Queen of Babble

10

He isn’t an angel. At least, not unless angels are born and raised in Houston, which is where he’s from.

Also, angels don’t have degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the way Jean-Luc does.

Also, angels don’t have parents who are going through an acrimonious divorce, the way Jean-Luc’s are, so that when they want to come visit their father-the way Jean-Luc’s taken a few weeks off from his job at the investment firm of Lazard Freres to do-they have to come all the way to France, since that’s where Jean-Luc’s dad, a Frenchman, lives.

Also, angels tell better jokes. He wasn’t lying about the joke thing. He really does suck at them.

But that’s okay. Because I would rather be with a bad joke-teller who remembers I hate tomatoes than with a gambling welfare cheat who doesn’t.

Because Jean-Luc does-remember about the tomatoes, I mean. When I come back from the ladies’ room (picturesquely referred to on French trains as the “toilet”), where I went to repair the damage done to my face by my tears-fortunately, nothing a new application of eyeliner, undereye cover-up, lipstick, and powder couldn’t cure, along with some hair combing-I find the waiter already at our table, taking our order. Jean-Luc does all the talking because, being half French, he speaks the language fluently. And quickly. I can’t catch everything he says, but I hear “pas de tomates” several times.

Which even I, with my summer-school French, know means “no tomatoes.”

It is all I can do to keep from bursting into tears all over again. Because Jean-Luc has renewed my faith in men. There are nice, funny, totally good-looking guys out there. You just have to know where to look…and apparently, where NOT to look. Which is in the ladies’ shower of your dorm.

Of course, I’ve found this one on a train…which means after I get off this train, I’ll probably never see him again.

But that’s okay. It’s fine. I mean, what did I expect, to walk out of one relationship right into another? Right. Like that’s even healthy. Like it would have had a chance of lasting, since I’m so obviously on the rebound from Andy.

Plus, you know. The whole two-ships-passing-in-the-night thing.

Oh, and the fact that I told him about the blow job. (WHY? WHY DID I DO THAT??? WHY DO I HAVE TO HAVE THE BIGGEST MOUTH IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE???)

Still. He’s just so…cute. And not married-no ring. Maybe he’s got a girlfriend-actually, no guy this cute could not have a girlfriend-but if so, he certainly isn’t talking about her.

Which is good. Because why would I want to sit here and listen to this totally cute guy talk about his girlfriend? I mean, obviously, if he talked about her I would listen, since he listened so patiently when I was talking about Andy.

But, you know. I’m glad he’s not.

He orders wine to go with dinner, and when it arrives and the waiter pours it out for us, Jean-Luc lifts his glass, clinks it with mine, and says, “To blow jobs.”

I nearly choke on the bread I’m scarfing down. Because even though we’re on a train, we’re on a train in France, so the food is incredible. At least the bread is. So incredible there’s no possible way I can resist it after I take a tiny nibble from a roll in the basket on the table. Perfectly crunchy crust with a warm, soft middle? How can I abstain? Sure, I’ll regret it later, when my size nine jeans won’t zip up.

But for right now, I’m still in heaven. Because, for such a bad joke-teller, Jean-Luc is still pretty funny.

And I’ve missed bread. I’ve really, really missed it.

“To blow jobs we want back,” I correct him.

“I can only pray,” Jean-Luc says, “there’s no woman out there wishing she could take back one she’s given me.”

“Oh,” I say, gently laying a curl of salted butter on top of the center of my roll and watching it melt into the warm bread, “I’m sure there’s not. I mean, you don’t seem like a user to me.”

“Yes,” he says, “but then neither did-what’s his name again? Blow-job boy?”

“Andy,” I say, blushing. God, why did I ever open my big mouth about that? “And my instincts were off about him. Because of the accent. And his wardrobe. If he’d been American, I never would have fallen for him. Or his lies.”

“His wardrobe?” Jean-Luc asks as the waiter brings over my pan-seared pork medallions and his poached salmon.

“Sure,” I say. “You can tell a lot about a guy from what he’s wearing. But Andy was British, so that threw everything off a little. I mean, until I got there, I just figured everyone in England wore Aerosmith T-shirts, like Andy was wearing the night we met.”

Jean-Luc’s dark eyebrows go up. “Aerosmith?”

“Right. Obviously, I assumed he was being ironic, or possibly that it was laundry day. But then I got to London and I saw that is how he really dresses. There was nothing ironic about it. If things had worked out between us, I might eventually have gotten him into decent clothes. But…” I shrug. Which is a very French thing to do, I notice. All the other ladies in the dining car are shrugging as well, and saying, “ouais,” which is French slang for oui, at least according to the copy of Let’s Go: France I bought from Jamal and skimmed before I zonked out in the Chunnel.

“So you’re saying,” Jean-Luc says, “that you can tell what someone is like just by the clothes they’re wearing?”

“Oh, absolutely,” I say, digging into my pork tenderloin. Which, I might add, is totally delicious, even by non-train-food standards. “What someone wears reveals so much about themselves. Like you, for instance.”

Jean-Luc grins. “Okay. Hit me.”

I squint at him. “Are you sure?”

“I can take it,” Jean-Luc assures me.

“Well…all right, then.” I study him. “I can tell by the fact that you tuck your shirt into your jeans-which are Levi’s; I doubt you own any other brand-that you’re confident about your body and also that you care about how you look, but you aren’t vain. You probably don’t think much about how you look, but you glance in the mirror in the morning to shave and maybe make sure no tags are sticking out. Your mesh leather belt is casual and understated, but I bet it cost a lot, which means you’re willing to spend money on quality, but you don’t want it to look show-offy. Your shirt is Hugo-not Hugo Boss-which means you care, just a little, about not looking like everybody else, and you have on Cole Haan driving shoes with no socks, which means you like to be comfortable, aren’t impatient about waiting in lines, don’t mind having weird girls you’ve never met before sit next to you on trains and cry, and that you don’t suffer from any sort of glandular foot-odor problems. Oh, and you’re wearing a Fossil watch, which means you’re athletic-I bet you run to stay in shape-and that you like to cook.”

I laid down my fork and look at him. “How am I? Close?”

He stares at me across the bread basket.

“You got all that,” Jean-Luc says incredulously, “just from what I’m wearing?”

“Well,” I say, taking a sip of wine, “all that and the fact that you don’t suffer from feelings of sexual inadequacy, because you aren’t wearing cologne.”

He says, “I got my belt for two hundred dollars, Hugo Boss fits weird on me, socks make my feet feel hot, I run three miles a day, I hate cologne, and I make the best cheese and scallion omelets you’ve ever tasted.”

“I rest my case,” I say, and dive into the mesclun salad the waiter’s just brought us. It is loaded with blue cheese and candied walnuts.

Mmm, candied walnuts.

“But seriously,” Jean-Luc says, “how’d you do that?”

“It’s a talent,” I say modestly. “Something I’ve always been able to do. Except, obviously, it doesn’t always work. In fact, it seems to always fail me when I need it most-if a guy is ambivalent about his sexual orientation, I totally can’t tell by what he’s wearing. Unless, you know, he’s in something of mine. And like I said-Andy was a foreigner. That threw me off. I’ll know better next time.”

“Next British guy?” Jean-Luc asks, the eyebrows going up again.

“Oh no,” I say. “There will be no more British guys. Unless they’re members of the royal family, of course.”

“Wise strategy,” Jean-Luc says.

He pours me more wine as he asks me what I have planned for after I return to the States. I tell him about how I was going to stay in Ann Arbor and wait for Andy to get his degree. But now…

I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Then I find myself telling him-this stranger who is buying me dinner-my concerns about how if I go ahead and go with Shari to New York, she is going to ditch me eventually to go live with her boyfriend, since Chaz is going to be heading off to NYU to get a Ph.D. in philosophy, and then I’ll have to room with total strangers. And also how I don’t really have my degree yet since I haven’t finished (or actually started) my thesis, so I probably won’t even be able to get a job in my chosen field in New York-if jobs for history of fashion majors even exist-and will probably end up having to work at the Gap, my personal idea of hell on earth. All those capped-sleeved T-shirts, each one exactly the same as the other, and people mixing their denim rinses. It might actually kill me.

“Somehow,” Jean-Luc says, “I can’t quite picture you working at the Gap.”

I look down at my Alex Colman sundress and say, “No. You’re right. Do you think I’m insane?”

“No, I like that dress. It’s kind of…retro.”

“No. I mean about how I was going to stay in Ann Arbor until Andy was done with his degree and live at home. Shari says I was compromising my feminist principles, doing that.”

“I don’t think it’s compromising your feminist principles,” Jean-Luc says, “to want to stay close to someone you really love.”

“Okay,” I say. “But what am I going to do now? I mean, is it insane to move to New York without a job or a place to live first?”

“Oh no. Not insane. Brave. But then you seem like a fairly brave girl.”

Brave? I nearly choke on a sip of wine. No one’s ever called me fairly brave before.

And outside the dining car, the sun is still setting-it stays light out so late in France during the summer!-turning the sky behind the green hills and woods we’re hurtling through a luscious, sultry pink. Around us, the waiters are passing out plates of assorted cheeses and chocolate truffles and tiny glasses of digestifs, and over in the smoking section our fellow diners have lit up, enjoying a lazy after-supper cigarette, the secondhand smoke from which, in this romantic setting, doesn’t smell anywhere near as foul as it might coming out of, say, my ex-boyfriend’s nostrils.

And I feel as if I’m in a movie. This isn’t Lizzie Nichols, youngest daughter of Professor Harry Nichols, recent college nongraduate, who spent her whole life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has only been out with three guys her entire life (four if you count Andy).

This is Elizabeth Nichols, fairly brave (!), cosmopolitan world traveler and sophisticate, dining in a train car with a perfect (and I do mean perfect!) stranger, enjoying a cheese course (cheese course!) and sipping something called Pernod as the sun sets over the French countryside whizzing past-

And suddenly, in the middle of Jean-Luc’s description of his own senior thesis, which has to do with shipping routes (I’m trying hard not to yawn-but then the history of fashion probably wouldn’t light his fire, either), my cell phone chirps.

I snatch it up, thinking it must be Shari at last.

But the caller ID says Unknown Number. Which is weird, because no one Unknown has my cell number.

“Excuse me,” I say to Jean-Luc. Then, ducking my head, I answer. “Hello?”

“Liz?”

Static crackles. The connection is terrible.

But it’s unmistakably the last person in the world I want to hear from.

I don’t know what to do. Why is he calling me? This is terrible. I don’t want to talk to him! I have nothing to say to him. Oh dear.

“Just a minute,” I say to Jean-Luc, and I leave our table to take the call in the open area beside the sliding door to the next train car, where I won’t disturb the rest of the passengers.

“Andy?” I say into the cell phone.

“There you are!” Andy says, sounding relieved. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear your voice. Didn’t you get my calls? I’ve been ringing your mobile all day. Why didn’t you pick up?”

“I’m sorry, did you call? I never heard it ring.” This is true. Cell phones don’t work in the Chunnel.

“You have no idea what I’ve been through,” Andy goes on, “coming out of that horrible office and finding you gone like that. The whole way home, I kept thinking, What if she’s not there? What if something happened to her? I tell you, I must really love you, eh, if I was that scared something might have happened!”

I give a weak laugh. Even though I don’t feel like laughing. “Yes,” I say, “I guess you must.”

“Liz, Christ,” Andy goes on. Now he sounds…tense. “Where the fuck are you? When are you coming home?”

I gaze up at what looks, in the slanting rays of the sun, like a castle on a hillside. But that, of course, is impossible. Castles don’t sit out in the middle of nowhere. Even in France.

“What do you mean, when am I coming home?” I ask him. “Didn’t you get my note?” I left a note for Mrs. Marshall and the rest of Andy’s family, thanking them for their hospitality, and a separate note for Andy, explaining that I was very sorry, but that I had unexpectedly been called away and would not be seeing him again.

“Of course I got your note,” Andy says. “I just don’t understand it.”

“Oh,” I say, surprised. I have excellent penmanship. But I was crying so hard maybe my handwriting was shakier than I’d thought. “Well…like I said in the note, Andy, I’m really very sorry, but I just had to go. I really am-”

“Look, Liz. I know what happened this morning at the Job Centre upset you. I hated having to ask you to lie like that. But you wouldn’t have had to lie if you’d just kept your mouth shut in the first place.”

“I realize that,” I say. Oh God, this is awful. I don’t want to do this. Not now. And certainly not here. “I know it’s all my fault, Andy. And I really am sorry. I hope I didn’t get you into trouble with Mr. Williams.”

“Well, I won’t lie to you, Liz,” Andy says. “It was close. Very close. But…Wait a sec. Why are you calling me Andy?”

“Because it’s your name,” I say, moving out of the way of some people who’ve come through the sliding door from another car and are looking for an empty table.

“But you never call me Andy. You’ve always called me Andrew.”

“Oh,” I say. “Well, I don’t know. You just seem like more of an Andy to me now.”

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Andy says in a rueful tone. “Look, Liz…I know I made a fuck-all of everything. But you didn’t have to leave. I can fix this, Liz. Really. Things didn’t get off on the right foot between us, but everyone feels gutted about it, especially me. I’m done with Texas Hold’em…I swear it. And Alex has given up his room-he says you and I can share it. Or, if you like, we can go somewhere else…somewhere we can be alone. Where was it you wanted to go? Charlotte Bronte’s house?”

“Jane Austen,” I correct him.

“Right, Jane Austen’s house. We can leave right away. Just tell me where you are and I’ll come fetch you. We’ll patch things up. I’ll make it up to you-all of it-I swear it.”

“Oh, Andy,” I say, feeling guilt-ridden. Jean-Luc, over at our table, is paying the bill to make room at the table for the new passengers who’ve come in. “That just…I mean, it won’t be possible for you to come fetch me. Because I’m in France.”

“You’re WHAT?” Andy sounds a bit more surprised than is necessarily flattering. I guess he doesn’t consider me fairly brave, the way Jean-Luc does. At least, not brave enough to get to France on my own. “How did you get there? What are you doing there? Where are you? I’ll join you.”

“Andy,” I say. This is terrible. I hate confrontations. It’s so much easier to walk away than it is to have to explain to someone that you never want to see them again. “I want…I need to be by myself for a bit. I just need some time alone to think.”

“But for God’s sake, Liz, you’ve never been in Europe before. You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re doing. This isn’t funny, you know. I’m really worried. Just tell me where you are and I’ll-”

“No, Andy,” I say softly. Jean-Luc is coming toward me, looking concerned. “Listen, I can’t talk right now. I really have to go. I’m so sorry, Andy, but…like you said, I made a mistake.”

“I forgive you!” Andy says. “Lizzie! I forgive you! Just-listen. What about the money?”

“The…what?” I am so stunned I nearly drop the phone.

“The money,” Andy says urgently. “Can you still wire me the money?”

“I can’t talk about that right now,” I say. Jean-Luc has reached my side. He is, I note, really very tall-taller, even, than Andy. “I’m so sorry. Good-bye.”

I hang up, and for a second or two my vision swims. I would not have thought it possible to have any tears left, but apparently I do.

“Are you all right?” I hear-since I cannot see-Jean-Luc ask gently.

“I will be,” I assure him, more heartily than I actually feel.

“Was that him?” he wants to know.

I nod. It’s feeling a little hard to breathe. I can’t tell if it’s because of my barely repressed tears or Jean-Luc’s proximity…which, given how often the swaying of the train occasionally causes his arm to brush mine, is considerable.

“Did you tell him you were here with your attorney,” Jean-Luc wants to know, “and that he was busy drawing up your demand for your blow job back?”

I am so shocked by this I forget about not being able to breathe. Instead I find myself grinning…and the tears mysteriously drying up in my eyes.

“Did you let him know that if he can’t see fit to return your blow job immediately, you will have no choice but to sue?”

Now the tears in my eyes are from laughter.

“You said you can’t tell jokes,” I say accusingly when I’ve stopped laughing long enough to catch my breath.

“I can’t.” Jean-Luc looks grave. “That was a horrible one. I can’t believe you laughed.”

I’m still giggling as I collapse back into my seat beside him, feeling pleasantly full and more than a little sleepy. I struggle to stay awake, however, keeping my gaze on the window on the far side of the car, just behind Jean-Luc’s head, where the sun-still not quite sunk-seems to be silhouetting another castle. I point at it and say, “You know, it’s so weird. But that looks like a castle over there.”

Jean-Luc turns his head. “That’s because it is a castle.”

“It is not,” I say drowsily.

“Of course it is,” Jean-Luc says with a laugh. “You’re in France, Lizzie. What did you expect?”

Not castles, just sitting there for anyone to see by train. Not this breathtaking sunset, filling our car with this rosy light. Not this perfectly kind, perfectly lovely man sitting next to me.

“Not this,” I murmur. “Not this.”

And then I close my eyes.