Flirting With French (14 page)

This evening’s guest—there’s one every night—gives a lecture, in rapid French, on French politics. I understand barely a word. Then dinner, which is served precisely at eight. These are leisurely ninety-minute or longer soirées, consisting of an appetizer and talk, a main course and talk, a cheese course accompanied by more talk, dessert served up with a side of talk, and finally café klatch in the garden, an opportunity for
serious
talk. At ten o’clock, a full thirteen hours after the first class began, I excuse myself to go to my room—to do my homework for tomorrow.

When the alarm wakes me on Tuesday morning, I can hardly drag myself out of bed. I’ll be okay once I get going, but right now a full day of French immersion holds all the appeal of going to the dentist. Little do I know that I won’t have to choose between the two. During lunch, speaking French goes from the theoretical to the practical, from hobby to necessity, when, biting into a salad with lettuce and olives (and at least one olive pit), I feel and hear a sickening crunch in my mouth. My tongue explores the bottom right-hand corner of my mouth to discover a crater the size of Marseilles where a filling used to be. I’m not even sure all the tooth is still there.

This, of course, is the
petit problème
I referred to earlier. I tell the instructor at the table, “
J’ai cassé une dent.
” She looks concerned for only an instant, before cheerily telling me it’s not a crisis at all but an opportunity to put my French to work—to make an appointment, discuss the problem with the dentist, and so on. Good Lord, I’m not ready! Couldn’t they have waited till the end of next week to toss olive pits into the salad?

It turns out she’s half joking, and her assistance in fact goes much further than showing me to a telephone. The director will call a dentist and get me an appointment, but she can’t call before two o’clock, because the dentist’s office is closed for lunch between noon and two. In cities this custom is changing, but in rural France, it seems that most French workers still go home for an extended lunch, shuttering up their shops and offices. After my own aborted lunch I go for a walk and get an inkling of what some of them do with that time when, passing a house in the tiny village near the school, I hear the unmistakable cries of a woman in the throes of passion. She’s definitely having a better lunch than I am, I think, as I return to school.

The director meets me inside the gate. I have a dental appointment at three. It takes a few passes for me to understand the arrangements, but I finally figure out that the cook will take me there and back. At the dentist’s office, we pass through a door marked
SALLE D’ATTENTE.
Inside it’s indistinguishable from a typical American waiting room, lined with chairs and magazines, but with one big difference. There are no other people here, not even a receptionist. Don’t we need to check in with someone? Fill out some paperwork and sign some privacy forms? I wonder how the receptionist even knows we’re here.

Turns out, there
is
no receptionist. At 3:03 the dentist herself, a woman of about sixty, comes in and escorts me into a spacious, modern examination room. Just one room, with a tiny adjoining office. No receptionists, no billers, no office managers, no dental technicians, no half-dozen cramped exam rooms that the dentist races between while you wait forever with an uncomfortable clamp in your mouth so that he never wastes a single income-producing moment. Just this one, sunny, expansive room with a dentist’s chair.

Peering into my mouth, she pronounces, “
Ce n’est pas grave.
” Whew! Just a lost filling, which she replaces in ten minutes, but the tooth is fragile, she warns me, and I may need a
couronne
when I return home.

A what?

“
Une couronne.
”

I still don’t understand. She mimes a crown on her head.

“
Comme un roi!
” I exclaim, feeling like I’ve just won at charades.

I always get excited when a word that means two different things in English means the same two things in French. Like hairpin curve, for example. You wouldn’t necessarily expect that the French would also use the analogy of a hairpin to describe a sharp bend in the road, but in fact they do, calling it an
épingle à cheveux,
a word-for-word translation. My favorite, though, is “honeymoon,”
lune de miel,
literally “moon of honey.” Of course, you have to be careful in assuming a common English term can be translated similarly into French. You’ll get puzzled glances if you tell the waiter there’s too much of a foamy
tête
atop your glass of beer. If you are drowning and need a life jacket thrown to you, don’t ask for
une veste de vie.
They’ll have no idea what you’re talking about and will probably have collapsed in laughter while you go under. What you need, I learned on my flight over, is
un
gilet de sauvetage,
or a rescue vest, which actually makes more sense than “life jacket.”

The dentist’s bill, which I pay in cash, is forty euros, about fifty-seven dollars. All in all, my brush with the French health care system has been an entirely positive, not to mention educational, experience. Married to a doctor, I may be biased, but I find the notion of a medical professional who doesn’t need any staff and can come home for two hours every afternoon for lunch and sex quite sensible.

Forty-five minutes after leaving the school—less than three hours after my mishap—I am back at Millefeuille, happy to be going home with a little souvenir of France in my mouth.

“
Je suis fini,
” I announce to my class.

Cécile looks horrified. “
Vous êtes fini? Non! Désolée!
”

What did I say wrong? Cécile flops her head and lets her tongue fall slack to demonstrate that
je suis fini
means “I’m dead.”
J’ai fini
means “I’ve finished.” I wonder if I will ever learn this language.

After class I stop in to thank the director, and when I comment on the efficiency of the French health care system, she pulls what looks like a credit card from her wallet. It’s her health insurance card. Pointing to its embedded chip—you can see the little wires coming out of it—she tells me it contains her entire medical record: history, medications, and allergies. All physicians and hospitals have the equipment to read the card on a computer, to display and to update all the information. Thus not only does every doctor in France have access to your medical record, but should you be found unconscious and taken to an emergency room, no problem: they read your card and have your entire medical history in front of them.

So while American politicians continue to argue about universal health care, and doctors are just beginning the painful transition to dozens of different privatized electronic medical record (EMR) systems, none of which will talk to any of the others, and not one of which will give you one corpuscle of benefit should you be found unconscious somewhere, France already has a universal EMR on a chip that you carry with you.

What a wonderful country! If only they would discover the shower curtain, so I wouldn’t have to bathe by sitting in a bathtub filled with two inches of water while maneuvering a hand-held spray head, which, should I get careless, will go whipping around the bath like a furious, spitting serpent, spraying water everywhere. Go figure.

CLASSES CONTINUE, FIVE SESSIONS
a day, focusing on oral expression, oral comprehension, grammar, and pronunciation, one day blurring into the next. I again shock my favorite teacher, Cécile, when instead of telling her I often fly (
voler
) I say I often steal (
voler
). Cécile has been working with me daily on my miserable vowel pronunciation, at one point drawing a clever but simple two-dimensional chart that indicates the shape of the mouth (from open to closed) along one axis and the origin of the sound (from the back of the mouth to the front) on the other. She writes the various vowel sounds in the appropriate places. The most difficult enunciations for me are the ones in the corners, the extremes.

“The French use the entire mouth when they speak,” Cécile explains, pointing to each corner of the chart and having me watch her as she pronounces the sounds. “In English”—she draws a circle in the middle of the chart—“all of your vowels come from here.” As validation, I can tell when I’m getting closer to the proper French enunciation of some vowels because my slightly chapped lips, which are not used to being stretched to such extremes, actually hurt when I hit the right note.

By Thursday, my lips sore from vowels and my throat raw from searching (in vain) for the letter
r,
the fog of French has descended heavily over my brain. Lost in the haze of thirteen-hour days, I’m desperate for the weekend to come, but for the next two days I’ll have to work even harder, for my class of three is down to a class of two. The school, concerned about James’s approaching entrance exam in Fontainebleau, has pulled him out of class for private tutoring.

I’m concerned about him, too. He may be a talented financial analyst, but he’s learning French very slowly and speaking it even slower. When James speaks, he starts, like all of us beginners, before he knows how he’s going to finish, as if the brain says, Let’s just get going, kid, and we’ll figure out the rest by the time we get there. But we don’t, of course, and we all do idiosyncratic things when we hit the inevitable block. I clench my eyes shut for added concentration, which must look really weird; James pauses for what seems an eternity, his eyes wide behind horn-rimmed glasses, his mouth hanging open. He’ll say, “
Il ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,
” as if he’s showing his tonsils to a doctor while searching for the right vowel before finally switching in mid-uvula to “
ayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
” When we’re outside, our speech accompanied (sometimes almost drowned out) by the nonstop buzzing of cicadas in the trees, I worry that one of them will fly into his open mouth. A few have bounced off me. Still, James seems as relaxed as ever, hanging out by the pool every afternoon, working on his tan instead of his conjugations.

TH
URSDAY NIGHT FEATURES A
lecture about the French economy, only a few words of which I am able to grasp. After an hour of nuclear power, iron ore, and farming, we move to the dining room, where the conversation turns once again to
l’affaire DSK.
The hotel housekeeper who made the accusation has lost much of her credibility, and it looks as if Strauss-Kahn may be released, but the latest development is that a French journalist has just lodged an attempted-rape complaint against Strauss-Kahn. This has the effect of making her the most despised woman in France, while simultaneously sending DSK soaring even higher in the polls. Go figure.

Though I could hardly follow the economist’s earlier lecture, now as he discusses
l’affaire
with us, I mysteriously find myself comprehending a good bit. The French are furious with the American judicial system for holding DSK “hostage.” He’s a prominent figure, not a flight risk, and shouldn’t be treated this way. Emboldened after four days of classes, I decide to give a rebuttal in defense of my country. I rehearse it in my head several times, then speak up.

“I’ve a proposition. You give us Roman Polanski and we’ll give you DSK.” My French is decent enough that the room erupts in laughter.

SATURDAY MORNING THE SCHOOL
nearly empties out. Karen, the New York retiree with whom I’ve become friendly, and I decide to take the bus into Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, a town that sits across the Rhône from the more famous and crowded Avignon, for a day of sightseeing. After a long wait, a bus arrives, but the driver waves us away. The bus is “full” (meaning there are no empty seats, but tons of standing room). The next bus isn’t due for another two hours. Karen pleads with the driver to let us on and stand. Full? In New York, this bus would be considered half-empty.

“Another bus is coming in ten minutes,” he promises, showing ten fingers to make sure we understand.

“You swear?” Karen asks, crossing her heart for emphasis. He swears. We wait for ten minutes, then twenty, then an hour, before we realize that the bus driver was speaking another universal language, one that, like the periodic table, knows no borders or accents: the language of deceit.

We reach Villeneuve-lès-Avignon by taxi, and Karen and I, having pledged to speak only French to each other (a promise only occasionally broken), spend a pleasant day visiting the deserted hilltop gardens of a monastery established in the tenth century and an ancient, peaceful cloister. Millefeuille is Karen’s second immersion experience. Two years earlier she’d attended a school near Nice for a full month, and she’s been taking classes in New York on and off since.

I’ve been curious why a seventy-something-year-old is working so hard to learn French. The story comes out in dribs and drabs. Her initial, somewhat unconvincing response is that she wants to visit her daughter, who is currently living in the French-speaking nation of Cameroon. But as we wander through the ancient grounds of abbeys and castles, among the long dead, I can’t shake a weird feeling that we are not alone—that a third party is stalking Karen, staying mostly in the shadows but never losing sight of her, while at the same time propelling her forward.

The stalker is revealed over lunch.

“I’m two months short of being declared a cancer survivor,” Karen tells me in English. She expresses outward confidence that it’s not coming back, noting that all her tests have been encouraging, but her actions say something else. As we pass shops, she shows no interest in going in (“I’ve stopped buying things; I’m getting rid of stuff at this point”), and later she talks about all she wants to do in the next couple of years, finally letting her guard down and admitting, “I don’t know how much time I have.” Karen has made her list, and learning French—for no other reason than to learn French, to conquer something that has eluded her for life, something beautiful and desirable—is at the top.

Karen is determined to learn French before she dies.