When in French (8 page)

“¿Y qué pasó a la fiesta?”

“Josh
beso
'd Deanna.”

“¿Es verdad?”

The
fin-de-semana
scuttlebutt would degenerate into a doubly substandard Spanglish and stretch until Friday. Atrocious pronunciation, accidental and deliberate, was indulged and even considered cute, especially for boys, especially for boy athletes, as foreign languages were thought to be a vaguely effeminate business. Failing to assimilate them was almost a form of good citizenship. We said “sacapuntas” a lot. We averaged a tense a year.

At Christmas the señora assigned us a holiday-themed art project, accompanied by an original composition. An array of half-baked handicrafts accumulated on her windowsill: ice-cream-cone Christmas trees, ragweed wreaths, droopy-faced elves fashioned out of bleach jugs.

The Friday before school let out for the holidays, a senior
named Jon—an avid sailor, with rimless glasses and a grizzled ponytail—showed up carrying a lumpy brown papier-mâché figure. With paws and a stripe on its back, it appeared to be some sort of rodent. (We later learned that it had originally been an art-class prairie dog, repurposed for the occasion.) On the top of its misshapen head, Jon had placed a miniature Santa hat.

Jon took his place in front of the class, clearing his throat. In a sonorous voice, he began to read:

E
L
C
ASTOR DE
N
AVIDAD

Sentado, sonriendo, girando

Yo soy caliente y mojado.

Necesito el madero

Que Santa trae por la chimenea.

THE CHRISTMAS BEAVER

Sitting, smiling, gyrating

I am hot and wet.

I need the wood

That Santa brings down the chimney.

“¡Qué poema!” the señora cheered, breaking into rapturous applause. “¡Muy bueno!”

 • • • 

W
HEN THE TIME CAME
to think about college, I decided to apply to Princeton. It was an impulse: I liked the photograph on the front of the brochure, of a bicycle propped attitudinally against some arches. I knew that it would please my
grandmother, who lived nearby. (She was less excited by the link to John Zurn, who had matriculated there in 1942—his tenure was interrupted by the war—than she was by the lingering scent of Brooke Shields.) New Jersey, to me, might as well have been New Zealand. But reluctant as I was to leave home, I didn't want to follow many of my friends to college in North Carolina, where the hometown social lattice tessellated into a permanently inescapable statewide grid.

“I'm thinking of applying to Princeton,” I told the guidance counselor. “Do you think I have a chance of getting in?”

“I'd say fifty-fifty.”

“Okay?”

“Nobody's ever applied there. The best I can say is you might get in, you might not.”

In mid-December I received an acceptance letter. That weekend we went to a Christmas party at the house of some family friends.

A man, the father of one of my classmates, approached, clutching a sweating Miller Lite wrapped in a shredded green paper napkin.

“Hear you're going to Princeton,” he said.

I nodded, mentally preparing a humble reply to the congratulations that I imagined were forthcoming.

“Well, no matter what you do,” he said, taking a swig, “don't get a Yankee accent.”

Whatever horrors awaited, no one would have guessed that I would become an American living in Switzerland with a Frenchman I'd met in England. It was the longest of shots that I'd marry in a registry hall, under a portrait of the Queen, or that the grandparents of my children would be socialist nudists. I would be old enough to vote before I rode a train. My
first passport, acquired when I was nineteen, reveals a tadpole-browed provincial in a lavender polo shirt and a red nylon anorak, newly acquired for the fall season from L.L. Bean. I'm jowly, grinning, with clothesline lips that will never properly nurture rounded vowels. I resemble a petite blond John McCain.

T
HE PLANE LIFTED
over wheat fields, terminal tanks, and shipping containers, gliding past the butterfly wing of the coastline, its edges fraying into foam. We had taken off from the airport near Honfleur, a fishing village in Normandy, where we had spent the afternoon eating lunch on the harbor, the wind rattling mainsheets like cowbells, before setting out to tentatively wander the streets of the old town, each of us trying to calibrate our pace to what we guessed was the other's level of interest in military souvenirs and producers of apple cider. It was just fall, the kind of day where summer lingers in the sun and winter lurks in the shade. It was our first time together as tourists.

We were flying at five thousand feet. The treacly dregs of daylight poured through the left side of the plane, where Olivier sat, manning the controls. I was next to him, forehead pressed against the window. The lower clouds were full, darkening to violet. Above them were
Cirrus uncinus
—mare's tails, glowing gold.

In half an hour we would land at White Waltham, a former RAF field outside of London, now a flying club where members could rent planes by the hour. That morning, as Olivier prepped for takeoff, calculating weights and checking gauges, I'd shoved damp palms into the pockets of my jacket. To abandon firm ground when you didn't have to struck me as a provocation. Olivier, from what I could gather, spent every second of his free time in the air. The home screen on his phone, I'd noticed, was a picture of a runway.

Snatches of air traffic control chatter occasionally flared from the radio. Otherwise, it was silent. We were quiet, too, holding hands. Below us, the sea was a sidewalk, the occasional ship a wad of gum. The sense of solitude was as luxuriant as if we had been lying under clean sheets in a king-size bed on the top floor of the tallest building in a city cleared of traffic. I was surprised at how calm I felt. We were alone, together, exactly halfway between France and England. I wondered where, at which exact ripple, La Manche gave way to the English Channel,
ciel
turned to sky,
la mer
became the ocean.

“Golf X-Ray Bravo Zulu Mike request frequency change to London,” Olivier said into the microphone of his headset, breaking my reverie.

“Information one two three decimal seven five,” the operator radioed back. “Zulu Mike frequency change approved. Squawk seven thousand.”

Now we were flying over farmland, the grass like baize. Gliders swooped in the distance. Soon we would be descending.

“London Info, Golf X-Ray Bravo Zulu Mike,” Olivier said. “Good afternoon. Requesting basic service.”

“Golf X-Ray Bravo Zulu Mike, pass your message.”

“Cessna 182, VFR flight with two people onboard from Deauville to White Waltham.”

 • • • 

A
YEAR EARLIER I'D
been living in New York. Since leaving North Carolina, I'd traveled a little, but no one would have mistaken me for a jetsetter. When I was twenty-seven, the
New Yorker
assigned me to write a profile of the Italian fashion designer Donatella Versace. It was my first big work trip. I booked a ticket to Milan, and soon was sitting in the middle seat of the back row of an Alitalia plane, as anxious about pulling off the job as I was giddy at my luck.

Ten years earlier, Donatella's brother Gianni had been murdered by a serial killer on the steps of his mansion in Miami. In tribute to him, she had commissioned a ballet, to be performed at La Scala on the anniversary of his death. I sat in on rehearsals. Donatella, racked by nerves, hovered on the sidelines, fingering a skeleton key from the Miami house, the last thing Gianni touched before he died. That night I put on a gown, attended the ballet—a gunshot, a falling man in a red leather motorcycle jacket—and ate truffles in the cavernous staterooms of the Palazzo Reale. I wasn't able to choke down the espresso that followed, but neither did I expose myself as a complete yokel. The next morning, Donatella and a liveried driver picked me up from my hotel in a black Mercedes. We were to drive north, to visit the family's villa on the banks of Lake Como.

Donatella was in a philosophical mood. She had slept through the night, she said, for the first time in a decade. “I think change in life is important,” she began, as the car wended its way into the hills above the city. “I don't like to look at the past. The past is inside you. Now, after ten years, this is a starting point for me to go towards something new.”

It was July. She was chain-smoking. The air-conditioning
was off. With the tinted windows not so much as cracked, the air quality in the car was beginning to resemble that of a sweat lodge.

“Believe it or not, I have been listening to jazz at this moment, not rock,” Donatella, still dilating on her newfound lightness of spirit, said as the chauffeur performed a stomach-churning swerve.

I felt my mouth water.

“I will die, Gabriele!” she yelled to the front seat. “No, he's a great driver. Ha-ha.
Bello!
”

We continued toward Como. Donatella was talking about her plans to spend August in the Caribbean. I knew I needed to ask her whether it was true that on vacation she typically brought along her own purple bedsheets, but I couldn't form the words.

“I'm feeling a little carsick,” I finally whispered. “Maybe we should pull over?”

It was too late. Just as I croaked out my SOS, Gabriele shot into a tunnel.

At the villa, I was greeted by a manservant bearing a concoction in a crystal tumbler. “This is lemon water, without sugar,” he commanded. “Drink it.” I managed to conduct the interview, eating penne with caviar and touring a grotto. Donatella and I had been scheduled to ride back to Milan together, but something, I was told, had come up. The manservant hustled me into a van. Later I called my boyfriend. He didn't answer. I couldn't reach my mother, or anyone else. Panicking that I'd committed a firing offense, I dialed my father at his law office in North Carolina.

“Dad, I threw up on Donatella Versace.”

“Honey, who's Donatella Versace?” he replied. “Is she one of your friends?”

 • • • 

S
OON I WAS TWENTY-NINE,
newly dumped. For several years I'd been dating an Englishman who had two middle names and wore lavender socks. His residence in my life, before Olivier, might lead one to believe that I was partial to foreign men. But in fact he was the latest entry in a catalog of relationships that, taken in the aggregate, made absolutely no sense. My first boyfriend, in high school, had been a “yo-boy”: that was how “preps” like me referred to the skaters and surfers, who wore hooded sweatshirts, drove cars that were low instead of high, and shunned jam bands for rap. After that I went out with a “baseball player,” another local genre. They were country boys, chewers of dip and drinkers of Mountain Dew, who had part-time jobs delivering bottled water, cut the sleeves off their T-shirts, and lived in ranch houses with American flags flying out front.

In college I fell in love with a tall Tennessean who directed his considerable intellectual gifts largely toward gambling on sports. The son of a southern lawyer and a serious-minded northern mother, he was so much like me: a partier and a reader, as introverted as he was sociable, stuck between two parts of himself whose ambitions and desires often seemed to be in direct opposition. He was a fraternity stalwart. He was also a bagpiper, a history nut, a brilliant writer, a real friend to many women. I couldn't assimilate these contradictions any more than I could my own. I was always giving him horrible gifts—a clan Houston cummerbund and bow tie, when he'd have preferred a Coetzee novel—trying to push him toward one pole of his identity, to make him into a type, as typical as possible. I felt I lacked a culture: I was a WASP, but I wasn't a WASP; I was Irish Catholic, but I wasn't Irish Catholic; I was
southern, but I wasn't southern. Dating a person who had one, or strong-arming him into one facet of it, I could be someone by proxy. I was always looking for more of a bird.

Not long after the Englishman and I broke up, a friend from college invited me to a party, an “urban tailgate” in Madison Square Park. There would be Frisbee, the e-mail promised, and Jell-O shots. Fun would be had by all. That sounds like a terrible party, I thought. I went anyway, heeding the immortal rule that to refuse an invitation, as a single person, is to invite the misery for which you're sure you're destined. It was a terrible party. I quietly fled to a nearby restaurant, where I found a seat at the bar.

Eating a steak and drinking a glass of red wine by myself, I was significantly less miserable than I had been half an hour earlier. If I can tolerate some level of solitude, I thought, why am I here in Flatiron, eating dinner alone, instead of off somewhere having an adventure? A long-suppressed, late-breaking desire began to rise within me. It was as though someone had stuck a pipette into my id and squeezed the bulb. I loved New York, and I loved my job, but I had spent every day of my working life reporting for duty at the same desk. I was an organization kid, aging out of the period in life that indulges experimentation. I had never really taken a risk.

 • • • 

N
INE MONTHS LATER,
thanks to a kind boss and portable profession, I arrived in London, a city I'd chosen largely on the basis of the fact that I, like its inhabitants, spoke English. My possessions whittled to the contents of two duffel bags, I showed up and proceeded to the studio apartment that I'd signed for, unseen, on the recommendation of an acquaintance.

It was perfect: clean, white, cold, with high ceilings and that London-flat smell of radiators, carpet, and mail. Wooden shutters as tall as barn doors flanked a pair of French windows that opened onto an overgrown balcony with a wrought-iron railing. The move seemed fated. Later, people would ask what kind of visa I had, and how I'd managed to secure it, and who had been my lawyer. I'd just gone on the website and filled out some forms. The documents had arrived not long after, as though I'd ordered a pizza.

I assumed I would stay a year or two, eat some scones, move back to New York. Meanwhile, I basked in the parks and parapets, the blue plaques and stained palaces, the roads that bore the names of the places to which they led, having been furrowed, long before the rubber tire, by feet and wheels and hooves. I'd never had a garden, or even a cactus, but on the balcony I dug dead plants out of concrete urns and potted boxwoods, lavender, a gardenia. I cleared out a window box and soon had a free supply of basil.

Mornings, I rode a bike to the London Library, where I worked at a long table in a pleasantly fungal room presided over by a bust of Hermes of Praxiteles. The actress who played Karen, the wife on
Californication
, often sat beside me, typing with surprising fervor. (I later found out that she'd been married to a surgeon who, coming home late from an operation, had dropped dead on their doorstep. Pregnant with their third child, she continued to write letters to him, which she eventually published.) I liked how you could be more than one thing in London, how industries intermingled and demographics mixed. I took trains to the countryside and exercised my right to ramble, keeping the hawthorn trees on my right-hand side, passing through kissing gates. I learned to cook. I went to a
picnic where an elderly woman took a look at my feet and said, “Red shoes, no knickers.” Then I realized that she was wearing orthopedic sandals the color of a tomato.

London seemed, from the start, a deeply tolerant place, whose forbearance yielded freedom without giving off the usual urban by-product of aggression. History had discredited the flag-waving impulse, so—at least for foreigners, who were exempt from the strictures of the class system—the greater part of fitting in was showing up. Going to the gym was considered a harmless but slightly embarrassing activity, like philately or folk dancing. People didn't put their phones on the table during dinner, and if you droned on about your job or your kids or your diet, they didn't feign interest. It seemed both easier and more intense. If New York was the movies, London was the boxed set.

The city was familiar but intriguing, the friend of a friend. Newspapers were trashy, but television was dignified. Lunch was dinner, where whoever you were eating it with would most often encourage you to join him in a “cheeky glass.” Chief among the city's charms, for me, was the vibrancy of British English—the blunt pejoratives, the thrusting staccato verbs. Knobs, yobs, wankers, berks. Sack, shag, chuff, nick. The word
bellend
was the most efficient synecdoche I'd ever heard.

In public speech, trying to be memorable and coming off as slightly unhinged remained more advantageous than trying to be bland and succeeding. The Houses of Parliament had eleven bars, one of which had an arrow near the exit, three inches from the ground: “It is to accommodate those who choose to leave the premises on their hands and knees,” a police officer once told a reporter. The month I arrived, an MP named Mark Reckless went on a six-hour binge and missed the vote on the budget. “I'm terribly, terribly embarrassed,” he
said. “I apologise unreservedly and I don't plan to drink again
at Westminster
.” (Italics mine.)

This was a city whose “love-rat” mayor once dismissed rumors of an affair as “an inverted pyramid of piffle,” the intellectual arsenal of a country where words were deployed like darts. There was an entire church—St. Bride's, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672—dedicated to journalists. My supermarket published its own surprisingly good magazine, which I would flip through while enjoying the slatternly pleasure of “having a lie-in.” On the radio one atypically rainless Saturday morning, I heard the weatherman prophesying “a usable day.”

A sort of two-for-the-price-of-one city, London was one of the world's great conglomerations of buildings and roads and restaurants and theaters and people, overlaid by an equally superb megalopolis of words. British English was my gateway language. I strolled in the mews of understatement. I drove the wrong way down the streets of
graft
(meaning “hard labor,” rather than “corruption”) and
quite
(meaning “not very” rather than its opposite). I stalled in the roundabout of the English non sequitur, in which someone declares that something is dreadful and ghastly—this usually involves boarding school, or Wales—and then says immediately, “It was great fun.”