The Art of the Kiss Read online

  Guilty.

  You’ve felt it. We all have. It’s not merely that the heat of passion has cooled. We know that happens. We all recognize it. We expect it. What I’m talking about is worse, and you know you’ve felt it.

  We have all been bored by love.

  Love of a person.

  Or maybe it was simply love of a place. Love of home.

  Or love of an activity, a pursuit that had once made you feel whole—more like you than anything else.

  And what if…stay with me, here…what if this being bored by love stems from something deeper, something far closer? What if the truth—the horrible, rotten, completely unvarnished truth—is we get bored by the day-in, day-out of us?

  We seek escape. We seek refuge. We blame others. We blame obstacles. But in all stark, bare reality, we are bored with ourselves.

  Our passion dulls. It grows tarnish. Because, as I said, we are bored with ourselves. More than we are bored with our surroundings. Our careers. Our spouses. We are bored with ourselves. Just like that magic mirror, we are sick to death of finding the same face in our reflection day after day after day after day.

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?”

  If only we were shinier, flashier, more exciting. If only.

  “Mirror, mirror, on the wall. What’s the fairest thing of all?” To learn that love is fragile? That it grows old? That it dries out, it cracks and breaks? It bores us? That we bore ourselves?

  We bore ourselves—and that means everything, everything involved with us gets boring.

  Love gets boring. Because we are bored with ourselves.

  Don’t let your love get dusty. Don’t take it for granted. Even if you swear you haven’t seen it in a while—it’s not because it’s not there anymore. Love can’t be that fragile, can it? Didn’t the fairy tales promise us more?

  What do you need to do to keep your love shiny?

  To make sure it stays anything but humdrum?

  What is it that you love? What would you be willing to do to keep it?

  ~Sharon~

  I actually said it out loud, right there in the middle of the shop: “Who do you think you’re fooling?” Did Michael think some microphone would make him unrecognizable? Was he trying to disguise himself? He hadn’t introduced himself. He hadn’t used his name. But wasn’t all that fairy tale junk a dead giveaway? His old newspaper column’d once had a castle turret at the top of it, for the love of all things in a land far, far away…

  Of course, in our story, the “fairyland” wasn’t far away at all.

  In our story, everything was uncomfortably close.

  I cranked the volume on the radio and leaned in to listen.

  I wondered if giving away the camera had actually had a bigger impact on him than I’d anticipated. Was that what this was about? Was it why Michael had gone to the radio station—my favorite radio station, the one that played jazz? Because of the camera? Because of the girl who’d stopped by? Heather Something. Right then, I couldn’t even remember her last name, especially not with Michael’s voice coming through the speakers.

  How did he even get on air, anyway? Who let him?

  I listened, my heart hammering in the way it only can when you’re furious. It doesn’t just beat. It throbs, creating aftershocks all through your veins.

  He was bored with our life? Oh, yeah, I heard what he said. Bored with ourselves. But he also said bored with everything he touched. With love. With his life. With me. Right? Bored with me.

  He longed for the old days, when people flocked to our store. When my Art of the Kiss had literally caused a traffic jam, so many people all trying to see our image for themselves. Like I was a rock star.

  Was I not as special if I didn’t have the same audience? Not worth as much if the world wasn’t beating down my door?

  What if, more than he loved me, he loved the promise of who I could be? Had it been more about the excitement that had surrounded me back then? The excitement, not me as a person?

  Maybe I couldn’t remember Heather’s last name. But I could remember what she’d said. Isn’t love love? It’s not something you’re supposed to critique, is it? Some love isn’t better than other love, is it? My love wasn’t good anymore because I wasn’t the same person? My love didn’t feel as flashy, as special?

  That was preposterous. I tried to tell myself that. But he’d said it. Bored. He’d used that very word.

  How long had he been bored? A week? Ten years? Longer? Had he been bored during the long days that had made up our busiest seasons, bored with the work we’d both put into the studio? It had fueled me. I’d considered it all something we’d made together. I’d loved that he had always been there, helping with advertising and fixing customers’ cameras, often working with me well into the night after having put in a full day at the paper. Doing the cooking in the evening when I was busy downstairs trying to wrap things up, usher the last few students or clients or shoppers from the store.

  He’d always had a knack for fixing things. All those busted cameras he’d repaired. All those ideas he’d had for pulling us out of semi-sluggish times.

  We’d been in it together. Hadn’t we?

  Or had he always felt something different?

  Most of all, I wondered why he didn’t talk to me. Really, I grumbled to myself repeatedly. He tells all of Fairyland instead of looking me in the eye?

  Why did he think he needed to go to such extremes?

  Anger kicked up all these thoughts over and over again, sending them to swirl through the air, then turn right back around and smack me in the face again.

  Right then, I had no idea how to make sense of any of it. The picture was blurred and the most important pieces were outside my line of sight. I only knew that Michael was upset. All because of what? Giving away some camera? Or had that simply been the breaking point?

  Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t watch the Nikon walk out of our door without a pang of regret. Goodbyes are never easy.

  Bored. Every time I thought of the word, I made a fist.

  I told myself I needed to calm down.

  Mostly, I needed to wait for Michael to get home.

  Excerpt from

  The Fairyland Times

  Entertainment Section

  April 10, 1969

  Grand Opening Tonight! Murio’s Bar and Grill - Southeast corner of our downtown square. Dance to live music every Thursday through Saturday nights. Mention this notice and receive half off one cocktail of your choice. Offer good this Friday and Saturday, Happy Hour to closing.

  ~May 30, 1969~

  Sharon stood on the sidewalk, cover charge in hand.

  “Place used to be a mortuary,” the bouncer told the girls in front of her.

  The girls sucked in deep breaths, put their hands on their chests. Let their eyes swell. Muttered something that displayed their general shock or revulsion.

  Sharon sighed, threw her weight onto one leg. This was stupid. And besides, she felt strange here all by herself. Really strange. She needed these girls to get a move on before she talked herself out of it.

  She’d been thinking of coming for weeks. No. Months. Murio had been inviting her, “You gotta come see the place at night.”

  But good girls did not go to bars. Not alone, anyway. They went, as Sharon always had, with a date. A woman in a bar on her own was a different breed.

  Still. Her Fairyland pictures were awfully tame lately. Her work needed some bite. Even her early pictures of the tattoo parlor’d had that.

  She’d waited until her dad’s poker night. Kissed him on his cheek when the cigar smoke was thick in the kitchen and he was holding a full house. “Back soon,” was all she’d said when he tried to ask where she was off to.

  “Any creepy stories?” one of the girls asked.

  “Oh, the things I could tell you,” the bouncer said, puffing his chest out. The motion accentuated the fact that the top three buttons of his shirt were undone.
r />   “You ever have any problems,” he told the girls as he opened the door for them, “you come find me.”

  Sharon stepped forward. The bouncer grinned, preparing to start in again with his story.

  But he stopped as soon as he got a good look at Sharon’s don’t mess with me expression.

  He straightened his back, took her money, and offered a polite, “Have a nice night.”

  The entire bar throbbed with a pulse, a tug, an undertow. Packed full of people, full of music, and full of another feeling, one that instantly infected Sharon, even though she couldn’t quite identify it, not at first.

  What she did notice, as she began to snap her photos, was that the colors men had chosen for their shirts were far brighter. Girls’ skirts featured far shorter hemlines. Hair was bigger, makeup darker. Everyone here had turned themselves into neon signs. Hard to miss. Flamboyant. Gaudy.

  She fell in love instantly with the pageantry of it all, the way everyone had made themselves up in order to venture out after sunset. She had never seen this side of Fairyland, not through her photographer’s eye. A girl on a date did not look outward, did not take in her surroundings. Now, here, alone, she saw it all.

  And because she saw it, she was finally able to put into words the feeling that had engulfed her upon entering. Each and every person, it seemed, was engaged in a quest to find that illusive something missing from their lives: love, adventure, perhaps a taste of wildness.

  The room thumped and roared and whipped itself into a near-frenzy. It was raucous, joyous. Even as she relished capturing it on film, even as she enjoyed the look of the bar and the electric buzz in the air, underneath it all, Sharon detected a few distinct notes of sadness in the scene.

  Sharon fell into the rhythm of work, forgetting herself until she bumped into someone. “Sorry,” she muttered as she started to swerve around him.

  But the man put a hand on her arm, stopped her from taking another step forward.

  “Buy you a drink?” he asked.

  Sharon frowned. She was working. Couldn’t he see that?

  Clearly, he didn’t. That knowing grin on his face said he was seeing a woman alone in a bar and nothing else. Which meant he wasn’t seeing her, Sharon. He was only seeing his own ideas, seeing who he expected her to be.

  This was just what she was afraid of. It was exactly why Sharon had been dragging her feet about visiting Murio’s after dark.

  He wasn’t the only one, either. She could see it all through the crowd, all those men turning every so often so look at her. All of them wearing that same awful knowing grin.

  When they didn’t know anything. Not about her.

  Sharon excused herself, bumping and weaving her way to the bathroom.

  In the mirror, she found the same old Sharon. Same long hair, curled slightly at the ends. The same eyeliner, same lipstick. She had not presented herself any differently than she would have stepping out to the grocery store at noon.

  And yet, because night had fallen, and because of where she happened to be standing, everything about her was being interpreted in a completely different way.

  She shook her head, clenched her jaw. Wiped her lipstick away with a paper towel. Pulled her hair back, securing it with an elastic band she found inside her camera case.

  She stepped back into the bar. She needed to shake off the encounter that had unnerved her. She needed to forget what had been in those strangers’ eyes. She needed to get back to work.

  Through the viewfinder, she searched for a new subject.

  There it is, she thought, right in the middle of the dance floor.

  From the

  Studio Walls

  ~

  Murio’s

  1969

  The crowd at Murio’s had peeled back from a woman in a sequined top. She twirled and turned in the middle of the dance floor, pausing to lift her long skirt slightly and hold it to the side, mimicking the stance of a matador waving his cape and provoking an angry bull to charge.

  I dare you to come at me with the worst of your assumptions, the woman’s stance challenged the crowd in Murio’s. The same assumptions that said any woman in a bar must be seeking male companionship. That said a woman who wanted to dance needed a partner. And if a person didn’t behave as they were supposed to, why, there must be something wrong with them.

  Was the woman drunk? Up to no good?

  Absolutely not. The music was vibrating through every pore. Pummeling her. Demanding she express what had settled into the deepest parts of her heart. Insisting that sometimes, a woman needed to talk with something other than words. Sometimes, a woman needed to dance.

  There she was, alone, stomping a roomful of assumptions into tiny, unrecognizable bits. Why should she wait for someone to ask her? Why couldn’t she just dance?

  Sharon snapped her photo, unable to ignore the upturned face, the smirk. A woman daring to defy expectations and rules and standards and patterns. Needing no partner. Seeking no approval.

  Asking only for space. To dance for herself.

  ~Sharon~

  I hated waiting for answers. About anything. Especially why?

  Michael returned late in the day. I wouldn’t have even known he was back if I hadn’t smelled dinner wafting downstairs. He’d no doubt used the back entrance, which was weird. Sneaky. Almost, even, a little cowardly.

  Why can’t you talk to me? The question buzzed inside me like the radio does when I’ve turned it up too loud.

  The meat Michael was searing gave the shop the smell of an outdoor barbecue, of a picnic. Like the Fourth of July. I had a soft spot for the Fourth, actually.

  Enough of a soft spot that the smell started to untie all the knots just under my skin. I was drifting backward, into memories that felt so incredibly fresh. Vivid pictures seared forever on the photographic paper of my mind. (How’s that for a metaphor, Michael?)

  Ah, but really, how could those memories not feel fresh? Our younger selves are never very far away—not even versions of ourselves that are fifty years gone.

  ~July 4, 1969~

  “What’s the matter?” Sharon asked when she discovered Michael standing on her front porch. Or, really, her father’s front porch.

  His face tumbled. “Matter?”

  “Was something wrong with the headshot? Did your newspaper decide not to use it?”

  “It appeared at the top of last week’s column. Right there next to my byline. With photo credit, as promised. Didn’t you see it?”

  Of course she had. She’d torn through the pages looking for it first thing, before reading the headlines. Her dad had even started a scrapbook. Pasted Michael’s column on page one.

  The remaining blank scrapbook pages, the ones that needed filling, made him happy. So much for Sharon to accomplish.

  Those blank pages—and all her father’s expectations—had given Sharon something of a stomachache, frankly.

  Funny how blank pages could be heavier and harder to breathe under than a pile of bricks.

  Still. None of that answered what Michael was doing on the porch. Was Sharon supposed to thank him? Why? They’d had a business agreement. Agreement, Sharon’s preferred word. She didn’t like the tone of the word promised he had so casually slung out. Like he’d done her some sort of favor.

  They’d had a business transaction. If the paper was going to continue to run the picture she’d taken, their transaction was completed. Over. Finished.

  Wasn’t it?

  Besides, it was a holiday. Why would he show up unannounced on a holiday?

  He was making Sharon awfully nervous. She shifted her weight from side to side. She reminded herself she was no fidgeter. But no matter how she scolded herself, she could not stop.

  Maybe she was tired. She’d become obsessed lately with taking nightlife photos. Which meant she’d been spending what felt like half her nights in Murio’s, chasing down what she’d considered her own brand of storytelling, and the other half developing her images in the darkro
om.

  Sleep was a luxury she couldn’t afford.

  But Michael already knew all this. He’d seen her not-so-incredibly-grand photography studio. He’d already found out (by drilling her with reporter-esque questions while she’d attempted to pose him) that her dad, the retired mechanic, was collecting his pension and working part-time to maintain the buses for the public school system, all to help fund his daughter’s floundering small business.

  Michael knew Sharon was little more than a novice in her field. She was no Edward Steichen or Man Ray. No one of any regard in the photography world. She hadn’t even gotten as far in her chosen profession as he had. Michael had gone after what he wanted, and had made a point to show Sharon he was already doing it, even though they were practically the same age. He certainly hadn’t needed truckloads of time to get his life off the ground. There he was, appearing in print each week, and making enough money to take care of himself. He’d no doubt opened a savings account—the height, Sharon thought, of all things sensible and mature.

  Why would Michael be standing on the porch now? To rub in his supposed superiority?

  Michael offered a crooked, sheepish grin. “Wanted to stop by and thank you. For your work. And to—well. I suppose I wanted to know if you were up for a Fourth of July excursion.”

  Clearly Sharon was up for a Fourth of July excursion. She was dressed in a red, white, and blue chevron patterned sleeveless sundress, which she’d paired with a giant white floppy wide-brimmed straw hat and a navy blue cardigan, tied around her waist, in case the air should turn a little cool after dark. She was holding a picnic basket. Nobody in town looked more primed for a Fourth of July excursion than she did right then.

  But Sharon also had her camera case with her. “I’ve got some work to do—” she started, in an attempt to rid herself of him. Hearing the thundering footsteps behind her, she raised her picnic basket and quickly added, “Dad and I were on our way to the park for a kind of all-day outing. You know, an afternoon in the sun, then the big fireworks display later on. And I’ll be photographing the crowd.” Why didn’t you tell him you had a date? she asked herself, fuming silently. The lie would have been the easiest way to get rid of him.