The Kissing List (16 page)

“Less messy,” the friend offered.

“Less everything,” Maureen answered. “Less of less.”

T
wo weeks after the Porn Star’s first visit, the two of them sat in Maureen’s backyard drinking gin and tonics. It was either very civilized, or Maureen was trying hard to salvage her self-respect. Everything was in bloom—the lilacs, the crab apple tree, the dandelions, and the yellow and purple crocuses—and the grass was still damp from the sprinklers. The Porn Star was wearing khakis with crisp creases running down the front and back, a nice brown belt, and a white dress shirt with the cuffs rolled up, revealing his thick, sturdy forearms. It was the beginning of the weekend, and Maureen felt happy. She thought that perhaps she and the Porn Star could become the kind of friends who sat in her backyard from time to time, the ice cubes rattling in their cocktail glasses. She imagined laughing over how they’d met, and someday even telling him the story of his nickname. I will try to be nicer, she thought, which was a funny thing to tell herself. I will stop playing games. She made a mental note that the Porn Star’s name was Jed Caraway. She looked at him. He had reached the age at which wrinkles formed in the corners of his eyes when he smiled. She handed him a red and
green cocktail napkin left over from Christmas. He took a piece of bruschetta from the blue plate.

Overhead, the sky was the same color as the plate. She wanted to point out the similarity to Jed. She wanted to show him that everything wasn’t a pale imitation of the original. Instead she said to herself, “This blue is true,” and petted the cat who was rubbing against her bare legs and against the metal legs of the lawn chair where she sat. The tomatoes were sweet; the olive oil, vinegar, and tomato juice had soaked into the center of the bread, but the crust was still crisp. The contrast created a nice texture. It was delicious, and Maureen hoped that Jed might comment, a kind of compliment-comment. But they sat quietly, chewing the bruschetta and sipping their gin and tonics.

Jed started to talk to her about erotic things, about the most erotic thing he’d ever seen. It was simple. A woman whose shirt was unbuttoned too low. She was kneeling down to retrieve a book from the bottom shelf at Barnes and Noble, and he came around the corner, in search of a how-to guide on electrical wiring, and saw down her shirt, a peekaboo of flesh and satin. Surprise is sexy, he said. Less is more. He winked and asked Maureen about her most erotic moment.

Well, she started, it was the summer after she graduated. “I was on a road trip with friends. That part doesn’t matter, I guess. Anyway, I was at a gas station, and there were two guys there; they had the hood of the car up, fixing it. One of them was wearing jeans and a jeans jacket with nothing underneath. He looked at me, and for some reason, I didn’t look away, which
was what I normally did when I was in college, when I used to be embarrassed to look too closely at strange men. I kept staring at him, and he stared back at me and slowly slid open his jacket, exposing his bare chest for me to see.”

Maureen paused, thinking about why she’d been afraid to look at men, how she had once believed that looking could invite something unwanted.

She continued: “I think it was strange because he was performing for me. That doesn’t happen often. Mostly, it’s the other way around—the woman performing for the man.”

When she looked up, she saw that Jed was masturbating again. His hand moved deliberately up and down his penis. This was Friday afternoon. This was early summer in Maureen’s backyard, and she was trying to have a conversation with him.

“That was a sexy story,” the Porn Star said, smiling. “It got me turned on.”

She picked up the plate and dropped it on the rock path from the house to the garage. “It was my story,” she said. “We can be friends, but I’m not interested in continuing to have this weird sexual relationship with you.”

“Weird sexual relationship?” He sounded surprised.

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll have to meditate on that.”

“Meditate, huh?”

“What’s wrong?” he said.

S
everal weeks passed before Maureen saw him again. She was working on the quilt square, trying to think of something
clever to commemorate Lila’s engagement to Edu. For some reason, the only thing that came to mind was a silly nursery rhyme that she had known in elementary school:

Now, of course, that wasn’t the order at all. After kissing and before love came sex. And after sex with no love came a liberation (or deadening?) of the emotions, a severing of sex from love, which Maureen had once declared a good thing, standing by this belief for many years. Sex was just an act. And after love, marriage didn’t necessarily follow, though it could. Or marriage might precede love. Or it might exist independent of love. The two little lovers might climb down from their perch in the tree and find the baby already waiting in the carriage.

Maureen heard him knock, but by the time she got there, he had moved to the center of the front lawn. Through the half moon–shaped windows at the top of the door, she could see that he was facing her house. His sweats were pushed down and scrunched around his ankles; his white T-shirt fell to the top of his hips. His hand was on his penis. Maureen thought about going into the living room, opening the curtains, and sitting down on the couch to watch the whole show. She imagined the picture that would form in her mind—all the details that
she’d missed before by being too connected, too close: the way he moved his hand and how he held his body, his hair, his expression, the color of his skin. She would simply focus on the image: the man on the lawn outside the window masturbating.

Maureen stood, thinking about whether she could do all of this, but she felt scared. She felt scared and sad, and finally disappointed that she couldn’t will herself to walk into the living room with a funny rhyme already forming in her mind. In the kitchen, she called the police.

Y
ou know you have reached a certain age when you learn that your BFF (in today’s vernacular) is writing a memoir. “It’s nice to be writing on an advance,” she notes. Of course you’re happy for her, the girl who taught you how to shave your legs and introduced you to eyeliner, Emily Dickinson, and Ivy League colleges, your locker partner and confidante from seventh grade onward. You have long admired her intelligence, her beautiful sentences, the way she could hunker down in the
hallway right before class and scribble out a perfect compare/contrast essay on
Heart of Darkness
and
Apocalypse Now
, the only two things you remember studying in AP English. You think about those lazy late afternoons on your sleeping porch with the smell of the flowering crab apple riding little eddies of air through the open windows and rainbows darting like schools of tropical fish across the walls as your crystal prisms twirled in the light. Dreamy! Your BFF propped herself up against your pillows underneath the glow-in-the-dark stars you’d arranged into several constellations when you were eight and obsessed with astronomy and the fuzzy pink bat you’d hung more recently, opened the leather-bound diary that you envied, and read her newest poems while you hmm-hmm-hmm-ed in a way you hoped conveyed profound admiration for her verse. “That’s
soo
amazing,” you said afterward, praying she wouldn’t press you for specific reasons why. When she did, you searched for the right words to
obfuscate
(SAT prep) the truth: that you didn’t understand them well enough to say anything meaningful.

You were never a poet. One of your poems, whose title was something like “Is This One Man’s Fate?” was about a moth repeatedly drawn to a lightbulb until it singed to death. At a statewide creative writing camp for kids like you and your BFF, kids who mooned over words and socialized in study groups, the local bearded bard told you to stop trying so hard. You were showing him the masterpiece you’d suffered over for days about chained dogs and spiritually dead lawns and proud flags wilting like lettuce, a poem you’d written after wandering through
bad neighborhoods
for inspiration.

“This, for instance, is a very good poem,” the bard said, pointing to a little ditty on a neighboring page:

You went red with shame, embarrassed by the idea of an adult being privy to feelings you weren’t sure you had. You can’t even remember if you had a crush on a particular soccer player, or if you’d just written the poem because you liked the sound of it. You do remember that your BFF made out with a super-gorgeous fullback from a rival high school. She was interested in boys long before you were, or maybe it was that boys were interested in her. The poet also touched upon one of your sensitive spots: trying hard. This was what you specialized in. You weren’t a natural genius like your BFF or Roderick Netermyers, who in a single day whipped off a semester-long biology project on the effects of caffeine on athletic performance. (Never mind that he had to fake all his data.) At that time, you thought of yourself as
just
a hard worker, a plodder who
only
made good marks through sheer discipline. For your AP Bio project, for example, you cloned a carrot. This involved driving to the local university several times a week, where you wrestled your hands into plastic gloves and checked on the progress of your experiment under a sterilized hood. Mostly you had to monitor whether there were sufficient nutrients in your petri dish to feed your little orange nub. The nutrients? You can’t for
the life of you remember what the sticky gel consisted of—come to think of it, you’re not sure why this experiment of yours was considered cloning and not just gardening.

For her experiment, your BFF did something far more exotic on pheromones. She was testing the theory that attraction is mostly chemical and not a conscious choice, not a careful tabulation of how cute so-and-so looks in his wire-rimmed specs and brown slouchy corduroys, how much you admire the way he dances to the Talking Heads, making subtle movements of his upper body while his feet remain firmly planted, how you melt at his old-fashioned greetings versus your misgivings about how frequently he wants to discuss
The Naked Ape
, specifically how often the typical male thinks about sex in an hour. Yuck, your seventeen-year-old self thought but never said aloud.

If you were going to write your own memoir, you would definitely include your BFF’s experiment. She recruited couples and pairs of best friends as test subjects, and they agreed to wear cotton balls taped in their armpits for a whole day and forgo all the products they usually wore to mask their natural smell: Dial, Chanel, and ChapStick; Noxzema and their mom’s Night of Olay. At the end of the day, everyone gathered to see whether they could correctly identify their partners. You can’t recall whether couples fared better than friends, though you do seem to remember that your BFF failed to choose the damp, shriveled cotton ball saturated with your essence. Or perhaps you were the one who plucked up a cotton ball smelling of
ambition and hunger and teacups of melancholy and immediately thrust it back to its designated spot, the bagel you ate for lunch rising dangerously fast. Your BFF was always on a diet and often moody. Were the two connected? You’re not sure. Her moods scared you. You often felt responsible, or rather you thought if you did everything perfectly—if you were the nicest, most conscientious best friend ever—you might cheer her up. You tried to be punctual, say the right thing, agree or disagree gently. Ah, adolescent narcissism! Face it, though: you’re still susceptible to this kind of magical thinking. Which is why you and your BFF don’t spend much time together anymore. Which is why you haven’t seen or talked to her in three years. Which is why it’s probably better, or at least more honest, to call her your BFFY (Best Friend from Youth).

Y
ou’re happy for her. Maybe you’re a little jealous, but jealousy is natural. You have watched from afar as she fought her way to the top of her Ivy League class, aced the LSATs, edited the law school journal, was courted by a white-shoe firm with a reputation of making pulp of women. You knew she would do well because she is so brilliant and well connected and very good at making strategic decisions and willing to do whatever success requires. After she tells you about her memoir, you e-mail back:

A day or two passes before her name appears in your Inbox. Her memoir, she writes, is about quitting the firm for a year (you had no idea she did!), surfing from California to South America, meeting the man who is now her husband (did they have a wedding?! Were you really not invited?!). It started as an essay about radical rebirth (it is hard to imagine your old friend hanging five or ten), but the poetry of bombs and barrels, the beauty of lining up beyond where the waves were breaking and looking out into the vast and always changing sea … “well, it was like nothing I’d ever done before, and I ended up writing a hundred pages of this thing in a fevered dream … Then I got an agent, and she shopped it around …”