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

eyes, enraptured eyes, luminous, stricken brilliant, spellbound, spellbinding eyes. I don’t know it yet, not consciously, but I feel it, my father, holding himself so still and staring at me, has somehow begun to see me into being. His look gives me to myself, his gaze reflects the life my mother’s willfully shut eyes denied. Looking at him looking at me, I cannot help but fall painfully, precipitously in love. And my loving him is inseparable from a piercing sense of loss. Whenever I am alone in my bedroom, the bathroom I find myself crying, sometimes even sinking to my knees. How am I to endure this new despair? How can it be that I am twenty years old, that I’ve had to grow up without a father, only to meet him now when it’s too late, when childhood is over, lost?
    On the last night my father spends with us, I wake after only two hours of sleep. I sit up in bed and find my wristwatch on the nightstand. It’s ten minutes before three. My throat is sore as if I’m catching a cold, and I go downstairs for a glass of orange juice. I move quietly so as not to disturb my father sleeping in the den. The thick carpet on the stair treads absorbs my footfalls. As I pass the den’s open door, I see that the convertible sofa is empty, my father is not on it. I turn on the lights in the living room just to make sure he’s not sleeping on that couch, but already I know where he is, in my mother’s bed. I sit on the carpeted stairs to consider this, their cheating on his current wife and my mother’s banished, trusting partner. Do my parents perhaps consider their bond so primary that it is absolute, ungovernable by the dictates that guide more pedestrian relationships? Maybe they believe that they are being faithful only when they’re sleeping together, and that other loves are the betrayal. Alone, outside my mother’s closed bedroom door, I feel jealous. And, like all children, I discover that I’m squeamish at the thought of my mother and father having intercourse.
    I’m both fascinated and repelled. When I turn on the light in the kitchen, I find a cockroach on the counter, rather than kill it, I gingerly and at arm’s length place a water glass upside down over the insect leaving the problem for my mother to resolve in the morning. I dislike insects, and cockroaches in particular have always frightened me. As I drink the juice, I see the roach circle inside the glass, rising occasionally on its hind legs to touch the clear, smooth, obstructing surface with its forefeet and sensitive antennae. I watch how it must relentlessly search for the seam, the tiny ridge or rill in the glass that might offer some hope of climbing, penetrating, escaping.
    But there is nothing about the glass that it understands. The next day, while my mother is taking a shower, my father talks about what happened the previous night. “I heard you, ” he says. “I heard you go downstairs.
    ” He leans forward over the breakfast table. “I did it because I had to, ” he says. “She asked me. ” I say nothing, but we both know that I know what he’s talking about. He describes their making love not as sacred, the way I’ve imagined it, but as an act of charitable reassurance. He answers a question I never voice. “I didn’t do it because I wanted to, “
    he says. Humiliated on behalf of my mother, and shocked that he would betray her this way, I look not at him but at my plate. When it’s time to take my father to the airport, again my mother says she cannot go.
    She has a headache. She is flattened by discouragement. This visit, like all his others, has convinced her that she’s wasted years on the wrong men, the wrong life. “You drive him, ” she says. “He seems more interested in your company … . than m mine, anyway. As during our previous conversation about getting to the airport on time, I’m sitting in the rocking chair in her bedroom and she is on her bed, her face in her hands. Looking at her, I can’t think of any