The Kiss Test

by Shannon McKelden

  He was a year older than me, the same age as Chris. Occasionally I wondered what would have happened if my dad hadn’t left and Rob hadn’t buried himself in computers and video games. Would he have been more like Chris, athletic and outgoing, or would he have turned out the way he did anyway? Sometimes I mourned the lost brother I vaguely remembered. The one who allowed his kid sister to tag along when he and his buddies built forts in the woods behind our house in upstate New York, and who bragged to everyone at school when I made it all the way down Dead Man’s Hill on my bike, with no hands. Would Chris and I and Rob have grown up close friends if Rob hadn’t dropped out of society at the ripe old age of eleven? I’d never know, but I still held a soft spot in my heart for the kid Robert used to be, though I hadn’t seen him in almost two decades.

  “Whatcha doing?” I asked, my nose wrinkling a bit at the smell of stale coffee and soured creamer, obviously coming from the multitude of coffee cups covering every available surface. It appeared that, instead of washing cups when he ran out, my brother just bought more.

  Rob never took his eyes off the screen as his fingers tapped out unintelligible words and symbols. He did spit out the pencil though before speaking. “I’m re-architecting the hardware abstraction layer in the proprietary OS my client ships in their wireless devices to deconflict some API naming schemas.”

  I blinked, hoping somewhere, on some level, to someone, that made sense, and it wasn’t an indication my brother had started dabbling in drugs.

  I glanced around his bedroom, such as it was. I didn’t know where he possibly slept. A huge mound of clothes covered the bed. Maybe clean, maybe dirty. The closet, wide open, was virtually empty. The floor sported discarded sneakers and socks and a stray pair of jockey shorts or twelve. The top of the desk was a graveyard of take-out boxes, used utensils and unopened bills propped between the coffee cups. Amazing he had power or running water, considering how scatterbrained my brother was. He didn’t need a roommate, he needed a secretary.

  “So, I don’t have a job anymore,” I ventured, more to fill the silence than anything else.

  “Huh?” He kept typing.

  I tried a different tactic. “I’ve been uninstalled.”

  That got his attention. He turned to face me. “Really? How come?”

  I explained the situation in brief. Korean Jazz station, inability to speak the language, yada, yada.

  “Oh, and, on top of that, Kevin asked me to marry him.”

  Robert’s mouth dropped open and he stared at me over the top of his glasses with unfocused dark eyes that matched mine.

  “And you said…?”

  “What do you think?” I rolled my eyes and shoved aside a pile of clothes so I could sit on a corner of the bed. “Like I want to be anything like Mom.”

  Rob frowned, considering. “Speaking of, she’s pretty mad you’re not coming to the wedding. I’ve had to talk to her twice this week. That’s not really fair.”

  “Don’t talk to me about fair! You never answer the phone when she calls. You go months without talking to her.”

  He shrugged. How could he argue with the truth?

  “You’re a mess,” I said, changing the subject and tweaking the shoulder of his plaid button-front shirt, which sported a large spot that resembled blood, but was probably spaghetti sauce from Angelo’s judging by the restaurant boxes cluttering the desktop. “I hope you’re washing clothes before you go to the wedding.”

  He shrugged again, turning back to his computer. “So what’d Kevin say when you refused him?” Rob asked, tapping out a reply to an email he’d just received. How could he carry on a conversation with me at the same time he wrote a “conversation” with someone else? Especially if it contained all that mumbo jumbo he’d recited to me a few minutes ago.

  Well, let’s see, I thought, concentrating on the question. He called me childish, immature, sophomoric…“He told me I needed to leave.”

  Rob nodded as if that was totally logical. Okay, so it probably was, considering we’d broken up, but it didn’t feel all that logical from my homeless point of view.

  “So, where are you staying?” More tapping on the computer. I hoped he wasn’t transcribing our conversation for his clients by mistake.

  “Nowhere at the moment,” I said. “I found out this morning that the Ballards are expecting a baby, so I can’t very well throw them out of my apartment. I don’t know what to do.”

  He waved a hand over his head, in the general direction of the bedroom door. “You can stay here if you want. It may not look like much, but…” He chuckled to himself as if he’d made a joke. He hadn’t. It wasn’t much. But at this point, it looked like my only choice.

  “How’s the spare room?” I asked.

  He shrugged, so I went to check. I stepped over the monitor. It wasn’t one of the newer flat screens. It was an older seventeen-inch monstrosity that probably weighed thirty pounds. I wondered why he hadn’t set it down twelve inches to the right, where it wouldn’t have blocked the doorway.

  Across the hall, the spare room was dark. I reached in and flipped the light switch, and bit back a yelp. Scientists should study my brother to figure out how someone who never leaves his apartment can accumulate so much junk. The room held a myriad of items, from a bicycle with only one wheel, assorted piles of what looked like women’s clothing (I had no intention of asking what he did with those), mounds of shredded paper and a few large green plastic garbage bags I prayed didn’t hold the bodies of previous guests lost in the mess. Boxes overflowed with toys, some of which I recognized from Rob’s childhood, stacks and stacks of books and a pallet of toilet paper. I guess if you never leave your apartment, toilet paper is an essential item to have on hand.

  As I stared in abject horror at what was essentially an indoor landfill, I noticed the paper shreds moving. Suddenly a mouse shot out from under the scraps and darted toward me.

  “Ahhh!” I turned toward Rob’s room and leapt on top of the computer monitor, balancing precariously by holding on to the door frame.

  Rob turned at the sound of the commotion and I pointed in the direction of his spare room. “You have mice.”

  “Yeah, for some reason they like it here.”

  Before I could complete my wide-eyed head shake, a sudden, loud crash, which rattled the windows, came from the direction of the front of the apartment, bringing both of our heads up. Rob immediately dismissed it and went back to his computer.

  “What the heck was that?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. It happens all the time. I think it comes from the kitchen. Maybe roaches.”

  Or mice. “And, you don’t check on it or anything?” I prompted.

  “Nah. Have you seen my kitchen?”

  ***

  Needless to say, I didn’t move in with my brother. Aside from the fact there was nowhere to sleep other than on stacks of The New York Times, I wasn’t at all sure a house cat of any size could take on roaches large enough to create window-jarring crashes, and I couldn’t live like that.

  I meandered into Central Park that afternoon, looking for a place to think. It was a little cooler than it had been the past few days, a reprieve from the first humid nineties of the early summer, into the humid eighties anyway. Runners shot by me, and I felt no desire to follow them…a huge deal for me. Running is my anti-depressant, and I knew I had it bad when I couldn’t rouse myself from my despair to even enjoy that.

  My perfect life had developed some serious cracks. Things looked more hopeless by the minute. I was running out of time and still had no place to live. After I left Rob’s apartment, I headed for Katya and Adair’s place, just desperate enough to see if they had room on their couch. Unfortunately, their couch was parked in the hallway when I arrived. Their apartment was in disarray, most flat surfaces covered with sheets, paint cans stacked against one wall, and the strong smell of turpentine and latex fogging the air. Adair apparently decided remodeling their apartment, from his former favorite, F
rench Country, to his new favorite, Ultra Mod (complete with a wavy chrome-and-glass shelving unit, a wall clock in the shape of melted dice and what looked like a coffee table in the shape of a neon-orange foam mushroom), would snag him a date with the Wide-Strider from Central Park.

  “He saw some Oprah special the other day,” Katya informed me, rolling her eyes at her roommate’s sudden loss of mental faculties. “About people who regretted getting old without reaching out to their dream men. All these women crying about how they’d lost the best years of their lives because they were afraid to take a chance on the guys they were attracted to. Adair took it totally to heart. He decided he’s not getting any younger and if he doesn’t hook up with this guy now, he’s going to be alone forever, rocking in his rocker on the fire escape.”

  I groaned sympathetically and headed out, feeling sorry for Kat. And for myself. I was jobless. Boyfriendless. Homeless. I had nowhere else to go. A hotel was out. I needed money for my trip. And for surviving once I got back to the city next month, if I didn’t have a job by then. I couldn’t spend it staying in a hotel. Maybe I could bargain with Kevin. Talk him into letting me sleep on the couch. I mean, gee, he’d “put up” with me and my glaring faults this long. What was a few more days?

  Except I couldn’t stand the idea of begging him to let me stay, or even admitting I needed to stay because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. I wasn’t some bimbo who needed a man to take care of her. I was an independent woman. Which was why, when the Ballards were able to move out, I’d live in my very own apartment, by my very own self, with no one to criticize my habits or hobbies. No one to bad-mouth my career or clothing choices. No one to try to plan my future.

  Which was all fine and dandy, but didn’t solve my immediate problem.

  I had no idea where I was headed, but it was getting dark, so I decided I’d better make up my mind when my cell phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Margo?”

  “Oh. Hi, Mom.” Pardon my lack of enthusiasm. “What’s up?”

  “Kevin told me, dear. But I had to hear it from you, it’s just so outrageous.”

  “Kevin told you what?”

  “That you broke up with him. Whyever would you do such a thing? He was grounded and stable.”

  And I’m not grounded and stable?

  “He has a good head on his shoulders, and he’s handsome from what I remember. He seemed very upset that you’d leave him.”

  “He’s upset that I wouldn’t marry him.” I didn’t want to get into this with her, but I had to defend myself. “He’s mad because he didn’t get his way.”

  “He loves you, Margo. He told me so. He sounded like he’d been crying.”

  Crying my butt! Not in a million years. He just took the opportunity to use my mother against me.

  “You should take him up on his offer. Marriage is wonderful and I just know you’d agree with me once you gave it a try. This may be your last chance.”

  I paused in the middle of the sidewalk and blinked.

  This may be your last chance?

  Said a lot about what she thought of me. She’d had eleven men who wanted to marry her, but Kevin may be my one and only chance? Way to be supportive, Mom.

  “Margo?”

  “I have to go.”

  I punched the end button and fought back the urge to hurl the cell phone down the street.

  Someone shoved past me on the sidewalk and startled me out of my stunned state. I realized then that I really had to use the bathroom. It had been hours, and suddenly I had to go.

  A glance up and down the street showed I’d ended up a couple of blocks from Chris’s Upper West Side apartment, so I headed in that direction. He’d let me use his bathroom, give me a cold beer and let me whine about my sucky life. Granted, he wouldn’t sympathize with me about my mother, since he thought she was perfect—or at least not as bad as I thought she was—but he’d sympathize about the rest.

  Leafy summer trees guarded Chris’s stately brownstone. I let myself in with my key and bolted up the stairway toward his top-floor apartment. I needed to use the restroom and then drown in beer. At about the third floor my cell rang again.

  “What?!” I snapped, sure it was my mother again.

  “Margo? You okay?”

  Kat.

  “Sorry. Long day.”

  “I just wanted to say again that I’m sorry about not having the couch available.”

  I sighed. “That’s okay. Hope you survive Adair’s manic episode.”

  “I will. It actually doesn’t look that bad. I’m not sure I can stand living with that guy from the park, though. He’s too creepy, even for me.”

  “Worry about that if the time comes. Adair hasn’t even talked to him yet.” I reached the fifth floor and leaned on the railing to finish my conversation with Kat.

  “Where are you? You sound like you’ve been running.”

  “Just made it up the stairs to Chris’s apartment. I thought I’d—”

  “You’re going to stay with Chris? Oh, please can I come over? I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t even ask if he’ll let me retake the Kiss Test. I mean, if he offers, God, yes, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I know I’d be better. I’ve been practicing.”

  “With what, your pillow?”

  Katya made a little choking sound. “Never mind. Just let me come over there while you’re staying with him. Please. He’s a god. I’ll just sit and look at him politely.”

  “I can’t stay with him,” I protested. “He has a revolving bedroom door. He’d make me crazy with all the women in and out of here.”

  “Man, what I’d give to be one of those women.” Katya sighed. “But, where else are you going to stay? It would only be for a week or so, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No buts. Just ask him. He’s your best friend, for God’s sake. There’s no one else left, is there?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then go for it.”

  I stared down the hall at the forest-green door with the 5G plaque and considered the truth behind Kat’s words, no matter how tainted they were with her desire to get into Chris’s pants. There was no one left. And the fact that Kevin fed my mother that great big line of horse crap made me that much less willing to beg him to let me stay another week.

  I needed out of that apartment.

  Now.

  That left Chris.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t think he’d let me stay with him. It was just kind of weird. I mean, Chris had a sex life. I didn’t know how comfortable I’d be, sacked out on his couch, knowing he was getting horizontal with someone in the next room. Talk about a third wheel. But it was down to the wire, to the point I would have to put my stuff in storage and sleep on public transit. Bus seats don’t make good beds.

  I only needed a week. If it meant Chris didn’t have sex for seven days—which was doubtful, since he had no problem picking up women or administering the Kiss Test while I was standing right next to him—then he’d survive. I would, too. I’d prepare for my trip, find a job and get my life totally situated and ready to restart as soon as I returned from communing with Elvis.

  “Well, maybe I’ll see what he says,” I told Kat. “The worst that can happen is he says no.” Actually the worst that could happen is that I’d catch him in the middle of a torrid act in his living room because I arrived unannounced. Nature was calling in earnest now. “I have to go, Kat. I’ll let you know what he says.”

  “Invite me over!” she hollered at the last minute, as I disconnected.

  When he didn’t respond to my knock, I let myself into Chris’s empty apartment. The benefit of having keys to your friends’ apartments: Access to clean facilities in several different areas of the city at any given time.

  Having taken care of the necessities, I wandered back out into the apartment. It was good-sized as apartments in Manhattan go. Two bedrooms, one used as an office. One-and-a-half baths. The kitchen was separated from th
e large living room by a counter, and looked like it held the beginnings of dinner preparations. Salad fixings were spread out on a cutting board next to what I assumed was garlic bread wrapped in foil, and a pot of water, warm, but not boiling, sat on the cooling stove burner. Another pot contained hot spaghetti sauce that made my stomach growl. I hadn’t eaten all day. I rummaged around in a drawer for a spoon and was just savoring a bite of the meaty sauce when someone spoke.

  “Is nothing sacred to you?”

  I jumped and dropped the spoon into the pot, burning my fingers when I instinctively tried to retrieve it from the hot red sauce.

  “Damn!” I flung the spoon into the sink and sucked at my scorched fingers. “Don’t sneak up on people like that.”

  Chris sauntered in, taking a package of pasta from a paper sack and depositing it on the counter. “I didn’t sneak. Don’t think I’ve ever seen someone so engrossed in a pot of spaghetti sauce before.” He flicked on the burner under the pot of water.

  “Please tell me I can stay for dinner.” I licked the tasty tomato sauce from my fingers with relish. “I’m starving.”

  “I have a date.”

  “I’ll eat fast.”

  “The meal is for her, not for you.”

  I groaned and sank onto a bar stool, biting my lip and coveting Chris’s dinner. “How about a doggy bag…or bowl? I’ll even find my own pasta at home. Just give me some of the sauce, and no one gets hurt. My blood sugar is exceedingly low, and I can’t be responsible for my actions.”

  “Not a chance.” Chris popped the garlic bread into the oven and took out place settings for the table. “You have fifteen minutes of my precious time then you’re seriously out of here. I’ve tried to get a date with Julie for six friggin’ months, and this is it. Make yourself useful.”

  I pouted as he handed me a stack of plates, napkins and silverware, and nodded toward the small dining table where he’d placed flowers and a couple of candles.