Queen of Babble

“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 Chu

“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 pla

I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Then I find myself telling him-this stranger who is buying me di

“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 A

“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 A

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 co

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.