When in French (2 page)

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W
E HAD ESTABLISHED
our life together, in London, on more or less neutral ground: his continent, my language. It worked. Olivier was my guide to living outside of the behemoth of American culture; I was his guide to living inside the behemoth of English.

He had learned the language over the course of many years. When he was sixteen, his parents sent him to Saugerties, New York, for six weeks: a homestay with some acquaintances of an English teacher in Bordeaux, the only American they knew. Olivier landed at JFK, where a taxi picked him up. This was around the time of the Atlanta Olympic Games.

“What is the English for ‘female athlete'?” he asked, wanting to be able to discuss current events.

“‘Bitch,'” the driver said.

They drove on toward Ulster County, Olivier straining for a glimpse of the famed Manhattan skyline. The patriarch of
the host family was an arborist named Vern. Olivier remembers driving around Saugerties with Charlene, Vern's wife, and a friend of hers, who begged him over and over again to say “hamburger.” He was mystified by the fact that Charlene called Vern “the Incredible Hunk.”

Five years later Olivier found himself in England, a graduate student in mathematics. Unfortunately, his scholastic English—“Kevin is a blue-eyed boy” had been billed as a canonical phrase—had done little to prepare him for the realities of the language on the ground. “You've really improved,” his roommate told him, six weeks into the term. “When you got here, you couldn't speak a word.” At that point, Olivier had been studying English for more than a decade.

After England, he moved to California to study for a PhD, still barely able to cobble together a sentence. His debut as a teaching assistant for a freshman course in calculus was greeted by a mass defection. On the plus side, one day he looked out upon the residue of the crowd and noticed an attentive female student. She was wearing a T-shirt that read “Bonjour, Paris!”

By the time we met, Olivier had become not only a proficient English speaker but a sensitive, agile one. Upon arriving in London in 2007, he'd had to take an English test to obtain his license as an amateur pilot. The examiner rated him “Expert”: “Able to speak at length with a natural, effortless flow. Varies speech flow for stylistic effect, e.g. to emphasize a point. Uses appropriate discourse markers and connectors spontaneously.” He was funny, quick, and colloquial. He wrote things like (before our third date), “Trying to think of an alternative to the bar-restaurant diptych, but maybe that's too ambitious.” He said things like (riffing on a line from
Zoolander
as he pulled the car up, once again, to the right-hand curb), “I'm not an
ambi-parker.” I rarely gave any thought to the fact that English wasn't his native tongue.

One day, at the movies, he approached the concession stand, taking out his wallet.

“A medium popcorn, a Sprite, and a Pepsi, please.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Did you just specifically order a Pepsi?”

In a word, Olivier had been outed. Due to a traumatic experience at a drive-through in California, he confessed, he still didn't permit himself to pronounce the word “Coke” aloud. For me, it was a shocking discovery, akin to finding out that a peacock couldn't really fly. I felt extreme tenderness toward his vulnerability, mingled with wonderment at his ingenuity. I'd had no idea that he still, very occasionally, approached English in a defensive posture, feinting and dodging as he strutted along.

I only knew Olivier in his third language—he also spoke Spanish, the native language of his maternal grandparents, who had fled over the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War—but his powers of expression were one of the things that made me fall in love with him. For all his rationality, he had a romantic streak, an attunement to the currents of feeling that run beneath the surface of words. Once he wrote me a letter—an inducement to what we might someday have together—in which every sentence began with “Maybe.” Maybe he'd make me an omelet, he said, every day of my life.

We moved in together before long. One night, we were watching a movie. I spilled a glass of water, and went to mop it up with some paper towels.

“They don't have very good capillarity,” Olivier said.

“Huh?” I replied, continuing to dab at the puddle.

“Their capillarity isn't very good.”

“What are you talking about? That's not even a word.”

Olivier said nothing. A few days later, I noticed a piece of paper lying in the printer tray. It was a page from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

capillarity
noun

1: the property or state of being capillary

2: the action by which the surface of a liquid where it is in contact with a solid (as in a capillary tube) is elevated or depressed depending on the relative attraction of the molecules of the liquid for each other and for those of the solid

Ink to a nib, my heart surged.

There was eloquence, too, in the way he expressed himself physically—a perfect grammar of balanced steps and filled glasses and fingertips on the back of my elbow, predicated on some quiet confidence that we were always already a compound subject. The first time we said good-bye, he put his hands around my waist and lifted me just half an inch off the ground: a kiss in commas. I was short; he was not much taller. We could look each other in the eye.

But despite the absence of any technical barrier to comprehension, we often had, in some weirdly basic sense, a hard time understanding each other. The critic George Steiner defined intimacy as “confident, quasi-immediate translation,” a state of increasingly one-to-one correspondence in which “the external vulgate and the private mass of language grow more and more concordant.” Translation, he explained, occurs both across and
inside
languages. You are performing a feat of
interpretation anytime you attempt to communicate with someone who is not like you.

In addition to being French and American, Olivier and I were translating, to varying degrees, across a host of Steiner's categories: scientist/artist, atheist/believer, man/woman. It seemed sometimes as if generation was one of the few gaps across which we weren't attempting to stretch ourselves. I had been conditioned to believe in the importance of directness and sincerity, but Olivier valued a more disciplined self-presentation. If, to me, the definition of intimacy was letting it all hang out, to him that constituted a form of thoughtlessness. In the same way that Olivier liked it when I wore lipstick, or perfume—American men, in my experience, often claimed to prefer a more “natural” look—he trusted in a sort of emotional
maquillage
, in which people took a few minutes to compose their thoughts, rather than walking around, undone, in the affective equivalent of sweatpants. For him, the success of
le couple
—a relationship, in French, was something you were, not something you were in—depended on restraint rather than uninhibitedness. Where I saw artifice, he saw artfulness.

Every couple struggles, to one extent or another, to communicate, but our differences, concealing each other like nesting dolls, inhibited our trust in each other in ways that we scarcely understood. Olivier was careful of what he said to the point of parsimony; I spent my words like an oligarch with a terminal disease. My memory was all moods and tones, while he had a transcriptionist's recall for the details of our exchanges. Our household spats degenerated into linguistic warfare.

“I'll clean the kitchen after I finish my dinner,” I'd say. “First, I'm going to read my book.”

“My dinner,” he'd reply, in a babyish voice. “My book.”

To him, the tendency of English speakers to use the possessive pronoun where none was strictly necessary sounded immature, stroppy even: my dinner, my book, my toy.

“Whatever, it's
my
language,” I'd reply.

And why, he'd want to know later, had I said I'd clean the kitchen, when I'd only tidied it up? I'd reply that no native speaker—by which I meant no
normal person
—would ever make that distinction, feeling as though I were living with Andy Kaufman's Foreign Man. His literalism missed the point, in a way that was as maddening as it was easily mocked.

For better or for worse, there was something off about us, in the way that we homed in on each other's sentences, focusing too intently, as though we were listening to the radio with the volume down a notch too low. “You don't seem like a married couple,” someone said, minutes after meeting us at a party. We fascinated each other and frustrated each other. We could go exhilaratingly fast, or excruciatingly slow, but we often had trouble finding a reliable intermediate setting, a conversational cruise control. We didn't possess that easy shorthand, encoding all manner of attitudes and assumptions, by which some people seem able, nearly telepathically, to make themselves mutually known.

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I
N GENEVA,
my lack of French introduced an asymmetry. I needed Olivier to execute a task as basic as buying a train ticket. He was my translator, my navigator, my amanuensis, my taxi dispatcher, my schoolmaster, my patron, my critic. Like someone very young or very old, I was forced to depend on him almost completely. A few weeks after the chimney sweep's visit, the cable guy came: I dialed Olivier's number and
surrendered the phone, quiescent as a traveler handing over his papers. I had always been the kind of person who bounded up to the maître d' at a restaurant, ready to wrangle for a table. Now, I hung back. I overpaid and underasked—a tax on inarticulacy. I kept telling waiters that I was dead—
je suis finie
—when I meant to say that I had finished my salad.

I was lucky, I knew, privileged to be living in safety and comfort. Materially, my papers were in order. We had received a
livret de famille
from the French government, attesting that I was a member of the family of a European citizen. (The book, a sort of secular family bible, charged us to “assure together the moral and material direction of the family,” and had space for the addition of twelve children.) My Swiss residency permit explained that I was entitled to reside in the country, with Olivier as my sponsor, under the auspices of “regroupement familial.”

Emotionally, though, I was a displaced person. In leaving America and, then, leaving English, I had become a double immigrant or expatriate or whatever I was. (The distinctions could seem vain—what was an “expat” but an immigrant who drinks at lunch?) I could go back, but I couldn't: Olivier had lived in the United States for seven years and was unwilling to repeat the experience, fearing he would never thrive in a professional culture dominated by extra-large men discussing college sports. Some of my friends were taken aback that a return to the States wasn't up for discussion, but I felt I didn't have much choice. I wasn't going to dragoon Olivier into an existence that he had tried, and disliked, and explicitly wanted to avoid. Besides, I enjoyed living in Europe. For me, the first move, the physical one, had been easy. The transition into another language, however, was proving unexpectedly wrenching. Even
though I had been living abroad—happily; ecstatically, even—for three years, I felt newly untethered in Geneva, a ghost ship set sail from the shores of my mother tongue.

My state of mindlessness manifested itself in bizarre ways. I couldn't name the president of the country I lived in; I didn't know how to dial whatever the Swiss version was of 911. When I noticed that the grass medians in our neighborhood had grown shaggy with neglect, I momentarily thought, “I should call the city council,” and then abandoned the thought: it seemed like scolding someone else's kids. Because I never checked the weather, I was often shivering or soaked. Every so often I would walk out the door and notice that the shops were shuttered and no one was wearing a suit. Olivier called these “pop-up holidays”—Swiss observances of which we'd failed to get wind. Happy Saint Berthold's Day!

In Michel Butor's 1956 novel
Passing Time
, a French clerk is transferred to the fictitious English city of Bleston-on-Slee, a hellscape of fog and furnaces. “I had to struggle increasingly against the impression that all my efforts were foredoomed to failure, that I was going round and round a blank wall, that the doors were sham doors and the people dummies, the whole thing a hoax,” the narrator says. Geneva felt similarly surreal. The city seemed a diorama, a failure of scale. Time unfurled vertically, as though, rather than moving through it, I was sinking down into it, like quicksand. I kept having a twinge in the upper right corner of my chest. It felt as though someone had pulled the cover too tight over a bed.

The gods punished their enemies by taking away their voices. Hera condemned Echo, the nymph whose stories so enchanted Zeus, to “prattle in a fainter tone, with mimic sounds, and accents not her own,” forever repeating a few basic syllables. First God threw Adam and Eve out of the garden. Then
he destroyed the Tower of Babel, casting humankind out of a linguistic paradise—where every object had a name and every name had an object and God was the word—in a kind of second fall. Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.