Don't Kiss Me: Stories (3 page)

At lunch we have pizza, someone’s client is the manager at the Pizza Slab. For a snack we order wings from the bar next door. I alternate celery stick, wing, celery stick, wing. We smoke out back, a while ago someone wrote, You so ugly on the seat of the one chair out there, it’s a badge of courage to sit in the ugly chair, the pedicurist declaring me so ugly that I could scare the shit out of poop. Everyone laughs and me the hardest, when she’s not looking I ash into the pedicurist’s side part, go back inside.

My husband calls, the TV blaring in the background. Could I pick up some laundry detergent he asks, could I also pick up some beer, something for dinner, dessert, breakfast, lunch for the rest of the week, juice. What are you watching? I ask him. The History channel, he says, but I know better, I hear the childlike yelling of those anime cartoons he loves, I know he is at half-chub and doesn’t want to talk about it, I hang up over him saying, And some string cheeses.

At the grocery store a song about a man on a boat is playing, he feels so free. I stand in the frozen foods aisle, all the boxes are green or red, stop and go, yes and no, I get raviolis and frozen peas and chicken nuggets and a cheesecake. At the checkout I add two packs of bubble gum, the kids will probably chew three times and swallow just like always. A tabloid shows a young starlet’s cottage cheese thighs. I ask the cashier to wait while I run to the dairy aisle, I am craving cottage cheese now, I get the biggest tub there is, large curd, I laugh to myself, I laugh and laugh, big girls gotta eat. In the car I listen to a song about a small-town slut, the DJ comes on and assures me there’s more where that came from, a song about a lonely desert wanderer starts, I pass tacos pizzas chicken ice cream barbecue. The sky is pink meatblood, is a runny sorbet, the sun is a melting butterscotch, the sky is a dirty plate.

NIXON IN RETIREMENT

I had an egg for breakfast. I put too much salt on it so Pat would notice and yell at me. She didn’t. Sipped her coffee like it was tea. Smiled like the machine of her mouth was winding down. A bit of hair had come loose from its setting. Like she was molting. I was grateful to see her flawed, I can’t tell you exactly why. That egg was like eating a jellyfish coated in sand. I endured. The last time I was at the beach a teenaged girl walked over. She was fully developed, I don’t mind telling you. Mr. Nixon, she said. Not President Nixon, or Mr. President. Mr. Nixon. I could try to forgive her for that but who has the time? Her voice was like a cartoon squirrel’s. Some moptop future Democrat might like to climb all over her. I held it together. I just wanted to come over and see if it was really you, the girl squeaked. In the flesh, I answered her. The truth was I could feel every inch of my flesh, even the dark catacombs in my trousers. Could have been the sun. Could have been the girl. Could have been any girl from the neck to the upper thigh. Wow, the girl said. Just wow! Super, was my reply. Whitehead, my day man, cleared his throat. Oh, the girl said. Is this your Secret Service man? If I told you that, I said, he’d have to kill you. I winked up at her. I was wearing sunglasses. No way she saw. I had said the wrong thing, it was clear. The girl went stiff, like she’d been flashed in ice. Could have chipped pieces of her for my drink. And all right, I would have chosen her breasts. Two breasts floating in a tumbler of Scotch, softening with melt into goosepimpled skin. That’s what I call a Saturday. The girl chopped at the sand with her feet, walking backward. Thanks for your interest, I called to her. Her body a ripple of movement. From ice to jelly. Jiggling, you understand. I looked at Whitehead, that block. He looked around, turning in a slow circle. Good man. The girl had vanished, absorbed into the landscape before me, a landscape owned and operated by teenagers. The world’s future leaders. My ulcers went zap. Instead of landscape perhaps I should say channel, should say program. All of them playing a part, all of them in Technicolor. Was there any real dialogue to be had, anymore? My God, what a boredom.

Pat took my plate, clacked it to the sink. Clacked back to me. Kissed my cheek. She smelled like the air in a forgotten trunk filled with flowers. I smelled it with my throat, in other words. Words burbled forth from the pink, oiled relief of her lips. That misplaced feather of hair fluttered near her ear. Pat, I wanted to say. Pat! Time is a thing that moves. We are not the ones moving. Back in our early days in the White House I had once balanced her on my lap in the tub. We were nearly sixty. She’d come back from some dinner drunk, my favorite Pat. We went to the bath, we made a froth. Two men waited outside the door. You learned not to care about such things. Later Pat lurched from bed, upchucked into the gold wastebasket. I put her back to bed, handed the wastebasket to one of the men outside the door. In the morning I gave a televised speech. You beautiful citizens, I wanted to say, is there anything more important than having your wife in whatever room you choose? If there had been an amendment guaranteeing such a right, I’d have ratified it then and there. Instead I continued with my speech. Often, I wished for a lever that would allow me to send an electric current from my desk to every citizen’s home. I wish for that still. Did you hear me, Richie? Pat asked. Sure, I said. There came the lips. Other cheek, kissed. I palmed her breast. It was as loose and lifeless as a chicken cutlet. She didn’t notice. Clacked out the door. Her ass these days was still tight in her white pants, but was the shape of two halved apples. An old woman’s ass. Her day man followed a polite three steps behind.

*   *   *

Late morning, nine holes with an old lobbyist friend. After lunch, nap. During nap, I’ll do my damnedest to enter my favorite dream, the dream in which I’ve mounted Jackie Kennedy on the steps of my alma mater. It’s a cold night and we are under my coat. The stars are like flecks of ice on a dark ocean. After nap, dinner with Pat. After dinner, telephone hour. After telephone hour, bed. Pat calls our bedroom the Secret Garden. Because of all the florals. Like we are preparing for the casket. Tonight I will reach for my wife the way I reach for Jackie in that dream. Like I mean it. Not open to discussion. It’s not Jackie Kennedy that is the draw. It is that in the dream neither of us has seen the inside of the White House. We are just two people getting primitive. History corrected. I can taste it like a brine: so many mistakes. Tonight I want to touch Pat. See her the way she was. Skin like cream, bright bright eyes. Present corrected. Forget how the world has turned on its axis for all of eternity. And will long after I’m gone.

DALLAS

Dallas’s momma kicked him out three nights before. He slept the first two nights next to the old man next door on a yellowed twin mattress. The bed was up on cinder blocks and the old man used their hollow centers to display his valuables, which looked to be made up mostly of chipped chess pieces and dinged-up model cars and pink bunches of toilet paper Dallas guessed were supposed to look like paper flowers, or something. The old man was out on his porch when Dallas’s momma chased him out the house with his own switchblade, and soon as she slammed the door the old man waved Dallas over with his old-man claw, said, They’s biscuits and jam and shit in the kitchen, help yeself. The old man had cable, and besides Dallas wasn’t a snob or anything, if the old man needed someone’s arm to hold at night Dallas wasn’t fixing to call the authorities over it, except during the third night the old man tried to roll over onto Dallas, whispering about how Dallas could have anything in the house, money, things worth money, even that guitar in the corner, and Dallas at first just let it happen, he couldn’t quite catch up to why there should be any bother with it, and then something surged up in his gut, something tentacled, and he pushed the man off him and ran out the house with his pants and shoes in one hand and the guitar in the other, and then when his bare feet hit the cold grass in the yard he thought maybe how that was the first time he’d ever actively decided he didn’t want something to happen, and he wondered if that meant he was a man, at least according to what his momma would think was a man. He looked toward his momma’s house, could see the light from the TV in the front room through the curtains, his momma just inside relaxing and enjoying herself with a glass of beer resting comfortably on that big whale belly while he looked longingly in, her own son shirtless, and Dallas put on his pants and shoes and walked past her house and the one after that and then the one after that, and he turned a corner and walked all the way to the park and slept in the soft dirt under the monkey bars. In the morning a redheaded child stood over him and asked him could he please move, she was trying to practice. The sky was the color of the buttermilk his momma drank every morning and it hurt his eyes. He sat on a swing and watched the child for a while. She pumped her legs and grunted. The guitar wasn’t anywhere his eyes could see and he tried to work up some emotion about that but there was none.

He walked over and asked the child for some change. She stopped moving and hung there, arms straight. Her hair shimmered in defiance of such an ugly sky. For a minute Dallas saw friendship in her big child’s eyes, and he felt his heart open a little, like a blossom, or a fist, then she told him, Take yeself to a shirt store, you all burnt up, then take yeself to a churchly place where you could find a bath. Dallas said, No one likes a redhead anyway, and grownups don’t bathe, they shower, and then he stuck his fingers in her pockets and fished out a nickel and a dime and a colorless gumball he popped immediately into his mouth. In the scuffle the child dropped down and fell to her knees and let loose a warbling cry Dallas recognized as mostly anger, and he turned and ran. After a few blocks he slowed and spit the gum at his feet, kept spitting every few steps because it felt appropriate. Yessir, he said as loud as he pleased, just
exactly
like a fist.

Dallas knew there was a Circle K a few streets over and he walked there to pass some time. Inside he loitered in the home-aids aisle and pretended to be choosing between two different types of lightbulbs. When the girl at the counter wasn’t looking he snatched a shirt with
Who Farted?
printed on it and put it on inside out. He moved to the soda machine and cupped his hand under the orange Fanta and helped himself while the girl tended to the donut case. Dallas watched a man survey the candy selection at the counter. After a while he settled on a packet of licorice rope and some Goobers. Dallas walked over and said, I’ll give you fifteen cents for a lift to wherever you going, and without meeting Dallas’s eye the man said, Surely can, I’m a Christian ain’t I?

Dallas rode in the cab of the man’s truck. It felt like afternoon but he couldn’t be sure. That odd sky lay above him like a yellowed sheet but quite a breeze got worked up and whipped around him and through his hair and it was all Dallas could do not to open his mouth and swallow up big mouthfuls of it. The truck slowed and turned and Dallas saw that the man was going to the movies. He wondered what kind of man this was, going to a movie in the middle of the day, but he was grateful to arrive at some kind of destination.

The man got out and shoved the candy packages down the back of his pants. He looked toward Dallas, but the tint in his glasses made it near impossible to tell whether Dallas was being looked at. You can come along, the man said, should you desire to. The man had a cleft lip but Dallas realized a movie sounded like just the thing, and he jumped from the cab and followed the man inside. The man bought two tickets and when Dallas paused by the snack counter, near bloodthirsty for a kernel of popcorn or a pat of butter, the man slapped his leg like a master to his dog. Dallas choked back a robust Fuck you and followed the man into the pleasant darkness of the theater. You sit down here, the man whispered, pointing to a row in the middle. I’m up there, he said, and we ain’t together from here on out. The man turned and Dallas watched him trudge up the steps, holding his pants where he’d stuffed the packets of candy. The rest of the theater was empty so Dallas chose him a seat where he pleased relative to the area the man in the glasses allowed him.

Dallas hoped this was a movie with some kind of monster or evil snake or something. At least featuring knives and guns or a tank or a ghost. Then when the lights came all the way down Dallas couldn’t tell what kind of movie it was. A woman looked out and didn’t say nothing. A man in a suit started his car, then sat there. A few strings were plucked for musical effect. Dallas got a feeling that he tried to laugh off, a feeling like the light coming from the screen was a spotlight on him, like the movie was watching him rather than the other way around, only he didn’t have no story to tell. Suddenly the man in the glasses came down the steps and walked out the door marked
EXIT
, slamming the door behind him. Dallas was alone and the woman in the film was walking toward a door in a hallway. Dallas didn’t want to see the other side of that door and he’d be damned if he was going to sit and figure out why. He ran and burst out the exit. He saw he was at the back of the building and the man in the glasses was gone.

A lady in a wheelchair was sitting near a propped-open door, smoking. Dallas recognized her as one of the ticket takers. She squinted at Dallas, called over, Ain’t that movie a bore? Her legs looked shriveled inside her pants. He wondered if she could hear the same buzz he heard, like a thousand voices and a clump of cicadas and a steady rain. He wondered if things shimmered when she looked at them as they did for him. He wondered if she felt like her insides were on her outsides all the time like he did. The woman opened her mouth and let the smoke meander out. She seemed content to just watch him and let him watch her. He realized if he wanted to he could walk over and start to love this woman. He imagined waking up and making toast in her yellow kitchen, patting her cat between its ears, reading the TV guide to her each night.