Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“Roger, sweetheart, please stop,” Adeline complains. “I'm not your Snack-o-Matic.” He's a passionate guy, with great feelings, the sweetest lover, but his face has been rooting between her thighs since one a.m. of Halloween. “I love it, but there's a limit, even to pleasure, Mighty Mouth. It's been twenty-four hours, no, twenty-two, no, twenty-seven hours by now. It's almost five.” She went as a bag of golf clubs, and he as a marijuana plant; however, the big party they had anticipated turned out to be a sedate gathering of her corporate cronies dressed as company products. So they cut out and walked the streets for a while, taking in the human marshmallows and spareribs and shish kebabs. Barbecue was a big theme this year. They saw some superheroes, too; and wizards, and one couple dressed as the Twin Towers, and a whole sorority of witches that emptied out of the Lido bar and marched down Broadway. There must have been sixty of them.

“Stop, Roger. I love you bunches, but please now, stop.” She doesn't want to hurt the feelings of this sensitive, caring, long-haired, gentle vegetarian guy, the one man she loves; but they have hardly slept. “Save some for a rainy day, Rog, honey. You know I'm happy to be where your next meal is coming from, forever. I promise.” Even in their ordinary life there is some truth in that. She's the one who brings home the brie. “I'm a whole person. You don't have to think of me all the time as some munchies.” She feels her sense of humor slipping away.

Roger lifts his head to face her face. “Almost finished. It's the ABCs of it, even the XYZs of it,” he intones. His face looks as if it has been dipped in a vat of lanolin, her stuff thick even in the eye sockets, and the whole prolate sphere textured here and there with her pubic curls. Can he see? She hopes not. She hates to look at it, so she sinks it back down.

It's five a.m. now, Sunday morning. Good thing she doesn't have to go in to work. She's hungry, but can't think of anything she really wants to eat. Shoah is on the all-night art film channel. She can't remember if she saw it years ago at the theater or not. It's engrossing, but very painful to watch, even in the throes of this pleasure. Full of stink, of lies and hypocrisy. Maybe that's why it comes on at four a.m.

At the commercial break she pulls on Roger's ponytail. Enough is enough. She's a woman who works for a living. “Sweetheart, come on,” she entreats. To her astonishment the head starts to separate from the neck. She stops, but it won't fit back. It continues to separate with a pleasant, Velcro-like crackle. Velcro is one of the few benefits to the population at large that she can understand from the cost-inefficient space age. “Stop this, Roger,” she says, and rolls the head back, pushing from the crown to refit it to the neck, but no luck. It is already half-detached. She looks around the room, as if afraid there might be a witness.

When they got home he said, as if he had learned about romance only from pornography, “I want to give you head all night.” So this is what happens when words of lust take a literal turn. It won't screw, it won't chink back in. She will either have to leave it dangling, or take it off the rest of the way. She's famous for finishing whatever she starts, so dangling for her is not an option. There's a reason she has climbed the corporate ladder, has penetrated the glass ceiling. She knows it sounds ridiculous, but she says, “Okay, relax, sweety,” and she gives the graying ponytail another tug. It comes off easily, just like ripping wet newsprint. Then she lies back and holds it above her face to look at this. “Gosh, pumpkin. What happened? I'm so sorry.” The head is thickly coated with herself. The tongue, curled into a tube, sticks far out from the lips. One eye winks at her. A slight sneeze.

“Sweetheart, yuk!” Her revulsion reflex makes her toss the head at the bathroom door, where it rolls into the fresh kitty litter, one of her company's original products, picking up most of it on the face before it comes to rest near the sink, its features spackled with green, chlorophyl-impregnated chips.

“Roger is a novelist,” says Adeline aloud, another irrelevant thought. The novel is something to read on a flight to Indianapolis, when you don't have work to do. She had shown Roger how to use the Mac in the first place, and that was a help to him. By itself the novelist is an anachronism. A novel can be written as well by committee or a computer can be programmed to produce it. She factored all this in when she chose to live with Roger. He presented a contrast to her professional life, put a quaint spin on her personal time.

She shakes the nightgown loose from where it's sticking to her thighs, and follows Roger's head into the bathroom. It rests on its side under the washstand. “Everything will be perfect, darling. I can handle everything.” She drags the head across the floor to lean it face-out in the crotch the clothes-hamper makes with the bathtub, and secures it in place with a beach towel rolled up.

“Oh Roger, baby,” she says, after gazing a few moments on the face. “If this has happened to you, what do you think God has in store for me?” The word God , from her own mouth, unnerves her. She uses that word only with her grandmother.

As soon as she steps back the eyes open and the lips move. The head starts talking. “Lift is produced by the difference in pressure between the upper and lower surfaces of the airfoil, or wing. Since the pressure of a gas is inversely proportional to its speed you shape the wing to maximize the speed of the air across the upper surface. The characteristic lifting airfoil profile has a maximum thickness of six to eighteen percent of the chord aft of the leading edge. The normal component, or lift, may be expressed in equation form as L = C sub l sub q S. The variation of C sub L with geometric angle of attack… ”

She finds his voice more nasal than before, although she recognizes it as Roger; but she can't bear to listen, and decides to wash downstairs in the guest bathroom. Roger's body now stands on his own two feet in the bedroom. An erection has developed. “So that's what it takes,” Adeline thinks, then thinks better. The right arm is extended and bent, pointing at the baby bazooka with a crooked forefinger. The body seems to follow this stiff thing around as it bumps into things, like someone in love. She's afraid at first to approach, but then finds it quite docile as she takes the left hand, leads it to the bed, and lowers it to the sheet. The penis seems to be pleading for someone to grab it. Not her, not now. With another sheet she covers this, so the thing stands like a tent-pole in the midst.

As she scrubs in the guest shower she maps her whole week. It will be Thursday before she has time to get back to this Roger situation, but it isn't so catastrophic to delay since everything is more or less alive. The ability to speak, the sustaining of erection, that was life enough for a man. She could wash the head when her schedule permitted. The kitty litter is a stellar product. It would keep the thing fresh at least until Thursday.

She spends most of the day in her bathrobe in the office downstairs, editing the manual some of her writers produced for a new investment-tracking program. They made the new software seem too complicated. Better the other way around. Then she works on her laptop on a PowerPoint presentation she is going to make for her board. To avert a hostile takeover she has fashioned a sexy offering for their stockholders, and leveraged a distribution deal that will get their swift new RAM expanders into every computer store in the country. This is only one aspect of the diversification she has designed for a corporation that before herself languished in the business of pet products.