The Kiss: A Memoir (7 page)

His wife. We’re locked in the kind of sympathy for each other that only two people spurned by the same woman could feel. Through her, in thrall to her, spiting her the person neither of us could ever know or possess we hold on to each other. She is more compelling than we are, because she always eludes. She is mysterious, whereas we are only too eager to bare ourselves. With words, my father and I lay open the organs of love.

We see from where our blood flows, how fast and how thick, how red. It fascinates us, our capacity for pain. For we are in love with that, too, our suffering, the anguish of the unrequited. Or if we don’t love suffering, we don’t know who or what we are apart from it. For half of his life and all of mine, we have defined ourselves as those who love her, the one who won’t love us back. My father vilifies my mother and her parents. I defend them, but they have hurt me, too. It’s a relief to hear someone say that my young, beautiful mother, whom all my friends jealously admire, is a narcissist, that she’s selfish and cruel as only the weak can because cruelty is all she has to keep herself safe. My father identifies the dire triangle that my grandmother, my mother, and I form. He says that I protect my mother against her mother, that she passively protects me by offering one generation’s distance, and that my grandmother manipulates the two of us, playing one daughter’s insecurities off against the other’s. He disarms me by naming this triangle even as he steps in to break it by forming a new one, my mother, my father, and me. My father takes the place of my grandmother, one despot steps in for another. Astonished by his honesty, his perceptivity, I somehow miss what I don’t want to see that my father himself is selfish, a narcissist, dangerous. While he talks, he sits in his unlit office, feet propped on the desk he describes the scene for me. I lie curled on my bed, the lights out in my room. In those long hours of dark conversation, we fill in twenty years of history, we interrupt ourselves and each other to say over and over how unbearable is our separation. We say we are both bewildered and even frightened by the force of our feelings yet how can we stand to remain apart as we have been for so long? His voice fills the darkness. Nothing like this has ever happened to him before, my father says. His church, his wife, his other children, he tells me he doesn’t pay any more attention to them than I do to the rest of my life.

He is pushing them away even as I withdraw from my family, my friends, my boyfriend, breaking dates, not answering the phone or knocks at my door. He understands why I’ve stopped out of school.

He even applauds it. His only worry is that it will set my grandparents against him, against us, that they will prevent our becoming a part of each other’s lives. “But we’ll face that, ” he says. “Every one will have to understand that for now I am your school. I am what you have to learn. ” I’m excited by my father’s desire to tell me everything about himself How could I be otherwise, child as I am of a father who vanished and a mother so cool and withholding that she left me no means of contacting her when she moved out? “I have to see you again, ” he says each night on the phone. “I have to figure out a way to see you again soon. I can’t wait much longer. ” Then, one night, he calls to say he has a plane ticket. His church will sponsor a trip to the university, where he’ll meet with a professor of religion. The money comes out of a fund for the pastor’s continuing education. He’ll be with me in two weeks. Before my father arrives, I go home to explain why I’ve stopped out of school. My grandparents make the connection, as soon as my father reappears, I begin to mismanage my life. “Drop out! ” they protest. “How can you! Why? “

“Stop out, not drop out, ” I correct, but this distinction is lost on them. Do my grandparents disapprove of my father’s returning for another visit because they suspect that he might be angry enough to be vengeful?

Are they frightened that he’s coming back because he is at last strong enough to settle the score? To reclaim or destroy all that was his? “You don’t even know him! ” my grandmother cries, livid when I tell her that I want to see him again. “He’s never even been a father to you! ” she says. “But that’s exactly why seeing him has been such a shock. It’s why I need to see him again. Why I need to take a break. I need to know who he is. ” I cannot answer my grandmother’s questions about so sudden an attachment, my willingness to love a person I don’t even know. It’s a question I can’t answer for myself. “I swear I’ll go back in September, ” I say, and I assure her that having entered college with advanced placement credits and having taken the maximum course load every quarter, I’ll still be able to graduate with my class. “Have I ever broken a promise before? ” I ask. My grandfather shakes his head with the same disgust he reserves for my mother’s financial mismanagements.

He looks at the paper on which I’ve calculated my credits the way he regards one of her worthless checks.

“Well, ” he says, “you’ve already done it, haven’t you? It’s not as if you’re asking for my opinion, much less my permission. I’m sorry, I say to him. I’m very sorry. I Will go back. I promise. ” Lips pursed in disapproval, he nods, says nothing. The distance that has long separated his body from .., me grows. “Why won’t you throw that awful thing out? “

my mother says of my favorite black sweater, its embroidery unraveling and dropping jet beads on her kitchen counter. We talk together as we make tea on her stove, and she nods when I tell her that I love my father with a sudden and irresistible force. Depressed in the wake of his visit, she’s actually more understanding than my grandparents of my desire to see him again, she is for now, at least.

“Yes! Yes! ” she says, when I tell her that he’s returning, and we agree that the visit will, once again, include her, that my father and I will drive from school to her house. My mother looks at me.

“Your father is the only man I’ve ever really cared about, ” she says.

I’ve heard this before, of course, but the confession that follows is new. “You know, I’ve never really enjoyed being with any other man, ” my mother says. “In bed, I mean. ” She puts her hand on my arm, she grasps it so that I can feel the separate pressure of each finger.

“Having sex is what I mean, ” she says, and then she removes her hand, she crosses her arms. I say nothing. Embarrassed, I look away.

Standing so close that I can feel the heat of her body, can feel her breath as it moves over the fine hairs on my upper arm, I don’t yet know what my mother’s revelation means to me. I feel a tiny cold thrill that I ascribe to the surprise of her willingly telling me something so personal. Why are you telling me this, I think, marveling silently. Why?

Innocent of how I, and my father, will come to use it.

In preparation for my father’s visit, I tidy my basement apartment, I borrow an old sleeping bag from a friend. If I worry that he’ll dislike the place where I live, so different from my mother’s cool and elegant home, I need not. When he gets there, he never sees it. He sees nothing but me. “Mine, ” he says, holding me with hands that are hot and shaking. “You belong to me. ” He cannot keep from touching me, looking at me, reaching for my hand, my sleeve, my hair. In restaurants, his food grows cold as he stares across the table, his hand holding tight to mine. Tears gather behind the lenses of his glasses and fall silently down his cheeks. They convince me that what I want to believe … .. .

is true, as love IS gellullle. At night I give him my bed. I take the sleeping bag unrolled on the floor beside it. “That can’t be comfortable, ” he says, but he does not offer to trade places. “Come here, ” he says, patting the blanket. “There’s room for us both. “

Remembering the kiss, I hesitate. I’m not ready to have to forget something else. Is it because he senses I’m troubled by what happened that he’s never mentioned our parting in the airport? I think of the kiss not as what he did but as what happened. I’ve separated him from the act, I’ve made the adjustment of regarding the kiss as I would a more helpless physical transport, a seizure, perhaps, or a spasm of coughing. If the kiss was an accident, outside of human control, then it doesn’t pollute the love he has for me. It doesn’t demand that I turn away from what I want. Still, I worry. I think about the kiss all the time, but each time I consider asking my father about it, I find I can’t open my mouth.

It’s not just that I’m afraid he might tell me what I don’t want to hear, but that I’m so thoroughly under the spell of my own denial I sometimes wonder if anything happened at all. I ask myself if I haven’t perhaps made the whole thing up, an overwrought fantasy inspired by wanting too much to be admired and loved. “Come here, ” he says again.

I stay where I am, on the floor at his feet, zipped into the bag, caught between fear and longing. “Please, ” he says. “I just want to hold you.

Don’t you want me to? Think of how many years of each other’s company we’ve missed. I don’t want to miss any more, do you? ” I want to be held too much to stay away. But, once next to him, I fall asleep before his arms are around me. I sleep above the covers and in the sleeping bag, and in the morning, I rise and bathe before he’s awake. My father began to take photographs, he tells me, to compensate for what he describes as his lack of imagination. He always travels with a camera because without its help he can’t visually recall where he’s been.

He says he can’t picture things in his head, that he thinks only in words, a text unrelieved by any sensual memory. Trying to understand what he means, I remember looking something up in the Encyclopedia Britannica and noticing how claustrophobic its dry pages were, many crammed only with black letters, no images, the narrowness of the margins discouraging a reader’s drifting off into mental pictures. Can it be true that this is what it’s like inside my father’s head? An endless march of articulation? Not a face or a flower or a room he once slept in, not the smell of sweat or of rain, not the taste of an orange, of wine, of blood only words and more words? Between the university and my mother’s house are countless scenic stops, lookout points, chasms, rock formations, gulches carved by rivers, gnarled, ancient roots holding tight to big rocks, cliffs above distant roiling water We take our time as we explore each one, setting a pattern we’ll follow for the next few years, my father and I by the side of a road, looking, ostensibly, at some sight worth the drive, but in truth wholly absorbed with each other. “Sit here, ” he says, posing me on a rock. “Do you want me to smile? ” I ask. He looks up from the camera in his hands. “I just want you to be yourself, ” he says. I say nothing, and he reaches forward, touches my cheek. “Do you know who you are? ” he asks. “How can you, when you’re only twenty? ” He stands back and puts the camera before his eyes. “I’ll have to show you who you are, ” he says. “I’ll have to do it with this. ” The shutter clicks, and clicks. My father takes hundreds of photographs of me.

He has to have them, he says, because when I am not before his eyes, it’s as if I don’t exist. He can’t summon my face. From a mother who won’t see me to a father who tells me I am there only when he does see me, perhaps, unconsciously, I consider this an existential promotion. I must, for already I feel that my life depends on my father’s seeing me.

I was eleven years old when my grandmother’s Persian cat had a litter of kittens. There were five of them, all female, white, perfect.

She promised one of them to me, whichever one I wanted. “But don’t touch them, ” she said. “Wait until they’re older. Until their eyes open. “

Each day I knelt beside the box where they lay with their mother.

I picked them up one at a time, cupped each body like milk in my hands and held it so close that I smelled its sweet breath, felt its heart beating under my lips. Eyes sealed, its head bobbed in confusion, bumped my cheek, my chin. It was one day after school that I did it. I didn’t know why, I knew only that I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t bear to see their always sleeping faces, their tiny eyes that never woke to me.

For a week, longer, I’d held their beating, blind life in my hands, and I’d felt my heart squeezed in my chest. I’d felt as if I were dying. I laid one in my lap and, with one thumb on the upper lid, the other on the lower, I carefully pulled its eyes open, separating one delicate membrane of flesh from the other. My heart was pounding and I was sweating with fear, but I accomplished the violation gently. The kitten made no sound, it did not struggle. What I did hadn’t seemed to cause it any pain. I held it up to see its eyesbleary, watering, already closing against the light. Its head moved in the same blind bobbing circles as before. Having failed once, I didn’t spare the remaining four kittens, I couldn’t stop myself from continuing. I finished the job weeping, and the fur around all of the kittens’ eyes was wet as well. They looked as exhausted and grief-stricken as I felt, and they curled into their mother’s warm belly and went to sleep. Within a day their eyes were swollen shut, tightly resealed under lids that showed red beneath the fine white fur. I picked one up and tried to brush away the yellow crust that had formed in the corner of one of its eyes. A worm of pus shot out, and, shocked, I dropped the kitten. I knew this was the worst thing I had ever done, too awful to confess, and when I told my grandmother that I thought something was wrong with the kittens’ eyes, I didn’t tell her what, only that they looked funny to me. My voice shook as I talked to her. “What’s wrong with you? ” she said.

“Nothing, ” I said. “My throat is sore, ” I lied.

The veterinarian kept the cat and the kittens for a week. When they returned, their eyes were open and clean, a pale icy blue, disdainful, disinterested. I pulled a string on the floor and they followed it. “But I thought you wanted one, ” my grandmother said when they were older, when she was selling them. “I don’t, ” I told her.

“Why not? “

“I just don’t, that’s all. I changed my mind. “

On our way to my mother’s, the backseat of the car filled with camera equipment, my father and I have our first fight, one that begins, like most lover’s quarrels, with a misunderstanding as absurd as it is revealing. On a street corner outside a little bistro where we ate dinner, we argue about the price of shampoo. He insists that at some point during his previous visits seemed to cause it any pain. I held it up to see its eyesbleary, watering, already closing against the light.