Violeta and Teddy kindly went along with it. We drove to the nearest multiplex, in Bordeaux. Our only criterion being that we needed something that everyone could understand, we decided to see A Dangerous Method, a historical film by David Cronenberg. It was playing in the original English version, with subtitles in French.
I was the only one to require popcorn. We proceeded into the theater and took our seats, close to the front: Teddy, me, Violeta, Olivier. The lights dimmed, and the curtains opened. Violins wailed as the screen filled with the opening credits.
The film began: a horse-drawn carriage barreling through verdant countryside while Keira Knightley, restrained by a pair of men in peaked caps, screams at the top of her lungs. The carriage arrives at a mansion on a hill, and the men join forces with a white-jacketed orderly to carry her, flailing, into the Burghölzli clinic near Zurich.
In the next scene, a door opens into a room with lots of molding.
“Good morning, I’m Dr. Jung,” says a man with a mustache and a pocket watch. “I admitted you yesterday.”
“I’m not . . . I’m not . . . mad, you know,” Keira Knightley stutters in Eastern European–inflected English, jutting out her chin.
“Let me explain what I have in mind,” Dr. Jung replies. “I propose that we meet here, most days, to talk, for an hour or two.”
Soon Dr. Jung and Keira Knightley are enjoying a constitutional in a hardwood forest. When Keira Knightley drops her coat in the dirt, Dr. Jung picks it up and beats it with his cane. Keira Knightley makes an Edvard Munch face, soon confessing that any kind of humiliation makes her “so excited.”
“Can you explain why your nights have been so bad?” Dr. Jung inquires during their next session.
She’s afraid, she says. Just the night before, lying in bed, she experienced the sensation of a visitation by “something slimy, like some kind of mollusk moving against my back.”
“Were you naked?” Dr. Jung wants to know. “Were you masturbating?”
Keira Knightley answers in the affirmative. All I could do, squeezed in between Teddy and Violeta, was to pray that the subtitler hadn’t felt up to dealing with the shellfish.
Dr. Jung and Keira Knightley begin an affair. They ride steamboats in straw hats, sprawl out in the hull of a sloop, listen to arias. Eventually they consummate the relationship.
“Don’t you think we ought to stop?” Dr. Jung asks.
YES!!! I screamed silently, staring straight ahead.
The camera cuts to Vienna: Jung and Freud, chomping on a cigar. They’re sitting in Freud’s study, droning on about catalytic exteriorization phenomena.
Relaxing, I went back to my popcorn. Then: a loud crackling sound made me bobble the bucket, sending kernels flying through the dark. I glanced up at the screen, where Dr. Jung was spanking Keira Knightley. She was bent over a brocade sofa, writhing like a fortune-telling fish.
I focused on the popcorn, chucking pieces into my mouth by the handful, crunching as loudly as I could in an attempt to override her moans.
At last we exited the theater. No one said a word. As we stepped out into the sodden Bordeaux night, I pulled up the hood of my coat, wanting to hide. After a few minutes, Violeta broke the silence.
“Quel beau film!” she said, grabbing my wrist. “J’adore Keira Knightley.”
• • •
THE PROBLEM WITH THINKING of translation as a journey is that it’s impossible to know where it starts. Just as science cannot tell us how or when human speech emerged in the grand scheme of human evolution, neither can it isolate the place, on the micro-scale, where instinct gives way to expression, biology shading into culture. Consider blinks and winks: a blink is an involuntary twitch of the eye; a wink is a conspiratorial signal. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz pointed out, they are physiologically the same thing, contractions of the eyelid controlled by the orbicularis oculi muscle. An alien would not be able to distinguish between a guy with a mosquito in his face and one trying to pick her up at a bar. A French-speaking alien, for his part, would not know that blink and wink rhymed.
Darwin asserted that certain facial expressions are hardwired, challenging the belief, dating from Aristotle, that the ability to smile and to laugh is a hallmark of civilization, distinguishing man from beast. At some point in history, Darwin wrote, facial expressions arose to serve evolutionary functions, and over the course of generations their association with emotion became ingrained. In 1972, to test Darwin’s theory, the psychologist Paul Ekman asked subjects from a variety of backgrounds to look at photographs of facial expressions and to match them to a set of descriptive words. He identified seven basic universal emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and interest. These emotions, Ekman argued, manifest themselves in a corresponding set of facial expressions. In any corner of the world, happiness will entail “no distinctive brow-forehead appearance”; eyes that are “relaxed or neutral in appearance, or lower lids may be pushed up by lower face action, bagging the lower lids and causing eyes to be narrowed; with the latter, crow feet apparent, reaching from outer corner or eyes toward the hairline”; and, in the lower face, “outer corners of lips raised, usually also drawn back; may or may not have opening of lips and appearance of teeth.”
Ekman is CEO of the Paul Ekman Group, which has worked with the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense, along with Pixar and Google; he has written a book, Emotional Awareness, with the Dalai Lama. His Facial Action Coding System, “an anatomically based system for comprehensively describing all observable facial movement,” breaks the range of human emotion down into forty-six Action Units (“neck tightener,” “nostril compressor”), so that “practitioners who must penetrate deeply into interpersonal communications” (animators, law-enforcement officers) can read faces as though they were pictograms. To communicate while traveling abroad, he has claimed, you don’t need a Berlitz book.
Before I met Olivier, I would have more or less agreed. People, it had always seemed to me, were more alike than they were different: they ate, they slept, they fought, they made up, they did their best for their children, they wanted to be loved. They didn’t like to be too hot or too cold. They smiled when they were happy and cried when they were sad. Psychologists such as Ekman call the universal smile of true pleasure the Duchenne smile, after the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne. By attaching electrodes to the faces of patients—the photographs have become a cult grotesquerie—he established that the smile that we perceive as joyful (versus smiles that mean all sorts of other things, from aggression to sarcasm) involved the activation of two groups of muscles: the zygomatic major (which controls the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi (the eyes).
If the Duchenne smile is the look, as Duchenne wrote, of “the sweet emotions of the soul,” then Olivier, during the majority of our waking hours, did not appear to be having a very good time. I’d give him a compliment, and he’d remain impassive; we’d pose for a photo, and he’d stare straight ahead, as though it were a mugshot. His smile did not come nearly as often as I thought it should. When it did, it often struck me as half-watted, an energy-efficient flicker of the eyes.
Worse, his expression, at rest, seemed to me to constitute a snarl. He would assure me that nothing was wrong, but his knitted brows and pursed lips, overcast by five o’clock shadow, sent me into paroxysms of doubt. I was used to corn-fed faces, gentle chins and pinchable cheeks. The lack of softness in Olivier’s look suggested to me a corresponding inner severity. I was forever coaxing him to show his teeth, which actually did annoy him. He seemed, on the other hand, to find my big American grin undignified. I was hurt by the way that, whenever we took pictures, he always deleted the ones in which I was mugging too uninhibitedly. I took it as some fundamental rejection of my character, of the ideals of fun and friendliness with which I had been brought up.
It is
possible that faces are not as easily deciphered as Ekman and his disciples have suggested. Among other researchers, Lisa Feldman Barrett, who runs the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University, in Boston, has disputed Ekman’s methods. Suspecting that his preselected description words primed his subjects’ responses, in the manner of leading polling questions, Barrett and her team conducted a similar set of experiments in which participants were not given any prompts. Their performance in describing faces plunged. When Barrett performed the tests upon a set of non-Western subjects—drawn from the Himba tribe of Namibia—she found that supposed distinctions between many facial expressions—for example, “happy” and “afraid”—fell apart. Barrett has written, “These findings strongly suggest that emotions are not universally recognized in facial expressions, challenging the theory, attributed to Charles Darwin, that facial movements might be evolved behaviors for expressing emotion.” In other words: bring the Berlitz book.
In pre-Enlightenment Paris, the Duchenne smile was as rude as a sneeze or a fart. Since antiquity, experts on conduct had preached the advisability of a demure, closed expression. Jesus wept. Ladies kept straight faces. Open orifices were for the rabble. “Greatness in kings,” Richelieu advised, “resides in nothing offensive coming out of their mouths.” Besides, almost everyone over forty, from paupers to princes, had appalling teeth. Those of the rich, who consumed the most sugar, were the worst. Louis XIV lost most of his jaw during a botched surgery for toothache; as a result, his physician wrote, “every time the king drank or gargled, the liquid came up through his nose, from where it issued forth like a fountain.” To correct the defect, the king endured an operation in which a surgeon cauterized the perforation in his palate with an iron.
With the Enlightenment, the public display of emotion became acceptable. As revolutionary ideals spread in France, the open smile of the street seemed an attractive alternative to the tight-lipped court. In 1787 the Parisian dentist Nicolas Dubois de Chémant, dismayed by the smell of false teeth (they were made from hippopotamus ivory), invented porcelain dentures. Soon a smile was an accessory, as desirable an adornment as a powdered wig. “In late eighteenth-century Paris, the smile came to be viewed as symbol of an individual’s innermost and most authentic self,” Colin Jones writes in The Smile Revolution. “In a way that was perceived as both novel and modern, it was held to reveal the character of the person within.” But the smile revolution, the expression of a time and place, was short-lived. “Face too jolly to be accounted a true republican,” a guard at the Sainte-Pélagie prison commented, of one of the condemned.
• • •
BODY LANGUAGE CEASED to be a factor for us when, a year and a half after we’d met, Olivier moved to Geneva. The complications of long distance threw off our counterpoise: we’d get cut off on the phone and, five minutes later, still be trying to figure out where we had been. The old frustration of not being able to understand each other deepened with the new one of not being able to hear each other. A fight lurked in every dropped call. Needing all the cues we could get, we would attempt to Skype. The signal faded in and out, but even when it worked, it was a dispiriting exercise. Olivier had rented a small furnished apartment—a prefab bachelor pad—in the eaves of an old building. He was working long hours, and in the summer it got very hot. Day after day I clicked onto the same image: Olivier, eating spaghetti in his underwear, in front of a monstrous purple-and-green painting of Mick Jagger.
I still thrilled to London, but I was starting to wonder if it thrilled to me. Commuting across continents felt like a crime against not only the planet but also elementary human instincts. I feared I was becoming, without ever having wanted to, a member of some grim modern class that David Brooks would soon dub the aerostocracy: an estate of deracinated strivers, bullies of the boarding gate and hoarders of frequent-flyer miles, sealed off from anything that remotely resembled actual flourishing life on the ground.
This is a roundabout way of saying the thing that an educated, ambitious woman in the waning years of the first quarter of the twenty-first century is not supposed to say: I wanted very badly to get married. I had been conditioned for this, by where I came from and who I was. But the fact of being far away from my first sources of stability exacerbated my underlying biases to the point of fixation. My family was in North Carolina. My employer was in New York. My boyfriend was living in the Alps. Just the vocabulary of the situation felt like a mortification: Olivier was neither boy nor friend. (French, I would later learn, was even worse: if you weren’t mariée, you were célibataire.) When a London friend asked, curious about the logistics of our setup, “Why are you still here?” the question reverberated like a metaphysical taunt.
I felt diffused: a place for nothing, and nothing in its place. All I could talk about was getting married, because all I could think about was getting married, which I was sure would give me the title—in the sense of a claim to some ground—that I craved. I saw marriage as almost a physical place, an island of safety. Olivier considered it a more vulnerable state. He told me, over and over again, that he loved me. He wanted to be together. He intended to have a family, and he intended to have it with me. But he was worried, he said, about the strains of being a bicultural couple, and he wanted us to take the time to be sure that we could manage a life stretched across two continents and two cultures. We needed to think about how we wanted to educate our children—whose sets of great-great-grandparents had all been born in different countries—and what would happen to them if something happened between us. We needed to figure out where we were going to live.
I had exactly two anxieties about cross-cultural marriage: (1) I feared being marooned, at the end of my life, in some French nursing home where no one had ever heard of baseball; and (2) it made me sad to think that my kids would miss out on one of the great joys of an American childhood, learning to spell Mississippi. But, generally, I didn’t see what the big deal was. Tied up as I was in rules, timetables, and proverbs about buying cows, I couldn’t take Olivier at his word.
Had Olivier been someone whose worldview I thoroughly understood—a God-fearing frat boy, say, from the American South—I would have been long and decisively gone. I could say with confidence that after thirty, the people whose minds I knew best asked the people they wanted to marry to marry them as soon as they knew that they were the people they wanted to marry. Most of my closest friends were married; the commitments, after they met the right people, had come fast. When I considered Olivier’s friends—the majority of whom were in long-term relationships, many of them with children, but a minority of whom were technically wed—I didn’t know whether I was taking into account a reasonable point of cultural contrast or deluding myself.
I was facing a problem of attribution, which prevented me from coming to credible conclusions, from which I could have taken confident action. I was perpetually unsure as to whether I was dealing with instances or patterns, individuals or groups, things or kinds. Trying to educate myself, I devoured books about French people, but they seemed farfetched, with their little black dresses and harmless affairs. They were really about a certain class of Parisians, no more applicable to Olivier and his family than an ethnology of wealthy Manhattanites would have been to mine. I didn’t know whether Hugo was adorable because he was Hugo, or because French teenagers were well behaved. I couldn’t tell whether Olivier’s friends resisted marriage because they had different values than I did, or because people of their generation and background were uneasy about the relationship between their private lives, the church, and the state. There were too many variables. Did Olivier feel the way he did because (1) he was a guy; (2) he was French; (3) he was left-wing; (4) his parents had divorced; (5) he was scared of commitment; (6) he didn’t love me enough; or (7) he was a left-wing French guy of divorced parents who was scared of committing because he didn’t love me enough?
That year we went to my parents’ house for Christmas
, and then to Mexico, where we’d rented an apartment for a week. The trip was tense. Deranged by our stalemate, I pushed in every direction, preferring any sort of movement to the status quo. I made passive-aggressive proposals of my own. I said we could get a civil partnership; I tried to gin up family pressure that didn’t exist. All the while, I assured myself that Olivier was being manipulative, a wily European debaucher toying with the prospects of a straightforward American innocent.
The afternoon of New Year’s Eve, we went snorkeling. Watching the angelfish swarm and scatter, I felt a momentary respite from months of disquiet, probably because I was physically forced to stop asking questions to which the answers would inevitably disappoint. The sea grass gesticulated; I was silent. That evening we drank margaritas and listened to a scruffy mariachi band in the town square. I said that I had to know now. We passed the saddest night trying to come to some sort of resolution. After the sun came up, we went for a walk.
“I just can’t,” Olivier said.
I called a taxi, decisive at last. At the airport, I ran up an enormous phone bill, speaking English to my American friends.
I boarded the plane. We sat on the runway for three hours before the pilot announced that our flight, the last of the day, was being canceled due to a mechanical glitch. Everyone disembarked. After great chaos, we were loaded into vans. I actually told the person sitting next to me that I was in transit to a family funeral, to justify my bursts of weeping. It was midnight before we arrived at a brightly lit tower complex. I spent the first night of the new year alone in a double bed on the twenty-first floor of an underbooked hotel on the Cancún strip.
Six days later, Olivier called. He was all in. The answer to why he felt the way he did, he explained, had been none of the above. I had been giving ultimatums to someone who preferred to come to his decisions in freedom.
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