Sticky Kisses Read online

  Sticky Kisses

  Greg Johnson

  Dzanc Books

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  For Terry Simmons

  LOVE’S NOT TIME’S FOOL, THOUGH ROSY LIPS AND CHEEKS WITHIN HIS BENDING SICKLE’S COMPASS COME;

  LOVE ALTERS NOT WITH HIS BRIEF HOURS AND WEEKS, BUT BEARS IT OUT EVEN TO THE EDGE OF DOOM.

  —Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116”

  WE HAD OFTEN KISSED BEFORE BUT NOT LIKE THAT. THAT WAS THE LIFE AND DEATH KISS AND YOU ONLY KNOW A LONG TIME AFTERWARDS WHAT IT IS, THE LIFE AND DEATH KISS…

  —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

  Chapter 1

  Outside her window, a young man in shirtsleeves ascended through the whirling snow.

  Long-haired and slender, he looked like an angel, Abby thought. She blinked, frowning, as she always did when something failed to make sense. Along with the other passengers on this side of the plane, she watched as the man lifted a silver wand and began spreading a foamy pink substance along the wing. Now she understood, or thought she did. He must have arrived at work expecting a warm day, wearing his faded blue jeans and oversize white shirt that now flapped along his arms like wings of his own. No jacket, no hat or gloves. Abby leaned forward and pressed her nose to the blurry little window. Far below, the service truck looked snug and protected, while the metal tentacle it had sent upward—a small platform bobbing at its tip, the lone shivering workman inside it—bounced and swayed in the frigid wind.

  She and her mother, Lucille, had heard a weather bulletin on their way to the airport. The temperature outside was fourteen above, the sky darkening. The temperature had plunged fifty degrees in advance of a winter storm. By lunchtime the snow had begun.

  Abby’s mother, after exulting for several days that her daughter was going, had abruptly decided she shouldn’t.

  “Not only is the weather bad here, but it’s raining in Atlanta,” Lucille had moaned, hovering at the bedroom door while her daughter packed.

  Abby didn’t answer; long ago she had learned not to acknowledge her mother’s fickleness. You simply had to wait it out, sticking with a decision once you had made it.

  “Thunderstorms,” her mother said forlornly. “I was just watching the Weather Channel, honey, and what if it’s a sign? Bad weather here, bad weather there, and you know how Thom drives. What if…”

  Abby told her mother that she didn’t believe in signs. She started zipping the garment bag, making more noise than necessary, and by the time she turned around Lucille had vanished.

  She didn’t believe in angels, either, yet that’s exactly what she’d imagined—or hallucinated—when she saw the man outside the airplane. An angel who resembled her brother, wafting upward through the snow as if to prove he was fine, fine, they needn’t worry; as if echoing the words Thom had whispered over the phone, during his surprise call on Thanksgiving day. Listen, Abby, I’m so glad you answered. Mom isn’t in the room, is she? Good. Listen, honey, I’ve got something to tell you…. Watching the workman de-icing the plane’s wing, Abby felt her mouth cementing in a grim line even as her heart began throbbing, glowing. It was Thom; it was her lost brother Thom…. But she quelled these emotions at once.

  Steeling herself to face Thom, to “let him have it” in a way that even her mother, had she known her daughter’s plans, might have approved, she had no business giving way to sentimental whimsies. And now, as the man turned his head briefly in her direction, eyes clenched to slits, mouth contorted in a pained grimace against the bitter cold, Abby saw that in fact he didn’t resemble her brother at all. Abby felt an annoying flush creeping up her throat, as sometimes happened in class when she misspoke, or inadvertently said something that made the students laugh. Her susceptibility to blushing (Lucille insisted it was her thin, delicate skin, inherited from Abby’s father’s side of the family) was one of the minor plagues of her life, but only recently had she suffered these attacks of red-facedness when alone. Quickly her chagrin would turn to anger, which brought an even hotter blood into her cheeks. Sometimes she would stare at her flushed face in a mirror, frustrated and angry, not understanding herself.

  As she vowed to banish these pointless, pestering thoughts, she felt movement at her side: a petite, well-dressed woman had settled into the next seat.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” the woman said, leaning to whisper in Abby’s ear. “But they put me two rows back, next to this awful man.”

  The woman, in her late forties, genteel and perfumed, reminded Abby of the friends her mother had made since they’d moved to Philadelphia four years ago. Ladies who lived on the Main Line, or in one of the grand old apartments on Rittenhouse Square: her aunt Millicent’s friends, actually, but they’d become her mother’s, too. They tended to be snobbish, shallow, vain; they liked to ask Abby why on earth she wasn’t married. To keep the peace at home, Abby was usually polite to them, but today she wasn’t in the mood. Already the blood had drained from her face, leaving her skin feeling cool, slightly damp.

  “What was so awful about him?” she said, more coldly than she’d intended.

  Unfazed, the woman smiled confidingly and touched Abby’s forearm. “Look for yourself,” she said. “Two rows behind us, on the other side. The aisle seat.”

  Abby glanced back and saw a young, very obese black man. She’d noticed him boarding the plane and had tensed at the possibility of his sitting beside her. He must have weighed close to four hundred pounds. Instead of carry-on bags he’d brought two boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts on board, and had rammed one into an overhead bin before maneuvering into his seat with the other. In the seats across the aisle from Abby, a pair of teenage boys wearing Braves caps turned backwards had snickered as the man trundled past.

  The woman whispered to Abby, “People like that should have to buy two seats, don’t you agree?”

  Abby didn’t agree, but gave the woman a thin smile and made a pointed gesture of opening the book she’d brought on board—a paperback of Wide Sargasso Sea, recommended by one of her colleagues at West Chester Academy, the girls’ school where Abby taught. A rather bad, sexually explicit film had been made of the book, so the paperback featured a near-pornographic still shot: Abby made sure the woman saw the illustration before she started reading. Maybe she’d think that Abby was “awful,” too, and would change her seat again.

  Instead the woman said, extending a tiny suede-gloved hand, “I’m Valerie Patten. It’s terrible weather we’re having, isn’t it? And this is still November!”

  Abby shook the woman’s hand, murmuring her own name. She tried to resume her reading, but the man working on the plane had come within a few feet of Abby’s window. The snow had lightened, the flakes were smaller now, but the wind had strengthened, blowing the man’s white shirt into a kind of balloon around his chest.

  Next to her, Valerie Patten clucked her tongue. “Young men think they’re invulnerable, don’t they? They think they’ll live forever.”

  Abby turned her head, startled, but before she could answer the captain’s voice came over the loudspeaker.

  “Sorry for the delay, folks,” he said, in an airline pilot’s offhand, avuncular tone, “but this little storm kind of took us by surprise. We’re in the process of de-icing the wings, just as a safety precaution, and when that’s done we’ll be preparing for our departure to…” The voice faltered. “To, uh…to, let’s see…” The microphone clicked off—there were nervous titters from the seats around Abby—and clicked on again. “To Atlanta!” the captain said brightly,
like a schoolboy giving the correct answer.

  Laughter rippled through the plane.

  Valerie Patten touched Abby’s arm and said, “Did his voice sound a little…slurred?” But she was smiling.

  “Let’s hope not,” Abby said shortly. She didn’t want to be rude, but she hated making small talk in airplanes, preferring to read a book or think her own thoughts.

  “A surprise snowstorm, and a drunken pilot,” Valerie Patten said. “Sounds like we’re in for a delightful trip.”

  Despite herself, Abby laughed. The woman’s exterior seemed so conventional, even fussy—this playful drollery came as a surprise. Valerie Patten wore an oatmeal-colored wool suit, heart-shaped gold ear clips, a matching gold necklace of imbricated heart-shaped links that caught the light whenever she turned or gestured. As if responding to Abby’s curiosity the woman began tugging at her gloves, one tiny finger at a time, revealing exquisitely slender hands tipped with bright crimson nails. A manicure within the past three days, Abby judged, and it didn’t surprise her that the ring finger was bare. Not that Valerie wasn’t attractive or, as Lucille would say, well-preserved. Dark, wavy hair, expensively coiffed; an oval, powdered face, placed into the fragile triangle of brittle cheekbones and pointed chin like an opal gentled into its setting. The kind of pampered, self-conscious woman Abby normally disliked, but something about Valerie Patten had snagged her interest. The woman’s throaty, surprisingly deep voice had an edge, as if roughened by cigarettes and alcohol, and she wore her clinging, heavily floral perfume like a mantle of desperation. Inside the mascara-spiked lashes a pair of pale-blue eyes peered out, girlish and forlorn.

  Abby felt a tug of curiosity. “Are you from Philly?” she asked. “I don’t hear an accent.”

  She was thinking of her mother’s speech rhythms, clipped and somewhat abrading to Abby’s ears. Since moving north, Lucille had mentioned often how happy she was that people no longer made fun of the way she talked, as they’d done in Atlanta; it was so nice to be normal again. Abby honestly couldn’t remember anyone “making fun” of Lucille’s speech—the city attracted so many newcomers, from so many parts of the country, that you rarely met a native Atlantan, and even they didn’t sound particularly Southern—but it was like her mother to claim that people did. Lucille had lived in Atlanta for three decades but now claimed she’d never felt at home there.

  “Oh, I’m from all over, really,” Valerie Patten said. “I’ve got family here, but my husband lives in Atlanta.” She paused, her lip curling. “My ex-husband, I mean. We’ve just gotten divorced.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “He’s number four, I’m afraid. Or was.” She laughed again. “I’m training myself to use the past tense when I talk about him, but it’s hard.”

  She gave Abby a quick, assessing look, as if seeking permission to keep talking. Abby tried to smile, but the strain must have shown, since the woman said nothing more. Abby didn’t want conversation of a personal nature, not today of all days. She could imagine a string of queries from the woman’s crimson-glossed lips: Why are you traveling to Atlanta? And your husband couldn’t join you? Oh, I see. You’re divorced, then? No? But you’re so attractive, why on earth…? If necessary, Abby thought, she too could change her seat.

  A sudden small jolt, and the plane began to move. Abby turned to her window but of course the young man, the angel, had vanished, leaving only a shimmer of windblown snow obscuring the dim grayish outline of the airport buildings.

  Young men think they’re invulnerable, don’t they?

  “Oh well,” Valerie Patten said, clicking her seat belt in place. “Time to say our prayers.”

  Abby breathed deeply and considered doing exactly that. Although she hadn’t, to her mother’s dismay, attended mass in years, she knew well enough that a docile Catholic schoolgirl lodged deeply in that element of herself she may as well call, for lack of a better word, her “soul.” This child wore the white veil from her First Holy Communion ceremony and still felt, at the vaguest throb of sexual desire, a responding and considerably stronger prod of censure, like a stick poked rudely into her side. A resigned agnostic—even to her adult ears, the word “atheist” sounded uncivil—Abby still felt herself reduced, in moments of seeming peril, to that desperate nine-year-old whose bony knees had ached against the cold black marble edging the side altar devoted to the Blessed Virgin. Standing with her plaster arms outstretched and her pleasant but mysterious gaze trained on the far distance, the Virgin had answered few of her childhood prayers. Yet she lingered in Abby’s awareness as a benevolent tribunal, an opportunity for special pleading. A few nights ago, after she’d gotten the heart-numbing phone call from her brother, the statue’s pallid features had come to her mind’s eye for the first time in years, a taunting chimera floating out from an improbable past.

  Her first impulse had been to flee, which she might have accomplished by remaining where she was. She’d felt a little breathless at the thought of putting down the phone and simply resuming her life, exactly as if Thom hadn’t called. Her school, half of whose students were boarders from far-flung parts of the country, closed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. She had no excuse for hanging around the office, but she’d agreed to go house-hunting this week with two of her colleagues, Jane and Ted Mickelson, who were looking at several farmhouses in Bucks County; she’d planned to spend a couple of days in the library at Penn, doing some research for an honors seminar in the English novel she would teach next fall; and she’d offered to drive her mother into Center City for one of her dreaded gynecological exams, which made Lucille so nervous that she had fantasies of plunging her car over the guardrail and into the Schuylkill River, if she tried to drive herself. All these things Abby could accomplish, and would have, with the sort of even-tempered pragmatism that dominated this phase of her life, an efficiency in accomplishing tasks focused on others that had always come naturally to her. (That bony-kneed girl of nine had longed to become either a teacher or a nurse, and Abby had often thought if she’d chosen the latter option, she might have done equally well.) Within five minutes of answering her phone, Abby had said, “All right, I’ll come. I’ll call you back when I’ve made the flight arrangements.” But she might have pushed her brother’s raw, anxious voice into the same cluttered mental closet where the plaster Virgin Mary had long resided, knowing Thom would never call back.

  He’d be too proud—and too angry. More than four years had passed since Abby or their mother had last spoken to him, and she’d sensed Thorn’s mix of anguish and excitement passing through the phone wires like an electric current, so much more powerful than their relatively pallid exchange of words. Just before they hung up, Abby did say, “I’m glad you called. We’ve got a lot to talk about, and now this,” in a queer toneless voice that had silenced them both for a moment. Despite her self-indulgent, cold meditation that she need not go to Atlanta, after all, and could let her brother suffer there, angry and alone, she knew that she’d meant those unlikely words (I’m glad you called—who was that?) even if she couldn’t feel whatever ancient emotions had prompted them.

  Abby and Thom had agreed not to share his bad news with their mother, at least for now, since that conversation required a good deal of thought and planning. “Maybe she won’t have to know,” Thom had said quickly, guiltily. “She’s almost seventy, isn’t she? And I’m feeling fine, basically. I’ve lost a few pounds, but otherwise I’m OK, so why throw a bombshell into her life? When she’s doing so well?”

  Abby had felt like asking bitterly why Thom supposed she was doing well—she wasn’t, particularly—but she’d let it pass. She knew Thom was right, and between them they plotted, in a quick rush of words, the carefully distorted version of the truth Abby would pass along to Lucille. She would announce that the prodigal son, at long last, felt ashamed by his past behavior and wanted to make amends. He’d spoken to Abby first in the hope she would intercede for him, and Abby had su
ggested he shouldn’t come to Philly—not yet; instead, she would go to Atlanta, as though to test his sincerity, help pave the way for the grand reconciliation between Lucille and her son. (The more complicated, baroque, and unlikely the scenario, they both knew, the better the chance that Lucille would believe it.) Thom had always claimed their mother was a “drama queen.” She loved intrigue, controversy, operatic emotions, and she’d made the most of the few opportunities her fairly conventional life had yielded—her grandmother’s death of lung cancer in 1962, her sister Grace’s stormy marriage to an alcoholic, and her son’s violation of the family code of denial, which had caused this four-year breach between them. Otherwise, she pursued her addiction to hand-wringing in vicarious ways. These days Lucille spent much of her time watching television soap operas and talk shows featuring extremes of personal behavior never encountered in her own experience; she particularly enjoyed family squabbles—the messier, the better.

  Abby had felt amazed that she and Thom could resume, so quickly, the effortless rapport and bemused daring of their childhood conspiracies. Despite herself, as they talked her pulse had quickened with pleasure, an almost discomforting surge of happiness, giddiness, relief—a reaction linked inextricably with early memories of her brother, emotions she hadn’t felt in many years and didn’t pause to examine until she hung up the phone.

  And then, the possibility entering her soul like a cool sliver of glass: It didn’t happen, he didn’t call. I could simply ignore him. How furious she was with him, after all; how deeply, coldly angry to a degree she could not quite fathom.

  But the idea of ignoring his call was pure fantasy, she knew. Pure self-indulgence of the kind Abby didn’t allow herself these days. Within minutes Abby had come out into the den, and Lucille had looked up from her needlepoint (a six-inch-square portrait of a red-nosed reindeer, one of five she was making as Christmas presents for her canasta club) to ask in her plaintive way, “Who was that?”