What a Kiss Can Do

by Kathy Johncox

  It only took a minute before he said, “Especially this one.” It was the shot of Derek and me, the one that had made Derek pull me outside. I looked alarmed and Derek looked determined. There was nothing casual about that image. In fact, it could have Diane Arbus image potential. But on second look, it was a great photo of me, even though I did look a little, let’s say, questioning. Fergie was so good that you could even see the little beauty-mark mole near the corner of my mouth. Derek looked quite GQ. His face had one of the intriguing looks that often appear on the faces of the male models in that magazine. Their lean bodies with their handsome faces always are puzzling. Or maybe enigmatic is a better word. Do they love? Do they hate? Are they happy with the boxers they are advertising? Then, in my head, I went to, does Derek love? Does he hate? Is he happy with boxers? No, enough.

  I smiled at my secret thoughts and pointed to the picture, first to Derek, then to me. “Seems like a smile from someone would have been better here. This exchange is not exactly easy for the society page readers to decipher,” I said carefully.

  “God, I love it when you talk like a writer,” Fergie said. He nuzzled my neck, nicely but inappropriately for where we were, in the newsroom at the light table.

  I reluctantly pulled away. “We’ll go with the Caroline photo.”

  “Want me to write the caption?” Fergie offered this since sometimes our photographers got to be word people, but only if we were behind and on deadline.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, not having any idea what I’d write. I also had to compose the story for tomorrow’s deadline. Something was sure to come to me.

  Confidence is a wonderful thing and when it comes to words, I had it locked. With words, you always know where you stand. They are there for you, like a support group of infinite proportions, just waiting for you to find the right one. Words generally had certain hard and fast rules for things like subject-verb agreement, making plurals, talking about the past, and thinking about the present. You could choose an interesting word and people would just think you were erudite, another word Fergie would get turned on by, no doubt. But with people, there are no hard and fast rules. The constant process of ferreting out other people’s rules for whatever—work, play, romance—was tiring. The process was so exhausting that I was less and less likely to involve myself in it, hence my declaration of being done with love and lust. Actually being here, being nuzzled by Fergie, for a moment made me wonder how I got here. Then I remembered the mistletoe.

  “Okay. I’ve got to write,” I said, gently pushing him away. “I’m sure there’s a photo opportunity waiting for you somewhere.”

  “Great segue,” Boss said, breezing through the door. Her prematurely salt and pepper hair flowed behind her, as did her artsy style garb, gauzy and wrinkled. As the assignment editor, she pretty much controlled where the paper went with its news and “Boss” pretty much summed up her style. Her name really was Alicia, but that name was gentle and that was not Boss.

  “Need a shot of the town supervisor cutting the ribbon at the new boutique in the plaza.” She pointed at Fergie. “It’s happening in 20 minutes.”

  “What would you do if I weren’t here right now?” he asked, gathering up his equipment.

  “Punt,” Boss said mysteriously, which I knew meant she’d send me, a picture-taking novice, with the newspaper’s point-and-shoot digital camera.

  Fergie knew that as well as I did, so he teasingly commented that he was glad he was available, as he sauntered out the door.

  “He doesn’t usually hang around here,” Boss commented in that irritating way she has of asking a question without asking it. I used to get suckered into answering those non-questions all the time. Now I just start talking about something else and that usually does the trick.

  “You should have been at Caroline’s party last night,” I said. And I proceeded to tell her about the scene, the food, the unusual people. “It’ll make an interesting story about the local theater scene. And actually, they’re staying for a few weeks to do Waiting for Godot and something else at Backstage.”

  “They should be doing A Christmas Carol. Doesn’t anyone do that anymore? It is the holiday after all. We have to decorate this place.” Boss swept out, leaving her what-is-the-world-coming-to comment behind her, and then stuck her head back in and said, “Write it.”

  Like I wasn’t going to write it anyway. That’s why we called her Boss. I estimated she was about 10 years older than I was. She was very self-assured, one of my euphemisms for bossy, which ticked me off occasionally until I reminded myself this wasn’t my permanent career. There were bigger things out there for my words and me. She could stagnate here. Having thought that, I felt good. I created a new document, a blank page on my laptop and copied the Derek-with-Rita photo into my personal document file.

  A lead, a lead, my kingdom for a lead. I stared out the picture window at Main Street and the dead-leaf brown muck on the ground made me think of the food table the previous evening. People were hurrying in and out of the bank across the street, and watching them was making me tired. I asked Felicia, our college intern, to put on a new pot of coffee and put my feet on the ancient rolltop desk, folding my arms. Sometimes the smell of coffee brewing could help me concentrate, so I breathed deeply and waited.

  Here’s what came to mind. Christmas in 22 days. Gifts to buy. Maybe even one for Fergie, the way things were going. Plans to make. To go home or not. Home was about two hours away in Cortland, New York, a college town, and a ghost town when the students left. If I took Fergie, there would be much curiosity, especially if my sister and her husband and the kids were there. But actually, I might dare to do that.

  Not that anything had happened the night before that would allow us to share the futon at my mother’s house. But it could between now and then. Okay, so maybe one date was too much to parlay into a relationship, but there was the nuzzling. And the promise of dinner tonight. Or was that Derek. No, Derek had said dinner sometime, somewhere at a normal place. It was Fergie who had said dinner tomorrow, that is today, something way more definite than sometime and somewhere.

  I poured coffee into the tall black mug with the Toulouse Lautrec poster on it. I had bought the mug at the Louvre in France two summers ago on a splurge vacation, and no coffee ever tasted as good as it did in that mug. I took a big savoring slurp. Ahh.

  Writing. Get to the writing. I poised my fingers above the keys. Ah. The elusive lead.

  The pre-production festivities at Caroline Jorgensen’s house had all the earmarks of an unusual holiday theater season. Too normal.

  Differently-abled actors and actresses are joining local Blackfriars to jazz up the holiday fare. Too patronizing.

  Oh, hell. I wrote the article focusing on the resurgence locally of theater of the absurd kicking off the winter season, mentioned Caroline’s party, talked about the circus performers as serious actors and Caroline as the trendsetter, ended with a flourish exhorting readers to try something new for the holidays, and started the spell checker. In terms of a second photo, I knew the suburban community of Bridgefield wasn’t ready for the hermaphrodite, so I picked a shot of the table, the frog fountain, Caroline and Celeste with others in the background. At least everyone was smiling.

  Later that afternoon, I was at the coffee maker making the umpteenth pot when Boss stumbled in with a huge box. It was full of decorations and I knew I was going to have to help her unless there was a massive traffic accident at the four corners, or some grade school called to pitch their holiday play rehearsal as a good opportunity for photos.

  “I need to read over my Caroline article one more time before I hand it in,” I said. I moved purposefully toward my desk.

  “For once, we have some time before the next issue crunch. Unpack that box, will you?” Boss said, looking directly at me. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  By the time Boss, Felicia, and I had decked the halls, Fergie was back with the ribbon-cutting photos. He had about 24 shots, some qu
ite interesting, and Boss was cooing over a few of them. Fergie kept looking at me, which I didn’t mind because he did it in a nice way. I winked, totally a lost art, and blew him a kiss, causing a grin, then went to my desk and reread my article. It struck me there was no mention of Derek. Then I thought, why should there be?

  “Look at the photos on this card,” Fergie said. He handed me a memory card with my name written on it.

  I inserted it in my laptop, expecting to see all angles of ribbon cutting, and political figures, but no. The first image was me last night, looking svelte but uncomfortable at the food table with the ornamental cabbages. I looked vulnerable, even in my black dress with my leather-cased smartphone at the ready. The second and last image was a sharp close up of the mistletoe at Caroline’s, shot through the archway, with out-of-focus candles shimmering in the background. My stomach flipped.

  Mistletoe. Now, I normally don’t believe in otherworldly happenings. There’s not enough time in life to figure those things out. But when I see mistletoe, any mistletoe, what I see is a man and a woman, a ghostly image, pale and transparent. They flit under the archway or hall light or underneath the doorjambs, wherever the mistletoe hangs. Then the location changes to under the archway in the house where I grew up, and the man and woman become my father, a tall blond man, and Mrs. Clark, our neighbor, a tiny blond woman. They are holding each other close in an embrace and kissing each other on the mouth, their eyes closed. I had seen under-the-mistletoe kisses before but this one was different. In my 12-year-old eyes, with that kiss, they might as well have been committing one of the few things that I had learned about in Sunday School that I remembered. It was one of the Ten Commandments.

  It was their enjoyment in that moment, the way they looked at each other, that upset me for days afterward. I didn’t dare say anything to anyone about it, especially my mother. But after that kiss, I felt less certain about many things.

  My mother and father argued frequently after that night. At least between Christmas and New Year’s, most conversations were argumentative, and at first, conducted softly in another room. Soon they made no attempt to hide their differences about pretty much everything, but I sensed the big difference was about what I had seen between Dad and Mrs. Clark. Most of the time Mom ended up crying, I know she did, but she tried to hide it and never would explain to my sister and me when we dared ask what was wrong.

  Whatever was wrong went really wrong the day my father moved out, slamming doors and pushing his suitcase, typewriter and boxes of his books and writings out the doorway, taking everything but the purple chair. The mistletoe hung from the woodwork in the archway between the dining room and the living room, swaying with the force of the slam.

  Our lives went on, but never the same, and the mistletoe image stayed with me, even to the point where every year at Christmas I consider therapy, but never quite make it there.

  Fergie’s photo was beautiful and festive and, I suppose, meant to be a romantic image for me. I smiled and blew him another kiss. He would be happier not knowing I was going to press the delete button.

  This will explain my reaction when I walked into the newspaper office early the next day and saw mistletoe, hanging in the place where we all stood the most, under the archway near the coffee pot. I snapped on the lights but not quickly enough to dissipate the image of the blond man and that woman, catapulting me back to my adolescence, a place where, if I go, always makes for a bad day.

  I grabbed the three-legged stool, climbed up on it, and yanked at the mistletoe. I got it, but the stool tipped over. I jumped, relying on my catlike reflexes but, obviously not having any, landed not on the ball of my right foot, but on my ankle. I crumpled to the ground clutching the evil leaves and berries.

  “Shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit,” I screamed, then moaned, then cried. I was sobbing and clutching my ankle when Felicia walked in a few minutes later. She helped me up, got some ice, and propped me in my purple easy chair. Then she picked up the phone.

  “Who are you calling?” I sniffled.

  “Boss,” she said in a questioning tone, then started muttering into the phone so I couldn’t hear.

  I looked at my ankle and it was big.

  “She says to stay put,” Felicia said as authoritatively as a college intern can.

  I started to get up but couldn’t stand.

  Boss’s arrival, her call to Fergie, him carrying me to his Jeep, the drive to the emergency room, waiting hours for a cast, painkillers and a crutch, and finally being placed by Fergie’s strong arms on my new red couch, all seemed a story that someone else was writing.

  My ankle throbbed and I dutifully popped the pills the doctor had given me. Boss, Fergie and Felicia all sat in my living room and watched me get woozy. Boss didn’t want me to be alone, but she had to get back to work. She assigned Fergie to stay and said she would call for reports.

  “What the hell were you thinking anyway?” she said. “On a stool snatching mistletoe from the doorway. You’re supposed to be kissing under it, not lying under it.”

  I think I remember Boss patting my head and leaving with Felicia, who promised she’d be in touch.

  That left Fergie and me, and through the fog of pharmaceuticals, for the first time since I’d met him, he looked unsure.

  I smiled, probably dreamily, and patted the couch next to me. He sat down and put his arm around me. He kissed my head. I fell asleep seeing myself fall in slow motion, seeing that ghostly man and woman kissing in the doorway.

  Fergie stayed with me like a trooper. For several days, he was my human crutch, always there for me to lean on as I got up from the couch, out of bed, even out of the shower, during which he closed his eyes and covered them with his hand while I reached for my bathrobe. Even so, this was somewhat dicey because, in all this excitement, Fergie and I had not yet been together in a biblical sense. With a cast on my ankle, it didn’t look like it was going to happen for a while either.

  But proximity breeds something and perhaps a wet woman with her casted foot wrapped in a plastic bag is irresistible to some men. After a few days, when my ankle was approaching being more inconvenient than throbbing with pain, Fergie was sitting on the toilet seat cover waiting for me to get out of the shower. I stepped out, with my good foot first, the plastic bag foot trailing, reaching for my robe, but he handed me a plush red bath sheet and this time his eyes were not closed, not even in teasing.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Bought it because you seem to like red,” he said. “The couch, you know. Been spending a lot of time there. And, you look so good in red.”

  I wrapped the towel around me and he began rubbing me gently with the terrycloth. I felt a rush of desire and it felt so good. I put my arms around his neck and he scooped me up and took us both to the bed.

  His hands explored and stroked and were deliberate and intent on pleasing me, I could tell, unlike some of the other hands I’d experienced. Soon I didn’t even want to be careful of my ankle and it was Fergie who had to whisper positions like a quarterback, a pretty damn good quarterback, to make it all happen.

  I’ve noticed there’s a certain euphoria that comes after sex, especially if you really feel connected with your partner. And I was definitely connected.

  “What are you not good at?” I said, cuddling up against him with my wet hair on his chest.

  “Cuddling,” he said.

  “Oh, come on.” I propped myself on one elbow to see his face. Only a tiny smile as his eyes met mine.

  “Really. Don’t enjoy it,” he said.

  “You just haven’t cuddled with the right person.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So, you don’t like this?” I fitted myself as closely as I could to him, sliding my clunky cast over his feet.

  “This actually is not my definition of cuddling. This to me means, ‘I want more’.” He pushed himself up on his elbow and we were face to face.

  I smiled. He gently pushed me down and kissed me longer a
nd more sensuously than anyone ever had. I did want more.

  This was not the time to do any of that psychoanalytic stuff I normally get into, either inside my head or aloud to him. So I just held him close and fell asleep, no dreams, against the man who didn’t cuddle.

  The next day I invited him to come home with me for Christmas.

  Chapter Three

  Time to Make a Resolution

  Living in upstate New York, I accept that snow is a threat every time I drive home for the holidays. The day we left for my mother’s house, there was not much snow as yet, so driving was more boring than challenging. Fergie and I were about two hours into the trip and even really good music wasn’t helping. So far, we had found out that his country music tastes and my alternative rock preferences were not compatible.

  We agreed to no music for a while and did, for a time, ride in silence.

  Then Fergie said, “What a few weeks we’ve had, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That party. Then your ankle. Then us.”

  It sounded like he wanted to talk about those things in some kind of order so I went with it.

  “You’re a really good sport,” I said.

  “That door woman at Caroline’s. Something else, eh?”

  “Just can’t get her out of your mind, can you?”

  “And the dwarf, too,” he said. “What a pair. Actually had a freak show type dream that night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember him at the emergency room?” Fergie said.

  “Who?”

  “That Derek guy. From the party. He was there.”

  “To see me?”

  Fergie snorted. “Why to see you?”

  I shrugged. My instincts told me now was not the time to show any interest in Derek’s being there.

  “Looked like he had a client there or something,” Fergie continued. “Maybe he’s an ambulance chaser. I was worrying about you, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to him.”

  “Hmmm, worrying is nice.” I tried to make my response noncommittal.