When we were newlyweds, my husband suggested we launch the Million Kisses Club. I was charmed, but doubtful.
I hadn’t been a member of a club since I fled the Brownies at age 8, having no interest in “flying up” to the Girl Scouts, with their paramilitary sashes and enforced camaraderie. I was not much of a joiner, it turned out.
“A club?” I said. “For kissing?”
“Yep. For one million kisses. You and me.” He was pretty irresistible when he suggested this.
“One million?” I looked at my guy. “Have you done the math? Not in our lifetime.”
We were in bed on one of those drowsy, careless Sunday mornings, the ease of which it seems is reserved for the very young or the newly in love — often hard to resurrect in later years when life becomes such a busy place.
“So,” he asked, “how many times do you think we’ve kissed already?”
My husband was not interested in that other notch on the belt, the running total that men our age more frequently bragged about. He wasn’t that guy who kept a tally of partners, or a little black book rating his sexual exploits.
No, he was talking about kisses, and kisses of all kinds. A smooch on the lips, a peck on the cheek. An air kiss, a French kiss, a gentle kiss to a fevered brow. A yearning, goodbye kiss at the departure gate and a swing-you-in-the-air, “You’re finally here” kiss at arrivals.
And of course, he was also talking about the remember-them-forever kisses. Yeah, my husband meant those deep, swooning kisses too, the ones that slay you with desire, those back-bending, unstoppable kisses portrayed in European noir films and the most ardent love stories.
“Maybe do the math?” Wet blanket, me.
“Do the math?” He looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“The math,” I said. “The space-time continuum, call it what you want. A million? That’s a lot of kisses.”
“Let’s say we kiss, I don’t know, 20 times a day — that adds up pretty quickly.” His eyes were hopeful.
I sighed, found a calculator and punched in some numbers. “Good thing you’re so good looking,” I said as I showed him the total. “If we kiss 20 times a day, it will take us 109.6 years to reach one million.”
“OK,” he said, undeterred. “How about 50 kisses a day?”
I typed in the numbers. “Better,” I said. “That’s only 54.8 years.”
“And 100 kisses a day?”
I calculated. “Down to 27.4 years.”
“Then, no problem!” he said. “We’ve got a few good decades in front of us.”
My husband came from Denmark, one of those countries with poppy-dotted fields, a robust social safety net and a sky-high “happiness rating.” His sunny upbringing and temperament were a world away from my gloomier homeland, northern New Jersey. I was an independent, overthinking sort of person, reared on the notion that I would need to make my own way as best I could. That life would be more sour than sweet.
When we first met, he launched a campaign to indoctrinate me with his optimism: Our toaster wasn’t broken, just temperamental. The endless torrential rains? A lucky jump-start on a vibrant spring. And landing in a new country, almost broke? An excellent adventure.
I wanted to believe in the world he tried to recruit me into, but given my own temperament and upbringing, it was a hard sell. His positivity seemed sanitized, as if he were naïve to the hard work of being a person. So I, in turn, tried to yank him into my wariness: Our cranky toaster? An electrical fire in waiting. That downpour? A soggy basement to mop up. And always, the ax of bad luck poised to fall at any moment, severing our happiness.
Optimist meets pessimist. They fall in love, and though appreciating the differences that attracted them, attempt to convert the other to their team.
Then he floated the notion of the Million Kisses Club.
So seductive. Such a lovely fantasy. I finally surrendered to his romantic heart. Despite my initial hesitation, the first chapter of the Million Kisses Club was founded, an exclusive society for just us two. We sheltered in our animal bubble, lulled by the time and expansiveness afforded by youth.
But we never made it to one million kisses. Not even close.
For not only is 100 daily kisses a herculean, lip-chapping quantity of smooches, it turns out we ran out of time.
Cancer came at him like a hand from the grave in a horror film, gripped him hard, and did not let go until he was dragged under. He was dead at 34. We had only been together for 10 years.
The Million Kisses Club disbanded unceremoniously, buried with its founding member and his poetic soul.
A few years later, I fell in love again and wed again. And again, I chose a man so different from me that some days, our marriage felt like a tango of negotiation. Bring on the children and the dogs and the ineffable churn of life and the Million Kisses Club was forgotten, buried under a mountain of domestic detritus: the deadlines and dead lawns, the D.M.V. and S.A.T.s, the contractors gone missing and the teens gone wild. If there was a faint whisper from the Million Kisses Club, I was too preoccupied to hear it.
I am a serious person. I know life is serious business. With my first husband’s death, my cosmology had shifted even more toward the wary. I lived with the slow drumbeat of worry. How can we keep anyone safe in a precarious and increasingly insane world? Like most people, my family and I got kicked around a bit. Illness knocked. Parents died. Work stalled. Friends suffered. The planet seemed to spin haphazardly, throwing all of us into tumult.
Then my grandson was born.
By this point the busyness of midlife had ebbed. Within a renewed spaciousness, the whisper of the Million Kisses Club grew too loud to ignore. My grandson allowed me to time travel back to a circle of two; there is an uncrowdedness in the bond with an infant that is very much like falling in love.
The world felt reborn.
So, my internal cosmology shifted once again. I embraced hopefulness as I never had before. Perhaps this is the generational tug, a pat on the back for a job well done? We did our part in keeping the human species chugging along!
Or, is it the simple joy grandparents so often kvell about? A big new love that finds us somewhere near the end, after life has hammered us, or coddled us, and deposited us into our last chapter?
My grandson is still too young to apply to the Million Kisses Club. And he has yet to give his consent, what with his being pre-verbal and all.
But if my daughter hands him to me when he’s fussing, the surefire solution is to hold him on my lap and place dozens of tiny kisses on the soft side of his cheek, right below his left ear. That is his sweet spot. He will sit happily for long stretches, eyelids fluttering, leaning into me. I hope it will be at least a little while before he outgrows these kisses.
Though he is very young, I am not. Our years of overlap will not measure in decades. We do not have that much time to rack up a record-setting number of kisses between us. the Million Kisses Club goal-post seems to recede once again further into the distance.
Then, just the other day, holding my grandson’s baby-fat hand in my own wrinkled, freckled one, it struck me: There is no reason the million kisses need to be shared with only one other. How silly, how miserly, to have such a mono-kissing rule for the club. I will not receive one million kisses from this little boy or from any other single person in my life. (The old pesky space-time continuum again.)
Yet if I add them up, from all my years on planet Earth, with the hope of a few more, I will have shared many, many kisses with all the people I have loved and who have loved me back. And while there is no security or guarantee of who will fall next and who will remain standing, while we are here, we can all be in the club together. That is more than enough.
Denise DiIanni, a writer and filmmaker in Cambridge, Mass., is finishing her debut novel.
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