The Kissing List (2 page)

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.

T
he 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.

A
fter 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.

“Take it,” she said. “It’s as close as you’ll come to kissing him.”

I
never kissed Seamus Heaney, though I did kiss (and more than kiss) Dixon again after Todd and I finished kissing and he went back to Maureen. Dixon was initially repentant, eager and accepting of my kisses, but a one-month stretch of snogging along the damp banks of the Thames gave me a head cold, plus Dixon was too depressed to share a bed. When Vita found out about our afternoon quickies (all Dixon had the energy for), she was so furious she started haunting our house, leaving notes instead of speaking to me. Once, after copious amounts of red wine, I tried to explain the invisible but potent aphrodisiac qualities of Dixon’s intelligence, but she just gave me a withering look and said: “Get real, Sylvie. You’re not fucking the guy’s mind.”

“Good point,” I said.

Dixon and I broke up and got together three more times before we finally went our separate ways.

T
he funny thing about being in your early twenties is that it’s a lot like being any other age, except you don’t know it.
For a long time, you think you’ll change and become a better version of yourself, but really, you just wind up being a little more tolerant of the person you’ve always been. Or something like that. That year when I thought I should be more mature, I kept kissing people—on the lips, on the cheek, sometimes on the chest and other not readily accessible places. I kissed friends, I kissed strangers, I kissed people I had no intention of kissing, had never dreamed of kissing. I made out with an usher at Todd’s wedding. Maureen was there, her lipstick a slightly more subdued shade of fuck-you red. She sniffed the mini-quiches in her napkinned hand. “I eat animal by-products now,” she said, “but crusts are dangereux.”

As Todd fed his bride, a lawyer named Rhadika, a nibble of cake and then kissed her—long, long, long—I didn’t feel the stirring of anything, or at least not much. Right then, I wished Vita might magically appear in a funky dress she’d thrifted and her grandma’s rhinestones, take me aside, and whisper about how it was weird to see an old flame do it. “Poor Sylvie,” she’d say “Not that Todd was the one, but it still feels icky.” I could protest that it was no big deal, maybe convincing myself in the process that it wasn’t. I’d lost track of Vita after she graduated. It made me sad. If she’d been there, I probably would have kissed her, too.

Just then, the DJ called all the single ladies to the dance floor for the bouquet toss, and in that brief lull of scraping chairs and quiet groans and damp-palmed excitement, someone yelled, “Not me,” and I turned to see Maureen careen out of the room.

The usher said, “That girl is a piece of work.”

I smiled at him. Kissing was easier than talking, and the usher kissed fairly well, loose lipped, not too wet. We exchanged e-mail addresses, but I knew we wouldn’t stay in touch, even though he was tall and handsome, a guy’s guy whose family had made its fortune in trailer parks. Later that night, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, in the apartment I shared with two nice men who were always offering to set me up with their nice eligible friends, and asked myself: “Is this one for the couch or the cosmetics counter, darling? Do you need your head shrunk or your face scrubbed? Electroshock or electrolysis?”

T
he evening when I thought this spell finally broke was much like the evening when Dixon kissed Anna or Anna kissed Dixon (and who knew what else!), the evening I kissed Todd and Maureen kissed us both, offering a blessing she regretted the next day. That is to say, Anna and I were drunk.

By now, though, we had grown up enough that it only required three beers to make us silly. “If it still matters to you, I think we should talk about it,” she said gravely, bringing up the ancient history that drew us into permanent intimacy.

I watched her fiddle with her pearls. That was one of the things that had irked me at the time, the fact that Dixon had kissed someone who wore pearls, but I now half-wished that I was the kind of woman who could pull them off. They gave Anna a certain sheen. I slid my nail under the label of my bottle of beer, considering what I wanted to say. Anna leaned toward me.

“You weren’t there. Let me explain what happened.”

I had a moment to decide whether I wanted to hear or not, whether I wanted to find out who kissed who, or who kissed whom. Would the truth set me free? I giggled at the thought.

Anna was leaning in, and I leaned in—maybe I was on the verge of whispering, “Yeah, tell me what happened,” but instead my lips found hers. This way, that way, and then this way again. It felt dangerous and familiar. A murmur of conversation drifted downstairs as the host and her friend got ready for bed, and Anna’s eyes rose, lines etching her forehead. I could tell she was considering the likelihood of someone appearing at the top of the staircase and catching us, but I didn’t care.

“Am I scandalizing you?” I asked, before pulling her back to me. This delighted me, the thought of unnerving Anna, of derailing a conversation that she’d surely control if we used our lips and tongues for making words. Her mind was just as sexy as Dixon’s, and she was much, much nicer. She kissed me back, and we kept kissing, pressed together on another woman’s sofa, and after a long while, during a brief flash of drunken clarity, when I asked whether she was freaked out, hoping I might freak her out simply by asking, she laughed and said, “Oh, Sylvie, you of all people should know better. It’s just kissing.” Then she gave me mouth to mouth one last fierce and tingly time, and though I’d like to say this brought me back to life, it only woke me up enough to follow Anna to the door, where she sent me on my way.

O
f the things that I remember, one of them is the size of the apartment. It was so small that my roommate, Laurie, usually kept the Styrofoam head on the blond-wood kitchen table, its smooth face turned toward the mirrored bathroom door about five feet away, as if it were primping. When I would come home late at night, the head would greet me, wearing its regal copper-colored wig. At work, whenever my mind wandered from whatever manuscript I was proofreading, I would think about the head, bald during the day, turning away from the
mirror and surveying our apartment, looking dubiously at the shabby blue couch against the window, the matching armchair, lumpy with springs, the front door with its collage of locks, the kitchen, or what there was of a kitchen in the shoebox-size fifth-floor walk-up that we shared. The Styrofoam head couldn’t see, but I daydreamed that it sensed how things were.