Esker’s not a social kisser. The convention has always struck her as unlikely. It seems as random and farfetched a thing to do as tugging earlobes or knocking wrists or something—a contrived, codified gesture, not springing from natural impulse.
So she is deeply surprised when she kisses Ann’s father. It wrecks the whole rest of her Saturday; she can’t put it down. It rides her shoulder like a sharp-taloned bird and won’t be shooed away.
It wasn’t, at any rate, a kiss kiss. It was a brief, quiet thing on the cheek before he left, a warm little baked good of a kiss, neat: a beginning and end unto itself. Still, most unlike her. And even more unlike her to be remembering it now, remembering the actual sensual detail of the kiss, the curving, unused plushness of her own lips against the smooth, slightly cooler plane of his cheek. She even remembers a sensation of taste, in an olfactory sort of way: some subtle mixture of shaving cream, tea, and clay mug.
The details come to her unbidden in the bath at the end of the day. Baths are her addiction. Albert started that. She bathes in plain water, as hot as she can stand.
He’d looked so startled when she’d answered the door, so abashed, bits of glass winking and crunching underfoot. She’ll have to replace the pane; her landlords never will. Putty? she thinks. Buy the rectangle of glass and then stick it in with putty? That doesn’t sound right. Cardboard in the meantime. But he’d looked so abashed, and it was her fault, really; she’d heard him knock the first two times but didn’t answer. She had actually contemplated pretending she wasn’t there. How pushy of him to insist on coming after she’d assured him she could do without her calendar until next time she tutored Ann. And underneath that, how mortifying, how mortified she’d been, to have left something of hers behind in their apartment. The Freudian-slipness of it! He’d worn an orange sweater, and drunk two cups of tea, with milk and sugar (she’d had to hunt to find sugar, and then spooned it straight from the sack). When they finally began to ease into conversation, it hadn’t been about Ann at all, not until the end, but first there’d been the better part of an hour talking about, of all things, food: mangoes first, and then his restaurant, and game cooking, and unusual things they’d tasted while traveling (Wally had had a single bite of whale in Japan, which led them to think of other items they’d tasted once and no more. Esker: grits. Wally: Marmite. Esker: Raisinets. “Raisinets?” “I had them once as a kid: there were maggots in the box”), which segued into a discussion of the annual entomophagous banquet in New York (Wally knew a food critic who’d been), and then more loosely into talk of water chestnuts, cherries, rice pudding, kale. Esker gave Wally her grandmother’s latkes recipe (“Take a couple potatoes the size of your fist . . .”), and Wally gave Esker his secret for a perfect pie crust (“Rub the chilled butter into the dry ingredients with your fingertips”).
“But that’s my PIN!” cried Esker. “PIES, 7435.”
“No. Really?”
She nodded, a little sadly. “But you’re never supposed to tell anyone your PIN.”
The tea had vanished from the pot and the minutes from the clock, and then they noticed the time and both were disconcerted, and Ann’s father had been on his feet, bringing his mug to the sink, retrieving his bag and his coat there on the peg by the door, and Esker kissed him.
Upon which he said, “I’ve been wondering whether I should be worried about Ann,” and Esker didn’t know whether to take this as a rebuke, meant to remind her of who she was in relationship to him, or as his parallel descent into a new level of intimacy. Unmoored by her action, and further so by his quick shifting of gears, she failed to respond with her like concerns, or even to come back with an inviting comment about what a pleasure it was having Ann as a student. She said lamely, “Oh?” and left him to dismiss his own statement with a deprecating wave of his hand. “Your visits have been really nice for her,” he said. And then, all but slapping his forehead, “Oh! I’m supposed to invite you for supper!” They picked a time, Monday, seven, then shook hands goodbye.
But it’s the kiss she recalls in the tub. Whatever possessed her? It’s because he’s short, she thinks doubtfully. After all, she’s short, and not ordinarily near anyone’s cheek; a kiss in most cases would involve tiptoes for her and stooping for the other party, a little series of contortions and accommodations, and all for the sake of what? A social nicety she’s never appreciated, never liked.
Unbidden, sensory elements flood back: his orange wool shoulder briefly under her palm, the arresting firmness of his cheek, the tiny click her lips made pushing off his skin, like the tight golden clasp on a change purse. She is thoroughly vexed, and tunnels her scowl into the infinite black center of her snowflake.
In another apartment, Albert had sat on the toilet and read aloud to her while she bathed, his eyes on the page. He’d read her the quirky human-interest pieces from the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and then Isaac Bashevis Singer stories over a series of weeks. Back then she’d used bath salts, but never bubbles; the water was always clear, and still he would keep his eyes on the page, even when she rose, eventually, and stood towelless and dripping on the mat, even when she came over and dripped right on the page, the drops spreading dark across the print. Only when she shrugged and turned away did he clap the book shut and grab her slippery wrist, twirl her back around, laughing, so that she lost her balance and skidded, and he caught her very fast then, like the sportsman he wasn’t remotely.
But that was only at the very end, when they’d both known he was leaving in twelve weeks, eight weeks, six weeks, five days. . . . Only in that last summer had she let herself go, let herself fall and be caught. And who knows if it counted, when they’d both known it wouldn’t last? Not a real fall. Only a pratfall, after all.
And now, nine years later, she cannot buy The Wall Street Journal and she will never read anything else by Singer. And she does not care for kissing.
Monday, seven.
It’s her student’s father, she argues silently.
You kissed him.
Just a freak attack of social graces, she scoffs, and searches her mind for some reason to dismiss him: falsely conspiratory, she thinks; hadn’t he been a little falsely conspiratory about his pie-crust tip?
Across from the tub, soaking in the stoppered sink, floats a yellow-and-purple-starfish towel with his blood on it.
In fact, Esker has to admit, he had not sounded conspiratory; it had simply been a startling suggestion, oddly graphic, and surprising coming from a man, but he had offered it in an appealingly matter-of-fact way. For just a second she fails to prevent herself from imagining him working butter into the dry ingredients with his fingers.
Do the math, Albert whispers in her mind.
“Albert,” she whispers, shutting her eyes.
It is her deep shame to be haunted by the ghost of a living person.