The Kissing List Read Free

pretend he really wanted me (we were kissing, after all), but on some level, I knew he still wanted Maureen just as I still wanted Dixon, even though he’d once made fun of the way I kissed, accusing me of leading too aggressively with my tongue, just as Dixon still wanted everyone because it was fun to get drunk, and the electricity right before you kissed, when you didn’t know whether your tongues would touch or not, wasamazing. First kisses were always thrilling, even if you were depressed, or perhaps especially if you were depressed. Vita wasn’t kissing anyone. She was scandalized—that’s the word she used—after she’d needled me into admitting that Todd had been in my bed that morning. “How could you,” she cried, “when you’d just had your heart broken by Dixon?” She believed in a better version of me than I did. I didn’t dare tell her about Maureen.
    I couldn’t stop crying. I attributed the abundance of my emotions to the gray winter or my overidentification with Margery Kempe, a woman I was reading for my thesis on female mystics, who wandered around the British Isles during the Middle Ages, bursting into tears every time she thought about Christ’s sacrifice. I didn’t want to accept the possibility that I was crying over a stupid kiss—misdirected, alcohol induced, hard lipped, empty. I know it’s trite, but so much of what is crippling is. Cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry is cuckoldry. With enough repetition, it starts to sound like
cuddly
, the word made new. I wish it was that easy.
    The table erupted in laughter. I sniffled.
    “What’s wrong?” Maeve swept back her tangle of brown hair, and three bobby pins tinkled onto her place mat.
    “Cuckoldry” was all I could think to say.
    “Give me your hand.” She studied my palm as if reading a map. “A very good hand.”
    I wanted her to say more, but the dinner party was breaking up. Todd caught my eye and flicked up his thumb like theblade of a knife. He must have had a word with the poet. As I was going out into the night, the air as clammy as a damp sponge, someone tugged my sleeve. Maeve held out a wineglass. “The lips of Seamus Heaney touched this glass.” She smiled, and her face crumpled like a paper bag. Being a poet was hard work.
    “Take it,” she said. “It’s as close as you’ll come to kissing him.”
    I never kissed Seamus Heaney, though I did kiss (and more than kiss) Dixon again after Todd and I finished kissing and he went back to Maureen. Dixon was initially repentant, eager and accepting of my kisses, but a one-month stretch of snogging along the damp banks of the Thames gave me a head cold, plus Dixon was too depressed to share a bed. When Vita found out about our afternoon quickies (all Dixon had the energy for), she was so furious she started haunting our house, leaving notes instead of speaking to me. Once, after copious amounts of red wine, I tried to explain the invisible but potent aphrodisiac qualities of Dixon’s intelligence, but she just gave me a withering look and said: “Get real, Sylvie. You’re not fucking the guy’s mind.”
    “Good point,” I said.
    Dixon and I broke up and got together three more times before we finally went our separate ways.
    T he funny thing about being in your early twenties is that it’s a lot like being any other age, except you don’t know it.For a long time, you think you’ll change and become a better version of yourself, but really, you just wind up being a little more tolerant of the person you’ve always been. Or something like that. That year when I thought I should be more mature, I kept kissing people—on the lips, on the cheek, sometimes on the chest and other not readily accessible places. I kissed friends, I kissed strangers, I kissed people I had no intention of kissing, had never dreamed of kissing. I made out with an usher at Todd’s wedding. Maureen was there, her lipstick a slightly