Rainy nights in late winter are a time for watching ghosts in the mirror. On rainy nights here I can look out to the river and feel melancholy wash over me.
I was thinking about kisses today. A kiss is a simple thing, and sharing kisses is how most of us first began to learn to be a lover. A kiss is a first step in the dance, a first touch of flesh and breath. It's easy to think about kisses tonight, to think about places where I've kissed lovers for the first time. A parked car, the terrace of a bar, the rooftop of a residence hall at university. Walking hand-in-hand through a street of small, hip shops. In the doorway of a Long Island Railroad car. At an arrivals gate at an aerodrome. Each kiss is a gateway to stories, to pieces of my life, to the faces of lost loves in the mirror.
I remember a girl turning to me in that train car doorway and kissing me hard and saying, I love you...or something.
I remember a rooftop bar on a late-September night, with Talking Heads' "The Lady Don't Mind" playing on the sound system--- looking out at the city lights and then half-turning to kiss the girl who was pressed against me.
I can remember those things tonight. But tonight I am feeling my age, and I'm feeling aware of how time runs out. I'd love to hear that Talking Heads song again. The rains are coming in from the north and west and it does occur to me how long it's been since I kissed anyone. What's going through my mind is that I've forgotten how to kiss.
Once upon a time, a Young Companion kissed me for a while in a doorway and told me that she'd never been kissed like that, and that she understood why girls liked older men, why girls she knew liked kissing me. That was a long time ago now, and I lived off that one compliment for years and years.
I may just talk about kisses for a bit. There are ways to talk about kisses without feeling ghosts in the air, and I have to find those ways.
Let's just admit that I've always liked kisses hard and deep. I've liked sharing breath and wetness in a kiss. I've loved the games of passing an ice cube back and forth in a kiss 'til it melts. I've liked sharing a mouthful of champagne in a kiss.
Long, long ago, far back in another century, I first read about sharing wetness in a kiss. I didn't hear the old term "swapping spit" until I went off to university. But I do recall reading about characters in novels sharing saliva in a kiss. I know that a couple of years ago there was a whole thing in porn videos of characters spitting in one another's faces or into each other's open mouths. That's a more deliberate thing, and it traffics in the idea of humiliation more than domination. But what I was thinking of tonight was a particular book, a novelization of an Italo-French erotic film from the early 1970s, something not-quite-hardcore called "Female Animal". I can't recall where I found the novel, though it was almost certainly in some used-paperback store, the kind of place that had its shelves and tables stuffed with yellowing mass-market paperbacks for twenty-five cents each. I don't recall if ever I saw the film version of "Female Animal", though I may have. I remember the "novelization", though. The cover was white--- I remember that ---with the image of a topless girl, her breasts hidden by long, straight hair. She was holding a large cat to herself and trying to look sultry. The cover was taken from the poster from the film. I have no clue at all who the actress was. I suppose she'd be in her sixties now--- a memento mori thing to realize.
The plot of the film (and its novelization) was simple enough. It was set on the Italian Riviera, and the heroine was a village girl of seventeen or eighteen who was desperate to leave poverty and boredom behind and go off to the bright lights and high life. I suspect that it was called "Female Animal" because there was a fairly brief passage where she's alone in bed and unable to bring herself to orgasm and coaxes her cat into licking her. I have no idea how that was handled in the film. What I do recall is that the author always describes her sharing saliva when she kisses anyone.
I read that, read about the character's kisses, and resolved to try that with someone very soon. The first girl I did do that with squirmed and made a face when I passed saliva into her mouth, then passed her own back to me very deliberately and intensely. I remember how it felt, and how amazing it was when I was young.
These days, though, I find myself freezing up with worry that I've forgotten how to kiss, that I've lost whatever sense of timing, pressure, rhythm, use of lips and tongue I may ever have known. It's Carnevale season here in my city, and it's a time for masks and kissing strangers on parade-filled streets, and I can't imagine kissing anyone this season. I really do think I'd be afraid to kiss anyone, afraid to try, afraid of not being able to kiss to any effect, afraid of no longer what to do.
I suppose it's the rain that makes me think of these things.
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