Read The Kissing List for Free Online Page B

reading all the serious sections of the previous Sunday’s
Times
. The friends-once-removed had promised European DJs, absinthe, transcendence, but after ten minutes or so, Goldy had decided it was no different from a college kegger, except instead of beer there were watered-down bottom-shelf cocktails in red Solo cups and guys who wore as much gel and eyeliner as girls, their hair groomed into weedy lawns, and women who resembled hookers, and if not hookers,suburban good girls who had worn one dress out of the house and shimmied into another en route. If Goldy rolled up her top-of-the-knee-length skirt and unbuttoned her blouse to her sternum, she’d fit in, but what was the point? Her bra was pink, not black, and she danced with too much happy enthusiasm for the stuttering rhythms the DJ was mixing. She vowed to stay until at least 12:15 because she’d paid the cover, and she was having an experience—perhaps not the one she expected, but never mind. Closing her eyes, she tried getting into her zone, but only wound up ricocheting off a guy in Levi’s and a too-big button-down. He had a way of smiling that was like winking, but without one iota of creepiness.
    How are you supposed to dance to this? she asked him three times before he motioned her toward the door. It was less a real question than a rhetorical one, since he danced just as badly as she did. After getting their hands stamped with red skulls that quickly bled into blobs, they stood outside in the smelly summer night and talked, one coincidence piling on top of another, the way they do when you’re starting to like someone.
    Let’s grab a drink someplace else, he said, and she said, Sure, though once they reached the bar—a grown-up place with red banquettes and frosted globes of yellow light—Goldy was taken aback when Pork Pie slapped down a hundred for their cocktails. I’ll pay, she protested, and he said, Looks like I beat you to it, and she said, But I’m a feminist, and he just laughed.
    Later on, he’d claim he made the first move, and she’d protest, saying, Who talked to who first? They liked to argue about this almost as much as they liked telling people the story oftheir beginning. Goldy used the word
improbable
, and Pork Pie called it
lucky
, and they both secretly considered it
fate
. And aside from his vegetable and soft-cheese phobias and his avoidance of dark, difficult movies and her constant competitiveness and occasional moodiness (which made her crave the sort of dark, difficult movies that gave her an excuse to cry), they were pretty happy. So fate, yes. Maybe.
    S he said, See you tonight, and he said, Knock ’em dead, Goldy, before the subway doors slid together, and the train whisked him downtown to Wall Street.
    She worked in poor-man’s land in the Garment District, where morning, noon, and night she dodged the rack pushers shepherding the fancy outer skins of women up curbs, around puddles, and through herds of cabs. She wore the clothes they pushed—DKNY, Miu Miu, and Helmut Lang—thanks to the generosity of Pork Pie. Her wallet was lined with Thomas Jeffersons from their ridiculous bets, her body was clothed with surprise Saturday shopping sprees, the odd anniversary present marking the 127th day since their first date, the gifties he bought just because business was good, foreign derivatives were strong, he’d called Brazil, or won $10,000 in the football pool at work. He had her squirreling away all her extra money in the most aggressive mutual fund around. She could afford to be aggressive because she was young.
    She stopped at the Broadway Deli, three blocks west of Broadway, for fried egg and sausage on a roll, a cup of watery coffee. Light with two sugars, she told the aproned man. Gracias.She walked up Eighth Avenue, underneath the permanent scaffolding and past the stores that sold ninety-nine-cent T-shirts and the Cuban restaurant where she bought a plate of yellow rice and black beans with fried plantain on