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

for my mother’s financial mismanagements.
    He looks at the paper on which I’ve calculated my credits the way he regards one of her worthless checks.
    “Well, ” he says, “you’ve already done it, haven’t you? It’s not as if you’re asking for my opinion, much less my permission. I’m sorry, I say to him. I’m very sorry. I Will go back. I promise. ” Lips pursed in disapproval, he nods, says nothing. The distance that has long separated his body from .., me grows. “Why won’t you throw that awful thing out? “
    my mother says of my favorite black sweater, its embroidery unraveling and dropping jet beads on her kitchen counter. We talk together as we make tea on her stove, and she nods when I tell her that I love my father with a sudden and irresistible force. Depressed in the wake of his visit, she’s actually more understanding than my grandparents of my desire to see him again, she is for now, at least.
    “Yes! Yes! ” she says, when I tell her that he’s returning, and we agree that the visit will, once again, include her, that my father and I will drive from school to her house. My mother looks at me.
    “Your father is the only man I’ve ever really cared about, ” she says.
    I’ve heard this before, of course, but the confession that follows is new. “You know, I’ve never really enjoyed being with any other man, ” my mother says. “In bed, I mean. ” She puts her hand on my arm, she grasps it so that I can feel the separate pressure of each finger.
    “Having sex is what I mean, ” she says, and then she removes her hand, she crosses her arms. I say nothing. Embarrassed, I look away.
    Standing so close that I can feel the heat of her body, can feel her breath as it moves over the fine hairs on my upper arm, I don’t yet know what my mother’s revelation means to me. I feel a tiny cold thrill that I ascribe to the surprise of her willingly telling me something so personal. Why are you telling me this, I think, marveling silently. Why?
    Innocent of how I, and my father, will come to use it.
    In preparation for my father’s visit, I tidy my basement apartment, I borrow an old sleeping bag from a friend. If I worry that he’ll dislike the place where I live, so different from my mother’s cool and elegant home, I need not. When he gets there, he never sees it. He sees nothing but me. “Mine, ” he says, holding me with hands that are hot and shaking. “You belong to me. ” He cannot keep from touching me, looking at me, reaching for my hand, my sleeve, my hair. In restaurants, his food grows cold as he stares across the table, his hand holding tight to mine. Tears gather behind the lenses of his glasses and fall silently down his cheeks. They convince me that what I want to believe … .. .
    is true, as love IS gellullle. At night I give him my bed. I take the sleeping bag unrolled on the floor beside it. “That can’t be comfortable, ” he says, but he does not offer to trade places. “Come here, ” he says, patting the blanket. “There’s room for us both. “
    Remembering the kiss, I hesitate. I’m not ready to have to forget something else. Is it because he senses I’m troubled by what happened that he’s never mentioned our parting in the airport? I think of the kiss not as what he did but as what happened. I’ve separated him from the act, I’ve made the adjustment of regarding the kiss as I would a more helpless physical transport, a seizure, perhaps, or a spasm of coughing. If the kiss was an accident, outside of human control, then it doesn’t pollute the love he has for me. It doesn’t demand that I turn away from what I want. Still, I worry. I think about the kiss all the time, but each time I consider asking my father about it, I find I can’t open my mouth.
    It’s not just that I’m afraid he might tell me what I don’t want to hear, but that I’m so thoroughly under the spell of my own denial I sometimes wonder if anything happened at all. I ask