The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  Goldy, he said, petting her tangle of yellow hair, and she said, Pork Pie, and he said, Let’s go running. It will make you feel better.

  She hissed like a cat. She hated running, even though the year before she had placed seventy-first in the NYC Marathon. In college, she was a speedster, a girl with big thighs and below-normal body fat. She ran so fast the pink bandana holding back her unruly hair always fell out during the last mile of her cross-country races. Now she was wearing out. She could barely touch her shins, and her knees popped when she walked up stairs. Her Achilles tendons felt like old rubber bands. Running had lost its charm, but it was habit, and she enjoyed its certain perks: high metabolism and perfect calves.

  It was three blocks from his classic six to the park, and she made them walk. He was wearing Princeton U, and she was wearing Tommy H, and his right hand was laced into her left hand. Neither of them wore rings.

  He said, I’ll give you ten bucks for every runner we pass in the park, and she said, It’s done.

  He laughed and looked at her with gooey eyes because that’s what they shouted to close deals in his business. And, moreover, some friends of his who had married last fall on Nantucket had passed out baseball caps with “It’s Done” embroidered across the front because when Matthew proposed, Oona answered: “It’s done.”

  She got annoyed with him in the park because he was running faster than she wanted to, even though it meant they were passing loads of people, and with every person they passed, he said, Ka-ching, ka-ching. She was racking up the bucks, but she still wanted to kill him or something. He ran marathons too, though they never ran one in the same year. Competing was a strain, but so was not competing. When he ran one, she resented all the attention he received, and when she ran one, he always left for a long European business trip the next day. When they had first started dating three years ago, they had agreed to minimize the number of situations in which they directly competed since she got upset about the smallest losses, like being beat in Scrabble. She couldn’t manage her competitive feelings, he said, because she was a girl, and girls couldn’t leave things on the court. How essentialist of you, she had told him, and he drooped, because when she took him to the court intellectually, he knew he’d always lose.

  On the east side of the park underneath the crouching-panther statue, she said, Can we please slow down for Christ’s sake, and he said, At the top of the hill we can.

  She ratcheted back her pace near the Metropolitan Museum, but he didn’t. She had to roll onto her toes and exaggerate the swing of her arms to catch up with him. Then she sprinted ahead by a couple of steps, turned around, and said, Ka-ching, ka-ching, and he said, Double or nothing the rest of the way.

  You’re on, she said, and those were the last words they spoke until they hit the reservoir, where she vomited in the bushes as he stroked her sweaty back.

  Good job, he said, and she tried not to gloat, even though she knew that he had probably let her win. Naturally, he was much faster than she was. At home, he took four one-hundred-dollar bills from his shiny silver money clip and handed them to her.

  Two misfits at a happening in the Meatpacking District—that’s how they’d met. Goldy had gone with friends of friends (in other words, acquaintances) with the goal of adding to her Friday night repertoire. Usually she alternated between getting tipsy with the Fast Five (whittled to three since not all of her cross-country team had shins for city sidewalks) or pretending to study great masterpieces at the Met while really sizing up her Internet date and wondering whether she should politely call it a night. On occasion, she relished going to a movie by herself, a tub of popcorn clenched between her knees, a Diet Coke with three splashes of the sugary stuff at her feet, or even staying in and reading all the serious sections of the previous Sunday’s Times. The friends-once-removed had promised European DJs, absinthe, transcendence, but after ten minutes or so, Goldy had decided it was no different from a college kegger, except instead of beer there were watered-down bottom-shelf cocktails in red Solo cups and guys who wore as much gel and eyeliner as girls, their hair groomed into weedy lawns, and women who resembled hookers, and if not hookers, suburban good girls who had worn one dress out of the house and shimmied into another en route. If Goldy rolled up her top-of-the-knee-length skirt and unbuttoned her blouse to her sternum, she’d fit in, but what was the point? Her bra was pink, not black, and she danced with too much happy enthusiasm for the stuttering rhythms the DJ was mixing. She vowed to stay until at least 12:15 because she’d paid the cover, and she was having an experience—perhaps not the one she expected, but never mind. Closing her eyes, she tried getting into her zone, but only wound up ricocheting off a guy in Levi’s and a too-big button-down. He had a way of smiling that was like winking, but without one iota of creepiness.

  How are you supposed to dance to this? she asked him three times before he motioned her toward the door. It was less a real question than a rhetorical one, since he danced just as badly as she did. After getting their hands stamped with red skulls that quickly bled into blobs, they stood outside in the smelly summer night and talked, one coincidence piling on top of another, the way they do when you’re starting to like someone.

  Let’s grab a drink someplace else, he said, and she said, Sure, though once they reached the bar—a grown-up place with red banquettes and frosted globes of yellow light—Goldy was taken aback when Pork Pie slapped down a hundred for their cocktails. I’ll pay, she protested, and he said, Looks like I beat you to it, and she said, But I’m a feminist, and he just laughed.

  Later on, he’d claim he made the first move, and she’d protest, saying, Who talked to who first? They liked to argue about this almost as much as they liked telling people the story of their beginning. Goldy used the word improbable, and Pork Pie called it lucky, and they both secretly considered it fate. And aside from his vegetable and soft-cheese phobias and his avoidance of dark, difficult movies and her constant competitiveness and occasional moodiness (which made her crave the sort of dark, difficult movies that gave her an excuse to cry), they were pretty happy. So fate, yes. Maybe.

  She said, See you tonight, and he said, Knock ’em dead, Goldy, before the subway doors slid together, and the train whisked him downtown to Wall Street.

  She worked in poor-man’s land in the Garment District, where morning, noon, and night she dodged the rack pushers shepherding the fancy outer skins of women up curbs, around puddles, and through herds of cabs. She wore the clothes they pushed—DKNY, Miu Miu, and Helmut Lang—thanks to the generosity of Pork Pie. Her wallet was lined with Thomas Jeffersons from their ridiculous bets, her body was clothed with surprise Saturday shopping sprees, the odd anniversary present marking the 127th day since their first date, the gifties he bought just because business was good, foreign derivatives were strong, he’d called Brazil, or won $10,000 in the football pool at work. He had her squirreling away all her extra money in the most aggressive mutual fund around. She could afford to be aggressive because she was young.

  She stopped at the Broadway Deli, three blocks west of Broadway, for fried egg and sausage on a roll, a cup of watery coffee. Light with two sugars, she told the aproned man. Gracias. She walked up Eighth Avenue, underneath the permanent scaffolding and past the stores that sold ninety-nine-cent T-shirts and the Cuban restaurant where she bought a plate of yellow rice and black beans with fried plantain on the side from the roly-poly ladies who asked, The usual, Guapa? No variety, Guapa? You wanna try the pollo con ajo, Guapa? Muy rico. Ricisimo. She liked this neighborhood. When she had moved to New York five years before, there had still been lots of neighborhoods like the Garment District. She could remember the thrill of wandering around Alphabet City as if she were an intrepid explorer. That was the thing about New York. It prolonged the period of disorientation, of being lost, of giving you the opportunity to make magical discoveries, like the shop that sold cupcakes topped with dollops of pastel frosting on Ninth. On Ninth Avenue of all places! She didn’t especially
care for cupcakes, but the fact they were sold on Ninth Avenue next to a stinky bodega made her love them. She took a sip of her watery coffee.

  A guy pushing prom dresses the color of blue carnations said, Let me love you, Sugar. Let me put a smile on your face.

  This was the one thing she didn’t like about the neighborhood. These guys, these heathens, these assholes who interrupted her walk from the subway. She looked straight ahead, pretending not to hear him, but thinking, Bastard, fuck you, fucker.

  She felt breathless. Blood rushed to her temple. She was already angry, and it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. It was bad enough when she reached her office (which housed sweatshops on all of its floors except for hers) and suffered the daily humiliation of walking into the lobby where the lobby guys, chain-smoking menthols, would have a poker game going with the less familiar building guys.

  Every day it was the same thing. As she waited for one of the three crappy, slow elevators, they stopped their game and licked their lips, like she was a mysterious parcel tied up with string that might contain something they wanted to sample. She didn’t even think she was pretty. No, that wasn’t true. Rather, she tried not to think in terms of categories like pretty or not pretty, because once you began, you were your face, your pores, your hair—including the curly black ones that sometimes appeared in places other than your private areas. You were your crooked pinky, your pomegranate breasts, your sandpaper elbows, your vino belly, your thighs with half a cantaloupe scooped out beneath the hip. Then it was inevitable. You wanted to keep your pomegranate breasts but trade your butt for something more melon shaped, and you wanted to hack off your left ear, which stuck out, and could the right cream or a couple of slices of cucumber restore elasticity under your eyes? When Pork Pie told her she was beautiful, she told him to shut up, because she didn’t want to consider it.

  One morning after they’d been dating for just over two months, she was sunbathing on the deck of his share, and he waltzed out after sleeping until noon and sang, There’s my golden girl, my lovely, my Goldy, and she shrank back from his silliness, a little happy, a little mortified, but mostly strangely self-conscious in the pink bikini she’d bought for this, her first trip to the Hamptons. And then she did that terrible thing she was apt to do when she was feeling embarrassed. She struck back: Oh hi, Pork Pie. But he just smiled and said, Hmm. Pork pies. I’m hungry. How ’bout breakfast, Goldy? And she said, Sounds good, Pork Pie. He was often oblivious to her sarcasm. It saved their relationship but could also be cat-claws-scratching-nice-upholstery maddening.

  Now, she looked down at her feet to avoid the men’s eyes, but mostly to resist saying something inappropriate or inviting. She wasn’t even wearing a skirt. She hadn’t worn a skirt in more than three weeks. The elevator car smelled like a dirty ashtray, and by the time she stepped into the office of the not-for-profit organization—or the not-for-pleasure organization, as her best office friend and lunch buddy, Anne, called it—she was so tightly wound that she wanted a cigarette and began to plot how she could bum one from the graphics guy without pissing him off. Of course, the graphics guy was the only one who smoked openly. Everyone else was too uptight or virtuous, including her.

  The not-for-profit had been forced to move after a developer decided to convert its downtown digs into a luxury hotel. The real estate market was like a runaway train, the headlines screamed. She rented a room for $1,450 per month in a loft with a pressed-tin ceiling and a view of Delancey Street gridlock. The other rooms were occupied by three twenty-three-year-old guys who left crumbs on the counters. It was really just a faux chambre, or FC, a means for her to avoid admitting that she spent almost every night in Pork Pie’s classic six on a quiet street lined with real trees.

  She was glad they had moved, even though their new office windows offered a panorama of bolts of fabric on one floor and women hunched over sewing machines on another. After all, it was a not-for-profit, and it had always seemed wrong to work downtown amid armies of bankers. The space itself could have been a little nicer, or at least more conducive to productivity.

  Converted space was how Anne described it. Translation: no hot water in the bathrooms, no carpets to absorb the echo, no shades on the windows, no heat except from the radiators along the wall, which roasted the unfortunate ones who happened to sit near them. Unfortunately, all of it was true, and she was one of the unlucky few to sit by both a window and a radiator, and on sunny winter days she felt like she was locked in a car in a parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, in the middle of the summer.

  Anne had sent out an officewide e-mail that said: Unwashed Hands: How Germs Spread. Most of the women kept small bottles of liquid sanitizer in their top drawers. The ones who should have been killing germs, given their anatomical architecture, appeared unconcerned, however, and Anne started a rumor that the president and founder of the organization was going to disseminate a memo re: It’s Time to Take Important Matters into Hand: What You Take into Your Hands Matters! It was rather too wordy for Elizabeth, the president, who believed that, as a rule, the subject lines of memos should be no longer than five words.

  Goldy—her real name was Frances—sat down and shuffled a pile of papers from one spot to another on her desk before she powered on her computer and dug into her day’s work: writing a strategy memo pitching their program to the Yetman Foundation. Their not-for-profit-nor-for-pleasure was called Pencils Are Important and Necessary Tools (PAINT), and their mission was to raise money for school supplies, including pencils, paints, pens, rulers, glue, tacks, calculators, crayons, and so on. Yetman, of course, earmarked its grant money for the arts, so in the “Likelihood” section, Frances typed improbable. Improbables, however, were her favorite challenge—how to persuade foundations and corporations that cared not one whit for public education, or whether schoolchildren in the Mississippi Delta had pencils, to make a commitment to school supplies. It tapped her creativity. She knew exactly how they’d pitch this one—they’d request funds for recorders. A travesty it was that elementary schoolchildren in poor, backward areas weren’t learning how to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and other favorites. Of course, they’d also throw in money for chalk and paper for copying sheet music, meeting two needs with one proposal. Her fingers danced over the keyboard.

  Writing grants wasn’t what Frances had set out to do. When she graduated from college, she had wanted to do something good with a capital G, like working with poor or oppressed women. In college, she’d been an anthro major—at her school the administration looked down upon the study of anything practical like education or social work or even business—but she’d taken a slew of courses in women’s studs: Women: Sex or Gender?; Gender: An Anthropological Perspective; Heterosexuality: “The Unconscious Non-Choice”; and The Economics of Marriage. For a while, she had even considered becoming a lesbian, at least for political reasons. In spite of what her parents argued—they urged her to cash in on the value of her education—she took a job at a battered women’s shelter, thinking she’d become the Jonathan Kozol of poor women, writing moving books that shed light on their plight. But the shelter was poorly run, and because of her liberal arts background, she was only qualified to work as a front desk receptionist for a salary that barely covered her rent. She had looked around—so many of the places like NOW tackled the struggles of American women who already had good jobs but wanted equal pay or needed rocks to shatter glass ceilings, or women in faraway places like Burundi and Bangladesh who were forced to consent to genital mutilation. But there was no Women’s Defense Fund, no Women’s Aid Society; there were just millions of poor children, children who appeared to be orphans. It was as if their poor mothers had been carefully rubbed out of the picture with erasers provided by PAINT and other not-for-profits.

  I like it, Elizabeth said, and Frances said, I’m so relieved. Though there are some changes I’d like to make in terms of wording, Elizabeth said. First, I don’t like travesty. I don’t know. It just sounds too melodramatic to me. Le
t’s try tragedy and see whether that works. She tilted back in the donated office chair and put her Prada loafers on her desk.

  Frances admired the shoes, the way they deconstructed the traditional loafer with their clunkiness. Elizabeth’s husband’s family had money, which was what enabled both of them to work at not-for-profits and still be fashionable. Elizabeth’s husband’s nonprofit raised money to send new and donated eyeglasses to people in third-world countries, some of the same places where Pork Pie—whose real name was David—made his money second-guessing the rise and fall of currency values.

  It is a tragedy that children in the birthplace of jazz graduate from elementary school without learning to play the recorder, Elizabeth read aloud.

  Frances nodded.

  Yes, I think that’s better, Elizabeth said. Now let’s look at graduate. Do elementary schoolchildren graduate? She stared quizzically at Frances, but before Frances could answer, Elizabeth punched Harry’s number, even though he was just on the other side of the four-foot-high cubicle wall.

  Graduate, Elizabeth said. What do you think, Harry? Graduate or leave?

  Frances noticed that Harry needed no explanation. He had probably been eavesdropping on the whole discussion.

  On the one hand, Harry said, graduate might be confusing, and on the other, leave is so lackluster. What about trying emerge? He lowered his voice: It is a tragedy that children in the birthplace of jazz emerge from elementary school without learning to play the recorder.

  He’s so brilliant, Elizabeth said in a stage whisper loud enough for Harry to hear over the partition.

  Frances felt nauseated. Harry was one of only three men who worked at PAINT. The other two men, the graphics guy and a new program assistant, were soft-spoken and slightly effete compared with Harry, who left the top two buttons on his Oxfords undone, revealing a triangle of tangled chestnut-colored hair. It was difficult to find men who wanted to work at not-for-profits, which made Harry very precious for the sake of workplace diversity.