Remembering how much he had enjoyed his high school French class, Barnaby recently bought a copy of Du côté de chez Swann. Feeling very well satisfied with himself, he slipped the unopened book into his pocket and went downstairs to Two Boots.

As he stood in line, his eyes affixed themselves like ancient stars to one particular red wedge: it was covered in tiny shrimps that promised the languor of New Orleans leavened by the sere romantic malice of the sea. His mouth began to water, as it had when, as a child, he had reverently watched his mother pour a can of Progresso minestrone soup into a saucepan on the stove. But the red of that soup, in his memory, at least, had been simple and wholesome, while the mottled color of the pizza, ranging from orange to crimson to almost yellow, was impossibly complex. What strange colony of spices combined in its alluring sauce? Suddenly he felt a tapping at his side.

Barnaby looked up and saw a beautiful, dark-eyed woman with her hair in a braid, simply dressed, pleasant, discreet. There was a single strand of pearls around her throat. Pointing seriously at the book in his pocket, she said, “This is the best book ever written.”

“Yes,” Barnaby coughed, “I haven’t quite finished it yet, but so far I agree.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what was your favorite line?”

“No,” he replied, placing two plump fingers upon her delicate, porcelain arm, “I refuse to read that way. To isolate a single line would be, so to speak, like admiring the butterfly’s dizzying flight while dismissing the beauty of its wings. I prefer to let the author’s pen speak to the harmony of my soul without division.”

“That’s beautiful,” she murmurred, gazing deeply into his eyes. Barnaby’s own gaze dropped down to her neckline and he felt himself deeply in love. But before he could gather the courage to speak—to ask her name, to venture his own, to remark that he kept a room in a nearby hotel—she had collected her Sicilian end piece and walked out.

All his life Barnaby had been afflicted by a stutter in the presence of beautiful women. It was an ongoing pain to him to think that the mellifluous tongue that served him so well at stag parties, always ready with an incisive analogy or vulgar joke—how often had he not cried, “He’s the motherfucker that killed my frog!” and been rewarded with hearty laughter—should consistently fail him just at the critical, infantine beginnings of so many a great romance. But this thought had never pained him so terribly as it did tonight: tonight, when kindly or capricious fate had placed before him the plump, dark, pretentious sexpot of his dreams! Tonight, when all he had wanted—or needed—to say was, “Allow me to lend you a thousand francs!”

“Buddy!” shouted the counterman, a red-faced teenager with his hair in a topknot. “What’ll you have?”

Desparing of the world and of himself, Barnaby ordered five slices and a gallon of root beer. Later that night, kept from the healing oblivion of sleep by mysterious pains in his belly, Barnaby remembered the book. He brewed himself a cup of tisane à verveine, lit a single candle, and climbed into bed.

“Longtemps,” he read, “je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: 'Je m'endors.'”

Barnaby stared at these lines for several minutes, lost in thought; at last, as he extinguished the candle, he remarked to himself, “On second thought, I think I took Spanish.”