The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Stephanie Reents

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reents, Stephanie, 1970–

  The kissing list / Stephanie Reents.

  p. cm.

  1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Generation Y—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Chick lit. I. Title.

  PS3618.E437K57 2012

  813′.6—dc23 2011038354

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corp. for permission to reprint an excerpt from “This Is Just to Say” from The Collected Poems: Volume 1, 1909–1939 by William Carlos Williams, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Carcanet Press Limited for permission to reprint an excerpt from “This Is Just to Say” from The Collected Poems: Volume 1, 1909–1939 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.

  Selected stories in this work were previously published in the following: Epoch magazine: “Disquisition on Tears” and “Roommates”; Gulf Coast: “Love for Women”; New South: “Little Porn Story.”

  “Disquisition on Tears” subsequently published in O. Henry Prize Stories 2006: The Best Stories of the Year, copyright © 2006 by Vintage Anchor Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc. (New York: Anchor Books, 2006).

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95184-7

  JACKET DESIGN BY CHRISTOPHER BRAND

  v3.1

  In memory of my grandmothers,

  Jean Reents and Frances Bartron

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  KISSING

  ROOMMATES

  LOVE FOR WOMEN

  TEMPORARY

  NONE OF THE ABOVE

  GAMES

  MEMO

  LITTLE PORN STORY

  THIS IS JUST TO SAY

  DISQUISITION ON TEARS

  ANIMAL CRUELTY

  AWESOME

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  During that year, the year after the kissing list, I kissed a lot of people on the lips, unrelated to the usual factors such as gender, familiarity, or even sexual attraction. I traded spit on the corner of Houston and Mott with my out-of-town friend Dale, even though he was several inches shorter than me. I accidentally planted one on my college roommate and my best friend and running partner, Frances, too.

  “You can’t kiss me there,” Frances said, playfully socking my bicep. “With this rock, I could mess you up.” She pumped her fist, the almond-size diamond that she’d recently received glittering grotesquely. Then she gave me a quick, flirtatious lip brush back. “Don’t tell my financier.”

  I smooched a coworker in the middle of his going-away party. We’d never exchanged more than two sentences, but that afternoon, I discovered his well-moisturized lips tasted of chocolate. I got mouthy with a man named Peter, who would later become my boyfriend. He teased me relentlessly about not inviting him up that night, but it was past the witching hour, and I knew our kissing would be merely a prelude to more serious activities. I kissed countless other people, people I’ve forgotten now, they were so insignificant. The only people I didn’t kiss were those I actually wanted to: Lance and Laurie. But I’d lost Lance after that weekend in Santa Fe, and Laurie’s immune system was so delicate I donned a surgical mask whenever I visited. Sometimes kissing doesn’t count. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

  Take what happened with Anna. She and I had narrowly avoided a friend breakup during our graduate school days at Oxford over a certain incident in which Anna had kissed someone I was kissing and more than kissing, and I had kissed someone who was kissing (and perhaps more than kissing) someone else. Back then, Anna, Dixon, Vita, and I regularly got wasted at parties, standing underneath gloomy portraits of British aristocrats and drinking three-quid bottles of Portuguese wine. Vita, whom we called the tagalong, was a junior-year-abroader who lived in my house and sweetened our friendship with homemade pies. Dixon was my boyfriend and kissing partner, a black-haired, blue-eyed southerner whose greatest passions were arguing, college football, and antique marbles. And Anna, she was the voice of reason when Dixon got under my skin.

  One evening, as we weave-walked home through the streets, I saw Dixon and Anna exchange a sideways glance and knew, as one only can after too much to drink, that there was something in the way they avoided each other’s eyes.

  “Are you …?” I asked.

  “What?” Vita giggled. “Yes, I freely admit it. I’m drunk.” She started doing jumping jacks in the street.

  “I’m not talking to you.” I squared myself toward Dixon and Anna, but before I could ask my question, Anna opened her mouth, shook her head, clamped her mouth shut again, then spun around and zigzagged away down the sidewalk.

  “Come on, Sylvie,” Dixon said. “I’m sorry, but I swear it was just a stupid dare. We missed the bus back from London and shacked up in a hotel for the night. We were so drunk though …”

  For effect he said, “It wasn’t nothing, nothing at all. Just some fumbling and kissing.”

  He tried to put his arm around me, which would have been a victory at another time, but I fled, leaving him standing in front of a window full of chocolate shortbread and caramel-covered oatmeal bars. I ducked into the gardens of New College, stumbled through the rosebushes, and collapsed against a brick wall that had been built in the Middle Ages to fortress the town against marauding Luddites.

  “Sylvie?” Vita’s voice found me from across the quad.

  “Go away!” I shouted back.

  I watched in horror as a dark figure sprinted across the perfectly manicured lawn.

  “Vita, stop.”

  Now she was next to me, petting my back: “Oh, Sylvie, Sylvie, Sylvie, poor Sylvie.”

  I shrugged her away. “Go home, Vita. You could get sent down for walking on the grass.”

  “But this is an emergency,” she wailed.

  “No,” I said, “it’s just a stupid thing.” I dug a ten-pound note out of my pocket. “Now go to the High Street and get a cab.”

  “I can’t leave you,” she sniffled.

  “You can,” I said, unwrapping her arm from my shoulder. She wore a green tweed jacket that was big enough for two of her and a silly college scarf that she’d splurged on. She favored words like splurge and called this outfit her “intellectual getup,” which was why, among other reasons, I felt protective of her. “I’ll get you a cab,” I said, pulling her to her feet and linking my arm through hers to keep her moving in a straight line.

  A kiss is a kiss is a kiss is a kiss. Gertrude Stein claimed she reinvented the rose through repetition. I thought about how kisses burgeoned, blossomed—dry lip pecks into moist tangled tongues, repetition into habit. A kiss is a kiss is a kiss is a kiss. But a kiss was never just a kiss, even when it didn’t convey affection. It wasn’t that I loved Dixon; in fact, I despised him in a way that made his unfaithfulness more painful because he gained power in our already lopsided relationship. Dixon could argue anything, including the mutually
exclusive positions that, on the one hand, fidelity signified nothing about your true affection for another person, and on the other, I should want him and no one else. When I tried to point out that his argument was a bunch of shit, he assaulted me with paragraph-long explanations and tender nuzzles. I don’t want to admit it, but when Dixon wanted to kiss persuasively, wow!

  I didn’t love Anna either, but she was the closest thing I had to a best friend, the person who liked big Indian meals and running the muddy river paths, who was wicked smart but modest and shared my skepticism about the other Americans on our fellowship, most notably the Harvard grads who complained about being in exile and a small clutch of ironic men who turned themselves into zombies by refusing to budge from East Coast time. As the wind blew, damping out the moon like sand thrown on a fire, I hiccupped and wiped my nose across the sleeve of my black jacket. It was getting late, and I needed comfort or at least another drink.

  Todd was at Maureen’s. He was a friend, and Maureen was an intimidating enigma. She lived in a fourth-floor turret with a fireplace that she kept stoked with stolen books; her dissertation was on the antivivisection movement, and to support the cause, she shoplifted cookbooks with glossy pictures of mouthwatering steaks and rich, oily stew. “Cows, not cuts” was her motto. She favored short dresses, patterned tights, vegan boots, and bright red lipstick. I knocked on the door.

  “Sylvie.” Todd tucked a strand of honeyed hair behind his ear, looking happy to see me. His shoulder-length locks also fed my affection. “What’s up?”

  “Hey,” Maureen said, drawing out the word.

  They were both tipsy, but in those days we were always under the influence of something.

  “Is monogamy old-fashioned?” I asked. “Does it count when you’re drunk?”

  “Bastard,” Todd said, bandaging me in his arms. From the beginning, he’d opposed my dalliance with Dixon, but I wasn’t sure whether it was because he liked me, or whether it was just an alpha-male kind of thing. He kissed me, and without thinking, I kissed him back.

  “Sparks are flying.” Maureen tossed a book on the fire. “I don’t like this.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?” I said, suddenly mortified.

  “Not technically.” She forced a smile to her face. “Whatever.”

  “You said you couldn’t seriously date a carnivore,” Todd told Maureen. “How was I supposed to interpret that?”

  The rhythm was less than satisfying: kiss, talk, kiss, talk.

  “We should stop,” I said, though my lips contradicted my words.

  Maureen suddenly leapt from the bed and kissed us both on the cheek. She reeked of gin and lime. “My blessing.”

  Todd’s lips got dry. “Really?”

  “Be free. Like animals,” she added.

  “Really?” Todd repeated.

  She exhaled wearily. I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t stop myself. Kiss, kiss. Kiss, kiss. It was like a reflex. Todd kissed me, and I kissed back. Maureen was standing on her tiptoes next to us, and we were standing in front of the fire, and I kissed Maureen once or twice, as did Todd, and she returned our kisses before screaming, “Enough!”

  Todd and I went back to my house on a road lined with cheap Indian takeaways and kept kissing, just kissing, reposing but fully clothed, groping fruitlessly and frantically through fabric.

  “We should have done this sooner,” he gasped.

  Instead of saying anything, I stamped his Adam’s apple with my lips. Our tongues kept moving, making vaguely unpleasant slurpy sounds until we both passed out from frustration or fatigue or our earlier revelry, which had reduced us to little more than bodies.

  The next morning, the sound of scratching woke me. Vita was pacing the hallway in flannel pajamas, her eyes moated. She pointed at the front door. “The enemy has made an appearance.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at her flair for the dramatic. “My tutor?”

  “No,” she said. “Your betrayer. Shall I tell her to scram?”

  “Why don’t you make some coffee?” I said. “That would be useful.”

  I found Anna stretching her calves in the front concrete garden. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair pulled back into a high, tight ponytail. Her bare legs were bright red. I hopped from one foot to the other to keep my feet from freezing.

  “You’re still dressed?” she asked.

  “Early morning run?” I said.

  “Penance,” she answered. “Up to the top of Cowley Road five times. Listen, Sylvie, I’m sorry. Dixon and I …” She scraped her teeth across her bottom lip. “We were really drunk, and we kissed, but nothing else happened.”

  It was still early enough in the morning that the clouds hadn’t swept in and blotted out the sun. England sucked. I squinted at her. I wanted to slam the door in her face, but she was already on the verge of crying. “Have a great run.”

  Inside, Vita sat on the staircase, hugging her knees to her chest. She held up a mug of coffee hopefully. “Oh, Sylvie, are you okay?”

  “No, and now I’m going back to bed.”

  Todd stirred after I crawled into our cozy tent of sheets. “When is a kiss just a kiss?” I pecked at his cheek as though my life depended on it.

  “Hmm,” he said. “That wasn’t.” And then we were starting all over again, our tongues bumping, our teeth trying to stay out of the way. I nibbled on his lip before giving him my best butterfly, the kind of kiss that was capable of arousing even a cold, depressed bastard like Dixon, and I hoped we’d carry on. That’s all I wanted. Just a kiss.

  After Anna allegedly “just kissed” Dixon, or Dixon allegedly “just kissed” Anna—the causality was never clear to me—I started a campaign to avoid Dixon. Vita volunteered to screen my calls, and from my bedroom or the kitchen, I often heard her lower her naturally high, sweet voice and growl, “She’s not home,” “Well, you should have thought of that earlier,” and “Take some responsibility.” When I actually saw Dixon scuttling around in his dirty gray windbreaker, I looked through him. I forgave Anna, or perhaps I just wanted to torture her, because once a week, we had lunch of ciabatta and hummus in her room overlooking the High Street, and Anna complained about the dart player she was kissing, who had strong wrists but weak lips, and I confessed Todd’s technique could stand some improvement (his mouth was often pressed into a grimace), or I cried over Dixon, who had hardly ever kissed me because he was too depressed, but had willingly kissed her, and Anna looked stricken and asked me about Maureen, who had lost Todd in the name of comforting me. These lunches were painful.

  I spent more time with Todd, who kissed away my worries and took me to literary festivals. Like the poor on pilgrimages, we bussed around England (the thought of our slobbery PDAs makes me shudder now) seeking transcendental moments: alone in the loo with James Fenton, sharing a cigarette with William Trevor, et cetera, et cetera. Once, through sheer persistence, we swung an invitation to dinner with Seamus Heaney, along with a whole party of minor writers, parasitic worshippers (us), rising stars, and falling-down drunks. Todd sat next to our idol, while I ended up next to an Irish poet named Maeve C.

  “His lips look like an eel’s vagina,” she said, nodding at Seamus Heaney.

  I didn’t want to talk to Maeve but had no choice since the man on my left spoke a language that didn’t sound like English, even though it was.

  “Have you heard of female condoms?” she asked, spewing small pieces of iceberg lettuce and cucumbers. “They’re all over Belfast.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “The women are walking around with latex fluttering out of their weenies.” She giggled.

  I tried to catch Todd’s eye, but he was having a moment with Seamus, not quite talking to him, but nodding his head enthusiastically in response to something that a poet on Seamus’s other side was saying.

  “You’re in love with him too,” Maeve whispered, so close her warm breath moistened my neck.

  Everything from the crumbed and fried cod
to the pale potatoes on our plates was as anemic as the winter sun. I felt vaguely sick.

  I had been kissing (and more than kissing) Todd for six weeks, but it was all motion and mechanics, our passion reserved for long discussions about contemporary British poetry. I tried to pretend he really wanted me (we were kissing, after all), but on some level, I knew he still wanted Maureen just as I still wanted Dixon, even though he’d once made fun of the way I kissed, accusing me of leading too aggressively with my tongue, just as Dixon still wanted everyone because it was fun to get drunk, and the electricity right before you kissed, when you didn’t know whether your tongues would touch or not, was amazing. First kisses were always thrilling, even if you were depressed, or perhaps especially if you were depressed. Vita wasn’t kissing anyone. She was scandalized—that’s the word she used—after she’d needled me into admitting that Todd had been in my bed that morning. “How could you,” she cried, “when you’d just had your heart broken by Dixon?” She believed in a better version of me than I did. I didn’t dare tell her about Maureen.

  I couldn’t stop crying. I attributed the abundance of my emotions to the gray winter or my overidentification with Margery Kempe, a woman I was reading for my thesis on female mystics, who wandered around the British Isles during the Middle Ages, bursting into tears every time she thought about Christ’s sacrifice. I didn’t want to accept the possibility that I was crying over a stupid kiss—misdirected, alcohol induced, hard lipped, empty. I know it’s trite, but so much of what is crippling is. Cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry. With enough repetition, it starts to sound like cuddly, the word made new. I wish it was that easy.

  The table erupted in laughter. I sniffled.

  “What’s wrong?” Maeve swept back her tangle of brown hair, and three bobby pins tinkled onto her place mat.

  “Cuckoldry” was all I could think to say.

  “Give me your hand.” She studied my palm as if reading a map. “A very good hand.”

  I wanted her to say more, but the dinner party was breaking up. Todd caught my eye and flicked up his thumb like the blade of a knife. He must have had a word with the poet. As I was going out into the night, the air as clammy as a damp sponge, someone tugged my sleeve. Maeve held out a wineglass. “The lips of Seamus Heaney touched this glass.” She smiled, and her face crumpled like a paper bag. Being a poet was hard work.