The Kiss: A Memoir (12 page)

You’re upset, obviously. But I can’t really help you if you won’t talk to me. ” I nod, tears washing from my face down my neck.

“So, ” he says. “It’s fine for you to come back. But perhaps you’d like to wait a couple of weeks? Maybe it would be better for you to come back when you feel like you can talk. ” I nod. I don’t come back.

How can I say what I need to say to this decent young man with his decent scant brown hair, his cheerful bow tie, the squeaky-clean vision imparted by his tortoiseshell glasses? We spend our nights in motels not so much sordid as depressing. Sordid has a style and swagger these places lack, rooms with curtains cut from the same orange fabric as the bedspread, ceilings of plaster textured like cottage cheese. The paint on the wall around the vents is gray, a pattern that betrays in which direction the air flows, air stained by the smoke of long-extinguished cigarettes. We drive to Lake Havasu, near Arizona’s western border, where the original London Bridge has been reassembled over a man-made stream in the desert. On the underside of the span, numbers have been inscribed on the stones, they indicate the order in which the structure was dismantled and then put back together. At either end of this historic crossing that now goes from nowhere to nowhere is a tiny fake Tudor village with fish-and-chip stands and racks of Union Jack postcards. We walk back and forth across the bridge’s cobbled road. The desert sun burns our heads. “No fog, ” he says, and I laugh. It’s hysteria, not mirth. For me, raised in a Victorian British household in which we had high tea every day at four, the London Bridge torn down and rebuilt in the Mojave Desert is the logical end of the earth. Later, at dinner, we begin once again to argue about my father’s need to control me. We fight over any independence I exhibit, whether of body, of mood, of thought. We fight over the clothes I wear and whether they might show any other man a snatch of the flesh my father considers his own. We fight over whether Paradise Lost is the greatest work ever written and whether its completion was worth the enslavement of the blind poet’s daughters. We fight about my unwillingness to fight, about whether my silences are a hostile strategy or simply bewildered exhaustion. My father leans across the table. His face is the same shape but much larger than mine, seemingly larger than other men’s. At close range, it seems planetary. “You, ” he s, rooms with curtains cut from the same orange fabric as the bedspread, ceilings of plaster textured like cottage cheese. The paint on the wall around the vents is gray, a pattern that betrays in which direction the air flows, air stained by the smoke of long-extinguished cigarettes. We drive to Lake Havasu, near Arizona’s western border, where the original London Bridge has been reassembled over a man-made stream in the desert. On the underside of the span, numbers have been inscribed on the stones, they indicate the order in which the structure was dismantled and then put back together.

At either end of this historic crossing that now goes from nowhere to nowhere is a tiny fake Tudor village with fish-and-chip stands and racks of Union Jack postcards. We walk back and forth across the bridge’s cobbled road. The desert sun burns our heads. “No fog, ” he says, and I laugh. It’s hysteria, not mirth. For me, raised in a Victorian British household in which we had high tea every day at four, the London Bridge torn down and rebuilt in the Mojave Desert is the logical end of the earth. Later, at dinner, we begin once again to argue about my father’s need to control me. We fight over any independence I exhibit, whether of body, of mood, of thought. We fight over the clothes I wear and whether they might show any other man a snatch of the flesh my father considers his own. We fight over whether Paradise Lost is the greatest work ever written and whether its completion was worth the enslavement of the blind poet’s daughters. We fight about my unwillingness to fight, about whether my silences are a hostile strategy or simply bewildered exhaustion. My father leans across the table. His face is the same shape but much larger than mine, seemingly larger than other men’s. At close range, it seems planetary. “You, ” he says, too loudly for a restaurant, “are a slut just like your mother. ” Every one who hears turns to see who the big man is talking to with such righteous conviction. My father has a knife in his hand. He lays it down on the table. I feel my face burn with shame, and consider, for a moment, running outside. But the gesture would be just that, a gesture. I have no money with me. My father would chase me over the bridge or down to the lake’s stagnant green banks.

He’d cry, of course, and so would I. These scenes of recrimination and apology, they cost so much energy, and nothing is accomplished by them.

I put my face in my hands, I block it from the eyes of all the people who think they’re looking at a slut. My father’s tears. Like the eyes from which they flow, they change everything. His crying convinces me he has no control over what he does or what he demands of me. His actions seem helpless in a way I never understand my mother’s to be. To her I have always, and undoubtedly unfairly, accorded a volition that I and my father now lack. Is this because of her inability to weep? My mother has always been frozen against her tears, dry-eyed in misery. Unused as I am to ready grief, I allow my father’s tears to excuse anything. All his aggressive apparatuses pistols, shotguns, cameras, cars, fountain pens and his weeping while aiming them at life, at me, the way the tears drip down his face and onto my chest when he is over me, his tears afford him my forgiveness. My enslavement to my father blights the last summer my mother, my grandparents, and I spend together at the shore.

There’s no privacy in our rundown cottage, the place we’ve rented each summer for all of my life. In order to call my father, I have to use the public telephone in the nearby park. I make myself as small as possible in the dank booth. Wet Kleenex squelches underfoot, sand in the receiver abrades my chin, and the connection is poor, hissing with static.

Everything seems designed to torment me as I look nervously through the dull, greasy glass to see if my grandfather is coming down the hill, or if my mother is peering out of the cottage window, trying to catch me.

“I can’t stand this, ” my father says. “I can’t take any more.

I have to see you. ” Nothing satisfies him, not a nightly call, not a twice-daily call. It becomes increasingly difficult to steal away from every occasion, every evening. My family says nothing, but they know where I’m going, they know that if I were calling a boyfriend I wouldn’t have to sneak away. Each time I return from one of my lonely errands, everyone looks up in silence. The old wooden screen door sighs shut behind me. My grandfather presses the mute button on the television’s remote control, interrupting the news to give me an opportunity to explain myself. My grandmother puts down her magazine, and my mother replaces the tiny brush in her bottle of nail polish. Sometimes I make the obligatory meaningless comment. “The tide’s up, ” I say. Or, having taken the long way home, past the market or the bakery, I hold up a bag of pastries for breakfast. I move through the cramped living room with my face averted, not allowing any eye contact. My grandfather turns the television’s sound back on. My grandmother returns to her magazine article, my mother to her nails. In the kitchen, I quietly open the door of the bread box and place my purchase inside. It was in this yellow kitchen that, when I was fifteen, I blew up the old gas oven. My grandmother, checking to see if the pilot light had for once remained ignited, turned the knob to high and peered inside, no flame. As usual, it would have to be lit by hand. She turned the knob back in the direction of off but not all the way, allowing gas to seep from the jets into the closed oven, where we couldn’t smell it. “Light the pilot, will you? ” she said a few minutes later, a request made to either my mother or me, both of us just back from the beach and rummaging in the cupboards. I took the box of Blue Diamond matches from where it stood between the salt and pepper shakers on the little shelf over the stove.

I liked using the big wooden kitchen matches. I opened the oven door partway, leaned into it and struck one, in a gesture of adolescent affectation, against the sole of my sandal. The oven door blew open the rest of the way, hitting my shins, and the stove’s burner pans leapt up in sympathy. There was an enormous rush of air, as if the house itself had gasped. The room was filled with flames. No one spoke. My grandmother, my mother, and I all turned to its center and to one another, as if participating in a bizarre rite. We gasped, too, echoing the house. A web of fire hung between us. Tongues of it licked at everything, the curtains, our clothing, our hair. I saw flames in the lenses of my grandmother’s eyeglasses. And then they were gone, it was over. We fell into one another’s arms, weeping with fright, laughing in relief. When we pulled apart we saw how, among us, only I, closest to the oven, had lost my eyelashes and eyebrows, the hair on my arms and legs, and the outermost layer of the hair on my head. A fine white dusting of ash coated me. It fell from my limbs as I moved. “Oh God, “

we said, over and over. “Oh God. “

My grandfather came to the door. “What’s happened? ” he said.

“What on earth has happened in here? ” We didn’t answer. We wept and laughed and touched one another’s faces. At the shore, my mother and I walk along the breakwater. Curved into the ocean like an eyelash, its old railing is so rusty that in places it crumbles at our touch and leaves stains like those of blood on our hands. We look into the water below and say little to each other, flat in our separate torment, betrayer and betrayed. The sand scratches and sighs between our shoes and the walkway. The wind is hard, our faces are wet with spray, and we move slowly along the narrow path, not lifting our feet but sliding them forward like old ladies. White foam covers the cracked paving at our feet. “See how strong the water is, ” my mother says at last. “Someday it will knock all these stones down. ” It frightens me to stand on the breakwater with my mother. I imagine myself stumbling, falling, a victim of my own gravity, of my desire for oblivion, for release from feeling.

Because I feel too much I always haveand it’s impossible to live with my heart always breaking, equally impossible to keep myself anesthetized.

If I were to die in a fall from the breakwater, the last thing I’d smell would be the seaweed rotting on the beach. The last thing I’d see would be my mother’s face, like that of a clock, still, flat, and white, marked with the hour of my death. All summer, I am never warm, the sun can’t touch me. I go for long, solitary swims, frequenting dangerous beaches unattended by lifeguards. I go in bad weather, rain sizzling and hissing on the sand, and I go at dusk as the light fades and glitters on the sea. I swim underwater, eyes closed, for as many strokes as I can.

If the tide is low, kelp tangles around my legs, shells and pebbles move with the ebb and flow of the water They make a sound like hundreds of teeth coming together, chewing and grinding. One night I swim out to one of the buoys that mark the boundaries of the oceanographic institute’s preserve, three-quarters of a mile away from the shore. When I reach the buoy, I try to grab onto the algaeslick sides of the big, bobbing metal ball, but it offers no handhold.

The swells are so large that they obscure the lights of the town that glimmer from the shore. The greatest danger of swimming in the dark is that one can swim for some time, turned around by the riptide and heading OUT to sea without knowing it. I’m so cold on the way back that I cut my legs on rocks and coral without feeling it, so cold that hours in a hot bath cannot stop my teeth from chattering. Nights, in my room, I turn the handle of my grandfather’s old-fashioned razor to release the blade from under its stainless steel cover. I trace the sharp edge over my arm, press it into places where a scratch might go unnoticed. It’s not so much a desire for punishment as for manageable pain, bleeding that can be stanched. I give my mother every opportunity to accuse me again alone, just the two of us but she takes none. We watch each other.

liness and disorientation. The hero’s companion is a monkey undoubtedly because of all creatures they seem so like people, and yet can’t speak.

Because my father has at last separated me from the rest of the world and I can no longer imagine human friendship. I don’t go to graduate school. Instead, I move to New York, the city where I naively imagine writers must go. My portion of the rent for the apartment I share with two other women is five hundred dollars a month. It’s on Henry Street, in Brooklyn Heights, and would be small for a single occupant. We decide to make a loft in the back room in order to fit all the beds inside it and leave the front room free for living space. The luck of the draw is such that I get the uppermost bed, over which the ceiling is so low that I can’t sit up at night to read, the only way I know to fall asleep. I told my family I was moving east to become a writer, but how am I to begin? My savings and the two thousand dollars my grandparents gave me seem like very little between me and the world. Every day, I go to the public library and work in notebooks or on index cards on my post modern novel, in which an existential hero sets out for where I’m not sure and against what I don’t know. The story’s essence is lone My days are as long as despair can make them. I begin taking endless and exhausting walks to nowhere, just block after block into Brooklyn or over the bridge into Manhattan. Outside a seedy-looking beauty salon in Chinatown, a little man with long black mustaches offers me three hundred dollars for my hair. I gather the long mass of it into my hands.

“No, ” I say. “Okay, five, ” he says. I shake my head, keep walking, holding so tightly to the hank of hair that my hand sweats. I spend hours of each day sitting on a bench on the promenade, looking at the bridges over the East River, sometimes turning to consider the houses behind me, wondering in which Norman Mailer lives, if he still lives there, and if that’s the place where he stabbed his wife, if she was his wife. Or maybe he just waved a knife at her, whoever she was. The only thing that provides any structure to my time are the calls from my father, and his letters, their content always the same, he loves me, separation is torture. Having waited for the mail to arrive, I sometimes find myself unable to open the envelopes, to read the messages they contain. … I gave you my flesh and blood, my spirit It is my heart that beats within you. I have as much right to you as any one, as much as you have to yourself… Early in the morning, late at night, at home, in a library, my father’s words of what he calls love retain their narcotic effect in any setting, under any circumstance.