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Lines and Arrows | Jun 04 2003

We kissed for the first time at the northeast corner of St. Marks and Fourth Avenue. It was raining. We had been walking in the rain for several blocks. I was standing to her left and holding her umbrella above us. For some reason I was holding the umbrella in my left hand, across my body. The light was red. I was standing quite close to her, and probably our arms were touching or nearly touching. I believe she’d just been explaining why she wasn’t wearing her sweater, despite the rain. The reason was, she wanted something dry to wear later. It seemed better, she thought, to have a dry sweater for later than to be warmer now. I didn’t say but certainly did think that I respected her logic. In fact this may be why I kissed her: because I respected her logic.

She was wearing white and red sneakers which I believe are called Vans. Normally I don’t notice such things, but these sneakers were adorable. When I first saw them, I remembered that on our first date she had worn blocky black sneakers which I couldn’t help but find sexy. The truth is, I am usually impervious to such things. If anything, it’s a turn-off when I sense that a woman devotes half her life to fashion. The sneakers were white with little red flowers. The red matched the red of her pants. Later she confessed that she had left her entire wardrobe in a giant pile on her bed, which may have been the nicest thing anyone has ever told me.

The way the kiss happened was, I turned to her and simply started kissing her, without really thinking about it. Well, there was a bit more to it, of course. Because as I moved in, I definitely looked to see if I had permission to move in further. Did she tilt her head in acceptance? Did she part her lips slightly? Probably she did both, although I don’t claim to remember. In baseball this is called a bang-bang play. A player slides into second, the throw comes in, the second baseman catches it and slaps the runner with his glove, and it’s over, bang-bang, no time for anyone to think about what’s happening. Contrast this with the kiss itself, during which I focused entirely on the fact that we were kissing, that those lips touching mine, not to mention that flicker of tongue, belonged to her. This part was more like those slow-motion replays, usually in basketball, in which the announcer scribbles a lot of lines and arrows on the screen to explain what just happened and how it relates to what happened before and how it reflects and reveals what each team is trying at this moment to do, beneath all the lines and arrows.