Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  I once saw a jewelry ad on the subway going for the hard sell without irony: “Give your mistress something special for the holidays.” A recent ad for condoms showed a hotel room and the tag line below it read, “Sarah and Jonathan shared one in room #436.”

  As the years passed, I’d grow accustomed to this live-and-let-live approach to sex and discard whatever shred of American Puritanism had made the journey to France with me. Even if a situation or person wasn’t sexualized, I’d find some way to put sex on the table.

  “Those neighbors are total swingers,” I’d tell myself in the kitchen. “Just look at the way they stared at us at dinner. Typical.”

  “Did that mother just hit on me at school? Of course she did. They do that kind of thing here.”

  “That man with his dog talking to me on the canal—complete deviant—wants to have sex with me, I’m sure.”

  I read propositions into every encounter—at the gym, at parties, at the office—and sometimes my impression was confirmed. The man at the dog park actually did ask if I wanted to catch a sauna with him. The woman at the . . . nope, the man at the dog park was the only one.

  But it wasn’t all in my head.

  Échangisme, the French term for spouse swapping, had become the “it” (the French pronounce it “heat” and each time I’m thrown) topic of French society in the 2000s. There were tell-all books by former échangistes and best-selling books centering on échangisme. And there was a popular TV show called Paris Dernier. The host would visit Paris’s hippest bars and discotheques every Saturday night, interviewing tipsy stars and starlets, usually with a handheld camera, getting them to say stuff they’d regret the next day. The show would routinely end with the host stumbling into a “club échangiste” at 3:00 a.m., camera at the ready, where he’d interview guests and then film them screwing. It was a smash hit. To many Parisians, Paris Dernier was the French SNL. To me, it was quite possibly TV’s finest moment.

  The échangisme craze fed off a mix of paranoia and imagination. Your neighbor, your friends, your dentist—anybody could be an échangiste. You just had to be clever enough to read the signs. During my first few years in France, every dinner party was like a game of Russian roulette, with couples wondering if other couples were going to pop the question over dinner, and the tension was only made worse by the urban myths thrown around the table (which I always took to be a sign that the teller of the tale was indeed an échangiste).

  During all of this craziness, I was happily married to a wife I adored, but whose position on échangisme has never been made clear. For all I knew, Anaïs was a legendary échangiste, too, and was simply waiting for me to give the green light. Yet on the other hand, if she wasn’t, I didn’t want to be the first to say, “Honey, so what do you think about all this swapping business anyway?” She’d only interpret that as my wanting to try, and then I’d be in the merde. Because the sad truth was that, deep down, Mr. Topless Beach Wants to Move to France for all the Sex He Can Eat doesn’t have the guts to try anything.

  * * *

  Around this time, I’d been approached by a friend of Anaïs’s, Jeanne, to join what I guess you could call a “salon.” Some might call it a reflection group, others a lodge, and if you really want to sound pretentious, you could probably call it a think tank. Regardless of the name, the idea of joining something, anything, like this intrigued me. It seemed Parisian and literary and refined, so as an American living here, you can imagine how flattered I was.

  The past few years in Paris had not always lived up to my expectations. The bon vivant Hemingway lifestyle I’d envisioned for myself—café hopping and writing in parks—had crashed on the rocks of my present reality: pushing a stroller and drawing in a sandbox with Bibi. Here, I thought, was a chance to finally fill out the image I’d had of myself before I arrived: as a sort of Noël Coward/Dick Cavett type, holding court over a reading of Sartre. I would treat this not just as an invitation, but as recognition, for all the hard work I’d put in to becoming a real expat—and another in a long line of benchmarks I’d meet on the road to becoming fully French. I’d also done the math at home and realized Bibi, who was six, had more friends than I did, which obviously sparked some jealousy. If nothing else, joining this group would help even the score.

  But a club? I’d never been part of a club before. Teams, sure, baseball, football, basketball, but clubs? They were for nerds, non? When I was a student, the more clubs you were in the fewer friends you had. But the name of this group had flair: Futurbulance. Just by the title you could tell it had its focus on a turbulent future. My kind of group. Much jazzier than its passive American counterparts Aspen or Mensa, which I imagined were peopled by guys wearing light blue oxfords and khakis in a “dress down Friday” way, their cellphones clipped to their belts.

  Now the way the selection of a Futurbulant works is that they interview you—twice. Why two times, I don’t know. The first interview was conducted in machine-gun French by two women over lunch, and I left feeling unsure I’d even sat at the right table. Quick talkers and quick thinkers, these two waxed on about sustainable development and micro-loans and the Marshall Fund and we hadn’t even ordered yet.

  I smiled and let them go on, all the while holding myself back from interrupting them midstream to admit that I really wasn’t smart. But it didn’t matter, it seemed. I wasn’t being judged on my merits, but on my pedigree—the rationale being if their group was to resemble anything futuristic and turbulent, they’d better have an American on board tout de suite. Over the entrée, the conversation veered toward the mission of Futurbulance and the way in which the salon would run. I perked up and held on as best I could.

  “There’ll be long dinners, of course,” they explained, “and role-playing.”

  Silence on my end.

  “Themes will be chosen. We’ll often break off into groups, and special guests sometimes are invited.”

  More silence.

  Long alcohol-fueled dinners, breaking off into groups, role-playing, and guests invited on occasion. All they’d left out, it seemed, were the pig masks. Was all of this a pretext for sex? Was this a salon for échangistes and thus something I should avoid? But my curiosity got the best of me.

  The more I imagined this group as a sex club, the more I feared being rejected. It’s humiliating to know people don’t find you attractive. And as the days passed, I slipped into a micro-depression, thinking not that I hadn’t impressed them with my intellect or pedigree, but that I wasn’t hot enough.

  Then I got the second call, this time from someone named Stanislas. He and another member would meet me for the second interview . . . this time for drinks. Apparently in Futurbulance, the girls do lunch—the guys do drinks. So, we shared beers, and they also spoke fast, but this time, it wasn’t about role-playing or pairing off. It was about keeping this all a secret. As in, “Are we safe, John?”

  Later that month I received an email telling me I’d been accepted, but the elation quickly fizzled into apprehension. It’s one thing to yearn to be part of the group, it’s another thing to cavalierly accept their invitation to join. What the hell had I gotten into?

  Another email soon arrived, this one a mass message to all the other Futurbulants “re: the welcoming of our new member—John von Sothen, at our usual spot—the Red Throat.” The Red Throat? I mean really. And where is this located?

  I grew nauseated and quickly confided my dilemma and fear to Anaïs, only for her to laugh in my face and recount it to our friends over dinner the next night. “John thinks he’s been invited to an échangiste club,” she announced. I quickly left the table to fetch dessert.

  “An échangiste club? But you’re not going to let him go, are you?” asked an astonished friend.

  “Of course, it’s not that.” I heard her laugh. “But you see, he needs to believe these things. If I say anything to the contrary, it would be like telling him there’
s no Père Noël.”

  After our guests left, I told her to stop kidding around, because this time it was serious.

  “Well, just don’t go,” she countered as she continued to fill the dishwasher. “Email them and tell them thanks, but no thanks and basta. . . . Can you fill up the coffeemaker for tomorrow?”

  “But you know how these people operate.” She stopped and gave me a long look.

  “If they were a real sex club, why would they want you?”

  I tried to ignore the personal attack. “I think it’s because I’m American.”

  She burst out with a bigger laugh, and I ignored that as well, and went on to explain the international aspect of the group and wonder aloud if they perhaps found me funny. But she was already on to her second question:

  “Then why did Jeanne (our friend) think of you?”

  I watched as her mind turned and her anger grew. It was the same anger a mother shows when her child shoplifts for the first time. At first, the rage is directed toward the child. But then the mother realizes the child’s just pathetic, and worse, he’s been taken advantage of by some even more pathetic peers who talked him into stealing. Therein lies the real blame.

  This Futurbulance thing isn’t the first instance where Anaïs has been forced to bail me out. If she’s not having to explain that we don’t need to buy five calendars from the garbage man each year (“But what if they stop picking up our garbage?” I ask her), she’s on the phone with France Telecom pleading that her husband didn’t quite understand which soccer subscription he ordered.

  Countless times, she’s been forced to drag me around the neighborhood scolding various shopkeepers for ripping me off. All of whom shrug their shoulders as if to say they didn’t know I was incompetent.

  To the fish guy:

  “Does he look like he could eat a kilo of clams?”

  “But, Madame . . .”

  To the dry cleaner:

  “Do you really think he’s someone who wants his jeans pressed?”

  “But, Madame . . .”

  And as the door slams, she leads me back down the block. I’d probably suck my thumb if I wasn’t holding all the bags of returnables.

  Now at the dishwasher postdinner, Anaïs was telling me, plain and simple, to hand her the Futurbulance phone number, and she would deal with it, as she’d done every other time.

  “I don’t have their number. They’re secret.” All of sudden, I’d become the kid who didn’t want his mom to get involved.

  The next day I was sent off with strict instructions, so strict it was as if she’d safety-pinned a letter to my chest. I drilled myself on the subway ride there.

  “Don’t make eye contact; just pay your respects and acknowledge there’s been a big misunderstanding. Say you’re flattered—start with the . . . ‘Oh, you didn’t get my email?’ thing.”

  I was so busy rehearsing, I didn’t realize I’d walked into the Red Throat, and there at the bar stood an older, wiry type, maybe the restaurant owner, maybe the founder, maybe the “guest of honor”?

  “I’m here for Futurbulance,” I said meekly, realizing how weird that sounded.

  “Ah, Futurbulance.” He smiled. “They’re in the back room.”

  Of course they were in the back room. I gulped and shuffled toward a curtain separating Futurbulance from decent society. My moral compass would never be true again, and all because I wanted to see for myself the sort of sexual world I thought I’d caught a glimpse of on that Cassis beach.

  I took a deep breath and pulled back the curtain, at which point a strange thing happened. There were no capes, no masks. Classic chino khakis, sure, and oxford shirts, check, bottled water, yes, but wine, too, and even champagne.

  I shook hands and said my hellos, and everyone was gracious and modest. Some worked in banking, others worked in the Sarkozy administration. One oversaw the civic board in Orleans, and one ran a theater. I stood up at one point and spoke a little about myself. We ate and talked pop culture and the future of the middle class in France.

  We listened to the guest of honor, who spoke about the long-term consequences of video games for our culture, and whether they will properly address our desire for social interaction. It was all very well-thought-out, all very benchmarky, all very stimulating—and not sexually. I was so relieved I wanted to kiss everyone there, but then I thought, John, don’t push your luck.

  I joined not so much a secret society in Paris, but Paris society as a whole. It’s only when I tell my friends in New York that I’ve joined a salon/lodge/reflection group/think tank that I get the clichéd response.

  “You can call it what you want, John. We all know you’ve joined a sex club.”

  Wesh We Can

  C’était un entrepôt de pisse,” I reminded the realtor who’d come by to give us an estimate on our apartment one rainy day in April.

  “De pisse?” she squinted back, looking every bit as revolted as if I’d just flashed her.

  “Oui, de pisse,” I confirmed. “Pouvez-vous le sentir?” (“Can’t you just smell it?”)

  I inhaled and opened my chest as if I were taking in air at the shore.

  By then the agent had turned her back to me and was talking to Anaïs about square footage, subtly letting me know she didn’t care much for my description . . . that my apartment was formerly a “warehouse of piss.”

  What I’d wanted to convey, of course, was that the apartment had been a warehouse for spices, and if I was fluent enough, I would have said, “En-trah-poe day peace” (entrepôt d’épices) not “en-trah-poe duh peace.” The day and the duh were the stumbling blocks based on accents I had never bothered to learn in school or in France, and which are glaringly absent from my French emails, where I usually WRITE IN ALL CAPS anyway to avoid all those accents, acute, grave, and circumflex.

  When people ask, I tell them I speak French like Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks English, meaning you undahstand everyteeng I say, but nobody thinks I’m French. And most Americans I know would gladly sign up for that. I get where I want to go. I can talk my way out of a jam. Some people even find me charming. But if you asked me fifteen years ago where I thought my French would be by now, I probably would have aimed higher—perhaps not Victor Hugo level, but definitely higher than “All bee bach.”

  * * *

  Like any good immigrant, my goal upon arrival in France was to become fluent; a term that, I realize now, has different interpretations.

  “Oh, my God, you’re fluent!” my American friends squeal as they stand next to me gawking while I just order a baguette.

  At first, I just wanted to speak as well as Bibi. No better, no worse. And since I was arriving in France at the same time she was, me via Air France, her via Anaïs, she’d serve as a human benchmark by which to gauge my own progress. Hell, if anything, I had a head start on her. I had years of French under my belt, and I knew how to study. Plus, I was smarter.

  In a way, I was adhering to the writer Malcolm Gladwell’s premise that expertise in anything can be achieved by practicing something for ten thousand hours. If Gladwell was right, I thought, in ten years my French would easily be in the bag, leaving me to pursue other ten-thousand-hour endeavors, such as porn.

  I was also determined not to be like the other Americans I crossed paths with those first few years, the ones who told me they’d been here for decades, yet still hadn’t assimilated as they’d expected they would. I’d find them in the touristy areas of Paris usually, drinking pints on the F. Scott Fitzgerald beaten path or in a café where Josephine Baker once sang, stuck in a time they didn’t even live in.

  I found these people peculiar in many ways, one being they were rarely chic. Most of them had gray beards and ponytails, and carried ratty backpacks while strolling the banks of the Seine in Birkenstocks with socks as if they were in Burlington, Vermont. Call me a stickler, but you’d th
ink after thirty years of living in the fashion capital of the world something might wear off. Nope. They were happy as clams—looking as if they were still traveling on a Eurorail pass.

  What separated me from these people, I thought, was that I was married to a French woman. And Anaïs’s French, I might add, is really good. She speaks so well I think even French people are impressed. The pronunciation, the acceleration, the turning on a dime: She has it all. The way she could inflect her voice or drop the passé simple, the way she’d drive through difficult words like serrurier (locksmith) or vétérinaire (veterinarian) as if they were brush weed, then pull up with an old-school adjective like revêche (churlish) to describe another parent seemed, to me, magical. If anything, I thought, being married to her would be like having a virtuoso in the living room playing Chopin all day, and simply by listening, I’d eventually become a maestro myself.

  * * *

  Why this never happened is anyone’s guess.

  One reason may have to do with a quality that many would consider an asset: I’m not afraid. I’ve never been one of those Americans embarrassed to talk because they think their French isn’t up to snuff. I’m the opposite, actually. I’m like the bad golfer swinging away, oblivious that his balls are slicing and braining people on the course. The swing feels perfect to me, so why is everyone ducking? Often, I confuse facility with mastery (if it rolled off my tongue with ease, then it must be correct) and take compliments as confirmations of my talent, not as people just being painfully polite.

  I also conveniently never compare myself to native French speakers, but instead to those American cretins, the ones nasally stumbling their way through another limited-as-hell sentence like “Trump est . . . est . . . comment dire soon to be impeached?” their accent sounding more and more like a kazoo being blown in your face.