The Kissing List (3 page)

Just before I moved in with Laurie, I had ditched my job as a reporter at a small-town newspaper and hopped on a transcontinental train with two duffel bags and $1,500 from the sale of my already secondhand Subaru. Taking the train seemed like a romantic way to start fresh in New York. Unfortunately, it was really just the kind of idea that sounded wonderful to say to other people. The train lost power for five hours outside of Denver and again right before St. Louis, and though I’d imagined the other passengers would be people like me, people embarking on life-changing adventures, they were mostly retirees and families with overtired children. I didn’t blame the children for running through the cars. I felt just as restless. By the time the train pulled into Penn Station, I had covered dozens of index cards in intricate geometric patterns. It was as if I had spent the whole journey squinting into a kaleidoscope at bits of colored plastic and had never gazed out the window and seen cows moving across fields, or friends and lovers waiting at stations, or darkness slowly snuffing out the world.

L
aurie was the sorority sister of a friend of mine from Oxford. I didn’t know many sorority sisters, so this alone made me nervous about whether we’d be compatible. Laurie’s
roommate, a social worker, had moved out to the suburbs to save money. Laurie was thinking about offering the room to a homeless woman named Zahara who lived in front of the nearby Banana Republic, but instead she decided to take me as her roommate. The day I moved in, it snowed. It took me two trips by subway to bring my stuff from Brooklyn, where I had been camping out in a studio a friend was house-sitting. On the walk back and forth from the subway, I smoked cigarettes, the third pack I’d ever bought. Smoking outside in the cold didn’t look that different from breathing. Between the two trips, I ordered a futon for delivery. Laurie had left a plastic juice pitcher of flowers in my new room. They were nothing fancy, just a bouquet of deli daisies and green filler, but they made me feel welcome.

Several days later, there were more flowers, except this time the whole apartment was filled with long-stemmed roses. Every surface, even the back of the toilet, held a jar or vase, and the scent was so powerful, you could smell it from the stairwell.

“My ex feels bad,” she said.

I was expecting the usual story about how he’d cheated on her and was trying to win her back. I’d seen that before. Instead, Laurie gathered a handful of her hair and lifted it from her head. “The Frankenstein scar,” she said, briefly explaining how nine months before, her cancer had reoccurred, and another tumor above her left ear had been removed. The scar looked like a miniature railroad track. “That damn intern shaved more than he had to. You should have heard the doctor cuss him out,” she said. “He was pretty cute, though. No ring.”

I think I said, “Oh, Laurie, that’s terrible,” or something else equally meaningless. I’m sure I teared up. My friends teased me that I’d cry if a friend of a friend of a friend hit a squirrel, and what’s worse, I’d be blubbering for the squirrel, too.

But her cancer was terrible. And there was also something terribly audacious about flirting with the intern just before he cut into your skull. Maybe I laughed because I could tell she wanted me to, because I knew she needed someone else to share the dark humor of the situation. The task of remembering is so difficult sometimes.

“Let’s hope the cancer is finito,” she said before changing the subject. “What’s your deal? Are you looking for love?” The way she said it made me laugh.

I
was involved in a platonic affair with a sports doctor named Lance. He’d actually been my doctor back home when I was a teenager and fractures spun across my legs like cobwebs from running too many miles. We weren’t friends until my senior year, when I’d booked an appointment with him to look at my knee, a casualty of college competition. I can’t remember how, but the subject of dinner came up. When I met him at a nice restaurant later in the week, he was reading a book on female sexuality in Caribbean literature. Because I was so much younger than him, I found his interest in this subject sweetly hokey.

After I finished at Oxford and moved back west, he started sending me tickets to join him in different places. We met in Denver for a Sheryl Crow concert. We met in San Francisco
and rode across the Golden Gate Bridge on rented bikes. We went to places where neither of us lived and dined at expensive restaurants. We weren’t having a relationship. He had frequent-flier miles out the wazoo, and he felt sorry for me, stuck in a small town in western Wyoming, even though that’s where I thought I wanted to be. “From Merry Old England to an armpit,” he’d say, not entirely kindly. We talked a lot, but never about anything that had happened the week before. I didn’t even know whether he had a girlfriend. At the end of the night, when I was tucked into a separate bed or bedroom—in New Orleans, I slept on sofa cushions on the floor—I imagined being his real girlfriend. I listened for him to slip out of his bed. I waited for him to lie down next to me. Since he was older, I thought he should make the first move. When I decided to try my luck in New York, he bought my cross-country train ticket. I was both grateful and confused, since it meant we’d be farther apart.

W
hen Laurie and I were in the apartment at the same time, we usually sat across from each other at the table, since both the couch and the armchair were uncomfortable and our bedrooms were only big enough for beds. Sometimes we’d play chess. She always beat me. Concentrating on the black and white pieces made me feel tired.

“Your turn,” Laurie said one night after we’d already played two games. She said chess was good exercise for her. “Oops. Are you sure you want to do that? Your queen is going to be vulnerable.”

I moved my pawn and took a bite from the slice of pizza that I’d bought from the stand across the street. This, along with hothouse tomato and iceberg salads, was just about all I ate. Laurie took a sip of Diet Coke. Besides my meager salad makings and milk, the only other things the refrigerator contained were one or two of her half-drained Coke bottles.

“How’s the job?” she asked.

“It’s tough,” I answered. “I’m beginning to think my boss is psycho.”

“Why?”

“She threw a box of Kleenex at me today.”

“You’re kidding.” She moved her rook. “That’s really fucked up. Sounds like you should get a new job.”

“I know.”

“There’s always demand in publishing.”

“Not really,” I said.

“With your résumé, you shouldn’t have any problems.”

Her next move put me in checkmate.

“You’re right,” I said, though all I could think of were millions of reasons I couldn’t get a new job, especially since I’d only had my current one for three months.

“How’s el doctor?” Laurie said as she gathered all the pieces, the black ones first, even though they’d end up jumbled together in her wooden box. “When’s your next rendezvous?”

I watched as she stood on her tiptoes to bring the Styrofoam head down from the top of the refrigerator. It had been next to a box of cornflakes, also part of my limited diet. The reason I didn’t cook was because I didn’t think Laurie owned
any pots or pans. Months later when I finally found them in the oven, where Laurie’s old roommate had stowed them, it was because I’d decided to get creative and make myself a baked potato.

“Nothing planned.” I tried to sound casual, even though I found myself rehearsing imaginary conversations with Lance where I’d confess I had a major crush on him, and he’d admit he felt the same about me.

Without even turning and looking in the mirror, she lifted the wig off her own head and slid it onto the fake one. “I don’t get it. Do you get it?” she asked, licking her fingers.

She spun the head so that it was gazing at me. “No,” the featureless face said. “He takes you places, but then nothing happens.”

“We’re just friends,” I protested. “He’s a lot older than me. Maybe …” But I didn’t have an explanation that made sense. I wasn’t even sure of his age.

“I think he’s playing with you,” Laurie said, beginning to twirl sections of hair into tight spirals. Without the wig, she looked like a Brooklyn punk with Upper East Side eyebrows.

“Stop ganging up on me.” I addressed the head. “Make Laurie play nice.”

She swiveled it back, so that it was facing her again. Without the wig, the head had no front or back. “We’re just worried is all,” she said, and then in the mock girlie voice that she reserved for her Styrofoam sidekick: “El doctor would be crazy not to snap you up.”

Laurie’s ventriloquism unnerved me. I knew she was just
trying to be funny, but I was as skilled at playing this game as at putting her in checkmate. “You’re so traditional, Miss Brain. Isn’t it possible to be friends with men?” I immediately regretted the first part.

“Oh, Sylvie,” she said, “don’t be so naive. Guys are a different species. They don’t think the way we do.”

“As though we think alike,” I said.

“Oh, how it pains you,” she said, pretending to stab herself in the sternum, “a dagger through your heart.”

“Shut up,” I said, still leaning toward her.

“I am woman. Hear me roar.” She howled.

I rolled my eyes. “Do you even know who said that?”

“Except for the fried ovaries, the male pattern hair loss,” she continued. “Why couldn’t I lose the hair on my legs and you know where?”

I found myself smiling.

“Think of the advertising potential,” she continued. “Chemo: better than a bikini wax.”

I grabbed the head. I’d never done this before. “We’ll make millions,” I said in the head’s high voice. “We’ll move into a penthouse.”

I
n old photographs of Laurie, her hair is the color of amber, thick and straight. She has sparkly green eyes and freckles, which she almost always powdered over. She wore short skirts and high heels, even though she walked unsteadily once her balance began to falter. I envied her style. In the middle of a thunderstorm one night, the dusky restaurant guys from across
the street called out, “Nice legs!” as she struggled to find her keys. They invited her for supper. She rang the bell and told me to come along. Despite the fact that the intercom garbled everything, I could hear the excitement in her voice. I changed into my going-out-on-the-town clothes and took the stairs two at a time.

L
aurie didn’t meet Lance, because he never came to visit me in New York. Once, after coming home from a bar where a man had bought me a drink, I decided to call him. My plan was to tell him that I like
liked
him and find out how he felt. Why not? We e-mailed and sometimes even exchanged letters, but we rarely spoke over the phone. When he answered, my nerves filled my throat, turning my voice into something heavy and hard to move. “Hi,” I choked out, “it’s Sylvie.”

Lance brightened. “It’s good to hear from you.”

As we talked about small things, I felt somewhat calmer. Finally I broached the subject: “You should come to New York sometime.”

“Why would I want to do that?” he asked.

I could tell he was joking, and yet it was enough to blow out my little flame. “It’s a great city,” I said.

“It’s a pretty good city,” he said, “but it’s not L.A.”

And then we started to compare the merits of the two cities and playfully argue, and by the time we exchanged chaste good-byes ten minutes later, I realized that, as far as he and I were concerned, I was still lost: a red balloon drifting above gray buildings in a clip from a movie.

I
didn’t meet Laurie’s ex until after we’d been living together for a year, and she had relapsed again. It wasn’t a big deal, she insisted, and to prove her point she threw a big boozy party—her relapse bash—at a friend’s spacious apartment on the Upper East Side. I was predisposed to loathe Bradley. Through Laurie, who had a standing date with him each week, I knew Bradley was dating someone new, a woman our age who wasn’t sick. Laurie called her the bimbo because she was a secretary. Once Bradley finished fucking her—that’s what Laurie said the rare times she felt sorry for herself—he’d come back to her.

“Sylvia,” Bradley said, offering me his hand. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

He was handsome in a buttoned-up, stick-up-your-ass kind of way.

“Really,” I said, eyeing the cuffs rolled up to show off his thick forearms and heavy gold watch. All that was missing was a pinky ring. “I bet I’ve heard more about you.”

He laughed, missing my obvious sarcasm.

“How is she?” he asked. “I mean, really?”

“She’s fine.” I took a big sip of my scotch and soda and nearly spit it out.

Bradley studied me expectantly.

“What more can I tell you? She’s fine.”

“I just feel so guilty, you know,” he said touching my arm the way men do when they’re trying to get something from you.

I drew back as though his hand was a straightening iron. I thought he was going to tell me the story that I knew from
Laurie: about how good he’d been to her, about the totally normal doubts after graduation—how they had to sow their oats and date other people and blah, blah, blah … And then Laurie relapsed.

I was nodding from habit.

“I just got engaged. I don’t know how to tell her.”

I saw Laurie out of the corner of my eye. She was laughing, and though I couldn’t hear her over the music and loud stupid conversations that people were having because it was a party, after all, and they’d already forgotten the occasion, or because, like me, they were torn between believing the doctors would remove every last grain of cancer and it would never happen again and wondering about the odds of this, and drinking too much to forget, I knew she was letting loose. I knew her laughter was big and true, that it was coming from someplace deep inside of her that I longed to find in myself.

Bradley glanced over his shoulder to see what was more interesting than him. When he turned back, he looked like he was choking.

Fucking Bradley. I wanted to kick him in the shin or stomp on his polished loafers. I planned to whisper, “I will kill you if you tell her.” But instead I found myself grabbing his shoulders and pressing myself against him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.