Kissing in Manhattan

by David Schickler

  “You like?”

  James whirled. Beside him stood a red-haired woman in skimpy silver bikini armor and black battle boots, smoking a cigarette. She had goose bumps on her naked arms and thighs, and cemented onto her smiling front teeth were the golden letters B-A-R-B-Y.

  “Um . . . I,” sputtered James.

  “I was on my smoke break.” Barby dropped her cigarette, ground it under a heel.

  “Well, sure,” said James.

  Barby danced playfully toward James, swaying her hips, making James stumble back into the store. Barby sashayed inside too. She pulled the door shut behind her.

  “Whew,” she said. “Cold out.”

  “Um,” said James.

  Barby kept herself between James and the door. She turned a pirouette, tapped her chrome panties. “Pretty cool, huh? We’re having a sale. The theme is ‘The holidays are coming, so you should too.’ “

  James’s cheeks flushed. “I . . . wasn’t really shopping.”

  “Balls and chains are marked down,” explained Barby. “So are nipple clamps.”

  James glanced around nervously. The walls were covered with masks and gags and dangerous-looking whips.

  “I just need a rest room,” lied James.

  “Sure. Long as you buy something.” Barby yawned and pointed. “See that shelf labeled Orifice Fucktoys?”

  A squeak came out of James’s mouth.

  “You all right?” said Barby.

  “I just . . . swallowed my gum.”

  “Anyway, past the Fucktoys there’s a stairwell. Bathroom’s one floor down.”

  James sprinted for the stairs, hurried underground. At the base of the stairs he caught his breath, wiped perspiration from his temple.

  “Jesus Christ,” whispered James. He stifled an impulse to laugh at himself, at his prudish embarrassment. Looking around, he was surprised to find himself in a dank concrete hallway of some length, with several doors leading off of it. The doors were pink and each bore a word or phrase in neat black paint. One said BARBY’S, another said FOR SLEEPING, a third said LAV, and a fourth said PRIVATE. At the far end of the hall opposite James stood a closed black fire door, hinged on a track. Scrawled across it in drippy pink letters were the words JOHN CASTLE’S NOMADIC.

  James glanced back up the stairs. Barby wasn’t in view and there weren’t any other patrons around. James wasn’t normally an adventurous fellow—at this hour he was usually sipping ginseng tea and paying his Flat Michael’s check—but something inspired him now to tiptoe to each door and put his ear to it. He heard nothing through any of them except the last, the fire door. There seemed to be some clanging going on behind it, some meeting of metals, as if swords were being smithed. Also, the closer he stood to the door, the more he sensed that a warmth—perhaps a literal fire—was alive on the other side.

  James stepped back. The fire door was crude, thick, and ancient. It was made of steel and iron, and for some reason it reminded James of the antique but operable Otis elevator in the Preemption. He would have guessed that the fire door hadn’t been opened in decades except that the pink painted letters on its surface looked fresh.

  “John Castle’s Nomadic,” read James. “John Castle’s Nomadic.”

  He stared at these words, whispered them over and over. He couldn’t make sense of them, but the rhythm of their syllables in his mouth and the ping and tong of whatever metalwork was under way behind the door proved too much to resist. James grabbed the handle hook on the door and put his weight to it. The door slid easily aside on its hinges.

  What he saw inside looked half like a blacksmith’s shop and half like a storage cellar. It was a large room mostly in shadow, with a glowing orange kiln and small furnace against the far wall. Beside the kiln stood a tall bookshelf, two stools, and a wooden table. The ground was concrete. The thirty yards of floor space between James and the kiln were crammed with weathered cargo trunks. A path that stretched from the fire door to the kiln had been cleared between these trunks, like a church aisle leading to an altar. As James stepped down this aisle, a scented steam rose from the furnace, and the kiln fire flickered like a great, quiet candle. Also, the clanging had ceased as soon as James opened the door.

  “Hello?” called James.

  As his eyes grew sure in the darkness, he stopped walking. The beaten cargo trunks around him were opened and turned toward the aisle like display cases. Within them, on beds of black velvet, lay the most stunning, prodigious collection of gems that James had ever seen. There were diamonds, fat as fists, and inch-thick emeralds cut in squares, like portions of some sweet, gelatinous dessert. There were amber stones, mica-thin but pancake-wide, set on golden saucers. The facet of a ruby, shining in the kiln light, showed James the entire glimpse of his profile.

  “Whoa,” whispered James.

  “Who sent you?” boomed a man’s voice.

  James jumped in place. “Whoa,” he said again.

  “Who sent you?”

  James turned one revolution, scanning the darkness for the speaker. “N-nobody sent me. I just . . . wandered in.”

  “No one just wanders in. People are sent.”

  James heard a scrape behind the bookshelf. “Where are you?” he asked.

  A severe-looking man appeared from behind the stacks. He had a full head of shock white hair, but stood with such firm, healthy carriage that James couldn’t say he was elderly. Also, the man wore a black tuxedo with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as if he’d been engaged in some physical labor. In fact, he held an enormous hammer in one hand and a thin gold necklace in the other, and James surmised that the recent clanging had been the work of the hammer.

  “I—I’m sorry if I disturbed you. Are you John Castle?”

  “Never mind about that. Come over here.”

  The man’s voice had a resounding quality, as if he were calling out within a cave. James moved closer to the kiln, inside which he could see white-hot rocks or embers. He could also see clearly now the eyes of the white-haired man. They were brown eyes, rich and earthy like soil after rain, and they were watching him closely.

  “Hmm.” The man set his hammer and necklace on the table. He took James’s right hand, inspected the palm.

  “Oh,” said James. “Well. Hello.”

  The man dropped James’s hand. He sniffed the air, as if to place where he might have smelled James before.

  “Hmm,” said the man. “Who’d you say sent you?”

  “Nobody. I don’t know. Barby?”

  The man shook his head. He situated himself on one stool, nodded at the other.

  “Perhaps you’d like to sit down,” said the man.

  “Well . . .” began James.

  “Sit down,” said the man.

  James sat. He looked at the man, and the man looked at James.

  “Barby doesn’t send people. And people don’t just wander in.” The man tapped the table. “So who sent you?”

  James stared back at the fire door. Through it he could see a square of normal light, a peek of the stairway. But for some reason he was not afraid to be where he was, in this strange room with this stranger. James liked happening upon odd corners of Manhattan. He liked this cellar the way he liked Flat Michael’s or the Cloisters or the Otis elevator in his apartment building. Plus the white-haired man beside him seemed calm but deeply sure of himself, like a Supreme Court justice.

  “I don’t recall having been sent by anybody,” said James honestly. “I was just waiting to eat dinner. I was looking around.” James peered at a trunk full of diamonds. “I guess maybe I sent myself.”

  “Good answer,” said the man. “Bravo.”

  The fire crackled. The stools had no backs, yet the man opposite James sat with fine posture, his hands on his knees. James waited to see what would happen next. Apparently, he and this stranger were going to sit on these stools beside this furnace.

  “Um. My name is James Branch.”

  “Yes, I know. It’s a good name.”
/>   “Thank you. Um. How do you know it?”

  “Never mind about that.”

  James waited to be offered the man’s name, but he wasn’t. He stole glances at the stranger’s white hair and strong jawline. His face had a hard dignity that James seemed to recognize, as if the man were a veteran film star whose picture James was used to.

  “Have we met somewhere before?” asked James.

  “Hmm,” said the man.

  James rubbed his neck. He cast his eyes over the opulence around him, the trunks of gems. He wondered if the man had gathered this treasure to himself in some grand, death-defying manner. Or maybe, James thought, he just forged them out of thin air in his kiln.

  “So the sign on your door,” said James. “John Castle’s Nomadic. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  The man didn’t smile. “It means I get around.”

  “Oh. Are you franchised?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  James decided to try a joke. “And are all your places in sex-shop basements?”

  The stranger shrugged. “I am where I am.” He stood and clapped his hands, as if some preliminary negotiations had been settled. He beckoned James toward a chest of gems. “So, what can I interest you in tonight, Mr. Branch?”

  James sighed. He’d been happy just sitting. “Well. Thanks, but I don’t know that I need any . . . you know, diamonds or whatnot.”

  “You might soon. Perhaps you should have a look?”

  “I don’t think I—”

  “Have a look,” said the man sternly.

  James obeyed. He didn’t know why, but he felt compelled to follow the older man’s lead. So he crossed to the chest and inspected its contents. This particular chest contained gems fashioned into jewelry. Lining the edges of the chest was a string of pearls long as a lasso. Coiled double around any woman’s neck, James decided, these pearls would still droop to her waist. Besides the necklace there were brooches of amethyst, moonstone finger rings, and baubles whose origin or application to the human frame James could not discern. One ankle bracelet was a thick gold chain loaded with chunks of topaz so large that the bracelet might have been a manacle, designed to restrain or delight a queen.

  “You may touch them,” said the white-haired man.

  Once again James obeyed. His fingertips descended, glided shyly over smooth, cool surfaces.

  “That one is heliotrope,” said the man. “These are garnets.”

  “But . . . I don’t have a girlfriend,” said James.

  “This is onyx.”

  James kept his fingers moving. The man in the tuxedo turned the chest toward the kiln, let more light spangle off the stones.

  “Beryl,” he said, pointing to what James touched. “Cat’s-eye. Agate.”

  James nodded. Quietly, almost without his noticing, his lips began repeating the names of the gems, as if he were sitting in Flat Michael’s, whispering for his dinner.

  “Jasper,” prompted the man.

  “Jasper,” said James.

  “Hyacinth.”

  “Hyacinth.”

  After a while James became silent and just touched the stones, let their winking in the kiln light wash over him like a spell. He admired coral, turquoise, lapis lazuli. It suddenly seemed correct to James that men had slaved for centuries to mine these precious things from the earth and offer them to women. Whether a shopgirl wore chain-mail brassieres or a bride wore her diamond ring, it struck James as lavishly proper that women should flaunt the strong, sturdy stuff of the universe in a way that men couldn’t.

  All at once a great sadness rose in James’s heart. He knew that he couldn’t afford the treasures spread before him, but what struck him now with a pang was the fact that even if he could gather a trove of rubies or sunstones, he had no one to give them to.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said again. The revelation sounded half right, so he tried it once more.

  “I don’t have a woman,” he affirmed.

  “You might soon,” said the white-haired man.

  James blinked. Lost in epiphany, he’d forgotten the man.

  “What?” asked James.

  The man in the tuxedo stood tall behind the chest. “Let’s imagine, James Branch, that a woman was coming into your life sometime soon. If you loved her and you could give her any one of the items in this chest as a gift, which would you choose?”

  James bit his lip. He gazed around at the cellar, the furnace, the door.

  “How do you know my name?” he asked, for the second time.

  “Never mind about that. What one thing in this chest would you give the woman you loved?”

  James studied the man’s face. He searched again for some clue as to how he knew this person. He also tried to find any malice in the stranger’s gaze, any sneer to his lip that would reveal whether he was toying with James, testing him merely for sport. But the man seemed earnest.

  James lowered his eyes. He felt embarrassed. “I—I couldn’t afford a single thing you have.”

  The stranger sighed patiently. “Say you could, though. What would you give her?”

  James couldn’t help looking. The gems were lovely. All right, he told himself. All right, what the hell.

  “Um,” he said. His eyes browsed the chest. Not the snake of pearls, he thought. Not the topaz anklet. James had seen such accoutrements in Madison Avenue bars, heaped on the necks and limbs of fashion models. He liked it more when a woman wore just one piece of jewelry, something simple and elegant.

  “Maybe this,” he said, lifting a small silver bracelet. Strung along the bracelet were tiny jade dolphins.

  The white-haired man took the bracelet from James, slipped it into a pocket. “Sorry. This one’s reserved for a different party. Choose another.”

  “Um. Weren’t we only speaking hypothetically?”

  “Choose another,” ordered the man.

  James surveyed the gems. He considered an egg-sized ruby, a pyramid-shaped diamond. They were all too giant, too oppressively wonderful, to suit any woman that might date James. In one corner of the chest, though, stuck between two ripples of velvet, lay a pair of small earrings. The settings were plain gold, and the stones were a polished, muted white. James picked the earrings up.

  “What are these?”

  “Opals,” said the man.

  James turned his palm toward the kiln. When firelight struck the opals, tiny prisms came to life inside them. James got a glimpse in his mind of a woman with warm skin and hair the color of honey. He pictured the opals against her skin.

  “I’d give her these,” declared James.

  The white-haired man nodded curtly. “Good answer. Bravo.”

  James stared at the little white worlds in his hand. “They’re beautiful,” he said.

  “They’re yours.”

  James looked up. “What’s that?”

  “You heard me. Keep them somewhere safe. You’ll know when to give them to her.”

  James looked back and forth from the opals to the man. “You—you don’t understand. There is no her.”

  Just once the man’s face softened. He smiled like a parent lifting a curfew.

  “There will be soon,” he said.

  For a moment James loved the conviction in the stranger’s voice. He thought of the women he worked with, of Barby, of the woman who’d just popped into his mind, the one with honey-colored hair. Then he shook his head.

  “B-but,” he stammered, “you still d-don’t see. Even if I had somebody, I couldn’t really afford to buy—”

  “This transaction is complete.” In a nimble move the stranger kicked shut the trunk of jewelry at his feet, knelt, and locked it. The opals still lay in James’s palm.

  “But there hasn’t been any transacting,” complained James. “I haven’t paid you any money. I can’t. You haven’t even told me how much these are.”

  The man sighed, his face stern again. “Money, money. Listen, James Branch. If I need something out of you, I�
�ll ask for it. In the meantime, go eat your Tilapia or Dingo or whatever it is you order up there. There ought to be a table coming free around now. Good-bye and good luck.” The stranger moved back toward the kiln, toward the hammer he’d left on the table.

  “Hey. Sir?” James cleared his throat loudly. He glanced at the closed trunk on the floor. He still hadn’t closed his fingers around the opals.

  “Um,” he said, “you’re very kind to offer me these, but I’m not entirely comfortable taking them without—”

  The white-haired man turned on James. The hammer was back in his hand, and, suddenly, some acute, terrifying purpose flashed in his eyes, as if the work he was resuming was none of James’s business.

  “W-whoa,” whispered James. His spine trembled. Without another word, and feeling like a thief, he turned and fled.

  All the next day James pondered what had happened. He brought the opals to work with him, took them slyly from his pocket, gazed at them during lunch. But he showed them to nobody and told nobody about them. He suspected that the manner in which the opals had come to him and the man who’d delivered them were powerfully inscrutable. He’d heard a story once about a hiker on some mountain who’d been struck by lightning from the only cloud in an otherwise blue sky. The man survived, having felt only a momentary sizzle in his brain and his toes. James felt like that man. He worried that if he spoke of the opals or showed them around to just anybody, they might vaporize in his hand.

  He did stare a bit more boldly that day, though, at the earlobes and haircuts of his female coworkers. He imagined the opals against each woman’s skin, asked himself if she could be the one.

  The other slightly bold action he undertook that evening was to return to Barby’s Bondage. Something told him not to push his bravado by entering the basement, but he did approach Barby herself, as she was stocking dildos on the Fucktoys shelf.

  “You again.” Barby was dressed like a civilian now, in blue jeans and a cotton sweater, though her teeth still professed her name.