Kissing in Manhattan (23 page)

James had had only two real experiments with the opposite sex. The first was as a college sophomore. Frustrated by his lingering pangs for Anamaria, James had gone out alone toa bar one night, gotten drunk on three sloe gins, and endedup in an alley, pinned against a Dumpster, kissing a heavyset sorority girl named Clarice. The kissing lasted about five minutes, during which time Clarice grunted repeatedly, clawed at James’s trousers, and instructed him to stick his tongue in her ear. After James repeatedly refused to obey this instruction, Clarice invoked the name of Jesus Christ, slapped James across the face, and stormed away.

After Clarice there’d been only Eleanor, who occupied two months of James’s senior year with her purple capes and her rummy. Neither Clarice nor Eleanor had sparked any joy, hope, or dread in James’s heart. He never fought with them or for them, never danced with them, never learned to waste time with them or to kiss the tips of their eyelashes or to leave certain things unsaid.

So when Rally McWilliams came along, James was unprepared.

He saw her again two nights later. It was the third evening of the Spree, and Patrick’s coterie was expected at Duranigan’sRestaurant at nine o’clock. James would ordinarily have beggedoff, but he wanted a chance to see Rally in clothing, so he kept his suit on after work. He killed some time in Rockefeller Center, watching tourists and ice dancers. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first he found Morality John playing his guitar for a small crowd. The vagrant man sang in a dark, tender voice, looking straight at James.

“Somehow, all is falling into place,”
sang Morality John,
“and love is yet awaiting me.”

James made it to Duranigan’s by quarter till the hour. The restaurant was magic for the holidays. The first-floor lobby was an arboretum of holly, white and red roses, and a simply dressed, towering pine tree. Two celestial beings, twenty feet tall and shaved from ice, stood in a marble pool, their wings reaching higher than their halos. A ruby-red carpet had been laid on the staircase that spiraled to the second floor, which Patrick had reserved entirely for his party. At the head of these stairs was a closed oaken door and before it stood a tall, bony, olive-skinned woman, whose charge it was to collect the black-and-silver Spree tickets. The woman bore a haughty Mediterranean air, and she wore a black-and-silver dress that matched the ticket colors exactly.

“Yes,” she said when James handed her his ticket, and, without smiling, she opened the door.

When James passed inside, he almost reeled. Before him was the most gratuitous and lovely array of etiquette he’d ever seen in one room. The floor was a square rink of the same ruby carpet that led up the lobby stairs. In a corner, at the end of the room farthest from James, was an enormous hearth with a fire high and alive across its base. In this hearth the largest animal James had ever seen indoors turned roasting on a spit. James couldn’t tell by the splay of its legs or the gold of its hide, but he guessed that the creature was some giant, imported pig. Turning the pig on the spit was a man in a white chef’s uniform. He wore one large black glove on the hand that was turning the spit, and he appeared to be whispering threats to the pig, forbidding the meat to char or dry out. The spit handle itself, a brass wheel that jutted out from the hearthstones, had a circumference of more than four feet and looked like the winding mechanism of some wonderful doomsday clock.

In another corner sat Tony DiPreschetto, playing his cello, wearing a black tuxedo and his perennial white scarf. Two wine carts, complete with sommeliers, were situated at either end of the room, stocked with every great year of every great wine. Across the floor itself five tables with twenty settings each—ten settings to a side—were arranged in long, elegant dashes. Everything on the tables looked to be either silver, crystal, or edible, except for the lighted, vanilla-colored candles, and even they, to James’s staggered mind, could have been twisted, flammable sticks of taffy or marzipan.

Finally, of course, there were the guests. The men, except for Checkers and James himself, wore classic black tuxedos. James couldn’t recall Patrick having mentioned a black tie requirement, and the ticket had said nothing at all, but these dozens of males, with some collective urban instinct, had known to choose gentlemen’s dress. Walter Glorybrook, minus his ferret, looked stout and correct at the bar. He was drinking gimlets with Henry Shaker, who appeared to have trimmed his eyebrow. Also at the bar, alone, was the sloe-eyed Marcy Conner, gripping a champagne bottle by its neck and hating how single she was. The Iranians were not in attendance, but there were identical twins from Juneau—Inuitgirls named Kettle and Fife—whose father was a musical iconoclast. They stood close to the cellist, listening.

“Hey, there.”

James turned around. It was Nicole Bonner, and her older guy, and Liza McMannus.

“This is Douglas Kerchek,” said Nicole.

James shook hands. Douglas wore a plain, rumpled tuxedo and a bewildered expression, as if he were confused by the girl on his arm. Looking at him made James feel better.

“Isn’t this beautiful?” Liza smiled around at the room.

“It’s Rivendell,” said Douglas quietly.

“No,” said Nicole, “it’s just Patrick.”

At the bar James drank a highball. He scanned the crowd, dismayed as much by the wrappings of the women as by the army of tuxedos. For tonight, Patrick’s female guests had gone beyond the call of mere formality. Their dresses, almost all in shades of black and silver, fell perfectly from their shoulders or luxuriated over their hips. Eva Baumgarten was in furs, Hannah Glorybrook wore satin, and Sarah Wolf kept laying her white-gloved hand against her cheek, hoping someone would notice. There were handfuls of other women on hand, some wicked, some nervous and kind, but all of them exquisitely outfitted. James got the sense that every woman’s clothing, after severe thought and expense, had been tailored precisely to her body and her temperament. There was something too prepared, James thought, too carefully glorious about these girls, about the whole room, and he wondered if he was somehow in danger.

Then James saw Rally. She was standing beside the hearth, chatting up the chef. She wore a dress the color of a deep red wine, and it came just barely to her knees. Her earrings were fine, simple drops of silver, but her closely cropped hair, against the firelight, looked even more to James like that of a cadet or an army private. He fantasized for a moment that she was in fact a militaristic woman, that she spent her days enduring some top-secret, vital, very physical training, and that tonight she was away on a lucky, rare leave. The cello played a bass note, and as James stared at Rally, he remembered the arcs of her body, the privileged view that he’d had. He thought, not for the first time, of the opals in his suit-coat pocket, of the light they might catch against Rally’s skin. Then James finished his highball and, already blushing, moved to the hearth.

“Um,” said James. “Hello.”

Rally turned from the chef. She touched her hand to James’s arm.

“If it isn’t James Branch,” she said.

James nodded dumbly. Rally watched him, smiling, while he prayed for something to say. Finally he jutted his thumb at the hearth.

“What is that animal?” he blurted.

The chef scowled darkly. “It’s a boar.”

“Well,” said James. “Yes. I thought so.”

“It’s a boar,” emphasized the chef, “and so are you, if you have to ask.”

“Oh. Very good.” James rocked on his heels, suffering. “Ha, ha,” he said.

Rally giggled, wrinkled her nose.

Kill me now, thought James. But Rally took him by the elbow, led him away from the hearth.

“No tuxedo, James Branch?”

James’s blush hadn’t faded. “I guess not,” he said.

“Aren’t you the brave one.”

Rally led James to a wine cart where no one else was standing.

“You look like you need a drink.”

James accepted a glass of Frascati. He peered at Rally’s wrists, looked for marks of binding.

“So,” said Rally. “You haven’t been to a lot of Patrick’s shindigs.”

James straightened his back. “I stick out that much?”

“Sticking out among Patrick’s boys is a good thing.” Rally yawned, turned it into a smile. “You’re different,” she said.

James said nothing. At the door Freida and Crispin were entering, arm in arm. Walter and Henry Shaker left the bar and bore down on these women.

“Ha—have you actually been to the Himalayas?” James asked.

Rally snapped her fingers. “The Cloisters. That’s where I’ve seen you before. I saw you once at the Cloisters.”

James shook his head. “I would remember you.”

“I had long hair. We were looking at a tapestry. Of a unicorn.”

James couldn’t think about the Cloisters. He was wondering what would happen if he took Rally’s arm and sank his teeth into it, or kissed it from her wrist to her shoulder.

Rally sipped her wine. It made her lips glisten.

“You’re thinking about the other night, aren’t you, James Branch? You’re thinking about how I looked.”

“I’m thinking about how you look right now,” said James.

Rally raised her eyebrows. She’d been about to speak, about to say something smart and coquettish. Instead, she checked out James’s shoulders, which were wider than she’d guessed in the dark of Patrick’s bedroom. Her glance settled on James’s eyes, on the kind blue wash of them, on the deliberation behind them. Rally drew in a breath.

“How’s the wine?”

Rally and James both jumped. Their host was beside them, smiling, a hand on each of their shoulders.

“Patrick,” breathed Rally. “Hey.”

Patrick stood tall and lordly in his tuxedo. He kissed Rally on the cheek. Then he kissed James on the cheek, and stood grinning back and forth between his roommate and the woman.

“You look radiant,” he told Rally. “Scintillating. Scrumptious.”

Rally pulled away. “Patrick.”

“Doesn’t she, though, Branch? Doesn’t she look good enough to eat?”

“Patrick,” scolded Rally.

“Well, doesn’t she?” demanded Patrick.

James had backed up against the wine cart.

“I—” he said. “I . . . suppose.”

Patrick thumped James on the shoulder. “Branch here is a little shy around the womenfolk.”

Rally finished her wine. “Some womenfolk find that very attractive.”

“I’ll bet they do. I’ll bet they do.” Patrick was finished laughing now. He was still grinning his hyena grin. “Rally’s a travel writer, Branchman.”

James cleared his throat. “I—”

“He knows what I do,” cut in Rally. “James was just asking me about the Himalayas. I was saying that I’ve never been there, but that I’d love to go.”

“Well.” Patrick bobbed his head. “It sounds as if James and Rally were having a bona fide conversation. Is that what you were having, Branch?”

“I suppose,” said James.

“You hear that, Rallygirl? He supposes.”

“I hear him fine,” whispered Rally.

“Well.”
Patrick extended his hand, took Rally’s elbow between his thumb and forefinger. James thought he saw Rally flinch.

“Ms. McWilliams,” said Patrick, “you’ve finished your wine. Can I escort you to the bar?”

Rally sighed. “Patrick—”

“I’d like to have a private word with you, Ms. McWilliams.”

“Ow—all
right,
Patrick. All right.”

Patrick turned his head to James. “I’m very glad that you’ve come,” he said evenly. Then he steered Rally off toward the bar, leaving James alone.

“I don’t know, Otis,” whispered James. “It’s weird. Patrick gets all these men and women together. The men are handsome and the women are beautiful, but if one guy talks to one girl for too long, Patrick steps in, like a chaperone. Except that he’s not a chaperone, he’s a—”

James held his tongue. He didn’t know what his housemate was, didn’t have a word for it. He only knew that whatever power or quality Patrick exuded made him nervous. So he switched topics.

“She looked wonderful, Otis. She had on this burgundy dress, and silver earrings, and her hair looked all golden and bristly. I wanted to run my hand through it.” James rocked, kept his eyes closed. “We weren’t seated at the same table. She sat next to Patrick, and I got stuck between Liza McMannus and some guy from Harrow East.”

James furrowed his brow. “I don’t think Patrick’s in love with her, Otis. That’s the thing. I don’t think he’s in love with any of them.”

It was one in the morning. There was a ticking in the walls that came on and off intermittently, and James liked to hear it. He imagined it was the Preemption digesting all that he said.

“For dinner we had roasted boar and some weird kind of port wine. It was like a medieval feast, except that Sarah Wolf wouldn’t eat any boar, because she’s kosher, and Liza kept asking for vegetables, because she’s a vegan. I don’t think they had vegans in the Middle Ages, Otis.”

James kept rocking. He breathed in and out, smelling the trace of mahogany that he liked. It was warmer in the elevator than normal, and cozy after the bracing wind outside.

“I don’t think Rally is short for anything,” said James. “I think she’s just Rally, and that’s her real name.”

James thought of the way Patrick had gripped Rally’s elbow, the way Rally had winced and gone off with him. James didn’t get to be alone with her or even speak to her again for the rest of the night. He’d planned on trying to corner her after dinner, but when he came out of the lavatory around midnight, she was gone.

“I hope she’s just Rally,” whispered James.

To get to the Spree story night at Cherrywood’s, Patrick insisted that he and James share a cab downtown. It was the evening after Christmas, and James stared out the cab’s window at the snow-covered sidewalks, which were quieter than they’d been in weeks. The eye of the storm, thought James. New Year’s will be a madhouse.

James wore a tuxedo, not wanting to repeat his underdressed, eyesore status from Duranigan’s. Patrick wore a black overcoat, a black blazer, a black T-shirt, and chinos.