Sticky Kisses

by Greg Johnson

  Abby recognized now the good-natured ruefulness of Valerie Patten’s voice.

  She apologized again, and explained to Valerie who she was. This took a minute. Laughing, Valerie admitted she’d been fast asleep and was “out of it.” Finally she coughed, cleared her throat, and said, “But sure, hon. I remember you. Flying home to visit your brother, right?”

  “That’s right,” Abby said, taking a deep breath.

  There was an awkward pause, then Valerie’s offhand, throaty laugh. “How on earth did you find me?”

  Another breath, and Abby plunged ahead. “I have your husband’s letter,” she said. “You—you left it behind on the seat, so I picked it up. Remember, you’d been planning to show me the letter, before we ran into that turbulence? Anyway, when I got inside the gate, I looked around but I couldn’t find you.”

  “Sure, I remember,” Valerie said, sounding amused. “That’s funny, because I saw you. I saw you talking to your brother and hugging him when I came out of the ladies’ room. Sorry we missed each other, hon. I had no idea you were looking for me. I did wonder what the heck I’d done with Marty’s letter.”

  Abby’s heart raced; she felt encouraged by Valerie’s pert, cheerful voice.

  She said, timidly, “Then he’s—he’s all right? I hope you don’t mind my asking, but—”

  “Oh yes!” Valerie cried. “In fact, we’re thinking of getting back together! I was just intending to stay a few days, you know, but it’s the strangest thing… I realized I still care about the guy, I guess. I’m not getting any younger, either…but my Lord, you don’t want to hear all this.”

  “No, it’s fine. Really.” Abby felt relieved, and strangely pleased. “I’ll just—shall I mail the letter back to you? The return address is here on the envelope. Or would you rather I throw it away?”

  “God, yes, just toss it,” Valerie laughed. “I sure don’t want it. It would be like saving my gallstones or something.”

  Abby laughed, too, though she felt eager to get off the phone. This little drama had a happy ending: Valerie and her husband would live happily ever after. She didn’t need to hear any more.

  But Valerie said, “So what is your phone number, Abby? We ought to get together, have lunch or something. It was so sweet of you to call me about that letter! You know, I don’t really have any girlfriends here in town. What about tomorrow? Want to have lunch?”

  At the same moment, both Mitzi and Chloe raised their heads and glanced to the doorway; Chloe, still on her side, gave a sharp little yip, her tail skittering lightly atop the bed. Abby had heard nothing, but it must be Thorn’s key in the front door.

  “What was that?” Valerie asked. “Does your brother have a dog?”

  “Can I call you back?” said Abby, relieved for this excuse not to give out Thorn’s number. “Someone’s at the door.”

  Without quite knowing why, she didn’t want to have lunch with Valerie Patten. Once they hung up, Abby would not have to think about that plane ride, or the embarrassing way she’d hidden Valerie’s letter, or about the letter itself. She would throw it away and that would be that.

  “Sure, Abby. I promise not to be napping, next time,” she laughed.

  “Goodbye, Valerie,” Abby said.

  “Bye, hon.”

  Abby waited until she heard the pleasant click, breaking their connection.

  Later that evening, Abby went shopping with Thom for his Christmas Eve party. Connie and Warren were coming, and Pace had said he would try to make it; he’d been invited to several other parties. Thom had also asked some of Carter’s friends, thinking they might be lonely or in need of cheering up, but he kept assuring Abby it would be a small gathering.

  “I specifically said ‘for cocktails,’ so everyone’s clear we won’t be feeding them,” Thom said, as they drove toward Lenox Square. “Otherwise, some people will stay all night. We’ll just have a couple of drinks, exchange a few gifts, and when the others leave we’ll go out for dinner somewhere with Pace and Connie and Warren. Do you think most places are open on Christmas Eve? I can’t even remember what I did last year.”

  Their shopping would have taken less time but for Thorn’s habit of chatting with salespeople, clerks at the registers, grim-faced shoppers waiting in line. Abby had her old sense of pride in accompanying her handsome, likable brother, seeing how people glowed and smiled as they basked in his casual but friendly attention. Old men, teenage girls, small children—all responded to his smiling banter about the Christmas traffic, the mall crowds, the high prices of everything, ordinary conversation he managed to personalize just enough to make anyone feel singled out, pleased by the unexpected approach of this tall, brightly talkative, but easygoing man. At such moments Abby would see her brother from a stranger’s perspective—his genial, angular face with its deep-set, amused blue eyes; his glossy dark hair, wet-looking as though he’d just stepped from the shower; his lanky, long-limbed build; his rumpled clothes. Handsome in a friendly, anonymous way, Thom Sadler was someone you might not notice until you felt the pleasurable warmth of his grinning, gently flattering conversation. Abby remembered that in high school one of Thorn’s girlfriends said laughingly he was “comfortable as an old shoe,” a remark that had gratified Abby though the girl hadn’t intended a compliment, exactly; underneath the laughter, there had been an edge to her voice. Now as they walked through the mall Abby supposed anyone to whom Thom had spoken must assume she was Thorn’s girlfriend, and once or twice Abby suppressed the odd impulse to slip her arm through her brother’s. After several weeks of living together, he treated her with the same careful attentiveness he’d given to girls he dated in high school.

  After they’d left the mall and were driving back down Peachtree through the gathering dusk, Abby felt mildly elated without quite knowing why. Earlier that day, she’d felt troubled at the prospect of not seeing Philip until after Christmas; he’d insisted he had no plans, and no intention of making any. Christmas was just another day to him, he’d said, and he would probably use the holiday to get some reading done, or catch a new movie. She shouldn’t worry about him, he said, giving her a peck on the cheek; Abby should just have fun with her brother and not think about anything else. She’d felt hurt by this remark, but now she decided the advice was easy enough to follow, since during this shopping expedition with Thom she hadn’t, in fact, given her lover a moment’s thought. Or her mother. Or the job she had resigned so impulsively, abandoning her colleagues and her students, those bewildered needy adolescent girls who all adored “Miss Sadler.” This morning she’d indulged in some guilty moping at the idea of her and Thom enjoying their party while Philip sat home alone, reading; and of her and Thom sipping champagne with their friends while their mother endured a dull holiday dinner at Millicent’s town house. But, Abby thought, didn’t everyone choose how they would spend the holiday? Lucille had made her choice, hadn’t she?

  Abby stared ahead at the lovely skyline of midtown Atlanta, shrouded this evening in a kind of foggy glamour, the faraway glimmering of the downtown hotels overshadowed by these soaring, stately midtown buildings: the elegant conelike structures built in the booming ‘80s by Coca Cola and BellSouth, glowing eerily in their complex swathings of multicolored wreaths and winking “stars”; the splendid obelisk of the IBM building with its crisp geometric outline of red and green lights. These opulent towers thrust skyward into the mist, basking in the homage-like illumination cast up from the hunched, shoulder-like masses of the smaller buildings below.

  Abby remembered driving along the interstate with Lucille the night before they’d left for Philadelphia, those few but impossibly long years ago, and how tears had pricked her eyes at the thought Home. This is home. Lucille had been chatting busily, her clipped northern vowels returned in self-conscious force; she was reverting into the Yankee she’d always claimed to be. All through Thom and Abby’s childhood, their mother had made the tired joke that Atlanta “might be a nice city, once they get it finished.” How ene
rgetically she’d decried the never-ending construction, the traffic detours, the startling blend of preserved antebellum glamour and spit-polished urban sheen you could witness along any single block of Peachtree Road. Yes, her mother allowed, Philadelphia might be gritty and glowering; you may not want to dip your little toe into the Schuylkill River, or drive into Center City after dark, or venture into South Philly at any time; but she’d insisted fervently those last few days how she couldn’t wait to get back.

  Abby, sitting next to her in the car, or across from her during dinner, or in the den watching television at night, had not made so much as a grimace of protest, even as her heart throbbed with longing that Thom might call. Surely, at the last minute, he would call and apologize and coax his mother into staying here, for they could be a family only if they lived here together, now that Daddy was gone they had to stay here, didn’t they…? These sentimental notions had evaporated as the final slowed days of their Atlanta lives ticked past. Against Abby’s will her heart had hardened. Even her mind had hardened, for she had stopped thinking about what was happening, what she was allowing to happen. And so these past few years Abby, too, had chosen how to spend her holidays, and the long stretches in between, inhabiting her life as a kind of ideal tenant, she thought, someone who made no noise or trouble, left no impression on her surroundings. Yes, the mere tenant of her own life, and she forced these words through her mind slowly, as if to insist she would not forget them, not stopping to consider that if she was the tenant, then who was the owner? Self-pitying tears no longer threatened her now, but her sense of home, no less of herself, seemed as foggy and unformed as that skyline glimmering in the distance.

  The next evening as they prepared for the party, she felt a moment’s shock, but no real surprise, when she blurted to Thom that she’d wanted to stay here, move back here. When the doorbell rang, precluding his reply—except for the deft instinctive curl of his arm around her waist as they turned to greet Connie and the others—she knew that beneath the surface hilarity of the evening ahead she and her brother would be acclimating to a new togetherness, an alliance she had sealed with as unilateral a stroke as Thorn’s when he’d seceded from the Sadlers’ broken, bewildered family union in the aftermath of their father’s death. During the party Thom met her eyes every few minutes with a sad-looking smile, or an amused-looking frown, as the others sipped and munched and chattered all around them. Somehow Abby couldn’t bear these moments and had to glance away.

  Yet Thom and Abby—as Connie declared after they’d all drunk several glasses of champagne, and had resettled in the living room awaiting the seven o’clock guests—were the “perfect hosts,” and despite his many invitations to other parties he could think of nowhere else he’d rather be. He added, “You really are. Now, I’m sure Abby did most of the work, as I’ve never seen this place so tidy and so nicely decorated for Christmas, but you two make a great team. I wish you’d just chuck it all and move here, Abby”—this was a moment when she’d glanced at Thom, then had to look away—“since it’s silly for poor Thom to be all alone. And now that Carter’s gone…”

  “It really is better to live with someone,” Warren said, with his genial smile. Like the others, Warren looked his best tonight, his bushy swatch of reddish-brown hair elaborately combed and parted, his face shiny as a choirboy’s; even his pleated navy corduroys and wool shirt of red and green plaid looked boyish, like a set of school clothes from which the tags had just been removed. “People who live with someone tend to have a longer life expectancy, you know, than—”

  “Come on, Warren, no psychobabble tonight,” Connie said teasingly, but then he leaned across and pecked him on the cheek. “This is what we get for inviting a shrink,” Connie told the others, rolling his eyes.

  “I need one, goddamn it!” said Pace, with his affable bark of a laugh. Tonight even Pace, who normally wore what he called his “uniform”—flannel shirt, faded blue jeans, a pair of ancient, battered moccasins with thick white socks—wore a dress shirt. His mop of dark brown hair—even more copious than Warren’s—was neatly brushed; his sharp-boned face with its rimless spectacles looked alert and curious, like the straight-A prep school student he’d once been. Now his chin jutted forward as he exclaimed with a pained grin, “The traffic is driving me crazy! Usually, I get out of town during Christmas, but this year it slipped up on me.”

  “I’m glad you stayed,” Abby said, touching his forearm. She understood why everyone liked Pace so well. Despite his incessant complaining, and his overloud voice, and her own disinclination to admire a man in his forties who lived off his “investments,” there was a kindliness to Pace, for all his world-weary bravado, that tugged at her sympathy. Often he snarled half-jokingly about his “goddamn stockbroker” and his “goddamn lawyers” and his “goddamn accountant, stealing me blind,” and about the service he’d hired for his housework, whose employees didn’t “clean worth a damn,” but even during these tirades his sky-blue eyes, slightly enlarged by his thick glasses, seemed unsullied and expectant, like a small boy’s.

  Abby thought: Were all gay men essentially childlike, even in middle age?

  “I’m sure your other friends are glad, too,” she told Pace. “I heard you’ve gotten plenty of invitations.”

  Pace shrugged. “Social obligations. It’s a vicious circle—I give a big party, then I get invited to three-dozen smaller parties. And they feed me dinner, some of them, so then I feel I’ve got to reciprocate, so I throw another big party. I think I’ll move to New York, so I won’t have to see any people!”

  He laughed and took another swallow of champagne. As his head tilted back, his glasses became small octagons of reflected light.

  “Where were you invited tonight?” Connie demanded of Pace. “I was asked to five other parties, but I’m staying right here!”

  “Your parties are terrific, Pace,” Warren said quickly. “I wish you had one every week.”

  “Then I’d be one of your patients, for sure!” Pace shouted.

  Around seven-thirty, shortly after Thorn’s remark that after two flutes of champagne Abby resembled a “corrupt sorority girl,” the other guests began to arrive, each exclaiming over the tree ornaments, the “almost obscene”—as Pace had observed—heaps of brightly wrapped packages underneath it, and the fireplace mantel decorated with holly and candles and braided strands of red and silver tinsel. During the next hour Thorn’s living room became a scene of constant commotion—shrill talk and laughter, exclamations of pleasure over small gifts (mostly bottles of wine) passed from hand to hand, and over the trays of pungent-smelling party food Thom kept bringing out from the kitchen. New arrivals called to friends across the room, waving excitedly and shouting “Happy holidays!” as, at shin level, the black-and-red blurs of Mitzi and Chloe raced among the guests, begging shamelessly for bits of food and racing off again, barking hysterically with each new ring of the doorbell.

  Abby had intended to help Thom, but Connie kept hold of her elbow and involved her in conversation with the new arrivals, most of whom she remembered from the gathering after Carter died. But she couldn’t recall their names or think of much to say, so she simply smiled and shook her head and took another swallow of champagne. Thom carried the food trays back and forth, and managed to dart into the room every few minutes and refill his guests’ glasses; Abby had stopped after her third, her head reeling. She attributed Connie’s almost obnoxious ebullience to the champagne, too, though she’d seen him consume large quantities of alcohol before without becoming quite so agitated. There had been a degree of frankness—and occasional vulgarity, too—to his incessant chattering tonight, including several jokes about Monica Lewinsky and Clinton (she gathered that Connie despised Clinton) that Abby thought especially jejune. Locker-room jokes, sniggering double entendres lacking in Connie’s usual wit and playfulness. She found herself watching him and wondering if something might be wrong. (Nor did Warren seem quite himself: he stayed close to Connie but had gotten q
uiet, his forehead creased in what might have been chagrin, or simple embarrassment.) Connie’s aqua-blue eyes glittered as he spoke, his attention flitting from one person to another; his talk seemed oddly random, disconnected.

  During a rare moment of quiet, when the others were focused on some picture-taking next to the Christmas tree, Abby leaned to Connie and whispered, smiling, “Are you feeling OK? You seem—I don’t know, a little jittery?”

  His eyelids fluttered, taking in this unexpected query, but he gave his theatrical smile, his cheeks flushing, and gestured broadly.

  “It’s the company, sweetheart, and the occasion! I always get hyped up at Christmas time…”

  His attention veered off, as though Abby had not spoken.

  By eight o’clock, more than a dozen guests had arrived, and the talk had gotten louder, the bursts of laughter more raucous. Although Connie downed each glass of champagne swiftly, Abby noticed the others drank at the same accelerated pace, leaving her to imagine, with a schoolteacher’s anxiety, their cars weaving off drunkenly into the night. She and Connie found themselves talking to Alex and his lover, the two physicians they’d seen during lunch at Agnes & Muriel’s, whom Connie had disliked so intensely, but tonight he joked and bantered happily with both of them, though allowing himself a perfunctory, offhand bit of malice.

  “I thought you two would be jetting off to Rio or something!” he cried, greeting them both with air kisses.

  The four of them chatted for a while, though Alex’s cell phone kept beeping—“the hospital, sorry!”—and Alex, frowning, sank into the sofa and gave medical advice in his authoritative mutter, as if oblivious to the chatter and hilarity swirling around him.

  Again the doorbell rang and they greeted the new arrivals, a lesbian couple with whom Connie seemed to have a close but teasing friendship.

  “Patsy!” he cried, hugging a heavyset woman with short-cropped gray hair and a round, pudgy face that reminded Abby of Roger Ebert’s. “Patsy, it’s you! I should have known—I thought someone had just opened a can of tuna fish in here!”