Kid was a reclusive sort who didn’t seem to know his ass from his eyebrows. Maria didn’t care in the slightest about his lack of money or how he wouldn’t return her phone calls until days after she had made them. Oh, he’s probably wrapped up in a book and eating the last egg in the refrigerator, she thought to herself when the days were short and the nights grew unbearably long.

Every few days, Maria would ride over to Kid’s apartment on her bicycle after work, unannounced, and go to the backdoor, past the old drunks sitting on the porch smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer from tall cans, and tap on the living room window with the ring on her finger. Kid would get up from the couch, greet her with a comically formal handshake, and let her in for another round of diplomatic efforts to unearth whatever longings were bubbling beneath their skins.

Kid first noticed Maria when he was at a bar with another girl he met one night over whiskey and bad knock-knock jokes. The fling turned sour, but that girl had pointed out a dancing Maria from the back of the barroom and said she was cute. Kid focused in on Maria and agreed. A few weeks later he saw Maria again, dancing at that same bar, and approached her with the strangest pickup line she’d ever heard: You have a classic Italian profile. I could get lost in your visage.

No one had ever complimented her with such diction. She went home that night and had to look up the word visage, which turned out to be a fancy word for face. Once she knew what it meant, visage kept popping up in magazine articles, on billboards; a character on the “Gilmore Girls” even used it to reference a Botticelli painting she had seen during a trip to Florence. Maria thought back to a guy she dated in college who always told her she was smokin’, a word that made her feel not desirable, but more like a chimney.

It seemed Kid expected her to arrive at anytime. He was prepared for her visits with coffee or tea perpetually on the boil, and jazz records spinning on the turntable. The sexual tension between Kid and Maria would often result in hours of silence, playing board games or quietly sipping tea. Maria didn’t feel right pushing herself on him, but couldn’t understand why he didn’t just stop talking about whatever he was reading and slip her a bit of tongue. Was it really too much to ask? She kept touching his hands and arms and laughed at all of his remarks, even if she didn’t understand them. What was he waiting for? Maria was throwing herself at him, and he simply shook her hand or brought her another cup of tea.

He was so polite and certainly the cleanest guy she had ever met. His bathroom sparkled, and there was never a speck of grime to be found. Maybe Kid was gay? No, he freely discussed past relationships in such intimate detail that he couldn’t be lying. Kid was a baseball nut, carried himself with the virility of a construction worker, and she had caught him staring at her breasts countless times.

Kid was still in love with his old girlfriend. The thought of being with another woman actually made him nauseous. He couldn’t tell Maria, could he? He went over in his mind the contours of Maria’s face, the curve of her hips and the gentle slope of her breasts. Kid suppressed his longings with the self-loathing dogma of a desperate sinner readying himself for the fires of hell that burn for eternity. This morbid psychological approach did little to turn the tides of his loins.

After a long night at the bar dancing with Maria, when Kid couldn’t deal with all the nonsense of self-inflicted celibacy anymore, he turned to the girl with the classic Italian visage and kissed her long and hard. He led her into the apartment and didn’t offer her any coffee or tea. He didn’t put a Bill Evans record on the stereo or start elaborating on the finer points of Dylan Thomas’s approach to contemporary verse. It was springtime in New York City, and the drunks outside the window smoked cigarettes and watched the best display of love they had seen in years.
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Sean Lambert has provided his artist management skills to everyone from literary behemoth Salman Rushdie to jazz great Ellis Marsalis. His writing has appeared in The New Haven Advocate, The Portland Mercury, Underground Voices, Floss Magazine, and the recently published book How to Talk to a Yankee Fan. He is a regular contributor to Verbicide and www.kevchino.com, writing music reviews and features whenever duty calls. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.