(Not Quite) Mastering the Art of French Living

by Mark Greenside

  I have no phone, no language, no AAA card—and no idea where I am or where I’m going—and I’m about to run out of gas. My hands are so sweaty I can barely hold onto the wheel. I turn right again and again and again and drive down another service road winding up back where I started. I take the next right, the second right—so much for French logic!—and see the Total station up ahead. I coast to the pump.

  My legs are shaking when I get out of the car. I wait several seconds and carefully remove the green unleaded gas hose, making sure not to use the yellow diesel hose, because I made that mistake once before, and start filling the tank, amazed as always that I pay after it’s filled. In the U.S., I’d have to leave a body part or a family member as a down payment.

  I go inside to pay—it costs sixty dollars to fill the tank of the economiest of cars—then return to the car and look at the Mapquest directions. I’ve already driven the first thirteen steps—from Renault to the Total station. There are fifteen more to Senlis. I’m going to Senlis because it’s twenty miles away, less than three miles from the highway exit, and avoids—at least for today—the Périphérique, the thirty-six kilometer bypass loop that allows you to circle Paris forever and is the best representation of the eight circles of hell on Earth.

  I start the car and enter the A-1, following the signs for Lille, where I don’t want to go—a common occurrence when driving in France. Forty minutes later, I park in front of a hotel. I enter and make my usual request for a room. “Je voudrais une chambre pour un noir avec un lait.” I would like a room for a black with a milk, (instead of “Je voudrais une chambre pour une nuit avec un lit,” I’d like a room for a night with one bed). Unbelievably, the man hands me a key to room 303, the third floor.

  I drag my two heavy bags and briefcase, one by one, up the forty, dark, progressively narrower, winding stairs to the fourth floor, because as I always forget, the ground floor isn’t counted in France. I lie down on the bed and crash. It’s 6:30. I’ve been in France four and a half hours, and I’ve managed to travel twenty miles from the airport. There’s a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is.

  I wake up early, refreshed, and eat breakfast. It’s a six-hour drive from Paris to Plobien. I should be there by early afternoon. I put my bags in the car, start the engine, and look at Mapquest, then put it away and look at the map. Senlis and Aéroport Charles de Gaulle are northeast of Paris. I’m going northwest. There ought to be a way to drive due west, but I don’t see it. I put the car in gear, reluctantly enter the A-1 and follow the signs to Paris, where I don’t want to go, swearing, as I do every year, that next year I’m getting the GPS.

  I pass the airport, take a huge breath, and brace myself. I’m about to commit one of the bravest, most dangerous, blood-chilling acts in my life: I’m going to enter the Périphérique.

  My heart’s pounding. I’m sweating. I’m more afraid of this than a bungee jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. I’m looking for signs to Lyon, where I don’t want to go, gripping the wheel, staying in my lane, letting the traffic lead me. Signs whiz past me, appearing from nowhere, without regularity or warning. I’m hugging a middle lane in case I suddenly have to veer right for an exit or left for a fork in the road, trying not to hit or get hit by the trucks, buses, taxis, vans, motorcycles, and cars switching lanes and passing me on both sides at 120 kilometers per hour, 40 km/h over the speed limit of 80 that I’m driving. It’s worse than the “MTA song,” where you want to get off and you can’t. Here I don’t want to get off, and I’m afraid I will, and it will be the wrong exit, and I’ll never get back. It’s the harrowing ride around Charles de Gaulle airport, running out of gas, driving in circles, feeling completely lost and confused, logarithmically multiplied. It’s Fantasyland meets panic room.

  After fifteen minutes, I feel like I’m going into anaphylactic shock. Blindly, I follow a van with a picture of a chicken on it—a metaphor if I ever saw one. I pass exits for Strasbourg, Metz, Lille, Rouen, and aim toward Bordeaux, where I don’t want to go. Bordeaux is southwest. I want to go northwest—but it’s the only western destination I see, so I head there. I’m looking for the A-6, which connects to the A-10, which converges with the A-11 in the direction of Orléans and Rambouillet, two other places I don’t want to go, but which are closer to Brittany than Bordeaux.

  Miraculously, I see the sign for the A-6, take it, and successfully connect with the A-10, but miss the A-11, and wind up in Orly Airport. The good news is I’ve been here before, I have a full tank of gas, and Orly is smaller than de Gaulle. The bad news is it takes me an hour and an eighth of a tank of gas to get out and back on the A-10, looking for the A-11, once again following the signs toward Bordeaux, because my other choices are worse.

  Thirty kilometers before Orléans, I stop at an aire, a rest stop. My whole body is shaking—from fear, frustration, and the vibrations of the nearby idling trucks. I have to go to the bathroom, but I’ve stopped at the only aire in France that doesn’t have a toilet, and I’m not French enough to pee on a tree. I unfold the map and see I’ve gone wrong again. I drive to the next exit, which by another immutable French law is never less than twenty-five kilometers in the direction you don’t want to go, turn around, and drive sixty-five kilometers back to connect with the A-11 to Le Mans, the A-81 to Laval, and the N-157 to Rennes, where I miss the bypass because it’s not called a bypass, but a rocade—what the hell is a rocade? It’s not even in my dictionary—and drive straight into the center of town (centre ville) of the capital city of Brittany at two o’clock in the afternoon when everyone is getting into their car to go back to work after their two-hour lunch, complete with wine. It’s almost enough to make me wistful about the Périphérique.

  I drive around and around centre ville, avoiding pedestrians, bikes, cars, prams, and buses, searching for signs to Brest. There are none, no signs for anything west. Clearly, there’s no “Go west, young man” in France. I can go north to Mont-Saint-Michel, east, back to Paris, or south to Nantes.

  For no reason at all, I choose south, which turns out by the law of averages to be right. As soon as I’m out of the city I see a sign to Quimper and follow it all the way to Plobien. I arrive at the house at five thirty, ten hours after I left Senlis, me and my Twingo intact, and to my great surprise I’ve already forgotten about Aéroport Charles de Gaulle and the ten-hour drive, and I’m happy. . . . “Happy” being one of the operative words for my life in France.

  My First Accident

  My friend Peggy, who’s fluent in French, has come to Plobien to help me. She’s been here before with her husband, Larry. This time she’s alone, and she’s stayed a week, adding to the questions, lore, and consternation my neighbors have about me. As in, who is this guy, anyhow?

  French people marry young, have children young, and are grandparents by their late forties. And here I am, of grandparent age and living alone. I’m married, but Donna’s self-employed and doesn’t have summer-long teacher vacations, which means most of the time I’m in France I’m solo. To the people in my petite ville, this makes me an oddity and a challenge: what to do with me?

  Mostly, I think, they pity me. After observing French men, I understand why.

  Every French man I know is much more capable than I am with things mechanical, electrical, and physical. Something breaks, they fix it. They change electric sockets, rewire lamps, repair lawnmowers, insert fireplaces, fix leaky faucets, replace roofs, rebuild houses, but hardly anyone from my generation knows how to wash his clothes or fry an egg. When it comes to the domestic, they are helpless. Without fail, once a week, when I hang my laundry on the clothesline, couples of all ages walk past the house, holding hands, and take note. The women smile and nod at me in silent appreciation, perhaps collusion, maybe even hope, and the men grumble, a sound so familiar, universal, and disparaging I understand it immediately: ‘Nuh-uh. No way, baby. Not me. Not a chance.’

  The result is women visit me at the house. Men visit, too, but less often. Mostly, I think, because whenever they
do, I ask for their help. Can you fix this? Look at that? Tell me what to do here? The women visit because I’m an anomaly, and because I have something to give to them. They arrive at different times of the day, late morning, afternoon, early evening—never at lunch, midi, or dinnertime. They always bring something; flowers or vegetables from their gardens, something they’ve cooked, or an invitation to dinner at their home, as if they, themselves, aren’t enough. They take their favorite kitchen chair and sit at the table, some facing the window, looking at the geraniums, the river, and trees; others facing the dining-living room and the granite walls, terracotta floor, and fireplace. They sip tea or coffee I prepare for them and they talk, sometimes smoking, telling me things they know I can’t understand, suspecting I do, knowing also I couldn’t tell anyone what I heard if I wanted to.

  My American friends visit me because it’s France, and I’m here, and they know I need all the help I can get. Hence Peggy.

  I’m driving her to the airport outside of Quimper so she can fly to Paris to meet Larry, who doesn’t speak French, and is arriving at Aéroport Charles de Gaulle with his luggage and two bikes. His greatest fear, which I fully understand, is that she won’t be there, and he’ll have to get to the car rental place by himself, which, he made perfectly clear before she left, would be grounds for dismembering or divorce, whichever hurt most. She left a week before he did because she’s a dear friend, loves France, and I hired her thirty years ago for a job she still has and likes. She volunteered to help me with things I don’t have a prayer of doing myself—like understanding my insurance policy and paying my water bill over the phone. She volunteered the evening she heard me practicing my French. “Je voudrais un verre du vent.” I would like a glass of wind. But it was, “Je voudrais une chambre pour une noir avec une lait,” that cinched it.

  I’m taking the old route through Quimper because it’s the route I took the only other time I drove to this airport. Luckily, over the years, I’ve learned a few things about driving in France: navigating the fantasy of speed limits; gauging the safest distance between vehicles in centimeters; parking anywhere I can. I’ve also learned about relations with other drivers (no guns, horns, yelling, or digital finger waving), pedestrians (never have the right of way; crossing the street—any street—is a life-threatening, nearer-to-God experience), and police (speak Franglish). But the most basic rule of driving in France is this: there is no grid. There is no straight line to anything.

  France discovered roundabouts, ronds-points, somewhere in the recent past, and driving has never been the same. Maybe it’s a nationalistic thing, the desire to replicate the Place de l’Etoile on every ten to fifteen kilometers of non-highway roadway, or maybe someone went to England in the 1950s, saw what the English did with their roads, and returned with an idea and a plan to better them. In any event, ronds-points are everywhere and determine the geography of French driving. To go west, you drive east. To go north, you drive south. The good news is you can circle a rond-point for eternity trying to decide which way to go. The bad news is the odds are you’ll choose wrong. But the best news is up the road, not more than ten or fifteen kilometers away, there will be another rond-point, and you’ll have another chance to try your luck, and luck is what it takes, believe me, because greeting you at every entrance to every rond-point in France is the sign cédez le passage: you don’t have the right of way. It’s France’s mantra from Caesar to the Maginot Line, direct, confusing, and ineffective—like much of the road signage in France.

  It’s eight forty-five in the morning, and we’re approaching Quimper. There’s not much traffic, and it’s a beautiful, cloudless, blue-sky sunny day. I’m carefully following the signs with the name of the airport—Pluguffan—and a picture of a plane beneath it, knowing at any time the signs could disappear, or I’ll misread an arrow and go left instead of straight—something you’d think would be impossible, but I’ve done numerous times. Still, I’m confident. The airport is a forty-minute drive from the house, and I’ve given myself an hour and a half to get there. And Peggy is here, and she speaks French. She can ask for and understand the directions—if worse comes to worse comes to worse . . .

  I’m moving with the traffic, maintaining five times more space between my Twingo and the car in front of me—about half a car’s length—than any other driver on the road. We’re almost at the cutoff to the airport, when I see Quimper’s mother-of-all ronds-points up ahead . . . Merde.

  Roundabouts in the United States are single lane, occasionally double, because Americans hate driving in circles. In Paris and other large cities, I’ve seen seven, eight, and ten lanes of cars circling around and around like hawks. This one is three lanes. I slow down, knowing I don’t have the right of way: Cédez le passage. Every entrance to this rond-point, all six of them, has this sign, meaning everyone is confused, worried, anxious, and waiting for someone else to gun their motor and make the right move, so they won’t make the wrong move and feel bad. Or worse, do bad. Understand this, and you’ll understand French people. As immoral as they appear, they’re moral. (The reverse of the U.S.: the more moral we appear, the more immoral. Think Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards.)

  I stop—cédez le passage—and wait for my opportunity to enter the rond-point. Looking left into the oncoming traffic, I see an opening, hit the gas pedal, and plow broadside into a car that just zigged across three lanes of moving traffic to reach the exit that was carefully, scientifically, rationally, logically planned and placed eighteen inches to the right of my entrance. Boom! I hit him broadside, smashing in the passenger’s side door. I look at Peggy. She’s whiter than usual.

  “You OK?” I ask.

  She nods.

  I leap out of the car to apologize and see how the other person is, though given that I’m driving a toy car and went from a dead stop to five kilometers an hour, how bad could he be? Still, I want to do what I can to not completely destroy Franco-American relations and not give them one more reason—McDonald’s, global warming, peanut butter—to hate us.

  “Vous allez bien?” I call.

  He looks at me, blank.

  I think it’s my accent. So I say it again, louder and slower. “Vous . . . allez . . . bien . . . monsieur?”

  He’s walking toward me slowly, giving no recognition of hearing, seeing, knowing anything. I figure it’s either Night of the Living Dead or I hit a narcoleptic. That’s when I realize he’s in shock. Shock! What is with these people? This was a nothing, a tap. No big deal. I look back at Peggy. She’s sitting in the front seat, crying. Why? Because I hit the guy? Because she’s going to miss her flight and her husband, my friend Larry, is going to divorce her and dismember me for making his worst nightmare come true? I’m torn between my friend, who’s in a panic, and this stranger I just put in shock. This all happens in less than five seconds: (1) I’m out of the car; (2) I call to the guy once; (3) twice; (4) I look at Peggy and see she’s in worse shape than the guy; (5) I stand there helpless.

  This is where French people are at their best: in a crisis. In the U.S., everything is OK—I’m OK, you’re OK, we’re all OK—so when a crisis comes, we’re like Peggy and me, lost, confused, and helpless. Not the French. They’re often in crisis, so when a real one comes, they’re ready.

  Four young men, singly, on their own, stop their cars, and without saying a word to one another, go to work. Number One steps into the busy, now backed-up traffic and begins to direct the cars around us. It’s almost nine o’clock, commuter time, and not a single horn has sounded. No one jumps out of his car screaming—or worse, shooting. No one throws anyone’s dog into traffic—and there are plenty of them to throw. People just wait patiently, as they do in stores, airports, post offices, banks—unlike Americans, who like me, grumble, grouse, moan, curse, want to kill. It must be the difference between a two-thousand-year-old culture and a three-hundred-year-old culture. Time has a different meaning. When I say now, I mean yesterday. When they say now, they mean tomorrow. So the d
rivers, knowing they will now be late, patiently sit and wait for direction. Young man Number One provides it, as one by one, he waves cars safely around us.

  Young man Number Two is on his cell phone. He calls his wife, his boss, the police, an ambulance—in that order. He’s absolutely calm and buoyantly animated. He retells the story each time.

  Number Three has joined the victim, who’s in his late forties, looks in the prime of health, and is lying on the grass with his hands folded over his chest like a corpse. Number Three takes the guy’s hand and holds it. He strokes his hair, his forehead, his cheek, like a lover or nurse or family member, speaking so gently, so comfortingly, reassuringly, so sweetly I think he’s going to break into song. I don’t get it. Unless the guy has some dread disease or the accident has triggered a bile or adrenaline so potent it’s drowning him, the guy ought to be OK. Then it hits me: it’s an insurance scam, the French version of whiplash, back pain, and stress. If this were New York, the guy would already be a millionaire: they’d pay him right here, on the spot.

  Number Four, thanks to the unluck of the draw, gets Peggy and me. She’s useless, sitting in the car, fretting and worried, probably having visions of divorce and dismembering. Number Four looks at me and steps backward. It’s early morning—who’s going to see me?—I’m wearing flip-flops, black socks, frayed and paint-stained cutoff jeans, a Curly of the Three Stooges T-shirt, and a green and yellow A’s hat worn backward: this, in a country where women wear heels to go grocery shopping, and where only old men, young boys, and crazy people wear hats. Number Four quickly eliminates two of the three hat-wearing types and slowly steps forward, arms outstretched in either a welcome or self-defense, saying something I don’t understand.

  “Comment?” I say, pronouncing it como, as in “lake.” What?