Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  “He’s a Machiavellian bastard,” said Rhonda Phelps.

  “You know what’s an excellent word to say out loud repeatedly?” Nicole Bonner chewed her hair. “Rinse. Think about it, Mr. Kerchek. Rinse. Rinse.”

  That evening, as always, Douglas walked home to his shabby studio apartment. Douglas was thirty-one. He lived alone, five blocks north of St. Agnes’s, in an apartment building filled with Mexican men who drank Pabst and had boisterous poker games every night in the lobby outside Douglas’s first-floor apartment. Their nickname for Douglas was “Uno,” because whenever he sat with them, he had one quiet beer, then bowed out.

  “Uno,” cackled the Mexicans. “Come take our money, Uno.”

  A twelve-year-old boy named Chiapas rattled a beer can. “Come get your medicine, Uno.”

  Douglas grinned wanly, waved them off, keyed his door open.

  Rinse, he thought, frowning. Rinse. Rinse.

  After a quick sandwich Douglas corrected essays. He was a tough grader, and he had short black sideburns with streaks of gray in them. He also had a boxer’s build, a Harvard Ph.D. in English literature, and no wife or girlfriend. All of these qualities made Douglas a font of intrigue for the all-female population of St. Agnes’s—both the lay faculty and the students—but in truth Douglas led a sedentary life. He loved books, he was a passionate, solitary filmgoer, and he got his hair cut every four weeks by Chiapas, whose father ran a barbershop down the block. All told, Douglas was a quiet and, he thought, happy man. He was also the only male teacher at St. Agnes’s. Cheryl, Audrey, and Katya, the three single women on the faculty, would have taken up the crusade of dating him, but he wasn’t drawn to his coworkers. Cheryl wore electric shades of suede that confused him, Audrey had two cops for ex-husbands, and Katya, despite her long legs and Lithuanian accent, was cruel to the girls. So Douglas spent his nights alone, seeing films, correcting essays, and occasionally chatting with Chiapas and company. On this particular night Douglas was barely into his stack of essays when the phone rang.

  “Hello?” sighed Douglas. He expected it to be his mother, who called weekly from Pennsylvania to see if her son had become miraculously engaged.

  “Good evening, Mr. Kerchek.”

  Douglas frowned. “Nicole?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “Off the Rolodex in the principal’s office. How’s your ankle?”

  Douglas sneezed, twice. He did this instinctively when he didn’t know what to say.

  “God bless you,” said Nicole.

  “Thank you,” said Douglas. He glanced around, as if expecting his apartment suddenly to fill with students.

  “How’s your ankle?”

  “It’s . . . it’s all right. I banged it on my radiator.”

  “Really?”

  The truth was, Douglas had slipped in his shower like an elderly person.

  “Yes, really. Nicole—”

  “Do you know what’s happening to my ankle, as we converse?”

  “No.”

  “John Stapleton is licking it. He likes to nibble my toes too.”

  Douglas blinked several times.

  “John Stapleton is a domestic shorthair. Sometimes he licks, other times he nibbles.”

  “I see,” said Douglas. There was a substantial pause.

  “John Stapleton is a cat,” said Nicole.

  “Of course,” agreed Douglas.

  “Do you enjoy gnocchi?”

  Douglas set his essays on the couch beside him. “Pardon?”

  “Gnocchi. Italian potato dumplings. We had them for dinner tonight. Father makes them by hand every Thursday. It’s the only thing Father cooks, but he’s good at it.”

  Douglas crossed his ankle over his knee.

  “So, do you enjoy them?” said Nicole.

  “Gnocchi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, meaning you enjoy them, or yes, meaning you understood what I was asking?”

  “Yes. I mean yes, I like them.”

  Nicole Bonner laughed.

  “When should I start hearing from colleges?” she asked. “It’s nearly April.”

  Douglas was relieved at the topic. “Any week now. But you’ll get in everywhere. It’s all about what you want.”

  “I want Princeton.”

  Douglas imagined Nicole sitting on a dorm bed, reading, sipping soup. He imagined baggy sweater sleeves covering her wrists.

  “Fitzgerald went there,” said Nicole.

  “Yes,” said Douglas.

  “He was a career alcoholic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know that John Stapleton is toilet trained?”

  Douglas laughed out loud, once. This usually only happened at the movies, if he was alone and the film was absurd.

  “Toilet trained. Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that he uses the toilet, like a human being. He crouches on the rim of the bowl and does his business and presses his paw on the flusher afterward. He’s very tidy.”

  “Nicole,” said Douglas.

  “It’s the truth, sir. It took Father eons to train him, but he did it. We don’t even have a litter box. Father was a marine.”

  Douglas checked his watch. “John Stapleton’s an unusual name for a cat.”

  “He’s an unusual cat,” said Nicole.

  “I think maybe I should hang up now, Nicole. Why don’t we talk in school tomorrow?”

  “All right. I don’t want to inconvenience you in your evening time.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Really?”

  “Well,” said Douglas. “What I mean is, it’s no problem. But, um, we’ll talk in school tomorrow.”

  “Inevitably,” said Nicole, and she hung up.

  Douglas had written Nicole a letter of recommendation for Princeton. In the letter, he’d said this:

  Whether she’s tearing across the field hockey grass, debunking Whitman, or lecturing me about Woody Allen films, Nicole exudes an irrepressible spirit and a generous, unguarded tenacity. She reads an entire novel every night, not to impress anyone, but because she loves to do it. She is organized, clever, and kind hearted, and once she knows what she wants, she will pursue a thing—a line of argument, a hockey ball, a band to hire for the prom—with a charmingly ruthless will.

  Douglas prided himself on such recommendations, on making his students shine on paper. It was one of the few vanities he allowed himself. When it came to crafting words, written or spoken, Douglas felt that he’d been blessed with a knack for always knowing what to say. That was why, the morning after his call from Nicole, Douglas awoke feeling flummoxed. He’d spent ten minutes on the phone with a nineteen-year-old girl and tripped over his tongue the whole time. During the night he’d also dreamed he’d been walking barefoot down a beach with Nicole. In the dream she worea low-rider black bikini and a lovely blue scarf in her hairlike Jackie Kennedy. Douglas, meanwhile, wore green Toughskins jeans and a shirt made of burlap. Every time the waves washed over their feet, Douglas scampered back and yelled: “Beware the manatees.”

  Ridiculous, thought Douglas. Embarrassing. He put on a smart coat and tie, and decided to give the girls a pop quiz that day.

  At school, in the faculty lounge, Douglas forced himself to make small talk with Cheryl, the suede-clad mathematician. When the bell for his AP class rang, Douglas strode into his classroom with confidence.

  “Mr. Kerchek.” Meredith Beckermann jumped from her desk. “Jill’s going to ask you to come watch softball today, but you promised to see our forensics meet against Regis, remember?”

  “I remember,” said Douglas.

  “Suck-up,” Jill told Meredith.

  Meredith glared at Jill. “Avaunt, and quit my sight,” she sniffed.

  Douglas surveyed the room. His AP class consisted of six girls, the brightest lights in St. Agnes’s senior class. There were Meredith and Jill, the arguers; Rhonda Phelps, the bombshell
achiever; Kelly DeMeer, the agnostic; Nancy Huck, who was always on vacation; and Nicole Bonner, who sat by the window.

  “Where’s Nancy?” asked Douglas.

  “Bermuda,” said Rhonda. “Snorkeling, with her aunt.”

  Jill tapped her Othello script. “Can we discuss the last act?”

  “Desdemona’s a dipshit,” said Meredith.

  “Meredith,” warned Douglas. He glanced at Nicole, thenat Kelly. They spoke the least of the six, Kelly because shewas cultivating spiritual fatigue and Nicole because . . . Well, thought Douglas, because she was Nicole. The look in her eyes when she stared out the window reminded Douglas of when he was a boy and he would gaze at his mother’s dressing-room mirror, wondering who lived on the other side.

  “Vocab quiz,” said Douglas.

  The girls whipped out pens and blank pieces of paper.

  “Three synonyms, from Latin roots, for bellicose.” Douglas thought out loud. “Two antonyms for abstruse. One example of synecdoche. Extra credit, list four books by Melville. You have five minutes.”

  The girls began writing immediately. Douglas watched them with fondness. They were gifted young women, and they would all conquer this class and every literature class of their futures. He passed among them, staring at their bent heads, at the roots of their hair and their earlobes, wondering how many had prom dates, how many might end up teachers, how quickly Rhonda would marry. He rolled his eyes at Meredith and Jill’s papers: each of them already had seven synonyms for bellicose. Kelly was finished in three minutes, and was now drawing hangman nooses—her trademark—on all of her letter T’s. Then Douglas looked over Nicole’s shoulder. Her paper was in a band of sunlight, and on it she had written no vocabulary words whatsoever. She was, however, busily churning out sentences. Douglas watched, then caught his breath. Nicole had written verbatim, from memory and without error, the entire first page of Moby Dick, and was still going. Douglas waitedto see if she would run out of steam or turn her head to lookat him, but she didn’t. He tried to recall if he or any otherSt. Agnes teacher had ever asked the girls to memorize and recite Melville, but he knew this wasn’t the case.

  Douglas leaned down. He could smell Nicole’s raspberry shampoo. He scribbled in the margin of her paper, This isn’t what I asked for.

  Without glancing up Nicole crossed out what he’d set down and wrote, It is a far, far better thing that I do.

  “Pens down,” said Douglas.

  After school he performed his daily regimen, half an hour of free weights followed by a three-mile run in Central Park. He got back to St. Agnes’s with just enough time for a shower before the forensics match. Outside the locker room, though,lounging on her back on a windowsill eight feet off the ground,was Nicole Bonner.

  “How’d you get up there?” panted Douglas. He was winded from his run.

  “Flew.” Nicole sat up, studied her teacher. Douglas had a privileged view of her ankles, which were crossed and not at all blue. She wore her school uniform, and low black pumps.

  “What’d you read last night?” he asked.

  “The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Did you know, Mr. Kerchek, that thousands of runners die every year from heart attacks in midworkout?”

  “I don’t think I run fast enough to induce cardiac trauma, Nicole.”

  The girl on the ledge didn’t swish her legs.

  “Trauma’s an excellent word to say out loud repeatedly. Trauma. Trauma.”

  “I should shower,” said Douglas.

  Nicole pointed at him. “Give me one good reason why I should go to college at all.”

  “Tons of reading time,” said Douglas.

  Nicole jumped off the ledge, landed lightly on her feet a yard from Douglas.

  “I’ll accept that,” she said, and off she walked.

  It was three weeks later, in mid-April, that Douglas received the invitation. It happened on a rainy Tuesday, at the start of the school morning. Just before chapel Nicole Bonner poked her head in the faculty lounge, where Douglas and Katya Zarov sat beside each other on the couch. Douglas was reading the paper and Katya had just noticed a ladder in her stocking.

  “Mr. Kerchek,” said Nicole.

  Douglas and Katya looked up.

  “No students in here,” said Katya.

  “Mr. Kerchek, I need to speak to you privately.” Nicole stood with her hands clasped in front of her. She wore her uniform, as always, and a silver bracelet with jade dolphins on it.

  Douglas stood. Katya Zarov made a little snort.

  Out in the hall Nicole flashed Douglas a smile.

  “Princeton’s taking me,” she said.

  Douglas had a fleeting image of hugging his student. He patted her once on the shoulder.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  Nicole nodded sharply. She had a Bible under one arm, which surprised Douglas.

  “As a thank-you for your letter of recommendation, my parents and I would like you to join us for dinner this Thursday at our home.”

  “Well,” said Douglas, “that’s very kind, but there’s no need.”

  “We’ll be serving gnocchi that Father will have prepared by hand. I’ve assured Father that you enjoy gnocchi.”

  “Nicole . . .” began Douglas.

  The bell for chapel rang.

  “You told me that you enjoy gnocchi, Mr. Kerchek.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Douglas quickly, “but—listen, Nicole, I’m very proud that you’ve gotten into Princeton, but you don’t have to—”

  “I’m reading the Book of Revelation.” Nicole tapped the Bible. “In case you were wondering.”

  Girls surged past Douglas and Nicole, chattering, chapel-bound.

  “Come on, Nicky,” said Rhonda Phelps.

  “Good morning, Mr. Kerchek,” said Audrey Little, the horny health teacher.

  Nicole cocked her head to one side. “Did you know, Mr. Kerchek, that there are creatures in the Book of Revelation covered entirely with eyeballs?”

  Douglas shook his head. He felt slightly dizzy, in need of ibuprofen.

  “My parents and I will expect you at seven on Thursday.” Nicole stepped backward. “We live in the Preemption apartment building, West Eighty-second and Riverside.”

  “Preemption?” called Douglas, but Nicole Bonner had turned away.

  On Thursday afternoon Douglas got his hair cut at the corner barbershop. Chiapas, who wasn’t five feet tall yet, stood on a milk crate, moving an electric razor over Douglas’s sideburns, grinning at Douglas in the mirror.

  “You a week early, Uno. Hot date tonight?”

  Douglas smirked. “Yeah, right.”

  Chiapas whistled a tune Douglas didn’t know. Because Chiapas was only an apprentice, Douglas got his haircuts for free.

  “Bet you got a date, Uno. Bet you and Grace Kelly going out for oysters.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Chiapas knew Douglas’s movie addictions.

  “Ow.” Douglas flinched, and Chiapas pulled the razor away. Douglas turned his head. Two inches below his part the razor had bitten his hair down to the scalp.

  “Whoops.” Chiapas shrugged. “Sorry, Uno.”

  Douglas fingered the gash. “Chiapas. Today of all days.”

  The boy’s eyes lit up. “You do got a date.”

  Douglas blushed. “I do not.”

  Chiapas inspected Douglas’s head. The cutaway hair was in the shape of a question mark without the period. “Don’t worry, Uno. It’s cool. She’ll love it.”

  “There is no she,” insisted Douglas.

  At seven o’clock Douglas arrived at the Preemption apartment building. He wore a camel’s hair sport coat, and he carried a German chocolate cake from Café Mozart. He’d thought first to bring wine, then decided it was inappropriate, since Nicole was his student.

  In the lobby Douglas was met by a tall black doorman with an oval scar on his forehead. Also in the lobby, sitting in an upholstered corner chair, was a young man wearing a sl
ick black suit and an expression of profound malevolence.

  “Douglas Kerchek?” said the doorman. “This way.”

  Douglas followed the doorman to an ancient Otis elevator, the hand-operated kind. From the corner of his eye Douglas watched the seated young man, whose lapel was flapped slightly open. If Douglas wasn’t mistaken, there was a gun inside the young man’s coat.

  “Top floor. Penthouse.” The doorman ushered Douglas into the elevator, pulled a lever, stepped out. “Bonne chance.”

  The elevator doors closed, and Douglas was alone, moving. He glanced around. The elevator was antiquated, with mahogany walls that smelled like something Douglas couldn’t place, a medieval monks’ library maybe, or the inside of a lovely coffin. When he disembarked the elevator, the door to the Bonner penthouse was already open. Nicole stood leaning against the jamb.

  “Good evening, Mr. Kerchek.”

  Douglas made an effort not to widen his eyes. Nicole was wearing the most exquisite black silk evening gown he’d ever seen. It lay along the lines and curves of her body in a fashion so perfectly tailored that the material might have been woven around her as she stood there in the doorway. The gown was exactly as black as her hair, and, for a fantastic second, Douglas imagined that crushed black diamonds and the ink of several squid had gone into making the silk. Around her wrist was the bracelet of jade dolphins.

  “Hello, Nicole,” said Douglas. “You look . . . really nice.”

  “You have a question mark on your head,” said Nicole.

  Douglas sneezed, twice. Nicole blessed him. A man and a woman appeared behind her.

  “My parents,” said Nicole, not looking at them.

  “Samson,” announced the man.

  “Paulette,” smiled the woman.

  “Douglas Kerchek,” said Douglas.

  Samson Bonner resembled a gigantic bass instrument. He was well over six feet tall, and although his torso sloped forward around the abdomen, it appeared to be formidably muscled. His voice was resoundingly deep, almost a shout, and his eyes were black. He was a renowned lawyer of unwavering, conservative politics.

  His wife, Paulette, was as skinny and straight as a flute.

  “The teacher, the teacher,” chirped Paulette. “Come in, come in.”