The Kissing List Read Free Page B

you of all people should know better. It’s just kissing.” Then she gave me mouth to mouth one last fierce and tingly time, and though I’d like to say this brought me back to life, it only woke me up enough to follow Anna to the door, where she sent me on my way.

O f the things that I remember, one of them is the size of the apartment. It was so small that my roommate, Laurie, usually kept the Styrofoam head on the blond-wood kitchen table, its smooth face turned toward the mirrored bathroom door about five feet away, as if it were primping. When I would come home late at night, the head would greet me, wearing its regal copper-colored wig. At work, whenever my mind wandered from whatever manuscript I was proofreading, I would think about the head, bald during the day, turning away from themirror and surveying our apartment, looking dubiously at the shabby blue couch against the window, the matching armchair, lumpy with springs, the front door with its collage of locks, the kitchen, or what there was of a kitchen in the shoebox-size fifth-floor walk-up that we shared. The Styrofoam head couldn’t see, but I daydreamed that it sensed how things were.
    Just before I moved in with Laurie, I had ditched my job as a reporter at a small-town newspaper and hopped on a transcontinental train with two duffel bags and $1,500 from the sale of my already secondhand Subaru. Taking the train seemed like a romantic way to start fresh in New York. Unfortunately, it was really just the kind of idea that sounded wonderful to say to other people. The train lost power for five hours outside of Denver and again right before St. Louis, and though I’d imagined the other passengers would be people like me, people embarking on life-changing adventures, they were mostly retirees and families with overtired children. I didn’t blame the children for running through the cars. I felt just as restless. By the time the train pulled into Penn Station, I had covered dozens of index cards in intricate geometric patterns. It was as if I had spent the whole journey squinting into a kaleidoscope at bits of colored plastic and had never gazed out the window and seen cows moving across fields, or friends and lovers waiting at stations, or darkness slowly snuffing out the world.
    L aurie was the sorority sister of a friend of mine from Oxford. I didn’t know many sorority sisters, so this alone made me nervous about whether we’d be compatible. Laurie’sroommate, a social worker, had moved out to the suburbs to save money. Laurie was thinking about offering the room to a homeless woman named Zahara who lived in front of the nearby Banana Republic, but instead she decided to take me as her roommate. The day I moved in, it snowed. It took me two trips by subway to bring my stuff from Brooklyn, where I had been camping out in a studio a friend was house-sitting. On the walk back and forth from the subway, I smoked cigarettes, the third pack I’d ever bought. Smoking outside in the cold didn’t look that different from breathing. Between the two trips, I ordered a futon for delivery. Laurie had left a plastic juice pitcher of flowers in my new room. They were nothing fancy, just a bouquet of deli daisies and green filler, but they made me feel welcome.
    Several days later, there were more flowers, except this time the whole apartment was filled with long-stemmed roses. Every surface, even the back of the toilet, held a jar or vase, and the scent was so powerful, you could smell it from the stairwell.
    “My ex feels bad,” she said.
    I was expecting the usual story about how he’d cheated on her and was trying to win her back. I’d seen that before. Instead, Laurie gathered a handful of her hair and lifted it from her head. “The Frankenstein scar,” she said, briefly explaining how nine months before, her cancer had reoccurred, and another tumor above her left ear had been removed. The scar looked like a miniature railroad track. “That damn intern