21 Stolen Kisses

by Lauren Blakely

  I was a fixture of the Broadway scene and became a communal theater kid. Those same thespians I hung out with came with my mom to my games, cheering me on in football and baseball with the loudest hoots and hollers. Maybe that’s why chatting with her over her broken foot and reminiscing about high school days felt the closest to normal I’d had in a while.

  “Will you sign my cast?” She tipped her forehead to her foot.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” I said, and reached for the Sharpies she’d left at the foot of her hospital bed. Her friends had already commandeered most of the plaster real estate with colorful loopy signatures and red hearts. “Hmmm. Not much room left,” I said, appraising her foot and its new packaging.

  “Right by the toes. There’s a little space right next to the toes,” she said, pointing toward the edge of the cast.

  “Nice toes,” I said, with a laugh, when I noticed her toenail polish. Her toenails were bright green and bright purple, alternating each shade on every other toe.

  “My friend Amanda calls them Skittles toes.”

  “I’ll just sign right here under those Skittle toes then,” I said, then scratched out my signature near her candy-colored toenails.

  I didn’t have a foot fetish. I certainly didn’t fall for her because of her toes. Romance didn’t even cross my mind.

  I just liked talking to her. I had no idea that three years later, she’d become the center of my universe.

  Chapter Eight

  Kennedy

  “Think Mr. Lipshitz will remember you if he sees you?” Lane asks, accentuating the name of my mom’s onetime lover, as we ride across a quiet block in the East Seventies, rolling casually by the brownstones and buildings with pretty stoops.

  “Probably,” I say with a groan as we hunt for the residence of the wife of the man with the worst last name in the world. “It was four or five years ago but I had to have dinner with Mr. Lipshitz a couple times. My mom even made her world-famous pork chops once when it was just the three of us at the dinner table. It was disgusting.”

  “And that didn’t offend your vegetarian sensibilities?”

  “She made me a peanut butter and honey sandwich instead,” I say in a deadpan voice, as if the choice of food is what mattered.

  “Epic. I love those things, especially when they’re toasted.”

  “There’s no other way to eat them but toasted,” I say. “Anyway, his wife knows me too. They came to one of my parent’s parties a few years ago. My mom invited them both, right while she was still in the thick of it with him. I even called the wife to confirm they were coming. I believe my instructions the night of the party were Act as if you’ve never seen him before.”

  “And did you? Act?”

  “You’ve seen the Oscar on my bureau, right?”

  He chuffs a humorless laugh. “What did your Dad say? Was he suspicious?”

  I shake my head as we near the curb, remembering how awful I felt that night, how my stomach tied itself in knots as I maintained that lie. “Didn’t have a clue. He never did,” I say as we pull our bikes onto the sidewalk and lock them up. I take an envelope out of my backpack and show it to Lane. There’s no return address on it, but Doreen Lipshitz’s name is on the front. She lives in the corner brownstone with a green planter in one of the windows.

  “How fortuitous that this block also happens to have a mailbox.” Lane points to a blue postal box twenty feet away. “Because of course you couldn’t mail this from anywhere else in the city,” he teases.

  “It’s ceremonial.” I walk to the mailbox, but before I open it, a jagged sort of worry sneaks through me. “I think this might be crazy. I shouldn’t do this. I should just leave her alone.”

  “What did you say in the letter?”

  “Just that I wish for her to be happy and to be surrounded by love,” I say in a small voice, feeling small. Why should she care? I’m just a seventeen-year-old girl, struggling to find a way through her messed-up life.

  “Does she know what happened though?”

  I nod, the memory of my mom’s affair so fresh it’s in high-definition. My stomach churns as images of those days flash by. After Mr. Lipshitz was caught by his wife, Doreen, my mom was a mess for a week. My dad was in Italy, so my mom had carte blanche to be mopey, to sniffle, and to barely eat anything but crackers. I brought her books to read and made her sandwiches and told her everything would be better when she said she was sad because she’d lost a friend. She let me take care of her though, let me cuddle with her and watch old sitcoms on television.

  We were both pretending. She was pretending she was sad over a friend. I was pretending I believed her.

  I try to shove the memories away so they don’t imprison me any longer. “Yes, his wife knows. She caught him e-mailing my mom.”

  “Then all you’re doing is saying sorry in a roundabout way. You’re not rubbing something in her face that she never knew.”

  “Right,” I say with a nod, reassuring myself. “Besides, my letter is anonymous. I just want to make her feel happy.”

  Lane smiles, then drapes an arm around me “You are a good person, my friend.”

  His arm feels warm and comforting, and it’s enough to give me the courage to just do it. I gulp, then open the door of the mailbox and slide the letter in, taking a deep breath as the door clangs shut.

  This is how I reverse the damage.

  “Oh, I’m so proud of you, my little Kennedy. Growing up now and making amends,” he teases.

  I swat him. “Shut up!”

  “Now I get to play,” he says, tapping his backpack. “I told you I’d be your comrade in amends. Since you’re sending letters to particular people, I thought we should leave love letters around the city too—to anyone. Like how some people leave stickers for a campaign or a cause? They plaster them on subways and billboards and railings. We do the same. It’s like found art. But found love. We’re Cupids, kind of, but more in a cosmic, big-picture sense.” He reaches inside and hands me several pieces of paper. He has printed copies of the F. Scott Fitzgerald love letter—the one from the “bonkers” wife of the drunk writer.

  “I love everything about your idea and I also think you’re crazy,” I say, admiringly, as he hands me thumbtacks from a plastic container in his backpack pocket.

  “I know,” he says, his eyes lit up with excitement. Now they’re bright green, it seems. “Let’s do it. Let’s go make public art.”

  It’s like a sip of champagne; his thrill is contagious and I catch it too. We race, watching behind us, in front of us, beside us, making sure we’re not caught by whoever it is that catches people doing what we’re doing. We execute our first mission as impromptu practitioners of found love, tacking up the dozen copies of the letter all along various doorframes on Mr. and Mrs. Lipshitz’s block. An older woman walks a pug with a pink collar, and eyes us curiously. My heart beats faster in worry, but the woman says nothing as she passes us leaving messages of love.

  Found love. Lettered love. Love from a stranger. Love on the street. Messages of love all around. I breathe them on the air, I imprint them on the walls, I spread my hopes and dreams for the way things could have been across the city streets.

  I look at our handiwork—each piece of ivory-colored paper, curling at the edges, like parchment, then the words in curving script, letters shaped like they were made in another century. I don’t know who will see them, but the possibility that someone will stop and read and realize that they too are surrounded by love for just a moment here in this city of millions unclenches some of the pain inside me.

  I could get used to this feeling. Buoyed by the lightness inside of me, I throw my arms around Lane and hug him tightly.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  “For what?” His voice is nervous, worried.

  “For being my friend,” I say, as I untangle myself from his arms.

  He waves a hand in the air as if to say it’s no big deal. “Easiest thing I’ve ever done,” he
says.

  But it’s more than easy. It’s vital—this friendship. No one else knows all my family secrets, or all my family shame, or all my family guilt. And no one else knows how much I want to mend all the mistakes I have made my whole life over.

  And in this moment, his friendship is even better than a crush.

  *

  After we leave the first letter, I head to my dad’s. He’s making a mushroom risotto that smells delicious. I’m tempted to ask if he misses cooking with my mom, laughing in the kitchen with her, and kissing the back of her neck while she arranged Goudas and Bries on a serving plate. I want to ask if he wishes I never told him what she’d done, if he wants to go back to whatever blissfully ignorant state he was living in just so we could all be together again.

  I’m dying to know if I ruined cooking for him.

  He was making pasta primavera the night I told him. “Mom is having another affair and it’s not the first time she’s fooled around on you. Mom has been having affairs since I was nine or ten years old and she has men over at the house all the time when you’re not around and she does everything with them,” I began and then went on and on. He stopped stirring, stopped moving. Face white as a sheet, eyes glazed.

  Soon the water from the pot boiled over, spilling onto the stove. He didn’t move, so I grabbed a towel, cleaned it up, turned off the burner, and said I was sorry a million times. He unfroze and said it wasn’t my fault, none of it was my fault, that I should never ever be sorry for what I told him. Then he called the pizza place down the street and had them deliver a cheese pie and we ate the whole thing.

  In the morning, I found the pizza box had been stabbed many times.

  Now, as he finishes the risotto and spoons it onto plates, I can’t help but wonder if cooking is a bitter reminder of my mom. But I don’t want to stir up painful memories.

  “How is the love letter exhibit going?” I ask when he sits down with the plates and I push my calculus homework to the side of his dark-brown oak dining room table, a newish table, because this place is still relatively new. We are in his apartment—my other home—a fifth-floor Greenwich Village walk-up with windows that look out over my dad’s quiet street. There’s just a sliver of a view of the Hudson River and New Jersey if you push your face as far as you can against the corner of the window. It is homey in its own way, with exposed brick and art on the walls, mostly prints of my dad’s favorites, works by Édouard Manet and Willem Claesz Heda, by Francesco Hayez and Roy Lichtenstein, but also originals from newer artists, like one of the photographs from his exhibit.

  “It’s going really well,” he says with a smile, then takes a bite of his culinary creation. He nods several times, pleased with his proficiency in the kitchen. “You should meet the photographer behind that one,” he says, gesturing to the photo he bought. “She’s really fantastic. Nineteen, an art student at NYU, very talented and very easy to talk to. Her name is Amy Vaughn.”

  “Got a crush on her?”

  He pretends to laugh. Then he turns serious. “I hope you know I wouldn’t have a crush on someone that much younger than I am. Because you know how I feel about that.”

  “Dad, relax. I was just kidding.”

  “I mean it, though. It’s not appropriate for a man my age to date a college student.”

  “Obviously,” I say quickly.

  His face turns pinkish blotchy and he clears his throat. “I didn’t mean it like that, Kennedy. I mean in general, there is a certain acceptable age range that people should date in.”

  “So are you dating anyone?” I say, trying to deflect from the dangerous topic of age.

  “I don’t really think that’s the issue here.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize we were discussing issues now. I thought we were discussing art.”

  “And somehow it got turned around, so let’s continue,” he says, and I brace myself. But his question surprises me. “How are things going with your therapist?”

  I put my fork down. “Really? You really want me to tell you how things are with my shrink?”

  He stops eating too. “Yes. Really. You don’t have to go into the details. I understand it’s personal what you talk about with her. But is it going well? Is it helping you? Because I just want you to be happy in life. I want you to be able to have the sort of happiness your mother and I never had.”

  I had that kind of happiness.

  Only I can’t say that because then I’d be spinning more lies. But, he’s my dad. He’s the one parent I can at least try to be honest with.

  “Okay, so you want to be all open, then here you go. Here’s what I’m getting out of seeing Caroline. I’m learning how to move on from what I did. Because I was complicit in her affairs. By lying for her and covering it up and saying So-and-So is just a friend and So-and-So was just over for dinner. And I’m sorry I lied for her. I’m sorry I hurt you by never saying anything to her, by never telling her to stop.” My dad covers his mouth with his hand, and he looks like he’s going to cry. “Dad, what did I say wrong?”

  He shakes his head and speaks softly. “You did nothing wrong, Kennedy. Not now. Not then. You have to know that. It was never your fault. Please don’t blame yourself.”

  “I’m a pretty good punching bag for myself though,” I say, reverting to jokes and sarcasm, because this is comfortable terrain for me. I pretend to punch my own arms.

  He is undeterred by my attempt at humor. He remains starkly serious. “I mean it, Kennedy. Your mom has to live with what she did. It’s not your fault.”

  But I don’t really think she’s living with it. And since we’re letting it all hang out, I decide to ask him something I’ve always wanted to know. “Why didn’t you ever tell Mom you knew about her affairs? After you left her? Why didn’t you tell her you knew?”

  “Why,” he says softly, repeating. He exhales deeply. “Because. Because I knew if I told her then it would always be there, it would always exist, we would always be aware of it every single time we talked about you or anything. And I didn’t want to have to think about it every time I talked to her. I didn’t want to have it in front of me all the time. I wanted it to be behind me.”

  “Self-preservation,” I say.

  He nods. “Yes, I suppose it was self-preservation.”

  “Dad, I’m old enough to know what real love is. I’m the opposite of her. You have to know that.”

  “I know, sweetie. I know you are.”

  “Then why do you worry so much about me?”

  “Because you are young, Kennedy. Because you are too young to feel that way for anyone. And especially because you know how I feel about him,” he says, and there’s a steeliness in his normally warm brown eyes, a hard glint that tells me exactly how he would feel if he knew how much I want Noah back.

  When I go to bed, it is quiet. I never have to worry about overhearing my dad having sex. I can sleep peacefully, and while I still long for Noah, for a note, for a picture, it’s not necessary for my health and sanity like it is when I’m at my mom’s. I shove my phone under my bed so I’m not tempted to reach out, so I’m not seduced by this peaceful, easy feeling. Staying away from him is my amends to my dad.

  After he found the bits and pieces of the letter, he freaked out to the nth degree. I had no choice but to conjure a heap of tall tales around the letter, so many that I was dancing dangerously close to the edge of sanity. I had to end it with Noah. I didn’t want to be another source of stress for my father. That was the least I could do for my dad, considering all he’s done for me. The biggest thing he’s done is to just be a normal dad, a normal parent who doesn’t ask his daughter to keep his secrets.

  I have a copy of the letter still, a chronicle of my so-called “21 Stolen Kisses.” I keep it in a safe-deposit box so no one can ever see it. That’s the only thing in the box, because it’s the only thing I have that’s priceless to me.

  I wrap the sheets around me one more time. Maybe I should just start over. Maybe I should just go out w
ith boys my age. That’s what my dad wants, and he’s the only one who’s remotely normal among the two people who passed on genes to me.

  But really, what’s normal? This is New York City. Nobody is normal anymore.

  Chapter Nine

  Noah

  After a few rounds of hoity-toity hors d’oeuvres, consisting of fig-wrapped ricotta cheese and polenta cups with sweet peppers, and a painfully detailed conversation about the upcoming story arc in Lords and Ladies with my date, Jenna, who works on a late-night talk show, I spot an opening with Tremaine. He’s made his way to the bar as his wife heads down the hallway to the restrooms. We’re at The Modern, the restaurant that overlooks the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art.

  The salt-and-pepper-haired TV show creator holds up two fingers to get the bartender’s attention. I excuse myself from Jenna and join the man my boss wants me to nab.

  “David Tremaine,” I say, extending a hand. “Noah Hayes. I wanted to say hello because I’ve always admired your work. I think you were one of the first to truly poke fun at the hipster universe in Brooklyn before it became a target for everyone.”

  He raises a bushy eyebrow. His expression is wary, but pleased. “You read my New York Press pieces?”

  “Of course. I can see how they’ve informed your shows. Your dark sense of humor was evident in those columns. I read them growing up,” I say, referring to the pieces he penned for the paper well before he started writing for the small screen. He was a humor columnist many years ago, and sometimes when my mom went to auditions she’d drop me off at the nearby library for an hour and I’d spend that time reading Tremaine’s columns.