Queen of Babble (15 page)

“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 toleave. 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 Brontë’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
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consider me fairly brave, the way Jean-Luc does. At least, not brave enough to get to France on my own. “How did you getthere ? What are youdoing there? Where are you? I’ll join you.”

“Andy,” I say. This is terrible. Ihate 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…Ineed 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 itis a castle.”

“It is not,” I say drowsily.

“Of course it is,” Jean-Luc says with a laugh. “You’re inFrance, 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.

The so-called Empire dresses worn by women at the dawn of the nineteenth century were often as sheer as today’s nightgowns. To keep warm, women wore flesh-toned pantaloons, made of stockinette (a closely woven cotton) and reaching all the way to the ankles or to just below the knee. This is why, when seen in paintings of the era, women in Empire gowns often appear to be wearing no underwear at all, though the idea of “going commando” would not actually occur to anyone for at least two more centuries.

History of Fashion

SENIOR THESIS BY ELIZABETH NICHOLS

11

We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth.

—E. M. Cioran (1911–1995), Romania-born French philosopher Iwake up to someone saying my name and gently shaking me.

“Lizzie. Lizzie, wake up. We’re at your station.”

I open my eyes with a start. I’d been dreaming about New York—of Shari and me moving there, and finding no better place to live than a cardboard refrigerator box on some kind of highway meridian, and my having to get a job folding T-shirts—miles and miles of capped-sleeved T-shirts—at the Gap.

I am startled to find I am not in New York but on a train. In France. That is stopped at my station. At least if the sign outside the window, silhouetted against the night sky (when did it get so dark out?), which says Souillac, is any indication.

“Oh no,” I cry, hurtling out of my seat. “Oh. No.”

“It’s all right,” Jean-Luc says soothingly. “I’ve got your bags here.”

He does. My wheelie bag is down from the overhead rack, and he passes me the handle, along with my carry-on bag and purse.

“You’re fine,” he says with a chuckle at my panic. “They won’t leave with you still on board.”

“Oh,” I say. My mouth tastes awful, from the wine. I can’t believe I fell asleep. Had I been breathing on him? Had he smelled my disgusting wine breath? “I’m so sorry. Oh. It was so nice to meet you. Thank you so much for everything. You’re so nice. I hope to see you again someday. Thanks again—”

Then I barrel from the train, saying,“Pardon, pardon,” the French way to everyone I bang into on my way out.

And then I’m standing on the platform. Which appears to be in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the night.

All I can hear is crickets. There is a faint scent of woodsmoke in the air.

Around me, the other passengers who got out at the same time I did are being greeted by excited family members and escorted to waiting cars. There is a bus purring nearby that other passengers are climbing onto. The sign in the bus’s windshield says Sarlat.

I have no idea what Sarlat is. All I know is the town of Souillac isn’t much of a town. It appears, in fact, to be merely a train station.

Which is currently closed, if the locked door and dark windows are any indication.

This is not good. Because, despite the numerous messages I left informing her of my arrival time, Shari is not here to pick me up. I am stranded on a train platform in the middle of the French countryside.

All alone. All alone except for—

Someone beside me clears his throat. I spin around and smack—almost literally—into Jean-Luc. Who is standing behind me. With a big grin on his face.

“Hello again,” he says.

“What—” I stare at him. Is he a figment of my imagination? Can blood clots form in your legs on trains and then travel to your brain? I’m almost sure not. They are from the air pressure in planes, right?

So he really is here. Standing in front of me. With a long, extremely bulky gray garment bag in his hands.

As the train pulls away.

“What are youdoing here?” I shriek. “This isn’t your stop!”

“How do you know? You never even asked where I was going.”

This is totally true, I realize belatedly.

“But—but,” I stammer, “you saw my ticket. You knew I was getting off at Souillac. You didn’t say you were, too.”

“No,” Jean-Luc says, “I didn’t.”

“But…why?” I’m suddenly seized with a horrible thought. What if charming, handsome Jean-Luc is some kind of serial killer? Who woos vulnerable American girls on foreign trains, lulls them into a false sense of trust, then kills them when they get to their destinations? What if he’s got some kind of scythe or garrote in that garment bag? He totally could. It looks awfully bulky. Way too bulky to be a suit jacket or hemmed trousers.

I look around and see that the last car in the parking lot is pulling away—along with the Sarlat bus—leaving us alone on the platform. Totally alone.

“I wanted to tell you I was getting off at Souillac,” Jean-Luc is saying when I am able to focus on him, and not my complete and utter lack of recourse if he starts trying to kill me, “but I was afraid you’d feel embarrassed.”

“About what?” I ask.

“Well,” Jean-Luc says. He’s starting to look a little sheepish in the bright glare of the streetlamp, around which moths are throwing themselves about as noisily as the crickets are chirping. Why does he look sheepish? Because he realizes he has to kill me now and I’m probably not going to like it? “I haven’t exactly been honest with you…I mean, you thought I was just some random stranger on a train you could pour out all your problems to…”

“I’m really sorry about that,” I say. My God, what kind of person would kill another person just because she told her life story to him on a train? This is totally unreasonable. All he had to do was pull out a book and pretend to read or something, and I’d have shut up. Probably. “I was very upset—”

“But it was so entertaining,” Jean-Luc says with a shrug. “I have to tell you. I’ve never had a girl sit down next to me and start talking about—well, what you did. Ever.”

This can’t be happening. Why did I tell a total stranger so much about my personal life? Even a totally cute one in a Hugo shirt?

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me,” I say, backing slowly toward the train platform’s stairs.

“I’m not that type of girl. I’m really not.”

“Lizzie,” Jean-Luc says. He takes a step toward me. He is not letting me back away toward the steps.

“The reason I didn’t tell you I was getting off at Souillac—besides the fact that you didn’t ask—is because I’mnot some random stranger you met on a train.”

Oh, great. This is the part where he starts telling me something psychotic about how we knew each other in a past life. It’s like T.J. from my freshman year all over again. Why am I such a weirdo magnet?

WHY?

And he seemed so great back on the train! Really! He said I was fairly brave! He totally restored my faith in men! Why does he have to turn out to be a murdering psycho? WHY?

“Really,” I say. This is all Shari’s fault, of course. If she would just answer her freaking cell phone once in a while, none of this would be happening. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m actually your host. Jean-Luc de Villiers? Your friend Shari’s staying at my father’s place, Mirac.”

I stop backing up. I stop staring at the garment bag. I stop thinking about my imminent death.

Mirac. He said Mirac.

“I never told you the place I was going was called Mirac,” I say. Because, while it’s true I’d babbled almost nonstop to him, I don’t remember ever saying the wordMirac . Which I’d actually forgotten until that very moment.

“No, you didn’t,” Jean-Luc says. “But that’s where your friend Shari is staying, isn’t it? With her boyfriend, Charles Pendergast?”

Charles Pendergast? He knows Chaz’s real name! Iknow I never told him that. No one ever uses Chaz’s real name, because he tells hardly anyone what it is.

Who would know Chaz’s real name? Only someone who knew him. Well.

“Wait,” I say, my mind lurching for some—any—reasonable explanation for what’s happening.

“You’re…Luke?Chaz’s friend Luke? But…you said your name was Jean-Luc.”

“Well,” Luke—or Luc—or Jean-Luc—or whatever his name is—says, still looking sheepish, “that’s my full name. Jean-Luc de Villiers. But Chaz has always just called me Luke.”

“But…but aren’t you supposed to be at Mirac with Chaz and Shari?”

He swings the garment bag off his shoulder. “I had to go into Paris for the day to pick up my cousin’s wedding gown. She didn’t trust the shop’s courier to get it here in one piece. See?”