“Every Man She Kisses Dies”
Bring on the sports heroes and the U.S. senators and the middle management bosses and the bad-seed uncles and the boyfriends your mama brought home from the cheap bars for the night, bring them to me and let them put their hands on me and their lips on mine and I’ll kill the sons of bitches, giving them what they want. I might as well. Because the men I love, the ones who come to me gentle and speak sweetly and take it slow and look me in the eyes and try their hardest to do it right, they all die, as it is. From the touch of my lips.
He’s gone for the moment, into the bathroom. He’s surely afraid. He’s so gentle and he must be afraid. I haven’t kissed him yet. The room is white. The sun is coming through the window and the glare from the walls blinds me. I have nowhere to look, it is so pure and so empty. I listen for him. He clears his throat. Even that sound from him, coming through the closed door, has a tiny trembling in it. He is afraid. So am I.
Did I catch this from somebody? In some unprotected moment of passion? It’s possible. How do you protect yourself from passion? And if you can protect yourself, how can it be passion? Must passion be gone from this world forever? Is that what we have to expect from each other if you suddenly find a man looking you in the eyes and you’re sure he’s seeing you and you can see him, real clear, and he says here is my body, take it, from my love for you, and I say here is my own body, I give you the same. If you are to really love each other, do you have to want this thing made of rubber between your sweetest flesh and his? If you find a moment on this earth when there is passion and there is love, shouldn’t this barrier between the two of you make you sadder than death?
It does me. And it made me that sad even before I knew my own curse was worse by far. I have nightmares — they seem like nightmares but maybe they’re just visions of the right thing to do in a world like this. I am about to kiss a man and we both really feel something between us and I say, Wait a minute. I go into the drawer in the nightstand and I pull out a foil pack and I tear it open and it’s wax lips, big red wax lips, and I put them on and I murmur okay out of the corner of my mouth and we kiss.
The thing is, I believe in God. I still do. My daddy was a preacher and he would talk about the lips of a strange woman dripping like a honeycomb and her mouth being smoother than oil but her end being bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, he would say, and her steps take hold on hell. It was from Proverbs that he was quoting, and he quoted it about once a year in our church and I would always remember it. Later on, though, I would read farther in Proverbs and I would hear the voice of those bad women and they would talk to the men passing by and they would sound to me like they were simply full of yearning and love. I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt, one of them says. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloe, and cinnamon. Come, she says, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with love. The Bible says the house of this woman is the way to hell, but I’ve thought about her often. And about God. I want to ask Him: What’s wrong with seeking solace with love?
I went on to disappoint my daddy till he wouldn’t even talk with me when he was dying. But I went to the hospital anyway and he turned his face from me and I went out into the hall and I watched my mother bend to him and they kissed on the lips. He would kiss her on the lips at night in our house, all my childhood long. He would do that. I think I forgave him his ideas for a long time more than I should have because I would see him kiss my mother on the lips.
I did not become a woman like the ones in the book of Proverbs. They were prostitutes and all I did was love the men I wanted to love, even if sometimes I made some bad choices. He knew I kissed them and sought solace with them. He would quote these verses in his church and look at me when I was there and think of me when I wasn’t, and there was no difference in his mind between what I did and what he believed was an abomination.
I went away to the city. The big city, Chicago. And I suppose I’ve received my answer from God. He’s fixed it so that I kill with my kiss. Even a man, I must assume, like Philip. A good and sweet man like him. The wood floors shine between me and the door to the bathroom. One large room. Utterly empty. All white. The sunlight is white, too, and in the great splash of it on the floor, there is not a single scuff mark. We are barefoot. We are wearing white linen. I am sitting in the center of the floor on a white down cushion. I think Philip loves me, and we have not kissed. He knows about me.
I’m not entirely sure when this began. I think it was up in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. It was when Daddy was alive and I went up there with a man named John. A poet at heart. And on the first day in some lodge on some lake up there beyond Oshkosh we ran into a man and woman from Daddy’s church. An hour later Daddy was on the phone.
“We haven’t talked much in recent times,” he said.
“I know,” I said.
“I’m not going to quote scripture to you,” he said.
“Good for you,” I said. “‘He that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame. And he that rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot.’” That was Proverbs too.
I heard him squeak in rage on the other end. But still he didn’t do what came so natural to him. I felt a sneaky little admiration for him at that. But he did pick up my words. “Do you see yourself as a scorner and a wicked man?” he asked.
“Not a wicked man.”
“Person then,” he said.
“No.”
“I was afraid that was so.”
“So why did you call?”
“Because I love you.”
“You sure it’s not because I’m embarrassing you in front of your friends?”
“It’s not their souls I’m worried about,” he said.
“Bye, Daddy,” I said, though I didn’t hang up the phone. Neither did he. He didn’t say a word. For a long time we just sat there on the phone listening to each other breathe. He wasn’t going to be the one to do this. So finally I did. I put the phone on the cradle as softly as I could.
That night I was with John. He took me in a rowboat out onto the lake and there was an enormous red moon coming up over the trees. God was mooning us on the lake. John was rapturous over it. He started quoting poems, one after another, until I said, “Quiet. Please.” I said it very gently and he obeyed without a flicker of hurt on his face and I appreciated him for that. “I want to hear you breathe,” I said. And he drew near and put his face close to mine and I listened to him. Perhaps we dozed, as well, because a long time passed, and when we were conscious, we did nothing but listen and drift. Then the moon was very high. It had shrunk above us but it had grown much more intense. It was full and silver and cold. He’d made no attempt to touch me, though we had rented one room with one bed. He was a patient man, and I was filled with longing to touch him. So I put my hands on his cheeks and drew him to me and kissed him.
He sighed deeply and began quoting Chinese poetry. Written by Li Po, he said, a man in love with the moonlight. Then John turned and the image of the moon was floating right beside us in the water and he said, “Li Po would kiss the moon from love.” And John leaned out of the boat and bent his face toward the moon in the water and there was only the slightest roll of the boat and he was gone.
“John,” I said and I leaned out and waited for him to come up, tossing the water out of his face and hair and laughing. But he never reappeared. Not even to flail around and go down again. Nothing. And I feared at once that I had done it.