Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  “I’m James,” said James from behind the priest. “James Branch. I’m the one you telephoned, Father.”

  “I’m Rally,” said Rally.

  The priest said nothing. He was facing only Patrick, boring all the force of his mind and his countenance into his one desperate parishioner. If James and Rally could’ve seen the priest’s face, they would’ve witnessed two fine blue eyes, but beneath those an expression of revulsion, a hint that the man was smelling something nasty.

  “Give me that gun,” said Thomas Merchant. “Leave these people alone.”

  Patrick’s hand quaked on the gunstock, but the SIG was pointed at the priest, who stood just ten yards from Patrick.

  “She has to be with me,” said Patrick.

  “Nonsense. Nobody has to be with anybody.” The priest unzipped his parka, revealed his collar. “Now, give me that gun. You’ve got no business pointing it at people you care about.”

  Patrick’s eyes rimmed with tears. “I don’t care about them.”

  “Uhm-hm. Give me that gun.” The priest held out his palm.

  “You—you can’t talk to me like that.” Patrick’s fingers clutched the SIG. “No one talks to me like that.”

  “Father,” began James.

  “Give me the gun,” said the priest.

  With his free, left hand Patrick petted the gun barrel.

  “It’s mine,” he stammered.

  The priest stamped his foot. “Give it here, I said. Let this nonsense end.”

  “I can’t.” Patrick sobbed loudly.

  “Let it go,” ordered the priest. He took a step toward Patrick.

  “Don’t. I can’t. I can’t.” The gun wavered back and forth.

  The blood drained from Thomas Merchant’s face. He took in the pitiful man before him, the dark, expensive clothes, the shaky arms, the lost, snuffling, bewildered expression. Patrick’s index finger quivered on the trigger, and the priest sensed terribly what he’d sensed in the sob of confessing voices, in the bombast of wartime headlines, in the deepest heart of Scripture: the time for words had ended. A gun was drawn, a foul human will was acting, and there were young lives present. For the sake of those lives, for the sake of charity, Thomas did the one thing he could think of to keep all of Patrick’s violence focused on himself. He aimed a mocking sneer at the armed young man.

  “You utter fool,” the priest taunted.

  “Stop it,” begged Patrick.

  “Father,” warned James.

  The man in the silly red parka laughed. He made himself do it. “Good God, boy,” he scoffed, “do you have any idea how ridiculous you look?”

  The gun fired almost by itself. Rally screamed, and Patrick jumped back in surprise, as blood streaked from the priest’s temple. Thomas Merchant collapsed in a heap.

  “Oh my God,” screamed Rally. “Oh my God, you shot him.”

  “Patrick,” whispered James.

  They watched the fallen, bleeding man.

  Patrick staggered forward, his eyes fat with horror. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “You shot him,” screamed Rally. “You killed him.”

  Patrick dribbled to his knees. He reached out with his left hand, pressed a thumb to the priest’s bootheel, pulled the thumb back as if scalded. Thomas Merchant’s head lay on the floor, blood matting the hair.

  “Oh, Jesus.” Patrick’s breath came in gulps. His entire body shivered. His right hand brought the SIG to his own temple.

  “No,” hollered James. He dived over the priest’s body toward his housemate, but Patrick had already fired.

  The nurses at St. Luke’s Hospital got used to James quickly. Perhaps they could see, or even smell, the traces of passion on him, the love affair that awaited him outside the hospital walls. For James came always alone to St. Luke’s. Whatever their reason, the nurses smiled on the young man with the sleepy eyes who sat beside Patrick Rigg’s bed every day.

  The priest had survived. The bullet had gone through the edge of his temple. It did enter his skull, just nipping his brain. If James and Rally hadn’t been there to bandage his head and call an ambulance, Thomas Merchant might have bled to death in the Preemption hallway. As it was, just two days after the incident the priest was out of his hospital bed and gingerly on his feet. He wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital yet, but he padded up and down the hallways, visiting the ill and dying, a thick blue dressing wrapped around his skull. The only permanent damage to his person, if it could be called such, was a new, slight, but constant watering of his eyes that his doctors said might be with him for life. It had been caused, they said, by the bullet bruising his brain just so, leaving scar tissue that was impossible to remove and that tweaked certain nerves. So Thomas Merchant, previously a man of uncannily clear vision, would spend his days now with a handkerchief in hand, working to keep his world from blurring.

  Meanwhile, Patrick Rigg was paralyzed, in a coma. The paralysis went down his entire right side, from his eye to his toes. His suicidal bullet had struck the meat of his frontal lobe. The bullet had been successfully removed in surgery, and Patrick’s chances for recovery from coma and subsequent survival were fair. The doctors held little hope, though, that his paralysis would clear.

  As for James, he took another two weeks off from Harrow East to sit with his wrecked housemate. Traumatized from the shooting, and afraid to be near Patrick despite his condition, Rally waited in SoHo for news from her lover. James called her from St. Luke’s, whispered plans for their future.

  “We’ll get some spumoni,” he said, “in Palermo.”

  Rally was cranky. She didn’t like Palermo.

  “Eelburgers,” said James. “In Shanghai.”

  “Why do you have to stay with him?” snapped Rally. “He wanted to kill us.”

  “I’m his housemate,” said James. “I’m all he has. He’s got a dad somewhere, but the dad’s unreachable.”

  “He shot a priest.”

  “The priest is okay.”

  “Tell me you love me.”

  “I do.”

  Rally didn’t sound convinced. “Who’s my tiger?”

  “I am.”

  Rally paused on the line. “This is real, right?” She sounded frightened. “I mean, no matter what happens to Patrick, you and me are . . . This is real?”

  “Tell me you love me,” said James.

  Rally did.

  James sat with Patrick for fourteen days and most of the nights too. When he stayed at night, the nurses made him sleep on a cot in the hall across from Patrick’s room. It was against the rules, but the nurses liked James and wouldn’t kick him out.

  Day by day James watched Patrick get skinnier. He watched nurses bathe Patrick, watched them stretch the limbs on Patrick’s left side. James tried sitting motionless for ten minutes, to see what being paralyzed was like. He wondered if people in comas could think, or pray. He ate vending-machine sandwiches, and thought of Rally. One night, after peeking at Patrick’s chart and seeing that he’d lost twenty pounds, James spoke with Patrick’s doctor and asked for a prognosis. The doctor, a small Haitian man, did not say good things. James called Rally.

  “Please come,” he said. “Please come here tonight. I have to talk to you.”

  So Rally came. She met James in the ground-floor cafeteria, the closest she felt she could get to Patrick. James sat with her at a table with a white plastic top. They drank fruit juice.

  “Patrick’s losing weight fast,” said James. He had blue skin beneath his eyes from poor sleeping.

  Rally nodded softly. She’d gotten dressed up for James, to remind him of her. She wore a black dress and black heels.

  “Your eyes look all bruised,” she told him.

  “I think he’s dying,” said James.

  Rally sighed. “Is that what you need to talk to me about?”

  James looked around the cafeteria. There were four bald children sitting around a table nearby, and a twisted, drooling man in a wheelchair beside a water fountain. Also, at a table
by itself, abandoned by human company, was a green balloon. The balloon had just enough chemistry or magic left inside it to hover above the tabletop.

  “Everybody’s dying,” said James.

  Rally touched James’s knee. “James. Honey, what is it?”

  All at once James was unafraid. “I have to tell you something about myself,” he said. “It’s very important.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s something that I do.”

  “All right.”

  James watched the cancerous children. He knew there were ravenous, invincible forces at work in their bodies, in their blood. He knew, too, that Rally was probably expecting him to confess something felonious, something perverse or difficult. But the children were playing a card game together, and for all James knew, they were siblings, content with their fate. Also, moved by an air draft or its own volition, the green balloon was floating slowly above and past these children now, like a reconnaissance blimp. On top of it all Rally was holding James’s hand.

  “I talk to my elevator,” said James.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I talk to the Otis elevator in my building. I do it every night for almost an hour. I shut myself in the elevator and stop it between floors. I sit cross-legged and rock back and forth and I talk to Otis the elevator about everything under the sun.”

  “You—” Rally leaned closer. “You do what?”

  James looked at Rally. There was tender shock in her eyes, and bewilderment, and a willingness to hear the rest. James smiled simply and shrugged and kissed Rally once on the lips. Hoping she’d always look as sturdy and fragile as she did just then, he pulled the pair of opal earrings from his pocket and pressed them into Rally’s palm.

  “Also,” said James, “these are for you.”

  Rally looked down at her gift. She breathed in sharply. Any confusion, any questions she had for James, could wait.

  “Oh, sweetheart,” she said.

  James spent three more days and nights keeping vigil at Patrick’s hospital room. During the days he read some of his favorite books aloud to Patrick, but he avoided conversation now with the Haitian doctor and he tried not to note the shrinking skin on Patrick’s bones. Each night he fell asleep on his cot, sure that his housemate would perish before morning.

  On the third of these nights, however, James raised his head groggily from his cot. It was two A.M., and the hall around him was dark and lonely. What had woken James was a persistent chanting sound that he thought had been part of a dream. When he looked up, though, and peered fuzzily into Patrick’s room, he thought he saw three figures dressed in white bending over his housemate in the dark. They seemed to have their hands on Patrick, on his head and his right leg, and James wondered if they were the chanters. One of the figures looked like Sender the doorman. One of them looked like Thomas Merchant. The third was a white-haired man that James didn’t recognize for sure, but he could have sworn it was John Castle, the underground stranger who’d once given him something precious. When this man turned his gaze toward the hall cot, James, gripped by a mighty fatigue, fell back to his pillow.

  The morning after this apparition a green-eyed nurse shook James awake.

  “Your friend,” she said. “He’s conscious.”

  Yawning, stunned, James went to Patrick’s bedside. Thomas Merchant was in the room, too, standing at the foot of the bed, his face calm, his eyes crying automatically. The nurse left.

  Patrick’s eyes were open, but gauzy. His cheeks held less pallor than they had the day before.

  “Hey, Patrick.” James sat beside the bed.

  Patrick’s eyes traveled, found James.

  “James,” he said weakly.

  “Your right eye,” said James. “It’s open. It works.”

  Patrick nodded. With tremendous effort he lifted his right knee slightly.

  James stared at the knee. He touched it gently. “You’re cured?”

  Patrick set his knee back down. “Not all of me,” he croaked.

  “Your friend’s right arm is still paralyzed,” said Thomas Merchant. “And the four smaller toes on his right foot.”

  “But they could heal, too, Patrick,” said James.

  “No, son.” The priest’s voice was firm. “Those injuries are permanent.”

  James turned to the cleric. He studied the man’s bearing, his tears of indeterminate emotion.

  “How do you know?” said James.

  “Never mind about that,” said the priest.

  “Branchman. James.”

  James looked to the bed. The bandages on Patrick’s head were twice as thick as those on the priest’s head. James wondered if Patrick would have to see shrinks now. He wondered if Patrick would have to go away.

  “Yes, Patrick,” said James.

  Patrick coughed. His eyes had the scratchy red look of infection or sorrow.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” whispered Patrick.

  James patted Patrick’s leg.

  “I’m so sorry, James.”

  James didn’t know what to do. He sat there. He patted Patrick’s leg again. From the hallway he heard morning sounds, carts being wheeled and sheets being snapped, as if Patrick weren’t in a hospital at all, but a glorious, well-staffed hotel. James thought of Rally’s breakfast breath, of Dolly Parton, of the bald young cardsharps waking up. He rocked back and forth a little on his chair.

  “I’m . . . saying it to both of you,” whispered Patrick. “I’m sorry.”

  James sighed. “How about, instead of talking right now, you just stay still and get better?”

  Patrick glanced down at himself. He stared at his limp right arm. He closed his eyes, began to laugh feebly.

  “I really fucked myself up, didn’t I, Branchman?”

  James looked to the priest to see if he was going to take over. He figured there were official words of comfort, words he didn’t know. But Father Merchant waited for James to speak.

  “Patrick,” said James. “I—um. Maybe you should, um, just be quiet right now. Just rest and heal up.”

  “I don’t want to be quiet,” croaked Patrick. “I just came out of a coma.”

  “I know,” said James.

  “How long was I . . . you know. How long was I out?”

  “Two weeks,” said the priest.

  “A fortnight,” said James.

  Patrick reached out with his left hand, his good hand now. He closed his fingers around James’s thumb. It took him a long time to do it.

  “Do you know what that’s like?” Patrick’s face was strict with fear. He looked appalled. “Do you know what it’s like, going that long without talking? Being awake inside, but not talking?”

  James bowed his head in assent. He let Patrick keep holding on to him.

  “I do,” said James.

  * * *

  * * *

  acknowledgments

  Morality John’s lyrics are excerpts from songs by New York singer-songwriter Chris Tengi, printed with his permission.

  I am grateful many times over to these teachers and angels of encouragement:

  Larry Wroblewski, Bill O’Malley, Bob Bradley, Tom King, John Breslin, John Dolan, Mary Gordon, Susannah Meadows, Susan Kamil, my editor Carla Riccio, and most especially to my agent Jennifer Carlson and my friend Cliff Green.

  * * *

  * * *

  Praise for David Schickler’s

  Kissing in Manhattan

  “A deft and entertaining debut.” —Newsweek

  “Forget mere sex and the city . . . Kissing in Manhattan feature[s] die-hard romantic strivers in a surreal turn-of-the-millennium New York ruled by the spirit of improbably happy endings.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “A beguiling debut collection. Alternately as funny and frightening as the city itself.” —People

  “With these wonderfully haunting, strange, and hilarious stories, David Schickler has established himself as a major new voice in American fiction.”

  �
�Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy

  “An ambitious and often captivating work of fiction . . . Schickler is a vastly talented writer.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Schickler’s playfully alive voice is uniquely his own—sprightly, exact, Herculean in all the fundamentals. What talent! From beginning to end, here you have some of the most pleasurable storytelling of this—or any—year.”

  —Darin Strauss, author of Chang and Eng

  “Thrums with humour and pain, glamour and danger.”

  —Harper’s & Queen

  “One of the most charming and memorable debuts this year . . . This tender, lovely book and these love-starved and hopeful individuals linger like a reader’s dream.”

  —The New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “For once, a new author has managed to perfectly render the quirkiness of New York City . . . Schickler’s writing is bold and his stories inventive . . . A terrific read.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “This wonderful book—magical at times, surprisingly sweet at others—never ceases to amaze and impress.”

  —Booklist

  “Terribly charming . . . Even newcomers to the land of enchanted isles . . . will be hard-pressed not to fall under the spell of Schickler’s loopy, spooky, unexpectedly warm brand of storytelling.”

  —The Star-Ledger (Newark)

  “Schickler’s stark, beautiful prose is elegant and achingly accurate.” —Philadelphia City Paper

  “Whimsical, witty and accessible . . . inventive and entertaining.”

  —The Independent on Sunday (London)

  * * *

  * * *

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  The author gratefully acknowledges The New Yorker, where “The Smoker” first appeared, Tin House, where “Jacob’s Bath” first appeared in the spring 2000 issue, and Zoetrope: All-Story, where “Fourth Angry Mouse” first appeared. Excerpt from “Disillusionment of Ten O’clock” from COLLECTED POEMS by Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1923 and renewed 1951 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.