The claim to be the world’s best kisser

The claim to be the world’s best kisser turns a boast into a question about dependence: can an intimate act make one person exceptional when it requires another person’s participation? Recounted by The narrator during a drive with Jake, the anecdote first sounds like a story about a student’s confidence and an instructor’s reaction. Its later correction exposes a second tension. Jake assumes The narrator kissed Doug, but she did not; the gap between the story he thinks he has heard and what happened gives the claim its sharpest significance.

The boast and its power

The anecdote begins with a student telling her driving instructor, without apparent prompting, that she is the best kisser in the world. She is described as certain enough that the instructor finds her convincing. Her confidence is not presented as a modest claim about technique: she treats this talent as a source of power greater than money or intelligence, and imagines that it makes her the center of the universe. The boast makes an intimate act sound like a personal possession and a route to singular importance.

That claim is striking precisely because the act cannot be performed alone. The narrator answers that kissing involves two people, so a person cannot be the best kisser as an isolated individual. If there must be two best kissers, the superlative depends on another participant rather than on a skill one can demonstrate independently. The comparison with playing guitar makes the distinction concrete: the guitarist can practise and judge the performance alone, while a kiss requires someone else. The claim’s confidence therefore contains a contradiction. It asserts complete individual distinction through an action that cannot be separated from a partner.

Dependence, loneliness, and the story’s turn

The instructor is troubled by this answer. In the anecdote, he objects to the implication that a person cannot be best alone and that one depends on another kisser. The disagreement quickly widens from a question of ranking to a question of human isolation: what if there is no one else? His response, that this is too much to overcome, gives the argument emotional weight. The logic of the claim offers no self-sufficient version of intimacy; the possibility of being alone turns that dependence into a source of distress.

The instructor then snaps out of the discussion, says it is foolish to wait out the rain, and directs the student to turn right from the parking lot. His head tilts indicate where she should go, and he is quiet afterward. The abrupt change from abstract argument to driving directions leaves the question unresolved in the anecdote itself. Jake later returns to it, asking whether a second person is required for there to be a best kisser. He recognizes that the question can stay with someone and become an object of thought and obsession.

Jake’s response and the mistaken inference

The idea returns in Jake’s conversation with The narrator. He acknowledges that she was right: a person cannot be the best kisser alone, unlike the smartest person, and he contrasts that solitary superlative with a kiss that necessarily involves another. His broader reflection on intelligence treats being the smartest as a burden, while he describes confidence combined with self-consciousness as especially attractive. These remarks extend the anecdote’s concern with how a person is measured or valued, but they do not resolve its central dependence on another participant.

Jake does not let The narrator finish the story. He assumes she kissed Doug after their driving lesson, although that is not what happened. The mistaken inference matters because it turns a question about mutual participation into an imagined event: Jake hears the claim and fills in a kiss that would make the anecdote seem autobiographical in a different way. The narrator’s correction is exact: “A kiss needs two people who want to kiss, or it’s something else.” The condition is not merely that another person be present; both people must want the kiss.

The actual ending and its significance

The narrator explains that she returned to the car and leaned in through the window with her hand open. In it was a tiny, wrinkled candy wrapper Doug had given her. She unfolded it and read the verse printed there: “My heart, my heart alone with its lapping waves of song, longs to touch this green world of the sunny day. Hello!” The anecdote’s real final object is therefore not evidence of a kiss but a small piece of paper bearing a poem. Its tenderness contrasts with the grand claim to be the best and with Jake’s assumption that a kiss followed the lesson.

The revelation does not make the claim simply false or true as a measure of skill; it changes what the reader can know about it. The boast can be made by one person, but its supposed proof would require mutual action, and the story supplies no kiss at all. By letting Jake’s assumption stand until The narrator corrects it, the telling makes the difference between imagined intimacy and shared willingness part of the anecdote’s meaning. The claim to be the world’s best kisser thus remains less a settled title than a paradox: an assertion of solitary distinction about an act that only exists between people.