I regard it in the light of a duty to caution my readers emphatically, and at the very outset, as to the danger of even reading about kisses.
—Christopher Nyrop, The Kiss and Its History
It’s nearly impossible to tell for sure when the baseball game first appeared in the American conversation as a metaphor for sex, but it’s not difficult to guess why it did. How better to describe the frustrations, risks, and rewards of sexual pursuit than to call on the image of a game where going three for ten makes you an all-star? Then there is the game’s association with summertime and youthful conquest. The very language and imagery of the game—with its bases, bats, and balls, and its sliding, stealing, and striking out—make it a flexible, if decidedly misogynistic, metaphor. Consider the unintended sexual undertones of this commentary about baserunning in an 1895 issue of Spalding’s Baseball Guide: “Any soft-brained heavy-weight can occasionally hit a ball for a home run, but it requires a shrewd, intelligent player, with his wits about him, to make a successful base runner.” And so, let’s forget for a moment the glory of a home run, the distance a ball must fly to turn a triple, the hustle and nerve involved in landing a double—forget all of that and instead contemplate briefly the combination of patience, speed, and luck necessary to even make it to first base.
One evening in the thirteenth century, in the secluded study of an Italian castle, Lady Francesca da Rimini found herself sitting alone with her brother-in-law and sometimes-tutor, Paolo. Holding the story of Lancelot and Guinevere open between them, their minds filled with ancient visions of chivalric knights, fair maidens, and rapturous kissing. As such stories go, their “eyes were drawn together, and the hue / Fled from [their] alter’d cheek,” and the young Paolo leaned forward and stole a kiss. And, as such stories go, the unhappily married Francesca returned the gesture with gusto. And then as they sat together, lips locked, their book all but forgotten, the jealous husband stormed into the room and dispatched them both with a twitch of his sword.
Such was the lifespan of a kiss for Italian royalty, whose sordid romances involved arranged marriages, drafty castles, and clandestine study sessions. At least that’s the storyline Dante wants us to remember. And he should know. He met the couple in the second circle of hell, bound together in a blustering gale of lost souls, eternally damned for one weak moment: an ill-fated kiss.
I hope it was a good one.
What constitutes a “good” kiss, anyway? According to Princess Bride author, William Goldman, who claims to have recorded the greatest kiss in history, “the precise rating of kisses” is a “terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy, because although everyone agrees with the formula of affection times purity times intensity times duration, no one has ever been completely satisfied with how much weight each element should receive.” But let’s just say that each element is worth ten points—simple and democratic. Then we get possible individual scores of affection (10) x purity (10) x intensity (10) x duration (10), which gives us 10,000 points—a perfect kiss.
I kissed my wife, Melissa, for the first time while we sat in a small armchair near the front door of the apartment she shared with five other girls during college. We’d just come home from a date, and the room was dark, the apartment quiet, and the chair a little snug for the two of us. The kiss was simple, lingering, electric, and overdue. Five months we’d been dating, and I hadn’t kissed her yet (and yes, I know how this will sound to some readers—prudish, old-fashioned, quaint), but I knew when I met her that I might marry her, had an “uh-oh” moment the first time I saw her, actually felt something inside me whisper, “There is the girl you are going to marry.” Such romantic notions are fine for the heart, but my brain thought the entire arrangement quite absurd, and so I resolved to pay as little attention to passion as I could so it wouldn’t cloud my judgment. Her friends thought we were crazy, and after a while, I’m pretty sure Melissa thought I was crazy. Still, I managed to hold out long enough for my brain to almost completely reconcile itself to my heart, and on that spring night, in the dark quiet of her apartment, I hit a solid single to center field, and the crowd went wild.
Sam wanted to kiss me. Well, okay, not just me, everyone, really. “Greet one another with an holy kiss,” admonishes the New Testament four different times, and in Brazil, Sam’s home country, they apparently mean it. Sam grew up Catholic and had, at every Mass since he could remember, shared “an holy kiss” with his neighbors as part of the service. So when he met a pair of Mormon missionaries on the street in Japan and agreed to attend a Sunday service, he was disappointed when nobody puckered up. After the service, he pulled me aside and said, with a look of genuine pain in his eyes, “Why no kissing?”
I once attended a Catholic Mass in Beaverton, Oregon, for a friend’s First Communion, and at the end of the service, after the torn bread and red wine had passed from lip to lip down the rows of the small congregation, the priest invited all of us to “extend a hand of fellowship” to our neighbors—a firm handshake and the words “peace be with you”—a puritan version of the holy kiss that keeps our friends and neighbors at a safe, sterile distance.
In the Old Testament, God bemoans those who “draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me.” What is this but the description of an empty, soulless kiss with all the trappings of passion and none of its substance?
I remember in elementary school how preoccupied I was with the idea of kissing—a preoccupation born, in part, of Disney movies, prime-time television, and the kisses my parents shared in front of us kids. A kiss meant acceptance, affection, and commitment. But I also remember the girls at school brandishing them like weapons, striking at random, and leaving us boys dizzy with the attention, overestimating the meaning of those kisses as much as the girls underestimated their effect.
Rodin’s famous sculpture The Kiss began life on a main panel of the 1881 version of The Gates of Hell, a nineteen-foot-tall, thirteen-foot-wide set of bronze double doors covered in the writhing bodies of the damned—a tribute to Dante’s Inferno. The embracing figures of The Kiss were meant to depict Francesca and Paolo in the consummate moment of their lustful betrayal, and they were meant to feature prominently in the themes of agony and suffering that so dominated The Gates. But something wasn’t right about the couple, and in subsequent versions of The Gates, Rodin relegated them to a minor position on one of the pilasters and eventually removed them from the portal altogether. What was the problem? Their embrace was too pure, their bodies too full of life, the man’s hands too hesitant and graceful, the woman’s feet all but leaving the ground, the intensity of the kiss lifting her heavenward, ecstatic, rapturous.
Ryabovitch, the hapless protagonist in Anton Chekhov’s 1887 short story, “The Kiss,” is an unsociable military officer with rounded shoulders, a long waist, and “lynx-like side whiskers” who finds himself a wallflower at a dinner party full of beautiful people dancing, making small talk, and playing billiards. Looking for an escape from the uncomfortable crowds, Ryabovitch enters what he thinks is an empty, unlit chamber, only to be accosted by a strange woman who mistakes him for someone else in the darkness. “At last,” she sighs, flinging her arms around Ryabovitch’s neck and kissing him, only to recoil in horror as she realizes her mistake. The accidental couple flees from the room in opposite directions, but the damage is already done. Poor Ryabovitch is smitten.
“His neck seemed anointed with oil,” says the narrator. “And on his left cheek, just by his moustache, there was a faint, pleasant, cold tingling sensation, the kind you get from peppermint drops.” Throughout the night, he is “gripped by an inexplicable, overwhelming feeling of joy,” and the effect lingers for months, distracting him from his duties, filling his mind with irrational fantasies about the girl, about meeting her again, about her perfections, and about the beautiful life they could have together. But as you read on, you realize that Ryabovitch is not so much enamored of the girl but of the kiss itself, the dark room of its genesis, the way it made him feel normal and right and ordinary, and you realize the man has been bamboozled by his own loneliness, deceived into believing that the whole of the world could be found on the soft pout of a woman’s lips.
“If you kissed a pretty face, would you not that very instant lose your freedom and become a slave?” warned Socrates. “Would you not have to spend much money on harmful amusements, and would you not do much which you would despise, if your understanding were not clouded?”
A big part of why I waited so long to kiss Melissa had to do with the number of girls I’d kissed before I met her. Growing up, I chased female approval like a starved puppy after a bowl of kibble, and I measured that approval in a girl’s willingness to pucker up. For several months in middle school, I chose to forgo the bus in favor of a two-mile walk home beside a girl who would occasionally kiss me before saying good-bye and turning down her street. For half a year in high school, I dated a girl with whom I had little in common because one day she walked up to me in the hall and kissed me on the cheek. And once, I skipped out on work and drove three hours from Portland to Seattle to see an old girlfriend on the off-chance that she might have a few kisses left to give. By the time I’d entered my twenties, I’d kissed so many girls in my search for self-affirmation that I’d come to mistrust the gesture altogether.
“Since feeling is first,” wrote E. E. Cummings, “who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you.”
I’ve always sort of known movie theaters were a place that couples went to make out, but I’d never actually seen it until one day in the sixth grade, when I went to a local second-run cinema with some friends. We entered the dark, cramped theater just after the previews had begun and ascended the stairs toward our seats, and that’s when we saw them, illuminated by the bright light of the screen—a man and a woman, maybe in their midthirties, embracing across an armrest. One of the man’s legs protruded into the aisle as he leaned toward the woman, who leaned in just as aggressively, the popcorn almost falling out of her lap. “The film’s barely started,” I remember thinking as I took in the image of the couple—their heads rotating comically, their lips crawling all over each other—and I remember feeling in the air something like desperation emanating from their sprawled feet, their pawing hands, and their roving lips, as if at any moment the floor might give way beneath them.
“The real lover,” said Marilyn Monroe, “is the man who can thrill you by kissing your forehead.”
The 2005 film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice has two endings—one for the British market and one for the American market. In the British version, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth find themselves standing in the misty morning fields outside Longbourn Estate, finally confessing their love for one another. Elizabeth kisses Darcy’s hand, and then the couple touches foreheads and embraces in a way that even Queen Victoria could have tolerated. Then we cut to Elizabeth standing in the library before her bewildered father as she explains that she actually does love Mr. Darcy. The film ends with happy Elizabeth leaving her father to ponder over the peculiar nature of romance. “If any young men come for Mary or Kitty,” he says, “send them in, for I am quite at my leisure.”
The American version adds one more scene, set at some point in the near future, ostensibly on some evening after the wedding. We find the couple in an intimate moment, all the trappings of Victorian propriety removed, with a barefoot Mr. Darcy kneeling beside Elizabeth as she sits on the open-air porch in her nightgown. Torches illuminate the scene as the couple exchanges sweet nothings.
“How are you this evening, my dear?” says Mr. Darcy.
“Very well,” says Elizabeth, taking his hand. “Only, I wish you would not call me ‘my dear.’”
“Why?”
“’Cause it’s what my father always calls my mother when he’s cross about something.”
“What endearments am I allowed?” he asks.
“Well, let me think,” she says. “‘Lizzy’ for every day, ‘my pearl’ for Sundays, and ‘goddess divine,’ but only on very special occasions.”
“And—” he pauses for dramatic effect (Mr. Darcy knows what he’s doing), “what shall I call you when I’m cross? Mrs. Darcy?”
“No. No,” she scoffs in mock disgust. “You may only call me ‘Mrs. Darcy’ when you are completely and perfectly and incandescently happy.” And this is what the Americans in the theater have been waiting for. The couple has been leaning closer and closer together during the entire conversation, and now there’s only one thing left to do.
“And how are you this evening, Mrs. Darcy?” he asks, and kisses her on the forehead. He then repeats “Mrs. Darcy” four more times, kissing her on the nose and on both cheeks and, finally, with the firelight reflecting on their faces and the orchestra reaching a crescendo in the background, their lips meet, and they hold their kiss until the scene fades to black.
The only bit missing is the Barry White album and the bearskin rug.
I think we have Lord Byron to thank for the overwrought Hollywood kiss:
They look’d up to the sky, whose floating glow
Spread like a rosy ocean, vast and bright;
They gazed upon the glittering sea below,
Whence the broad moon rose circling into sight;
They heard the wave’s splash, and the wind so low,
And saw each other’s dark eyes darting light
Into each other—and, beholding this,
Their lips drew near, and clung into a kiss;
Though our first kiss has meant so much to us, if there were annals dedicated to kissing history, I’m fairly certain that ours would not demand more than a line or two: “April 4, 2002: angst-ridden, abstinent couple finally reaches first base in foyer of small Provo, Utah, apartment much to the relief of patient girlfriend. Kiss effectively seals the marriage deal months before actual proposal. Standard Kiss Rating (SKR) based on accepted formula of affection (9) x purity (9) x intensity (8) x duration (7) = 4536 points.” A perfectly average, middle-of-the-pack, everyday kiss, much too tame for Hollywood.
There’s an unfortunate YouTube video of an unfortunate couple from Portland, Oregon, who made a big deal of waiting until the altar to share their first kiss and then invited a reality TV crew to come to the wedding. What’s captured on camera is the entire wedding party looking on as the couple shares a kiss or, rather, a quick series of kisses that make them look a little like two people trying to chew the same piece of gum, or two gerbils trying to drink out of the same water bottle, or, as one YouTube viewer put it, “like a mother penguin feeding her baby.” Watching the video, one does not question the couple’s sincerity—nor their affection—but their imaginations. So wrapped up in the idea of what they thought a first kiss should be, neither of them appears to have thought about what they wanted it to be, and as a result, they come together like robots, soulless automatons whose fumbling embrace is as embarrassing for everyone watching as it is for them. The camera jumps around the audience, showing what must be siblings, cousins, and parents laughing nervously, averting their eyes, and, one imagines, trying to hold back a gag. The most painful shot shows one of the fathers lowering his head into his hand. “You know it was a bad kiss,” wrote one viewer, “when even your dad facepalm’d.”
Rodin believed that creativity and sexuality were intrinsically connected and was always trying to close the gap between clay and flesh. He had what one biographer called “the need to touch,” and that need manifested itself as much in his romantic relationships as in the “kneading, fidgeting, feeling” way he approached his work.
His first love was nineteen-year-old Rose Beuret, a farmer’s daughter who met and fell in love with Rodin in 1864. She posed for him, kept up his studio, and stood with him during the struggles of his early career, but she was eventually relegated to the status of domestic partner, a sort of live-in friend who accompanied him on walks, traveled with him when he wished, and put up for decades with one mistress and casual lover after another—a harem of women that included models, dancers, artists, and aristocrats. Rodin loved women, loved sensuality, and thrived on the creative force he saw emanating from both. So large was the number of women who found themselves entangled in the brambles of Rodin’s casual, sometimes-requited love that some observers began to call him a “sultan” and questioned the sanity of his obsession.
As his relationships with women became more complicated, so did his relationship with the female form in his work. Departing from the relatively tame composition of The Kiss, his sculptures became more openly erotic—limbs contorted in a mix of pleasure and agony, lips pressed against bodies, and torsos bent around torsos. Later in his career, he penciled more than seven thousand drawings, described as female bodies “violently agitated either by the memory of, or the waiting for, sexual pleasure.” As one critic put it, “Rodin was searching for everything that exalts, maddens, contorts and fevers the human body,” and it’s easy to see that same searching in his personal life, easy to see how moving from one woman to another, always with Rose in the background, had made some around him uncomfortable. Rose had been his first muse, had helped ignite something inside him, but she’d become little more than a glowing ember lost and forgotten in the conflagration of his search for artistic and sensual inspiration.
On a sunny day in June, a few months after our first kiss, I asked Melissa to be my wife. The proposal should have been an event, a precisely choreographed display of my burning desire for her. I should have traveled across three states as my cousin did when he surprised his girlfriend, hiding in a gift-wrapped box and bursting forth with ring and roses in hand. I should have taken her aloft in a hot-air balloon and proposed, as my friend Tyler did, with the lush Oregon landscape rolling hundreds of feet below him. I should have at least gotten down on one knee. Instead, I forgot to kneel, forgot the clever words I’d rehearsed in my head, and when she said yes, I forgot to put the ring on the correct hand. The entire event proved anticlimactic, and looking back on that scene, I realize I have forgotten nearly everything about the few minutes after my proposal. I know we talked, and I’m sure we kissed, but the words of any conversation have vanished, and the memory of any fevered kiss has disappeared. Certainly, we felt the gravitational shift in our relationship, shared the collective jitters of a “did that just happen?” moment, but the signs of that shift have not survived—no persistent sensation to trigger the memory, no lasting impression, no cool Chekhovian tingling, nothing that lingers in the neurons of my mind or in the memory of my flesh.
A homunculus is a 3-D human model developed by neuroscientists as a visual representation of the way nerves are distributed throughout the body. All the fleshy parts are there as they would be in a real human being, but those parts are either swollen or shrunken out of natural proportion, depending on how much real estate their respective nerves occupy in the primary motor cortex of the brain. So the arms, legs, and torso—areas of simple, coarse movement that require relatively few neural controls—are diminished, while the hands, fingers, and lips—areas of fine, intricate movement that require complex wiring—are exaggerated on a monstrous scale.
To imagine a homunculus walking down the street is to imagine a pitiful creature with hands the size of washing machines swinging at his side, sunken eyes and diminutive nose hiding behind his gargantuan wet lips that protrude forward, flapping as he walks. To imagine a homunculus walking down the street is to imagine private access to the neural preoccupations of a stranger. To imagine a homunculus walking down the street is to imagine witnessing the silent struggle that engrosses each of us every day, a struggle to engage with the world, to manipulate our surroundings, to touch and be touched, to kiss and to be kissed back.
If you flip through our engagement photos, you’ll find dozens of images of Melissa and me posing for the camera, doing what engagement photos are meant to do: putting us on display for our friends, smiling at all the people who will send us presents, testing the permanence of the photograph against this new theory of us. And for the most part, the photos do this. Here we are leaning in, our heads touching; there I am cradling Melissa in my arms; here she is leaning over my shoulder from behind. In one, we are lying on the ground beside each other, looking up at the camera with green blades of grass stabbing at our ears, and in another, I’m supporting her as we lean against a gray and brown wall of rock. And then there are two in which we are kissing.
In the first, we are the cute couple that grandmothers and neighbors and my parents’ college friends will smile over—the fresh, pure hope for the next generation just a step away from the black tux and the white dress. But in the other, we are something different, and for that reason, it has remained quietly in the back of the album. It’s the same photo shoot—we’re wearing the same clothes, and the same warm colors of the park fill the background—but I sit slightly behind Melissa, with my face turned toward her as she turns back toward me, and our lips have met, our mouths ever so slightly open, the tension palpable in the tendons of our necks.
We were both startled by the image when we went through the proofs, not because the picture made us uncomfortable, but because it was a snapshot of a side of our relationship we hadn’t talked much about, let alone shared with others. This image from a carefully crafted photo shoot designed to capture the prospects of our happy future instead froze in time a rare moment of passionate expression in our otherwise chaste courtship. I remember laughing with Melissa about the prospect of sending off that photo in all of our announcements and the surprise we pictured on people’s faces, and I also remember liking the image for its honesty—for its subtle confession that despite the role a traditional wedding has in preserving, promoting, and embellishing certain ideas about romance, chivalry, and purity, at the heart of every love affair is an animal passion that can, and perhaps should, make the outside observer at least a little uncomfortable.
At nineteen years old, I spent two years living in Japan as a Mormon missionary—long enough to start thinking seriously about what it would be like to date a Japanese girl, even if, as a missionary, I knew I’d never have the chance. I remember wondering how you’d woo a girl in a foreign language, what you might say, how, without a mutual cultural footing, one would even begin to offer a compliment, suggest a date, or steal a kiss. Even after living for two years in the country, my lips could barely manage the language, let alone anything else they might be used for.
Until the U.S. occupation in the 1940s, kissing was not a customary part of romantic relationships in Japan. As a rule, couples did not express affection in public—no hand-holding, no romantic strolls, no cuddling on a blanket in the park. Kissing could get you arrested. Apparently, even in the pleasure districts of geishas and prostitutes, kissing wasn’t “part of the repertoire.” Considered unsanitary at best and flat-out obscene at worst, kissing was cut from most imported American cinema, and during the lead-up to the war, kissing was derided as an example of rampant Western perversion. In the 1930s, French officials wanted to bring Rodin’s The Kiss to Tokyo, but Japanese officials would have nothing to do with the now world-famous statue of Francesca and Paolo. To be sure, it wasn’t the nakedness of the couple but their mouthy embrace that presented the Japanese officials with such a moral dilemma. Trying to accommodate the French, they even came up with a compromise in which they would agree to exhibit the sculpture as long as they could cover the kissing heads with a cloth. But Paris rejected the offer; morally, the French just couldn’t allow it.
During college, a friend of mine named Brandon started dating Nozomi—a striking woman from Osaka with panther-black hair and a name that means “desire.” Like me, Brandon had served as a missionary in Japan, and like me, he had zero experience with the Japanese syntax and grammar of relationships. But unlike me, he’d found himself a persuasive reason to learn. Nozomi had lived in the states for several years and spoke fluent English, but her Japanese had the raw, earthy flavor of her native corner of Japan—the interior region southwest of Tokyo that the Japanese call Kansai or Kinki. They dated in Japanese and English, but Brandon was determined to impress her with some of her own dialect. He ordered a book online, and from it he learned to speak with the hypercasual inflection of the region, and the surprise on Nozomi’s face the first time he used it was enough to know he’d scored the points he was hoping for. But the book itself, with its red-banded cover and its title in large white letters, proved more of a problem. He read it between classes while attending school at BYU’s famously conservative Idaho campus, but he kept the cover wrapped in brown paper, hoping to avoid sideways glances from pious strangers who might wonder about a man reading a book titled Kinki Japanese.
The other day, Melissa and I took our children to the park, so they could bounce themselves off the play structure while we chatted in the cool breeze of a spring morning. We wore shorts and T-shirts, and Melissa stood on a balance beam in front of me with her arms around my neck. We stood at eye-level and shared the kind of forgettable small talk born of contentment and the distraction of everyday life. But while standing there in that casual embrace, remarking on the silliness of our boys, the unexpected pleasantness of the weather, and the to-do list of the day that lay before us, I looked at her face and saw her again, as I sometimes do, the way I saw her when we first met. Ten years of life together—a decade made mostly of raising children, paying bills, and folding laundry—all washed away, and the angle of her jaw, the almonds of her eyes, and the soft edge of her no-nonsense beauty appeared at once novel and irresistible to me, and so I leaned in to kiss her, cutting her off midsentence.
She kissed me back in the pleasant-but-impatient way she does when she’s in the middle of something and can’t understand why I want to stop and kiss her. And I wanted to say in response to her perfunctory peck, “Listen: you are this mysterious creature who surprises me every day, and you make me want to write bad poetry and buy exploding bouquets of purple irises on the way home from work and turn up sappy country music ballads when they come on the radio, and you must know that I love you, and you must know right now, and words are too slow, and not enough, and what else can I do but kiss you?” But instead I said, simply, “Hey, I need a real kiss,” and she said back, incredulous, “We’re talking,” and dismissed my kiss altogether, confused as usual at my timing, unaware that “talking” is exactly what I’d been trying to do.
“A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point,” said Mistinguett, the French starlet who danced and sang at the Moulin Rouge and the Casino de Paris, and appeared in more than forty-six films between 1908 and 1917. She was right about the acute power of a kiss, but it can do more than punctuate: it can apologize, forgive, confess, confuse, demand, offend, remind, embrace, and let go. Each kiss is its own language, with its own set of rules, its own accents and dialects, its own evolution and history, its own risk of growing old, becoming obsolete, and dying off.
The Kiss is among the most famous sculptures in the world, and yet Rodin thought the couple too “conventional,” was displeased with them, and believed the composition uninspiring. “The embrace of The Kiss is undoubtedly very attractive,” he wrote in 1907, “but I have found nothing in this group.” He believed The Kiss too formulaic, too scripted. He wanted art to “open up wide horizons to daydreams,” and, at least to him, that simple kiss was little more than a highly academic retelling of a tired love story that transcended nothing, and, frankly, he’d had enough of it.
I think it’s no coincidence that the punishment meted out to Francesca and Paolo for their illicit romance was to be bound together eternally in perpetual embrace, their passions never forgotten and yet never fulfilled.
Brandon tells me that after he and Nozomi married, they lived in the United States and kissed and held hands in public the way any typical American couple might, but when they moved back to Japan for a few years, things slowly began to change. Each time she held his hand, she felt more and more exposed, and when they kissed, she felt the eyes of every person over forty bearing down on her.
It became too much, and she began to pull away occasionally when he leaned in. Brandon took the rejection in stride though, choosing to tease Nozomi rather than get offended. And now that they live stateside again, they’re back to kissing “the way we used to.” But Brandon still can’t watch a Japanese TV romance without chuckling. “For the entire series, there’s no PDA,” he tells me, “and at the very end, when a couple finally ‘gets together,’ they hold hands!” He describes the typical final shot of a couple sitting side by side, interlocking fingers for the first time while they look off into the sunset. His description reminded me that I’d seen shots like that on Japanese television—closing scenes that baffled me, the long shot of the “amorous” couple complete with overdone music and close-up angles of their hands slowly moving toward each other with what, to my American eyes, seemed like all the passion and intensity of a bonsai growth spurt.
Melissa has never been terribly comfortable with public displays of affection. When we were dating, if I pulled her into my arms during an evening stroll, she’d hug me back and maybe even kiss me briefly, but then she’d pull away. Even after we were married, it took some convincing for her to kiss me like she meant it when she dropped me off at work and said good-bye. In a moment of exasperation, I once asked her whose opinion mattered more, the people walking by or mine. She’s gotten more comfortable with it over the years, but even around the house, I sometimes feel my homunculus is showing, that I’m all hands and lips and starving for affection, while she seems quite in control of herself, even confused a bit over what all the fuss is about. If passion is an animal best kept on a leash, then hers must trot obediently at her side, while mine drags me tripping and rolling down the street.
Needless to say, she’s had some reservations about the writing of this book.
“For a kiss’s strength I think,” said Lord Byron, “It must be reckon’d by its length.”
In ten years of marriage, our first kiss has become one of those moments we relive, the way couples do, tapping into our intimacy archive, trying to rearticulate the past through a sort of living bibliography of the life we’re writing together. It’s on the top-ten list of our highlight reel, a touchstone for how far we’ve come, a measure of what we’re capable of, and, sometimes, a reminder of what we’re missing.
Though Rodin was never pleased with his first version of The Kiss and dismissed it as a mere nod to the academy, I wonder whether the sculpture had more personal significance than he let on. Certainly many critics have suggested autobiographical undertones in Rodin’s more sexually charged sculptures. I Am Beautiful, for instance, depicts a desperate and straining man as he clings to the body of an indifferent, almost disdainful, woman, who appears to be rising up and away from the ground, her face turned away, her body almost out of reach. Another, titled Minotaur, mimics the seated position of The Kiss but lacks any of the mutual passion. Instead, a half-man, half-bull has accosted a woman and pulled her into his embrace; the wincing woman leans away, repulsed by animal lust. To many critics, these sculptures betray in Rodin an internal struggle about his relationship with women and may suggest that the sculptor was as frustrated and conflicted by his sexual desires as he was inspired by them.
But if that is true, what of The Kiss, with its subdued, perhaps idealized, passion? The image is not prudish but reserved and suggests a hint of the sacred, of the intimate and personal. A celebration? Yes, but not a carnival. A burning desire? Absolutely, but not a frenzied lust. If there is an autobiographical hint hidden in that famous embrace, what would it be? A nod to Rose, his first love? To love itself, perhaps, and the simple, seemingly uncomplicated nature of its beginnings? It’s impossible to tell, but what’s certain is this: The Kiss stands center stage at any discussion of Rodin’s erotic work—not as his most sensual sculpture but as the genesis point from which his sexual energy emerged.
Of the kissing I did as a child, none of it stands out in my memory as more than self-serving curiosity, and I’m not sure that it would be realistic to expect anything else. It’s a Hollywood notion, I think, that as children we can be capable of anything approaching real romantic love. Rather, I think the experimenting I did, that most of us did, was more akin to putting a marble up my nose, punching my sister, and pulling the dog’s tail—just one category in a long series of short, clumsy essays in owning a body. Even as teenagers, our kisses can mean only one thing—“I want you, and I need you to want me.” And it’s becoming clear now that the most significant kisses Melissa and I have shared are the ones that transcend that sense of codependency, the ones least tied to my preconceived notions of passion, of romance, of self-worth, the ones that have opened my mind, as Rodin might say, to those “wide horizons to daydreams” that too often seem unattainable.
There are times when I have wondered why every kiss couldn’t be this way, but perhaps I’m coming to know the answer—perhaps a transcendent kiss, like a transcendent sculpture, is not something we decide to create but something we arrive at—that moment for the artist when clay is more than clay, and for the lover when flesh is more than flesh, and for both of them, when the distinction no longer matters.