Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Vacations for them are a chance to get behind the apron and test their own talents, which is great if you’re the one cooking, not so great for the others who become de facto sous-chefs, prep cooks, or in my case, kitchen hand/bus boy. I can’t tell you how many times I’d been relaxing by the pool only to hear “Where’s John? He’s supposed to beat those egg whites for me!” or, “Did John get the charcoal ready?”

  During our first dinner, I learned that some in our group were dieting. Why you would choose summer vacation to do this, especially when you’re in the heart of southern Italy, is beyond me. What it meant, though, was that the food, namely the gorgeous ham and mozzarella, plus all the delicacies I loved and all the talented French cuisine I dreamed of gorging myself on, would be rationed down to the gram. And if the plate wasn’t passed your way on the first helping, well, you might not even get a small serving.

  The food rationing was also a warning shot for just how potent the notion of “group” is with the French. If everyone is set on one course of action (say, rationing), you’re expected to step in line.

  “Why can’t I, though?” I whined to Anaïs, wanting to know why I couldn’t just unhinge my jaw and pack the food down my neck, while the others were dieting.

  “C’est juste comme ça,” she replied, quickly looking at my waist for a pause, while we went to the kitchen to find dessert (fruit). “And anyway, it probably won’t do you any harm.”

  Over coffee and candlelight, it was announced with fanfare there would be activities, too, but not the kind you find listed in a pile of brochures inside a laminated pouch on the dining room table, which the owner had left behind for us. No, the activities announced at our table were more organic ones, ateliers (“workshops”), they were called, and each “atelier” would be headed by, yes, one of us, depending on each of our respective talents and passions. Let me repeat this. On the first night of my first French vacation, I was told I’d be running a two-week workshop. The list I’d noticed thumbtacked to a corkboard in the entry way had been just that, the atelier listing, with the programs written down next to the name of “the professor.” There was an atelier abdoss-fessiers (a snobby word for crunches) manned by Elizabeth, plus an atelier peinture guided by Simone, an atelier philosophie (Spinoza followed by a question mark) was Stan’s gig, and an atelier théatre would be led by Anaïs. Aside from the fear of having to act in a play, what stressed me the most was that it wasn’t quickly apparent to me what my talent was.

  Although they hadn’t said it at the New Year’s party, it was becoming clear this group had not only vacationed together before, they knew the proper order of operations: arrive at the house early to get the best room, write down your atelier, jump in the car for a six-hour food shop, and make sure you say Grazzie! to other French people. An aside: It turned out this group of French people was obsessed with speaking Italian to each other, and they’d apparently all learned what they knew of the language by pantomiming Roberto Benigni.

  I assumed the frantic pace set during these first few days was due in large part to the stressful schedule my friends had left behind in Paris, and I sympathized to a degree. It’s not easy decompressing overnight, but it was doable. I know because I’d witnessed it first-hand on a trip to Jamaica once with my parents, where we came across a group of American vacationers who shared a skiff with us to a nearby island for a day trip.

  The group as a whole was nothing special, but their ringleader, a sequined bikinied fifty-year-old with running lipstick, who’d stumbled onto our boat with a cheeky “Step aside y’all, ’cause cap’n Reba’s heeh,” was. Not only was she wearing one of those umbrella hats and carrying a travel coffee mug full of cheap margarita, she wore on her face a notion of fleeting time and an ability to shut down within hours of arrival, something my French Umbrian brethren didn’t. Reba, I bet, had some hideous job at a Nashville DMV waiting for her when she got back, and she wasn’t going to let that stop her from getting hers. As we pulled into shore at sunset, her slack-jawed sunken quip of “Just slit mah wrists and let me dah” stuck with me as the proper motto for vacation etiquette.

  * * *

  The atelier I should have chaired was spoken English. That way I could have killed two birds with one stone. Throughout the trip, my fellow guests insisted on speaking English to me. Why, I don’t know. If it wasn’t John, is he in ze kitchen? or small things like Why not! interjected when it really wasn’t the context, they’d corner me in the pool to recount to me their trip to the States. “And then we drove cross-country on Route 66,” they’d start, the death-knell opening to any vacation story.

  I’ve never driven on Route 66, and none of my American friends have either, and yet every French person I cross who’s been to the States has. I’ve heard Route 66 mentioned so often, I’ve started to wonder if it’s part of French territory that was never included in the Louisiana Purchase, if it stretches today from an Air France gate at JFK all the way through to the Grand Canyon, and is inhabited only by SAG actors hired to perform American clichés on a freeway driven by French tourists.

  As Simone ground on about her vacation to “le fahr west,” I doggie paddled to the lip of the pool, thinking about those poor SAG actors, sweating in the heat, dressed as cliché-ridden, face-paint-and-feather-wearing Native Americans, their walkie-talkies clipped to their belts, comparing pension plans and catering issues, their conversation suddenly interrupted by a call telling them to get in place, that Simone’s family of four from France was arriving in two minutes.

  Bad fortune would have it that a heat wave was sweeping Europe that summer. Our nights were cruel, and thanks to the ivy covering the window, I lay in a soaked bed laughing almost at the folly of thinking I could ever sleep in this hellscape. It wasn’t frustration as much as wow! surprise, the kind you have when you enter a sauna and you’re fascinated by how inhuman it is.

  I left Anaïs to her denial upstairs and spent our first week solo on one of the couches downstairs, which made things only partly bearable. My initiative was seen as peculiar by the others, if not a bit precious. “What, can’t John live without his little AC?” they needled Anaïs. Ironically, I had dreamed about AC the previous night, and the dream put me in a blinds-drawn hotel room in an anonymous Charlotte Radisson, soulless and freezing—a place I’d always imagined to be the nadir of American travel, but which now, I gladly would have traded for.

  * * *

  On French vacation, there’s no chance of sleeping in. I’d awake on the couch to a commotion in the kitchen made by early risers already fixing a giant tray the French call a plateau, which holds tea, coffee, bread, butter, cheese, and jam for everyone. The plateau is a sort of dinner bell for French breakfasts, and its preparation is the signal that everyone is expected, once again, to eat and be together.

  As far as I was concerned, the plateau could have been a bucket of bait. Small chitchat with people precoffee I find almost impossible, probably because my normal mornings usually involve a quick vomit followed by two espressos taken in complete silence in some dark corner as I grow back my human skin.

  For a few mornings I kept my distance, scurrying up to my room after folding up the couch, telling them that “I need to help Bibi put together that Lego horse stable she’s been wanting to build.”

  Bibi, I found out early on, hated plateau as much as I did. She was used to our laid-back style in Paris, which included baby bottles and cereals and croissants and coffee all served up in our bed each morning, an activity she called le camping! For the rest of her meals, Bibi had been raised like every other angelic French child, to be attentive and polite at the table, but mornings were different, because her parents, who hated mornings, were different.

  Now in Umbria she was finding out she was expected to eat breakfast downstairs with everybody else à table, and there wouldn’t be any camping.

  “Pourquoi?” she asked, looking at me on the verge of tears.

/>   “Because.” And I flashed her that unsettling smile Jack Nicholson perfected in The Shining. “Because we’re on vacation, that’s why,” I said, my weird grin frozen in place.

  Sure, it might have been cruel, but it was the cold unvarnished truth, and when I turned to leave, I sensed I’d won an ally.

  “Well, I hate vacation then,” she pouted.

  “Me, too, dear. Me, too.” I hugged her.

  My absence, in the grand tradition of French mockery—one that tends to isolate and humiliate the individual—was noticed. “Where is our American?” they’d ask Anaïs as the plateau passed, loud enough for me to hear them through the ivy.

  The Breakfast Club, as I called them, would then all wash dishes together and hit the pool, but there were never any calm laps or quiet float time. A net was brought over from the garage and a volleyball game would start up. I tried to sleep, but the bink of the ball, followed by a splash, then an “Ohh—trois zero!” was hard to ignore. And amidst the splashes and the yells, all of this at 9:00 a.m., there was the announcement, “One more game, and then we’re off to food shop!” which was met with a sort of childish group response of “Ouiiii!!!”

  Staring at the ceiling in my hot coffin, the lure of the cool water was too strong, and before long I found myself joining them. But what started as simple back and forth lobs soon morphed into a game, and although I was a novice, my unorthodox serve turned out to be very effective. Before I knew it, the game had ramped up to become serious, and Bashir, the token artist who was somehow more fit than the rest of us, the one who’d taken the first and largest room upon arrival although he was single, suddenly flashed in anger, which I found flattering, only because it meant my serve was baffling him. When his teammate François started bitching about meaningless points, their anger became mine, and soon I was flopping around the shallow end, trying to save the ball at all costs, spiking on a frail Simone, taunting the other team with wide eyes, all with the goal of beating Bashir’s ass. Not because he’d taken my room and brought his own stress into my vacation, but because I wanted so badly just to be able to ask him at tomorrow’s plateau if he planned on hosting his annual How to lose gracefully in volleyball atelier?

  The pool excitement soon made me hungry, though, and while the others were resting (for the first time) on their chairs following the game, I darted into the kitchen on wet feet and in a dripping bathing suit to raid the fridge. Normally this wasn’t allowed, because no snacking is an unwritten rule on French vacations, and in French life for that matter, but the urge was too great. Halfway through pawing some mozzarella and cutting wedges of tomatoes, I heard footsteps, which forced me to shove the tomatoes in my mouth and sadly, the mozzarella down my bathing suit. It was Elizabeth who’d come to fetch water for the group, and I could tell she sensed something was up, probably because I looked odd standing there in the nook of the kitchen counter, my legs crossed like an adolescent hiding a joint.

  “We’ll be leaving for the village in a couple of minutes, if you want to get ready,” she said in a parental way. I nodded and smiled oui oui with a closed mouth, and since bathing suit mozzarella should never be put on bread, I then inhaled it like a Jell-O shot and changed clothes for another two-hour shop.

  I always knew this French obsession with being together on vacation existed, but not to this degree. I’m not sure if it’s the ingrained notion of République they learn at school or if it comes from the socialist colonie de vacances (summer camps) they attend as children in July, camps that are so team-oriented and group-centered you’re practically attached to your fellow campers by a harness. But the more my housemates wanted to be together, the more I wanted to be alone, and by the second week, the impromptu atelier I’d created could have been called Find the hiding John.

  “Où est John!” became a group-rallying cry, because John, it seemed, was always needed for some pool game, some bocci contest right before dinner, or some karaoke sing-along of French seventies music. And the more they looked, the better I hid. There were “jogs” in the morning just so I could actually be by myself. There were fake long calls from the United States, just so I could play games on my phone, and long stints with Bibi either playing “hide from the evil adults” or in the pool fake-teaching her how to swim just so I didn’t have to hear the minstrel Italian being spoken on the terrace.

  In order to escape, I stole away to the furnace called our room, where Anaïs was seated on the bed. I flung myself down, screaming into my pillow like a grounded teen. If you were downstairs you probably couldn’t hear a thing, but if you were next to the bed, or if you had your ear to the door, you’d catch a muffled guttural hurl coming from the room, a sort of “John’s here you fucking assholes! Fucking try and find me!”

  “Oh, stop exaggerating. Look at you! You’re going to get hot again!” she would scold. Anaïs had been oblivious to much of the horror I’d faced these past days, perhaps because as a French person, she found most of it quite normal. That or maybe she assumed anybody after two weeks could come off as pénible (annoying). Anaïs’s father often repeats his famous proverb regarding guests. “Friends are like fish. After three days, they start to stink.” He usually tells us this on the fifth day of his stay at our apartment.

  That night, on my mat during the nightly yoga atelier, as I sat in crow pose staring at the same laptop we’d used on that fateful New Year’s Eve, which was now transformed into a screen to project Yoga for Dummies, I realized the celebrated French vacation I’d been led to believe was so awesome was kind of overrated.

  It was decided our last night together would be “American night,” which meant we’d speak English all day and eat American for dinner, and, of course, yours truly was named cook. I accepted the nomination, only because I didn’t want to confirm everyone’s preconceived notion that Americans suck at cuisine. Plus, by choosing to do smoked barbecue, I’d be able to avoid all the group activities planned that day with the excuse that someone had to keep an eye on all the ribs. And there, under a tree in the shade, I enjoyed a bag of chips and a beer that I’d asked Bibi to smuggle to me by whispering, “Sweetie, go and get Dad another bottle of courage.” And as the hours passed, I’d routinely “test” the ribs every hour, letting the sauce run down my stomach, unashamed because officially the fuck inside me had been given up.

  A soothing calm drifted over me. I’d finally found my sweet spot, and when we said our good-byes over the plateau the following morning, I wasn’t even angry anymore at my friends for having hoodwinked me into French vacationing with them. I accepted them for who they were; people I’d gladly hang out with . . . in Paris.

  And as the years passed and we vacationed with other French people on different French holidays at different French locales, I began to realize my trip to Umbria was not an outlier but part of a general trend; one of skiing destinations two hundred miles away that take thirteen hours to drive to because of biblical traffic; a friend’s house in Burgundy in the fall with no heat, whose kids your kids hate; or a wine-tasting trip to Bordeaux, whose vineyards don’t even grow the wine you were drinking.

  What Anaïs should have told me when she brought me to France years ago was that, at least for six weeks a year, we didn’t have to feel guilty, because we, too, could skimp and cook, and hump bags of dirty laundry and truck bottles of half-finished olive oil all around the country with people we didn’t even necessarily like on half-assed vacations we didn’t really want to take but we were obliged to because the system’s rigged that way.

  * * *

  We returned a day before the rentrée, the ceremonial French back-to-school period, and in front of the school, while Bibi hugged her friends and scanned the Scotch-taped pages of the front door to see who her teacher would be for the year, the parents hung back and caught up on, of course, what else?

  “Alors? Vous êtes partis où?” (So? Where did you take off to?), Nathalie asked. And as I began describing my
first real French vacation, the photoshopped Instagram version, with great friends and food and “lots of stories to tell,” I could see the gears of her mind were already turning.

  “Well, you sound like just the kind of people we should go on vacation with!”

  And while she told me about the dinner she was organizing that weekend to plan for next year’s trip, extending an informal invite to you know who, I found myself backing away, ever so slowly, subtly looking over my shoulder for the one lifeboat I could count on to save me from all this French vacation.

  “Bibi . . . Bibi? . . . BIBI!”

  Letter from the No-Go Zone

  The evening we closed on our apartment, Anaïs and I visited our future space with a bottle of champagne and some drawings we’d sketched on napkins. And there in the upstairs bathroom, while we discussed (as all good bobos do) the pros and cons of installing matching sinks and a walk-in shower style the French ironically call “an Italian douche” (and which I’ve renamed “le Berlusconi”), I spotted from our window a man sprinting down the street chased by another with a brick. Since I didn’t want the new-car smell of home to wear off just yet, I chose to assume the men in question were up to something nobler than what it seemed. Maybe the tall one had botched the taxi reservation and was running ahead to catch the driver, his buddy trailing behind with the pound cake they’d just baked. Perhaps the two were training for that restaurant race they have in Paris, where waiters run down the street weaving in between tables holding trays above their heads—the brick simulating the tray and the lead runner setting the pace.