Kissing

Photograph by Tony Hisgett

Oh! let me live for ever on those lips!

The nectar of the gods to these is tasteless.

—John Dryden

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 for more. 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...