Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

She sighed and gathered herself back together. He watched her, the biggest grin in the world on his face. He liked the way she listened to his telling poetry, and she liked the way he told it to her, though a lot of it passed right through her circuits without registering a meaning. “I am writing now of preconceptions / Those of sex and ropes.” The sound was nice, however, and his voice a smooth river of syllables. Then all at once it got silent, and one of those moments opened that can be excruciating when people are becoming acquainted, when no one has a thing to say, and all of a sudden the room shrinks around them and someone looks for the nearest TV remote, or for evidence of a computer so you can start a software conversation. This was a moment like those in which during the years before AIDS lust might have flown in through the window like a fresh Holstein flung by a tidal wave.

Then Nelly got up and Joe watched her go into the other room, and he thought, What a nice dinner she prepared for me. So rare that someone cooks a dinner for anyone anymore. Maybe she likes me. I would do anything for her.

Nelly came out of the room, holding something behind her back. “Joe,” she said. “I've been thinking a lot about your problem, and I hope I've come up with an idea.”

She placed in front of his face the package she'd been hiding behind her back. He gasped. His eyes flew wide open and he covered them with his hands. He wanted to run away as fast as he could as far as he could to the North, or else put on every one of them that the package contained, every one he could, and embrace Nelly, and hold her till she turned to porridge. She was showing him a package of five dozen condoms, a sixty-pack. That was what she put before him. What could this mean? Sweat rained down from his palms, his mouth watered, his eyesight blurred, he blushed all over.

“See, my thought is… ”

He interrupted her. “Nelly, I like you in an enormous way, but shouldn't we… I mean, isn't it too soon? Shouldn't we go for a walk first, or bake brownies together, or… I don't know what to say. And you're my teacher. This is dangerous. They'll take away your library privileges, the key to the faculty bathroom. They'll make you sleep in a wetsuit.”

“It's not what you think, Joe. Listen to me,” she said. “You are right that these are condoms, or safes, or buster baggies, whatever you like to call them, but my idea is that you should try to use them on your fingers.”

Joe looked at his fingers.

“See, each one of these will stretch over one of your fingers, I think, and at the end of each one is a little reservoir. Into each of the reservoirs you can fit a pencil eraser that you've shaped to a point, and once you get used to it you strike the keys with those erasers rather than those big galoots of fingers that you've got. You'll be processing the words as fast as anyone.”

Joe saw that Nelly was proud of this solution she'd devised. Although he had embarrassed himself a little with his original assumptions, he accepted her gift and thanked her. He broke the erasers off some pencils she gave him, sharpened them a little with a penknife, worked them into the reservoirs of the condoms, then stretched the condoms over his fingers. They both got a laugh at his clumsiness when, because he was still wearing the prophylactics, he misjudged grabbing the serving spoon and sank his fingers directly into the tiramisu. The feeling of kinship between them was very close to love. He could hardly talk to her any more except to say as he left, “This is just to say / I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox / and which / you were probably / saving / for breakfast / Forgive me / they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold.”

She thought about that a lot once Joe was gone. It must have been a poem, what he said, although it didn't really sound like one. She thought about the plums. What did plums have to do with it? Did they rhyme with condoms? It was nice. He was very nice. But plums were puzzling.

Joe went right home. He wore the condoms all the way, because he wanted to start practicing as soon as he got to his laptop. In a few weeks the class would be over, finishing with a contest that pitted the students against each other for speed and accuracy. He thought the best way he could show his appreciation would be to win that contest.

Nelly agreed to meet Jasmine at The Newsstand Café on the corner of Sixth and Washington. Over the phone, Jasmine told her she was planning a big change in her life, and she needed to talk it over with her friend. It was warm for early December, a nice morning. The skiff of snow that had accumulated overnight was already history. The air was clear. The traffic on Sixth looked elegant in December light. In the café people were lined up to buy newspapers and get their lattes to go, on the way to work. They looked grand, these people in their spotless suits, alert and charged up, ready for new challenges at the office. Jasmine was already sitting at a table next to the birthday card display, reading the New York Times , when Nelly arrived. She got some coffee and sat down across from her friend. Jasmine folded up her paper, and grinned.

“So what is it?” Nelly asked.

“My aunt Tuffy died.”

“Tuffy?”

“That was her nickname, because she'd always say, ‘I think I'll go sit on a tuffet.’”

“I'm sorry about that.”

“Oh, it's okay. I hardly even knew her, but she left me some money.”

“That's great.”

“I think I'll move to Seattle.”

“Why? You just moved here.”

“I've been here two years, already. But I can get my teaching certificate there, and I know I like the ocean. I loved Sleepless In Seattle .”

Nelly spotted something on the page of the New York Times that had fallen in front of her. It was the Religion page, and in a small box towards the bottom was advertised a week of revival meetings outside of Philadelphia with the up and coming pair of televangelists, Cyrus Ophilus Mackenzie, and Rafael (Beeper) Mishbooker, of the Third Baptist Church of The Revelations, Internet. The former was the name of her stepfather, and the latter, of course, was her real father's name. He had made the shift from politics to the pulpit. Mishbooker, man of God. It snatched her breath away, festered in her mind. She started to ponder things she'd long ago forgotten.

“So what do you think?” Jasmine asked. She waited for an answer, then raised her voice, “Nelly! Yoo-hoo. Hello.” She waved her hand in front of Nelly's face.

“Oh, I think it's good. Go to Seattle. Yes. Tuffy.”

“I bet I know what's up.”

Nelly looked at Jasmine, “What?”

“You saw it. You got a look at your big friend's thing. A good look, I bet.”

“Jasmine.”

“Don't be coy, girlfriend. How big is it?” Jasmine leaned almost all the way across the table.

“Yes, big. Okay?”

“Tell me about it.”

Nelly looked down at the paper again, transfixed by the names in bold type.

“Tell your girlfriend. How big?” Jasmine spread her arms as if showing the measure of a big fish.

“He could tear people apart.”

“ALL RIGHT.” Jasmine made a fist and jerked it into her body. “Tell me. Tell all.”

“With his bare hands,” Nelly mused.

“And?… Hup… What?”

“It was a religious experience, okay?”

Jasmine threw her arms up and whooped so loud she startled the young lawyer at the cream dispenser. He spilled the white stuff across his brand new kangaroo-hide dispatch case.

Joe spent almost all his time during this period working at his laptop, getting down the little strokes, so he got faster and faster. He had almost no time to work on The Scary Place , and he missed that a lot, but frequently while he was at work in the Checker Auto Parts Store, where he would long ago have been manager if his fingers were smaller, a couplet would come to him like, “At Cheyenne Mountain they've got the plan / That helps them survive the destruction of man.” And he would stop whatever he was doing and write it down on anything handy — invoice, register roll, napkin from the 7-Eleven. He stuffed these in his pockets and threw them into a box when he got home.