revisions. no conclusions.

On the first-class train from Amsterdam to Paris, a small-framed eager-faced man helped me with my suitcase and pointed me to my seat – across from his. My hair was unwashed, last night’s mascara had pilled on my lower lashes, and as I shifted into my seat, my clothes released the moldy-fresh smell that hovers like a green cloud around Amsterdam’s canals. The man – after introducing himself as Jean – deftly initiated a conversation despite the stacks of magazines and postcards I had stacked around me. I was planning on busying my senses with mindless surface tasks while allowing my thoughts to wander out the window and around the passing Dutch countryside, sprinkled with snow, as it collected the dusk, but the man maintained what quickly moved beyond small-talk even when I tried to leave the dialogue to dwindle. His air of eagerness came from his wide brown eyes and tanned skin, pulled taught over his wiry features: a ski-slope nope, a high forehead, and a jovially, but perhaps slightly jester-like, or maniacal, pointed chin. He wore his hair in a clean, heavy side-part, lending him an air of post-war glamour that was heightened by his crisp white shirt. As the drinks cart passed by, he spoke to the attendant in Dutch; afterwards, he said with a tone of false modesty that his five, almost six, languages are motivated by his desire to communicate with people, to make them comfortable in their own language, and – he said vaguely – to ‘expand.’ Here, he raised his eyebrows at the same time as lowering his face, trying to give me what I assume can only have been an attempt at a mysterious, seductive look.
With me, he communicated with questions that were leading but not prying, inquisitive but not sinister; he wove together my provoked responses in the pauses that he left after my reply: I could see, through his unmoving yet twinkling eyes, his observations forming conclusions to my character. Curling his lips in a wry smile, he ignited my defense mechanism: I bristled, feeling as though my thoughts were being invaded through his immediate, judicious interpretation. To respond to his own questions returned to him, he would quote Voltaire, Goethe, or Freud. Peppering the quotations with his own hard-earned philosophies, nearly dogmatic in their assertive conviction, he introduced the topic of intelligence and wisdom.
“I can tell you are an intelligent woman,” he said, “but you have yet to completely understand this curse.” He said this as though he were Adam naming the animals; in saying it, it was as though he were bringing it into being. “In my next life, for example, I would rather be a cow.”
Before he could go on to conjure the musings of Sartre, the ticket-collector came by and told me that I was, in fact, in the wrong seat. Jean made no sign of acknowledgement.

Brussels, where Jean lived, was the next stop. He wrote down his phone number on a small piece of paper, folded it up, and slid it across the table, leaving it in the shallow hollow intended for cups. “Let us carry on this conversation at a later date: I will be in Paris on business in two days time. I will take you out for a walk and a drink.”

He kept to his promise, and on the day that he had mentioned he would be in town, he called me in the afternoon.
“Hello Harriet, are we still on for tonight?”
“Oh, uh, well, yes, we are, aren’t we,” I stuttered out, with no inflection at the end – a question statement.
“Well, what is your address? I shall send my driver round to fetch you at half-past seven. I am at the Hotel Intercontinental on rue Scribe.”

Upon arriving in the lobby of the fin-de-siècle hotel facing the Opera Garnier, the porters, though friendly, were looking at me waiting as though I were waiting a, you know, rendez-vouz. Jean was late; I inspected the centerpiece of chartreuse orchids, the reality of which every passer-by questioned. They were real.
When he finally arrived, he was even smaller and bonier than I remembered. He kissed me on both cheeks, lingered on the left, and then made an vague attempt to put his arm around my waist and guide me to the private lounge on the next floor up, a move which I retracted from with an exaggerated motion to remove my gloves. In the empty lounge for the “premium guests,” he plied me with chivalry, champagne, and fresh raspberries. The chauffeur drove us around the Marais, and then to the Champs-Elysees, where we sat on the stools at a bar. Jean’s legs didn’t reach the footrest on the chair; he looked like a small child with his legs, encased in jeans that were far too trendy, dangling. My intentions for the night were to show him that the statements he made on the train were larger concepts than he had pigeon-holed them into, that maybe things were not as black and white as he proposed. He said to me more than once that I was serious, that I was rigid, and was not letting myself go.
“No,” I replied instantly: “I don’t know what your intentions are.”