Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  James swallowed. He stared at Freida’s chest, at her black stretch pants, at the inviting leer on her face. This was supposed to be easy. He was horny, and Freida was lovely, but his being there had been orchestrated. James was unwilling to pass Freida off as a slut, but, as crazy as it sounded, Patrick had somehow convinced this girl to seduce him. James was sure of it.

  “I have to go,” he stammered.

  Freida ran her hands down her figure. “Are you nuts? Look at me.”

  James grabbed his coat. He needed Otis.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You can’t be serious. Hey. Buddy? Hey!”

  James was out the door and gone.

  That night, in the elevator, James didn’t do a lot of talking. He rocked and rocked, with his eyes closed, and he thought of nothing. He sat, and breathed, and felt the way his limbs and muscles came together to make him who he was. After a while three peaceful images swam into his mind. The first was of his mother, lying on the couch in the living room, reading the sports section. The second was of Kettle and Fife, sharing their seat at Cherrywood’s, singing their Inuit song. After finishing they’d explained that it was a creation song, a tribal myth about how the world came to be. James thought he’d seen Kettle wipe moisture from her eye as she spoke about this myth.

  The last peaceful thing that James thought of was the shape of Rally’s skull. There was a funny, sloping lump to it just behind her ear, he remembered, an extra grade of bone that wouldn’t have been visible when she’d had her hair long. The lump was symmetrically present on both sides of her head, so James knew it wasn’t something cancerous or harmful. It was just her.

  James searched for Rally at the remaining Spree events. On the nights when his and Patrick’s apartment filled with guests, James surveyed the hairstyles in the room, hoping for Rally’s clipped, honey-colored head. He talked toys with Henry Shaker, got to know Douglas Kerchek, even endured Freida’s hawkish flirting. During the group’s outing to Fizzle, the Lucas Theater’s millennial revue, James laughed and applauded with Patrick’s cronies. Each night James reported to Otis his lack of a Rally sighting.

  “She might be away, Otis,” pondered James. “She might be off on some end-of-the-century assignment in Europe or Asia.”

  What James wouldn’t articulate to Otis, or even to himself, was his deeper suspicion, his fear that Patrick had banned Rally from the Spree, simply because she’d socialized with James. James knew that his housemate had handfuls of women in his thrall, but it unnerved him that Patrick might hold enough sway over these girls to puppet them about, ceasing one’s access to James entirely, forcing another to throw herself at him.What exactly, James wondered, did Patrick offer these women that gave him authority over them? And what pleasure did Patrick get in return? James pictured Freida bound naked to Patrick’s bedposts the way he’d found Rally. He pictured Liza McMannus that way, and Eva, and Crispin, and Sarah Wolf and Hannah Glorybrook, all of whom he’d seen slip out of Patrick’s bedroom on various nights over the last year. James had first written all of this traffic off as hedonism, plain and simple, but now, during the Spree, he thought otherwise. James watched the way Patrick spoke intimately in a corner with Crispin, the way he held hands with Eva at the Fizzle performance. It was clear that Patrick followed some loopy, chivalric personal code, that he cared intensely for and wanted to protect each woman he befriended.

  But James didn’t want to think about or get to know all of Patrick’s women. He only wanted Rally, and it was the first time his adult heart had ever lurched so hard toward one woman. So he needed to see her, to speak to her, to find out if the clutch in his stomach would ever stand down while she was beside him. What frightened James was the thought, the diabolical possibility, that Patrick had sniffed all of this out, that he would push a random, sexy distraction like Freida at James just to keep him from pursuing something wonderful, maybe even honorable, with Rally.

  “Is he jealous, Otis?” said James.

  The darkness said nothing.

  “He must be jealous,” whispered James.

  There was a new order in James’s blood. He rocked inside Otis, and caught himself holding his breath. He realized that he’d rather be impaled on the Chrysler Building spire than think about Rally ever returning to her naked, bound place in Patrick’s bedroom.

  Jesus, thought James. Am I in love?

  New Year’s Eve answered the question. James showed up, black ticket in hand, at Minotaur’s Nightclub in the meat-packing district. He’d never been to a rave before, and he’d never been to Minotaur’s, but he remembered Rally sayingshe hung out there, so he risked it. He wasn’t prepared forthe club’s dark indulgences, its maze of cubby rooms, its barswith steel counters and bright blue lights behind the bottles. In one room stood an authentic iron maiden, its door thrown open, while in another room the furniture set of a 1950s American kitchen—stove, refrigerator, table, and chairs—had been nailed upside-down to the ceiling. In the Forum, Minotaur’s cavernous main hall, Freida Wheeler and her band, The Great Unwashed, cavorted onstage, thumping their instruments, moaning lyrics. Kettle and Fife and Hannah Glorybrook were goths on the dance floor. They all three wore black cloak dresses with plunging necklines and they sportedthick black eye-shadow and silver cross studs in their tongues.

  Presiding over the Forum was Half Stack, Minotaur’s renowned DJ and bouncer, who’d once locked the drunken, disorderly manager of the New York Mets in the iron maiden for an hour. Half Stack was angry at being supplanted by a band for the night, and pissed at the club’s owner for allowing Patrick’s private party on a Friday, not to mention a millennial New Year’s Eve. Friday was normally ska night at Minotaur’s, the night when Half Stack’s most loyal tramp followers filled the club, and the only thing assuaging the DJ’s wrath was the sight of Liza McMannus in her electric-pink miniskirt.

  James puzzled his way from room to room. The club was underground, and it extended for a whole city block, and James never entered the same nook twice. In one corner James found Tony DiPreschetto on one knee, proposing to a woman James had never seen before. Not far from them Marcy Conner leaned against the iron maiden, stroking her lonely forearms. In another room were Jeremy Jax and Lucas Theater owner Michael Hye, toasting each other with petal glasses of a fluorescent yellow liqueur.

  “In the new millennium,” said Jeremy, “I shall bed a virgin prostitute.”

  “I,” giggled Michael, “will swindle the Chinese mafia.”

  “I will cochair Mensa.”

  Michael burped. “I will disinvent candy.”

  In still another alcove sat a man with a pug face and a woman with hair to her waist. They were holding hands, and when they saw James, the pug-faced man said, “Join our vigil.”

  James wandered on through Minotaur’s, lost but unafraid. Many of the chambers had walls but no ceilings, and the lights and noise coming from on high showed always the direction in which lay the Forum, the center of the labyrinth. So James meandered, hearing conversations, watching high-heeled strangers, till he came to a room that was empty except for a man sitting on the floor in the shadows, playing a guitar. It was the room with the kitchen on the ceiling.

  “You’d better do something about it,” sang the guitarist, ” ’cause I don’t want to live without it.”

  James peered into the shadows. He knew the voice.

  “You’re John,” he said. “You’re Morality John.”

  The singer finished his song. James could see only teeth and a chin. He’d never spoken to this man before, but he felt bold.

  “What’s that song called?” asked James.

  “ ‘I Can’t Wait Another Day,’ “ said the teeth.

  “I’ve heard you play it before. I hear you on the trains.”

  “I know.” The man in the shadows hadn’t moved. “I know who you are.”

  James glanced at the ceiling, at the frozen home there.

  “How’d you get in here? Did Patrick invite you?”


  “That’s not what you want to know,” said the teeth.

  James caught his breath.

  “You want to know what you’re going to do,” said Morality John.

  James looked to his left and his right, made sure they were alone. “What I’m going to do about what?”

  Morality John only smiled.

  James stepped closer. He didn’t dare move near enough to see the guitarist’s face—that seemed against the rules tonight—but he felt like a commoner come to Delphi.

  “Is it her?” whispered James. “Is it her and me that you . . . sing your songs about?”

  In the distance the guitars of The Great Unwashed quit in midchord. There was a crash and a holler. James looked to the doorway. The noises came from the direction of the Forum. There were yells, and the tramping of boots.

  “What’s happening?” James wondered out loud.

  “Go see,” said Morality John.

  James tapped his pockets. He moved toward the door, stopped, looked back. Morality John laid a finger over his lips, pointed toward the Forum.

  “Go see,” he said.

  By the time James got there, skinheads were flooding the dance floor. There were over one hundred of them, kids with nose rings and muscles, girls without eyebrows, guys James’s age with tattoos and bald skulls and steel-toed boots. It was a coup: Half Stack stood grinning beside the stage, at the club’s fire-exit door, which he’d thrown open to admit his exiled punk brethren, who were still pouring in. Kettle and Fife and Hannah whooped and welcomed the newcomers, but Eva Baumgarten, a claustrophobe, frowned. Freida and The Great Unwashed stood uncertainly onstage, their instruments limp at their sides, while Patrick Rigg leaned viciously over a bar counter, arguing with Minotaur’s owner. Patrick gestured at the uninvited punks. The owner shrugged and held up his palms and Patrick kicked the bar counter, shattering a pane of glass. Meanwhile, Half Stack bounded into the DJ booth and fired up the BossTones. The dance floor became a stompfest of pounding Doc Martens and flying elbows. Sarah Wolf, who only knew the tango, ran for cover. James stood on the edge of the mosh pit, watching the melee. It was eleven-thirty.

  “They’ve stormed the Bastille,” said Douglas Kerchek, at James’s side.

  James nodded, then froze. Twenty feet away from him, in a denim skirt, brown leather boots, and a white cowgirl blouse with blue sequins, was Rally. She was whirling and laughing in the mosh pit, and by the way she shoved the men around her and got shoved back, it was clear to James that she was one of their kind, that she’d surged in on the interloping skinhead tide. This depressed James, made Rally seem even morealien and unreachable. But seconds later, in midtwist, Rally sawJames. She shouted, charged through the crowd, half tackled him with a hug.

  “You’re here,” she squealed.

  James held her away from him, but didn’t let go of her forearms. Rally had amaretto on her breath but didn’t seem drunk.

  “I—I’m here,” confirmed James.

  “Happy New Year,” panted Rally. “Dance with me.”

  “Oh. Um. I’m not really a—”

  “You’re dancing with me.” Rally tugged James into the madness. She flung him away from her, laughed as he pinballed among the bodies, trounced him happily on the shoulders when he stumbled back to her. James lurched around as best he could, tried to match the zeal of the girls and guys around him, tried to stay near Rally. The music drove on at a heart-attack pace, until just before midnight, when a pleasant piano melody kicked in. As if on cue the skinheads bowed to one another, like debutantes and escorts, and coupled off. Rally found James, curtsied before him, took his hands in hers.

  “Whoa,” said James.

  “It’s Dolly Parton,” explained Rally. “It’s ‘Here You Come Again.’ I’ll lead.”

  James fumbled his feet, blushed. The music was sweet. Rally’s sequins were absurd.

  This is crazy, thought James.

  “Half Stack plays this every Friday at midnight,” said Rally. “It’s a Minotaur’s tradition.”

  James followed Rally’s feet. She waltzed him in circles. All around them were couples—men with men, men with women, women with women—turning elegant arcs. Their more savage movements, for now, were gone. Several of them sang along. They were dressed in torn leather and had viciously pierced bodies, but they winked at James, as if at a new recruit.

  “This is crazy,” whispered James.

  Rally had her cheek against James’s cheek. She steered him over the floor.

  “It’s tradition,” she said.

  James danced on. He didn’t ask Rally where she’d been lately, didn’t ask her about Patrick. He danced and smelled Rally’s hair. There was sweat on her cheek. The twin lumps behind her ears were inches away.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” whispered James.

  “It’s almost midnight,” said Rally. “Happy New Year.”

  “Did you hear me? I—I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Rally dipped James, held the dip, met his eyes.

  “Then kiss me, silly. The song’s almost over.”

  So James did it. Arched back, with her face looming over his own, James kissed Rally. It was a good kiss—not a great one—with some touching of their tongues, and a hard click of their front teeth. When it ended, Rally stood James on his feet. The dance was over, and James blushed, waiting to find out how he’d done.

  “Have you . . . been thinking about me too?” he said.

  Rally took James’s hand.

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “Let’s go for slices.”

  Rally tugged James toward the fire exit. He looked at her cowgirl clothing, watched her skirt press to her thighs. He’d once seen her naked, but this, somehow, was sexier.

  “Wait,” insisted James. “Have you?”

  “Out, out, out.” Rally hustled James through the door. “We need pizza pie. We need slices.”

  They were in an alley, with snow on the ground, and a plot of stars overhead. James thought of his coat, still inside Minotaur’s, in the coatroom. The fire door clicked shut, locking them out.

  “Jesus,” he said, “it’s freezing.”

  “I’m starved,” said Rally.

  They stood looking at each other. Steam rose from their arms.

  “I’ll bet you’re a pepperoni man,” said Rally.

  “I’m crazy about you,” said James.

  Rally canted her hips, crossed her arms. “You don’t even know me.”

  I said it, thought James. I’m standing here. I said it.

  “I’m a pepperoni man,” he told her.

  Rally threw her arms around him for kiss number two.

  It can happen like that, sometimes. The city can tilt its hand, let two people fall for each other as completely as James and Rally did. That night they not only went for pizza, they took a cab ride around the island. In honor of the New Year the cabbie offered them squares of acid, but they refused. They sat in the backseat, content with each other’s tongues, kissing softly, saying little. By three in the morning they were at Rally’s SoHo apartment, in her bed, slowly getting to know each other’s bodies. They petted, teased, smiled, held off on consummation. They whispered and made each other orgasm. Rally sang James a song she remembered from when she was a girl. At sunrise they stood outside her window on the fire escape, wrapped in blankets, watching the light.

  A halcyon week followed, during which James and Rally barely parted. James took five days off work, and Rally cleared the week of distractions. They tussled in Rally’s bed for whole afternoons. They took the train to Coney Island and walked on crunchy winter sand. James treated Rally to Flat Michael’s, where she’d never been, and Rally introduced James to the incomparable hamburgers of the Corner Bistro. They held hands at the Angelika, saw two plays, experimented with lingerie, slept until ten. They were in love, and after midnight on Thursday, their sixth night together, James sat on the floor of Rally’s bathroom, weeping his happiness. Rally was asleep in her bed, and
James stayed in the bathroom with the lights off for half an hour. He missed Otis, missed the part of himself that observed without sentiment the passing facts of his life, but the new current inside him was entire, ineluctable. The smell of Rally’s skin was a fix in his lungs, and her voice was what he had to hear. Morris, Minnesota, and Anamaria, and his own history of quietude, vanished with the precision of a nuclear strike, and all James saw were Rally’s arms and thighs and throat. When he walked with her through SoHo, holding her hand, he checked the eyes of people passing them, to see whether he and Rally were still physical entities or whether their happiness had rendered them invisible. James and Rally disagreed only about what films to see, about what streets they should walk down, about where in the world they would travel together first.

  “New Zealand,” said James.

  Rally kissed his calves. They were in bed, naked.

  “The Isle of Skye,” she said.

  “The Serengeti.”

  Rally knelt between his legs. She moved her lips up his thighs. “The Isle of Skye.”

  James lay back, closed his eyes.

  “Tokyo,” he whispered.

  “Hmmm. Are you really in a position to argue?”

  “No,” gasped James.

  They avoided James’s apartment for the whole week. James dropped by there a few times to pick up clothes, but he always did so late on weekday mornings, when Patrick was at work. James wasn’t exactly afraid of seeing his housemate, but neither he nor Rally wanted to deal with Patrick yet. They didn’t know how he’d respond to their togetherness, and they didn’t want to articulate to Patrick or anyone what they were to each other. As a result they neither knew nor cared how the Spree had wrapped up its blitzkrieg. They figured Walter and Henry would stay buddies, and they hoped Nicole Bonner would marry Douglas Kerchek, but other than that, they let the last ten days drop. To Rally’s delight she realized that Patrick had no idea where she lived. She’d only ever been to his Preemption apartment, never he to hers. So she and James were left to each other. Manhattan, the world, all time, seemed spread out like a honeymoon.