The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  “But maybe not.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I fell.”

  “What are you telling me?” he demands.

  She feels sorry for herself. She is so irresponsible. Is it really possible to stop loving someone for no good reason? “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I killed another mouse,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I left it in the bathtub,” she says. “I didn’t rescue it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But you’re not listening to me. I let the mouse die. I didn’t do anything.”

  He is silent for a moment, though Deirdre can hear his anger and frustration drawing the phone line taut. How can you know someone so well, and also know so little? “Never mind,” he says. “What matters right now is whether the baby is okay. Are you bleeding?”

  “No,” she says, “there’s no blood.”

  She listens as Dale tells her the arrangements he’ll make to bring her back to Seattle. “I’ll call back in five minutes,” he says, and she thanks him and adds that she is sorry. On the railing of the deck, there is the cup, there is the small creature curled in the bottom. She flings the dead mouse into the darkness and flies with him, not knowing where her toss will take her, or whether she is still light enough to touch down softly, or how she’ll feel when she finishes turning into something new.

  When I first hitched my pony to Burt’s treat truck, I assumed that he was just like the other guys I’d been dating, guys who were still finding themselves: treat truck employee by day, aspiring rock star by night, or something along those lines. Under his white apron, Burt wore skinny jeans, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica T-shirts, and clunky boots, and he was never without a funny old-man hat. He’d bought the truck with money he earned putting a perfect sear on New York strip and creaming spinach during the week and running an underground supper club out of his Williamsburg loft on the weekends, and he dreamed of someday managing a whole fleet of trucks, each one with a different menu, sensibility, and soundtrack.

  On our fourth date, Burt told me he wanted to take me someplace special.

  “Where?” I said, guessing he meant the old wooden roller coaster out at Coney Island or a dive bar in Red Hook.

  Then he named a French restaurant I’d read about in the Times.

  “No way,” I said.

  “I’ve been saving up for months,” he said. “This is French, but without the sauciness. The chef is foaming everything. Picture it: Beet foam! Wasabi foam! Turkish coffee foam! And then he’s got all these cool tricks he does with liquid nitrogen.”

  Burt’s enthusiasm was contagious. “Are you serious?” I asked, referring to both the food and the invitation. At this point, we hadn’t even slept together. Our dates culminated in increasingly long sessions of stoop kissing that left my legs the consistency of firm Jell-O. (Burt believed that homemade gelatin in exotic flavors had great market potential.) But I didn’t invite Burt up to my apartment, and he didn’t press for an invitation. His hesitation seemed to match my own. We had no shared context, since we’d met in the cookbook section of the Strand, where we were both hunting for Julia Child’s bible on French cooking. He was buying a copy as a wedding present for his best friend, and I was embarking on self-improvement in the most predictable way possible. I was doing a lot of self-renovation in those days, trying to turn myself into a person with spacious, light-filled interiors.

  “As serious as you want me to be,” Burt said.

  “What?” I felt my face turning red.

  Burt’s eyes locked on mine. “I just mean I like you.”

  “I like you too.” Even though I’d said these words—and more serious ones—to half a dozen guys whom I probably liked less than Burt, they sounded hollow, other things I didn’t care to hear rattling around inside of them. Once you gave voice to your feelings, things could get so complicated.

  Burt laughed. “You’re a conundrum, Sylvie. Sylvie-who-has-fun-until-the-end-of-the-evening-and-then-disappears.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said, already taking a step back, losing my balance for just a second because of the doormat.

  Burt sighed. “It’ll be my treat, by the way.”

  “No,” I said. “I couldn’t let you do that.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” he said before taking his own step backwards. He held my hand until too much distance opened between us. Then, after smiling hopefully, he turned and walked away. This never happened. Usually I took the stairs by two. Usually I arranged things so that I was the one who left first.

  Before Burt, I had only dated guys who were not Lance. It’s hard to explain what Lance had meant to me. There was the Lance before we dated, the Lance who’d been my doctor when I was a teenager, whom I’d liked because he was the rare adult who listened, who seemed to find me worthy of regular conversations and not the kind of watered-down attention that adults manufacture for younger people. Then there was the Lance who knew me as a young woman, who just happened to be passing through wherever I was living and sent me tickets and took me places and introduced me to experiences: Lebanese food, canyoneering, left-wing magazines, salsa and merengue, the man with whom I had long philosophical conversations, the man who seemed to want to know me, who could appreciate my wanderlust, who treated me as his equal and was, according to my mother, my hometown’s most eligible bachelor. In my early twenties, I didn’t see myself as grown up and couldn’t imagine competing with real women (whatever that meant) for the attention of a man they wanted. This was why for many years I didn’t think he could like me, even though the tension was palpable, even though I thought I’d made my feelings clear by sending him flirtatious postcards that I addressed to my “Western Muse” and making him heartbreakingly silly things, like a ceramic jar that I filled with fortune cookies: “If you look in the right places, you can find some good offerings.” Hint. Hint. “Soon life will become more interesting.”

  Lance disappeared for several years after Laurie died. Actually, I was the one who vanished. I’d had a chance and blown it. After that weekend in Santa Fe, I fantasized about him often—crude, funny scenes of seduction that make me cringe now—while I was with other men. I knew this was a bad idea, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  The Lance while we were dating was someone else. At first, it was better than I had ever imagined. We continued our custom of meeting in different places every couple of weeks, and we went on amazing, exotic trips—to Spain, Hawaii, and even Zanzibar, flying first class and staying in the kind of hotels I’d only glimpsed in travel magazines. There was always a moment, when a driver holding a sign that read “Mr. and Mrs. Peters” in clear block letters greeted us or a bellhop opened the doors of a hired car and welcomed us to a boutique hotel, when I would see or imagine seeing these men doing a double-take, looking from Lance to me and back to Lance, and the hair on my arms stood up. I thought marrying Lance would be a continuation of these adventures, only no one would question my appearance with a man visibly older than me, and it wouldn’t give me pause either. When we weren’t traveling, we would live in a modern house filled with beautiful things (because Lance already possessed many beautiful objects) and books, and we would have two children, even though Lance doubted he wanted even one, and we would respect each other’s independence, and blah blah blah.

  Lance pointed to a locked wooden chest in the middle of his living room. “Do you know what’s in there?”

  This was my first visit to his house as his girlfriend instead of his friend.

  “A dead body,” I joked.

  “No, though close,” he said. “It’s your dowry.”

  “What?”

  “I’m joking, but everything in here is for you.” He opened the chest and began sifting through its contents, probing the shape of paper bags buttery-soft from age, while I perched on the edge of the sofa
, feigning nothing more than a mild interest in what was inside.

  “Ah,” he said, peering into a small white box, “I remember this. It’s from my favorite jewelry store in Denver.”

  At the time, it seemed like the most romantic thing in the world. He’d loved me for longer than I could have imagined, and he had the goods to prove it. During his many travels, sometimes with other women, sometimes solo, he’d always picked up a little something for me. Yes, he laughed, he occasionally lied and told these women—whose names I’d just learned from the disconcerting shrine of framed photos of girlfriends past on a bookshelf—that he was buying the batik for his mother or the pistachio green silk jacket for his sister, but what did it matter? “You’ve been on my mind for a long time.”

  “Are you going to give me something?” I asked playfully, gravitating forward, toward both Lance and the open chest.

  “No,” he said, sitting back on his heels.

  “But …” I was suddenly disgusted and frightened by the amount of greed I felt. “They’re for me.”

  “Yes, but they’re mine,” he answered. “They remind me of the feeling I had for you.”

  “But we’re together now.”

  “Right,” he said. “Now I have you, but when I bought these things I didn’t, and I didn’t know whether I would ever have you.” He walked on his knees toward me. He pressed his face into my pubic bone. “You don’t know what it was like,” he said in a muffled voice that I barely recognized, “not knowing whether this would ever work out.”

  On the night of the big French dinner, the night that was at once the beginning and nearly the end of us, I recognized Burt on the Fourteenth Street subway platform by his brown fedora. From a distance, with a book pressed close to his face, he was not the man of my dreams, or even, for that matter, a man I was sure I wanted to have dinner with. I’d also started to wonder about the timing of his invitation. To get Saturday night, Burt must have made the reservation months ago with someone else in mind. I was, I’d been telling myself, a replace-a-date.

  For a moment, I considered rushing back up the stairs, through the turnstile, and out onto the crowded sidewalks. No one would be able tell how scared and cruel I was, and over time, the decision would fade from my memory as well. But then Burt folded his book around his finger and glanced at his watch, and I found myself moving as though walking a tightrope toward him.

  “Hey,” I said. In my heels, I could kiss him without standing on my tiptoes. I hadn’t considered this when I was getting dressed. Was this a mistake? Was I too tall? These shoes dated back to the Lance era.

  “Hey, you,” Burt said. “You clean up nice.”

  “So do you,” I said shyly.

  Up close, it was easier to remember Burt’s charms. He was wearing a pinstripe suit with a vest and pointy black cowboy boots. His brown hair was slicked back except where it curled impishly at his temples. He looked like a lion tamer or an old-fashioned sheriff. Linking his arm through mine, he drew me closer.

  “And how did you spend the day, my pretty?” This was a real question since we saw each other just once a week.

  “I ran across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “Mon dieu.” He touched his cheek to mine, a more intimate gesture than a kiss. “How far is that?”

  “Just five.”

  “Five miles?” he gasped in mock surprise.

  He was being very silly.

  “And I thought I had it rough,” he continued.

  “Was it a good day at Tastiness in a Truck?” I knew enough about Burt’s routine to know he parked near Prospect Park on Saturdays.

  “Women swooning over my pork belly sandwiches.”

  I touched his bicep lightly. “That sounds very trying.”

  “Man, it was. I’m gonna have to start stocking smelling salts.”

  “Can I ask you …” But I was interrupted by the keening of the uptown express. Finding out whether he’d planned to bring another woman to dinner suddenly seemed like a sure way to make the evening mournful. I pressed my fingernails into my palm to keep things in perspective.

  “What’s that?” he asked when the noise had passed.

  “You smell nice.” This was a small joke between us—one of the few we shared. On our first date he’d come straight from work reeking of garlic and then spent the whole evening apologizing. He did smell good, some tasty combination of mint and rosemary.

  He sniffed my neck. “What a coincidence! You smell nice, and I smell nice …”

  “I was at the Strand, and you were at the Strand …”

  He playfully slugged me. “I was breathing air, and you were breathing air, and we realized we were both breathing the same air …”

  “And it was meant to be.” I raised one eyebrow.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?” I did it again.

  “When you do that …” He growled, and I blushed.

  By the time we reached the restaurant, we had settled into a comfortable banter, but my self-consciousness returned as soon as I had shrugged off my jacket and stood in my tight white and black sweater and short black skirt. These presents from Lance had been interred in garment bags since we broke up. They had cost more than a month’s rent. I told myself I didn’t wear them not because they brought back painful memories, but because they reminded me of how willing I’d been to change who I was. Or so I thought.

  “Wow,” Burt said, a smile playing on his lips. “Wow,” he repeated. “You look really, really good.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Shall I take that?” the hostess asked.

  “Umm.” Since I wasn’t carrying a purse, I’d stowed my wallet, lipstick, and mints in the pocket of my coat. “Is it okay if I keep it?”

  “As you like,” the hostess said.

  Burt raised his arm to signal my place in the procession toward our table. I knew the order. I knew that Burt would, if he were a certain kind of man, place his hand on the small of my back and steer me toward the table, but he didn’t. Instead, he whistled a watery tune that was so quiet and subtle it could have almost passed for breathing.

  The restaurant was very beige: beige walls, beige carpet, beige chairs, beige people. The tablecloths were off-white. Glass vases of purple and fuchsia as tall as trees sprung up in the middle of the room. The art looked famous. The people looked famous or, if not famous, important or wealthy. It was the kind of place Lance would have chosen, the kind of place where I would have sat on the edge of my seat, my body too charged to relax. It was oddly exhilarating to feel out of place. And also: wearying. Once, confronted with a menu with no prices at a three-star restaurant, I got so nauseated I told Lance I needed to return to the hotel. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He and the maître d’ had a whispered conversation, and then the maître d’ took my arm, guiding me to a room with a small bed, where he covered me with a blanket. Moments later, he returned carrying two glasses, one filled with milk, the other with anise-flavored fizzy water. “Drink, sleep,” he told me, “Soon you ready for delicious.” When I returned to the table an hour later, Lance was beaming. “Baby, you’ve risen from the dead.” He’d toured the kitchen, had a glass of wine with the chef, and ordered us a special tasting menu. “Are you up for it?” he asked. I said I was, and it was true. We ate for five hours that night, one of the best meals of my life.

  Now I found myself trying to recall whether Burt had taken off his hat, but I didn’t dare look back at him.

  “Here we are,” the hostess said.

  Cramped and with a view straight into the swinging door of the kitchen, the table was the least desirable in the room. Lance would have immediately raised a stink, but Burt just smiled. “Cool,” he said rubbing his hands together. “This looks great.”

  “It’s cozy,” I said.

  “It’s perfect,” he said, removing his hat now and settling it on the edge of the table, where it looked as out of place as a small roosting bird.

  “I think y
ou should put your hat under the table.” I felt my nose scrunch up.

  “Don’t let me forget it,” he said, winking at me. He knocked a bread plate off the table. My jaw tightened.

  “It’s a flying saucer,” Burt said, leaning over and picking it up. “Get it?”

  I counterfeited a smile and twisted my heavy linen napkin around my finger. To Burt, it probably looked like a small animal ferreting around in my lap.

  When the waiter came to explain the menu, I was sure he detected that this was a special occasion for us, though not in a good way, more like kids playing dress-up, kids wobbling around in their parents’ shoes and holding up their parents’ pants. We would be treated poorly, I imagined; the dinner Burt had been looking forward to would be ruined; or I would singlehandedly spoil everything by continuing to be as stiff and stupid as a plastic Barbie doll.

  “Do you have any questions?” the waiter asked.

  If it had been me, I would have said, “No, nononono,” not wanting to impose on the waiter, eager to escape his sham solicitous manner. But not Burt. He leaned forward, tilted his head up, his eyes as eager as a child’s glimpsing a soft-serve ice cream machine, and wondered about preparations and ideal wine pairings. He asked whether the tasting menu was the way to go. He inquired about the provenance of the oysters and the marinade on the hamachi. “A reduction of grapefruit juice frozen in liquid nitrogen?” Burt gasped, and the waiter seemed to blush.

  “And which do you prefer,” Burt pressed on, “the turbot or the skate?”

  The waiter was biting his words, swallowing whole syllables—escargot sounded like cargo, poisson like puss—and simultaneously fidgeting, though very, very subtly. I thought I could see his mouth twitching and his toes wiggling in his shoes when Burt added, “This dinner is a very big deal. I’ve been looking forward to it for months. I was going to bring my father, but then I had the good luck to meet Sylvie.”

  Right then, I felt such a complicated mixture of emotions: relief that I had not been Burt’s second choice and exasperation with myself for always tending to believe the worst and disbelief as I listened to Burt describe our last date, when we’d taken the train up the Hudson and spent the day picking apples: “A crisp fall day, perfect really, except that we picked more apples than we could carry.”