THE PAST
Le Passé composé
THE PLANE LIFTED over wheat fields, terminal tanks, and shipping containers, gliding past the butterfly wing of the coastline, its edges fraying into foam. We had taken off from the airport near Honfleur, a fishing village in Normandy, where we had spent the afternoon eating lunch on the harbor, the wind rattling mainsheets like cowbells, before setting out to tentatively wander the streets of the old town, each of us trying to calibrate our pace to what we guessed was the other’s level of interest in military souvenirs and producers of apple cider. It was just fall, the kind of day where summer lingers in the sun and winter lurks in the shade. It was our first time together as tourists.
We were flying at five thousand feet. The treacly dregs of daylight poured through the left side of the plane, where Olivier sat, manning the controls. I was next to him, forehead pressed against the window. The lower clouds were full, darkening to violet. Above them were Cirrus uncinus—mare’s tails, glowing gold.
In half an hour we would land at White Waltham, a former RAF field outside of London, now a flying club where members could rent planes by the hour. That morning, as Olivier prepped for takeoff, calculating weights and checking gauges, I’d shoved damp palms into the pockets of my jacket. To abandon firm ground when you didn’t have to struck me as a provocation. Olivier, from what I could gather, spent every second of his free time in the air. The home screen on his phone, I’d noticed, was a picture of a runway.
Snatches of air traffic control chatter occasionally flared from the radio. Otherwise, it was silent. We were quiet, too, holding hands. Below us, the sea was a sidewalk, the occasional ship a wad of gum. The sense of solitude was as luxuriant as if we had been lying under clean sheets in a king-size bed on the top floor of the tallest building in a city cleared of traffic. I was surprised at how calm I felt. We were alone, together, exactly halfway between France and England. I wondered where, at which exact ripple, La Manche gave way to the English Channel, ciel turned to sky, la mer became the ocean.
“Golf X-Ray Bravo Zulu Mike request frequency change to London,” Olivier said into the microphone of his headset, breaking my reverie.
“Information one two three decimal seven five,” the operator radioed back. “Zulu Mike frequency change approved. Squawk seven thousand.”
Now we were flying over farmland, the grass like baize. Gliders swooped in the distance. Soon we would be descending.
“London Info, Golf X-Ray Bravo Zulu Mike,” Olivier said. “Good afternoon. Requesting basic service.”
“Golf X-Ray Bravo Zulu Mike, pass your message.”
“Cessna 182, VFR flight with two people onboard from Deauville to White Waltham.”
• • •
A YEAR EARLIER I’D been living in New York. Since leaving North Carolina, I’d traveled a little, but no one would have mistaken me for a jetsetter. When I was twenty-seven, the New Yorker assigned me to write a profile of the Italian fashion designer Donatella Versace. It was my first big work trip. I booked a ticket to Milan, and soon was sitting in the middle seat of the back row of an Alitalia plane, as anxious about pulling off the job as I was giddy at my luck.
Ten years earlier, Donatella’s brother Gianni had been murdered by a serial killer on the steps of his mansion in Miami. In tribute to him, she had commissioned a ballet, to be performed at La Scala on the anniversary of his death. I sat in on rehearsals. Donatella, racked by nerves, hovered on the sidelines, fingering a skeleton key from the Miami house, the last thing Gianni touched before he died. That night I put on a gown, attended the ballet—a gunshot, a falling man in a red leather motorcycle jacket—and ate truffles in the cavernous staterooms of the Palazzo Reale. I wasn’t able to choke down the espresso that followed, but neither did I expose myself as a complete yokel. The next morning, Donatella and a liveried driver picked me up from my hotel in a black Mercedes. We were to drive north, to visit the family’s villa on the banks of Lake Como.
Donatella was in a philosophical mood. She had slept through the night, she said, for the first time in a decade. “I think change in life is important,” she began, as the car wended its way into the hills above the city. “I don’t like to look at the past. The past is inside you. Now, after ten years, this is a starting point for me to go towards something new.”
It was July. She was chain-smoking. The air-conditioning was off. With the tinted windows not so much as cracked, the air quality in the car was beginning to resemble that of a sweat lodge.
“Believe it or not, I have been listening to jazz at this moment, not rock,” Donatella, still dilating on her newfound lightness of spirit, said as the chauffeur performed a stomach-churning swerve.
I felt my mouth water.
“I will die, Gabriele!” she yelled to the front seat. “No, he’s a great driver. Ha-ha. Bello!”
We continued toward Como. Donatella was talking about her plans to spend August in the Caribbean. I knew I needed to ask her whether it was true that on vacation she typically brought along her own purple bedsheets, but I couldn’t form the words.
“I’m feeling a little carsick,” I finally whispered. “Maybe we should pull over?”
It was too late. Just as I croaked out my SOS, Gabriele shot into a tunnel.
At the villa, I was greeted by a manservant bearing a concoction in a crystal tumbler. “This is lemon water, without sugar,” he commanded. “Drink it.” I managed to conduct the interview, eating penne with caviar and touring a grotto. Donatella and I had been scheduled to ride back to Milan together, but something, I was told, had come up. The manservant hustled me into a van. Later I called my boyfriend. He didn’t answer. I couldn’t reach my mother, or anyone else. Panicking that I’d committed a firing offense, I dialed my father at his law office in North Carolina.
“Dad, I threw up on Donatella Versace.”
“Honey, who’s Donatella Versace?” he replied. “Is she one of your friends?”
• • •
SOON I WAS TWENTY-NINE, newly dumped. For several years I’d been dating an Englishman who had two middle names and wore lavender socks. His residence in my life, before Olivier, might lead one to believe that I was partial to foreign men. But in fact he was the latest entry in a catalog of relationships that, taken in the aggregate, made absolutely no sense. My first boyfriend, in high school, had been a “yo-boy”: that was how “preps” like me referred to the skaters and surfers, who wore hooded sweatshirts, drove cars that were low instead of high, and shunned jam bands for rap. After that I went out with a “baseball player,” another local genre. They were country boys, chewers of dip and drinkers of Mountain Dew, who had part-time jobs delivering bottled water, cut the sleeves off their T-shirts, and lived in ranch houses with American flags flying out front.
In college I fell in love with a tall Tennessean who directed his considerable intellectual gifts largely toward gambling on sports. The son of a southern lawyer and a serious-minded northern mother, he was so much like me: a partier and a reader, as introverted as he was sociable, stuck between two parts of himself whose ambitions and desires often seemed to be in direct opposition. He was a fraternity stalwart. He was also a bagpiper, a history nut, a brilliant writer, a real friend to many women. I couldn’t assimilate these contradictions any more than I could my own. I was always giving him horrible gifts—a clan Houston cummerbund and bow tie, when he’d have preferred a Coetzee novel—trying to push him toward one pole of his identity, to make him into a type, as typical as possible. I felt I lacked a culture: I was a WASP, but I wasn’t a WASP; I was Irish Catholic, but I wasn’t Irish Catholic; I was southern, but I wasn’t southern. Dating a person who had one, or strong-arming him into one facet of it, I could be someone by proxy. I was always looking for more of a bird.
Not long after the Englishman and I broke up, a friend from college invited me to a party, an “urban tailgate” in Madison Square Park.
There would be Frisbee, the e-mail promised, and Jell-O shots. Fun would be had by all. That sounds like a terrible party, I thought. I went anyway, heeding the immortal rule that to refuse an invitation, as a single person, is to invite the misery for which you’re sure you’re destined. It was a terrible party. I quietly fled to a nearby restaurant, where I found a seat at the bar.
Eating a steak and drinking a glass of red wine by myself, I was significantly less miserable than I had been half an hour earlier. If I can tolerate some level of solitude, I thought, why am I here in Flatiron, eating dinner alone, instead of off somewhere having an adventure? A long-suppressed, late-breaking desire began to rise within me. It was as though someone had stuck a pipette into my id and squeezed the bulb. I loved New York, and I loved my job, but I had spent every day of my working life reporting for duty at the same desk. I was an organization kid, aging out of the period in life that indulges experimentation. I had never really taken a risk.
• • •
NINE MONTHS LATER, thanks to a kind boss and portable profession, I arrived in London, a city I’d chosen largely on the basis of the fact that I, like its inhabitants, spoke English. My possessions whittled to the contents of two duffel bags, I showed up and proceeded to the studio apartment that I’d signed for, unseen, on the recommendation of an acquaintance.
It was perfect: clean, white, cold, with high ceilings and that London-flat smell of radiators, carpet, and mail. Wooden shutters as tall as barn doors flanked a pair of French windows that opened onto an overgrown balcony with a wrought-iron railing. The move seemed fated. Later, people would ask what kind of visa I had, and how I’d managed to secure it, and who had been my lawyer. I’d just gone on the website and filled out some forms. The documents had arrived not long after, as though I’d ordered a pizza.
I assumed I would stay a year or two, eat some scones, move back to New York. Meanwhile, I basked in the parks and parapets, the blue plaques and stained palaces, the roads that bore the names of the places to which they led, having been furrowed, long before the rubber tire, by feet and wheels and hooves. I’d never had a garden, or even a cactus, but on the balcony I dug dead plants out of concrete urns and potted boxwoods, lavender, a gardenia. I cleared out a window box and soon had a free supply of basil.
Mornings, I rode a bike to the London Library, where I worked at a long table in a pleasantly fungal room presided over by a bust of Hermes of Praxiteles. The actress who played Karen, the wife on Californication, often sat beside me, typing with surprising fervor. (I later found out that she’d been married to a surgeon who, coming home late from an operation, had dropped dead on their doorstep. Pregnant with their third child, she continued to write letters to him, which she eventually published.) I liked how you could be more than one thing in London, how industries intermingled and demographics mixed. I took trains to the countryside and exercised my right to ramble, keeping the hawthorn trees on my right-hand side, passing through kissing gates. I learned to cook. I went to a picnic where an elderly woman took a look at my feet and said, “Red shoes, no knickers.” Then I realized that she was wearing orthopedic sandals the color of a tomato.
London seemed, from the start, a deeply tolerant place, whose forbearance yielded freedom without giving off the usual urban by-product of aggression. History had discredited the flag-waving impulse, so—at least for foreigners, who were exempt from the strictures of the class system—the greater part of fitting in was showing up. Going to the gym was considered a harmless but slightly embarrassing activity, like philately or folk dancing. People didn’t put their phones on the table during dinner, and if you droned on about your job or your kids or your diet, they didn’t feign interest. It seemed both easier and more intense. If New York was the movies, London was the boxed set.
The city was familiar but intriguing, the friend of a friend. Newspapers were trashy, but television was dignified. Lunch was dinner, where whoever you were eating it with would most often encourage you to join him in a “cheeky glass.” Chief among the city’s charms, for me, was the vibrancy of British English—the blunt pejoratives, the thrusting staccato verbs. Knobs, yobs, wankers, berks. Sack, shag, chuff, nick. The word bellend was the most efficient synecdoche I’d ever heard.
In public speech, trying to be memorable and coming off as slightly unhinged remained more advantageous than trying to be bland and succeeding. The Houses of Parliament had eleven bars, one of which had an arrow near the exit, three inches from the ground: “It is to accommodate those who choose to leave the premises on their hands and knees,” a police officer once told a reporter. The month I arrived, an MP named Mark Reckless went on a six-hour binge and missed the vote on the budget. “I’m terribly, terribly embarrassed,” he said. “I apologise unreservedly and I don’t plan to drink again at Westminster.” (Italics mine.)
This was a city whose “love-rat” mayor once dismissed rumors of an affair as “an inverted pyramid of piffle,” the intellectual arsenal of a country where words were deployed like darts. There was an entire church—St. Bride’s, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672—dedicated to journalists. My supermarket published its own surprisingly good magazine, which I would flip through while enjoying the slatternly pleasure of “having a lie-in.” On the radio one atypically rainless Saturday morning, I heard the weatherman prophesying “a usable day.”
A sort of two-for-the-price-of-one city, London was one of the world’s great conglomerations of buildings and roads and restaurants and theaters and people, overlaid by an equally superb megalopolis of words. British English was my gateway language. I strolled in the mews of understatement. I drove the wrong way down the streets of graft (meaning “hard labor,” rather than “corruption”) and quite (meaning “not very” rather than its opposite). I stalled in the roundabout of the English non sequitur, in which someone declares that something is dreadful and ghastly—this usually involves boarding school, or Wales—and then says immediately, “It was great fun.”
Lamenting the way that the uprootedness of the New World manifested itself in the American vocabulary, Edith Wharton asked, “What has become, in America, of the copse, the spinney, the hedgerow, the dale, the vale, the weald?” If my infatuation was not requited—one day I opened a newspaper to find a letter from a man furious that his local convenience store had “seemingly used a foreign dialect of the English language to describe biscuits as ‘cookies’”—it was invigorating. I reveled in plural collective nouns (“England are winning”) and pro-predicates (“They might do”), the joy of experiencing my own language at a ten-degree remove.
• • •
I SAW A FACE ACROSS the room—deep-set hazel eyes, nose like an arrowhead. It was, unmistakably, a European face. Why, I wondered—as I’d wondered many times on the subway in New York, playing an idle game in which I tried to figure out where my fellow passengers had come from, whether recently or long ago—were Europeans in Europe immediately distinguishable from the many Americans who shared their genetic material? Even controlling for environmental factors—nutrition, dentistry, haircuts, red glasses—there seemed to be something different in the strength of the features, the splay of the crow’s-feet, the hold of the jaw. All four of my father’s grandparents were born in Ireland, but you could dress him in a flat cap and tweeds and still pick him out of a lineup. The dimple that slashed from the cheek to the chin of the person I was staring at seemed almost like a geographical feature, a gully that had taken centuries to carve.
I’m in Europe, I thought, with all the discernment of a study-abroad student determined to have chow mein on her first night in Beijing. I’m going to go talk to that European man!
I accosted him, sticking my hand out and stating my name in a manner that I would later learn is considered, by people who are not Americans, to be fairly bizarre.
He introduced himself as Olivier.
I asked where he was from. He was French, he said, from a beach to
wn near Bordeaux.
“It sounds a lot like Wilmington,” I replied.
Amazingly, he knew what I was talking about. He’d once been to my hometown, for the wedding of a North Carolinian he had befriended while studying in the US. It was probably the first time I had ever spoken more than a few words to a French person (or, for that matter, to a mathematician), but he seemed immediately familiar. We categorize people by the hemispheres they inhabit, the continents they occupy, the countries they live in, the deserts they traverse. Why not classify them by their affinities to oceans? If land were water, Olivier and I were compatriots. Swap blue for green as the organizing principle of the map, and we came from the same terroir.
We sat down. Neither of us knew the host of the party, which was taking place in an apartment above a Polish restaurant. Olivier had tagged along with some French acquaintances. I had come with some friends of a friend, Americans and Australians whom I had never met before and would never see again. I had been in London for twenty-one days.
A bottle of wine was sitting on the coffee table. Olivier glanced at the label before pouring it, dripless, into two dentist-size plastic cups, a move that struck me as the height of Continental refinement. We kept talking. I was surprised when he got up and said he had to leave. He was exhausted, he explained, from having spent the day at the airfield practicing aerobatics. As he spoke, he unconsciously mimed the maneuvers: stalls, barrel rolls, Cuban 8s.
A few days later, I got an e-mail asking if I wanted to get a drink.
“I’d like that,” I wrote back. “You can fly me to the pub.”
He suggested a place.
“C’est bon!” I replied.
I now know that this means “It’s good!”
We met on a Tuesday night. Petunias blared like phonographs from the pub’s facade. Inside, there were oriental rugs and flocked wallpaper. We squeezed onto benches at a long, sticky wooden table. Next to us, a couple was having an animated conversation, which seemed to involve something called a “budgie smuggler.”
When in French Page 7
