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If you don't close your eyes, it doesn't count. If his hands aren't in tune with his lips, if they're not bunching your hair, pushing on the small of your back, cupping your hip bone, or squeezing you closer, then girls, you're not getting what you deserve. And boys, you know what the cynics say about you, right? That you're like linoleum: lay you right the first time and you'll stay for years. But fiddle with the words a bit and the truth goes the other direction: kiss us right and you'll make a real impression. That's the best way to ensure a sound flooring.
This is a short history of my life behind lips. As you'll see, it's been the usual mixed bag, but the moral has remained the same: kissing, unimportant as it may seem, is a window to the whole. So until you find the smooch that tells you "look no further," kiss and kiss again.
Eric: A small party at Jennifer's;
I am fifteen. Bombs are exploding as Apocalypse Now flickers on the TV. Everybody leaves the master bedroom to give me and Eric time alone. What I'm expecting for my first French-kissing session: something as beautiful as the kiss from Rear Window (sweeping, glinting in cinematic gorgeousness). What I get instead: a darting, jabbing slobberfest. Eric even oozes in my ear — glchh! — and bypasses my earlobe entirely. (Who bypasses an earlobe? — a detached one, no less.) By the end I need a wipe. I cry in the cab all the way to my apartment building. For years I prepared for this, and it turns out I prepared only for it to go well.
Augie: I was only somewhat attracted to Augie — his face was too perfect to hold my interest for long — but we happened to be attending a party on an estate overlooking the Hudson River, and this was the closest I'd ever felt to being inside a Fitzgerald novel. I'd already drunk two piņa coladas, oohed at the table lamps, aahed at the Jazz-Age bowling alley, roamed the gardens, and paused (elbow arched) before various outdoor sculptures. In one of the living rooms, I encountered Augie and we wandered toward the river, found a low Gatsby-worthy wall, and started snogging. Unlike the surroundings, he was tepid to the point of neutral.
Kevin: I was seventeen, he was twenty-six.
He had one of those steel Arne Jacobsen ashtrays that empties the revolving bowl into a canister. I was more interested in the design of the ashtray and learning how to blow smoke rings than in kissing the non-high-school boy/man. Kevin's brain seemed stuffed with unreturned telephone calls and unpaid parking tickets. Kissing him was like kissing Arne Jacobsen's canister — and even worse with beer. But then, Kevin was twenty-six and told me he could converse so much more easily with me than with women his own age.
Declan: The next morning I was starting a job at Flushing Meadows, selling U.S. Open apparel (couldn't get the ball-girl gig), but Declan had such a sexy mouth, I was happy to risk a good night's sleep. First sale of the day, I rang up around a hundred dollars' worth of merchandise and didn't run the credit card through. Whoops. Nobody let on about his age until months later, after my first day at college. He was in ninth grade. Now and then I spot a man whose mouth reminds me of Declan's, and I think, Yes.
Charlie: Charlie invited me to his fraternity's Valentine's Day party held — where else? — in a one-time brothel kitted out in red velvet. He had long eyelashes, and I was flattered he wanted to take me, until we began making out. He "kissed" with the horsepower of an Electrolux. He clamped his lips around mine. We're talking hermetic seal. Eventually I broke free.
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