Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  It was late October and you could smell the burning leaves. It was the smell of burning memories for him, all the memories of all the things he’d lost. Burning leaves and football games and walking in Central Park with Karin and making love on the rug before the fireplace, warmed by the dying embers … Well, there wouldn’t be any more football, no more Karin in his arms, but there would always be the smell of leaves and the clouds of memory.

  He was beginning to get used to the ache in his chest and the gaping wounds in his memory where Karin had gone to stay forever. He didn’t look at the photo albums anymore. He knew every picture by heart. Maybe he’d never look at them again. Never want to, never have to. There was no little Karin to show them to and say, look, honey, there she is, she was your mommy …

  But he still had to play out the hand, live his life, risk the pot. He was going to have to make it work so that at the end when somebody up there said well, that’s it, pal, zip-zip, that was your life, hope you had a good time, mate, you pass this way but once …

  He strolled on down Fifth Avenue, crossed Central Park South among the horse-drawn hacks, and went into the Plaza. The Oak Bar was sparsely populated and he sat at the long bar and ordered a weak bourbon and water. He was feeling like a Hemingway hero, a kind of Jake Barnes for World War II, lonely and tragic, only he knew he was a fake, of course. Hell, anybody eavesdropping inside his head would have thought he had a war wound. The gridiron war, a paltry tragedy. Order of the Purple Shoulder Pads.

  People would see him with his cane, he’d see them watching and whispering among themselves, wondering if he’d been at Pearl or Bataan or Wake Island or Corregidor. Every so often some fat old guy in a bar somewhere would come up to him and shake his hand with tears in his eyes and tell him how he’d got it at the Battle of the Marne or the Somme and Cassidy didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d gotten his at the Polo Grounds.

  But for the moment he wanted a drink or two while he thought about the future, where nothing much awaited and anything might be possible. He didn’t want to get drunk. He’d spent enough mornings through that summer holding his head as if it were the last known egg of the last known giant auk while he left the previous night’s ration of experience in the toilet bowl. He was finished with all that. He was getting straight and maybe he’d drop by and see if the team could use him as an assistant coach or as one of the old bums who sold programs outside the stadium for a dime …

  First, however, he’d have a drink or two and then go home and take a good clear look at the future. Figure out what he was going to do with the gas stamps. So he sat at the bar, watching the barman polishing glasses.

  He should have skipped the drink. He should have gone home then, before she found him …

  She sat on the stool next to him. All those empty stools but that one had her name on it. He saw her face in the mirror behind the bar. Her perfume was so faint you almost couldn’t smell it. It pulled you toward her, like a whisper. There was just enough to make you want to smell a hell of a lot more of it.

  She was short of breath, like she was nervous or had been hurrying. He felt her brush against him, wiggling her rear end on the stool. She took a deep breath. It was nerves. Her cigarette case clattered when she dropped it on the shiny surface of the bar. Then she spilled most of the Camels trying to pry one loose. Her hand was shaking. She wouldn’t catch his eye. Her voice was low and a little hoarse and there was a tremor in it.

  “Light me, please?”

  He struck a match and watched her lean forward to meet the flame. She was wearing cream-colored gloves and a casual suit the shade of tobacco. The jacket hung open. There was a cream silk blouse.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Don’t you smoke?” She seemed becalmed now that she’d sucked the smoke down into her lungs and blown it across the bar at their reflection.

  “No, I’m in training.”

  “Oh, dear, how serious. In training for what?”

  “For living as long as possible. Those things’ll kill you.”

  “Well, what’s to worry, then? I won’t live long. So I might as well smoke. So many things can kill you these days. But, then, maybe I like living dangerously.”

  “Then it’s your style.”

  “I followed you for the last ten blocks. Wondering if I dare do this. Scared of the consequences. Then, of course, I’d remembered that I’m an adventuress. It’s a good thing, too. The world’s a pretty inhospitable place these days. Like the lady in the operetta, I laugh in the face of my own mortality, tra-la, tra-la.” She told the barman she wanted a perfect martini.

  He nodded. “Coming right up, Miss Squires.”

  She finally looked at Cassidy. “Billy makes a perfect martini. All gin. Sort of passes the vermouth over the glass. A ritual.”

  “Sounds like you’re a regular here.”

  “I’m a regular lots of places.”

  He watched the bartender with his black leather bow tie and the lonely strands of dyed black hair carefully stretched across his shiny scalp. “He would.”

  “Would what?”

  “Make a perfect martini.”

  Billy placed the glass in front of her, centered on a cork coaster. Her long-fingered hand flicked the pale curtain of hair back from her face. She sipped. “Dutch courage. I need it.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Well, I haven’t seen you for a long time. I didn’t like that. And … and I heard about your wife. I’m so terribly sorry. You must feel helpless. It’s all so bloody awful.”

  “I’m getting used to the idea now. You know what they say.”

  “No, I don’t think I do.”

  “About war. It’s hell. But that’s not why you followed me.”

  “True. I was going to see Terry and then I saw you. I knew you’d be better for me than Terry … you’re not one of them. Them.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, all the ones I need to get away from. Max and Bennie and all of Max’s other happy elves. And Terry, too, for that matter. And all the people at the club. Heliotrope. Where, I notice, your face is ne’er seen anymore. I can’t move without their knowing everything I do.” She was twisting a sapphire and gold ring she wore on her right hand. “They’re smothering me … Max, all of them, I feel like a little adopted refugee who also happens to sleep with her new father—”

  “That ought to appeal to your sense of danger.”

  She sipped the last of her drink and waited for Billy to place another one before her. There was a long blond hair on her tobacco-colored lapel. She lit another Camel. Her lips left a dark red smudge on the paper. Cassidy was drowning in her.

  “You know what I told you that time?”

  “You’ve told me quite a lot.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean. Well, I really am … a whore. Through and through, it’s my nature.”

  “It’s all part of living dangerously.”

  “I think it’s something a woman’s born with, something that goes all wrong inside her—”

  “Like being born with one brown eye, one blue.”

  “Like being born crippled.” She stared at Billy and he moved off down the bar, polishing, polishing. “Apparently I can’t belong to any one man, can I? I feel like I’m going crazy—”

  “If she finds the right one, then it all calms down. She’s a whore no more. She’s in love and it’s a well-known fact that love conquers all. It can even change people’s natures.”

  “What a dope! What an innocent you are!”

  “Just a romantic.”

  “Nothing changes one’s nature. It’s a well-known fact, the leopard and his spots.”

  “You’re a youthful skeptic.”

  “No, Cassidy. I’ve told you what I am. And Max is driving me crazy. I’m Max’s girl. Max’s property. He gives me everything I want but he doesn’t want me, doesn’t understand about me … He’s my father but he also does it to me, that’s his fantasy. And I’m little Bo Peep. I want to get ou
t … but I’m afraid. He doesn’t understand I have to be available.”

  “What the hell are you punishing yourself for?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a disciple of Dr. Freud.”

  “No, just a smart guy with a winning Ipana smile.”

  “Oh, you poor guy.” She touched his hand. “Is it your winning smile that makes me unload all this baggage on you?”

  He shrugged. “Soul mates. We did watch a bunch of guys get murdered together.”

  She ignored him. “So I escaped this afternoon. Max was at a meeting with his lawyers and Bennie went off on an errand and no one was watching me. So I just left.” She shivered with the daring of it.

  “So why were you afraid to follow me?”

  “When you belong to Max you get to thinking there’s always somebody following you, watching you … it’s like one of Dali’s paintings, eyes watching you, clock faces melting, time running out. Or that movie, the razor slicing the eyeball. Sometimes I’d like to take a slice at all the eyes watching me. I’d like to hurt them … and all they’re being is kind, taking care of me, but always for Max—oh, well, why don’t you tell me your troubles?”

  “Women always seem to have better troubles …”

  “No, they just make a bigger deal of them.”

  “Well, Cindy, I’m going home now. It’s been very nice psychoanalyzing you again.”

  “Mind if I walk with you?”

  They walked all the way down Fifth Avenue and his leg felt okay. Almost a year, and a good day with the leg was an event. She didn’t say any more about being a whore, thank God. It was getting to be an old story. As they walked, he noticed that he was beginning to feel like a human being. He wasn’t thinking about the war. He wasn’t thinking about Karin. He was listening to her talk about her childhood in England and her brother Tony’s letters from Deerfield and the music she liked and where she liked to shop and her love of Dickens. She admired his blackthorn stick and she read the inscription and he told her about the sword.

  Standing in front of a church on the corner of Eleventh Street, she said, “Can I see your sword?”

  “Just press the button below the knob.”

  She grinned, felt for it. The knob rose solidly into the gloved palm. “Can I take it out?”

  “It’s your funeral.”

  Slowly she slid the blade out. Her eyes were shining.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said slowly.

  His living room seemed so bookish and unfamiliar, so humble, after all the months at Terry’s. Out past the trellis at Washington Square they were burning leaves, and the aroma of autumn was seeping into his apartment. The late afternoon was darkening. The clouds of leaf smoke hung over the square like the mists of Avalon.

  Cindy said she didn’t really feel like another drink so they sat talking, watching the last of the sunlight wiped away by dusk. She excused herself and went to the bathroom. Cassidy closed his eyes, leaned back. Max Bauman’s girl was in his bathroom. He hoped to hell nobody actually had been following her.

  When she came back from the bathroom, she’d taken off the gloves and the suit and the blouse and the brown and white pumps and the stockings and her garter belt and her panties which dangled from one finger. All she had on was the slip. It clung to her nipples as if it were soaking wet. She wriggled her toes, the nails red as precious stones arranged on the rug. She went around the room turning off the two table lamps so the light from the street left the room in gray shadows, enough light to see her by. She stood in front of him with her feet apart so the dim light haloed around her and between her legs. “Well,” she said, half swallowing the words, “you know what I told you.” She slid the straps of her slip down over her shoulders. Her eyes were cast down upon herself as if she were as interested in what would be exposed as he was. She pulled the slip down until the top caught on the points of her nipples. Right about then it occurred to him that her nipples were the only things in the world worth living, dying, or fighting for.

  She tugged the slip down until it slid over them, making the tight erectile tissue twitch, and he saw the soft outline of her tiny girlish breasts with the distended dark tips. She eased the slip down over the swell of her broad hips and let it drop to the floor. Her belly was flat, actually a slightly concave dish pouring the dark flood of pubic hair from its rim. Her breath caught in her throat. “I’m going to feel awfully foolish,” she whispered, “if you don’t want to fuck me.”

  She took his hand and led him past the bathroom into the bedroom. She lay down on the bed. The light from the bathroom lay like an icicle across the foot of the bed. He slipped out of his shirt and slacks and stood beside the bed watching her. She reached up with one hand and gently pulled his stiff penis out of his shorts. She moaned when her fingers closed around him. “Oh,” she murmured, “you’re slippery already, aren’t you …” She placed her other hand slowly and carefully between her legs and parted her thighs, bending her knees slightly. He watched transfixed by her deliberate movements while she probed in her pubic hair with her middle finger until she located the labia touching one another. Then she slowly parted the thick hair, spread the lips wide with her forefinger and ring finger. The darkness inside of her glistened.

  “Come to me,” she whispered. “Hurry. I want to take you in my mouth before it’s too late.”

  He lay down on the bed beside her, rested his face on the solid, smooth fleshiness of her inner thigh, smelled the richness of her sweat and the lubrication of her vagina which was quickly matting the hair. Her tongue was licking at him, he heard it and felt it, and he felt what came out of him thickening as her mouth slid over him, engulfed him, pulling at the center of him as if she would willingly do him injury if it would fill her mouth, satisfy her need, but she couldn’t hurt him, she could only try, and he licked at her fingers as she worked them in and out of herself, licked at the viscous saltiness as she removed them and smeared them across his mouth, and he pulled her open with both hands and leaned into the darkness and the flood of her and tasted her and plunged his tongue into her and worked his finger into the tightness, circling his finger within her anus, felt her hips arch off the wet sheet, heard her mouth sibilantly sucking his semen, gagging and choking and pulling him in again, felt her fingers tightening rhythmically around his testicles, milking him efficiently, familiarly, an expert at work, but when she felt his finger work its way to the hilt between her hips and felt his teeth nibbling at the tiny wet bud hidden behind the folds of her inner lips, the thrashing and the deep growling in her chest was more primitive than any performance, a cry of pain and release and vulnerability, and for just that moment she was the helpless little girl she sometimes parodied and for an instant at least he knew she was his, not someone born a whore doing her job or acting out a man’s fantasies, but a creature slipping off the high ledge into uncharted darkness and she pumped her belly and her thighs and her hips spasmodically, out of control, all the gears stripped, in fast forward for what seemed a very long time …

  When he pulled her around so that her face was near his, she quickly clamped her legs around his thigh and continued the slow gentle lapping of her internal sea, soaking his leg with the endless flow. And before he kissed her he saw the saliva and the clots of semen in the corners of her mouth and drifting in streaks across her soft, downy cheek and she was crying.

  An hour later she moved around on the damp, sticky bed, said, “I want it all again, Lew, all the same things. Don’t leave any of it out,” and she began. They clung together with all the same results and his mouth was rubbed raw by the thick hair between her legs and she lay gasping on her back, holding the back of one hand to her forehead, collecting semen on her fingertips from the corners of her mouth and absentmindedly massaging it into the bulging nipples while he looked up the length of her past the dark sodden mass of hair licked flat against her thighs and groin. There was nothing left anywhere, no desire, no strength, no need to be a whore. Not for a little while, anyway.


  Another hour passed and this time it was Cassidy waking, wanting her again. She was breathing deeply, asleep, her head down by his knees. He had to touch her, explore her again. He pulled her nearly dead weight across him, her belly wet and sticky on his chest, her knees on either side of his shoulders, and she moaned, a mixture of exhaustion and desire coming alive. He looked up into the wet darkness again, opened her again and she sobbed. “It hurts,” she whispered sleepily, “I’m sore …” He stroked her with his tongue, tasting it all again. She sighed and giggled deep down. “I think we could be arrested for everything we’ve been doing … nothing but unnatural acts …”

  He took his mouth away from her and picked a strand of hair from his lip. “I know, I know, ain’t a life of crime just grand …” And soon she was rocking back against his face and from beneath her he flicked his tongue across the fingers she’d worked back between her thighs and she wouldn’t stop until they’d both struggled over the top yet again. He was smiling in his own darkness. Not a natural act since they’d started. His kind of girl. They’d watched men die …

  She was dressed, leaning over him where he’d collapsed. She smelled like powder and perfume again. It was a quarter to ten. In half an hour she’d be singing at Heliotrope.

  She spoke insistently, battering at his weariness. “Listen to me, darling. I don’t know when I’ll see you again. Whatever you do, don’t call me. You’re going to want to talk to me and do all this again but you mustn’t call me. And don’t send me a note. Barely remember me if we meet.” She leaned down and kissed him. “I used your toothbrush. I needed it.” She sighed and touched his tiny, helpless, limp penis. “Take care of this brave little soldier.”

  “He’s a private,” he said.

  She pressed her fingers when he tried to say something else. “Hush. No questions, no little endearments. My only answer is, I don’t know. I’ve got to be careful. If he found out, he’d … he’d kill me. Now go to sleep.”

  He heard her leave and sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets smelted of sex. He inhaled deeply.