The Art of the Kiss Read online

“I’ve got a feeling about him,” her father said, and returned to his morning paper.

  Sharon frowned, wanting to ask for more details. And deciding, in the end, to shake it off.

  Only, she couldn’t. Her father never sugarcoated anything. And he had never, not once in her entire life, ever lied to her.

  He slathered a piece of toast with marmalade and handed it to her. “Eat up. Takes a lot of energy to listen to phones ringing and never being answered.”

  Sharon grabbed the toast and snatched the phone off the hook, the curly cord stretching between the kitchen wall and the table. She’d barely gotten halfway through dialing the first number when their doorbell rang.

  “Bet that’s Michael now,” her father said.

  “Please,” Sharon muttered. “It’s a neighbor. Somebody didn’t get their paper delivered and they want to borrow ours, or they’re looking for the cat that ran off during all the fireworks commotion and hasn’t been seen since.” She hung the phone up and carried her toast to the front door.

  “I bet on the cat,” she called out, throwing the door open.

  But no—no worried neighbor. Her smile faded.

  There he was. Michael. On the porch. Pushing her camera case toward her.

  “Oh,” she said, not noticing the sticky jam she was getting on the case as she accepted it. “I know. It’s unfixable. Don’t worry—”

  “No, it’s done,” he said. He had that look like he could hardly hold back the laughter bubbling up inside him.

  “Done?”

  “Fixed.”

  She frowned. “How—”

  “Why don’t we go try it out in the studio?”

  “There’s no way—”

  From the kitchen, her father shouted, “Don’t leave Michael on the porch all day, Shar.”

  She flinched. “I guess—one shot—wouldn’t hurt. But I’m warning you, these things are sensitive. There’s no way. Even if it technically takes a picture, I’ll still see all the differences during development. It was nice of you to try, but—”

  “Would you like some coffee, Michael?” her father asked, carrying a steaming cup into the living room.

  “Hey, thanks,” he said, reaching out to accept his offer. The coffee was fresh and the ceramic sides of their cups were thin. Michael grimaced, fingers burning as he wrapped his hand around the cup. He gripped the handle quickly, shaking the pink, nearly-scorched fingers of the other hand.

  Sharon wore a look on her face that said she was more than a little annoyed by the whole back and forth. Yes, her father was the type to loop everyone in, extend invitations. But the over-eagerness, the nauseatingly sweet tone her father used...it was a little much, even for him. Almost like her father had decided to treat this guy like some sort of long-lost family member.

  She clearly did not believe some half-baked fairy tale spouting journalist was capable of putting together a serious column—let alone a camera full of delicate pieces, all of which had been smashed to oblivion.

  And yet, both Michael and her father could tell by the interested look on her face that she was dying to give it a go.

  Michael was on her heels as Sharon headed downstairs.

  She flicked on the lights and popped open her case. She ran her fingers around the camera, surely feeling the new ridges and scratches that weren’t there before.

  Sharon placed the camera on her tripod, her eyebrows all slammed together in a can’t be sort of way, while her lips mouthed a silent please please please still work kind of prayer.

  She attached her shutter release cable and turned. “You want to sit—” she started, motioning toward the stool where she’d taken Michael’s headshot. He’d already pulled the simple blue smudgy background down from a large overhead roller—the kind that had once allowed maps to be pulled down in front of the chalkboards in their own high school classrooms. Instead of sitting on the stool to pose, as he had for his column headshot, he was holding one of the nightlife photos she had spread across a table. But he wasn’t simply looking at it. He was inspecting.

  Sharon’s face twisted into a look of sheer mortification—like Michael’d opened a page of her diary.

  “You think I stink,” Sharon said, snatching the photo from his hand.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I’m not a little kid. You can tell it to me straight.”

  “I think these are an amazing starting point. But I also know you’re about to far surpass all this.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I am a sorcerer.”

  “A sorcerer,” she repeated sarcastically. Clark Kent was trying to convince her he really did have superpowers. “In Fairyland. Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”

  Michael offered her a crooked grin. “You know what rarely ever changes? Fairy tales. For the most part, they’re the same.”

  “A story told is a story told. Why would it change?” Sharon responded, still fingering the cable.

  “Oh, no,” Michael corrected. “A story told becomes a story repeated. And all good fish tales usually grow with each telling. Become wilder, more unbelievable. I’m a story man, remember? I know these things. And sure, there were a few variations in fairy tales, especially when the tales were new. But fairy tales during more modern times? Not so much. We must really love those stories, because we don’t change them. We simply repeat them verbatim, over and over.

  “Right now, right here, I’m telling you that what we are living in is a fairy tale and I am a Fairyland sorcerer, and these photos,” he paused to point at her latest images, “don’t matter, because I have changed your camera. It is, madam, like all fairy tale gadgets—the wheel upon which gold is spun. It is the beautiful carriage that will now carry you forward. It is Cinderella’s glass slipper, returned by the prince, that fits. Magic awaits you with this camera.”

  “And why, dear sir, did you do such a thing? Why have I become the chosen one?” Sharon asked, deciding to play along. Figuring, at this point, that his story was merely an excuse. Her camera, suspicion told her, was actually still broken. This tale was simply a way to soften the news that the camera could never be fixed.

  Michael didn’t answer immediately. He crossed to her record player and dropped the needle on the vinyl. Jazz notes filled the basement as he gathered her in his arms.

  They danced, but not clumsily. They swayed together like they’d done this before. Like they somehow understood how their partner moved, no stumbling period needed to get to know each other.

  “Want to hear how I fixed it?” he murmured in her ear.

  Sharon stiffened and started to pull away. “What is this? You showing me you can fix me?”

  “Fix?” Michael looked an odd mix of wounded and offended and sorry. “There’s nothing to fix here, Sharon. Not with you. There never was.”

  He took her up in his arms again, and continued, “I fixed the camera by thinking of you, the princess who doesn’t need me. I know you don’t. I happen to think we’d be good together. You and me. Amazing.”

  Before she could stop herself, Sharon was letting go, giving herself permission to become part of Michael’s fantasy world. For that brief moment, it was true, all of it—the camera was magical and the world sparkled. A man accepted her and didn’t want to fix her. She could be Michael’s and be her own woman separate from him. She could dance here with him and all by herself in the middle of Murio’s, any old time the mood struck. She could be supported without giving up being strong. She believed that Michael saw her as tough, and not just girl tough. That he would never send a Peter to protect her as her dad had lovingly done. Michael had spent who-knew how many hours fixing her camera; he had uncovered parts on a holiday weekend. And she believed it was not out of pity but because he had been overcome with genuine affection for her. Already, after only a few brief meetings. She believed that the world belonged to the two of them. And that they could make rules to fit them, not the other way around. She believed fairy tales really did
come true.

  They grew ever closer as they danced, taking tiny steps, never venturing far from the Nikon. “You and me,” Michael repeated. “My abilities and yours. All tangled up now in that single camera.” The song surrounding them swelled, hitting a crescendo. Michael’s face lowered toward hers. “Take a picture of us,” he whispered. “You’ll see it. Everything we can be.”

  Sharon closed her eyes. The sense of melting into Michael brought such shock that Sharon squeezed her hand—the one holding the camera’s shutter plunger. The one that would have taken their picture, if only that camera still worked.

  Only, it did take their picture. At the moment their faces met—or maybe in that slice of a second before their lips touched.

  Hard to tell for sure. All Sharon knew was that she had heard the snap, sensed the flash against her closed eyelids.

  How? Sharon’s shocked face seemed to ask, pulling away from Michael.

  It shouldn’t have. No more than fairy tales should ever come true.

  And yet…

  Sharon scrambled to crack open her camera, pull out the film.

  ~Michael~

  It sounds nuts. I know it does. As crazy as a story taking place in Fairyland. That camera should have been useless after the Independence Day fiasco. But it wasn’t.

  It was magic. My hands had made it so. After that accident, I’d turned an ordinary, everyday object into the kind of powerful tool that could make dreams come true. Abracadabra.

  Her dreams and mine both. And that kiss. Wow.

  But what had happened in the years since? After a million goodnight and hello kisses? Million. Such a lazy number. We lean on it when what we’re really saying is “too many to count.” This woman, the same I had once hungered to get close enough to speak to, had, by that point, kissed me so many times that I could rely on that lazy number. Million. An unfathomable amount.

  Had the fire between us been reduced, at that point, to mere embers? Little orange specks in the midst of ashes. Cinders, that was a better word, the preferable word. Because that meant there was still something left that could reignite at any time. Combustible material. Yes, combustible was so much better than contentment. Contentment was fine for small snatches of time—for picnics and vacations and little moments in-between adventures and new chapters. But what if contentment was all that remained?

  I crossed my fingers for cinders.

  But I was also painfully aware that my latest notebook was open on the kitchen table. Right where she could find it. I’d been putting it there, day after day, for the past several months. And she had never picked it up to read it. Not like she used to.

  Still, we sat, silently staring at each other, our memories covered in cold ash, two players in a real, ongoing Cinderella story.

  But what role did I play in it? Prince Charming? Or a villain? Was that possibly the reason for her detachment? Somewhere along the way, she’d started seeing me as her arch-enemy?

  I could no longer read her thoughts. Not anymore. I had no way of knowing if that Fourth of July weekend ever crept into her head. If she thought of it with affection. Or if the mere idea of it weighed on her with regret or what-ifs or images of a life unvisited, decisions that could have been made another way.

  A planet-sized chasm had opened between us.

  I was terrified the clock had already struck midnight.

  ~August 2, 1969~

  Sharon and Michael stood on the sidewalk, listening to the bouncer tell the story of Murio’s. A new bouncer, one that Sharon hadn’t yet seen. But the same story:

  “Used to be a mortuary.”

  The small cluster of young women gasped.

  “The tables they used to lay the bodies on to drain them are still inside.”

  One girl turned her eyes—lids loaded with blue eyeshadow—toward the front of the bar. “Maybe we should go somewhere else.”

  “Don’t you worry,” the bouncer told her protectively. “You ladies have any problems, you come straight to me.”

  He nodded once at the girls, implying that they would not have his own personal protection at one of the bars off the highway.

  Yes, they were safe here. On the Fairyland town square. Under his watch.

  Michael glanced at Sharon, who rolled her eyes.

  Michael swallowed a laugh as he handed over their cover charge.

  They slipped inside, immediately drifting off in two different directions—Sharon into the crowd and Michael toward the bar.

  He ordered a vodka tonic, which he placed next to his notebook, and twisted his barstool to face the crowd. They’d chosen Murio’s for the first of what Michael hoped would be many working dates.

  He leaned back, already smiling as Sharon prowled the edge of the crowd.

  “So.”

  Michael flinched as the single syllable hit his eardrum like a hammer.

  He glanced up, finding himself next to a man twice the size of the bouncer outside. With an unapologetic gotcha look on his face. “You and Sharon. Here together,” he said.

  He’d startled Michael, sending his thoughts scattering like birds frightened by a sudden noise. Slowly, though, as his thoughts settled again, he recognized the man.

  “Peter. Right? From the Fourth?” Michael asked.

  “Good memory.” Peter offered his hand. “She keeps telling me that I don’t have to follow her,” he added, shouting directly into Michael’s ear.

  Michael nodded slightly. “Sounds like Sharon.”

  “She tells me—basically to get lost. And that she’d cover for me. Tell her dad I was still out here. Keeping an eye on her.”

  “So why don’t you take her up on it?” Michael asked, his voice laced with a slight but ever-growing annoyance.

  Peter offered a sly smile. “Been doing it long enough that she feels like my sister or something. I keep thinking, though—maybe sometime she gets lucky. And maybe I’m not needed anymore.”

  Michael stared Peter down. “Lucky? Lucky how? She’s not looking to pick somebody up. She’s a photographer. Doesn’t need anyone defending her, either. She can take care of herself just fine. I came here to be close to her while I worked on my own column.” He nodded once at his notebook. “But as long as I’m here, you can take off.”

  Peter wheezed a laugh. “Sounds exactly like something Sharon would say.” He slapped Michael’s shoulder in an almost congratulatory way.

  In an abrupt change of subject, Peter asked, “Column, huh? What’s it about?”

  Michael nodded, beginning to understand. “So are you reporting back to Dad that I passed the test?”

  “Ah, you passed already. This was just...”

  “Confirmation?”

  “Maybe.” Peter shrugged.

  A nearby flash stole their attention. Together, they turned to watch Sharon at work.

  From the

  Studio Walls

  ~

  Murio’s

  1975

  Light from the disco ball created a polka-dot  pattern on the faces of the young couple. Frozen in time, seen only in profile, seated at a tiny table near a wall, hands touching. A portrait of newfound desire. Of feelings they had not yet expressed out loud, but that were ready to unfurl, shamelessly, one more new bud in the spring.

  The photo had been taken during the last time Sharon slipped, Nikon in hand, into Murio’s.

  She hadn’t known it would be the last, not until she was back in her darkroom. Not until memories began to swirl, one image after another, swimming through her developing solution.

  She saw her own first night at Murio’s, being mistaken for a woman on the prowl. And she saw herself later on, when she’d become The Art of the Kiss Sharon. Fairyland’s hometown celebrity. No assumptions or misinterpretations. They all knew her by then.

  But it wasn’t all work. And she began to see those images too. Fun nights with Michael and Peter. The three of them sharing cocktails and the latest stories ripped straight from the pages of their own lives. Saw them
raise their glasses in a toast, their arms swept out in wild gestures, their mouths open in laughter.

  She saw the friendly arm punches Peter gave her, their sibling-style rivalry fueled, surely, by sharing Sunday dinners at her dad’s place. Peter’s folks often showed, carting homemade desserts.

  Of course they’d had dinner together. Everyone was always invited. Her dad’s way.

  Image after image. Inside Murio’s, throughout the years, the faces remained ever-changing. Different groups, new crews. Didn’t that mean there would always be new pictures waiting to be taken?

  Sharon had once felt certain of it.

  But after a while, Peter’s parents moved to Florida. And Peter left to join the force in St. Louis, coming back to visit now and then. The now and then stretched farther and farther until he didn’t visit at all.

  Image after image, night after night. Recently, Sharon’s after dark photos had begun to feel less and less satisfying.

  She blinked the memories away, placing her current image of the couple beneath a disco ball in the stop bath.

  Yes, she knew, the faces had changed, but the story was the same. Over and over. New couples, firsts, youth. Here, right in front of her, was photographic proof.

  She had already done this. She was traveling old ground, sinking her feet into her own footprints.

  Even before she’d framed this portrait of new love, she’d known that her Nightlife Period was officially over. Time to move on. How strange, she thought, that beginnings and endings were so often twisted together, like the stripes in a peppermint stick.

  ~May 9, 1987~

  At ten years old, the last thing Charles Liu wanted to do was go to some boring old camera shop.

  But then again, it was where his father was going to spend his Saturday. He intended to buy a camera for Sara Liu’s twelfth birthday. Which meant that Charles didn’t really have much choice in the matter. Not if he was going to spend time with him.

  Charles most often saw his dad from the back. The man was perpetually racing off to catch yet another flight out of town. Charles wasn’t exactly sure what his dad did at IBM—something about networks and computers—but he did know he hated his dad’s job. He hated it for taking him away, and for being more important, it seemed, than Charles.