“What’s a budgie smuggler?” I whispered to Olivier.
“No idea,” he said. (With his accent, it came out sounding like he was lacking identification.)
He turned to the man on his right, polite as could be.
“Excuse me, but we were wondering about budgie smugglers?”
The man was happy to give us a lesson. A budgie smuggler, he explained, was a bikini swimsuit for a man, so called because it gave the impression of its wearer having shoved a budgerigar—it sounded like a lawnmower, but it meant a parakeet—down his pants. Budgie smuggler: the first entry in our private thesaurus. We bought the next round.
Olivier asked if I wanted to get dinner. He had made three reservations. I chose Chinese. Soon I was living with a man who used Chanel deodorant and believed it to be a consensus view that Napoleon lost at Waterloo on account of the rain.
• • •
WE SPOKE TO EACH OTHER in endearments. My darling, my love, mon amour, ma chérie, poussin, mouton, bébé. This was new to me, not characteristic. The word baby, applied to anyone over two, had always seemed like the adult diaper of endearments.
“Mon amour,” he’d say. “Pass me the salt?”
I’d yell across a store, trying to get his attention: “Bébé! Over here, in dairy products.”
People we knew, I think, made fun of us. What they didn’t know was that we couldn’t say each other’s names.
• • •
IN 1661, DEEPLY IN DEBT, Racine set out on horseback for Uzès, in southeastern France. He was hoping that his maternal uncle, who served as vicar general to the city’s bishop, could help him get a job. A Parisian, Racine spoke Francien, the predecessor of modern French. Once he reached Lyon, where the Franco-Provençal language prevailed, he could no longer make himself understood. “This misfortune got worse at Valence,” he wrote to a friend, “for God willed it that I asked a maid for a chamber-pot and she pushed a heater under my bed. You can imagine the consequences of this damned adventure, and what happens to a sleepy man who uses a heater for his night-time necessities.” By the time Racine reached Uzès, he wrote, “I can assure you that I have as much need of an interpreter as a Muscovite would in Paris.”
Nine months after we’d met, Olivier invited me to Bordeaux for Easter. We arrived on Good Friday, picked up a rental car at the airport, and drove into the city for lunch. Olivier showed me the hospital where he was born; the apartment where he had lived during cram school; the bars where he and his friends had hung out as students; the crack-of-dawn fish market where, after the bars, they had once bought a whole octopus to shove into the mailbox of a classmate who’d gone home early. That afternoon we followed the right bank of the Gironde estuary east to the vineyards—in the fall, Olivier said, surfers got into the river, paddled to the middle, and rode a waist-high tidal wave called the mascaret.
In Saint-Émilion, we stopped at the first vineyard we saw. A sprightly man with a crooked smile greeted us at the end of the drive. Introducing himself as the estate’s proprietor, he led us into a musty cave.
“I inherited the vineyard from my father, who inherited it from his father,” he told us, pouring some wine. “But my true passion is magic.”
We tasted the wine. It was good, for the product of a man who would rather be locking people in a box and sawing them in half.
“Fortunately I married the perfect woman,” he said. He gestured out the window toward a hunched-over figure in the fields.
“That’s my wife,” he said, beaming. “She’s a certified oenologist.”
Before leaving, we bought a few bottles to take to Olivier’s parents. I thought about the reluctant vigneron’s fantastically sensible marriage, how he had retrofitted his life with someone whose skills exactly matched his specifications. As he was making change, he pulled one of the minor Euro coins out of my ear.
At last: time to meet Les Fockers. I fidgeted all the way to Andernos-les-Bains, the village where Violeta and Teddy lived. Olivier had assured me that they were adorable (even though the words are identical, the French version seemed more genuinely affectionate, free of the patronizing edge of its English counterpart, and somehow less gendered: I couldn’t imagine an American male saying “adorable,” a habit I thus found adorable itself). Still I was nervous, the usual anxieties a person has about whether or not her boyfriend’s family will like her overlaid with uncertainty as to whether, in the fog of language, they’d even be able to make out the right person to like or not.
I’d never been a francophile, much less a francophone. If I’d had to free-associate about the French, I might have said, unimaginatively: cheese, scarves, rude. Before I met Olivier, my most intensive exposure to the language had occurred during ten days I’d spent camping in the Sahara, on assignment with an American photographer and his crew. The Algerians—half a dozen young men who spoke Tamasheq, Arabic, and French—had been superb company, despite the language barrier. But they simply had not been able to figure out what I, an unaccompanied woman, was doing there in the middle of the desert. Neither of the two words I knew in French, oui and non, had seemed exactly the right answer to their repeated enquiries as to whether I was a virgin.
We parked on the street outside Violeta and Teddy’s house, a bungalow on a quiet boulevard. Before Olivier even pulled the keys out of the ignition, they’d come running out to greet us. Violeta, in a platinum-blond side ponytail and purple heels, covered us both in kisses. Her tangerine-colored lipstick left imprints all over my cheeks, like the franking on an international package.
Teddy, seventy-eight and immaculate, insisted on carrying our luggage. We passed through the front yard. There was a hammock, a patio covered with artificial turf, hummingbird feeders, hibiscuses. Inside the house, ruby-colored beads dangled from a chandelier. A Venetian mask hung near a tasseled lampshade. The entryway was dominated by an antique bureau, covered in lace and porcelain figurines and incense sticks, which, after our marriage, would be replaced with a huge collage of wedding pictures in a heart-shaped frame that Teddy had painted.
I handed Violeta a box of chocolates.
She led us to our bedroom, where a package was sitting on the desk.
“Merci!” I said, fumbling with the wrapping. “Merci beaucoup!”
It was Miss Dior Chérie, my first bottle of perfume.
That night, we drove around the Arcachon Bay to Cap Ferret, at the tip of the peninsula. I knew the landscape like a friend’s face: the flat-cheeked marshes, stubbled with sawgrass and pocked with hermit crab holes; the sugary topsoil of the pine forests, which a bike could hardly grip. Flats of pluff mud let off a sweet hypoxic reek. The air was low and clammy, as though someone had smothered the horizon with a wet paper towel.
The sun was going down as we arrived at an open-air bar—striped umbrellas and some tables in the yard—run by a friend of Fabrice’s, a third-generation oyster farmer. Fabrice was in Paris working, but the rest of the family had gathered: Jacques; Hugo; Marie, Hugo’s mother. Jacques looked so much like Olivier. He was shy, but expressive, with a poetic way of phrasing things. “I pray you!” he’d tell me, clasping his hands, his English version of je vous en prie, when he wanted to emphasize a point. Wrapped in fleece blankets, we toasted to health. The wine came from Bordeaux. The oysters came from the far side of Mimbeau, a sandbar that jutted out from the cape, two hundred feet from where we sat. It was low tide. The thin wooden poles that supported the oyster beds wavered against the sky like rubber pencils.
After the apéritif—the pregame show to the French family meal—we proceeded in caravan formation to Jacques and Marie’s. As soon as we sat down for dinner, the table exploded into chatter, followed by rebuttal, counterargument, rejoinder. That was my impression, at least, judging from the unsmiling looks, the disputatious mais nons, the blowing of air out of cheeks. I wasn’t sure whether, or when, resolutions came. I felt like an explorer picking he
r way through a jungle, turning toward stimuli as they chirped and hooted. The language came in an oxytonic rush. It sounded to me like heavy rain, sluicing down a roof.
Listening to Olivier speak French was a bizarre sensation. I felt as though he had thrown on a jersey, sprinted onto the field, and proven himself a skilled player of a sport to which I did not know the rules. I was impressed by his mastery of the game, but alienated by my ignorance of it. The primal fantasy of intimacy is a secret language—one in which only the two of you can talk. French reinforced the primacy of preexisting bonds over the ones that we had built. It was a sort of conversational clubhouse, a pig Latin of which I was the odd woman out.
I retreated to the linguistic version of a kids’ table—giggling in international pop-cultural English with Hugo. My thoughts wandered, mainly to what sort of impression I was silently making. Unable to present myself the way I would have liked to, I felt exposed, as though I’d been rousted from bed and dragged to a party, forced to come as I was. But the passivity was also liberating: a free pass from the obligation of attempting to be intelligent, witty, or well informed. It made me consider whether there was some ineffable part of a person that transcended socialization, an essence that remained once the top notes of politesse faded off. Could Olivier’s family smell something fundamental about me, and if so, what was it? What did I exude when I couldn’t talk?
As much as I worried about how they would judge me, my impulse to judge them seemed to have evaporated with my powers of articulation. My critical faculties in abeyance, for once, I simply thought, What kind people, what a good meal, and how warm a reception. Violeta reminded me in many ways of my own mother: full of energy, unstudied, and unserious about herself, but formidable in her willingness to go to any length to ensure her children’s success. They were both the kind of parents who had jumped out of bed in the middle of the night to encourage safe passage from teenage parties; who would meet a plane at any far-flung airport at any inconvenient hour; who were always trying, even if we could now afford it better than they, to pay for our flights. If Violeta had a daughter, I was sure she would greet her as my mother did me every time I came home, stripping herself of necklaces and sweaters and pairs of shoes at the slightest expression of admiration; running up the stairs to plunder her own closet before knocking on my bedroom door; forwarding everything I wrote to her family and many friends, never with less than a dozen exclamation points; accepting, and even applauding, the fact that I had moved halfway around the world, because she only ever thought of my happiness, not hers.
I was rarely able to appreciate my own mother’s ebullience, though, without criticizing her unworldliness. I sometimes found her naïveté its own form of affectation. It struck me as stunted that she had never smoked a cigarette, eaten a bite of fish, gone to a restaurant by herself, mixed her own drink. The joke in our family went that she had invented sushi, having—one Valentine’s Day in the 1970s—served up a cocktail dish of gelid gray shrimp, not realizing that they were supposed to be cooked. For his part, my father had neither a computer nor an e-mail address, cell phone nor ATM card, such was the fixity he required of the world. As much as I depended on my parents’ constancy—their permanent address, their forty years of marriage, their perpetual availability, their diligence in hanging on to immunization records and school diplomas—I faulted them for a lack of imagination. But at Olivier’s family table, deprived of the tools of discernment, I didn’t have the option to be cutting. I felt like a fool, but a sweet one—opened, in my wordlessness, to the possibility of an uncomplicated kind of love.
After dinner, Hugo ran off to the kitchen. A few minutes later he reappeared, carrying a cake. As everyone clapped, he deposited it in front of me. It was buttercream, with a marzipan scroll that read, in English: “Welcome to Lauren.”
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, we slept late. When we woke, Olivier and I put on the bathrobes that Violeta had left out for us. Violeta and Teddy, in matching silk kimonos, were up, buzzing around the kitchen. They’d set up a table under a tree in the garden: silverware, cloth napkins, cheery red-and-white polka-dotted cups and saucers.
I was embarrassed.
“We slept until lunchtime?” I said to Olivier in English, drawing my bathrobe tighter around my waist.
He looked at me like I was confused.
“This is breakfast.”
We all sat down, a phenomenon I was familiar with from cereal commercials. A plate of croissants went around, followed by jars of fig and strawberry preserves that Teddy had put up in the fall.
“Tea or coffee?” Teddy asked.
“Well, it’s kind of weird,” I began, “but I don’t drink either.”
I was waiting for Olivier to jump in and translate, but he remained silent.
“I don’t know why—people always ask if I’m a Mormon, but nobody drank coffee in my family growing up, and I just never really got started,” I babbled. “Actually, I’m not really big on any of the hot beverages, so I usually just drink water in the morning.”
Olivier, finally coming to my aid, repeated my excuses—suspiciously, his rendition of the monologue took about half as long as the original version.
Violeta and Teddy looked at me with benign wonder, as though I’d said I didn’t breathe air.
After breakfast, I went to take a shower. It was only after I’d stripped off all of my clothes that I realized that the toilet was in a separate room—an early lesson in the absolute demarcation between the scatological and the sensual, les toilettes and la salle de bain. There was one bathroom—of each type—for all of us. The latter was very much Violeta’s domain. The ultimate sign of maturity, a friend of mine once claimed, is having a piece of furniture in your bathroom. This bathroom, with its framed nudes, frilled lampshades, and twin walnut bureaus, heaving with beads and eye shadows, spoke of a sort of deliberate, pleasure-taking womanhood that I wondered if I could ever claim.
A hand shower lurked in the corner, coiled around the faucet of an uncurtained bath. I stepped in, sat down, and slowly turned one of the taps to the left. A risky maneuver, I knew, freestyling with European plumbing, but I couldn’t bring myself to call across the house for Olivier to help. Teddy was the kind of freakishly competent person who could rewire a lamp or explain how buttermilk was made. He washed rental cars. Violeta had grown up in a village in the Pyrenees. Even with four of us sharing a bathroom—later, it would be six, and eight—it never seemed to be occupied, Les Fockers slipping in and out like wraiths. I was clumsy in inverse proportion to their gracefulness. I had never felt so American, so conspicuous, so inured by comfort to common sense. Even the old-fashioned handles on the doors strained my technical skills. I could never open one of them—for example, to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, which seemed like an opportune time—without it sounding like someone was popping balloons.
I loosened the tap a little further. It was the hot one, I soon found. The showerhead struck like a python, the hose writhing around the tub, firm as flesh, spraying searing water everywhere. Eventually I wrestled it into submission and turned off the tap.
Twisting my knees into lotus position, I quickly lathered my hair and turned the showerhead back on. Water trickled out, the python reduced to a caterpillar. Fearing that I was taking too long, I decided to forgo a rinse. I stepped out of the shower. Rolling my towel into a sponge, I got down on all fours and scrubbed the room dry, covered in suds and gooseflesh.
• • •
IN DECEMBER OF 1977, Jimmy Carter visited Poland, his first trip to a Communist country. He stepped off the plane, proceeded past an honor guard, and ascended a stage to deliver a speech that would be broadcast live on television. It was intended to be a human-rights landmark, a message of inspiration from the leader of the free world to the Polish people.
It was raining. For the occasion, the State Department, which did not have an interpreter
on staff, had hired Steven Seymour, a respected translator of Russian, French, English, and Polish literature. (“Interpreter” and “translator” are often used interchangeably, but technically, an interpreter deals with speech, while a translator works with writing.) He was to be paid $150 a day. It was his first time interpreting for a head of state.
Carter opened the address with a nod to his hosts: “We are delighted to be in your great country. When I left the United States this morning, I told the people of my nation that this journey reflects the diversity of a rapidly changing world.”
The State Department had not given Seymour, who was thirty-one, what is known in the trade as a Van Doren—a cram sheet named after Charles Van Doren, the contestant who was briefed in advance of his appearance on the quiz show Twenty One. Drenched and speaking in his fourth language, Seymour began to translate the president’s words into Polish. Using the wrong conjugation of the verb “to leave,” he accidentally implied that President Carter had permanently defected from America.
Oblivious to the gaffe, Carter went on, praising the Polish Constitution of 1791. Seymour somehow rendered it “an object of ridicule.” Carter continued. “I have come not only to express our own views to the people of Poland but also to learn your opinions and to understand your desires for the future,” he said. Choosing the wrong form of desires, Seymour announced to the nation that Carter was carnally desiring the Polish people.
Seymour was quickly relieved of his duties. For Carter’s next engagement, a state banquet, the State Department brought on a Pole named Jerzy Krycki. When Carter stood up to deliver a toast, pausing after his first sentence so that the translator could relay his tribute, Krycki said nothing. Carter continued and paused again. Crickets. Šwierszcze.
Krycki, it turned out, was experiencing the inverse of the problem that plagued Seymour: he couldn’t understand Carter’s Georgia-inflected English. After the “carnal” fiasco, he had judged it wiser to simply remain silent. At last, one of the Polish officials’ translators came to the rescue.
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