Read Online The Kiss: A Memoir by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online

rematriculate without having to reapply to the university. “Why do you want to do this? ” the counselor in the office of academic probation asks. The last time we talked was when my grades were lost through a computer error at the end of the first quarter of my freshman year. As an incoming student, I didn’t realize that I hadn’t received a pink grade slip in the mail I never missed what I didn’t know I was supposed to get and I was shocked when my case was described as one of a particular concern” since I hadn’t failed just one or two courses but rather had earned no units whatsoever during my first quarter. High school valedictorian, child who routinely threw up from nerves before Latin exams, ambitious student who within a week of arriving at college had petitioned the dean to allow me to take an unusually high course load, I spent an hour sobbing in this same counselor’s office before the computer glitch was caught and my professors contacted for my grades.
    “I’m just having some family problems, ” I say to him now. “I need a little time to think. ” My tears, reminding him perhaps of those that proved so hard to stanch before, stop the interview. “Yes, yes. Of course, ” he says briskly. “I’ll just get the forms. ” The university returns my tuition fees and those for room and board, minus a prorated amount representing the two weeks I’ve wasted. No longer enrolled, I cannot remain in student housing, and so, despite my near paralysis, I have to move out. I use the refunded money to rent an apartment, a basement room with squat windows forced up to the low ceiling and plumbing tangled like entrails overhead. The pipes sweat and seep, filling the dark space with a uterine warmth. The basement, a labyrinth of dank, linoleum-floored units, is part of an old estate now engulfed by the campus. It borders the student commons, where the bookstore and bank and post office are located, and outside my windows busy feet walk or run by. The sky is invisible from my room. I can’t see past the trees in the rear courtyard. This is the spring that bagworms infest the oaks on campus, and the moths’ eggs fill silvery webbed pouches that hang from the branches outside my windows. Stray strands of silk twist in the breeze. I watch them, sitting on the end of my bed. My father continues to telephone me every day. He calls from his office, waiting until the rest of the church’s staff has gone home. We talk for hours every night, a courtship encouraged by the paradoxical intimacy of long-distance calls, the telephone’s invitation to say anything, to be more forthcoming, passionate, reckless in ways we might not be if we were meeting face-to-face. Our words about love are, like most people’s, unoriginal, unmemorable, but my father and I have a subject more consuming than love, Her. Love’s object. My mother.
    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