Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

At 9:30 she's ready for bed. The morning disaster has almost slipped her mind, but approaching her bedroom she hears Roger's head still yacking in the bathroom.

“Partially balanced incomplete blocks form a very general class of experimental design in which not all treatments occur in every block. 1.) Each treatment is replicated r times. 2.) Given any treatment… ”

Roger's poker has doubled in length. Business has doubled twice since she became CEO, she reflects. So she appreciates doubling. But Roger's thing could be like Jack's beanstalk. Who knows where it will end up? For the first time in the three years they've lived together she feels ambivalent about crawling into bed with Roger, even though the snoring problem is probably eliminated by this coup; but realistically, the longer erection has pulled the sheet into a higher tent now, and she will be at a definite disadvantage in what sometimes becomes a nasty battle for the comforter in the middle of the night. She intended to get a second one, but as with a lot of things domestic hasn't found time or motivation to shop for it. The major concerns of the day always distract her from the minor difficulties of the night.

She hears the head, still blabbing in the bathroom.

“After having been twice driven back by heavy, southwestern gales, Her Majesty's Ship Beagle , a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain Fitzroy, sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The object of the expedition… ”

Wrong! She can't tolerate this talk, but she has to suppress her response until pressure from work eases off. Meanwhile she will sleep alone in the guest bedroom. In Roger's closet she finds his bowling ball in its soft padded bag. It's been at least a year since they've gone bowling. The ball has his name etched on it, as well as the All American logo. She kisses the name and places the ball carefully on a pillow at the end of the neck. The three holes look almost like eyes and nose. It rolls side to side on the pillow, as if something about the presence of the body disturbs it. “Yipes,” she thinks, “even a bowling ball has feelings.” Something like that always makes her wonder. To quiet things down in the bathroom she carefully places the head inside the bowling ball satchel.

“The day was glowing hot, and the scrambling over the rough surface and through the intricate thickets was very fatiguing; but I was well repaid by the strange, Cyclopean scene. As I was walking along I met two large tortoises, each of which must have weighed at least two hundred pounds: one was eating a piece of cactus, and as I approached, it stared at me and slowly stalked away; the other gave a deep hiss, and drew in its head. These huge reptiles, surrounded by the black lava, the leafless shrubs, and large… ”

Wrong! She zips it up, and then curious to find out if it still talks while the bag is closed, quickly zips it back down.

“The women, on our first approach, began uttering something in a most dolorous voice, they then squatted themselves down and held up their faces; my companion standing over them, one after another, placed the bridge of his nose at right angles to theirs and commenced pressing. During the process they uttered comfortable little grunts, very much in the same manner as two pigs do, when rubbing against each other. I noticed that the slave… ”

Wrong! Talking. Wrong!

She gets up early to head for the office. Almost out the door, she remembers she has neglected to look in on Roger. He always has an especially sweet kiss for her on her way out, and she still wants one. Usually he stays home to write his novel. She runs upstairs to look in the bedroom. The whole sheet now has lifted way off the body, as if being raised to fly from a pole. It makes her think. Unless attached to a brain, the erection does not interest her; but she could appreciate a kiss sans body. She shleps the bag downstairs so the osculation can happen at the familiar threshold. How, she wonders, will the fact that she has to hold up the head affect the kiss? She zips it open. “Sweetheart, I'm off to work.”

“Bode's relation may be stated as follows: write down a series of fours; to the first, add zero; to the second, add three; to the third add six equals three times two; to the fourth, twelve equals six times two; to the fifth, twenty-four equals twelve times two, etc; the resulting numbers, divided by ten will give the approximate mean distances of the planets from… ”

This is unbearable. “Wrong!” She cries. She zips the bag, and drops it into the closet, next to the umbrellas.

In the cab as she reconstructs the moment she reflects that, unless her eyes have deceived her, Roger's head now appears much smaller than it was when attached, as if it is shrinking away. Everything keeps getting curiouser, but Thursday is still the soonest she'll have time. She puts it from her mind and focuses on work.

The two short morning meetings go well, as does the big board meeting, where she presents her successful strategies to the general approbation of the other execs. She is a kind of hero in the tight inner-management circles of Darkl-Melma Ltd.

So much accomplished in the morning leaves her with a lighter afternoon schedule. She declines the executive lunch. She isn't up to it. As she was making her presentation something strange happened: while she explained some of the graphs, the events of her weekend started to appear to her in images on the screen, then she heard Roger talking, then the sounds of his head separating from his body thundered into her skull. She was well-prepared, and confident enough to muck through the presentation, but now she is shook up. She wants to talk to someone, anyone but another executive. Is she going crazy? Will she cease to function?

She decides to grab a lunch in the employees' cafeteria, where she can be anonymous. One thing she misses from the days she worked in the trenches as a computer operator is casual conversation with other women. Now her lunches are mostly with men, sometimes accompanied by wives or girlfriends, who frequently seem to resent her. Very rarely is there another woman of her rank, and with those there is usually uneasiness, because often there seems to be some tacit competition. What she would like to have back is the coffee breaks or lunches with women — talking salaries, talking husbands and kids, laughing down the harassers in the office, comparing shopping notes, women's problems, dating, friends. She found more good humor, more laughter in the ranks than at the tables of the CEOs.

She leaves her jacket in the office, shakes her hair out of its bun, and unbuttons her blouse a little to let show the tip of the wing of the dragonfly she, in her wilder days, had tattooed above her left breast. Her boyfriend then, Mouse Bernstein, was a tattoo artist, and a Harley freak. Something about Mouse she misses. She gets a bowl of chowder and a Greek salad and sits down in a corner, hoping not to be recognized as the boss, and hoping one of the women will sit down with her.

Before long someone does settle in across the table, with a pasta salad and a peach melba. The woman wipes her spoon and fork with a napkin that she puts in her pocket, and then unfolds another for her lap, tucking the corners under so it makes a hexagon. She smiles at Adeline. The metal braces in her mouth are disturbing, like visual static. Metal braces on older faces make Adeline uneasy because her mom never had money for an orthodontist when she was young, and she grew up thinking her mouth needed improving. Now that she has the money, she doesn't want to bother; but now, seeing this woman makes her run her tongue across her teeth.

“I'm Sybil from Accounting. I don't think I've seen you in here before. Are you from Customer Service?”