The Kiss

Their lips are poised to meet in a classic gesture of pure desire. Her lips are soft and vulnerable, easily bruised, his more determined, principled, their mouths slightly open as though to ask a question. Do they know each other? It doesn’t matter. Only the imminent meeting of their yearning mouths matters. There is something gravely intimate about the moment, something almost sacred in its graceful choreography.

He is handsome in a rugged honest way; she is radiantly beautiful. A disembodied narrative voice is quietly cataloging: her heaving bosom, her flushed throat, her fluttering eyelids, her supple hips. Which could be where the man’s unseen hands are, just below the frame, these his general impressions. Are their lips moving? Perhaps they are whispering something to each other. Or maybe they simply like the feel of moving lips, brushing softly against their own.

The voice speaks now of the frame’s grip on a composed reality, its power to clasp and hold an image abstracted from the ceaseless flow of time, as the two gaze longingly into each other’s eyes. A tear glitters in one of hers. His, shadowed by the brim of his fedora, betray an infinite sadness, and we too feel sad; how can we not? In their eyes—lenses facing in and out at the same time—we see what they see and feel what they feel. We are inside their kiss, tasting the proximity of their lips, suffering their anguish, their ardor, their aroused anatomies (there are chemicals involved, hormones). We know nothing about them beyond this embrace, but we sense that, whoever they are, they are about to part.

Yes, something is ending. This is a farewell kiss. The steady rightward drift of the poignant image toward the looming edge (she seems about to swoon!) confirms this. As does the gentle voice, speaking now of the panoramic frame’s generous plenitude, its sensuous embodiment of the rational—or maybe the irrational?—as it succumbs to the roar of city traffic. Their lips have not yet met, but too late, they are crossing the threshold of the frame and disappearing into the obscure uncertainties beyond, swept away by the noisy rush of a congested city throughway. As hundreds of cars and trucks race by in both directions, brakes shrieking, horns and sirens blaring, a phantasmal image of the parting lovers appears on them, as though to say such a vision is not easily dismissed. We catch intermittent glimpses on the traffic’s flickering blur of their eyes, their mouths, their hats—though without the comforting integrity of the frame: It is impossible to know what is the container, what the contained. But then the traffic too slides away into the emptiness at the ad­vancing edge, carrying the ghostly lovers with it, the automotive roar sinking to a background hum, and then that dies too.

The throughway unravels to an empty country road, spooling through a bleak desert landscape like the thread of time. It is utterly silent out here, but for a soft breath of wind and the distant caws of predatory birds. After miles and miles of flat emptiness, a lone structure appears on the side of the road, a building long since abandoned, its roof fallen in, its doors boarded up, its broken marquee atilt. There is an old poster, yellowed with time, affixed to the wall under the marquee. It advertises a movie called The Kiss, and the two parting lovers are pictured on it in the same iconic scene of pathos and desire seen before.

One can hear, like wind chimes, the faint echoey tinkle of carousel music. As we approach the tattered poster, the image on it piv­ots, and we now face the slightly crossed eyes of the woman, gazing up wistfully into the face of the man, just beyond her nose, his back to us. She is still dressed in glowing white, and he is hatted, but the rest of his clothing is gone, his pale buttocks being used now as a screen for the projection of the original image: their rapt gaze, their yearning mouths, she on the verge of swooning. It is like a frame within a frame, reminding us of the rugged persistence of imbedded memory. The picture is grainy and water-spotted, adding to its romantic old-movie atmosphere, though that may be due in part to the texture of the screen. The darkness between his thighs seems to beard her, and their embrace is cloven and dis­torted, but their longing gaze across the dark divide still compels attention, and cues our own emotions. Their melancholy is again our melancholy, their ardor our ardor, the screen’s imperfections only augmenting the tender gravity of the moment.

But then it is over. The projected embrace recedes, as does its screen and the man who provided it, the wistful woman too—they all shrink away, as if to say we have seen all there is to be seen. There is only the desolate country road, the ruined cinema, and soon they are gone too—in the dreadful silence, a distant snap of elastic against flesh can be heard, a rip, a gasp—leaving only the ever vaster emptiness of the desert, stretching in all directions as far as the eye can see, like an image of the end of time.