When in French (9 page)

Lamenting the way that the uprootedness of the New World manifested itself in the American vocabulary, Edith Wharton asked, “What has become, in America, of the copse, the spinney, the hedgerow, the dale, the vale, the weald?” If my infatuation was not requited—one day I opened a newspaper to find a letter from a man furious that his local convenience store had “seemingly used a foreign dialect of the English language to describe biscuits as ‘cookies'”—it was invigorating. I reveled in plural collective nouns (“England
are winning”) and pro-predicates (“They might do”), the joy of experiencing my own language at a ten-degree remove.

 • • • 

I
SAW A FACE ACROSS
the room—deep-set hazel eyes, nose like an arrowhead. It was, unmistakably, a European face. Why, I wondered—as I'd wondered many times on the subway in New York, playing an idle game in which I tried to figure out where my fellow passengers had come from, whether recently or long ago—were Europeans in Europe immediately distinguishable from the many Americans who shared their genetic material? Even controlling for environmental factors—nutrition, dentistry, haircuts, red glasses—there seemed to be something different in the strength of the features, the splay of the crow's-feet, the hold of the jaw. All four of my father's grandparents were born in Ireland, but you could dress him in a flat cap and tweeds and still pick him out of a lineup. The dimple that slashed from the cheek to the chin of the person I was staring at seemed almost like a geographical feature, a gully that had taken centuries to carve.

I'm in Europe, I thought, with all the discernment of a study-abroad student determined to have chow mein on her first night in Beijing. I'm going to go talk to that European man!

I accosted him, sticking my hand out and stating my name in a manner that I would later learn is considered, by people who are not Americans, to be fairly bizarre.

He introduced himself as Olivier.

I asked where he was from. He was French, he said, from a beach town near Bordeaux.

“It sounds a lot like Wilmington,” I replied.

Amazingly, he knew what I was talking about. He'd once
been to my hometown, for the wedding of a North Carolinian he had befriended while studying in the US. It was probably the first time I had ever spoken more than a few words to a French person (or, for that matter, to a mathematician), but he seemed immediately familiar. We categorize people by the hemispheres they inhabit, the continents they occupy, the countries they live in, the deserts they traverse. Why not classify them by their affinities to oceans? If land were water, Olivier and I were compatriots. Swap blue for green as the organizing principle of the map, and we came from the same
terroir
.

We sat down. Neither of us knew the host of the party, which was taking place in an apartment above a Polish restaurant. Olivier had tagged along with some French acquaintances. I had come with some friends of a friend, Americans and Australians whom I had never met before and would never see again. I had been in London for twenty-one days.

A bottle of wine was sitting on the coffee table. Olivier glanced at the label before pouring it, dripless, into two dentist-size plastic cups, a move that struck me as the height of Continental refinement. We kept talking. I was surprised when he got up and said he had to leave. He was exhausted, he explained, from having spent the day at the airfield practicing aerobatics. As he spoke, he unconsciously mimed the maneuvers: stalls, barrel rolls, Cuban 8s.

A few days later, I got an e-mail asking if I wanted to get a drink.

“I'd like that,” I wrote back. “You can fly me to the pub.”

He suggested a place.

“C'est bon!” I replied.

I now know that this means “It's good!”

We met on a Tuesday night. Petunias blared like
phonographs from the pub's facade. Inside, there were oriental rugs and flocked wallpaper. We squeezed onto benches at a long, sticky wooden table. Next to us, a couple was having an animated conversation, which seemed to involve something called a “budgie smuggler.”

“What's a budgie smuggler?” I whispered to Olivier.

“No idea,” he said. (With his accent, it came out sounding like he was lacking identification.)

He turned to the man on his right, polite as could be.

“Excuse me, but we were wondering about budgie smugglers?”

The man was happy to give us a lesson. A budgie smuggler, he explained, was a bikini swimsuit for a man, so called because it gave the impression of its wearer having shoved a budgerigar—it sounded like a lawnmower, but it meant a parakeet—down his pants.
Budgie smuggler
: the first entry in our private thesaurus. We bought the next round.

Olivier asked if I wanted to get dinner. He had made three reservations. I chose Chinese. Soon I was living with a man who used Chanel deodorant and believed it to be a consensus view that Napoleon lost at Waterloo on account of the rain.

 • • • 

W
E SPOKE TO EACH OTHER
in endearments. My darling, my love,
mon amour
,
ma
chérie
,
poussin, mouton, bébé
. This was new to me, not characteristic. The word
baby
, applied to anyone over two, had always seemed like the adult diaper of endearments.

“
Mon amour
,” he'd say. “Pass me the salt?”

I'd yell across a store, trying to get his attention: “
Bébé!
Over here, in dairy products.”

People we knew, I think, made fun of us. What they didn't know was that we couldn't say each other's names.

 • • • 

I
N 1661, DEEPLY IN DEBT,
Racine set out on horseback for Uzès, in southeastern France. He was hoping that his maternal uncle, who served as vicar general to the city's bishop, could help him get a job. A Parisian, Racine spoke Francien, the predecessor of modern French. Once he reached Lyon, where the Franco-Provençal language prevailed, he could no longer make himself understood. “This misfortune got worse at Valence,” he wrote to a friend, “for God willed it that I asked a maid for a chamber-pot and she pushed a heater under my bed. You can imagine the consequences of this damned adventure, and what happens to a sleepy man who uses a heater for his night-time necessities.” By the time Racine reached Uzès, he wrote, “I can assure you that I have as much need of an interpreter as a Muscovite would in Paris.”

Nine months after we'd met, Olivier invited me to Bordeaux for Easter. We arrived on Good Friday, picked up a rental car at the airport, and drove into the city for lunch. Olivier showed me the hospital where he was born; the apartment where he had lived during cram school; the bars where he and his friends had hung out as students; the crack-of-dawn fish market where, after the bars, they had once bought a whole octopus to shove into the mailbox of a classmate who'd gone home early. That afternoon we followed the right bank of the Gironde estuary east to the vineyards—in the fall, Olivier said, surfers got into the river, paddled to the middle, and rode a waist-high tidal wave called the
mascaret
.

In Saint-Émilion, we stopped at the first vineyard we saw.
A sprightly man with a crooked smile greeted us at the end of the drive. Introducing himself as the estate's proprietor, he led us into a musty
cave
.

“I inherited the vineyard from my father, who inherited it from his father,” he told us, pouring some wine. “But my true passion is magic.”

We tasted the wine. It was good, for the product of a man who would rather be locking people in a box and sawing them in half.

“Fortunately I married the perfect woman,” he said. He gestured out the window toward a hunched-over figure in the fields.

“That's my wife,” he said, beaming. “She's a certified oenologist.”

Before leaving, we bought a few bottles to take to Olivier's parents. I thought about the reluctant vigneron's fantastically sensible marriage, how he had retrofitted his life with someone whose skills exactly matched his specifications. As he was making change, he pulled one of the minor Euro coins out of my ear.

At last: time to meet Les Fockers. I fidgeted all the way to Andernos-les-Bains, the village where Violeta and Teddy lived. Olivier had assured me that they were adorable (even though the words are identical, the French version seemed more genuinely affectionate, free of the patronizing edge of its English counterpart, and somehow less gendered: I couldn't imagine an American male saying “adorable,” a habit I thus found adorable itself). Still I was nervous, the usual anxieties a person has about whether or not her boyfriend's family will like her overlaid with uncertainty as to whether, in the fog of language, they'd even be able to make out the right person to like or not.

I'd never been a francophile, much less a francophone. If I'd had to free-associate about the French, I might have said, unimaginatively: cheese, scarves, rude. Before I met Olivier, my most intensive exposure to the language had occurred during ten days I'd spent camping in the Sahara, on assignment with an American photographer and his crew. The Algerians—half a dozen young men who spoke Tamasheq, Arabic, and French—had been superb company, despite the language barrier. But they simply had not been able to figure out what I, an unaccompanied woman, was doing there in the middle of the desert. Neither of the two words I knew in French,
oui
and
non
, had seemed exactly the right answer to their repeated enquiries as to whether I was a virgin.

We parked on the street outside Violeta and Teddy's house, a bungalow on a quiet boulevard. Before Olivier even pulled the keys out of the ignition, they'd come running out to greet us. Violeta, in a platinum-blond side ponytail and purple heels, covered us both in kisses. Her tangerine-colored lipstick left imprints all over my cheeks, like the franking on an international package.

Teddy, seventy-eight and immaculate, insisted on carrying our luggage. We passed through the front yard. There was a hammock, a patio covered with artificial turf, hummingbird feeders, hibiscuses. Inside the house, ruby-colored beads dangled from a chandelier. A Venetian mask hung near a tasseled lampshade. The entryway was dominated by an antique bureau, covered in lace and porcelain figurines and incense sticks, which, after our marriage, would be replaced with a huge collage of wedding pictures in a heart-shaped frame that Teddy had painted.

I handed Violeta a box of chocolates.

She led us to our bedroom, where a package was sitting on the desk.

“Merci!” I said, fumbling with the wrapping. “Merci beaucoup!”

It was Miss Dior Chérie, my first bottle of perfume.

That night, we drove around the Arcachon Bay to Cap Ferret, at the tip of the peninsula. I knew the landscape like a friend's face: the flat-cheeked marshes, stubbled with sawgrass and pocked with hermit crab holes; the sugary topsoil of the pine forests, which a bike could hardly grip. Flats of pluff mud let off a sweet hypoxic reek. The air was low and clammy, as though someone had smothered the horizon with a wet paper towel.

The sun was going down as we arrived at an open-air bar—striped umbrellas and some tables in the yard—run by a friend of Fabrice's, a third-generation oyster farmer. Fabrice was in Paris working, but the rest of the family had gathered: Jacques; Hugo; Marie, Hugo's mother. Jacques looked so much like Olivier. He was shy, but expressive, with a poetic way of phrasing things. “I pray you!” he'd tell me, clasping his hands, his English version of
je vous en prie
, when he wanted to emphasize a point. Wrapped in fleece blankets, we toasted to health. The wine came from Bordeaux. The oysters came from the far side of Mimbeau, a sandbar that jutted out from the cape, two hundred feet from where we sat. It was low tide. The thin wooden poles that supported the oyster beds wavered against the sky like rubber pencils.

After the apéritif—the pregame show to the French family meal—we proceeded in caravan formation to Jacques and Marie's. As soon as we sat down for dinner, the table exploded into chatter, followed by rebuttal, counterargument, rejoinder. That was my impression, at least, judging from the unsmiling looks,
the disputatious
mais non
s, the blowing of air out of cheeks. I wasn't sure whether, or when, resolutions came. I felt like an explorer picking her way through a jungle, turning toward stimuli as they chirped and hooted. The language came in an oxytonic rush. It sounded to me like heavy rain, sluicing down a roof.

Listening to Olivier speak French was a bizarre sensation. I felt as though he had thrown on a jersey, sprinted onto the field, and proven himself a skilled player of a sport to which I did not know the rules. I was impressed by his mastery of the game, but alienated by my ignorance of it. The primal fantasy of intimacy is a secret language—one in which only the two of you can talk. French reinforced the primacy of preexisting bonds over the ones that we had built. It was a sort of conversational clubhouse, a pig Latin of which I was the odd woman out.

I retreated to the linguistic version of a kids' table—giggling in international pop-cultural English with Hugo. My thoughts wandered, mainly to what sort of impression I was silently making. Unable to present myself the way I would have liked to, I felt exposed, as though I'd been rousted from bed and dragged to a party, forced to come as I was. But the passivity was also liberating: a free pass from the obligation of attempting to be intelligent, witty, or well informed. It made me consider whether there was some ineffable part of a person that transcended socialization, an essence that remained once the top notes of politesse faded off. Could Olivier's family smell something fundamental about me, and if so, what was it? What did I exude when I couldn't talk?

As much as I worried about how they would judge me, my impulse to judge them seemed to have evaporated with my powers of articulation. My critical faculties in abeyance, for once, I simply thought, What kind people, what a good meal,
and how warm a reception. Violeta reminded me in many ways of my own mother: full of energy, unstudied, and unserious about herself, but formidable in her willingness to go to any length to ensure her children's success. They were both the kind of parents who had jumped out of bed in the middle of the night to encourage safe passage from teenage parties; who would meet a plane at any far-flung airport at any inconvenient hour; who were always trying, even if we could now afford it better than they, to pay for our flights. If Violeta had a daughter, I was sure she would greet her as my mother did me every time I came home, stripping herself of necklaces and sweaters and pairs of shoes at the slightest expression of admiration; running up the stairs to plunder her own closet before knocking on my bedroom door; forwarding everything I wrote to her family and many friends, never with less than a dozen exclamation points; accepting, and even applauding, the fact that I had moved halfway around the world, because she only ever thought of my happiness, not hers.