The Kiss

“Physicists tell us that the solidity of matter is an illusion, more like a vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like a musical note. “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.”

― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

While my wife was still living, we would spend most every Sunday afternoon at the Museum of Art. We would drift through the cavernous halls, but always start and end with a life-sized sculpture, a nude couple in white marble. Embraced in the stone, their lips are barely apart.

The nudes are not just chiseled away, but formed in a heat of creativity; and not just creativity, but with the artist’s hands knowing how to bring out the proclivity of the lovers. We humans are animals. I remember myself and my wife only lasting so long. We soon found ourselves at home, the silk beige curtains drifting over our bed, the slow air in the diminishing afternoon cooling our entangled bodies.

“Excuse me. I don’t mean to interrupt, but you seem moved by the sculpture?” The voice is in a French accent and is low throated, a melodic call like nothing I’ve heard before.

I turn. Smiling at me is a striking young woman. She has a face set in ivory, close-cropped straw colored hair beneath a black beret, an effervescence, a glow. Her silk white dress seems not to drape, but to float. She is at the peak of her youth, her skin flawless, her lips an intrepid red.

“Moved? Yes. I suppose I am,” I say. “My wife and I used to come here.” And long ago, I think to myself. Before my gray hair, before the wrinkles lined my face in crevasses, and long before my body ached in the morning, my parts worn out. Long before I became an old man.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to prod.” She steps back, a spiked red high heel clicks, an echo on the terrazzo floor.

She seems embarrassed by not meeting my eye, or is she just shy, or is she something else? Above her red high heels, her legs are supple, strong, an athlete’s legs. “You’re not prodding,” I reply. “It’s been many years since my wife passed and we used to come here.”

“Do you know what they say?” she asks. Her eyes are teasing.

“No. What do they say?” She is looking at me as if I’m not old, not at all like I’ve been used to, with young people meeting my eye, only to quickly glance away, avoiding the image of an age they dread to become. Because she is encouraging me, holding my eyes, I sense the memories of a young man.

And now her eyes flare with me taking the bait, daring me. “A man who is struck by this sculpture needs to be kissed. Once in place, he needs to prepare to be kissed.” She flushes and turns away. There is a moment, a beat, and then her eyes stay on the sculpture. I have to strain to hear. “I will tell you I know more than you know. We feel the same when we see the two lovers together. I’ve watched you many times when you come to the museum. You think you are old, but age is only a perception. I see you marvel at the detail of the foot, the exquisite shape, the entire form following its function in honest anatomy. We both see, just by the angle of the woman’s neck, the artist has captured the seduction. She is getting ready to accept the kiss, or to bring the kiss to her, depending on the interpretation. We both are the same, I think.” She turns back to me. “So yes, maybe you need to be kissed.”

I laugh. “You've been watching me? Will it be you I’ll be kissing?”

She places her hands in front of her and rubs them together in a demure shyness, her eyes downcast, but then peeks up at me playfully. “I don’t want you thinking me forward.”

I laugh again. “You ARE a tease. Will you join me with the impressionists?”

“Do you insist?’

“I can tell you’re a free woman, you don’t have to. You have to be willing.” What am I saying? These are not an old man’s words, old man’s thoughts. But still I’m excited, enthralled, to be in this woman’s presence.

She looks at me as if I’m young. “You’re handsome and I shall pretend you are from Marseille. There are times a man should take control of the direction. So you lead the way.”

One particular painting draws our attention. “I know this one,” she says. “The bold blues and swirling yellows in the sky are enough to overwhelm the senses. They are not what the stars look like, but how they feel. Above the town, the yellow globes loom in the blue night. They are as a living presence, inviting you to enter the painting. You could live forever in this painting.”

I think of the artist. “The painting is alive. Do you think you have to be disturbed to paint this, a genius at the same time?”

She stares at the painting with her right hand to her chin. I notice her neck, a small place pulsating with her heart rate, just ever so slightly. “I think the painting shows a deep loneliness, the loneliness of desiring the company of a lover. Look at the wheat. It’s oversized. That’s the meaning of renewal, a re-joining once again at the end of a harvest. The man must rejoin the woman who is alone and needs him. Calls him. Toys with him.” She takes a breath and explains. “The painting has an ending of season. The moon and the grain are playing a game, a fantasy. They perform for the stars who look down as an audience. The stage is the land and the play on the stage is the moon and the grain teasing each other.

“How do you mean teasing with each other?”

“They are playing with their own sexuality in the painting. They never touch. But while the moon and grain are just having fun, the stars are the human condition looking down. It’s a tragedy though. The moon and grain are never truly together. How sad don’t you think?”

She leans into the painting past me to look more closely. The warmth of her neck, the paleness of her shoulder blade, her back hidden by the silk of her white dress. I smell the hint of a night’s rose, the floral of her skin emanating.

Standing back, I'm confused, flustered, my face burning.

“You’re blushing!” Her index finger makes a quick stroke on the bottom of my chin. “Why do you blush?”

“You know why,” I say.

She looks only at the painting again in response. She speaks softly again. “Are you struck? Have we been lovers in the age of Troy? Am I the face that launched a thousand ships?”

I can’t help laughing once again, but it’s forced. “You play with me. Are you Helen of Troy?”

She meets my eye, curious. “No, I’m not Helen. Of course not. But people pretend sometimes, don’t they? You have the poise of a prince? So you could be Paris, the prince. Do you like to fantasize? I bet you do, I can tell. Imagine the fun we could have. I picked you because you will need to fantasize, to imagine there is no physical form, to go where we’re going. After we’ve known each other better of course. We don’t want to rush into anything.” She’s distracted to across the room and shimmers away. “It’s the enigma,” she says. “Look.”

Across the vestibule a dozen museum gatherers drift. Yet the eyes of the painting draw us, serene, knowing, and only to us. We do not walk but feel as if floating into the room, like the casting of a spell.

She joins me by my side while the woman in the painting gazes back. “The enigma is a paradox, a dichotomy between smiling and not smiling.” 

“But she’s not smiling,” I say, and lean in to examine the eyes of the painting closely. There is a natural green haze, a landscape behind the portraiture of the woman. She appears as royalty, perhaps in Italy, the Renaissance.

We pause in silence, neither breaking the eroticism of standing close. As if blind, I can feel her next to me, and my heartrate builds as the moment stretches. I can tell we both sense the other’s closeness, but neither of us moves. We each let the moment suspend in time. How long can we last? When I think I can no longer hold, the touch from the woman’s hand takes my own, and although I hold my place as a statue, my pulse hits a crescendo, my chest aches. I feel only her hand moving in an intimate gesture, a tenderness. It is strange to say, but I am paralyzed. I can neither break my hand away nor move my fingers into hers. A coolness from her fingertips teases, caresses. She lifts my hand. At first with her fingers and then with her eyes she explores the tips of my fingers, explores slowly. A tingling down the tips of my fingers, the joints, my palm, her warm breath. Finally, I grip her fingers in return. The bravest I’ve ever been, I take her hand and hold the coolness of it to my cheek, kiss the back of her palm. Her breath intakes sharply, and she takes her hand back.

“You are a man who can live forever if you only believe you can. Would you like to live the dream of the everlasting, your body left behind?”

I feel dizzy, ungrounded. I lose myself in the present. For a moment there is no past, no future. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Nothing is as it is,” she says. “The woman in the portraiture only smiles when you look at your periphery. Try it.”

I angle to the side of the painting and let the image form to the side of my view, but only by consciously thinking about the edge of my vision. The woman is smiling. When I look squarely back again at the painting, the smile is gone.

She laughs. “You’re looking back and forth, looking for an answer. Sometimes the best answers are not when you face them, but when you approach from the side. Let the answers come to you. That is how we leave behind what we don’t need, the stress of the physical world.”

“You speak as if you know the painting?”

She pauses to look at the painting. “I don’t know it well. The woman in the painting seems honestly depicted, not beautiful in the classic sense of the time. She carries a calmness, maybe by the way she holds one hand over the other. Do you see it? Her hands are relaxed. I think she has a peace and understanding of knowing there is an afterlife. She’s staring into our soul.”

“So you believe in an afterlife?”

She smiles and then settles on a bench. “I think the woman in the painting does.”

I join beside her and turn into her. If I’m less than honest, I will lose her. Her eyes stare with patience into mine. I lean further into her; my face is higher than hers on the bench. She glances at my lips. As we start to kiss, she leans back and wraps her left arm behind my neck and brings me to her. Holding her steady, my right hand is on her hip.

“My dearest,” she whispers into my ear. “Are you ready? We cannot kiss quite yet, not until you are young forever.”

She leads me to the marble sculpture, the nudes. “Try to reach your hand into the sculpture,” she says. “Try to be one with the man. You must believe in your immortality, in your lack of a physical form, for the effect to work.”

This does not feel right. My head aches, it spins. “No. Enough now. We had some fun and you made me feel young again. Thank you for that. But I must go now.” I sense the man in the sculpture like a vacuum, pulling the air of my body into him. “No,” I say, “I’m not ready for this!” I feel being pulled into the marble, my breathing moving into him.

“You must relax,” she says. “You will have everlasting life. That is my promise. Let the sculpture embrace you, join with you.”

I step out from the sculpture, and as I do I can feel my heart ripping from my body, pulling me back. “This is not right,” I say. “You misunderstand me!”

“It’s too late,” she says. “We are lovers. You are the one I’ve been watching.”

My chest is burning as my heart rate spikes, my back contorts in pain as my spine seems to slip. “No!”

As my chest explodes in my chest, I merge as two fogs coming together in the marble stone of the man, like entering into a misting white. I now find myself sitting where he sits, my body has become his, his has become mine. Within the sculpture I can see my old man’s dead body lying on the terrazzo. How can I be in the sculpture? Is this my afterlife?

The woman has entered the marble sculpture next to me. We’ve taken our place. I’m leaned in to kiss, but know I will never touch her lips. I am a living stone.

“You have what you desired,” she says in my mind. “And I have my loving partner. But we were never meant to kiss, only tease.”

Works cited:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kiss_(Rodin_sculpture)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night (Vincent Van Gogh)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci)