Once, in youth, a girl in the play we were putting on,
catching me alone after rehearsal, fixed me with a grave, determined look
and pushed me against the studio-black wall. Taller than me,
and infinitely classier – literally from a Family – she pinned me there somehow,
all hair and height and lineage, and kissed me.
Not just the fact that I had a girlfriend then, and still have,
the mother of my children, the mother of the teen I’m sitting next to now on the plane
who’s flicking disdainfully through my magazine – politics!
but the sheer strangeness of it, the utter improbable incongruity of that class and height divide,
froze me into ungrateful rigidity, an inability even to speak. But I guess, what was said
in that silence, was I just don’t know what to do with this kiss.
The play went on and nothing about it was ever said, and it became
one of those glancing memories, for me, and I’m sure much more for her,
one of those moments which can lie dormant for decades only to come to you unbidden in a stab of shame. A kiss blast gasp from the past, catching your breath like a sudden shock of cold.
There she is now, in the magazine, face grave as ever, above her piece extolling the virtues of energetic middle-age.
See that woman? I suddenly say to my teen. She kissed me once. Pushed me
against a wall and kissed me.
Nineteen Eighty Something, I say.
He’s frozen, and his silence says, I guess, I just don’t know what to do with that.
The plane lands and we disembark and nothing more about it is said.
Her hair is still girlishly long.
Amongst other things she got involved in politics.
She’s a baroness now. A peer of the realm.