The Kiss: A Memoir (13 page)

Years later I’ll go back to the letters, 839 pages, all saved in a locked chest. Determined to get through them, I’ll pack a suitcase full and take them on a plane to a distant city. In my hotel room I’ll order a large pot of coffee, and after swallowing three tablets of Nodoz, I’ll spread the letters over the bed and the desk and the dresser. As I stack them chronologically by month, I’ll note with surprise how many were abandoned on first reading, replaced in the envelope after I had gotten no further than page two of the five or more sheets it contained. I’ll drink all the coffee, open the windows for cold, fresh air, and then I’ll curl up on the floor and sleep for five hours. When I wake, the room will be frigid and wind will have scattered the pages I can’t read.

I’ll return home with them disordered and crammed any which way into the suitcase, having yet again avoided my father’s telling me, You are all of life to me, and I must be the same for you… . You accuse me of being a jailer, you must learn the definition of freedom… . You ask me to be a father to you. I lose my appetite. I have a cough. My days are filled with my obsession, whether to see him, when to see him, when not to see him. Like a more prosaic addiction to alcohol, to heroin mine for my father has consumed the rest of my life. I take no pleasure in its satisfaction, and yet I cannot see beyond it, him, to anything else, even myself. I spend a lot of time in neighborhood boutiques, trying on clothes I have no intention of buying, looking at myself in dressing-room mirrors. I’ve always been drawn to mirrors, not out of vanity but for reassurance. I want to see that I’m there, and I don’t resist any reflective surface puddles, shop windows, the sides of the tea kettle. It’s a habit left over from childhood, my mother’s sleep mask. To believe in myself I’d leave her bedside and look in the mirror on her closet door. I’d stand before the image of myself for whole minutes, just to make sure that I was real and not a trick of the light, a phantom that might evaporate like the steam that roiled out from under the curtain when at last she got up and showered. Even now, in the stores, I don’t look at the clothes but at the pale face above them.

Now, I no longer know who I am, or if I am, apart from my father.

He stays in a nearby hotel, one within walking distance of my apartment.

I make the reservation by phone and draw no conclusions from the fact that the rooms are available on only a weekly basis. My father, when he arrives, is shocked by the accommodations. And I’m surprised as well, but there’s a difference, I think it’s terribly funny that he is staying in a welfare hotel, that this is the environment in which he will ravish me. I feel that in my own story I’ve at last arrived in the dirty place I belong. As for my father’s squeamishness, it strikes me as something he cannot afford, morally. The lobby of the hotel is carpeted in red, as if to allow for a more discreet spilling of blood. The walls are white (or they were), the man behind the desk black, his teeth gold. Upstairs, the halls teem with life of all description, winos, cockroaches, junkies. I sit on the bed in my father’s room only after checking the sheets, which are, in fact, clean. When I pull off the spread, Clorox fumes rise from beneath it. He wants to take pictures. Naked ones, I call them, as opposed to the word on which he insists, nudes. But nude implies art, and without my clothes the photographs my father makes of me have the same quality as those documenting medical anomalies. i’ll show you who you are, ” he said to me when he took the first pictures.

In these latest images the expression on my face, flat and dispossessed, is one I see years later in a museum exhibit of pictures taken of soldiers injured during the Civil War.

Undressed and propped against walls or on crutches, the veterans reveal those places where bullets entered and, perhaps, exited. My father strings a little wire from one side of the room to another, a line on which to hang his wet Polaroids. I sit on the bed and laugh, still in response to his outrage over the hotel. I can’t stop laughing.

Hysterics, perhaps, because I’m crying at the same time. “It’s just that”

I gasp, trying to explain, but it’s no use. Perhaps my father laughs only in social adaptation at what other people find amusing. When he does, the noise he makes is not quite right. It’s off, the way a deaf person’s speech never sounds like that of someone who can hear. It’s in this room, a few days later, that I capitulate. All right, I say. I’ll give it a try. My father has offered to support me for a year while I write. I’ll live in his home, use an office at his church. After all, I have nowhere else to go. My father stands between me and the rest of life, my family, the friends I once had. In keeping with the whole of our affair, everything about this plan seems both wrong and inevitable.

From the start, we’ve had to meet in rooms such as the one we’re in, rooms for addicts and prostitutes, people who exist outside the social contract. Does my father believe that he can take me home to his wife and children, whom I’ve met on only a few awkward occasions? That the two of us can live in the midst of other people? I don’t ask these questions. I have no life or will apart from his. I drive west without making an overnight stop. It cannot be true, but it seems that the road is perpetually wet, the sun always in my eyes, the wind and every natural force against me. At about 3, 00 AM, just outside Oklahoma’s Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, I come upon the four-hundred-foot-tall cutout of Jesus in His purple robe and crown, rising over the highway with supernatural luminosity. Trucks scream past me in the black night.

How long is it since I’ve slept or eaten? I’m afraid, more than I like to admit, that I’m seeing things. Ten miles beyond the billboard Jesus, a grass fire is burning, and no one stops it. I pull the car over to the side of the road and get out. The ground under my feet is black. The fire advances, a red line no more than thirty yards from where I stand.

I sit on the hood of my car to watch its progress. Truckers blow their horns as they pass me. They call out lewd remarks. When I can’t see the fire anymore, I get back in the car, I drive to catch up with it, stop, get out again. I go on like this until dawn, when the sun comes up and makes the narrow line of flame invisible.

A new carpet on the linoleum floor and a print of one of my favorite paintings over the bed can’t disguise the fact that in my father’s house I am to sleep and dress in a room without privacy, one separated from the kitchen by no more than an open-slatted wooden door, nor that this room offers the only access to the backyard where the children play. My place within this home proves to be like that of a young aunt or old child someone taken in for a spell while she gets her bearings or her footing or whatever it might be that she needs to equip her for independent life. At least this is the announced reason for my father’s insisting on bringing me under his roof. Just as the parsonage itself is so proto typically middle-American that it evokes the opening credits of a situation comedy, so does my father’s wife bear the same pleasant, harried, slightly madcap expression as a television mother, although her smile doesn’t hide the fact that she is as frightened of me as I am of her. She tolerates my presence because she is as controlled by my father as I am, and because she seems to consider me a project that might be saved by Christian guidance and clean living. At some point, she alludes to the promiscuous college life I used to lead, and I gather that my father has portrayed me as a girl who has gone awry as a result of my grandparents’ and mother’s permissiveness. In this house I am afforded an intimate look at the kind of family for which I’ve always longed, parents who are still married to each other, who has a demanding and admirable job, and a mother who raises children, shops, cooks, cleans, and teaches Bible school. Every one attends church on Sunday, the children go to Little League games and Girl Scout troop meetings, they come home from school to homework, chores, and piano practice. Picture perfect, and yet sitting next to my father at the dinner table and knowing what relation I bear to the head of this family, how can I not question all of what I otherwise might assume was happiness? Initially, everything, including my sudden appearance at my father’s hat this room offers the only access to the backyard where the children play. My place within this home proves to be like that of a young aunt or old childsomeone taken in for a spell while she gets her bearings or her footing or whatever it might be that she needs to equip her for independent life. At least this is the announced reason for my father’s insisting on bringing me under his roof. Just as the parsonage itself is so prototypically middle-American that it evokes the opening credits of a situation comedy, so does my father’s wife bear the same pleasant, harried, slightly madcap expression as a television mother, although her smile doesn’t hide the fact that she is as frightened of me as I am of her. She tolerates my presence because she is as controlled by my father as I am, and because she seems to consider me a project that might be saved by Christian guidance and clean living. At some point, she alludes to the promiscuous college life I used to lead, and I gather that my father has portrayed me as a girl who has gone awry as a result of my grandparents’ and mother’s permissiveness. In this house I am afforded an intimate look at the kind of family for which I’ve always longed, parents who are still married to each other, who has a demanding and admirable job, and a mother who raises children, shops, cooks, cleans, and teaches Bible school. Every one attends church on Sunday, the children go to Little League games and Girl Scout troop meetings, they come home from school to homework, chores, and piano practice. Picture perfect, and yet sitting next to my father at the dinner table and knowing what relation I bear to the head of this family, how can I not question all of what I otherwise might assume was happiness? Initially, everything, including my sudden appearance at my father’s church, proceeds with unnerving smoothness, a testimony to my father’s absolute control over his family and his staff.

Even his younger children, otherwise garrulous, do not betray that I am the shadow daughter from an unacknowledged, failed marriage. After the eleven o’clock service, a number of people in the informal receiving line at the door comment on how young my father’s wife appears. Can she possibly have so grown-up a daughter as I Following one of these remarks, my father’s wife looks at me, and then we both look away. “Do they think I’m” I ask later, hesitating. My father and I are alone in the office of his church, I’m sitting in the big leather chair from which he used to call me after his staff had gone home. “They think you’re her eldest, too, ” he says.

“Your wife’s, you mean? From the same marriage as your other children. “

“Yes. “

I nod, say nothing. But I am surprised, and stung, at how easily my mother and grandparents and the past two decades all of my life up until the point at which he reentered been erased. Cut out of the picture, leaving even less than my grandmother’s nail scissors. “The bishop and the board know you’re not, ” he says, as if reading my thoughts. “But no one thought there was any reason to announce it to the church as a whole. “

“I see. ” I look at the surface of his desk, the immaculate blotter, the ordered stacks of correspondence, the glass bottle of ink and the clutch of fountain pens. The awful simplicity and tidiness of the lie the same as his condescending sermon that delivered all the certainty of faith, and none of its doubts, its pain. My father’s possessing me physically seems increasingly to be just that, Each time, he takes a little more of my life, each time, there is less of me left. He drives us to his church, the place where he has long waited to do this. He unlocks the little office he’s given me for my work, and he takes me on the floor by the desk. Following his lead in imposing a religious context on the act, I concentrate on mortification of the flesh. I tell myself that if I give myself over to him to be sullied, then by the topsy-turvy Christian logic that exalts the reviled, I’ll be made clean. I will if I can just do it willingly, trusting in the ultimate goodness of God, and the way in which he sometimes takes unexpected and even repugnant forms, like beggars and lepers, like Saint Dymphna’s father. How could she have been martyred without him? How could she have been glorified? The heat of our early kisses was lost long ago on the highways, the weight of him has smothered the passion I once felt, and the workaday drudgery of our contact flattens me to the point that each time I am more still, more silent, more lifeless. We fight about this. “I hate it that you tolerate me! ” my father yells, and I put my face in my hands, I cover my eyes.

“What do you think that does to me! How do you think it makes me feel! “

I’m sick. My cough gets worse, and one morning I find I have a high fever, I’m too weak to sit up in bed. My father’s wife has to help me to get dressed. I have pneumonia, news that I regard with some interest and relie Please, please let it be fatal, I pray silently. Or at least serious enough that my fate is placed in the care of competent, impersonal professionals. “I’m sure you’ll be fine, ” the doctor says.

He asks my father to leave the room for a moment. My father has accompanied me into the examining room, watched as the doctor thumped my ribs and stood between us as the doctor asked me to remove my bra.

“She’ll be with you soon, ” the doctor says to him. “Do I have to go to the hospital? ” I ask. “No, ” he says. He looks at me, my tears dripping onto my paper kimono. The chest X rays hang behind his head, my narrow bones luminous in their ghostly envelope of flesh, my heart a tipped shadow among the rooting bronchi. “Is there something you’d like to tell me? ” the doctor asks. I shake my head.

He sighs. “Well, ” he says. “Maybe you’ll come to the next appointment by yourself, ” he suggests. “Maybe you’ll be feeling much better and your father won’t have to drive you. ” Despite hourly prayers for deterioration, a steadfast refusal of food, and throwing up the antibiotics, I do get better. Twice a day I have to lie belly-down on the bed, my head as close to the floor as I can get it, and be whacked on the back by my father’s wife while I choke up phlegm into a bowl.