The Kiss

by Brian Turner

  The door had a faint yellow bulb above casting an aureate glow onto the deck, and she turned to unlock, her hands betrayed the slightest tremor. Then she turned back to me, looked up, and we closed the foot of space between us. A mix of pent-up anticipation, raw sexuality, and need met. We used our lips, mouths, and tongues to reassure each other where we wanted this to go. I don’t know how long it lasted. Finally we separated, hearts banging; her head on my chest, muttering, “Oh, god.” We caught breath.

  I remember driving home out of the hills toward the ocean thinking, So that’s what it’s supposed to feel like. I was thirty years old.

  Almost five years later, after living together for four and postponing two wedding dates, she married someone else.

  I had gone through a marriage and a live-in in my twenties. I was not dispensed toward believing pop locutions such as Soul Mate or Love of My Life. As if you could sum up the heart with a two- or four-word catchphrase. Well, you don’t believe something, till you do. I eventually did.

  That kiss.

  I’ve chased it with everyone since, but never replicated it.

  Now past fifty, I shake my head at the memory. Although it’s been over two decades, sometimes up in the middle of the night, staring through the cast of moonlight out my back door, I think, Perfect.

  2: KISS OF THE SPIDER AUDITION

  After a few years in Los Angeles I found myself stuck in early morning rush hour. I was not happy. The obligatory traffic jam was not the only reason for my foul mood. I was en route to my sixth callback for what I had deemed “The Spider Movie”; a low-budget film centered around spiders mutated by nuclear waste that take over a small town. My part was the male lead, a sheriff, who is not only tasked with saving the town from glowing arachnids, but also falls in love with a beautiful nuclear biologist . . . who just happens to be passing through.

  It was shit. But my agent said I had to start somewhere, and it beat throwing drunks out of a West L.A. bar five nights a week, which was how I augmented my career in the arts. It was four weeks of work at union scale, which was four months’ rent.

  What vexed me was the sixth callback, which meant they were seeing me for the seventh time. The third time through I had read for the director, a craggy-faced man in his sixties with a wispy goatee and a scarf the size of a horse blanket. After the fourth callback I thought we were done; union rules stipulated that you were compensated for any subsequent calls, and it was low-budget. Wrong. I got the seventy-five bucks for my fifth visit and all nine present got a healthy dose of edgy sarcasm before I read: “If you all call me back again we’ll be spending Thanksgiving together and sending Christmas cards and shit.”

  I pulled into the parking lot deep in North Hollywood and cut the engine. I took a breath and let it out slowly. I reminded myself I was being paid to show up and it would surely be the last time because I was going to read with the lead actress. She was the little sister of a major movie star. Maybe talent ran in the family.

  Inside the paneled waiting room the casting director took me aside. We were almost old friends by now, and in hushed tones she gave me the lowdown: “The scene you’re doing ends in a kiss. Under no circumstances are you to kiss her. No matter what. Just embrace.” I shrugged, said, “No problem,” and took a seat. Four other actors sat around nervously looking at their pages. I got up to use the john.

  The bathroom had a urinal and a commode separated by a partition. As I unzipped I heard the unmistakable sound of someone retching. I rose and peeked over, and sure enough a short muscular man was heaving into the bowl. As I finished my business he appeared at the sink next to me. He washed his mouth out and then fixed his hair. He definitely shouldn’t kiss her, I thought.

  I was the last called in. I counted eleven people in the room as I was introduced to the starlet. She was red-haired, blue-eyed, thin, and looked nothing like her big sis. We read the scene. The end came and I moved to embrace and she planted her plump lips on mine, her tongue entering my mouth like a lizard on a mission. The rule in the thespian profession concerning kissing is you don’t use your tongue—it is considered rude and, after a warning, a firing offense. So as she mopped my teeth and the roof of my mouth, I froze. My own tongue cowered behind my lower gums. Time seemed to elongate. When she finally unlocked her mouth from mine, someone said softly, “Scene.” I stood paralyzed at the breach in etiquette. As she looked at me with bright eyes and mussed lips I had to remember to close my sarcastic trap, which was sprung open like it had a bad hinge. Finally I stepped to the door, opened it, and heard her say in a breathy timbre, “I like him.”

  I did not get that job. I did not spend Thanksgiving with them. I did not save a town from spiders. But under no circumstances did I kiss her.

  3: KISSING L.A. GOODBYE

  I had left L.A. but I hadn’t said goodbye. So I drove three hundred miles on four hours of sleep to try. The Inglewood cemetery is a flat expanse with all the headstones flush to the earth. The Great Western Forum sits across Manchester Avenue, its enormous circular structure vacant and surrounded by acres of asphalt. Planes roar low overhead en route to landing at LAX. The flight path had been a hot topic decades earlier, but the poor lost out and the dead didn’t care.

  I came to Los Angeles fourteen years before to try and make a living in the movie business. I worked on the margins of that industry: enough acting gigs and writing jobs to buy a house but never enough to quit my night job.

  After two failed marriages and far too many girlfriends, I fell in love—for what I thought was the last time. We moved in. We planned, loved, fought, and laughed. Then suddenly, after a routine outpatient surgery, she died. Then grief. Grief tortures. It cleaves you tangibly and drops you into an abyss. I plummeted from 205 pounds to 165. I drank. I was at her grave six or seven days a week. When I didn’t go I felt guilty. Nothing else mattered. Eventually, with the help of a few great friends and a shrink, I began to climb out of that hole.

  I sold my home and took a one-year contract job in Las Vegas; a place I abhorred. But I had a plan: One year in Vegas. One year in Mexico to write and fish.

  So I sat on the blanket that used to cover us. A large nylon bag full of mementos from our brief life next to me: Cards. Pictures. Her flight attendant uniform. I talked to her. I used to babble for hours, but I found the more I healed the less I had to say. It was noon on a Monday and the cemetery was empty. The sun shone, the planes descended through it, and I sat.

  After some time I called my brother; the person who knew all my secrets and kept them to himself. He’d received hundreds of my calls over the past year and never failed to answer. I told him about the drive and where I was sitting. He took a long beat and gave it to me straight.

  “Everybody still dead?” A bit taken aback, I actually looked around.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good, if not you should call the National Enquirer. Go be with the living, some of them are more interesting.” He hung up. I grunted through a tight grin. I was getting better.

  I struggled mightily with the decision to move and leave her. And now how to say a goodbye she would never hear.

  During that year I had seen an elderly black woman sitting in a low folding chair at the far end of the same row. She came almost as often as I did. She always brought a thermos and a pack of wet wipes. When she had finished her visit, she would take out a wipe, slide off the chair to her knees, clean off a section of the stone. Then kiss it.

  Once, after she had left, I walked by. He was a nineteen-year-old male who had been dead five years; the faint outlines of past kisses baked on, surrounding the fresh one like halos.

  Back at my vigil, my fiancée beneath me, I faced her inscription. I did the best I could to clean it with my hand. My palms on the short-cropped grass, I bent and kissed her marker; I smelled the sandy earth and felt the warming metal. I pushed up, and at arm’s length stared down.

  “Goodbye, honey. I won’t be back for a while.” The “I love you” caught in my throat
, but I got it out. I walked to my car with the grit from her stone on my lips.

  A SMALL HARVEST OF KISSES

  The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.

  —GUY DE MAUPASSANT, “A Tress of Hair”

  The kiss is also a perfect monitor of love. Either we are “into” it, or it sends out a signal of aloofness and lack of feeling. There is no way to camouflage the message present in a kiss. When we give a halfhearted kiss, we will often get the response “Kiss me as if you mean it,” from a disgruntled partner. An unshared kiss is worse than no kiss at all. Many times it signals the end of a relationship. As Betty Everett so aptly phrased it in her classic pop song, “It’s in his kiss.” It is easier to fake sexual pleasure than it is to fake the kiss. Unlike sex, there is nothing to prove in kissing.

  —MARCEL DANESI, The History of the Kiss!:

  The Birth of Popular Culture

  When I was in high school in the early Sixties, nice girls didn’t go all the way, and most of us wouldn’t have known how to anyway. But man, could we kiss! We kissed for hours in the busted-up front seat of a borrowed Chevy which, in motion, sounded like a broken dinette-set; we kissed inventively, clutching our boyfriends from behind as we straddled motorcycles, whose vibrations turned our hips to jelly; we kissed extravagantly beside a turtlearium in the park, or at the local rose garden or zoo; we kissed delicately, in waves of sipping and puckering; we kissed torridly, with tongues like hot pokers; we kissed timelessly, because lovers throughout the ages knew our longing; we kissed wildly, almost painfully, with tough, soul-stealing rigor; we kissed elaborately, as if we were inventing kisses for the first time; we kissed furtively when we met in the hallways between classes; we kissed soulfully in the shadows at concerts, the way we thought musical knights of passion like The Righteous Brothers and their ladies did; we kissed articles of clothing or objects belonging to our boyfriends; we kissed our hands when we blew our boyfriends kisses across the street; we kissed our pillows at night pretending they were mates; we kissed shamelessly with the robust sappiness of youth; we kissed as if kissing could save us from ourselves.

  At fourteen, just before I went off to summer camp, which is what girls in suburban Pennsylvania did to mark time, my boyfriend, whom my parents did not approve of (wrong religion) and had forbidden me to see, used to walk five miles across town each evening, and climb in through my bedroom window just to kiss me. These were not open-mouthed “French” kisses, which we didn’t know about, and they weren’t accompanied by groping. They were just earth-stopping, soulful, on-the-ledge-of-adolescence kissing, when you press your lips together and yearn so hard you feel faint. We wrote letters while I was away, and when school started again in the Fall the affair seemed to fade of its accord. But I remember those summer nights, how he would hide in my closet if my parents or brother chanced in, and then kiss me for an hour or so and head back home before it became dark, and I marvel at his determination and the power of a kiss.

  —DIANE ACKERMAN, A Natural History of the Senses

  I did not realize that kissing was a first date taboo. I’m such a sinner.

  —ROXANE GAY

  ALARACT 350/2011

  Sept. 15, 2011

  Subject: Clarification Of Army Standards Of Conduct Policies

  1. Reference. Army Regulation 600-20, Army Command Policy, 30 Nov 09.

  2. The purpose of this message is to clarify Army policies on Standards of Conduct.

  A. Long-standing customs of the service prohibit public displays of affection by Soldiers when in uniform or while in civilian clothes on duty. Soldiers must project an image that leaves no doubt that they live by a common military standard and are responsible to military order and discipline.

  B. However, long-standing customs of the service permit modest displays of affection in appropriate circumstances including, but not limited to, weddings, graduations, promotions, retirements or other ceremonies; during the casualty notification/assistance process including funerals; during deployment or welcome home ceremonies; for displays of affection or other physical contact between parents or guardians and children in their charge; or in other circumstances where modest displays of affection are commonly accepted.

  —THE U.S. ARMY’S Journal for Homeland Defense,

  Civil Support and Security Cooperation in

  North America (p. 25, September 2011)

  Steven returned from the war without lips.

  This is quite a shock said his wife Mary who had spent the last six months knitting sweaters and avoiding a certain grocery store where a certain young man worked and looked at her in that certain way. I expected lips. Dead or alive, but with lips.

  Steven went into the living room where his old favorite chair stood, neatly dusted and unused. I-can-eat-like-normal, he said in a strange halted clacking tone due to the plastic disc that covered and protected what was left of his mouth like the end of a pacifier. The-doctors-are-going-to-put-new-skin-on-in-a-few-weeks-anyway. Skin-from-my-palm. He lifted up his hand and looked at it. That-will-work, I-guess, he said. It-just-won’t-be-quite-the-same.

  No, said Mary, it won’t. That bomb, she said, standing on the other side of the chair, you know it took the last real kiss from you forever, and as far as I can remember, that kiss was supposed to be mine.

  —AIMEE BENDER, “What You Left in the Ditch”

  from The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

  I want, she said, moving into position, un beso.

  And before he could say anything she was on him.

  The first feel of woman’s body pressing against yours—who among us can ever forget that? And that first real kiss—well, to be honest, I’ve forgotten both of these firsts, but Oscar never would.

  For a second he was in disbelief. This is it, this is really it! Her lips plush and pliant, and her tongue pushing into his mouth. And then there were lights all around them and he thought I’m going to transcend! Transcendence is miiine! But then he realized that the two plainclothes who had pulled them over—who both looked like they’d been raised on high-G planets, and whom we’ll call Solomon Grundy and Gorilla Grod for simplicity’s sake—were beaming their flashlights into the car. And who was standing behind them, looking in on the scene inside the car with an expression of sheer murder? Why, the capitán of course. Ybón’s boyfriend!

  —JUNOT DÍAZ, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

  “I think it’s perfectly sweet of you,” she declared, “and I’ll get up again,” and she sat with him on the side of the bed. She also said she would give him a kiss if he liked, but Peter did not know what she meant, and he held out his hand expectantly.

  “Surely you know what a kiss is?” she asked, aghast.

  “I shall know when you give it to me,” he replied stiffly, and not to hurt his feelings she gave him a thimble.

  “Now,” said he, “shall I give you a kiss?” and she replied with a slight primness, “If you please.” She made herself rather cheap by inclining her face toward him, but he merely dropped an acorn button into her hand, so she slowly returned her face to where it had been before, and said nicely that she would wear his kiss on the chain around her neck. It was lucky that she did put it on that chain, for it was afterwards to save her life.

  —J. M. BARRIE, Peter Pan

  NO KISS FORGOTTEN; it resides in the memory as in the flesh, and so Katya many times felt the press of Marcus Kidder’s warm mo
uth on hers in the days and especially in the nights following. And her heartbeat quickened in protest: How could you! Kiss him! That old man! Kiss him! Let him put his arms around you and kiss you and kiss him back! The old man’s mouth and Katya Spivak’s mouth! How could you.

  —JOYCE CAROL OATES, A Fair Maiden

  The kiss of shame was more than just a parody of the kiss of peace and a symbol of the heretics’ solidarity. The physical act of putting one’s lips to the anus, buttocks or genitalia revealed other attributes of the witch sect and the character of the witch. It is interesting that descriptions of the osculum infame give an alternative site of kissing: the feet. This detail has its origins in the Gospel episode in which a sinner, usually identified as Mary Magdalene, washed Christ’s feet with her tears. After she had dried them with her hair and anointed them with perfume, she kissed them. The whole ritual was one of adoration and reverence, and the kiss element of it became incorporated into the rituals of greeting the Pope. The kiss offered by Mary Magdalene to Jesus, king of the Jews, also reflected the kiss given by Samuel to Saul after he had anointed him king of Israel, a kiss which found its way into European coronation ceremonies. In this sense the kiss could be interpreted as an act of fealty and honour. Alternatively, the kissing of feet could be used as a sign of humility not to sovereigns, but to God.

  —JONATHAN DURRANT, “The Osculum Infame:

  Heresy, Secular Culture and the Image of the Witches’ Sabbath”