It's a really beautiful gift," she says. I assume she's referring to the sentiment, not the shiny disc itself. "Your intuition was very good. I love Billy Bragg. I love Sleater-Kinney; I think they are just amazing. And the Smiths are probably one of my favorite bands of all time." Morrissey again gets the girl.

I'm friendly with several, especially Jude," she says, "but I tend to be closer with the directors."I seem to be riding high, and since we've just finished up dessert, I risk it all with a final question from Esquire. True or false: You are more likely to have adventurous sex after receiving a gift of jewelry. Rachel started modeling when she was 14, and began acting during her studies at Cambridge University. While there, she formed a theater company named "Talking Tongues", which won the Guardian Award, at the Edinburgh Festival, for its take on Neville Southall's "Washbag". Rachel went on to star on stage in the lauded Sean Mathias revival of Noël Coward's "Design For Living". It was a role that won her a vote for Most Promising Newcomer by the London Critics' Circle. And what does she think of us strapping American guys? "American men are certainly more direct than British men." Okay, point taken. "Here, there's much less ritual to get through, much less bizarre courtship. We actually don't date in England. You go out with a guy, and you never know whether it's a date or not. Also, I think American men listen better than English men." She has starred in many movies, including The Mummy (1999), Enemy at the Gates (2001) and Stealing Beauty (1996). Rachel can also be seen in the movies The Shape of Things (2003), About a Boy (2002), Constantine (2005) and The Constant Gardener (2005), for which she won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress. Now, in "187 Things You Don't Know About Women," it states: If a woman says you would get along with her boyfriend, that means she wants to sleep with you. Nowhere, however, does it explain what it means when a girl compares you to Paul Rudd. I'm not sure what to think.

It's kind of like having a penis for a bit, isn't it?" she says, which somehow sounds good when she says it. "Hmm, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one as a first-date gift, though."Me: Okay, but can I remind you that you did pose naked with a live snake this weekend? The most common answer was a ten. I'm left no choice but to try to buy her affections with some of the gifts Esquire has provided me. The first one she unwraps is a Pucci scarf. I hand her a card with my verse. Unlike the CD or the flowers or the Pucci scarf, however, this gesture appears to alarm her. She reads the lines: "When He created you lying in bed / He knew what He was doing / He was drunk and He was high / And He created the mountains and the sea and fire / At the same time." We arrive at L'Orangerie, a gilded French restaurant so aggressively romantic, it looks like the Hollywood set of a gilded French restaurant. It has huge murals of chteaus and a flower arrangement the size of my New York apartment. Or as Rachel puts it, "It's incredibly posh." We are guided to a candlelit table. Rachel: Yes. It's more comfortable, especially if you have to run for a bus or something. In London, it seems like you're always running for the bus.