French Kiss

A bus meet-cute.

“Does your country kiss with tongue?” might not be typical bus seatmate conversation–-especially not on the sleepy route between Vermont and Massachusetts––but it’s what I found myself asking the floppy haired man next to me as the mountains, covered in the last of the season’s snow, rolled past our windows.

When they say romance happens when you least expect it, perhaps the most remote of those possibilities is while on a Greyhound bus to pick up your totaled car in the middle of rural New Hampshire––especially if you’re wearing thick polarized sunglasses, a frumpy pink travel vest, and monopolizing the meager air conditioning vents to prevent your chronic motion sickness. But while I was repeatedly checking my pockets for my car keys and adjusting the devastating (see: Jeff Buckley) music I’d be playing, a gorgeous man in a backwards baseball cap put his bag in the overhead compartment above me. I stuck my hand out immediately, causing him to almost drop his luggage as he reached for it.

“I’m Carlo,” the baseball cap said, “what brings you to the bus?”

“Oh,” I pulled off my headphones and shrugged my shoulders, “I crashed my car and I have to go pick it up from an auto shop.” He laughed, and despite the awfulness of the situation, I did too.

“Sorry––” he said, shaking his head, but I waved him off. It was so good to not feel miserable about it.

“No, it is a little funny,” I said. “It was because I couldn’t see; for a minute the sun was too bright and I…hit a curb. Really hard,” I said. “Which is why I’m wearing all this sun gear. Do I look a little crazy?” I asked, blabbering.

“You do, yes, a little,” he said, still smiling.

“Look,” I said, taking off my sunglasses, “my eyes are too light to, like, process the sun.” Carlo looked into my eyes while I blinked, “See?” I asked.

“They look good to me,” he said, his brown eyes staring intently into my blue ones. I put the sunglasses back on, hoping I wasn’t blushing.

“How about you? Do you have happier reasons for being on the Greyhound?”

He had been visiting a friend he’d met while they were both studying in the U.K. Carlo was still there, working on a Master’s in linguistics, though he was originally from Italy, a fact wholly incompatible with how he spoke: like an American fraternity brother, with an occasional slip into a British sounding ‘keen.’

“My name is a word in Italian,” I told him, “and Spanish.”

“Oh my God, but I forgot it,” he said, touching his hand to his forehead in a moment of tiny anguish.

“It’s Mia,” I said. I told him about how when I had lived in Italy, my homestay dad loved to call me la mia Mia––playing on the word’s translation to mine. Carlo told me about the dialect they spoke where he was from, and he let me practice the miniscule amount of Italian I had retained from my study abroad program. When I told him piacere with the delight only the unpracticed can muster, I remembered the long Roman Sundays my classmates and I would spend walking as slow as we possibly could (still too fast) around Trastevere, eating artichoke pizza and fresh apricots, getting pink from the sun. I remembered my homestay’s goldendoodle who was named Pilsner after an American beer but pronounced so differently that they had to write his name down on a napkin before I got the joke. I remembered the train to the ocean, the pizza at the dimly lit student’s bar, being nineteen, and dreaming with different vowels.

After regaling him with I’d like a gelato please and I spent a summer in Rome five years ago, Carlo said the hence undefeated multilingual pick-up line: “I like your accent.” I smiled and squinted at him. We looked at eachother in that language that has no language.

Plato said that falling in love means that our souls are lonely for God. I don’t know about that––but as the bus looped down 1-91, I realized that I had been very lonely for the world. Especially as life in the U.S. became more and more unrecognizable to me in the wake of the new President’s executive orders that had, amongst many other devastating results, been making me question my pursuit of academia. PhD offers were being rescinded around me and university after university announced hiring freezes; I was seriously considering moving back to Spain, where I had spent my first year out of college teaching English in a small, rainy city along the ocean. I asked Carlo what he thought about America––I was hoping for some perspective, someone to tell me it would be okay.

“Where I come from in Italy is the most conservative part of the country and facism is everywhere.” He shook his head, “I always said that free expression would mean that we could get past it, but no. I think at least here, you try not to offend people,” he said.

I conceded that he was right––people in the U.S. were less willing to, as in Spanish and Italian communities I had lived in called it, speak without a filter. But I had been chilled by the relative amount of silence from anyone in power––I wanted to scream, to cry, to have someone tell me it wasn’t normal to wake up to the Department of Education being defunded. I wanted to be impolite, to rage, to scream.

“At least the cigarettes in New Hampshire are so cheap,” Carlo said and then he looked at me for longer than strictly necessary, and with such kindness, it made me realize I was overheating.

I thrust my bag and water bottle at him, “Sorry, can you just––” and took off my vest. “I get really car sick. I used to throw up so much that my childhood car had a vomit stain on the seat––” at this Carlo reached up and tried to aim his air conditioning vent at me, fiddling with the plastic ducts and looking down at me to see if I was better. That kind of kindness––the unconscious, reflexive kind––was something I hadn’t had enough of. I was just out of a year long not-relationship with someone who was more than happy to kiss me, stay the weekend in my bed, and call me for hours before falling asleep––but who would also sometimes say the wrong name and once took four weeks to respond to a heartfelt poem I’d written him. I couldn’t imagine him giving his air conditioning up for me, but this handsome stranger who spoke at least Italian, Spanish, English, Latin, and Greek did. Feeling tender, and bold, I pushed my sunglasses up in my hair and turned my whole body towards Carlo.

“When I was living in Spain, everyone kept asking me why Americans don’t kiss with tongue,” I said, turning my palms up and smiling. “What do you think?” Carlo broke out into laughter. I was glad the row across from us was also talking, a mother daughter duo whose whopping conversation hopefully covered our own.

“No…well,” he thought back, his hand running over his face, “you’re right. The American girl I got with in Boston didn’t use tongue.”

“I just think we the appropriate amount of tongue! In Spain it was a lot of people just licking eachother!”

“The Spanish,” Carlo said, “do use a lot of tongue.”

“You should rank the countries you’ve lived in from most to least tongue,” I said, both of us finding the conversation ridiculous––but leaning over towards eachother like we were guarding a small fire. He told me that he had barely kissed any Italian women, they were too intimidating and he had a stutter in Italian: he couldn’t roll his r’s. I told him that the last person I’d kissed had bit my lip so hard it bruised and he said Oh, the biters are the worst!

“Another question,” I began, both of our faces close. “Have you ever kissed someone on the bus?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “never.” He inched closer, “But I should try, right?”

And then, after I looked around us at the rest of the mostly still bus, a huge smile on my face, I leaned in to meet him. We kissed, but only briefly.

“So, no tongue,” I said.

“Only because you pulled away immediately!” He said, his hand on my knee, his eyebrows raised. I rolled my eyes, smiled, and we kissed again––this time, a real kiss. I can only imagine what the other people on the bus were thinking about the two strangers French (Italian? American?) kissing at noon between the Montpelier and White River Junction stop. But I wasn’t thinking about them at all. Only later did I muse about how rare the moment was––to be truly moved by someone, but also to allow yourself to be truly moved. Most of my life I spend over thinking, especially about love. While I had not a month prior gotten my hair cut, put on make-up, swiffered my room, and brushed up on cold war politics to impress the not-boyfriend who would go on to call another girl while in my bed, somehow a gorgeous linguistics student and I were kissing even though I was in my travel sneakers and extra thick zinc sunscreen.

It was not unlike the ease with which children make friends with each other. I had seen in my summer job at a farm school how often kids said things with declarative statements: I’m cold; I’m hungry; I’m tired; I’m bored; you hurt my feelings. They ask for what they want––they take each other as they are. When you’re world weary, or car sick, or just caught off guard, some of that openness returns. And really, who wants romance that’s totally expected, totally planned for, militantly strategized?

When I stepped off the bus, I called my friend Joslynn immediately.

She said, “I can’t believe that happened to you.”

“I think,” I said, walking down the sidewalk away from the bus, “that I happened to it.”

That, of course, is only partly true. Only some alchemy of fate, luck, and timing ever makes someone who stirs you your assigned seatmate. But it also took a whimsical belief in love, a surface level understanding of Italian, and a moment of courage––in other words, knowing what to do when you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.

And, also, of course, how much tongue is the right amount.