by Brian Turner
from The Kiss in History (Karen Harvey, ed., p. 43)
They lay listening. Can you do it? When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time. Curse God and die. What if it doesnt fire? It has to fire. What if it doesn’t fire? Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock? Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be? Hold him in your arms. Just so. The soul is quick. Pull him toward you. Kiss him. Quickly.
—CORMAC MCCARTHY, The Road
He back in my mouth before I can say bad man don’t kiss. Sucking my tongue, moving his lips over my lips, tongue on tongue, dancing it and making me do it back. He is making me think like a faggot.
—Aw, look at you. You just giggled like a school girl. There may be hope for you yet.
Lip on top of lip, lip turned on the side licking me in the mouth, tongue on top of tongue, underneath tongue, lips sucking my tongue, and I open my eye and see him two eye close tight. That moan come from him not me. I reach up and squeeze him nipples but not hard, I still don’t know hot from hurt. But he moan and now he taking him tongue down my chest to my nipples and my navel leaving a wet trail that feel cold even though him tongue warm. New York spying me do this? I spy what do you spy? B A T T Y with a tight needle-eye. Outside the window is five floor up but I don’t know. Too high for the window washer or pigeon or whoever climbing the wall although nobody would be climbing no wall. Nobody can see but the sky. But Air Jamaica going fly right by and Josey going see me. The man tickle my navel with him tongue and I grab him head. He look up for second and smile and the hair pass through my fingers so thin, so soft, so brown. Hair that make you sound white when you describe it.
—Come back, fucker.
—MARLON JAMES, A Brief History of Seven Killings
“Let’s not go on with the medical lesson,” she said.
“No,” he said. “This is going to be a lesson in love.”
Then he pulled down the sheet and she not only did not object but kicked it away from the bunk with a rapid movement of her feet because she could no longer bear the heat. Her body was undulant and elastic, much more serious than it appeared when dressed, with its own scent of a forest animal, which distinguished her from all the other women in the world. Defenseless in the light, she felt a rush of blood surge up to her face, and the only way she could think of to hide it was to throw her arms around her husband’s neck and give him a hard, thorough kiss that lasted until they were both gasping for breath.
He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.
—GABRIEL GARCíA MÁRQUEZ,
Love in the Time of Cholera
“You, Al,” said Phil. “I really value your input.”
“Well, sir,” said Al, the mirror-faced Advisor, flattered to have been asked. “In my view? Love is one of the most outstanding experiences a human being can undergo. When we love someone, wow, we just feel so super about being with them and sharing such experiences as our feelings and emotions, not to mention hopes and dreams we might possess. The feeling we get from that interaction is for the most part the most pleasant one we can ever do. And commitment, that commitment we feel, is the strongest bond we can subject ourselves to.”
“I so much agree!” said Phil. “I love love. All Outer Hornerites love love, but the sort of love we love to love is of the gentle connubial sort between man and wife, not this sleazy proposed love between unwed sweaty lusters! But clearly, there can be no marriage between Inner and Outer Hornerite! That would be like a swan marrying a worm! And why would a swan do that? They could not even kiss, what with a worm having no lips and a swan merely a beak! Therefore this propositioning letter does not reek of love, but of lust, not of marriage, but of unseemly sweaty trysts between disparate types. Trysts of sly barter! Like a transaction! She gives me what I want and I give her what she wants, and it is all grunts grunts grunts and no gentle smiles between grunts at all! It is all business! She is willing to sell herself, this harlot. Willing to sell herself to the leader of the enemy of her people! Please step forward! Step forward whichever harlot wrote this!”
—GEORGE SAUNDERS,
The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil
“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.”
—TONI MORRISON, Beloved
She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers . . . She did not say goodbye.
—MARKUS ZUSAK, The Book Thief
. . . She was a little dark, and her dark eyebrows were narrow but thick and defined, with a little arch like a V pointing upward in the middle of each one. And her eyes, closed, were wide-set. But it was her mouth that transfixed Parnell. It was broad and full, her lips a little dry and cracked, and now parted in death he could only imagine how expressive it must have been when she was at home, with family, and uninhibited by her shyness, how much joy she must have given to her mother and father, how much they must have hoped for her.
It was the hint of exotic in her features that began to sink into him now. What exotic locale they suggested he could not imagine, but someplace different. It was not the look of a gypsy. Until the woman with parrot fever, which ended it all, his father had often embalmed and buried gypsies; he had a friendship with the old gypsy queen’s son. He’d buried the queen, in that grand ceremony they’d conducted down 8th Street to the old cemetery west of town, Rose Hill. But she was not a tipsy. Her name, now he remembered, was Littleton, that was fitting. Constance Littleton, they called her Connie. Little Connie Littleton, here alone with Parnell. He leaned down and kissed her lips. Dry as desiccated clay. No give there. No, there was the faintest. She was not entirely cold. Still fresh in death, still sweet in passing. Still between the living and the dead, her spirit not entirely removed.
—BRAD WATSON, The Heaven of Mercury
“It is through closure that openness is divided into things. Without closure we would be lost in a sea of openness:
a sea without character and without form.” Closure is about defining limits, and while some of those limits are negative and constricting, they are also the basis for our reality: “Closure is responsible . . . for our being able to experience a sunrise over a field of corn; or hear the sound of a log fire and the warmth that it brings; it is closure that makes possible the kiss of a lover or the pain of injury.”
—HILARY LAWSON, Closure: A Story of Everything
“A kiss may not be the truth but it is what we wish were true.”
—STEVE MARTIN
(as Harris Telemacher in L.A. Story)
KISS KISS BANG BANG
Téa Obreht and Dan Sheehan
Returning from a recent trip, Dan Sheehan and I got wrapped up in talking about the most iconic kisses of the silver screen. We had just surrendered all attempts to celebrate our fourth anniversary to help my family host a massive dinner party. Frenzied preparations had left us exhausted, more than a little hung over, and battling the onslaught of spring colds while we meandered through the bowels of Washington’s teeming Union Station. We were separated on a packed train bound for New York’s Penn Station, and were forced to continue our debate by iMessage from several rows away.
TO: All right, so what are your criteria?
DS: Well, deciding on the single best anything is a fool’s errand, damn near impossible, so instead I propose three categories: Sexiest Kiss; Most Romantic Kiss; and Strangest/Most Sinister Kiss.
TO: For a moment there I misread that as “Sexist Kiss” and thought: that’s going to be a damn long list. How do you define romantic? And does sexiest mean it must lead to a love scene?
DS: A romantic movie kiss is one where the other background aspects of the situation don’t overwhelm the romance. So if the ratio of grief/lust/hypnosis to good old-fashioned love is greater than 50:50, then the kiss in question has been compromised and will have to be categorized elsewhere. Sexy kisses can lead to sex, but don’t necessarily have to. These are my arbitrary rules.
TO: Sounds fair. Strangest/Most Sinister seems a broad category. It’s obviously one that only comes into its own upon second viewing.
DS: Fun fact about that category: it was created so I could shoehorn in Michael Corleone’s “I know it was you, Fredo” kiss of death, administered to his traitorous brother as confetti rains down on them at a wedding reception in The Godfather: Part II. However, I’m sure there are other worthy examples.
TO: Mostly between family members—my Strangest/Most Sinister award definitely goes to Leia kissing Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. This is one leery red herring. It’s meant to be titillating. It’s meant to provoke jealousy in Han Solo. Then Luke puts his hands behind his head in peacocking triumph. But she’s his sister! The writers already know it, and once we do it makes all subsequent viewings extremely uncomfortable. Sidebar: there’s a pretty steamy train kiss happening at my 3 o’clock right now . . . your 5 p.m. . . .
DS: There is some serious steam rising there all right. But yes, incest kisses in family movies definitely belong in that category. I’m thinking of Marty McFly and his mother in Back to the Future.
TO: Another skincrawling one. As is the kiss from Big. The early 80s really were a bizarre free-for-all in this regard.
DS: God yeah, you’d never get away with Big nowadays. Going deeper down the unpleasant kisses rabbit hole, how about Jack Nicholson embracing a corpse-ghost in The Shining?
TO: That almost made my list. Oh! You know what? I stand by my Luke & Leia pick, but now feel obliged to give a shout-out to Joaquin Phoenix’s repressed priest throwing the lips on a recently dead Kate Winslet in Quills. This is one of my favorite films, not least of all because of their chemistry throughout. But then she’s killed in what can only be termed a literary sexcapade gone horribly wrong, and he’s so guilt-stricken he ends up hallucinating a sexual encounter with her shrouded corpse on a church altar.
DS: Christ almighty—that might warrant its own special category. We’d have to use the Internet café computers for that research, though.
TO: Moving on, then. Where do you stand on Most Romantic Kiss?
DS: I’ll entertain arguments for Casablanca or Lost in Translation or Brokeback Mountain, but for me, it’s gotta be the climactic kiss between a plucky, trash-compacting, earthbound robot and hopeless romantic, and his sleek, technologically advanced, no-nonsense girlfriend at the end of WALL-E . . .
TO: Eve!
DS: Gets me every time.
TO: That song, though.
DS: And the song is the clincher. Till then WALL-E’s amnesia threatens to tip the grief-romance balance. But just when you think that all is lost, that the memory of their magical robo-courtship has been permanently deleted, those magnificent heartstring-tuggers at Pixar pull it out of the fire.
TO: Pulling it out of the fire is crucial for romantic category kisses, I think. Nothing worse than waiting all movie long for something that suddenly seems unlikely to catch fire. Mine: ex-con Al Pacino has spent the better part of Frankie and Johnny trying to convince diner waitress Michelle Pfeiffer that they’re meant for each other—she’s reluctant for a whole host of very good reasons we don’t yet know, but the end of a hard-won first date finds them roaming the Flower District, where Al makes his overture in a series of ever-simplifying gestures while the rising musical score drowns out his voice. Their first real kiss happens at the crescendo, just as a delivery guy throws open the cargo bay behind them, suddenly revealing a brilliant Eden of violet flowers. It’s one for the books.
DS: I’m ashamed to say I’ve never even heard of Frankie and Johnny, but I’ve just watched the scene in question and it’s a hell of a kiss. Pacino as offbeat romantic lead is a very underrated Pacino.
TO: Pacino is the only one making a repeat appearance on this list so far—so I think it’s safe to say he’s an underrated kisser overall. Of course, one would rather have my kind of Pacino kiss than yours, I think. Because of death.
DS: Sure. That’s the strange beauty of the Pacino kiss though: you never know what you’re gonna get.
TO: 50% chance it’s death. 50% chance it’s some other thing. 100% chance that it will involve shouting, either way.
DS: If you can’t handle the shouting, you don’t deserve Al’s kisses.
TO: Al was very close to featuring on my Sexiest Kiss list, actually, in Sea of Love. But he was defeated.
DS: Sea of Love, now there’s a dangerously sexy film. I’ll never understand why they stopped making erotic thrillers. Hands down the best cinematic genre.
TO: Sometimes extinction is senseless, Dan. And unjust.
DS: They truly are the dinosaurs of contemporary Hollywood.
TO: The best we can hope for is that Steven Spielberg will resurrect them as he did the dinosaurs.
DS: Now that you mention Spielberg, the lack of sex in his films is pretty remarkable. He should have spent more time with Michael Douglas.
TO: Maybe he’s saving it all up for one sweet, ultimate erotic thriller to rule them all.
DS: We can only hope. Michael’s not getting any younger. So if not Sea of Love, what then?
TO: So Sexiest Kiss, for me, has always been a steady favorite. Sure, a few contenders have threatened to unseat it over the years—Brokeback Mountain ranks in this category for me; The Piano is pretty high up, too. But for all it’s an otherwise problematic film, there’s just no beating Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeline Stowe’s romantic interlude in The Last of the Mohicans. That whole film is basically foreplay for their epic make-out on the eve of the big battle—to the extent that, when they find each other at the fire while those amazing violins play, they don’t even have to be coy about what it is they’re heading up to the guard tower to do.
DS: Nice. The sexiness really does ratchet up when a couple are trying to evade death together. In that spirit, I’m gonna have to go with the Sarah Connor/Kyle Reese motel room kiss toward the end of The Terminator. By this point, the relentless T-800 cyborg has been stalk
ing future mother of the resistance Sarah and time-traveling soldier Reese through the streets of Los Angeles for a good half hour and they’re at their wits’ end. In a moment of vulnerability, Reese confesses that back in the future year of 2029, he fell madly in love with a picture of Sarah. As you do. Then, as he angrily shoves homemade pipe bombs into a duffel bag, mad at himself for revealing too much, Sarah moves in for the kiss. If what transpires doesn’t get your motor running, you’re as asexual as the Terminator. Or one of Spielberg’s films.
TO: I have to tell you something. I have never seen The Terminator. I know you love it. I know you paid $3 to rescue a VHS tape of it from our bodega, where it was serving as a display rung for boxes of Ritter Sport, and that you’ve since hidden it among our books. Sometimes, when you say something that sounds like a film-line and look at me knowingly, I suspect you must be quoting The Terminator, but I can never know for sure.
DS: Everything I know about love, sex, relationships, time travel, cyborgs, and pipe bombs, I learned from The Terminator.
TO: Then never mind. I’ve seen The Terminator.
CONTAGION
Roxana Robinson
In a foreign country, everything is strange. You walk the streets like a child, trying to understand the stream of newness pouring over you.
I was in Kyoto to see the gardens, which are marvelously strange, and unlike anything in Europe. We went one day to a fancy hotel to see a vertical garden: an interior wall, planted in mosses and orchids and vines. We couldn’t get close, because it was in a reception room where a private event was being held. We stood in the doorway, in the back.
The room was full of seated well-dressed people. They were all watching the stage, which held a young couple and a middle-aged woman. The older woman stood at a podium, with a book and a microphone. The young man wore a dark suit and the young woman wore a long white dress. Clearly they were getting married. The officiant spoke and they answered, in a formal ritual exchange. I couldn’t understand the words, but I understood the import, the grave message of commitment and responsibility.
