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  At dinner, he’s not the headliner I expected. Only after the soup course does he emerge from a genomics debate with his female dinner partner, a blonde surgeon, and address the table. He mentions weddings, and stories start to ricochet: the nude groom in a top hat, a ring bearer who swallowed the ring, the poodle “bridesmaid,” and the accident in the aisle.

  Reese’s contribution isn’t remarkable. He tells about the time he waltzed with a gay usher at his son’s high-society wedding. But he “throws the gift,” as they say down South. Reese sets the big-tent scene with wry details, mimics the in-laws’ whispered invectives, and builds up to the moment when the priest cut in and escorted him off the floor. The women at the table are riveted. The surgeon beside him slips him her card, and he leaves with a just-divorced Swedish journalist.

  A seductive conversationalist does more than verbally connect; he conjures enchantment—of a prepotent kind. A man of winged words and colloquial gifts, no matter how ill-favored, can gobsmack a woman. “Give me ten minutes,” bragged Voltaire, “to talk away my ugly face and I will bed the Queen of France.” And keep her bedded, if he wishes. Conversation is a long-acting charm that fires and feeds female desire and potentiates with time. “Women,” wrote Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins, “can resist a man’s love, a man’s fame, a man’s personal appearance, and a man’s money, but they cannot resist a man’s tongue, when he knows how to talk to them.”

  Perhaps for good reason. Not only is a woman more verbal and communicative than a man, but she’s also erotically “lit” by conversation. The XX-chromosome brain is built to savor speech. Women have a larger communication center than men, possess faster verbal circuits, and process language more emotionally. The emotional-linguistic parts of their brain are extensively meshed and hypersensitive to social nuances. When women connect via talk, explains Louann Brizendine, they get a huge dopamine and oxytocin rush, the biggest neurological reward outside of an orgasm or a heroin hit.

  All too often, male conversation isn’t providing these rushes. In poll after poll, women complain about men’s inability to give good dialogue—to listen, engage, and interest them. Silence is the number-one gripe. Studies suggest that the fallout may be serious, accounting for a high percentage of fights, divorces, and women’s affairs. Sociolinguists attribute the problem to an innate gender gap in speech styles, and say “cross-cultural communication” can’t be helped. But that’s cold comfort to many women who yearn, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes, “to be in a relationship with a guy they can seriously talk to.”

  The female fantasy world is full of such men. In Madame D’Aulnoy’s seventeenth-century fairy tale “The Blue Bird,” the King Prince transforms himself into a blue bird who visits his truelove’s prison cell each night for seven years and talks to her for hours. In more contemporary tales, heroines leave perfectly good lovers the moment they encounter talented talkers. Irina McGovern of Lionel Shriver’s Post-Birthday World discards her loyal partner of nine years for conversational sorcerer, snooker star Ramsey Acton. In and out of bed, he bespells her with his “soft, thick” down-market accent, his intuitive ear, funny stories, and off-color gabfests where he extemporizes with her until dawn, gesticulating with his fine, thin fingers. In Elin Hilderbrand’s Summer Affair, a Nantucket artist and mother two-times her “nothing-to say” cute husband with an overweight, balding retiree who’ll discuss “her work,” culture, and “important ideas” with her.

  Mass-market romance heroes answer women’s wildest dreams: they’re talkative girlfriends embodied in 210 pounds of Mr. America muscle mass. Lisa Kleypas’s four Travis brothers in her Texas trilogy are ripped hunks, but they talk up a storm—about dreams, ambitions, psychic wounds, love, and the heroine’s endless attractions. The chiseled six-foot-six Mat Jorick of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s First Lady is a conversationalist from female heaven. Smart, empathic, and gregarious, he love-swoons a hitchhiker (a president’s widow in disguise) on a trek in his RV through his sparkling, in-touch dialogue.

  Mythic love gods, predictably, possessed the celestial gift of gab. The Irish Ogma was “honey-tongued,” and Hermes, “the god of eloquence,” wore a gold chain dangling from his lips and deciphered the hidden meanings in language. Dionysus not only founded dramatic dialogue in comedy and tragedy, he drew the wrath of King Pentheus with his “clever speech” and “slippery words.” And Paris seduced Helen of Troy by such “sweet and persuasive” speech that it affected her like “witchcraft” or the “the power of drugs.”

  Gifted conversationalists may also have been the erotic kingpins of evolutionary history. According to many theorists (Darwin included), men who were good talking partners had the romantic edge over the grunters and club-wielders and monopolized the prime women. “Verbal courtship,” states Geoffrey Miller, “is the heart of human sexual selection.” Language itself is “made out of love” since speech may have evolved as a mating call or from the shamans’ spell-magic at fertility rites. Conversational fluency in general is a mark of “mating intelligence” and a male plumage display. Great communicators fantail empathy, humor, brains, psychological health, and social aptitude, and suborn women away from the mute studs.

  For centuries amorists have implored men to get their colloquial skills up to speed. “Women are conquered by eloquent words,” proclaimed Ovid in ancient Rome. The European, Arabic, and Indian love literature was equally emphatic: a man must be “good at the art of conversation” and render a woman “rampant” with honeyed rhetoric. He is “no man,” said Shakespeare, “if with his tongue he cannot win women.” From Balzac to the present, the advice has persisted. “Speech is the true realm of eroticism,” writes Professor Shoshana Felman. “To seduce is to produce language that enjoys,” that “takes pleasure.”

  By conversation these writers didn’t mean solo flights of glittering oratory. Although a command of words, subjects, and narrative drama is part of conversational charm, the rest is interactive, a dialogue that resembles a complex, erotic pas de deux. Ladies’ men are master choreographers. They both shine alone and coordinate conversation for two—talk that soothes, amuses, entertains and informs, and poetically enchants. And not all of talk is spoken; much depends on how a man moves, uses his voice, and listens. A great seducer provides verbal and nonverbal eloquence, shows a woman to her best advantage, and creates an improvisational “zone of magic” that’s charged with drama and sexual sorcery.

  Unspoken Eloquence:

  Gesture, Voice, Listening

  There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Winter’s Tale

  You can miss his SoHo shop if you aren’t looking for the small plaque, “Bryce Green, Couturier,” on a black nondescript door. But you can’t miss his edgy, neo-fifties’ designs in fashion circles, or the man himself. He’s tall, rail thin, with a mane of sandy hair, and on the day of my first visit, he’s dressed in black jeans, a fitted checked shirt, pink socks, and matador shoes. In his world, heterosexuals are rare—rarer still are beloved ladies’ men like Bryce.

  “Ladies man!” Bryce protests when we sit down in his studio. “That has a rather negative ring; I prefer a man who loves ladies.” His voice is soft, plumy, and dusted with his native Scottish burr. He cants forward, drapes his long arms over his knees, and says, “I was a late-bloomer—married twice—and now here I am with a string of lady friends. Must be a dearth of decent men,” he laughs.

  “There’s more,” I coax.

  “Oh, absolutely,” he spreads his arms. “I make a woman feel appreciated. Like most good lovers, I expect?” Then I’m off on Casanova—his gifts, veneration of women, and adventures—while Bryce beams and listens: “Right!” “Right!” “Yes.” “Exactly!” The phone trills, a client is here, and he shows me to the door, with a light hand on my shoulder: “Let’s talk again. Fascinating.” Back on Broome Street, I’m suddenly struck by what Bryce didn’t say, the spell of his voice, supple gestures
, and avid listening.

  Gesture

  Conversationally, we speak volumes without words. At least 60 percent of conversation content is “silent.” Women read this nonverbal subtext better than men, and attend closely to men’s paralanguage, especially in romantic exchanges. In a Harvard University study, 87 percent of women versus 42 percent of men correctly interpreted the content of a couple’s conversation when the sound was turned off. A woman is on high alert for unsaid messages—wise to nuances of body movement.

  Unlike ordinary men, great lovers are pros at wordless communication. T. C. Boyle depicts an adept in his novel about Alfred Kinsey, The Inner Circle. “Sexual Olympian” Corcoran seduces the narrator’s fiancée, Iris, with a polished nonverbal “rush,” sidling over and mimicking her smile for smile, move for move. Most men, say body-language students Barbara and Allan Pease, display few facial expressions (only a third of women’s) in conversation, and use mutual eye contact just 31 percent of the time. But Corcoran gazes fixedly at Iris, his mobile features alight with animation. Before long, she’s packing her bags for a liaison.

  Gabriele D’Annunzio was celebrated for his “speechless” eloquence. Although handicapped by a homely face and squat build, he bewitched women with his amorous gestures. In a photograph of him talking to his Russian mistress, he stands tilted toward her, head inclined, arm extended, and one foot pointed forward. As kinesics experts explain, this was a fine-tuned erotic move. An inclined, asymmetric posture communicates immediacy and engagement; a head nod, rapport; a swerved foot, inclusiveness; and an open arm sweep, attraction. Expressive hands—a female favorite—were a D’Annunzian specialty as well. Actress Madame Simone found the poet’s looks repellent, but she conceded that he spellbound her as soon as he spoke, “waving his beautiful white hands in the air.”

  It takes an agile romancer, too, to manage personal space successfully. He needs radar for mood and timing and a working knowledge of female “proxemics.” During intimate talks, a woman tends to stand closer and may become more generous with her favors if a man touches her lightly. Conversational doyen Bill Clinton excels in this lexicon. When he speaks to women (and men), he’s “almost carnal,” squeezing their hands and wrapping his arm around their shoulders as he locks eyes with them.

  Voice

  Along with his way with words, Casanova had another conversational gift that made him irresistible to women: his sonorous voice with its “seductive inflections.” As the Kāma Sūtra recognized, a woman “can be hypnotized by a man’s voice.” The female weakness for vocal seduction has been featured in folktales since ancient Egypt, where the vulva was called “the ear between the legs.” Women hear better than men and listen with their libidos. Even as babies, girls are better at detecting tones of voice, and they remain good at it, sizing up potential mates by the sound of their speech. Vocally expressive themselves, women favor inflected male voices that are deep, low, and musical, which may be related to the fact that a “sing-songy, lilted voice” correlates with stronger empathic abilities.

  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.

  —PAUL TILLICH, 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 clo
thes 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.