B007Q6XJAO EBOK (19 page)

Skilled seducers spoon up rich, creamy baritones. An actor once enrapt a female audience by mellifluously reciting the names of vegetables in French. “A voice,” writes author Alice Ferney in
La conversation amoureuse
, “can enter deeper inside you than a man’s sex”; “[it] can inhabit you, lodge in the pit of your stomach,” and whip up desire as “the wind whips up the sea.”

For the fullest seductive effect, soft is the charm. Hermes, the Greek god of seduction, was “the whisperer”; in primitive magic, love spells had to be crooned
sotto voce
to work. Vronsky accosts Anna Karenina (with fatal results) in a “soft, gentle, calm voice,” and the ladykiller Lorcan of Marian Keyes’s
Last Chance Saloon
ensorcels women by talking to them in his “soft-spoken” melodious brogue. Popular romance heroes, like Rick Chandler of
The Playboy
, may make content-free conversation, but their “bedroom voices” drip “charisma.”

A great lover can voodoo women with his voice. Lady Blessington visited Lord Byron in Italy and enthused that “his voice and accent are particularly clear and harmonious, not a word is lost.” One clue to Aldous Huxley’s success with women (despite his beanpole appearance) might have been his famous voice. It was “an instrument of music,” said violinist Yehudi Menuhin, “beautifully articulated, modulated, [and] silvery.” Duke Ellington too spoke, recalled bandmates, as if he were singing, with “an extraordinary range of pitches, inflections and rhythmical patterns.” Mika Brzezinski, co-host of television’s
Morning Joe
, recently told President Bill Clinton, “You’re a low-talker. Soft. You have to lean in to listen.”

Listening

[Love’s] first task [is] to listen.

—P
AUL
T
ILLICH
,
Love, Power, and Justice

There’s almost no female desire like the desire to be heard. Nearly every relationship study documents women’s longing for men’s full attention, engagement, and empathy. “Love is listening,” women explain, a way of saying, “I love you.” If so, legions of women must feel love-deprived; men’s refusal to listen is one of their chief complaints. Mike Torchia, a personal trainer who has had affairs with more than forty married women, told
Newsweek
that he’s in such demand because husbands tune out. “It’s very important,” he said, “for a trainer to be a good listener.”

For lovers it may be crucial. The traditional guides underscore the importance of listening “attentively” to women and discerning subtexts. Attention, claim several philosophers, is the paramount “demand of love.” What we seek most in romantic passion is to be the sole focus of another’s interest, our unique self perceived and appreciated. A woman blooms under a man’s total concentration, and returns the favor, haloing him in superlatives. Brian, the young banker, told me he once listened to a date for forty-five minutes, only to have her say he was the best conversationalist she had ever known.

The role of listener, however, isn’t simple, especially in high-stakes romantic exchanges. Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm compares listening to poetry interpretation, an intuitive and creative art. Rather than a passive, laid-back enterprise, it’s as demanding as talk. A man has to be fully present, his mind cleared of distractions, and his brain and emotions engaged. A hint of insincerity and a woman’s superior bullshit detector will find him out. In addition, he must supply spirited feedback—responsive facial expressions, eye contact, “go on” signals such as “mms” and yeses—and divine the wishes beneath the words.

Some sex gods were sublime listeners. Hermes possessed insight into the hidden meanings of speech, and Shiva had supernaturally attuned ears that heard the truths “beyond ordinary perception.” Even Pan, the horndog of the Greek pantheon and disciple of Dionysus, listened astutely. His long pointed ears denoted both his animal nature and his gift of prophecy and interpretation. The Greeks considered him the patron of theatrical criticism.

Women’s fantasy lovers listen like divinities; they’re focused, empathetic, sincere, and emotive, and they read beneath the lines. When Annie of Laura Dave’s
First Husband
drifts into a restaurant bar after a nasty breakup, she runs into a chef who listens to her as if there were no other news in town. “So,” Griffin says, grazing her cheek with his finger, “care to elaborate?” She does, and becomes so smitten afterward that she marries him and moves to Nowhere, Massachusetts. Throughout their marriage, he’s a priest-cum-shrink who grasps her every word and covert desire, and encourages her to take a job in London, where her ex lurks next door. In less than a week, she bails and returns to Griffin.

Harlequin-style ladykillers usually come more alpha-sized. They’re hard-shell heroes with soft centers who psych out heroines and feel their pain. Gabe St. James of JoAnn Ross’s
One Summer
is a testosterone-fueled marine with a therapy chip. As soon as he meets veterinarian Charity Tiernan, he senses something is wrong and invites her to dinner, where he elicits her story. Studying her with “slow, silent interest,” he listens to her wedding fiasco and affirms and commiserates. “Thank you for listening,” she says as the clothes come off, while he murmurs, “Feel free to share all you want.”

Listening is a ladykiller stealth weapon. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, Napoleon’s prime minister and a leading European politician, was regarded as a “King of Conversation.” He also reigned supreme with women. At salons where success depended on talk, the
précieuses
were drawn to him like birds “fascinated by the eye of a snake.” But as he told his harem of mistresses and Napoleon, it was an aural illusion. His conversational fame, he said, rested less on his wit than his ability to listen. And he was an expert, hearing people out with complete attention, approval, and a perceptive twinkle in his eye.

Benjamin Disraeli, another major statesman—twice prime minister under Queen Victoria—was a favorite of women and had the same talent for listening. One anecdote has a society lady dining with his rival, William Gladstone. Afterward she said that she thought she’d been “in the presence of the cleverest man in all England.” The next day, she sat beside Disraeli and realized
she
“was the cleverest woman in all England.” An eloquent speaker when he chose, Disraeli believed the best way to beguile women (and there were many, from his besotted wife to mistresses) was with an appreciative ear. Sometimes silence, he quipped, “is the mother of truth”—and desire.

True to the breed, Gary Cooper “was a great listener,” as was Warren Beatty, who soaked up women’s conversation. “It’s like he hangs onto every word,” recalled Natalie Wood’s sister. “Everything that comes out of your mouth is the utmost importance to him.”

Conversational Balm

Soft is the roucoulade, murmuring, cooing of love.

—O
VID
,
The Art of Love

The widow is distraught. She has thrown herself into her husband’s tomb and refused food for five days. One night, in this tale from Petronius’s
Satyricon
, a Roman soldier on guard hears her cries and descends to the crypt to investigate. In his softest voice, he pours out condolences until she at last comes around. She accepts his food offerings and begins to see the attractions of the living, specifically of the soldier before her. Soon they find a better use for the bier, and spend three nights together in the closed tomb.

Conversation can be at its most seductive in a slow groove. Anthropologists call this phatic speech—the kind that sedates, placates, forges bonds, and supplies romantic comfort food. Male macaque monkeys groom females into a sexy languor before mating with them, just as accomplished ladykillers verbally massage lovers in courtship. Content hardly matters; the object is affiliation, mutual sympathy, and relaxation. It’s grease for the amorous wheels, designed to calm, assure, and lull a lady into that lovin’ feeling.

Women are particularly partial to grooming talk. Unlike men, say linguists, they speak more for warmth, companionship, and connection. They’re really singing a roundelay of social cohesion, observed essayist J. B. Priestley. In the process, they derive a neural payoff that floods pleasure circuits with peace and composure and assuages anxiety.

Men might do well to brush up their phatic. In contrast to a man’s, a woman’s sexuality is skittish and complex and easily spooked; hers is wired to the “big brain” where primal fears or imperious commands from the neocortex can shut down the works. For women’s desire to run free, their minds have to be at rest. “If you’re not relaxed, comfortable, warm, and cozy,” writes Louann Brizendine, “it’s not likely to happen.” Few sexual sedatives carry such clout with women as conversational mood music, which anthropologist Helen Fisher traces to our female ancestors who required precoital talk to feel safe.

Soothing speech is a strong elixir. It takes us back to the delights of an infantile state, to the “voluptuous sleepiness” of the maternal embrace, and “the moment of the enchanted voice.” Sweet nothings also contain bonding magic. Baby talk between lovers swamps the reward center of the brain with feel-good chemicals and promotes romantic attachment. Richard Burton knew what he was doing when he addressed Elizabeth Taylor as “My Lumps,” “Twit Twaddle,” and “Toothache.”

“Relaxing the Girl” through phatic speech is a classic piece of amorous advice. The
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
devoted a whole chapter to the arts of calming discourse, and Ovid directed men to imitate the cooing, caressing language of doves in their love talks with women. Others counseled hypnotic-like techniques—the repetition of soft, suggestive words. Dumuzi uses this device with the goddess Inanna to put her under his sexual sway: “My sister, I would go with you to my garden,” he intones. “Inanna I would go with you to my garden / I would go with you to my orchard.”

Thomas Mann’s “god of love,” Felix Krull, speaks fluent phatic and chain-seduces women with his “sympathy” and mastery of the “primordial regions of human intercourse.” While a waiter at a resort, he schmoozes a pretty blonde hotel guest by asking the weary girl if she rested well, and “softly” offering to bring up her breakfast: “It’s so calm and peaceful in the room, in bed . . .”

A similarly suave groomer is Edwardian sex evangelist Herbert Methley of A. S. Byatt’s
Children’s Book
. When Olive Wellwood, a married author and mother, meets him for an assignation, she stands terrified at the bedroom door. Anticipating her fear, Methley fastens the latch and croons, Of course, you’re anxious, “but I mean to make you forget all those thoughts, soon, very soon now.” “Don’t think, stop thinking,” he whispers, “now is the time to stop thinking, my dear, my darling.” After which, she experiences a seismic orgasm.

In mass-market romances, men supply a continual loop of erotic Muzak. The Texas heartbreaker of Lisa Kleypas’s
Smooth Talking Stranger
sweet-talks the heroine into bed, and John Wright, the African American Romeo of Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s
Hot Johnny
, lullabies all his lady friends. “Aw baby girl,” he chants to one, “don’t cry,” “let me lift you up where you belong.”

The “Enchanter” of Napoleonic France, François-René Chateaubriand, owed much of his erotic celebrity to his genius for bonding with women. Although a professional wordsmith—a diplomat and author of twenty volumes of prose, including the seminal novels
Atala
and
René
—Chateaubriand was a poor public speaker. Alone with women, however, he was in his element. He immersed himself in their joys and sorrows, listened, drew out confidences, and soothed them in his “rich and sympathetic” voice. After these soulful communions, the greatest ladies fell for him “
suddenly
and
forever
.”

Chateaubriand seemed a poor candidate for the Casanova trade. Morose and often “disagreeable,” he was five foot four and bandy-legged, and looked like a “hump-back without a hump.” He rarely took the initiative; women “came to him.” The youngest son of an impoverished, aristocratic Breton family, he returned from exile after the French Revolution to a career in Napoleonic France and an arranged marriage with a titled neighbor, Céleste Buisson.

It was a fractious, unhappy match. Mistresses soon flocked: first, the
salonnière
Pauline de Beaumont who doted on his “caressing” talk, and later the “Queen of the Roses,” Madame de Custine, who purchased Henri IV’s castle for his pleasure. “He was prepared to make your life a sweet one,” said one adorer, “save that he shattered [it].”

Hooked on serial intimacies, Chateaubriand couldn’t be faithful, even after he met his great love, Juliette Récamier, a cultured
charmeuse
, hymned as “the loveliest woman of her age.” With her he used the same soothe-and-bond philter: “How have you passed the night?” reads a typical letter. “Are you still ill? How I wish I could know all about it! I will come at four o’ clock to find out.” During their thirty-year relationship, ladies besieged him, not just for his fame, but for his conversation that caressed, comprehended, and wove a web of togetherness and entrancement.