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no cellphones, and he lived at home, so I would inevitably talk to his mother first when I called—Beautiful weather, isn’t it? How was the Consulate today, and what did you have for lunch? (Young Neapolitans dating could never
not
know each other’s parents. An American mother might pass the phone like a baton, but in Naples that would be considered beyond rude. When Salva called my house in Washington months later and my mother said, “Hi! Just a second I’ll get ’er,” he asked me,
What have I done to your parents that they hate me so?
)
    On the evening of my first
ragù
, rigatoni with
ragù,
to be precise, Salvatore had finished studying late. He walked into the kitchen wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. Even before he sat down at the table, his mother brought a wooden spoon overflowing with her dense
ragù
over to him, and he opened up. She cupped his chin with one hand and inserted the spoon with the other.
Imboccare
is the Italian verb, to spoon-feed.
    I was floored by Salva’s total lack of self-sufficiency and independence. And pride, for Christ’s sake! He was twenty-three! When Raffaella saw me watching, disturbed, she did what she had to do. She used the same spoon to
imboccare
me.
    Salvatore and I had swapped saliva but had yet to kiss.
    Our plates of pasta that evening were so full of
ragù
that you couldn’t see any white of the rigatoni. Raffaella mixed all of the pasta with all of the sauce, spooned it out in the dishes, and then put a whole ladle of
ragù
on top of each serving. “There needs to be enough sauce for the
scarpetta,
” she explained. The
scarpetta
(literally, “little shoe”) refers to the piece of bread that you use to sop up the sauce after finishing your pasta.
    By the time Salva dropped me off at the gate of my boarding school I’d forgotten my discomfort about the spoon-feeding.
Te piace il ragù, eh, Pagnottella?
he laughed. Yes, okay, fine, I loved the
ragù,
I told him. I also loved his smile, and the way he touched my cheek when he said “Pagnottella.” Little Muffin-face.
    It was time for him to say
Ci sentiamo
or
Ci vediamo
and speed off in his Fiat, but he didn’t. He got out of the car and stood there. The air was moist, and smelled of magnolias and sweet fetid garbage. A motorbike buzzed by. I giggled to fill the silence.
    Salva looked around awkwardly, everywhere but in my eyes. The moment was hesitant and charged and then his mouth was on mine. It was so sudden and forward that my only thought was, When did he get drunk? I’ve been with him all evening! No one could do that if he weren’t drunk or on drugs! “Come on, Pagnottella, get in the car,” he said. I did as I was told. Was this Salvatore? The guy I had been spoon-fed with an hour earlier? The one who tenderly cut my pizza into tiny pieces? Where were we going?
    I was attracted to Salva and wanted to kiss him, but his behavior shocked me. I didn’t have a lot of experience with American guys, but the ones I had “hooked up” with in college were gradual and tentative in their advances…unless they were drunk. At Princeton in 1996, men were encouraged to ask, “Can I kiss you?” and not make a move until they had verbal consent. This guy went from zero to a hundred with no warning, and he was sober! There was no stepping back to see what my reaction was, no checking in with me about whether I liked it or not. What was he going to do next?
    Salvatore parked the little tin-can car in a row of similar cars perched on the high promontory of Posillipo, where during the day we could have seen the sea and the islands of Nisida, Procida, and Ischia. The car next to us had newspapers covering all the windows and windshield and was rocking slightly back and forth.
    I later learned that coming to this spot to have sex in the car is a necessity for Neapolitan
ragazzi,
or young adults, who live in small apartments with their families and don’t have any privacy. (The very word
privacy
does not exist in