Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson Page A

man’s opinion on that.
    â€”Johnny’s not just any man. But he said, “What’s in him at that moment? I don’t know, some bizarre cocktail of bravado and compassion and oedipal urgings. Why does he do it? Because she wants him to and he’s a good boy. Because he’s so alive he’s bigger than death. Because he’s on an Experience-gathering expedition, and this is a Big One. Because this is where he brings girls to kiss them, and she’s a girl. Because they’ve slipped out of the stream of time and become ageless. Because he’s so beautiful it would be a scandal if nobody were kissing him. Because he reads her well enough to know he can get away with it, and getting away with things is the teenager’s raison d’être . Because he’s in awe of the moment he’s concocted, and knows he has to do something remarkable to mark it . . .”
    â€”John’s words comfort you, don’t they.
    â€”They do.
    â€”Why do you think he kisses her? Before you answer, try to open your mind, your heart, try to think about where you are – in the country on a hot day and eating a handful of blackberries that will stain your lips, holding my hand like we’re girlfriends off from school for the turning-point summer we’ve been waiting for. Look at me. Now, why do you think he kisses her?
    â€”Feel this under the dog’s front leg. Here, Alice. Put your fingers under mine. Feel that? There’s a little tumor under there, floating around, fixing for trouble. But look at him, smiling in his sleep, oblivious. Good dog.
    He kisses her because she gives him the word “tannin”. No woman has given him a word. Take off your hat, Alice. He kisses her because she’s beautiful regardless of time. Because he can’t help it.

I Flirt with RICHARD FORD
    â€”Waiting for you to phone feels like high school. Will he? Won’t he? How do I look?
    â€”But I called, whereas in high school they likely didn’t.
    â€”I went to high school in Vancouver and stood far too many cold afternoons under the colonial street light on the corner of Wiltshire and 43rd with boyfriend X, after our respective rugby and volleyball games. I tried to convince him I wasn’t too crazy to love long term, that just because my sister was near death I wasn’t sad all the time, I could tell a good joke, cared about the civil rights movement and necked well, though ancient at fifteen. We stood so long my toes froze, in sight of my square blue Georgian house, its rhododendrons, my mother’s cream-coloured Austin inept in the driveway, but we didn’t go in there. X helped keep me whole but by graduation, he had taken up with a rough covey of rugger chicks who liked their boys straddling rebuilt Harleys with long scars where pins held their ruptured bodies – elbows, knees. Girls who drank hard liquor fast and smoked weed in their parents’ condos at Whistler and took pills and called that carefree. My sister dead, I quit the team, and found a nice United church redheaded boy who refused to fuck but could fingerpick a punchy acoustic guitar – his brother’s D-28 Martin – and who lived for the scratch and squeeze of tight harmony. Of course, moral differences ripped us apart, and the phone calls stopped coming when I begged the world for one more talk. Richard, this is already better than high school.
    â€”We’ll see.
    â€”Thank-you for calling.
    â€”My pleasure so far.
    â€”You may occasionally hear the sound of chickens. My office looks out on a rough little coop built seventy years ago from field stones and cedar shingles by a local shoemaker and is now home to a dozen Barred Rocks
and a couple of freakish and testy Black Minorcas. Their egg yolks this time of year are a yellow not otherwise found in nature and taste rich as French pastries, thick from a diet of hatching slugs. Early this morning, turkey vultures circled