Excerpt from Kissing You

from WHAT I WANTED MOST OF ALL

I’ve wanted to achieve things. I’ve wanted at one time or another to lose weight or increase my vocabulary or make a lot of money in a hurry, and when I was a boy I wanted most of all to stop masturbating. In short, I’ve wanted to change my life, I’ve always wanted that, and it’s a hard thing to change your life, you think it’s a matter of willpower, that the reason why your life has never changed significantly is because you’ve never really put your mind to it, you’ve never made the required sacrifices, but then you do put your mind to it, you become obsessed with changing your life and make a concerted effort, and your life doesn’t change, not one bit, and that’s not encouraging.

My father once told me a story about going into a public rest room and seeing a man with only one arm – he was standing at an adjacent sink – and my father realized that he’d seen this same man back at the urinal, only he hadn’t noticed the missing are, or he hadn’t noticed that there was a missing arm, either because he’d seen only the man’s “good” side or because he’d been too busy minding his own penis. My father felt sorry for the man and offered to help him wash his single hand, because it’s not easy to wash your hand when that hand it your only hand, and the man was touched by my father’s gesture, or at least that’s what my father said. I can’t remember my father ever describing the actual washing of the hand, but he was always a very thorough man, and I can imagine him sandwiching the man’s hand between the two of his own, and scrubbing it first with soap, then rinsing it and carefully drying it with paper towels, though it’s also possible that my father used only one of his hands and that he worked in conjunction with the man in washing his hand, that together they made up a full set of hands, one squeezing the other or however it is that hands get washed, and either this strategy failed in its objective, because the man wasn’t at all accustomed to the idea of hands working in unison since he’d never had two hands, or the strategy succeeded and yet reminded the man of a time when he had had both hands intact, which might’ve also led him to recall the way one hand had once worked, however unconsciously, in partnership with the other, and in that case I suspect that the man left the rest room not only with a clean hand but with a deep sense of sorrow, having been reminded in such a practical and sensual way of what was no longer his. I’m mentioning the breadth of possibilities, I’m wondering what actually did happen, because I really don’t know for sure, and because I think it’s possible that my father made up the whole story, or maybe my father did offer to help the one-armed man but was rebuffed, or maybe my father washed the man’s hand but then couldn’t help washing his own two hands with unusual care, contagion being no less compelling an idea than love. But in any case what now seems significant to me is that I never could believe my father’s account, even at that age – I think I must have been twelve or thirteen – even then I knew enough to wonder why my father was telling me the story in the first place, and I knew the story cast my father in a favorable light and that what I wanted most of all – it kept coming back to this – I wanted a father who washed a one-armed man’s hand and never told anyone about it and never gained any satisfaction from not telling anyone. But my father wasn’t like that, maybe nobody’s father is like that, and I’ve always thought of his story as the very beginning of doubt for me, the plight of never knowing for sure and never quite trusting what others say because there is always a story behind any story.

One time, ten or so years ago, I was sitting around with a group of people – it must’ve been at a dinner party – and one of them said that he had absolutely nothing to hide, that he couldn’t think of even one thing that would embarrass him enough to keep him from telling us, from revealing the secret to us, and I remember thinking immediately of a number of possible revelations, things I knew about him that he didn’t know I knew. In his minds he wasn’t really capable of embarrassment, he was one of the lucky ones who can fool themselves into thinking of their lives as open to inspection, although it should also be said, it’s only fair to say, that some people make up secrets and then act as thought they’ve been burdened with them, and it seems foolhardy to think that so-called sensitive people have secret lives and that everyone else doesn’t, both seem equally unlikely, Still, I’ve always suffered from this sense of having three hundred and seventy-one secrets and no place to keep them all, I keep spouting one leak after another, So maybe it was resentment that I felt toward that fellow at the dinner party, maybe I had it in for him because I couldn’t be as carefree as he could, having secrets was too important to me, it gave me a mysterious quality that I thought others didn’t have, and I imagined them the lesser for not having their secrets, for not having my secrets. It’s always struck me as extraordinary that you can tell someone that you have a secret, let’s say this one secret, and it absolutely takes the wind out of them if you don’t reveal it right there on the spot, people think it’s the height of impropriety if you say you have a secret and don’t tell it, but my feeling’s always been that if you tell it, then you don’t have it any longer, that’s the nature of secrets, so it seems reasonable to tell someone that you have a secret – how would they know if you didn’t tell them? – and then refuse to reveal what the secret is, that’s the best way of creating and maintaining power.

Copyright © 2003 by Daniel Hayes. All rights reserved.