around her and transformed everyone she met into a stock fairy-tale character. She wrote of polite men with wine-stained, crooked teeth, of buxom, helpful women, of children who carried baguettes and stomped on grapes. Everything was wholesome and pleasant and continental, until one night Rally drank far too much wine at a bar. She found herself dizzy and outside under the stars, her body being pressed against a rough-hewn rock fence by an eager young man named Olivier. Olivier kept making sexy French whispers and stroking the waistline of Rally’s blue jeans. The mistake came when Olivier put his lips to Rally’s, eased his tongue into her mouth, and kissed her. For a second Rally gave in to the swirling, crafted sky, and kissed Olivier back. She joined her mouth with a stranger’s and tried to be a happy, fleeting thing, as fleeting as wine. But repulsion came. Rally was aware not only of her tongue, but of her entire self beneath her clothes, and she pulled herself away from the man, as if she’d betrayed a jealous, omniscient lord.

  * * *

  * * *

  Duty

  My name is Patrick Rigg, and I’m thirty-three years old. I’m also a millionaire, because when I was six, my older brother, Francis Rigg, was killed unexpectedly by Guppy The Wonder Fish. My family lived near Chicago at the time, and Francis and I always begged our parents to take us to Guppington Estates, a theme park on the city’s outskirts. Guppington Estates was one of these bizarre start-up American theme parks. Guppy, the central character, was a stout orange fish who wore a black tuxedo and a monocle. He spoke impeccable English and munched on pralines, but he also knew jujitsu. Guppy’s afternoon cartoon show aired in Chicago and maybe everywhere. Each episode started with Guppy minding his own business, browsing through a bookstore, drinking latte, looking for collectible editions of Joseph Conrad titles. Usually, Guppyhad by his side his classy fish girlfriend, Groupy. Groupywas incredibly well read, with a killer figure. She and Guppywould exchange witticisms and hold fins until the Largemouths showed up. The Largemouths were rough-cut, troublemaking bass, who, for reasons unclear to me as a child, followed and tormented Guppy every episode. They seemed to resent that Guppy was well born, and that he had a sexy girlfriend, while they were just punks as far as fish went. Bear in mind that none of this made any sense whatsoever. In any case, the Largemouths would pester Guppy and shove him around and call him a square, but their big mistake—which they made unfailingly every episode—came when they began insulting Groupy. As soon as that happened, Guppy would remove his monocle, hand it to Groupy, and say quietly: “This I cannot endure.” Then, with lethal exactitude, Guppy would kick the living snot out of the Largemouths. He employed elegant, bone-crushing jujitsu moves, and when he was finished, there was a pile of dead fish carcasses on the floor beside him.

  Francis and I worshiped Guppy. Francis, who was three years my elder, would sit with me every afternoon to watch Guppy on TV, and after the show we would act out the carnage we’d just witnessed. Francis was always Guppy by virtue of seniority, and I was a Largemouth. Basically, my brother and I just pounded on each other till one of us bled or cried or it was time for dinner, but I always resented being labeled a Largemouth. The punches I threw were real, indignant and sloppy, and they cost Francis one tooth and two black eyes in the years before our last trip to Guppington Estates.

  The Estates was a fancy theme park. It featured the Hard Rock Bass Café, and Blowy’s Bookstore, and all the other places that some marketing genius convinced me were normal fish hangouts. I might’ve asked my parents a million questions about why Guppy didn’t live underwater and why he adored pralines, but I don’t remember such questions. All I remember are the utterly kempt streets of Guppington Estates, and most especially, Guppy’s mansion. The mansion was the coolest part of the park. Inside it were dazzling chandeliers and a wet bar where you could purchase pralines and imitation champagne. In the mansion’s backyard was a giant Plexiglas fishbowl, Guppy’s swimming pool. The bowl was probably thirty feet high and just as wide and it was filled with blue foam to simulate water. The idea was, your parents bought you a ticket and you were issued a Largemouth fish-head helmet. Then you climbed a staircase to the rim of the bowl and waited in line on a platform. Some guy in an eight-foot-tall Guppy suit stood at the head of the line. When you got up to him, you could throw a couple punches at Guppy and he’d fake some whimsical groans and moans, so your parents could get their money’s worth. Then Guppy would holler, “This I cannot endure!” and swat you across the butt with a fin, sending you over the rim of the bowl into the pit of blue foam. You got to clown around in the foam for a while with other kids and then an attendant plucked you out.

  If it sounds dangerous, it was. The platform was high, and poorly fenced in. Also, it’s amazing that no kid ever asphyxiated in that foam. Bear in mind, though, that this was the early 1970s, and neither parents nor children were very clear about what the hell was going on. You had to be eight years old to dive into the bowl, and you had to wear a helmet, but that was it. I’m sure theme-park ordinances are far more rigorous now, but back then, standing on the rim of Guppy’s sky-high fishbowl seemed like a perfectly sanctionable activity for a child. At least, it was sanctionable until Guppy swatted my brother Francis too hard and Francis glancedoff the bowl’s outer rim, plummeted thirty feet, and crashed headfirst into the ground in front of my parents and me. I’d been sulking around the base of the bowl, bitter that I was too young to be swatted by Guppy. Francis landed three feet from me. He was wearing his Largemouth helmet when he fell, but I heard his neck crack. It sounded exactly like it sounds in the movies, quick, clean, and sure, like a snapped wishbone. I knew he was dead as soon as I heard that sound and saw the weird twist in Francis’s neck. I knew it before my mother screamed, before my father raced to his limp, fish-headed son. I knew my brother was dead, and in that moment I knew something else, something that a lifetime of nightmares and bullshit therapy and millions of sympathy dollars bequeathed to me by the defunct Guppington Estates Corporation has never been able to erase or rectify. My brother’s death was absurd. It was an accident, yes, a progression of unforeseen, unfortunate split seconds in time, but when all was said and done, my brother was lying there dead with a fish helmet on, and his head was twisted in a silly way that heads shouldn’t twist, and it was absurd.

  Later, when I saw Francis in his coffin, I cried, because I understood that he would never punch me again. Today I live in Manhattan and trade millions of dollars in stocks every day, and Francis will never get to know this city—the glory of its money or the smell of its women. If your first temptation is to say, How tragic, my first temptation is to stick a gun down your throat and pull the trigger. You weren’t there. You didn’t see the twist of Francis’s neck or his stupid fish helmet. Your mother didn’t die of depression because of that twist and that helmet. Your father probably doesn’t live as a recluse in his Adirondack homet
own, and you probably don’t send him checks every month to keep him in his deer-blind bliss. My brother’s death wasn’t tragic, it was ridiculous. It was point-blank absurdity, Francis’s death was, and it wrapped itself around my life forever, like a straitjacket with clunky buckles.

  So that’s how I wake up every day, with the straitjacket—the absurdity of Francis’s death and the absurdity of just about everything—tight around my skin. I brush my teeth, I eat Special K, I make money, I drink whiskey, and I’m capable of laughing. But none of these things ever loosens the straitjacket. There are only three things that accomplish that feat, three things that I take seriously, three things that let me relax a little. I do these three things without fail. Here is what I do. I carry a gun every day, I listen to a priest every evening, and, almost every night, I tie up beautiful women in my bedroom.

  The gun’s easy to explain. It’s a licensed black SIG, and I carry it in the left breast pocket of whatever suit I’m wearing. My suits are expensive, always black or charcoal, and I’m handsome enough that people always check me out. They notice the bulge in the breast of my suit, the lump over my heart. They know it’s a gun, and they watch me with fear and interest, wondering if I’ll take out my gun and fire it. This doesn’t thrill me, having strangers fear me, or knowing my coworkers worry that I’m packing heat. What thrills me is that I’m not what these people take me for. They believe I’m predictably dangerous—I can tell from their handshakes, their eagerness to accept when I insist on picking up the tab. They think me a strong, well-dressed character, a man of a certain code. I am cordial and principled, they think. They believe that I’m like Guppy, or some mobster, that I’ll only resort to violence if my honor or the honor of someone I cherish is compromised. My weapon, they suspect, is my instrument for executing justice.

  Lucky for me, that is bullshit. What keeps me breathing in and out is knowing that I am not enslaved by principle at all. I can produce my SIG any time I want and snuff out the fourteen lives in closest proximity to me and still have one bullet left for myself. I can kill the Ukrainian woman sitting beside me on the uptown train, or Harrison Phelps, the shy man in my company’s bonds department. I could buy a dozen roses for nobody, then plug a hole in the heart of the salesgirl who sold me the roses. With my SIG I can leap at any second into the absurd abyss that swallowed up my brother, and if you’re too close to me when I leap, I might yank you in with me.

  To which you undoubtedly reply that I am one twisted individual. Well, so what? If you’re one of these people who feels he deserves a straight story, like I have some duty to enlighten or clarify, then go fuck yourself. How would you know the first thing about who I am, about what’s choking me, about what I can or cannot endure? Maybe if your best friend gets his neck broken by a man in a giant Guppy suit, we can talk. Barring that, I humbly beg you to shut the fuck up. I’m trying to talk about my gun, and the priest and the women whose wrists I hold behind their backs. I’m trying to talk about things that are potentially absurd but that can also level absurdity, nullify it, if only for a moment.

  So, the priest. His name is Father Thomas Merchant. He’s the pastor at St. Benedict’s Catholic Church, which is smack in the middle of Wall Street. Here’s a big, fat surprise, I’m Catholic. That means that I know there’s a God and that I grew up listening to inordinately bad acoustic guitarists every Sunday. Let’s get one thing straight, though. My knowing there’s a God doesn’t change my brother being dead, and it doesn’t stop the world from being full of pain. Yes, Jesus walked among us, and yes, you might get creamed in the street this afternoon by a delivery van carrying diapers or cherry cola. So I don’t waste my time begging God to help me win the Lotto or to keep children from suffering or to play Mr. Fixit for life on earth. God’s already proven He’s not going to do that to anyone’s satisfaction. Consequently, I feel quite free to say the word fuck whenever I choose, and to make and spend obscene amounts of money every day. I wear Armani suits, I read a tickertape the way doctors read an EKG, and I wait for that diaper van to run me down.

  Father Merchant comes into the picture like this. Every evening, after work, I duck into St. Benedict’s while Father Merchant is saying five o’clock Mass. I get there in time for the gospel and the sermon. I never sit down. Instead, I stand in back, in the shadows behind the candle trays, and I leave after the sermon. I never go to Communion, because not only do I carry a gun, but I love and need my gun in a way that God did not commission. I also never go to Confession because of what Guppy did to Francis. I can’t enter utterly into the sober contemplation of my own faults while there are still men in fish suits breaking the necks of little boys.

  I enjoy hearing Father Merchant, though. He’s not one of these softy modern guys preaching milk and cookies and moral loopholes. He’s got scraggly brown hair and strong brown teeth, like he’s been eating sand in a desert.

  “The Commandments come first,” says Father Merchant. “The Beatitudes second.”

  What Father Merchant means is that it’s no good worrying about meek, merciful peacemaking if you hate your parents, or if you’re fucking someone you’re not married to, or if you can’t tell people the truth. Father Merchant, of course, is an unpopular preacher. He’s got a gut, and his brown teeth are probably from cigarettes. Most nights I’m the only person under forty at St. Benedict’s, and the handful of old women in the pews wouldn’t exactly inspire the young or delight the weak. What I mean is, there are no frills at St. Benedict’s, no cozy youth groups, no flautists, no epiphanies. Father Merchant represents a God who needs to be obeyed rather than embraced, and that happens to be the kind of God I understand, a God who is truth—even if it’s absurd truth—rather than comfort.

  Yahoo, you’re thinking. I already mentioned that I tie women up every night, or hold their wrists behind their backs, so you’re thinking, Enough already, get to the sexy stuff.

  Fine, except I’m not sure you’ll think it’s sexy. It’s sexy to me, though.

  What I do is, I meet really beautiful women almost every day. I meet them in bars, on the subway, at bodegas, on the street. I am young, rich, handsome, unmarried, and often broodingly withdrawn into my thoughts, an irresistible combination for female Homo sapiens. Also, I have absolutely no compunction about saying whatever the hell I want, and most women adore that too. Either they adore it, or they’re appalled but so intrigued that they can’t help investigating me by accepting a date. I’ll give an example. The following conversation took place three months back between myself and a young German au pair named Eva. Eva is nineteen, with a forest of lush black hair, and eyes just as black. She has very pale skin. She is not skinny, but she has a killer figure, and she is undyingly sensual. When I first saw her, she was standing in front of FAO Schwarz, holding the hand of a boy named Rusty, the boy she takes care of. They were looking together through the store window at a giant stuffed animal Triceratops, and a June breeze pushed Eva’s short dress around her thighs. I walked right up.

  “I’m Patrick Rigg,” I said.

  Eva looked me up and down. She saw that I was dangerous, but she yawned. Undyingly sensual women can yawn on command.

  “Gee,” said Eva. “Gosh. Golly. Wow.”

  “I’m Rusty,” said Rusty.

  I ignored the child.

  “You’re not skinny,” I told Eva, “but you have a killer figure.”

  Eva stopped yawning. She frowned at me, tried to look naive.

  “Killer?” she asked. “Figure?”

  “You have a marvelous body,” I said.

  Eva’s lips parted slightly. I had her now.

  Rusty tugged on Eva’s hand, tried to remind her of himself.

  “Long ago,” he said, “Triceratops roamed the earth.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off of Eva.

  “Rusty,” I said, “if you go inside and leave us alone, I’ll buy you that Triceratops.”

  Rusty raced inside.

  “Hey,” Eva called after him.

 
“Forget him,” I said.

  Eva watched her charge through the window. Rusty was poking a salesclerk on the arm, pointing excitedly at the dinosaur.

  “You shouldn’t lie to children,” said Eva.

  My God, women are lovely. They’re lovely and prophetic. I could see from Eva’s simple cotton dress, from the lack of sun in her skin, from the way the breeze blew her hair into her teeth, that she knew she’d be in my bedroom that very night. She was only nineteen, but she already knew how to deflect the conversation away from herself to something neutral and insignificant, like Rusty. She knew that if she did that, if she prattled stupidly for a while, she could relax and let me move her toward lust.

  “I wasn’t lying,” I said. “I’ll buy him the dinosaur.”

  Eva gazed through the window display. She knew not to look at me.

  “That dinosaur,” she said, “will cost hundreds of dollars. Maybe even a thousand.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Eva smiled, and that was that. She met me at Saks Fifth Avenue later that night, when she got off work. I spentfour grand on a silk dress and heels and a makeover for her, then took her to dinner at Duranigan’s, where I take all my women. By eleven we were back at my apartment, in my bedroom, in the dark. With a pocketknife blade I cut Eva’s dress off her body and sashed it around her neck like a scarf. Eva stood expectantly in her brassiere and underwear, with the silk around her neck, waiting for me to remove all her clothing, lay her down, and take her. But I didn’t do that. Instead, I held Eva’s wrists behind her back and made her look at herself in my dressing mirror. I held her like that for an hour, until she was hot and bothered, then I dressed her in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, got her a cab, and sent her home.

  By now you’re wishing maybe that there were a sexual 911, so you could phone in my psychosis. If so, you have no sexual imagination, and I’ll leave you to your sorry missionary position. If you’re intrigued, though, I’ll tell you some secrets. One is that I don’t fuck women, on God’s orders. I’m not a virgin—I’ve had my slips—but I know the real rules as well as you. Following those rules or not is completely your affair, and if you’re looking for an argument, find a Jesuit. What I want to talk about, what I want to honor, are the most beautiful creations on the planet, women’s bodies. If you’re a woman, and you’re sick of hearing about how gorgeous you are, tough. I’m going to say what I want, and if you’d rather be demeaned or disregarded or merely endured, go find some stupid lover who will screw you blindly for his own pleasure, or maybe some drunk who will slap you around. I have a different aesthetic, and here it is. Women save me from absurdity. Think what you like about me, but when I watch the news and see thousands of Ecuadorians killed by a hurricane, or when a diaper truck flattens a pedestrian, or when I’m plagued by thoughts of my brother’s fishy neck, I have to run to the nearest beautiful woman I know and lavish all the money and attention on her that I can. It’s the only thing that helps, the only thing that loosens the straitjacket.