Ensemble

“Everyone very happy here,” “cher enfants,” “trés bon homme,” “Try Pear’s soap on your hands,” and so on, though

  Effie could not really be sure of any of the words, exactly. The signature was cryptic: the graceful calligraphic outline of a swan. She decided she would not bother Arthur with this, either, and without thinking later burned it with the rest of the household trash in the woodstove.

  When Arthur awoke from his long slumber, he took a little weak tea and then asked where Mrs. Karinskaya was. Off to an old maid she knows who lives on the Saranacs, she told him, and felt obliged to elaborate further, “She mentioned a will and a buried treasure, I think, something an ancestor might help them find.” Effie laughed, the first time she had since she had arrived here, but Arthur looked stricken. “Did she mention when she might be back?” he asked, his teaspoon tapping out a palsied rhythm against the cup. “We shall both have to go back to work soon.” Effie seized the spoon and the cup from him. At that moment, she noticed a cobweb she had missed in a window-corner. “I can play you something on that harmonium in the parlor,” she told him, just to change the subject. “You know, I still keep up my music a little. I find Chopin such a tonic.” Some minutes later, Arthur was lulled back to sleep with a somewhat hesitant nocturne rising from the asthmatic instrument below.

  A day or two later, Effie brought him an object she had found at the perimeter of the wreckage: the skeletal armature of a large umbrella, like the fossilized wing of a pterodactyl, its charred Malacca handle still attached. Arthur was not to recover, after all; he did not even make it back to the burned-out cellar where “Tel Mill” had been, never saw the twisted and blackened remains of his life’s work. Once he saw a pretty silver spider inching down a clock-face; the coroner wrote “cardiac arrest” on his warrant. Effie found refuge in a church choir and its bachelor minister, and was soon lost to history. As were the wishes of an unconventional man, Arthur Cahill was cremated without song or ceremony and buried in a country cemetery nearby, though I have never found his grave.

  Kisses

  They were falling over the town, drifting down cool and moist and gentle as the first snowfall of the year. Slow but seemingly heavy, out of a clear blue November sky, they fell, not in an evenly dispersed downpour, but in random spatterings over the entire district—streets, lawns, and fields. Since noon one could hear from place to place the soft wet plopping sounds, like innumerable bubbles bursting in the air, as the kisses landed on pedestrians or anyone else outdoors. For the most part, they went for their targets’ cheeks, giving them light pecks here and there, although a good many more daring ones firmly planted themselves on the lips and even went so far as to dawdle with the tongue (these would have to be forcibly wiped away; even so, most of them evaporated nearly as soon as they found their marks). Some people appeared to attract more kisses—not necessarily the youngest or prettiest; others felt nothing at all—it could be they were not sensitive enough to touch—but no one was able to determine whether this was merely a chance aspect of the climatic phenomenon or a definite preference on behalf of the kisses themselves.

  Though later there were bound to be many theories, not a soul really understood what was happening at the time, nor was anyone sure at first how to react, if one should react at all. The precipitation had begun so gradually and passed through each area so erratically not even our beloved authorities had much time to evaluate, only time to act. Should alarms be sounded? Geiger counters dispatched to the deputies? Government meteorologists called in? Probably all this and more was done, for there was certainly a commotion in the streets: people rushed out of their homes and businesses to see what the fuss was about—then they too became soaked in kisses, and this either enchanted them in an instant (mostly just children, it was claimed later) or left them maddened and perhaps a little horrified. The town’s everyday business came to a near standstill as secretaries left their typewriters, students darted out of classes despite their teachers, motorists abandoned their vehicles, and clerks walked out on customers—not all at once, of course, but wherever their invisible cloud carried the kisses and people exclaimed loudly.

  On my walk home from the office where I sit all day I saw my fellow townsfolk running every which way, trying to avoid the incessant kisses or, if they were daring or maybe lonely, racing to the spots where the kisses seemed to be falling thickest (though they were transparent, an indistinct iridescence shimmered in the air over certain blocks, like the sheen of moiré cloth without the moiré). Having listened to frequent reports on the radio all afternoon, I was not shocked but somewhat surprised nevertheless by what I was listening to. I noticed two or three old maids and widowers strike at the kisses as they landed on their persons, run into their homes, and slam down their windows against the onslaught. And I spied comely young women— hairdressers and nurses—wander out of their work-places, cautious with umbrellas at first, until their curiosity overpowered them and they allowed a few darting smacks on their taut cheeks, whereupon a few of them were swept away and turned their umbrellas upside down, collecting the invisible yet mobile kisses to keep for themselves—if that was possible.

  In a yellowed field which I pass every day two old farmers were sitting on an oversized pumpkin trying to play cards, even though mischievous kisses kept annoying the stouter of the pair. He would shuffle the deck—a kiss he immediately brushed away would tickle his ear or neck; they retaliated with more violence, drumming upon his bald pate and upsetting his cards, and so on; all the while his partner, unaffected, guffawed and mocked the man’s strange affliction, though everyone in town must have known of the kisses by then. Other laborers among the pumpkins were also dodging kisses, the younger men blushing and covering their heads, a few of the more rambunctious married men I know kissing the air and giggling like brides pelted by rice.

  Along the narrow hillside path which leads toward my neighborhood, dogs snapped at kisses which had inadvertently landed on their sensitive noses, and cats pounced at the effervescent things—for cats can see ghosts and cats can see kisses. The last of the year’s golden chrysanthemums bent under their pressure (or was it just the wind?); stray kisses became entangled in spider-webs (spiders would come trapezing across their threads for a real surprise); other kisses were caught in overhanging branches or rain gutters—-it was possible to hear, at quiet corners, the faint forlorn plashings above. Walking along with my old black valise and my head down, full of other thoughts, I did not really notice many of these things at the time, although one’s senses are always, like cameras and tape-recorders, collecting impressions for future reference. In that small cemetery at the top of the hill I paused as I often do and became aware of kisses striking the cold marble and grayed wreaths with some force, making subtle music, like the highest notes of a distant piano. Such a waste, I reflected, though I probably could not explain why that thought occurred to me: it was illogical and I am a logical man, so people tell me, and I had never made a study on the ontology of osculation. But on her grave, which had been allowed to go unkempt for some years, the kisses seemed to be falling with especially gentle ferocity: perhaps they nourished the soil—very well, then.

  Nearer my own home the kisses were also falling with rather more intensity, as if a denser cloud had blown through—I could determine this from the sight of all my neighbors scampering about, some of them in slickers and galoshes, as though they were expecting weather of an altogether different sort. (Do kisses bounce off rubber? I suppose so.) Indeed, here was a veritable deluge up the street, and the very nature of the kisses had apparently altered, though in precisely which way was difficult to decipher. In the fading sunlight the kisses took on somewhat more of a substance; there was a rainbow-colored gauziness in the air one could see through squinted eyes at the correct angle to the sunset—transparent and prismatic ribbons not so much descending as scattering in the breeze like the gossamer of spiders. The sound was also more audible, burblings and sighings both.
Attitudes had changed as well. Mothers were raising their infants up to the faded blue heavens; middle-aged husbands and wives were out walking bare-headed in the downpour; youths danced about to music in the open air (chilly as it was), giggling and flailing arms about like marionettes as the kisses peppered their skin. The elderly and bedridden were being wheeled out of doors to receive a treatment of kisses, some of them oblivious or confused or critical of what this new therapy could mean, until they too felt busses on their foreheads and hands. The blind or senile among them laughed like children, thinking surely the kisses were the work of spry young lads and lasses who were quick to kiss and flee. The influence of the kisses was unmistakable on all those who came into contact with them—it was easy to see the look of surprised bliss, that look which comes across a child’s face when a magician has performed some simple but bewildering trick, travel from face to face to face.

  Yet, in all this time I had been walking (a little too quickly, preoccupied with all those foolish documents