The Art of the Kiss Read online

  “No.”

  “You’ve read it, though.”

  “No. Well. Occasionally. Especially when you focus on new businesses. Potential new clients, you know. But the rest of the time, I usually skip it. Nothing personal. I don’t believe in fairy tales.”

  “You don’t—”

  “Nah. Don’t like ’em. Really dislike the name of this city. I know you’re probably playing off it in your column. But Fairyland. It sounds…” She finished her sentence by shuddering.

  “Who doesn’t like fairy tales? Not even for fun? Not Cinderella?”

  “Oh, maybe that one. In the old Grimms’ version, Cinderella cuts part of her feet off to prove that glass slipper couldn’t possibly be hers. That was kind of cool. Almost like a horror story.”

  “That’s not the way it goes,” he argued. “The stepsisters cut parts of their feet off because they were trying to prove the slipper does fit. Because they wanted to be princesses.”

  “Oh.” Sharon’s face twisted into the same expression she might have worn sniffing a carton of soured milk. “My version makes better sense.”

  “Does it,” Michael said through a crooked smile. This girl was getting more interesting by the second. “Michael Minyard.” He shifted the weight of the albums and extended his hand. It seemed the right way to greet her. With a handshake.

  “Sharon Grayson.”

  “Midnight Cowboy’s playing at the—” he started, before their handshake had even ended.

  “I told you,” Sharon interrupted, “it’s not me. The girl you’re looking for. I’m not her. Here’s the story: My houseplants are dead. I live with my father. I started my own photography business in his basement. I’m putting in insanely long days right now. Mostly twelve to sixteen hours. I develop my work in my own darkroom well into the night. I don’t go out for long two-martini lunches, and I don’t watch TV in the evenings. Every once in a while, Dad sits on the bottom step of the basement while I work. He drinks beer and talks to me while we listen to the fights on the radio. I don’t read ‘Hints from Heloise.’ As far as your paper goes, I’m mostly into political stories, but I do also check the comings and goings of the local chapter of the Rotary Club for possible business contacts. I do not do great laundry, I am not a whiz at folding bottom sheets, and I have never learned to cook.”

  “I see,” Michael said, still unable to stop smiling.

  They stared at each other, an uncomfortable pause opening up.

  “I guess I’d better—” Sharon said, nodding toward the checkout counter. She held her hands out to take the records back, but Michael insisted on carrying them.

  Sharon sighed with annoyance, but said nothing, deciding it was easier to go along with it.

  When the cashier handed Sharon her change, she lunged for the stack, but Michael beat her to it.

  Sharon raced ahead, opening the door for Michael.

  They walked across the lot, to her 1962 Dodge Dart.

  “Listen,” he said after placing the albums in her front passenger seat, “I need a headshot. For my column in the paper.”

  “Do you, now.”

  “And I was thinking maybe you—”

  “You don’t have staff photographers at the newspaper who can handle something like that?” she challenged.

  “You want the job?”

  She did. Michael could tell.

  But she shrugged, as if she could take it or leave it. “Only if I get photo credit,” she said smoothly.

  “Every week?”

  “Every week.”

  This time around, Michael’s smile wasn’t merely appreciative. He was doing it again. Being flirtatious.

  She offered the same I-could-take-it-or-leave-it shrug.

  That time, Michael was certain, she meant it.

  From

  Michael’s Notebook

  June the something-th, 1969

  Sunday—I think. Might be Monday by now.

  It’s awfully late.

  I’ve never been a journal keeper. Or a confessional writer. But then, out of the blue, I met a woman.

  She is beautiful.

  And hardheaded. And smart. And tenacious to the point of being stubborn.

  She’s opinionated and seems to present a kind of gruff exterior that reminds me of a junkyard dog.

  And yet, she is beautiful.

  Not beautiful despite what some might call questionable attributes.

  She is beautiful because of them.

  From

  Michael’s Notebook

  2015

  Friday. I think. Hard to keep track sometimes. Especially here, three full years into retirement.

  I’m still not really much of a journal writer, often going months between entries. But even with all those pauses, those flat-out stops and starts, I realize I have collected enough written-in journals through the decades to wrap the globe a time or two.

  Lately, all my entries dance around this phrase, one I’ve written before:

  I met a woman.

  And now, we’ve been together for more years than we were ever apart.

  Excitement never lasts. I know that. It leaves us all thirsty for more. Maybe in not such an obvious way as excitement left me and Sharon, the stream of admirers and customers filing straight out the studio doors, never to return.

  It was a thrill ride, being with Sharon during the height of her own fame, renown, admiration, interest. It felt like being on a rocket that kept climbing. Boosters exploding.

  Mostly, these days, it feels like we’ve made our trip, we’ve danced with the stars, and now we’re rusting in the junkyard.

  ~Michael~

  Mere minutes after Heather left with our camera, I was pacing our apartment with a fury I hadn’t known for years. I paused a time or two to give my donation box a frustrated kick.

  Who was I mad at? Me. I was the one to blame. Why did I have to unearth the camera? Why couldn’t I leave well enough alone? We were comfortable—weren’t we? Me and Sharon?

  Something bad had just happened. I’d watched it unfold. Something out-of-the-blue that had upset my attempt to break Sharon out of her spell. Something that had to be repaired.

  I ran a hand through my white hair, pacing. Pacing.

  I hadn’t wanted to upset her. I just wanted her to come back to us. I wanted her to remember when things had been so good. So exhilarating. We could get back there. I still believed it. Didn’t she?

  On the second or third trip around the living room, my eyes landed on one of my notebooks.

  The same notebooks I’d scribbled in incessantly over the years. Decades of them. The scribbling, somewhat predictably, had exploded since my retirement from the paper. I had piles of notebooks by that point, all filled with my longhand observations of life. Ideas. Snatches of poems. Jokes. Anything that had passed through my mind and down my arm. Anything my fingers had insisted needed to be scrawled onto a page.

  If only she could hear me, I thought, the sounds of Sharon’s favorite jazz station floating up from the studio below.

  I grabbed my latest notebook, and with a distant, muffled saxophone in my ears, I raced out the back exit, toward the square.

  ***

  “You need something?”

  Booming. That’s the only decent word to describe the guy’s voice. His words rippled and echoed across the slabs of concrete that made up the town square.

  The man who’d spoken to me was huge. Imposing. Thirty years my junior. And perturbed.

  Surely he was the DJ for KTXY—Fairyland’s lone jazz station. One of Fairyland’s few radio stations, period—the other two played country songs or classic rock. Anything else we happened to be able to tune in broadcast from nearby bigger towns. I told myself I was lucky that Sharon’s chosen station was just a few blocks away. Walking distance.

  Maybe. Maybe I was lucky. The way the DJ glared at me made it clear he hadn’t come outside to be friendly. He’d simply had enough of me staring wistfully through the plate glass an
d into his space, watching as he spoke into his microphone.

  He didn’t know about this place. He couldn’t have. He surely didn’t know that years ago, the location of this very radio station was Bleeker’s Records. He couldn’t have known that a lifelong love affair started right inside. My love affair. He couldn’t have known that when I looked through the glass, I saw the ghosts of us. Me and Sharon.

  I knew, though.

  And I knew immediately how he was seeing me. The same way the rest of the world had begun seeing me, right about the time the grays settled in. He saw an old man. Somewhere along the way, my value had lessened. Old people have about as much worth as used Styrofoam containers. Something that’s served its purpose, and now that the sesame chicken takeout has been gobbled down, needs to be disposed of.

  That’s how the DJ was staring at me. Like he was thinking, Must be some way to ditch this guy.

  “I was hoping for a few minutes of air time,” I said before he could quite figure out how to shake me.

  The DJ chuckled. No way did I look like the kind of guy with anything of value to say.

  Nervous, I pushed my glasses up higher on my nose. I glanced through the door he was propping open, eyes bouncing across the microphones and computers and all those crazy light bars moving up and down. I figured they had to be some sort of sound measures—whatever they’re called—marking the rise and fall of volume. A semi-familiar Dave Brubeck piece played softly. I didn’t have much time to get all my convincing done. Probably until this particular song ended, and the DJ needed to set up the next one.

  “For what, sir?”

  “To read,” I explained.

  He grimaced.

  “Spiral bound notebook,” I said, holding up my bright red college ruled. “Best laptop going.” And grinned, fingers crossed.

  The guy grunted.

  “I used to be a writer for the local newspaper. Had my own column for decades: ‘Observations from the Tower.’ Like I was watching all of Fairyland from up high, right? Where I could see everything. I’ve never stopped writing—”

  “You ought to start a podcast.” He was starting to look like a wall. Something I was never going to get through.

  “No, see—I want my wife to listen to me. Really hear me. And she’s not going to go trolling through a bunch of podcasts. She thinks they’re laughable. But she regularly tunes in to your station. She loves jazz. I know for a fact she’s listening now.”

  “Look, Mr.—”

  “Have you ever lived in a city?” I asked. “A big one?”

  The guy sighed. He could have knocked down trees with the force in that sigh. He had no idea what we were negotiating. What was hanging in the balance. Only my whole world.

  “I went to college in one. Totally different sounds, especially after growing up in a place far smaller than Fairyland. Never thought I’d get to sleep with all the horns and the shouts and the engines and the dogs and the slamming doors and the—”

  The guy started to suck in another breath for a new sigh. The kind that could send me flying like dandelion seed. So I got right to the point. “Then I went home for Christmas. And—”

  “Lemme guess. You couldn’t get to sleep without the sounds of the city.”

  I never knew that impenetrable walls could get bored so quickly. “You’ve heard this one.”

  He started back through the open door.

  “The thing is,” I shouted, “my voice has become like those horns and shouts. My wife’s stopped hearing it. She sleeps right through it. I’ve faded into the background. Got to change things up to get her attention.”

  “What for?”

  I couldn’t exactly tell him the truth, could I? What was the truth? That my wife had fallen into a spell of her own making, and given our magic away.

  My mind latched onto the phrase: she’s given our magic away. Maybe there was a way I could tell him that. Without giving him the details that would make him think I was senile.

  “I need her to miss us,” I explained. “I need drama. Without drama, what’s left? Isn’t a dose of drama the key to a good story? I’m afraid our drama’s been replaced by the day-to-day. The routine.”

  I turned my face away from the open door and toward the hazy plate glass, the spot where my memories came to life once again. I saw Bleeker’s, saw the aisles of vinyl and Sharon with that pen in her mouth and me sliding her records from her arms. I saw us then. And when I looked at the glass from a different angle, I saw me now, hovering on top of it all. My own reflection, which seemed faint, nearly unrecognizable. An old man staring into the past, at the time when he’d still been able to go after magic.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the fairest…

  “Maybe love isn’t fair,” I blurted, taking my eyes away from the glass. “Maybe it’s not anything you should have ever counted on. Maybe it doesn’t necessarily get more valuable with time. Maybe, in the end, it’s cruel. But I don’t want to think that’s true. Do you?”

  The wall unfolded his arms. That last bit got to him. I could tell.

  “Two minutes,” he consented, holding up the same number of fingers for emphasis. “Then you’re out. Okay? Two minutes. If it’s bad, I can tell my boss you wandered in while I was in the restroom.”

  Two minutes. Sounded like heaven.

  ~On Air~

  Mirror, mirror, on the wall—who’s the fairest of them all?

  How many times have we heard—then repeated—those very words? We recited them as children. Mindlessly. Chanted them as we played-pretend through summertime games, diving deep into imagination’s waters.

  Stories are powerful things, I’ve come to realize. Because stories—our make-believe play—well, that’s how we come up with our own personal vision of the world. What the world is, what it can be. What we can be. How we can navigate its highest highs and deepest disappointments.

  In our heads, our lives are fairy tales. We each cast ourselves as the prince or the princess, and the road blocks in our lives we deem evil. We are good, our opponents are bad, and we move forward knowing that a golden sunset is awaiting our chariot and a kindly fairy godmother is somehow guiding the way when times get especially tough.

  We believe. Because we have been taught to believe—not by what we have personally witnessed, not by any factual accounts, but by stories.

  Yes, “Magic mirror on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?” We’re certain the mirror will say, without hesitation, “Why, you are the fairest in the land!” No one else comes close.

  None of us could possibly believe we’re actually the wicked queen—or a fire-breathing dragon.

  You know, sometimes, I wonder about that old magic mirror in Snow White’s tale. It had obviously been sharing its daily ritual with that black-hearted queen for quite some time. Had the queen once been extraordinarily beautiful? Is that why it praised her for being the “fairest”? Or instead, had the magic mirror seen past her superficial question and into her deep-down need for continuous praise, and decided a little fib—a white lie, a little bit of ego-stroking—might do her some good…until it got out of hand? While I’m at it, why would a magic mirror be confined to trivial requests about a woman’s appearance? Or, for that matter, to giving the same rote answer over and over?

  Had the queen changed over time? Had she grown cruel? Had the mirror witnessed her descent? Had her increasing cruelty made the mirror begin to see her as ugly? Was that why the mirror began to name young Snow White the fairest?

  Or had something else happened—something that at first glance would appear benign, but in reality, was far more dangerous than anything, anything else?

  Consider, if you will, the possibility that after days and months—even decades—of staring into the same face and saying the same exact words over and over, the magic mirror began to long for another face to gaze upon. Any face. It wasn’t so much that the mirror saw the queen any differently. It was that the mirror began to hunger for another turn of events. Perhap
s the mirror—so magical, so powerful—succumbed to the most human quality of all. The mirror, in short, grew bored.

  Yes, boredom. The most evil, most wicked, least recognized danger of all.

  Was Snow White truly the fairest? Or did she show her face at a particularly low point in the mirror’s existence? Did the mirror latch onto her, repeat her name, because it needed to destroy the mind-numbing routine?

  And haven’t we all done something similar?

  We all grow blind to the startlingly beautiful things that surround us. The light dancing on the nearby lake. The antique chair in the corner of the living room. We forget it’s there. Because it’s part of our everyday. Humdrum. Ho-hum. Boring.

  Hi-ho, hi-ho, and it’s off to work we go! Only, we drive the same route at the same time on the same days. We sit in the same chair. We sleep in the same bed. We eat on the same plates. Day-to-day existence and schedules and deadlines are not the sparkling stuff of fairy tales.

  At least, we don’t think it is. But the answer from the old mirror, I’d argue, might very well be proof that day-to-day boredom can, in fact, seep into fairy tales. It’s far more destructive than any wicked queen or evil stepsister with a rotten plan.

  Yes, boredom finds us all, my friends.

  But here’s the worst part of it: What happens when the things we become bored with are not physical objects? What if we become bored by a feeling, an emotion? What if—just what if—the thing that bores us most is love? What if the very thing that had once aroused our every sense, dilated our eyes, raised the hairs on our arms, made the world brighter and more vibrant and fragrant…Oh, when love is new, doesn’t the world smell fresh and clean, like it does after a summer rain?

  Forgive me. I ramble. I’m an old man. It’s what we do.

  But it doesn’t erase my question: What if we become bored—by love? What if the thing that once excited us more than anything can pale, lose its power? Fade to oblivion?

  Now, you’re listening. You’ve stopped whatever it is you were doing a moment ago—peeling an apple or running on the treadmill—because you know you’re…