Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by John von Sothen

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  “Six Weeks of Not So Great Time Off” appeared in slightly different form as “Vacances” in Esquire and The Best American Travel Writing 2018, edited by Cheryl Strayed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Sothen, John von, author.

  Title: Monsieur Mediocre : One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French / John von Sothen.

  Description: New York : Viking, 2019. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018059867 (print) | LCCN 2019003430 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224841 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735224834 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sothen, John von. | Americans--France--Biography. | France--Social life and customs--21st century. | Authors, American--21st century--Biography.

  Classification: LCC DC33.8 (ebook) | LCC DC33.8 .S68 2019 (print) | DDC 818/.609 [B] --dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059867

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. All names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

  Version_1

  To the Annes in my life:

  My mother, Annie-Lou, who brought me into this world

  My wife, Anaïs, who helped me become a man

  My editor Anne Boulay, who let me write the way I am

  When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between two mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken as his present. They do not consider that they all are the same images in different planes.

  PABLO PICASSO, PARIS, 1923

  Avec l’amour maternel, la vie nous a fait à l’aube, une promesse qu’elle ne tient jamais. (With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold.)

  ROMAIN GARY, La Promesse de l’aube (Promise at Dawn)

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The Art of the Unfortunate Event

  She Had Me at Bah

  The Aristocrats

  Bringing Up Bibi

  Six Weeks of Not So Great Time Off

  Letter from the No-Go Zone

  Huge in France

  Voulez-Vous Think Tank Avec Moi?

  Wesh We Can

  Will You Be My French Friend?

  Years and Years and Years in Normandy

  The French Resistant

  There’s No Place Like Chez Moi

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Like many Parisian families, we occasionally rent our apartment out on Airbnb. It’s not an easy process, but it is practical, and as long as you can power through the tedious chore of prepping your house and fielding calls from guests who forgot the code to your building, it does provide some disposable income that’s handy for all those school year vacations that pop up in France like measles every six weeks.

  What many Parisian families DO NOT do is rent out their apartment while they’re not on vacation and when their kids are still in school, which is exactly what we did one year by accident, forgetting that the Easter break for families in the south of France hits a week earlier than that in Paris. We realized this fun fact days before our guests arrived, which sent us scrambling to find alternative lodging (on Airbnb, of course) in Montmartre, a hop skip and another hop away from our own place in the Tenth Arrondissement.

  Sure, it felt odd to pack up our clothes, the printer, plus the dog and cat, hair dryers and book bags, just to hoof it three metro stops west for a week. And yes, it was a bit bizarre to pass your own apartment in the morning on your way to school (now a twenty-minute schlep) and see the window of your bathroom fogged up from a stranger probably fucking in your shower.

  But in the end, the week turned out not half bad. It forced my family to break up a rut we didn’t know we were in, and gave us the chance to see a part of Paris we hadn’t had time to visit much. And it was during this impromptu staycation in Montmartre, dining out early with the kids at restaurants or ducking into a café for a beer midday or riding the bus (the bus?) and taking photos from the window of that bus, that I felt, for the first time in fifteen years, like an American in Paris. A tad curious, kind of stupid, and with much too much energy, not unlike the other Americans I saw in Montmartre that week, marching up single file to the Sacré Coeur church, where they’d take in a breathtaking view of Paris while also being pickpocketed.

  Some were backpackers on Snapchat, others were orthopedic-shoed retirees carrying on about Sedona. And although each looked winded and footsore, each had an enthusiasm for Paris I hadn’t felt in a long time. How could they not? Although it was now a bit Disney-fied, Montmatre had been the foothold for artists like Picasso and Modigliani and American expat writers like Langston Hughes, and its allure and romance were still potent. The streets were cobblestone and smoothed by time. Chickens turned on those sidewalk rotisseries. People leaned on flipped-over wine casks smacking back oysters and Muscadet.

  I myself probably rounded out the cliché, a real-life Parisian writer in his peacoat and five-day-old scruff scribbling in his Moleskine what the world would never understand but which had to be written. Little did these tourists know, I was just as lost as them, and had they’d asked me in their X-KUSAY MOI MESSSUR French where the Moulin Rouge was, or in which restaurant Picasso traded his paintings for meals, I couldn’t have helped. Because as a Parisian, I wouldn’t be caught dead at any of them. Yet at the same time it burned me how I’d lost the innocence for this place. I’d strayed so far off the range and gone so deep into the recesses of French life that Montmartre now seemed Vegas to me.

  Before I knew it, the week was over and I was back in my own Paris, a graffitied, kebab-standed, trash-strewn enclave near the Gare du Nord, feeling as if I’d just had an affair with another neighborhood. And like any cheater, I immediately tried to mask my guilt by finding fault with my present home. “Didn’t it feel nice to just sit outside and hear that accordion play?” I’d mention to my wife, Anaïs. I’d go on and on, harping about the cakes in the windows and the antique dealers, telling Anaïs what a relief it was to not hear sirens or to not have my conscience weighed down as I consider the circumstances of the refugees we pass every day on the way to the subway. (Yes, we’ve had refugee camps in the Tenth—probably because we didn’t try to evict them as other arrondissements have done.) But in my comparisons, I missed that our own Bohemian digs aren’t all that much different from what Montmartre had been back in the day. Anaïs knows this, though, and she’s keen enough to see how attached I actually am to our place. She even coined an expression—she claims she made it up, but it soun
ds too profound for that to be true—“On critique bien, ce qu’on aime le mieux.” (We critique best what we love the most.)

  She’s right. I love my adoptive home; so much so, I feel I’m entitled now to flame it à la Française. Yet what I’m zinging isn’t the French institutions themselves, but the Instagram version we Americans have imposed upon them.

  Within every best-selling book about France, there’s no doubt love, but it’s always been on our terms and one-way. We have this infatuation with keeping France a quaint and charming dollhouse. If the vision isn’t forged by Impressionist paintings, it’s forged by cantankerous civil servants who strike on a daily basis or farmhouses basking in lavender fields or a workplace where emails after 5:00 p.m. aren’t opened. If it’s not warm baguettes and good wine, it’s angelic kids in Bon Point standing next to chic and severe mothers who don’t get fat. According to these best sellers, France isn’t on the cusp of anything. It’s in the preservation business, keeping civilization alive while the rest of the world goes to Best Buy.

  When I moved here fifteen years ago, I, too, was under the spell of a rose-colored France. I had in my head that I’d be eating six-course dinners and vacationing three months a year with my French actress wife, all while promenading down the Seine with gloves and walking stick. The reality has proven quite different. But not in a bad way, just in a real-life, run-of-the-mill, everyday (let’s say mediocre) way that anybody who’s working and raising kids, walking dogs, trying to get the Internet installed, paying a mortgage, and struggling to help with homework he himself doesn’t understand can relate to.

  For me, Paris is a mess, a confusing, roiling, weird place. If anything, it’s America now with its Supreme T-shirt pop-up sales and cupcake parlors and hoverboards and Google stores that looks clean and vanilla and safe. Anytime I’m back in New York for work, it’s me who takes on the clueless glaze of those Montmartre backpackers, wondering how the deli I used to buy forty ounces at suddenly became an office building or why everyone feels obliged now to crank the AC in March. I’ll question why Amtrak can’t modernize, or how I missed the whole sippy cup craze, and it’s during these ruminations that I realize what the person across from me has pegged me for—everyday Eurotrash.

  My life in France, I tell my friends, is a lot like going back in time to the United States in the seventies, when the cities were rugged, cap gains were high, public schools were still doable, economic growth was minimal, people drank at lunch, and the national fabric and social net were intact, warts and all. When my American friends visit and I tell them this, I see there’s a slight twinkle of newfound romance for France, based on a new set of criteria. There’s also relief. France, the way I pitch it, isn’t perfect at all. And because of that, it’s accessible and, for the most part, English speaking, just like the rest of the world. Sure the Brie, Bordeaux, and baguette thing still exists, but it doesn’t define our life here. Plus those are things you can easily find in Manhattan or Mumbai or Berkeley as well.

  What you can’t find, though, is a Doctor Benayoun who comes to my house at midnight to give me a flu shot raving about Miami and how we should go in on a condo together; or the professor I see when I walk my dog each night teaching French on his off time from a paper board in the cold rain to Syrian refugees camped in our park. Nor can you find my aristocrat father-in-law, who has two children my own children’s ages and who has no qualms about asking me to babysit. Enduring love, I’ve learned, is when you’re smitten by something or someone for one reason, but you end up loyal to them for another.

  Since our Montmartre staycation five years ago, we’ve made it a point each year to recreate it. We rent out our place during a work/school week, throw together the suitcases and dog food and book bags and staplers, and live for a few days somewhere else in Paris. We’ve done Bastille. We’ve done Le Marais. And this year we’re venturing out to the no man’s land of the Fifteenth. And just as with our time in Montmartre, we’ll admire the scenes or walk the Seine or check out a museum. Hell, we might even buy souvenirs. And in doing so, I’ll once again feel like someone in the audience eating popcorn as he watches the stage production of “Paris!”

  Invariably the clock will strike twelve and we’ll return home, hoping the lucky family staying in our apartment had as much fun as we did. But judging from our Airbnb reviews, the compliments usually stop at the size of our loft. Most are a litany of masked disappointments. The bathroom towels were worn out, or they didn’t exactly love the street, the neighborhood was a bit too noisy and rough, a bit off the beaten trail. Our home in the Tenth wasn’t the Paris they thought they’d be visiting, at least not the one featured in all those books they’d bought at the airport. And in reading the feedback out loud in English to my cackling family and puzzled dog, I realize now how far from home an American can feel when he says in a perfectly accented French huff . . . “Ooh la la . . . les Américains!”

  The Art of the Unfortunate Event

  My story with France didn’t begin when I stepped off the plane at Charles de Gaulle airport fifteen years ago. Nor was it the year I studied abroad in the south of France or that steamy summer night inside a Brooklyn restaurant where I met a French woman named Anaïs. It started in the 1950s actually, long before I was born, when my mother, then a recent graduate of Vassar, received a scholarship to study at Les Beaux Arts in Paris.

  I know the date because I found among her belongings a dog-eared clipping taken from the Pittsburgh Press’s society section, which detailed Mom’s scheduled trip to Paris, where “cobblestone streets, art galleries and the picturesqueness of French life are luring this young Miss.” The piece was accompanied by a photo of Mom painting on the front porch of her family’s farmhouse outside Pittsburgh. It also went on to announce she and my grandmother would be hosting a picnic later that week, and that both would be “judging hats.”

  As a child I’d listen to Mom’s stories of France, snuggled into the nook of her neck, as we lay in her bed, she either reading aloud from a diary she’d kept during that year or staring at the ceiling and delivering the lines cold, sometimes even in French.

  Often she’d start at the very beginning of her adventure, on a slow steamer bound for Le Havre, where she attended lavish dinners and dances, had drinks with Princeton boys, met a swarthy count from Montenegro, and visited a tiger in steerage, whose presence prompted a party one night, to, yes, name the tiger. Other times, she’d skip ahead and place us smack dab in the centre of Paris where she bunked with others in a tiny flat on the Île Saint-Louis, soaking up the free-spirit life of postwar Paris.

  Over many years of these stories, I’d learn the characters by heart: Mimi, her roommate, who convinced Mom to captain a canoe on the Seine accompanied by two bottles of wine, which led to their capsizing and being fished out by the gendarmes. Or the starving artist friend, Hannah, who ate only onions because she wanted to save money, and eating a raw onion apparently cuts your appetite. And there was the struggling writer who had the unfortunate curse of sharing the last name Hemingway. “Je me suis dit,” Mom said in French, “a famous writing career was not in the cards for Russell Hemingway.”

  While she spoke, my mother would take on an exotic glow, as if she was inhabited by the actress Simone Signoret, and because I was keen on following each of her stories and descriptions, I’d latch on to certain words and phrases I knew as a way to cross the stream that was the rest of her vouloir courir comme ça French. During these nights au lit, me drifting off to sleep under France’s fairytale spell, I imagined it as a land full of wonderment, taste, and refinement, a place where Mom once shone, and where, one day, maybe I could, too.

  * * *

  As I grew older, our bedtime chats transformed into afternoon snacks together after school, when I’d sit upstairs in her studio on the top floor of our house, a place she called “the pigeon roost,” watching her paint. There, Mom would start with a squint, roll up her sleeves, then divvy up the oi
ls on her palette. Her canvases resembled enormous boat sails fastened to stretchers. In the lower corner of each a black and white photo would be Scotch taped, usually something banal like one of those curler machines from a seventies hair salon. And in large would be Mom’s bizarre interpretation, looking like the object turned inside out. Sometimes, I’d don a smock and sit alongside her, mimicking her gestures.

  While music crackled in the background on a transistor radio, she would take us back to Paris, where many artists had studios like hers, all of which faced due north, “so you had constant light the whole day.”

  “And it’s not the same light, Peaches,” she’d remind me. “There’s normal light and then there’s painting light.”

  I’d pretend to understand only because I loved listening to Mom talk. But what confused me weren’t the variations of light or the hard-to-pronounce French phrases or the names and places and dates we jumped through haphazardly when she spoke. It was why we weren’t living there. I mean if Paris had been so magical, why did she leave?

  When I was older, Mom explained that toward the end of that magical year, her brother, my uncle Charlie, had suffered a breakdown while a sophomore at Yale and had been diagnosed schizophrenic soon after. Whatever ideas she’d had of staying on in Paris after classes and continuing her life there were put on hold.

  But Charlie never improved. He was committed to a psychiatric institute. And while he was treated with electroshock therapy and insulin injections, and whatever else fifties psychiatry dreamed up, Mom settled back into life at home, where at least one healthy child was needed.

  Since she had a working knowledge of French, she eventually landed a job at Air France. During the Christmas party her first year, when the punch glasses and end-of-year bonuses were passed around, Mom politely refused her envelope. She had noticed in the fine print of her contract that instead of a raise, one could opt for a free open-ended ticket anywhere in the world. Yes, she knew it was an option nobody in the branch had ever taken, but she’d prefer to have that ticket anyway, thank you.