Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  For my father and me, the best part of setting the table that evening was imagining the names our new dish would assume, and throughout dinner, which, of course, was horrible, my father and I listed the nominees.

  “Turkey à la asphalt” was my contribution, a rookie effort compared to Dad’s.

  “While some may have Tur-duck-en for Thanksgiving,” he said, “we have Tur-eng-ine.”

  My mother bore up under the gentle ridicule with a smiling but hardened face. The bird was sort of edible, a lot like much of the fare she’d cooked in the past. But like the artist she was, she refused to accept failure, and saw this Thanksgiving dinner more as a rough sketch of what could have been with more time and resources.

  She finally spoke up at dessert. “What I do know is that next time”—my father and I shot each other panicked glances—“we’ll have to put the turkey on the engine a bit earlier, perhaps in Washington. That way we can take advantage of the full eight hours.”

  And that wasn’t the end of Mom’s expressionist cooking. That spring, when our oven broke at the same house down in Hatteras, Mom swung into action with a new plan. She rolled up her sleeves and started wrapping the fish we were supposed to bake in aluminum, just as she’d done the turkey. Then she turned toward the dishwasher with a familiar squint.

  My father, who’d just come in from outside, wasn’t sure how to respond when Mom greeted him with, “Do you think I should put it first on rinse or heat and dry?”

  Out of politeness, my uncle Frank and cousin Tom, who’d been invited for dinner that evening were briefed by telephone on the menu: Line-caught sea bass on two rinse cycles.

  Their initial shock was soothed by Dad’s vodka tonics and piano playing. And I must admit, there’s a guilty pleasure to be found in watching older people drink hard liquor while a dishwasher runs with their food in it. At one point my uncle Frank turned in his rocking chair and simply stared at the dishwasher as it kicked into another mode. “I think we’re getting close!”

  Again the meal was a horror film, and as Frank and Tom strained to be polite, my father and I showed solidarity by acting as if everything was normal.

  * * *

  I guess what my mother gave me in spades, which has helped me navigate my new home of France, a place where “unfortunate events” seem to lurk around every corner, is an optimism that borders on mania. Instead of allowing bad news to fester, she taught me, find a way to flip it on its head, whether that means moving to a country you don’t really know with someone you just met, or jumping on a Pakistani plane in the fifties, or cooking a turkey on an engine. And the upside? The return doesn’t need to be that exceptional. The act alone is noteworthy.

  Kids, and only children in particular, are very conscious of their parents’ blind spots. During the years I lived under my parents’ roof, I’d do my best to let Mom know she didn’t need to look back on her time in Paris with longing. We were making our own art with just as much pizzazz as those tigers and counts and capsized canoes. The proof would be in all those weird and unforgettable dinners we hosted or the mixed-up family vacations we’d take following in her Air France footsteps.

  Many years later, I retraced our route to Cape Hatteras with my new family in tow—my now wife, Anaïs, riding shotgun, and our kids, Otto and Bibi, in the back where I used to sit, retracing and remembering that infamous Thanksgiving Thursday.

  Somewhere near Rodanthe, where Mom said the sound and ocean kiss, I turned the dial to a country music station just as she had and recounted the stories of the fish in the dishwasher and the turkey on the engine, and the time I’d searched the closet for my real parents. And as I strained to answer Bibi’s and Otto’s questions, listening to their laughter mix with the breaking of the waves and the twang of the geetar, I wondered if this wasn’t Mom’s grand plan after all. Because, as she often said, “The worst thing that could happen, sweetie, is it’ll make for a wonderful story.”

  She Had Me at Bah

  The moment I realized I deeply wanted to marry Anaïs was the moment in which she casually reminded me that we could always get divorced.

  She said it in that French nonchalant way, preceding it with the classic “Bah . . .” opener I’ve heard millions of times from her since. Anything following bah is blatantly obvious to the person saying it; the tone contains a mounting exasperation with the one hearing it, who is usually me.

  “Bah . . . the drawer over there. Where else would we keep the batteries?”

  “Bah . . . Gene Hackman, John. Who did you think I was talking about?”

  I’ve always wanted to film Anaïs when she starts her bahs, then splice them together into one fluid bah, which I could then post online to show the world I married a woman who’s part French lamb. In this case, Anaïs’s bah was followed by the revelation that marriage wasn’t the be-all-end-all I’d built it up in my head to be. She loved me, yes, and sure, we should try it, but if it didn’t work out, “Bah . . . we get divorced. What do you want me to say?”

  At the time, we were standing on the medieval Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, which crosses the Seine and links the Left Bank with the Samaritaine department store on the right. The Pont-Neuf is one of those places in Paris that’s so picturesque, you not only feel you’re on a movie set when you’re there, you’re tempted to act out the film you think is being shot. It’s been the backdrop for countless films, including the 1990s cult classic starring Juliette Binoche titled (not too ironically)—Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.

  Perhaps those walking past us that night felt the cinematic magic of the moment in that same “Paris is for lovers” way. Anaïs and I were just another passionate couple caught up in the throes of romance. They expected us to embrace at any moment with a Bacall-Bogart kiss, and then attach a stupid lock to a nearby railing.

  If anyone had overheard Anaïs, it might have ruined their moment. But for me, it was an epiphany. She was right. We could always just get divorced. There was a fallback plan. All of sudden, the pressure was off, so what was I waiting for? I kissed her then, realizing no American woman I knew ever would have said that. Paris was my kind of town, cold and cynical, and Anaïs is as Parisian as they get.

  * * *

  Although the setting was perfect, our timing was ass backwards. Normal couples fret about whether or not they should get married before one of them is pregnant. Not us. For Anaïs, the decision to have a child with me far outweighed whether we got married. Some of her friends were already having children with people they weren’t married to. I’d met some of them, the woman usually referring to the silent man standing next to her not as her boyfriend or husband, but le père de mon enfant “the father of my child.”

  Whereas my fellow Americans were doubling down on marriage as a fuck you to their divorce-addled parents of the seventies, the French, it seemed, were headed in the other direction, abandoning the institution altogether or choosing from a sort of drive-thru menu of different options the French state offers.

  There’s mariage blanc for people who are marrying people for green cards. There’s something called PACS, a sort of common law union for people who want the tax write-off, but who don’t really believe in marriage. Gay marriage was brought into law in 2012, but a lot of gay couples still use PACS because they think gay marriage is too hetero. You can even live in something called concubinage (yes, you read that right), which means you don’t have a wife but a concubine. And if you do get married the traditional way, there’s mariage avec séparation de biens, a sort of prenup for the middle class, a clause found in any standard marriage contract, which ensures that whatever was yours before the marriage (apartments, juicers, ironically purchased vinyl records) is returned to you if the marriage expires.

  It’s safe to say the French have as many choices of marriage as they do cheese, which I guess is why it takes them so long to decide. Often marriage takes a backseat to the really big benchmarks i
n life, like having kids or buying a house. It’s not odd to see a ten-year-old daughter carrying her mom’s dress or little boys bringing the ring to their dad at a wedding. Or it’s often the case that it’s a famille recomposée, where both partners bring their kids and exes from the first and second marriages to the wedding. The French don’t treat marriage as the start of some grand adventure as Americans do. It is more the “we might as well get married now that we’ve done everything else” cherry on top. Marriages in France are for forty-year-olds who want to have a big party before their parents die.

  A lot of this explained Anaïs’s jaded response that night on the Pont-Neuf. That and the fact she’d already been married once. I hadn’t, though, and expected to have much more clarity by this point, the kind that’s supposed to hit you as you stand on a Parisian bridge on a warm night overlooking the Seine with the woman you love.

  * * *

  Up until our decision that night on the Pont-Neuf, my life had been a relatively idle and fancy-free one. I was living in New York as a perennial bachelor in Brooklyn, tethered only by my membership to the NY Sports Club. On the ground floor of my building was a French café called Le Gamin. And it was there that I met my future wife.

  Anaïs had one of those bobs with concave bangs French women seem to master, which make them look like adorable sixties KGB agents. We’d chat over countless cafés, sometimes in French, sometimes in English—me never knowing where I really stood, because French women don’t show their cards early. But all became clear when I one day offered her the ultimate gift, one no Parisian woman in the late nineties could refuse—a biography of the Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai. It was a cheap ploy since I knew Anaïs wasn’t just a waitress, but an actress as well. For one of our first dates, she took me to a festival where a film she’d starred in was premiering. I’d never been somebody’s arm candy before, so I relished the chance, only to find out moments later, when the lights dimmed and the film started rolling, that the Anaïs on screen was a deeply troubled person who slept with everyone, men and women alike.

  * * *

  My parents missed that movie, thank goodness, but were determined to meet Anaïs. They used the excuse of my thirtieth birthday to make a trip north from D.C. and drop by semi-unannounced, calling me on a Saturday morning to tell me they were on their way over for brunch.

  After I hung up with them my first instinct wasn’t to cheerfully tell Anaïs that my parents were in town. It was to hide her or at least get her out of my apartment.

  “They can’t see you here!” I told her in a panicked voice.

  Anaïs didn’t understand. Instead, she squinted at me. (Just as I now find myself squinting on countless occasions in France when I find myself clueless.)

  “Because they’ll have the impression we’re sleeping together.” My tone was bitchy because all of this was so very obvious.

  “Well, we are.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t know that.”

  Anaïs then laughed in my face.

  What I hadn’t explained was that my parents were notoriously old. They’d been old since I was little. My dad had fought in World War II, and my mother had an I like Ike pin and drank gin and tonics. Her days consisted of long lunches where she had Jean Marlow and Babs MacGarry to answer to. They weren’t going to just roll with something like this.

  “Could you maybe like leave now?” I nervously fiddled with the phone. “And, I don’t know, come back once they’re here? I’ll call a car service?”

  Anaïs realized I wasn’t kidding. And, like that, her look became one of disgust; the kind someone might flash when they notice the person across from them has long, curled fingernails.

  “No I khant jest leave and like calm bach,” she snapped, doing the best imitation a French woman could do of a Valley girl.

  None of her anger was directed at my parents, of course. Anaïs was upset at this child in front of her, masquerading as an adult.

  “What’s going to happen is this.” She made her way toward the coffee machine. “We’re going to make some coffee, and I’m going to take a shower, so we’re ready when they’re here.”

  But before I could finish, she’d left the room.

  Within minutes the door rang. And over coffee, I tried to prep Mom and Dad for what I thought would be the big revelation—that there was a woman in my bedroom.

  “Did I mention I’m seeing Anaïs?”

  “Yes, you did,” my mother said, “and she sounds grand.”

  “Well, she’s sure excited to see you.” I bit my lip. “Oh. Here she is. Ha. Ha. Hi, Anaïs.”

  Anaïs came out of my bedroom and introduced herself. Everyone, to my shock, behaved like real adults, and soon we were at brunch. Granted Mom and Dad still called me Johnny in front of her, and asked Anaïs if she was a Democrat like me, but something seemed different, I could tell.

  * * *

  Soon Anaïs would return to Paris, where employment for a French actress is a bit easier to find. But before we could embark on a drawn-out likely-to-die long-distance relationship, two towers would fall on Manhattan, anthrax would show up in the U.S. mail, war would be declared, and that reptile-brained instinct humans have to procreate during times of crisis would push me onto an Air France flight to accompany Anaïs to a wedding in France. There, I’d find out firsthand that terror sex does have consequences, and three months later, we were pregnant on the Pont-Neuf deciding whether to marry.

  When I broke the big news to Mom and Dad, I separated it into two chunks, thinking it would be easier for them to swallow. The “Anaïs and I are getting married!” generated yays and cheers, so I used the crowd noise to sneak in my follow-up “and Anaïs is pregnant” closer. They rolled with it. Plus an engagement meant they could throw a party in Georgetown and let all the guests figure out the math of who and what came first.

  What they didn’t appreciate was when I called back a week later in a panic, explaining in an existential crisis way that I had second thoughts and that maybe it all was a big mistake. I’d forgotten, of course, that women like my mother didn’t make big mistakes. Nor did they offer up any straight talk or give advice for something as large as this. It was crude. And I was supposed to be smart enough to know what to do by now and how to react and, especially, how to decipher what she was trying to say without her having to spell it out for me.

  “What aren’t you sure about, dear?” she asked. There was silence on the end for once. The blaring TV in the living room had been turned off.

  “About having a child and all this with Anaïs. Maybe we shouldn’t get married. Maybe we should just—I don’t know. Anaïs’ll be fine.” I made it sound as if I was letting Anaïs travel to Mexico with friends for a week without me.

  There was silence on the phone.

  “No, you’re right. Anaïs and the child will be fine without you.” Mom’s voice had hardened, giving her the air of a pissed-off Elizabeth Taylor. “You’re the one I’m worried about because I will cut you off, boy.” She said boy like a Texan and that was the end of our talk. The anger in her voice was an ominous warning of where my life would head if I remained a child. I would marry this girl and get on with this life that my clumsy ass had luckily stumbled over.

  “Besides,” she said, “I sent out the invites for the engagement party.”

  My mother didn’t understand why I was coming clean to her anyway. It was Anaïs I needed to talk to. And so it was there on that Parisian night, with Anaïs bahing me on the Pont-Neuf, that everything suddenly fell into place.

  * * *

  The wedding, we decided, should be held in Paris. That way, Anaïs wouldn’t have to fly, and we could plan something I wasn’t really comfortable with in a language I wasn’t really comfortable with.

  Soon the invites were sent out, the reception booked, and before long, we were saying our vows at the American Church in Paris on a nippy
spring day in late April. The fact that the American Church was Protestant (a rarity in Paris), with a reverend from Richmond, gave it allure. I was a sucker for Pastor Rogers’s Virginia drawl. Yes, he called me Don (which I corrected each time) and called Anaïs Ah-Nye-is, which she let ride. For us, Pastor Rogers could do no wrong. Just as much as I was attracted to the cold rationalism of Cartesian France, Anaïs was equally giddy to marry into American PowerPointed pragmatism, which is exactly what Rogers offered when he met with us before the wedding to discuss the pitfalls of modern marriage. Inside his office nestled in the bowels of the church, Rogers refrained from talking about faith or Jesus or the church’s stance on abortion, and instead jumped quickly into discussing the three traps that await the modern couple. We weren’t to worry, though, as each, he felt, had its solution. For the in-law issues: Spend Thanksgiving with one family, Christmas with another. For money issues: Have individual bank accounts and one common account. And for sex? Take long weekends without the kids. The fact that she was hearing this from a man of the cloth was downright exotic for Anaïs and nothing like the distant Catholic priests or nuns who spoke in abstractions and whom she’d feared at school.

  Rogers even had a response to Anaïs’s having been married before. “Well, I’m not going to say it didn’t happen,” he started. “Look,” he then leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone as if he were a coach drawing up a play, “I like to look at life a lot like a lawn, and that part over there that’s a little muddy? Well, we’re just going to cover it with a white sheet and walk on it.” I really didn’t get this metaphor. If a white sheet were walked over, wouldn’t mud seep through? And isn’t covering up the past with a sheet kind of, I don’t know, repressed? But Anaïs was sold and beaming at him, and soon we were shaking hands and out the door. We were married the next week.