What a Kiss Can Do

by Kathy Johncox

  I tapped my pencil, warming to my subject. Hmmm. Fergie could do a photo spread of the new museum. And Felicia could run a high school poetry contest with a prize attached. I could be the woman about town and get people’s impressions of the arts in general and see if indeed it is the opinion of the tax-paying public that arts should be the first to go. I was curious to know how the general public felt about that. Yes, the arts needed a shot in the arm. People needed to think of the arts as important, relevant parts of the life of the community, and to think of the people involved in the arts as creating activities that made the community an interesting and fulfilling place to live. Of course there would be movie and theater reviews and possibly even a restaurant recommendation page—food as art. Ah yes. It almost wrote itself.

  This spurt of creativity was my anti-doldrum defense. If I ever was going to be depressed, it was going to be in February. And I really had cause not to be this year. Actually two causes. Fergie and Derek. More Fergie than Derek, of course, because Fergie was in the picture just about every day. Witty, jovial and fun Fergie, suggesting things to do, places to go, people to see. Most of the time, this was okay, but it could also make me tired.

  I have a theory that some people are energized by other people and some people are sapped by them. I’m both or either, depending on the hormones. For example, Fergie suggested we organize a cabin party in the park for friends and colleagues, complete with sleds and cross country skis, fireplace and hot alcoholic libations. Just the idea of organizing it exhausted me. Even creating the guest list was enough to require drugs. But, then I had the idea that the paper should do it as a big “thank you” to all the people who advertised, dropped everything for photos and let us enter their businesses and homes with tape recorders and laptops, and to let us tell their stories. This required a staff meeting.

  “Don’t you see, it’ll be less work if the paper does it?” I said earnestly. “We’d have way more resources.”

  “But it won’t be as intimate, as fun,” Fergie argued.

  It was the closest to arguing we had done in our nearly three months together.

  “But if we combine the arts insert and the party, we’ll get so much more mileage out of it. People and business are the lifeblood of this paper and this is our chance to make sure it stays that way.” I punctuated this pitch with a long sip of coffee. “The cabin-type party would kick it off.”

  Boss was looking at me as though she’d never seen me before, like I was the goddess of new business or something.

  “You are bastardizing my idea of a relaxing winter picnic and making it a huge, stress-filled, working-overtime big deal,” Fergie said.

  He was looking at all of us—Felicia, Boss, me, and the few other people in the room.

  Here, I could have pointed out that Fergie wasn’t exactly on the staff per se. That he was a freelancer who worked pretty regularly, and who was getting somewhat uppity, but I didn’t say it. I could see his point, but as a doldrums antidote, which I was selfishly seeking, the bigger the project, the better. At least that’s what I thought then.

  “The good of the many outweighs the good of the one,” I said. That was a direct Star Trek quote from the first movie where Spock dies then comes back in the sequel on a planet created to regenerate and sustain life. It seemed apropos but probably no one knew what I was talking about anyway.

  Boss just kept looking at me. I wondered if she knew the quote.

  “Rita’s right,” Boss said finally. “We need a team project and we need to increase subscriptions and this could do both.”

  Fergie rolled his eyes, a sign of defeat.

  “Fergie, you will plug in on this, won’t you? We’ll need you,” Boss said.

  “For the good of the cause,” I said.

  That evening, sitting on my couch, me at one end, Fergie at the other, we were watching a movie and not cuddling. I was wrapped in my maroon, green and tan afghan and hugging a big microfiber pillow.

  “Fergie, you’ll help with this insert thing, won’t you? We need you.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Good old Fergie. He’ll be there.” Then he actually sighed.

  “Whoa. What’s this?”

  “I’ve noticed that getting my way in life has become harder since I met you.”

  “That’s the way…life is,” I said. I nearly said that’s the way love is but my mouth wouldn’t go there.

  “I’ll be glad to help. Who am I kidding? We’ll have a great time. We always do.”

  I think that’s what people who have been married for a long time say, but how would I know for sure, not really knowing anyone with a long-term commitment other than my sister.

  So I watched the rest of the movie, with my eyes but not with my head, because I was thinking about love. I was thinking about my three former boyfriends, previously mentioned. The one was married, the others stuck on themselves. The word “love” never came to me in those relationships. That word did not connect with my feelings for those guys. There was friendship, yes. And sex. And just hanging out. There was some element of the expectation of being together, doing things together except for the married guy, which should have been a clue.

  But there had been no joy, really. And joy was important to me. The joy of seeing that person come toward you, in the darkened parking lot with the Rolex watch…. No. Wait. Stop. This is Fergie I am thinking about here, the man sitting next to me on the couch, the man who made me think about the word “love” in the first place. Let me start again. The joy of knowing that he’ll be there, plugging into what makes me happy, caring about how I feel, knowing when I’m too tired to cook, rubbing my feet. This thought came as Fergie started rubbing my feet.

  But is all that love or is it comfort? Is it joy or is it happiness? Is there a difference? I was getting a headache. And I really wanted to cuddle. I shifted my weight down toward Fergie and leaned into him. He let me do that and even put his arms around me. I thought it was a start. Maybe love is tolerating someone’s cuddle. I fell asleep.

  Soon we were calling it the insert from hell. The doldrums were definitely gone, replaced by the big-time stress of planning the issue, making sure we got and thanked our big advertisers, organizing the party, deciding food, drink and location. Plus, I was writing like a fiend, interviewing the high school English teacher about the short story he had published in “Harper’s Magazine,” and talking with Laurent Lefrois, imported director of Caroline’s latest effort, an adaptation of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs with a French twist. Hah. His next challenge was going to be putting a French twist on one of Shakespeare’s comedies, As You Like It, the movie of which starred Kenneth Branagh. I pretty much had to make up what he was saying because his accent was so thick. I had the general idea and Caroline filled in the rest with such gusto that it crossed my mind she might be in love. That word again.

  Fergie was canvassing for appropriate photos and managed to happen upon Celeste, the giantess from the party, at the grocery store. Turns out she’s working for Caroline as a concierge, if that’s French enough. Fergie just can’t get enough of her and took a lot of pictures, although none really usable for our purposes.

  It took three weeks of solid work to plan the insert in addition to the regular paper. I’m including weekends here. There was little time for anything else except eating and a bit of sleeping, occasional quickie sex and answering a few phone messages from Derek. I was trying to keep Fergie and Derek separate in my life and in my thoughts.

  Speaking of Caroline, she offered her house for the party and Boss accepted, as Caroline was good for many stories as well as for bringing interesting people to town.

  It was snowing lightly, February 28, the night of the soiree, as Caroline and Laurent were calling it. It seemed like it took hours just to carry in the booze, dishes and munchies. We chose the caterer, because I told Boss about the purple stuff and the congealed this and that that I had seen at Caroline’s in December, and we didn’t want to risk having anything that
looked like that at our event.

  We actually chose Poor Boy Caterers because they were advertisers of ours and had the best selection of finger sandwiches in town. We had a French, what else, summer picnic theme going, lots of wicker baskets from the dollar store and red and white checked tablecloths everywhere. Munchies included baguettes and cheeses, specifically brie en croute with raspberry sauce, and several types of pate, as well as grapes of all colors and sizes.

  With the sandwiches, we’d asked for several soups, crudités and then dessert, something French. The whole event was designed to be something different and memorable. The newspaper insert was our best effort to date. The stories were interesting and the photos were really photo stories, illustrating the best of the arts community efforts in our area. We used color judiciously, and graciously thanked all the right people using all the right words, mostly mine, some Felicia’s; and all the right photos, all Fergie’s.

  We set up, and arranged our appetizers and everything looked great. Tasted great, too. How did we know? What great host doesn’t sample the fare? Caroline and Laurent bustled around. Caroline, with her flowing caftans of the ‘70s, fussed with everything as Laurent, looked on, a French Ichabod Crane with his shock of dark hair scooped over one eye, long lean legs and European cut, very tight jeans, a white shirt and a black cashmere jacket.

  Fergie and I were rearranging the drawing room and had to push some of the furniture around. We stopped for breath under the chandelier and he kissed me just like he had that night under the mistletoe. We didn’t say anything, just stood there looking at each other basking in something that began to make whatever was left of the doldrums go away.

  Then the doorbell rang and we scrambled to get the room ready for the caterer. Juan and Yevgeny pushed a large cart into the room, and it briefly crossed my mind that a Spaniard and a Russian were the ones making the French food, but I let that go. They unloaded several very large pots of soup, one some tortellini based and the other apple-squash-shrimp bisque. Assorted breads and croissants in bags magically appeared around elegant soup tureens.

  After midnight, it would be March. Things would be different, I felt it somehow. But we still had a few hours to go and the place was filling up. My face was starting to hurt from smiling, but people seemed to be having a great time. Every once in a while, I saw a flash, which told me where Fergie was.

  I had just finished a conversation with Caroline about the spring theater season, experimental theater, she called it, when I saw Derek walk in. He was not on my invite list, I knew that. I like to be prepared, really prepared if I am going to have a nervous breakdown and this didn’t give me enough time at all. He looked around, saw me, waved, smiled and headed my way.

  “Rita,” he said. “Good to see you.”

  Caroline doesn’t like to be ignored, you can imagine, and so she horned in, gushingly so. I saw a glint of irritation in Derek’s dark brown eyes. He said a few nice things to her that started her twittering. This gave me a minute to compose myself. Then he touched my elbow, steering me away with an “I need to talk to the newspaper lady,” excuse, which Caroline bought.

  “I’ve been terribly busy. No time to call you after our dinner. It’s been weeks. Way too long,” he said.

  “I’ve been busy, too. What you see here is nearly a month’s worth of full tilt effort.”

  “But I did intend to call and say how much I enjoyed our evening.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “Do you mean you enjoyed the evening too, or that you intended to call?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters to me. A phone call is an intimate way of expressing pleasure at time spent together. It clarifies certain things, or at least brings them into the light. Enjoying time spent together without commenting on it leaves both parties in the dark about, well, many things.”

  I’d seen this episode on Seinfeld. Elaine and Jerry have this big discussion about “The Call” after the date and what it means, how long you wait to make it, and what you say. I had given “The Call” some thought in my own life and decided it just complicated matters, especially if the person you called was surreptitiously married. I long ago had decided it wasn’t for me.

  Besides, a call indicated some kind of ongoing connection, a continuance of conversation or thought, or the well-being experienced on the actual date. It meant something more could or would happen. Now, just talking about the call gave a promise of something.

  He looked at me intensely, which I never like, but this look was even more disconcerting as I had to look down somewhat to receive it. He had to look up. This is one of my problems. I’ve never felt like patting his head, but I could easily do it automatically, as though he were my adolescent nephew. It could happen instinctively, without malice of forethought (I believe that’s a legal term) and it would be devastating.

  That a friendship could hang so delicately in the balance is distressing, especially when you want it to be secure. And I did, I realized, want it to be secure. So much so, that let me take a minute here to confess in the weeks since our dinner, I had felt compelled to do some research on achondroplasia, one of the medical terms associated with dwarfism. I think I knew it was a genetic condition, but I didn’t know that the incidence is one per 26,000 to 40,000 births.

  The most intriguing thing was that average size parents begetting dwarf children is the most common situation. If both parents are dwarfs, genetically there is a 25 percent chance that their child will be average size. With the way the world, and science are today, the short-statured community fears that if dwarfism is detected in utero, parents will terminate the pregnancy. I believe it’s eugenics that tries to improve human qualities by selecting and eliminating certain traits. These tests could become one of the battery of screening tests mothers-to-be take to make sure they are having a healthy child.

  I don’t want to get too deeply into this, but these kinds of things go through a writer’s head. Curiosity killed the cat and has assassinated many relationships. But not knowing enough and not getting the facts straight can be equally dangerous errors.

  One more thing is germane. In terms of what to call people with dwarfism, politically correct changes all the time but what currently is acceptable is dwarf, little person, LP or person of short stature. Of course, using the person’s name is always preferable.

  So I am standing there ostensibly talking about “The Call,” but really accessing my personal, internal hard drive for everything I had learned about dwarfism.

  “Anyway, I’ll pick you up Thursday for dinner at 7:30. Text me your address.” Derek handed me his business card just as Fergie came around the corner and parked himself on my right.

  “Hello,” said Derek. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, at least formally. I believe we did talk in the emergency room.”

  Fergie is even taller than I am, and had to actually bend over to shake Derek’s hand. Fergie introduced himself, then commented on seeing Derek at Caroline’s holiday bash as well.

  We chatted inanely for a few minutes when Scott Northrup, the amateur meteorologist I consult when I need a “unique” angle, for the weather, came over to talk to Derek.

  After nodding to Fergie and me, Scott said, “There’s been another sighting.”

  My ears perked right up, thinking about the wolf at the daycare, but my whole body went on alert when they began talking about that odd occurrence some weeks ago, in the cornfield at Sweet’s Corners, on the east side of Bridgefield, just the event I was thinking about a while back but didn’t have time to follow up on.

  “So d’you think it’s anything, then?” Derek asked.

  “Hard to tell,” said Scott. “Only saw it once and it felt like a blip with my sunglasses on. But it was a green blip.”

  “I’d love to go out there and look around. I know it’s private property and I’d have to get permission. D’you think it’s worth it?”

  “I don’t know. Closest we’ve come around here
to any extra-terrestrial anything. There are some people here who follow this kind of thing. They might have some information. Not for the newspaper, though.” Scott looked sheepish, like he had said too much. Or maybe I just imagined it.

  “You taking any action?” Derek asked.

  “Called the Feds, the UFO hotline, like I’m supposed to. They weren’t too interested. I’ll keep watching though.”

  “Good man.” Derek patted him on the shoulder. “Maybe I’ll contact you about hooking up with those other folks. Oh, have to go over and say hello to my banker.” Derek waved absentmindedly and strode across the room.

  Scott walked away. Fergie and I were left to ponder.

  “Think it’s anything?” he asked.

  My mind was sifting through everything I knew about local UFO watchers, which was not a lot, and I was wondering about the absentminded wave. The Derek I was coming to know never did anything absentmindedly. Something was up.

  “Let’s keep an eye out,” I said. “Maybe a trip to Sweet’s Corners when the weather improves.” I took his arm and led him to the brie. Thank God for the distraction of UFOs.

  A laugh tells a lot. I usually try to listen for a laugh because, like with a handshake, it gives you a feel for personality. Caroline’s laugh was raucous, as expected. It craved attention. Boss’ laugh was short and quick as though she were in a hurry to get it over with. When I was younger, my mother’s laugh came easily, as though it were bubbling forth, a fountain of well being in a world of uncertainty

  I heard Derek laughing from the other room. It was a cultured laugh, a withholding laugh, like there was something funny about what had been said that only he knew and he wasn’t sharing it. Fergie laughed freely, sharing whatever he thought was worth laughing at, and I smiled when I heard him. But there was something about the Derek laugh that held back, like he was waiting for the thing that really was funny. There was also something about the way I felt his eyes on me, but when I looked up, he was looking elsewhere.