When in French

by Lauren Collins

  Browsing the Internet one day, I came across a powerful American executive’s Twitter bio. The third line—“wife of awesome guy”—struck me as too much and too little, overdone and neutered at the same time. My English self sometimes longed for uncomplicated American manhood. When, one afternoon in Geneva, I saw a freshly showered man in khakis and a chamois shirt tossing damp bangs out of his eyes, probably smelling of Old Spice, I almost chased him down the street, just to hear him say “hi.” My French self thought, Who calls their husband an “awesome guy”?

  French is said to be the language of love, meaning seduction. I was uncovering in it an etiquette for loving, what happens next. My acquisition of the language had been a sort of conversion, and in the same way that Catholics value the Latin mass for its grandeur, French represented to me a sacred ritual. I had once interpreted Olivier’s reticence as pessimism, but I now saw the deep romanticism, the hopefulness, of not wanting to overstate or to overpromise. Vous and tu concentrated intimacy by dividing it into distinct shades—the emotional equivalent of two shades of blue. I understood, finally, why it made Olivier happy when I wore makeup; why he didn’t call me his best friend; why I had never heard him burp. Love was not fusion. Je t’aime was enough.

  • • •

  WE WERE IN THE KITCHEN one night, talking about taking a vacation. We hadn’t been on one in a long time. I was pushing for two weeks.

  “It might be tricky to ask for more than one,” Olivier said. “I think it’s better if I take them separately.”

  “But it doesn’t really make any sense to take one now and another later,” I said. “It’s the same amount of time, and it’ll just seem like you’re gone more.”

  Olivier fixed me with a stare.

  “What’s your argument?” he said.

  The word argument was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I thought I had just made one. I was upset that we couldn’t have a conversation about a vacation without it turning into an adversarial process, a trial with a winner and a loser. Olivier was always prosecuting me on form, pushing me to be more precise, haranguing me about changing the subject. His fixation on clarity drove me crazy: I found his queries unanswerable, and besides, I didn’t want to drink piña coladas with a member of the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française.

  “Why does everything have to be one?” I said. I could feel the tears rising like a tide, the silvery ache in my throat.

  “I just made a poor choice of word,” he countered. “How would you like it if I did that to you in French?”

  I decided to try something different, an alternate route around the old dead end.

  “Bon,” I said, taking him up on the challenge. “Donc, parlons!”

  We went back and forth, him accusing me of not explaining myself straightforwardly, me accusing him of creating a hostile atmosphere. I acquitted myself surprisingly confidently, the need to concentrate negating the luxury of fear.

  “Si tu veux savoir mes pensées, tu devrais essayer à faire une ambiance qui les élicite,” I said, relishing the severity of my French persona, the sibilant regimented syllables that seemed to carry within them not the slightest hint of doubt.

  “C’est ‘soliciter,’ pas ‘éliciter,’” Olivier replied, before he could stop himself from pointing out that I'd spat out a nonexistent cognate.

  • • •

  IT FELT GOOD TO TOUCH Olivier in his own language—to be able to push his buttons, graze his pleasure points. I was secretly flattered that he considered my French of a high enough caliber to be correctable. We could grapple bare-handed. But I sometimes worried that I had traded in the gloves for a mask.

  The ancient Greek word for acting is hypokrisis. Aristotle used it in On Rhetoric to refer to an orator’s method of delivery, writing that the style of a speech is as important as the content. There is a thread that runs directly from performance to speech to hypocrisy, in the contemporary sense of pretending to a character or an attitude—a voice—that one doesn’t actually possess.

  “It is our contention that second-language learning in all of its dimensions exerts a very specific demand with regard to self-representation,” the authors of a study wrote. “Essentially, to learn a second language is to take on a new identity.” They had asked eighty-seven students at the University of Michigan to drink a cocktail, which they served in a stemmed glass, garnished with a cherry and a twist of lemon. Each drink contained between zero and three ounces of ninety-proof liquor (cognac, light and dark rum). The students, English speakers, were then asked to pronounce a sequence of words in Thai. Those who had consumed an ounce and a half of alcohol scored better than the teetotalers; the two- and three-ounce drinkers performed worse. Small amounts of alcohol, the researchers wrote, lowered the subjects’ inhibitions, “inducing a state of greater permeability of ego boundaries.” Language skills, they concluded, “are related to basic differences in the flexibility of psychic processes.” The religious authorities were right to perceive the relationship between foreign languages and a certain fungibility of the soul. To speak one well, you have to be either Bradley Cooper or drunk.

  It was hard for me to discern where the line between adaptation and dissimulation lay. I wanted to be flexible, but I didn’t want to be spineless, or to stretch myself into impotence, like the object of the Afrikaans pejorative soutpiel, with one foot in Europe and one foot in Africa, and a “salt penis” in between. I wanted to join the party, but I didn’t want to be a guest at a costume ball, a Jamesian courtier “marrying foreigners, forming artificial tastes.” I wanted to speak French and to sound like North Carolina. I was hoping, though I didn’t know whether it was possible, to have become a different person without having changed.

  Six

  THE SUBJUNCTIVE

  Le Subjonctif

  THE MEGA SMERELDA hoisted her stern doors and we drove into the loading deck, where attendants in yellow jumpsuits were stacking cars as though they were stuffing suitcases into a thirty-three-ton trunk. It was almost midnight. Out on the tarmac, a delay had incited an open-air picnic—families passing around gallons of juice, kids dipping fingers into vats of Nutella, husbands waiting for half an hour at an overwhelmed snack truck to procure foot-long hot dogs for wives who never would have eaten them otherwise, as sea spray and gas fumes and feet sticking out of rolled-down windows mingled in the steaming August night. We got out of the car and took the stairs up to the reception desk. There was a spaghetteria and casino carpet, gold banisters and fluorescent blue cocktails garnished with pineapple wedges. The air smelled fried. Part of me wanted to power through and join the party, but we got our key and went straight to the cabin. I had been starving; now I was luxuriantly tired. Olivier pushed aside the curtains and we stared out at the sea, fuzzed with Toulon’s receding lights.

  We slept tangled up in a narrow bed with hospital corners and a pilled yellow blanket. After what seemed like minutes, an intercom crackled.

  “Bonjour, mesdames et messieurs. Il est six heures quarante-cinq et le temps est beau.”

  It was 6:45 a.m. The weather was good. I got up and looked out the window. An egg crate of hills coddled the harbor. We had arrived in Bastia.

  It was my second time on Corsica, the pinecone-shaped island that hangs between the coasts of France and Italy, its stem sticking up into the Ligurian Sea. The summer before, Violeta and Teddy had rented a house there, putting down money months earlier to secure the best deal. They had invited Fabrice and his girlfriend, Anne-Laure, and Olivier and me. We’d all booked flights. When July rolled around, Olivier hadn’t been able to get away from work. It was somehow determined that I’d go to Corsica solo, as a sort of household delegate.

  Initially, I was not thrilled about this assignment. In the end I had enjoyed myself so much—as a fifth wheel (the French, disturbingly, is tenir la chandelle, “to hold the candle”), in a language I could barely speak—that we’d decided to return.
The best day of my year had been the one on which we’d gotten a boat and followed the frills of the island’s northeastern coast, jumping overboard into jade water that looked as though it would shatter. Fabrice had taken a picture that day of Anne-Laure, Violeta, Teddy, and me, our heads bobbing like buoys in a swimming hole buttressed by limestone cliffs as high as the walls of a cathedral. For twelve months it had served as my phone’s wallpaper. The home screen was set to an image I’d once have found unthinkably saccharine. I’d taken it when we’d stopped for a glass of wine in a hilltop town full of stray cats. Every time I swiped a thumb over it, it made me happy: the word L’amour, scrawled, in a hand that looked strangely like my own, on a wall the color of calamine lotion.

  We exited the ferry and drove south. Cork oaks, dense as heads of broccoli, sprouted from the fields. The maquis was a fleece of arbutus and myrtle, sage and juniper, broom and lentisk. Bastia to Aléria to La Testa to Olmuccio to Muchietti Bianchi—the villages were barely intersections now—to the big tree, where we took a right.

  A Dutch caretaker let us into the house, which belonged to a Parisian businessman who, judging from the bric-a-brac on display, liked a round of golf. The place was perfect. We were relieved. In the lonely depths of the Swiss winter, a week in a hot climate surrounded by all of our relatives had seemed like a great idea. We hadn’t been sure who would show up: Violeta and Teddy were juilletistes (there is actually a French word for those who take their vacations in July, as opposed to August); my father, intrepid in his youth, now hated to travel, though we had been hoping to lure him with the opportunity to visit the birthplace of Napoleon (who spoke French with a Corsican accent his entire life). We’d invited the twelve members of our combined families to join us. To our surprise, they had all accepted.

  “C’est pas mal,” Olivier said. He was pacing the house, opening shutters and testing out mattresses, trying to figure out whom we should assign to sleep where.

  I was filling the refrigerator with the load we’d carried from Geneva—on one side bottles of rosé and Pellegrino, the other Coronas and cans of Diet Coke, squaring off like toy soldiers.

  Our families had met once before, at our wedding. To make the most of being in Europe, Matt and his wife, Melissa—like him a lawyer in Wilmington—had added a weekend in Paris to their trip. My brother, experiencing the gastronomy of France for the first time, had been inspired to compose a few verses: “They call me the fromagerie / ’cause I cut the cheese,” went one. Olivier’s relatives, who called the language I spoke “American,” weren’t particularly well versed in our culture either. Still, a tentative bond had taken hold between our two families. They seemed to consider each other long-lost members of the same tribe, as though the language gap were a fissure that had just opened up one day, on ground that they already held in common.

  In the months leading up to the trip, tidings of goodwill had pinged back and forth.

  “Dear Lauren, this 6th of June we take measure of all the aid brought by your country for our liberation,” Teddy, born in 1936, wrote to me on the sixtieth anniversary of the Normandy landings. “Of course, we know it, but it’s very moving, and I wanted to tell you that we think of all who died for our freedom. Please share our emotion with your parents.”

  My mother, in anticipation of the trip, had bought some Instant Immersion French software at Costco. She’d been listening to it every morning on her speed walk up and down the road. For someone who hadn’t spoken French since high school, her progress was impressive.

  “Voici mon mot du jour que me fait rire”—Here, my word of the day that made me laugh—read the subject line of an e-mail I received from her one afternoon. I opened up the message, which read, in its entirety, “un pamplemousse!!!”

  Pamplemousse, it was true, is a pretty great word, especially as a replacement for grapefruit, which, when you think about it, is sort of like saying “poodledog.” I wrote back that I had just made some drinks with grapefruit juice and whiskey, attaching the recipe.

  “Ooh lala!!!” came the reply. “Les cocktails de pamplemousse sont tres merveilleuse!!!”

  Despite the friendly preliminaries, Olivier and I were nervous. There were so many things that could go wrong, so many misunderstandings that might occur, so many misalignments that could set into permanent grievance. My people didn’t really do multiple-family vacations, or for that matter family vacations, or for that matter vacations. Set in their private routines, my parents rarely so much as invited anyone over for dinner. I worried that their individualistic tendencies would conflict with the more group-oriented approach of the French contingent, veterans of the cheerfully collectivist excursions that every French institution seems to sponsor. (Violeta, as the head of her workplace’s travel club, could often be found traipsing her colleagues through the churches of Prague or the canals of Venice.) Olivier, meanwhile, envisioned his clan forcing interminable seated breakfasts on mine, conscripting them into unairconditioned car rides to obscure historic sites. We were used to toggling between the families we were born into and the one we were creating, between Europe and America, but we’d never tried to inhabit them both at one time.

  “C’mon,” I said, unzipping my grimy ferry shorts.

  I jumped into the pool. Olivier followed. He swam over to the side, and I latched on to his back, wrapping my feet around his waist and my arms around his shoulders. The house was situated on a promontory that overlooked a bay, which was guarded by a watchtower that the Genoese had built in the sixteenth century to fend off pirates. I nuzzled into the scruff of his neck, inhaling the sunshine singe.

  • • •

  JACQUES AND HUGO got there first.

  “Can you get magret?” Hugo called, putting in duck breast as his choice of pizza topping as he cannonballed into the pool.

  That night it was just the four of us. The next afternoon, my parents and Matt and Melissa flew in from Paris. By some stroke of luck, the moment we’d managed to gather all of our far-flung relations happened to coincide perfectly with the one in which we were in the clear to announce that we were expecting a baby. Jacques cried when we told him.

  “OHMIGOD!” my mother squealed. “I should have known because there was Diet Coke in the fridge, and you totally forgot I’ve been off Diet Coke since my kidney stone!”

  Fabrice and Anne-Laure got in around dusk. It was a sight more beautiful to me than the lavender sunset to watch my husband, his brothers, and mine beating the hell out of each other with foam noodles. Hugo was, of course, the prime object of both their abuse and their affection.

  “Do you have a girlfriend these days?” somebody said.

  “Well, yes, there is a girl, but I have to—how do you say—refléchir about her.”

  “Do you like her?”

  “I do!”

  “Okay, so then why do you have to refléchir?”

  “Because, do you know the boeuf bourguignon?” Hugo said, his eyes lighting up as though he were a waiter steering a customer toward a particularly good special. “The woman is like the boeuf bourguignon,” he said. “You cannot go too fast. If you make one-hour, it is not a good boeuf bourguignon. But if you make twenty-four-hour, okay, voilà.”

  Later, I heard my mother telling Hugo that he was going to be a “huge ladies’ man.”

  “I’m sorry, what is a ladies’ man?”

  “They’re going to go bananas over you, go berserk,” she said, overlooking the fact that her paraphrase would probably have been incomprehensible to anyone under twenty-five, regardless of his native language.

  That night we stayed on the deck, swimming and eating and drinking until late. Fabrice was explaining to the American contingent that Corsica was famous for its boars.

  “You want to hear something about boars?” Melissa said.

  “Always.”

  “My uncle owns a piece of land in North Carolina, and in the middle of this mi
dlife crisis, he decided he had to kill a boar with his own hands. So he makes this spear, and he throws it at the boar. Well, when you throw a spear at a boar, the boar just gets mad.”

  “What happened?”

  “Fortunately, my other uncle, who had gone with him, had brought a gun.”

  “Blam,” my father chimed in.

  “We threw it in the Brunswick stew at Thanksgiving.”

  “What is Brunswick stew?”

  “It’s, like, this soup, with a bunch of meat and vegetables in it.”

  “Melissa’s grandmother makes it in a garbage can and serves it with a canoe paddle,” Matt said.

  My brother had gone in the opposite direction from me, marrying someone whose roots in the place we’d grown up ran very deep. Melissa’s family had been in North Carolina for hundreds of years on both sides. Her maternal grandparents, her parents, and her aunts and uncles all lived in the same neighborhood. They had a monthly book club, whose members consisted exclusively of blood relations. After meeting me, Melissa’s grandmother had taken a subscription to the New Yorker.

  “How do you like it?” Melissa’s mother asked her.

  “Well, there’s an awful lot about New York.”

  The cadences that my father had picked up over the years were Melissa’s patrimony; a pack of French in-laws were, to her, an even greater inconceivability than they had been to us. Where my identity seemed subtractive (I was the remainder of a chain of migrations), hers was cumulative (the principal and the interest of people who had stayed for a long time in the same place). Matt, when he’d met her, seemed to consolidate himself. I, too, felt her ballast.