The Kiss: A Memoir (10 page)

“Stress, ” he says. “Physical or emotional stress. ” He raises his eyebrows meaningfully at me. “What’s happening in your life? ” he asks.

“Oh, ” I say. “Not much. ” I tell him that I’m moving out of my apartment, that I’ll be traveling during the summer and returning to college in the fall. “You’re underweight, ” he says. “Are you eating properly, taking your vitamins? “

“Oh, yes, ” I say.

“What about sleep? Do you sleep well? “

He frowns. He knows I must be lying. I can’t turn my neck. My right arm is so weak I can’t use it, and my right hand, the one with which I write and eat hand of volition, of purpose can’t close around a pencil or a spoon, can’t make a fist. The pain of shingles is worse than any other I’ve experienced, so bad that dressing myself requires an hour, during which I take breaks to cry. There’s no cure for shingles, not in 1981, the drug that suppresses the virus is not yet available. My case will have to run its course.

The doctor gives me another cortisone shot for the pain, and prescriptions for topical medications and poultices to help dry up new blisters before they break and become vulnerable to local bacterial infections. “Maybe you should postpone your trip, ” my mother says when she sees me, my arm in a sling, a whiplash collar around my neck. My father and I have planned to meet in the city where he was born. I’ve had the plane tickets for weeks, long before I got ill. “No, ” I say. “I want to go. ” And I do. As frightened as I am to be with my father, I can’t not see him. My need for him is inexorable. I can’t arrest it any more than I could stop myself from falling if, having stepped from a rooftop into the air, I remembered, too late, the fact of gravity. On this visit my father has promised to show me the house he lived in as a boy, his missionary grandparents’ house with walls three feet thick.

We’ll eat at the diner where he ordered malts, we’ll drive past his old grade school, and we’ll walk around the campus of the university he attended after he and my mother were divorced, we’ll find whatever remains of the life he used to have when he was my age, younger.

His father still lives in that city, so I can meet my other grandfather, too. “And after that, ” he’s said, “we’ll drive to my mother’s.

You’ll meet both your grandparents. You’ll see where you came from the other half of you. ” The shingles are not gone when I leave, but there have been no more blisters for a week, and most of the old ones are now scabs. I can turn my head a little, and although my right arm is too weak to lift my backpack, I can use the fingers of that hand for short periods. “Long enough to write a postcard, ” I say to my mother, wiggling them. At the airport we say good-bye with the stiff formal kiss we always use. I feel the dry brush of her lips on my forehead, smell the faint gust of Guerlain. “Why don’t you ride with Dad? ” my father says to me. We’ve done all the things he said we would, and now we’ve come to meet his father after work. In the parking lot outside my grandfather’s office, I remember three things my father has told me about his father, First, that he was so handsome in his youth, so sexually magnetic, that women he didn’t know followed him down the street. Tagging along and watching the women watch his father, my father once ran into a parking meter and knocked himself out. Second, that years ago his father shot a man in his yard a Peeping Tom who was looking at his wife. And, third, that his father was now slowly dying of prostate cancer because he has refused radiation, hormone therapy, chemotherapy, and the last-ditch removal of his testicles. So this is the way my father understands his father, and thus his own manhood, mythic sexual appeal, violent sexual jealousy, fatal sexual vanity. If only this was how I understood it at the time, but to me the stories seem quaintly exotic, their danger like that of a great white hunter who long ago put his rifle away, they seem as if they have nothing to do with me. My grandfather, in fact, comes across as docile and friendly.

He lacks the loud, large bluster of my father, but then, he is much older, his hair completely white, his walk stiff. In his car, away from the notice of my father, his hand strays past the gearshift and onto my thigh. “Oh, oh, oh, ” he says. “You make me wish I was thirty years younger. If I was, you’d be in trouble. ” I don’t dare look at him, nor pointedly away, so I stare forward out the windshield. The next time he has to change gears, he takes his hand off my leg. My grandfather’s house is small, the sidewalk before the gate cracked into big slabs heaved up by the roots of old trees. Inside is his ex-wife his fourth exwife, or his third, I never get it straight.

Apparently, two of the four or five marriages were to my father’s mother. The ex-wife is a blowsy woman in her sixties, “mutton dressed as lamb” is how my grandmother would describe her, with her hair piled up in high curls and her wide hips packed into a tight black skirt. She still shares my grandfather’s home with him, and she carries a tray of iced tea into the backyard, where my grandfather takes us on a tour of his greenhouse, devoted to the cultivation of orchids. The small glass structure is filled with color, as if every hue in this dry, gray city has been drawn into the vibrant box. In it, my grandfather is a magician, and his smile tells me he knows this. As I walk behind him and watch his hands gently turn a beautiful bloom toward my notice, do I remember the linguistic connection between orchids and male genitalia?

Do I say the word silently to myself, or chidectomy, and define it as a surgical term for the removal of the testicles? I think, actually, that I do. “Did you like him? ” my father asks in the car on the way back to our motel. “I liked the flowers, ” I say.

“But what about him, your grandfather? “

I turn in my seat to look at my father. “He made a pass at me, “

I say, and I describe the circumstances. My father betrays neither surprise nor disapproval. “Maybe it’s genetic, ” I say. “Do you think? “

He bristles, and I begin to laugh, a spasm of black humor. We eat in a coffee shop.

At the motel, a squat sprawl of units built around a dusty courtyard, we share one room in which two twin beds are pushed together and covered with the same king-sized spread. Half asleep, I let my father kiss me the way he wants to, and I kiss him Early in the quiet morning, I wake as suddenly as if I’ve been roused by a loud alarm, my heart pounding as I remember the heat of the kisses. What I feel is not so much guilt as dislocation. I look around the dim room in confusion, not knowing, for a moment, where I am. In the bed beside mine, my father sleeps, the air whistling faintly in his nose as he breathes. I shower. I sit on the floor of the bathtub and let the hot water rain on me for an hour or more. My heartbeat doesn’t slow. I watch the water curl down the drain, a yellow scum of soap at its edge. There is a white desert in the state of New Mexico. Its beauty is unsettling, endless washes of something so white it looks like snow but burns the fingers. Each night, the wind pushes and sculpts the whiteness into great dunes and drifts, so that between dusk and dawn the whole face of the earth has changed. If you were to fall asleep, you’d wake in a place you’d never seen before. We go there because my father wants to take pictures of me standing in that desert. As he sets up his camera, I kneel in the sand. Curiously, despite a strong wind, the place seems airless. I sigh and yawn as if I can’t get enough oxygen. At my knees, the ground spreads out as white as a sheet. What I want, more than anything, is to close my eyes. When the film is processed, the images are of a girl alone in a place without any horizon, earth indistinguishable from sky v, no means by which to navigate. A car is in some of the shots, my father’s long red convertible with its top down. “Terrible car for a preacher, ” he concedes, looking at the prints. “Sends all the wrong messages. ” I take the photographs from his hand. I study the girl in them carefully, her averted eyes, the way her blond hair, as long as her arms, blows across her open mouth. In such a place as this, is she free or is she lost? The photographs offer no clue. We’re taught to call the church our mother.

My father, raised by his missionary grandmother while his mother worked as a secretary, must have heard this analogy from the time he was small, when his grandmother (who stood over six feet tall and whose imposing stature settled any disputes in which her pugnacious, diminutive husband found himself) gave him to God. Since he’d been entrusted to her, she must have assumed he was hers to give, and so, before my father’s life was his own, it was returned to the church. My father’s grandmother told him that he would grow up and be a preacher. This woman’s power over my father was such that her death did not release him from her wishes.

After all, he owed her everything. But he resents his servitude, along with the castration implied by the robes he’s forced to wear (he calls them skirts), and his insurrection finds a target in mothers, in mine and in my grandmother, who took away his wife and child, in the church itself, through whose wall he once put his fist, and, of course, in his own mother, with whom he always seems to be fighting over the most trivial matters. My father and I drive many miles, even days, so that I can meet his mother, my other grandmother. She’s married to her third husband, or maybe it’s her fourth. (Again, I’m confused by the two marriages to my father’s father. ) They live outside of town, in a small tract of homes on a hill so windy that I watch as the welcome mat placed before the front door is whisked up off the porch and falls, moments later, in the backyard. Through the sliding glass door I see it hit, I see the dust come up around its edges. My grandmother is not warm, but then my father hasn’t led me to expect it of her. “How is your family? “

she asks guardedly, separating her blood from mine. Dinner is strained.

My father does most of the talking. When he stops to chew, his stepfather tells jokes, each one more offensive than the last. He leans forward over his plate. “Why did the Jews wander in the desert for forty years? ” he asks, fork in one fist, knife in the other. “I don’t know, “

I say. “Why? “

“Because somebody dropped a quarter! ” He laughs, and I wonder if he’s singling me and my family out for attack. But eventually he covers every creed and race. After dessert, we sit stiffly in the living room, all of us in separate chairs, the couch left empty. We watch a crime drama on television, and then we go to bed. The wind moans and whistles around the corners of the house. It makes a wild, keening sound, and when my father comes quietly through the guest room’s door, he finds me still awake. He pulls back the covers, and I move over, expecting that he will lie beside me, hold me in apology for the words of the stepfather I know he dislikes. Imagining his shame, I feel sorry for him. But my father doesn’t lie down. Instead, he lifts the hem of my nightgown. He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. Nor do I make any attempt to stay his hands.

Beneath the nightgown I am wearing no underpants, and he opens my legs and puts his tongue between them. His mothers house! His mothers house!

I think the words over and over, aware that such a setting for his advance cannot be insignificant, but not understanding. What he does feels neither good nor bad. It effects so complete a separation between mind and body that I don’t know what I feel. Across this divide, deep and unbridgeable, my body I see it hit, I see the dust come up around its edges. My grandmother is not warm, but then my father hasn’t led me to expect it of her. “How is your family? “

she asks guardedly, separating her blood from mine. Dinner is strained.

My father does most of the talking. When he stops to chew, his stepfather tells jokes, each one more offensive than the last. He leans forward over his plate. “Why did the Jews wander in the desert for forty years? ” he asks, fork in one fist, knife in the other. “I don’t know, “

I say. “Why? “

“Because somebody dropped a quarter! ” He laughs, and I wonder if he’s singling me and my family out for attack. But eventually he covers every creed and race. After dessert, we sit stiffly in the living room, all of us in separate chairs, the couch left empty. We watch a crime drama on television, and then we go to bed. The wind moans and whistles around the corners of the house. It makes a wild, keening sound, and when my father comes quietly through the guest room’s door, he finds me still awake. He pulls back the covers, and I move over, expecting that he will lie beside me, hold me in apology for the words of the stepfather I know he dislikes. Imagining his shame, I feel sorry for him. But my father doesn’t lie down. Instead, he lifts the hem of my nightgown. He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. Nor do I make any attempt to stay his hands.

Beneath the nightgown I am wearing no underpants, and he opens my legs and puts his tongue between them. His mothers house! His mothers house!

I think the words over and over, aware that such a setting for his advance cannot be insignificant, but not understanding. What he does feels neither good nor bad. It effects so complete a separation between mind and body that I don’t know what I feel. Across this divide, deep and unbridgeable, my body responds independently from my mind. My heart, somewhere between them, plunges.

Neither of us speaks, not even one word. The scene is as silent, as dark and dreamlike as if it proceeded from a fever or a drug. His mothers house.

He needs to do it at his mother’s house. He needs the power granted by her presence, and he needs to thwart that power. Algeciras, Spain, to Copenhagen, Denmark, thirty seven hours.

Copenhagen to Milan, twenty-nine hours. Milan to Monaco to Paris to Munich, fifty-three hours. My Eurail pass grants me unlimited train travel. Transit is narcotic, fleeing irresistible. In Europe, I spend still more money I’ve begged from my grandparents, now eager to encourage me along any path that might lead me away from the father they sense looms ever larger and more dangerous. Neither here nor there, it’s not that I intentionally ponder my life back home from the safety of my train compartment, but that it unfurls like a flower on a hilltop we pass, a story in a book or on a screen. My father is more distant than the little cows and cars I rush past.