Featured Prose | February 07, 2022

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we bring you Ron Tanner’s meditation on kissing, which originally appeared in TMR 32:3.  Ron’s most recent book is his new story collection, Far West (2022), winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award .

Kissing

Ron Tanner

 

Oh! let me live for ever on those lips!

The nectar of the gods to these

is tasteless.

—John Dryden

Ron Tanner

 

How the Trouble Starts

I was five going on six when I saw my parents kiss for the first time. Really kiss, I mean. Like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was winter. My two brothers and I were sitting at the breakfast table, each of us before a bowl of steaming oatmeal.

Wearing his gray or brown suit, his briefcase in hand, my father always left the house first, while we were still eating. So he did on this morning. But when he and my mother came together for their usual good-bye peck, she cupped his neck with one hand and drew him down to her, then opened her mouth to his. And they went at it. I had never seen them like that, mouths locked as if exchanging the breath of life. The name for what they were doing I would learn years later: “French kiss.” “Tongue tango.” “Mouth hockey.”

We three boys gaped, our oatmeal cooling.

As Mom and Dad disengaged finally, I had the uneasy feeling that there was so much more to the world of grown-ups than I had imagined. Worse, it occurred to me that these two people on whom I relied for so much were strange, and that, really, I hardly knew them at all.

Trouble

When I fell in love with Laura, a tall, blond girl in my kindergarten class, it seemed only natural that I should kiss her. For weeks I thought about doing this but couldn’t work up the nerve. The last day of class, I was as desperate as a six-year-old can get. I sat next to Laura in the back of the room as our classmates watched a cartoon about squirrels in spring. Then I leaned into her, inhaled her wondrous scent and whispered, “I love you.” She said, “I love you too, Ronald.” I kissed her on the cheek. I kissed her again. Laura reciprocated. Our childish pecks devolved into slobbery smooches. So much kissing left me breathless. But I couldn’t stop. I kissed Laura’s cheek, Laura’s chin, Laura’s nose, Laura’s forehead, Laura’s ear. I rev­eled in the sweet stink of our spit, strands of her hair in my mouth, her hot cheeks against mine. I didn’t stop until the lights came up.

“I saw what you did,” Deidre Watts accused me later. We were standing in the hallway waiting for our mothers to take us home. Laura was waiting outside.

I felt my face burn with vague shame. “What?” I stammered. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Kissing Laura in the dark—I saw, and I’m gonna tell.”

I wanted to protest, “What’s wrong with kissing?” But then I began to consider that anything so pleasurable couldn’t be without a cost.

French Kissing

“You kiss too hard,” one girlfriend told me when I was thirteen. I knew she was right. We kissed with closed mouths because we knew no better. She wore braces, and it must have hurt. I feared I was missing something. Why was kissing so thoroughly unsatisfying? My hard kisses were an insis­tent plea After my girlfriend and I broke up, I met Eleanor Wall.

She showed me that our lips could open. It was a revelation. Finally I real­ized what all the fuss was about. Eleanor and I spent most of the summer kissing until our lips were numb and swollen. Occasionally, to shake things up, we’d give each other a hickey. But the kissing—we couldn’t get enough of it. French kissing, yes, the exotic name fit because it was like learning another language or visiting a strange, beautiful land. Nothing this splen­did could be home-grown.

Where the Trouble Leads

Katie, the woman who would become my first wife, had a theory about kissing. She said that when one person is attracted to another, pheromones rise to the lips. She called this “oyster breath” and claimed that it stirred in the other an irresistible appetite. True enough, when our mouths met, they smelled like tidal pools. We were not aware that scientists had proven Katie’s theory. Kissing excites and release hormones that create mild eupho­ria, leading to something akin to an addiction.

I was addicted to Katie. I bought her flowers and extravagant dinners, took her out every night, spent every free hour in her company, and still it wasn’t enough. When I wasn’t with her, I felt I was dying of dehydra­tion. After a few months of this, I asked Katie to live with me. She balked. She said that if we were that serious we should get married. I had always claimed that I would live with my mate for at least a year before marrying her. It only made sense. But now nothing made sense except my need to be with this ravishing woman. Yes, of course we’ll get married! Never mind that we were just out of college and I was a musician without a gig.

Of all the kisses we shared, only one stays with me. The preacher had just pronounced us married. In the company of our immediate family, we were standing on a windy hill of the Marin headlands, a tourist lookout with a stunning view of the San Francisco Bay. We’d had no rehearsal, so the preacher was unprepared to orchestrate the reading of our vows, which we’d written ourselves. He read his part wrong and had to repeat it twice. Though a sunny day, it was cool enough to raise goose bumps on our exposed arms. Katie’s lavender dress stuttered and snapped in the wind.

I wasn’t ready for marriage. In the midst of the ceremony, I was suddenly convinced of this. Katie and I hardly knew one another. We had argued nearly every day for weeks before the wedding. It seemed we would agree on nothing. The only time it was good for us was when our mouths met and we forgot ourselves in our mutual lust. Lately that had occurred less and less.

When I kissed Katie at the close of our ceremony, it was closed-lipped and perfunctory for both of us, as if suddenly we were embarrassed. Panic was winging through me like a spooked sparrow in a cage. Katie was shiv­ering from the cold. We embraced. Over her shoulder I saw a horde of tourists hiking toward us, a tour bus having just disgorged them at the bot­tom of our hill. It was remarkable that we’d had the lookout to ourselves for the ceremony. Suddenly we were surrounded by strangers: gleeful, middle-aged Germans, some of whom shook our hands. Had we been in Europe, I imagine people would have been kissing our cheeks.

Only a Kiss

In our fourth year of marriage, I began fantasizing about kissing other women. Women I’d see in passing. Women I’d see at my gigs. It was a bad sign, I knew. I tried to convince myself that it was nothing more than men­tal masturbation. But I was scared. I might as well have been carrying a loaded gun in my pocket.

I was working a club gig six nights a week that was an hour’s commute from our apartment. Though I loved music, I had grown to hate playing it to make a living. Five sets a night, six nights a week, the same songs per­formed the same way every night—it was no better than a factory job. I’d drive to work just as everyone was arriving home, the world opening up at the end of the day, couples walking hand-in-hand on the sidewalks at dusk, dining at candlelit tables in restaurants, stopping for wine at the gourmet grocer’s, laughing with their friends at the corner tavern. Every morning when I’d return at four, the traffic lights were blinking yellow and the world seemed abandoned.

Katie felt as trapped in her job as I in mine. She felt cheated too because I didn’t make much money, and we couldn’t afford the things she thought we deserved. We had separated briefly after our second year. She had moved east to stay with her parents for six months. Then I asked her back, deter­mined to make a go of it. Now, most of the time we were together, we were arguing. To Katie I was a huge disappointment.

I longed for a kiss that would deliver me somehow from what I’d become or, rather, from the realization of all I had not become. And I found myself waxing nostalgic about how miraculous kisses had seemed when I was too young to know better, like the day my babysitter and neighborhood idol, Amanda Glass, had turned around at the baseball backstop just before she got up to bat and stooped to give me a wet one on my forehead. Oh, Lord, how the heavens opened at that moment, my forehead wet with Amanda’s mark!

One night after my gig, an ebullient, almond-eyed woman invited me to her place for breakfast. “We’ll be with my friends,” she said. “It’ll be fun.” At her apartment, she made breakfast as promised, but soon she pulled me to her, and our mouths met. Our kissing lasted a while. She tasted of ciga­rettes. So did Katie. And, like Katie, she was good with her tongue, taking it slowly, savoring me. Her kiss was a form of flattery.

My mouth open to this stranger, I felt like I was falling a long distance. I had never been a cheater or a liar. It was exhilarating, the way jumping through a plate-glass window might be exhilarating. At last I pulled myself back and, drawing a breath, told her I had to go. At my car, she kissed me again, then smiled knowingly. “See you tomorrow,” she said. This made the blood rush to my ears, and somewhere deep inside I heard a distant alarm: I hadn’t thought about tomorrow.

As I sped home on the freeway, I told myself that I had been lucky. I had done no more than kiss a stranger. It was cheating, sure, but not so bad that I couldn’t be forgiven. It wouldn’t happen again, I promised myself. Just then I heard the blaring of a car horn. Had I wandered into another lane? I focused on the road. The blaring continued. Someone’s headlights flashed at me from behind. I tried slowing down, then speeding up. This freeway was notoriously dangerous. The other car was now parallel with mine, on the passenger side. The driver was waving.

It was the almond-eyed woman. She grinned and blew me a kiss. Meekly I waved. Then she veered off to make the next exit. She lived a half-hour south of this exit—she’d been following me north. She might have followed me home.

I was so shaken I was tempted to pull to the shoulder to catch my breath. My heart was pulsing at the back of my tongue. The next night, upon returning to the bar where I gigged, I would have to tell this woman that I had made a mistake. I couldn’t begin to guess how she would react. She might bawl (she did), she might beg (she did), she might threaten (she did), she might make a scene (she did), but by the night’s end it would be over, and I’d be hating myself for a long time.

One Thing Leads to Another

My divorce from Katie—after ten painful years of marriage—made me feel like such a failure, I was desperate to prove myself. At thirty-five, I already felt old.

On the phone, my mother said, “I knew you two would never make it.”

“Are you kidding me?” I blurted.

“You were always bickering,” she said. “And then you forgot to pick up your good pants the day before your wedding. That told me it was over before it started.”

I had moved to another state and started a new job, having left music behind. Lonelier than I’d ever been, I befriended the secretary where I worked and told her my woes. She was a good listener. I tried to be a good listener in return, as she told me woes of her own. She wasn’t happy with her fiancé, who happened to be my supervisor.

Our department was rife with leavings and betrayals, and nobody could do anything without generating gossip, so maybe I was an object of gossip too. Recently somebody had left a handwritten note in my work mailbox. It said, “I’m watching you.” Was this meant to be flirtatious or threatening?

“Then why don’t you move out?” I asked.

“It gets complicated,” she said. She loved him, she said, and she didn’t want to hurt him, and there were finances to consider.

Oh, sure, I nodded. I was beginning to understand how complicated life could get.

We had lunch together and even a drink after work once or twice a week. I was spending so much time with her, I was beginning to feel uncomfort­able whenever I saw her fiancé, my supervisor. It looked to be in a woman’s hand, but I couldn’t be sure.

One afternoon my friend took me to lunch at a place we’d never been. It was wood-paneled and dimly lit. We sat in one of the old wooden booths along the wall. My friend was wearing sunglasses. “Why don’t you take those off?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be seen,” she said.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because this is something I have to do.”

I nodded agreeably, though I wasn’t sure what she was saying. We ordered lunch. Then she stared across the table at me and said, “Come here.”

I leaned forward, thinking she was about to whisper a joke. But instead she kissed me, her mouth half opening as my Oh! of surprise met her wel­coming lips. Then I fell back in my seat as if pushed.

She had very full, very soft lips.

She glanced to the bar to see if anyone was looking. I understood imme­diately that she would use me to get out of her relationship, and it would be a messy, horrible affair that would end badly all around, and I wondered how low I would go, now that I was already spiraling from a stake-in-the-heart divorce.

My answer came right away. “Come here,” my friend said again.

I leaned forward.

The History of Kissing

Second to my parents’ French-kissing, the most disturbing kiss I wit­nessed as a child was on television, when the comedian Jerry Lewis roughly cupped his grown son’s face in his hands and kissed the young man wetly on the mouth. I had never seen a father kiss a son so voraciously. It seemed almost violent. In 1837, a man sued a woman for biting off the tip of his nose after he forced a kiss upon her. The man lost his case. That same year, one researcher wrote,

The mutual touching of the lips and the mingling of the breath is one of the most natural expressions of affection. . . . Inferior creatures express tenderness in a similar manner, as the billing of doves; and many creatures touch objects of love with the mouth, or rather tongue. The faithful dog cannot show his affection to his master more clearly than by licking his hand.

Some who have researched kissing have speculated that its origins lie in our cave-dwelling past, when a mother would chew up meat, then put her mouth to her infant’s to pass the tasty mash—much the way a bird passes food to its chicks. Of all the kissing theories, I like this one best because what could be more sustaining than a kiss? That’s why we call sugared sweets “kisses.”

Sarah, the woman who became my second wife, didn’t like kissing. She never said this outright, but she made it plain every time our mouths met. Her tongue would jab through my lips, then poke around in my mouth—hard and fast. The first time we kissed, I thought she was teasing. I withdrew and looked at her in puzzlement. Her face registered no message. I let my mouth meet hers again. This time my tongue attempted to still hers, as a coach might wrap a protective arm around a riled athlete. But I met with no success. Her bullying tongue continued to pummel the interior of my mouth. I was confounded.

There are other forms of affection, I told myself. Sarah was an accom­plished, beautiful person. Why would I hold her kissing against her? It didn’t occur to me that Sarah’s kissing might be a kind of warning or, even more disturbing, an honest expression of how she felt. Shamed by the fail­ure of my first marriage and desperate to be a better man, I thought I owed it to myself to accept Sarah for who she was.

There was a time when the spectrum of kissing, and what each kiss signi­fied, was as varied as the constellations in the Milky Way. Among strangers, acquaintances, merchants, maids, politicians, petitioners, friends and foes there was the kissing of hands, shoulders, wrists, knuckles, rings, shoes, rugs, coat cuffs, holy crosses, dress trains, cheeks, ankles, knees, books, contracts, flowers, swords and pens. How few things we kiss nowadays! We have diminished this act to simplistic categories: the familial kiss, the sex­ual kiss, the friendly kiss. As a result, none of us is well-versed in kissing. In part, that’s why I could not read Sarah’s. She left our marriage in its fourth year. We had stopped kissing altogether by that time. I realized that I could live without many things but not kissing.

Had you asked me years ago how I would look upon kissing in my middle years, I might have worried that I would be nostalgic or regretful, dwelling only on the romantic/sexual kiss. But memories of my history of kissing do not fill my head with romance or longing. Instead, they compel me to recall how vulnerable we are when we kiss, so little flesh between us and the other we would love. It is the most human act. Delivered with closed eyes and with great hope, no single gesture between two people takes more courage than opening one’s mouth to another.

I am not bold enough to kiss everyone I could or should. My brothers, for instance. I hug them but don’t kiss. There is more to learn, it seems. Still, I’m not convinced that the culture of our country will ever accom­modate, much less understand, the variety of kisses it once did, though I do see fathers kissing their sons more freely now than I did as a child.

The kisses I most enjoy now—in my seventh year with Jill, my third wife—start simply, as pecks of greeting, but then these pecks give us pause, they are so enjoyable. After more pecking—I imagine we look like doves billing each other—our caressing grows until we are into some serious kiss­ing. Sometimes we break off laughing. Other times we look at each other with satisfaction, as if to say, Mmm! In most cases, this bout of kissing sates us for the interim and we move on, each of us to our respective household task.

The other kiss I enjoy is the one I bestow on Jill’s sleeping face. This is the purest kind because it transcends desire and mirrors every kiss a par­ent bestows upon a sleeping child and every kiss a loved one imparts to a partner who must travel. It is the gentlest kiss because it’s meant to secure sleep, not interrupt it, and it is the most giving because it serves both as a benediction—“Farewell, my love, and God speed”—and a promise, as if whispering, “When you return, I will be here.” This is the kiss, I hope, that will send me from this world to the next.

 

*****

Ron Tanner’s writing has been named “notable” in both Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories. His awards for fiction include the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the Charles Angoff Prize, the Faulkner Society gold medal, Pushcart Prize, New Letters Award, and many others, as well as fellowships from the Michener/Copernicus Society, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the National Park Service, to name a few. His novel Missile Paradise was named a “notable book of 2017” by the American Library Association. He lives on an historic farm in Maryland and directs the Good Contrivance Farm Writer’s Retreat, an educational nonprofit.

His most recent book, Far West, a story collection, won the Elixir Press book prize in 2020.