The Kissing List

by Stephanie Reents

  It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d produced a jar of apple butter and presented it to the waiter. I wanted to disappear into the bathroom and sit on the toilet with my head between my knees, maybe even do a quick handstand, anything to shake the feeling of embarrassment.

  “This deserves some champagne,” the waiter said. I think he even winked, as cheesy as that sounds. “It’s on me.”

  The waiter was smiling without a trace of pity. I looked at Burt, his surprise and pleasure so real, his eyes were sparkling. I used to believe this only happened in books, but I swear I could see it.

  “That would be awesome,” Burt said.

  I smiled. It was a totally involuntary reflex, but I couldn’t help myself. I picked up an empty wineglass. It was childish, and maybe unlucky or impolite, to toast without something in your glass. “To an awesome beginning,” I found myself saying, even though I hated the word awesome. It was one of those grand words that had been ruined by people who didn’t know its original meaning, who thought it merely meant cool, but suddenly I didn’t care.

  “To many more adventures,” Burt said, looking me directly in the eyes while I did my best to hold his gaze.

  After Lance and I had been dating for six months or so, when we started talking on the phone regularly, our conversations were seeded with uncomfortable silences. I would tell him about the details of my day—a book on the origins of haiku that I was editing or a funny exchange with my boss about his most recent disastrous date—and he wouldn’t say anything. Afterward I would pace, clenching the phone like a small, rather useless weapon, wondering whether I should call him back. Whenever I did, when I asked, “Is everything okay?” or “Are you okay?” he would parrot back, “Are you okay, Sylvie?” Laugh. “I’m just fine.”

  Lance also started coming to New York more often. When we were together, we shrugged off the awkwardness, found our groove. He’d book a fancy hotel, a new one each time, and I’d pack my duffel bag and take the subway from Fort Greene to midtown and spend the weekend pretending to be a tourist. We’d roam Central Park, take in a singer-songwriter not yet quite famous, see a documentary about one small example of how shitty the world was, and discuss it for hours afterward. When we were together we were mostly good.

  Lance liked to shop. We’d wander into stores along Madison or Fifth Avenue, and Lance would pick out clothes for me to try on. He liked to sit on the slightly perfumed chairs outside the dressing room and evaluate each outfit.

  The first time, I tried to hide in the dressing room. In the mirror, I looked like a child pretending to be a grown-up, my head stuck on a body that I didn’t recognize, that somehow seemed too womanly now that it was in a fitted sweater, trousers that nipped my waist. This kind of shopping was too intimate. I planned to yell through the slats that nothing worked, but the door whipped open, and there was Lance, his face eager and expectant, and the saleslady pronouncing: “She looks fabulous. These clothes, they’re meant for a body like hers.”

  “She does look beautiful,” Lance said, squinting, appraising my body without looking at me, “but I think she needs some heels.”

  “I’m too tall. I don’t do heels,” I protested, but no one was listening. Lance wandered off with the saleslady and her smiling hips. When she said something, he leaned toward her conspiratorially, and they both laughed, and I found myself feeling pleased and jealous, delighted and wounded. I bit my cheek.

  I was relieved when Lance didn’t buy me anything that day. I had a vague idea how much our whole affair was costing him, and it was starting to make me feel nervous. Three months later, he emerged from his walk-in closet carrying a tower of five boxes festooned with purple ribbons. “What is this?” I might have squealed. I might have even jumped up and down on the bed, like a little girl being introduced to a new pony or kitten.

  “Happy New Year, baby,” Lance said, arranging the boxes around me on the bed before choosing one and shaking it. “Hmmm, not this one.” He shook another. “Not this one, either. Maybe this one.”

  The boxes exhaled the scent of luxury as I eased them open. At the sight of the black sweater, I might have shrieked again and again, “I can’t believe it.”

  I’m sure I gave Lance a passionate kiss. He liked a certain kind of passion, which is why he relished staying in hotels so much. All those mirrors. And then I stripped off my clothes and began trying on my presents, piece by piece, walking an imaginary runway, while he lay propped up on pillows in bed, calling out compliments.

  I returned to the restaurant to fetch Burt’s hat, where he’d forgotten it under the table. “That one’s a cutie-pie,” the waiter said, dropping the French and speaking Brooklyn. “He’s a real keeper.”

  I put on Burt’s funny hat and tipped it in his direction.

  I wanted to sleep with Burt that night. Though I don’t believe there’s a single moment when you know you’ve finally found the right person—I mean, come on, I’d felt that way with Lance when I was surrounded by all the beautiful clothes he’d bought—me! with those gorgeous expensive clothes!—I still sometimes catch myself thinking that, of course, something changed when Burt said, “Awesome!” As we rode toward Fourteenth Street, where he would go east and I would head downtown, Burt said, “How ’bout coming back to my place for a nightcap?”

  I laughed. “Let me change into my smoking jacket.”

  “And I’ll slip into something more comfortable.”

  Burt walked his hand around my shoulder, and I relaxed into his embrace, even though I usually cringed at public shows of affection, especially in the fluorescent-lit subway car, where it was impossible to fade into the background. We seemed to fit together like a ball in a socket.

  “So?” He doodled on my shoulder.

  “Write something,” I said. “See if I can decipher it.”

  I pushed up my sleeve, closed my eyes. His fingers felt like an eraser, instead of the ticklish tip of a pen or pencil. “All work and no play make Jack a very dull boy,” I guessed wildly.

  “Close. Not.”

  “Write it again.”

  “You have to wait for me to finish,” he said.

  “Okay.” I moistened my lips, the taste of the chocolate petit fours the waiter had brought as a gift lingering. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers …”

  “No,” he said, “but you do have a very nimble tongue.”

  “Indeed,” I said, “if Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?”

  Burt kissed me.

  “No distractions,” I said.

  He traced something else. “Red Rover.”

  “Good,” he said. “Two words. You’re getting warmer.” He wrote them again.

  “Calf groper?” I said. “ ‘If I warned you once, I warned you a million times: don’t grope the young livestock.’ ”

  He snickered. “Your unconscious is very revealing, my sweet.”

  I cracked open an eye. Burt was grinning.

  “Come over,” he said.

  “Come over?” I said.

  “Like come over tonight,” he said. “Really.”

  “I can’t.” This was my default response.

  “What?” he said.

  “I just can’t,” I said. “Okay?”

  I expected him to wheedle me, coax me, keep asking and even begging me, jokingly of course, to spend the night with him. It was all a dance. That’s what worked with me. A big scene. I’d rush off the subway, rush back on. With enough drama, I didn’t have to take responsibility. All I had to do was eventually give in. He didn’t say anything. At the very least, I thought he would say, “Okay.”

  But Burt—Burt, Bertie, Hubert, Hue—he left. Walked right away.

  By the time I got back to my apartment, I was in a state. I rushed into my room—which my roommates, two nice men with whom I had a cozy domestic situation, had helped me paint the most peaceful shade of green—and rifled through my closet until I found the things I needed:
a silk jacket with a spray of embroidered flowers across the back. A blue shirt that fit perfectly through the bust. Sexy thigh-high boots. A gorgeous military-inspired wool suit. I muscled open the window. I planned to heave this and all the other fucking things that Lance had given me out of the window with Laurie, or her ghost, rooting me on: “You go, Sylvie!”

  She would have approved. When she needed to, she could pull out the grand gesture. Once, as the last hour before she would hear the results of some test dawdled by, she sat on the lumpy couch in our cramped walk-up with a big, shiny box of chocolates on her lap. She bit off the bottoms, studied their centers. When she liked what she saw, she popped the whole thing into her mouth. When she didn’t, she pitched it, half eaten, out the window.

  “Life is too short for the fruits,” she said.

  Consider getting struck by a sweet on Bleecker.

  As I stood there with cold air huffing through the window, I decided that what I really needed to do was call Burt. “I’m so sorry,” I cried when he picked up after an excruciating five rings. “I’m on my way over.”

  “It’s too late, Sylvia,” he said. “Just go to bed.”

  “But I want to come over,” I said. “Really and truly.”

  “Not tonight,” he said, hanging up and leaving me with the empty hum of a broken connection.

  I climbed into bed, the window still open, the cold air rushing in, the clothes piled carelessly on the floor. In another time, in another place, they would have been the punctuation—the exclamation points, the sexy question marks, the unbearably slow commas—of a night of frenzied passion. Evidence of a striptease motivated mostly by teasing instead of a desire to lay anything of importance bare.

  Lance had been about the grand gesture, the exotic trips and the sun setting over a dhow in the East Indian Ocean, the impulsive ideas (to drive on down to the all-night chapel in Vegas and just do it, baby), the surprise visits, the folksingers sent to my doorstep to serenade me, the locked treasure chest in his living room.

  But, of course, I had loved the grand gesture just as much as he had. I’d believed in the great heroic possibility of his unwavering love. When it turned out the most eligible bachelor did have a girlfriend or girlfriends, which was why we always slept in separate beds, I believed him when he told me he couldn’t marry any of these other women until he’d seen what it was like to be with me.

  Tonight, I finally made a choice: I’d just go to bed. Period. I wouldn’t wind up standing on the fire escape in my underwear, surveying the abstract arrangement of jackets and skirts, blouses, and trousers on the asphalt below.

  Someday I would understand that the day I begged and wheedled and pleaded with Lance to please, pretty pretty please, baby, open the fucking trunk was the beginning of the end of our relationship.

  It took a good thirty minutes to empty the chest. Another thirty for me to peek in boutique bags, mine objects from paper confetti, cut through packing tape and candy-striped twine, demummify fragile goods swaddled in butcher paper, bubble wrap, foreign newspapers, and, in one case, a man’s stained undershirt.

  In the end, I had a whole bunch of stuff that I didn’t want. I’d pillaged a burial site that didn’t belong to me. A teeny-tiny pink tie-dyed bikini sent me into hysterical laughter.

  “You don’t like it?” Lance asked.

  “It’s just not me,” I said.

  “Really,” he said. “I thought it was you.”

  Months later, I discovered a lopsided list that Lance had written in grade-school cursive: Sylvie—Pros and Cons. “I’m sorry,” he said as I cried. “I didn’t mean for you to see it all spelled out. But you’re not the woman who I loved.”

  Someday Burt and I would get married. But in the meantime there was just tomorrow, when I would call Burt and thank him for the incredible dinner and also apologize. And the next night and the night after that and every night for several weeks. It would seem like a long, agonizing time before he agreed to go out with me again. When he said, “I don’t know about you,” my only choice would be to take the risk of showing him that he did know about me just as I knew about him.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Malena Watrous, Tom McNeely, Pamela Painter, Kate Wheeler, Paige Reynolds, and Shawn Maurer for reading these stories along the way; Geoff Demers for providing shelter and great adventures in New Mexico while I finished this collection; and my family, Scott Reents and Caitlin Van Dusen, their sons, Sebastian and Ivan, and Sue and Henry Reents for their enduring love and joy. I am grateful for the support of the Holy Cross English department, the Stegner Program at Stanford University, especially John L’Heureux, Tobias Wolff, and Elizabeth Tallent, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Michael Koch, editor of Epoch, and Laura Furman, editor of The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Finally, I am happily indebted to my terrific editor, Alexis Washam, the incomparable Emily Forland, whose unshakeable optimism, intelligence, and kindness has kept me going for many years, and Deb Jane Addis, best sister-friend and most generous reader.

  About the Author

  Born and raised in Boise, Idaho, STEPHANIE REENTS has lived in a shared flat in Oxford, England, a tiny studio on the wrong side of the tracks in Idaho Falls, a fifth-floor walk-up in Manhattan’s West Village, an adobe near the Sonora desert, a garden apartment in the Upper Haight of San Francisco, and the old Hamilton Watch Factory building in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Her fiction has been included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, noted in Best American Short Stories, and has appeared in numerous journals. She teaches in the English department at College of the Holy Cross and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.