Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  “Come on, Eisenhower.” James swallowed hard, moved to Patrick’s bedside, reached down carefully. “Come on, Eisenhower, let’s go.” The ferret screeched, tried to scurry, but James grabbed it. His fingers grazed the edge of a naked rib cage, but otherwise he didn’t touch the young woman. He held the ferret up for her to see, as if she’d given birth to it.

  The young woman rolled her eyes. “Little bastard. Honestly, who names a ferret Eisenhower?”

  “Walter Glorybrook,” said James. “Apartment six-F.”

  “It was a rhetorical question.”

  “Oh.” James tried not to fixate on the splendid thighs before him. He was still blushing.

  The young woman sighed. “Toss him outside. But come back and talk to me.”

  “All—all right.”

  James got rid of Eisenhower. He made sure the door was closed, then turned back to the bed. He picked up a blue flannel blanket off the floor, spread it over the naked stranger. It covered her from her toes to her neck.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “I’m past being modest.”

  James started loosening the necktie on the girl’s left wrist.

  “You’d better not untie me. It might piss him off. My name’s Rally.”

  James dropped his hands. He stood blinking down at the young woman. “You mean, it might piss Patrick off?”

  Rally sighed again. “Why don’t you pull up a chair?”

  James scanned the darkness around him. He peered out the window at the moonlight on the Hudson, looked over his shoulder at the door. Then, calling on all the bravado he possessed, he did what Rally had suggested. He pulled up a chair. He sat down.

  “This, um,” said James. “This is very strange.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Are you Patrick’s girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know what I am.”

  James surveyed Rally’s wrists and ankles. “Are you sure I shouldn’t untie you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you being . . . punished?”

  Rally shrugged. Neither of them spoke for a few moments.

  “I’m not very good at talking to women,” explained James.

  “Don’t worry. Right now, you could recite the alphabet and I’d be fascinated.”

  James shook his head. He took in Patrick’s room, which contained nothing spectacular except for the stripped, bound woman. On the floor near the bed lay a black brassiere and other lacy trappings.

  “This is weird,” said James.

  “You sound Spanish.” Rally smiled at James for the first time. “Are you Spanish?”

  “No. I, um. . . .” James rubbed his neck. “I was tutored by a Venezuelan woman in high school. She helped me get over a stutter, and I sort of picked up her accent.”

  “Really? How’d you used to sound? You know, when you stuttered?”

  James blushed. The blanket was thin, and he could still make out Rally’s hips and nipples.

  “Come on, tell me.”

  “All right.” James spoke a few lines as his old self.

  “Wow. You had it bad, all right.”

  “Yes.”

  “But now you’re totally cured, huh?”

  “I guess so.”

  “And I’m totally naked.” Rally glanced to her left and her right. “I thought Patrick’s room was off-limits. What’d you come in here for, anyway, James Branch?”

  “Eisenhower. Some girls set him free in here. I, um, thought he might . . . chew stuff up.”

  “What girls?”

  “Hannah and Eva are two of them. And a girl dressed like a candy cane.”

  “Morons,” sniffed Rally.

  Another lull happened. James thought of Eleanor, who’d always wanted to get dressed and play gin rummy immediately after sex.

  “So, what do you do, James?”

  James didn’t answer. His groin had already swelled and deflated once. He stared out the window, focused on the river.

  “Listen,” he said, “I think I should untie you. Aren’t you . . . uncomfortable?”

  “No,” snapped Rally. “And me being tied up is none of your business.”

  “Sorry.”

  Rally had her head turned so it was resting on the mattress, facing James.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “Apparently, it’s none of my business either. He never tells me why he does it.”

  “This isn’t the first time?”

  “Nosy, nosy.”

  James surprised himself by almost laughing. He caught the laugh in his throat.

  “Do you want me to go away?” he asked.

  “I want you to talk to me. Tell me what you do.”

  James looked at Rally. She had high, rounded cheekbones and a finely drawn chin. He couldn’t make out the color of her eyes, but he sensed there was power in them, a hard focus that matched the cut of her cheeks. James also guessed, without knowing how, that the young woman wasn’t accustomed to wearing her hair short. Her face, though pretty, looked startled, as if it were as naked as her body and unused to full exposure.

  “Hello? Earth to James?”

  James blinked. “Yes. Sorry. Um. I’m an accountant, for Harrow East.”

  “A numbers man.” Rally nodded. “So you live and work with Patrick. You must know all about him.”

  “I know nothing about him.”

  “But you party with him. You’re partying with him tonight.”

  “Sort of. I was actually . . . on my way out.” James wore a floppy flannel shirt and jeans. Inside them he flexed his forearm and calf muscles, imagining how it might feel to have these muscles constrained, bound with rope, like Rally’s were. His glance drifted again over the length of the shrouded woman.

  Rally followed his eyes. “Don’t I have a good body?”

  James ducked his head. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t I, though?”

  James nodded, still looking down.

  “Patrick makes me stare at it. He makes me stand stripped in front of his mirror there and stare at my body.”

  James kept very still. He’d never heard a woman speak like this. He couldn’t understand why she hadn’t dismissed him.

  “He wants me to understand that I’m sexy, I guess. So fine, I’m sexy. Right?”

  James inspected his cuticles. “I should probably get going.”

  “Wait a minute. So, if I’m sexy, and he keeps me all naked and helpless in here while he’s out there flirting, is that like some mambo turn-on?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Is that a guy thing?”

  James looked at the young woman’s feet sticking out from under the blanket. They were slim, petite. “I don’t know. I’ve never . . . tied someone up.”

  “Could you imagine it, though?” Rally fidgeted her shoulders, propped her head on a pillow. She peered at James as if they were study mates, as if they had a paper due. “Could you imagine trying it and having it totally rock your libido? You know, your sex drive?”

  “This is really very weird,” said James softly.

  “Oh, cut that out.”

  “But—look, I don’t even know you.”

  Rally rolled her eyes. “I’m Rally McWilliams, I’m thirty-one, I’m a travel writer, I hang out at Minotaur’s. Okay?”

  “A travel writer?” James sat up a little straighter. “Really?”

  “Oh, brother,” sighed Rally.

  “I’m sorry, I just . . .” James trailed off. He thought of Venezuela, of foods he imagined Anamaria cooking for her husband. He looked fully into the young woman’s eyes.

  “That just sounds like a good life,” he said.

  Rally opened her mouth, as if to vent a grievance, but she stopped. She noticed, finally, the fact of the slender young man beside her, the lazy cropping of his hair, the slouch of his jeans. He was sitting very quietly, with his hands almost folded in his lap, and, in the moonlight, the expression on his face was one of a rare, charming distress. Rally tilted her head, too
k a closer look at her attendant.

  “Have we met before?” said Rally.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re cute around the eyes. You look sort of drowsy. You know?”

  “Well,” said James. “Um. Thank you.”

  Rally laughed. “I’m freaking you right out, huh?”

  “I’m just . . . not very good at talking to women.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Sorry.”

  They looked at each other, full on. Through Patrick’swindow, which was slightly open, came the sound of distantcarolers or drunkards, singing of Christmastime in the city. A dusting of snow lay on Patrick’s window eave.

  “Hey,” said Rally, “how old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Why were you so interested in my writing? Are you a big traveler, James Branch?”

  Under his jeans James felt sweat on his kneecaps. He didn’t know why he was sweating, except that the young woman’s haircut was stark and lovely against the pillow.

  “I used to want to be,” said James.

  “Yeah? Where’d you want to go? Maybe I’ve been there.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Maybe, though.”

  “The Himalayas,” said James.

  Rally smiled. “The rooftop of the world.”

  James’s lower jaw dropped a fraction of an inch. He was about to recover, to address Rally’s smile, when the bedroom door opened.

  “Whoa.” James jumped to his feet.

  A body staggered through the door. In a block of light from the hallway the interloper turned a groggy pirouette. It was Crispin the bartender.

  “Wheresa toilet?” she demanded. “Thissit?”

  She started unbuckling her belt. Rally giggled, and James hurried over, got Crispin by the armpits. He tugged her into the hall, closed Patrick’s door behind him.

  “Hey, fella.” Crispin leaned heavily on James, still fiddling with her belt.

  “Keep your pants on,” suggested James.

  “Wheresa toilet, fella?”

  James dragged the girl down the hall to the bathroom door.

  “What’s this?” It was Patrick, suddenly at James’s side.

  Crispin stood up, wearing a dignified expression, her pants at her knees.

  “I muss evacuate bladder,” she told Patrick.

  Crispin fell into the bathroom. Patrick sniggered.

  “She was lost,” panted James, “wandering around.”

  Patrick smiled thinly. “You having fun?”

  James peeked over Patrick’s shoulder, into the kitchen, where Henry Shaker laughed into a cell phone, and Checkers and Donna were mashed against each other. James also glanced at the left breast pocket of Patrick’s coat, which—James was pretty sure—was where Patrick carried his gun.

  “I—” said James. “Sure. Yes. I am.” His face was flushed, pulsing.

  Henry guffawed into the phone, waved Patrick over. “Rigg. Come hear this.”

  Patrick gave James a queer look, then patted his cheek. “Good man,” he said.

  Patrick moved toward Henry, but cast a glance back at James. With his housemate looking on, James didn’t dare return to Rally. Instead, his breath still quickened, he quit the apartment, hurried into the hallway and then the elevator. He pulled the lever, turned the key, and arranged himself on the floor.

  “Otis,” he whispered, “you aren’t going to believe this.”

  James Branch had never been a ladies’ man. His parents hadn’t modeled much in the way of romance for their only child. They never kissed or embraced in front of James, they never went out for dinners or movies, and James had never heard anything resembling heavy breathing coming from their bedroom. The only time James ever had a baby-sitter was one Saturday when his parents overnighted in a Minneapolis hospital to have his mother’s appendix removed. James’s father never slid James a porno magazine—nor would he ever have owned one—and he never pulled James aside to discuss the physical merits of Bo Derek, Kathleen Turner, Princess Di. James’s mother never counseled James about the perils of sex, or its allure and dominance of American culture. She wore plain dresses, cooked pot roasts, followed football stats. All of the sexual breezes and storms of James’s youth had their epicenters in Anamaria, the unattainable ideal with whom James had never practiced the fumblings of real romance, where the other person’s breath could be stale or the menu could be in French.

  James had had only two real experiments with the opposite sex. The first was as a college sophomore. Frustrated by his lingering pangs for Anamaria, James had gone out alone toa bar one night, gotten drunk on three sloe gins, and endedup in an alley, pinned against a Dumpster, kissing a heavyset sorority girl named Clarice. The kissing lasted about five minutes, during which time Clarice grunted repeatedly, clawed at James’s trousers, and instructed him to stick his tongue in her ear. After James repeatedly refused to obey this instruction, Clarice invoked the name of Jesus Christ, slapped James across the face, and stormed away.

  After Clarice there’d been only Eleanor, who occupied two months of James’s senior year with her purple capes and her rummy. Neither Clarice nor Eleanor had sparked any joy, hope, or dread in James’s heart. He never fought with them or for them, never danced with them, never learned to waste time with them or to kiss the tips of their eyelashes or to leave certain things unsaid.

  So when Rally McWilliams came along, James was unprepared.

  He saw her again two nights later. It was the third evening of the Spree, and Patrick’s coterie was expected at Duranigan’sRestaurant at nine o’clock. James would ordinarily have beggedoff, but he wanted a chance to see Rally in clothing, so he kept his suit on after work. He killed some time in Rockefeller Center, watching tourists and ice dancers. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first he found Morality John playing his guitar for a small crowd. The vagrant man sang in a dark, tender voice, looking straight at James.

  “Somehow, all is falling into place,” sang Morality John, “and love is yet awaiting me.”

  James made it to Duranigan’s by quarter till the hour. The restaurant was magic for the holidays. The first-floor lobby was an arboretum of holly, white and red roses, and a simply dressed, towering pine tree. Two celestial beings, twenty feet tall and shaved from ice, stood in a marble pool, their wings reaching higher than their halos. A ruby-red carpet had been laid on the staircase that spiraled to the second floor, which Patrick had reserved entirely for his party. At the head of these stairs was a closed oaken door and before it stood a tall, bony, olive-skinned woman, whose charge it was to collect the black-and-silver Spree tickets. The woman bore a haughty Mediterranean air, and she wore a black-and-silver dress that matched the ticket colors exactly.

  “Yes,” she said when James handed her his ticket, and, without smiling, she opened the door.

  When James passed inside, he almost reeled. Before him was the most gratuitous and lovely array of etiquette he’d ever seen in one room. The floor was a square rink of the same ruby carpet that led up the lobby stairs. In a corner, at the end of the room farthest from James, was an enormous hearth with a fire high and alive across its base. In this hearth the largest animal James had ever seen indoors turned roasting on a spit. James couldn’t tell by the splay of its legs or the gold of its hide, but he guessed that the creature was some giant, imported pig. Turning the pig on the spit was a man in a white chef’s uniform. He wore one large black glove on the hand that was turning the spit, and he appeared to be whispering threats to the pig, forbidding the meat to char or dry out. The spit handle itself, a brass wheel that jutted out from the hearthstones, had a circumference of more than four feet and looked like the winding mechanism of some wonderful doomsday clock.

  In another corner sat Tony DiPreschetto, playing his cello, wearing a black tuxedo and his perennial white scarf. Two wine carts, complete with sommeliers, were situated at either end of the room, stocked with every great year of every great w
ine. Across the floor itself five tables with twenty settings each—ten settings to a side—were arranged in long, elegant dashes. Everything on the tables looked to be either silver, crystal, or edible, except for the lighted, vanilla-colored candles, and even they, to James’s staggered mind, could have been twisted, flammable sticks of taffy or marzipan.

  Finally, of course, there were the guests. The men, except for Checkers and James himself, wore classic black tuxedos. James couldn’t recall Patrick having mentioned a black tie requirement, and the ticket had said nothing at all, but these dozens of males, with some collective urban instinct, had known to choose gentlemen’s dress. Walter Glorybrook, minus his ferret, looked stout and correct at the bar. He was drinking gimlets with Henry Shaker, who appeared to have trimmed his eyebrow. Also at the bar, alone, was the sloe-eyed Marcy Conner, gripping a champagne bottle by its neck and hating how single she was. The Iranians were not in attendance, but there were identical twins from Juneau—Inuitgirls named Kettle and Fife—whose father was a musical iconoclast. They stood close to the cellist, listening.

  “Hey, there.”

  James turned around. It was Nicole Bonner, and her older guy, and Liza McMannus.

  “This is Douglas Kerchek,” said Nicole.

  James shook hands. Douglas wore a plain, rumpled tuxedo and a bewildered expression, as if he were confused by the girl on his arm. Looking at him made James feel better.

  “Isn’t this beautiful?” Liza smiled around at the room.

  “It’s Rivendell,” said Douglas quietly.

  “No,” said Nicole, “it’s just Patrick.”

  At the bar James drank a highball. He scanned the crowd, dismayed as much by the wrappings of the women as by the army of tuxedos. For tonight, Patrick’s female guests had gone beyond the call of mere formality. Their dresses, almost all in shades of black and silver, fell perfectly from their shoulders or luxuriated over their hips. Eva Baumgarten was in furs, Hannah Glorybrook wore satin, and Sarah Wolf kept laying her white-gloved hand against her cheek, hoping someone would notice. There were handfuls of other women on hand, some wicked, some nervous and kind, but all of them exquisitely outfitted. James got the sense that every woman’s clothing, after severe thought and expense, had been tailored precisely to her body and her temperament. There was something too prepared, James thought, too carefully glorious about these girls, about the whole room, and he wondered if he was somehow in danger.