Foreign Tongue (3 page)

“Like homework?” I smirked.

“Precisely. If he likes your work, you will be hired. If he doesn’t like it, I will write you a check for two hundred euros and we will go our separate ways.” He gave me a large envelope. I shook his hand and walked outside. Half my rear had fallen asleep. Pins and needles poked at me all the way to the place Edmond Rostand, where I knew I’d find Bunny upstairs at Dalloyau.

Stirring his
crème, The Economist
open in front of him, he neighed when he saw me. “He-e-e-y! How the hell are you?”

“Pretty good.” I kissed him on the cheek and sat. “I took your advice. I may have a translating job.”

“Let’s celebrate! What is it?” he asked, ordering his two favorite pastries, which also happened to be mine: an
éclair au chocolat
and an
opéra
.

“An erotic novel, written by some anonymous guy,” I said, grinning.

“Even better!” he said, rubbing his hands together with a leer. “Seriously, I’m pleased. You need something to keep your brain busy. It’s the only remedy,” he said.

We split the pastries and ate them while Bunny told me about his day. He’d been to one of the
trois-fois-rien
discount stores and laid out his finds on the table: an Astérix coffee mug, a pocketknife, and glow-in-the-dark lip gloss.

“What are you going to do with this?” I asked, pointing to the last item.

“Use it. I have chapped lips.”

“It’s lip gloss, Bunny, not lip balm.”

“You still can’t have it,” he said, wanting me to argue with him.

“I bet it smells girlie, like bubble gum or something,” I said.

“I like bubble gum.”

“It’s shiny. Shiny is not a good fashion statement for a man your age.” I picked it up. “Shiny with
glitter
?”

He let me have it, conceding with a loud sneeze. Afterward, I walked to Gibert Jeune, the student bookstore, to buy a dictionary of slang, or at least obscenities. I’d wanted one for a long time, and I was sure I’d need it for my translation, which I’d decided was going to be flowery and rude, and would probably reduce me to fits of giggles. I wanted to be prepared to understand every single thing.

H
ow I loved reference books: their heft, the joy of randomly opening them up and finding some interesting morsel of knowledge. In L.A., a collection of them edged the far side of my desk, my first line of defense, but the only thing I’d seen in Tante Isabelle’s apartment was a dilapidated paperback dictionary, brown with half a century’s age. I’d need more to do any translation justice.

Or rather, that’s how I justified springing for some major reference book booty: the indispensable Larousse
Dictionnaire de l’argot,
a Harrap’s French–English/Anglais–Français two-volume set, a paperback
Dictionnaire des synonymes,
and a
Petit Robert
—a pricey dictionary at sixty-seven euros. In the métro, I ripped the cellophane off the dictionary of slang and flipped through it like a sweaty-palmed kid.

On a graph-paper pad, I scribbled some notes on rude language, try
ing not to laugh. Some words I already knew, like the fact that “pussy” in English is the same as
“la chatte”
in French, meaning both a cat and women’s genitals. But I hadn’t known that
“une moule,”
a mussel, could also mean pussy (genitalia, not feline), or that
“un zizi”
could be both
“pénis ou vulve.”
Or that
“un papillon du Sénégal,”
a butterfly from that country, was slang for penis.

I flipped to
“baiser.”
As a noun, it means kiss, as in to give someone
“un baiser
.” But in the verb form, to
“baiser”
someone means to fuck someone. You’ve got to wonder about a language that uses the same word for both “fuck” and “kiss.”

Or not. I remembered a conversation I’d had at a party in Venice. As usual, I was nursing a bottle of beer and trying to figure out how soon I could leave, when the man sitting next to me said, out of the blue, “You know, I would never kiss someone I wouldn’t fuck.” I nodded halfheartedly, trying to remember where I’d parked.

“Ah, you, too.” He’d looked impressed, as if this meant we had something important in common. “Kissing is just as intimate as fucking. More, maybe.”

I’d thought it over as I drove home. I’d thought about how dogs’ mouths were supposedly more hygienic than humans’. I’d thought about the dog lovers I knew who let their dogs lick them on the lips and how it made me appreciate cats. I’d thought about the bad kissers I’d kissed and the ones who made my knees weak—Timothy, of course, but also Robin, a fireman I’d dated for a month. It was true I’d kissed men I wouldn’t sleep with, partly because I didn’t like the way they kissed. But he’d been right about the intimate part.

I flipped to the ubiquitous
“con.”
It always puzzled me how cavalierly the French threw around a word which literally meant cunt but was used to mean dumb, stupid, or useless. They use it everywhere, and while it’s nowhere near as strong or offensive as it is in English, at least American English, it wasn’t the sort of word I’d have used in front of my proper French grandmother. Harrap’s entry showed: “con, conne.
n
1.
a F
: bloody stupid 2.
F
: bloody idiot; cretin; faire le c., to fool about 3.
nm V
: cunt.”

On the other hand, the dictionary of slang said:
“con n,m. Sexe de la femme (vulve et vagin):…se dit d’un homme stupide…”
is used for a stupid man, and listed other uses:
“faire le con,”
to play at being an imbecile;
“à la con,”
meaning ridiculous, without interest;
“se retrouver comme un con,”
to find oneself alone and in a grotesque situation;
“si les cons volaient, tu serais chef d’escadrille,”
if idiots flew, you’d be squadron leader, et cetera.

As the train lurched into Châtelet, I remembered the famous feminist critic I’d heard lecture years ago. She’d worn a skirt made of men’s ties and transformed all words with “con” into “cunt.” It was both disturbing and hilarious to hear her speak matter-of-factly about things cuntentious, cuntemplative, and cuntroversial. Her point was that women’s sexuality existed in the English language; it had just been subsumed into the structure and made invisible. It’s not invisible in France.

I flipped back through the pages, looking for a definition of
“la chute des reins,”
a phrase I’d always wondered about. It was intriguing to me that this particular part of a woman’s anatomy had a name in French. It’s the place on a woman’s back that begins where the waist starts to flare out. The literal translation is the fall, or slope, of the kidneys, which doesn’t sound pretty, but in French, it’s poetic. To me, it meant that the French language had mapped out this part of a woman’s body; it wasn’t undiscovered territory, semantically speaking: it had a name, a location.

On the other hand, maybe it was just a fancy phrase for “ass.”

I nearly missed my stop, rushing out as the buzzer sounded at République. A newsmagazine headline at the corner kiosk read,
“Qu’avez vous fait pour les seins?”
What have you done for the breasts? I did a double take. Peering closer, I saw the word was
“siens,”
meaning your close ones or family.

Did merely looking up naughty words in a dictionary make me feel
like everything in the world was about sex? Had I regressed to adolescence? Did the words have some kind of effect, or was it merely the suggestion of the erotic, emanating from the shapeless, anonymous text in the brown envelope in my bag? Was it awful? Was it brilliant? Was it hot? It was titillating, not knowing.

I raced up the hill and picked up some Chinese takeout in Belleville. At home, I took out the manuscript and squinted at the poorly photocopied pages.

Chapter One,
I translated in my head.
The last time I saw Eve, she was laughing and dancing on a table.

Of course she was. I put my feet up on the coffee table and read on.

Wow, that was clumsy. “Thanks to her” sounded awkward, even resentful.
“Grace à elle,”
by her grace, literally, was more delicate.

Just the first two paragraphs were going to be harder than I’d thought. There were intricacies in French that didn’t translate easily into English. There was also the notion of feelings being violent, which was commonplace in French and seemed rarer in English.

The next two pages described her face (
of a purity of line like that of an ancient Egyptian princess
—sheesh) and her body (
long limbs, an exaggerated curve in the lower spine, a swan’s neck, a softly rounded belly
).
Yada, yada, yada. It was a tedious catalog of this woman Eve’s physical attributes:
caressing her skin was one of my greatest pleasures…it was smooth and soft, a warm golden brown with the scent of delicate flowers. I lost myself in the contours of her spine, the curve of her hip
—aha!
“La chute des reins.”
I would have to find a better phrase than “her kidneys.” Maybe “the small of her back.”

I could do this. It would be a challenge, figuring out how to shape the text and convey the nuances of the prose while watching out for the tricky
faux amis
: false cognates that mean different things in each language. Spotting the obvious ones—like
entrée,
which means appetizer, not main course;
comédien,
which means actor, not comedian; and
phrase,
which means sentence—was second nature. But others were sneakier:
actuellement
means at the present time, not in fact;
éxperience
means both experience and experiment; and
une déception
is a letdown, not a lie. Some are sly on spelling:
le moral
means morale, versus
la morale,
which means morals. Even the alphabet could trip me up on one letter: the French “g” is pronounced like an English “j,” and vice versa.

I skimmed the next few pages, translating in my head and looking up a few words before eating dinner in front of the evening news. I missed PPDA, the nickname by which TF1’s former news anchor, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, was known. Then I went to bed.

In the dark, I thought about the chapter, wondering if anyone would ever think about my skin like that. I ran my fingers along my body. The knob of my hip bone always reminded me of cows in European landscape paintings. I traced random patterns on my thigh, figure eights and stars.

I remembered the summer I’d spent in Paris with my grandmother when I was ten. I’d never been away from my parents for so long, and I was shy and lonely. But I made a friend or two in the parks before they went away for summer vacation, accepted the Jardin d’Acclimatation as a respectable alternative to Disneyland, and watched
Des chiffres et des lettres
and Japanese cartoons on TV before bedtime. But sometimes,
clutching my Snoopy at night, I’d sing commercial jingles and the TV theme songs from
Gilligan’s Island
and
The Brady Bunch.
Home seemed far away and confusing, and I was no longer sure where it was.

I punched the pillow into shape. A police siren Klaxoned its two-note call in the distance, the Doppler effect changing keys as it raced by. I could live here again.

W
hen Pascal, an old friend I’d met during an internship I’d had at a cosmetics company, came back from Greece, we met up for lunch near his office, at a glitzy bistro catering to the fashion industry, modeling agencies, and wealthy foreigners shopping on the avenue Montaigne. After two weeks in July on a beach in Páros with his boyfriend, Florian, he was dark brown and sported a neatly trimmed goatee. In a linen suit over a vintage metal concert T-shirt, he looked like a well-dressed pirate, as befitted the fashion editor for a men’s magazine. I kissed his cheek and rubbed his shiny, shaved head.

We sat at a corner table. Pascal waved to the other diners, texted and talked to his office on his cell phone, and threw me apologetic glances. I ordered an overpriced
salade Californienne,
with avocados and shrimp, because that’s precisely the kind of food I flew six thousand miles for, and watched a group of well-dressed Middle Eastern women with perfect eyebrows stroll by, laden with Chanel and Ungaro shopping bags.

“Alors. Raconte-moi tout,”
Pascal demanded, hanging up the phone.

“There’s nothing to tell. I missed Paris, so I found a way to come back.” I attempted a Gallic shrug. He looked at me, narrowing his eyes.

“Je ne te crois pas,”
he said. “Did you win the lottery? Did someone die?”

Heartbreak in French is
chagrin d’amour.
It means a disappointment in love, and it’s like food poisoning: everyone knows what it is and sympathizes. It’s probably covered under the state’s socialized medicine umbrella.
Arrêt de travail pour cause de chagrin d’amour
. I told him about Timothy.

“C’est très people!”
he exclaimed. The word “people,” pronounced “pipeul”
à la française,
had become the term for celebrity or worldly gossip. Trendy places were described as
hyper-people
, celebrity sightings photographed in the paper came under the rubric
“le monde des people,”
chic nightclubs were where the “
nice people
” hung out. Pascal flipped open his phone and scrolled through the display.

“What is his name? Timothy
comment
?” he asked. “I have to tell Florian.
Il adore les potins!”
he said, pressing the speed dial.

“It’s not gossip and that’s not funny!” I said, snatching the phone out of his hand. “I’m telling you in confidence. Besides, I’m still getting over it.”

“I am sorry,
chérie,
” he said, clucking sympathetically. “Can I tell him when you’re over it?” he asked.

“No!” I glared at him. He picked at his smoked salmon and blinis.

“
De toute façon,
you shouldn’t date well-known people,” he remarked, watching a plate of fried calamari go by. “I should’ve ordered that.” Turning back to me, he added, “It’s always a disaster.” He frowned and picked at the knife pleat in his trousers.

“He wasn’t well-known when I met him,” I said.

“Still. It’s a rule. In any case, you shouldn’t fall in love with them.”

“How are you supposed to stop yourself from falling in love with someone?”

“You can’t. But it doesn’t matter; now you’re in Paris.
Eventuellement
, you will get over it,” he said, waving to someone at the other end of the restaurant.

It wasn’t comforting.
Eventuellement,
the mother of
faux amis,
means possibly.

We ordered dessert, but he got another call and had to rush back to the office. I took the manuscript out of my bag and ate my
mousse au chocolat
alone.

I made a note to look up
pulpeuse
—does it mean voluptuous or fleshy?

No, that wasn’t right. The phrase was
“une poule de luxe,”
a female chicken with high-class tastes.
“Poule”
was also old-fashioned slang for a prostitute. In any case, the implication was insulting, but not as sledgehammer dull as “bitch.”

Oy vey. I counted the many ways in which I already disliked the writer. One, he sounded like a prick. Two, he sounded like a prick. Three, he dated models and bragged about it. Four, she’s Egyptian, and in the first chapter, he’d already referred to her “sphinxlike” gaze. Five, he insults her and she spills wine on him: it was exactly how Americans imagine over-the-top French people behaving. Pretty soon, there’d be slaps in public places, screaming matches, loud arguments, a woman crying and wrenching open the door of a taxi in the middle of the street in the pouring rain, mascara running down her face. It was a bad French movie, all right. Or a Chanel commercial.

Four pages later, I stopped to shake my wrist and change the cartridge in my fountain pen. I’ve always liked fountain pens. I’d started using them when I was a student here. Clara and I had taken a course on Marivaux at the Sorbonne. It met in a large amphitheater, and everyone smoked, which felt sophisticated in a bad way, exactly what I wanted in life when I was nineteen. The only thing I remember from the class now is the term
“marivaudage,”
a specific kind of courtly banter, light in tone, heavy on meaning(s). Which basically describes a lot of French conversation.

Back then, Clara took notes with an antique Waterman her father had given her. When I’d mentioned this to my grandmother, she’d remarked that the only acceptable way to write letters was with a fountain pen. Years of thank-you notes and Christmas cards I’d written her with crayons, pencils, and ballpoints went down the drain: I was the bar
baric, American grandchild in refined, old-world France. But she’d unlocked her Second Empire
secrétaire
and taken out a gold and burgundy Sheaffer.

“It belonged to your grandfather. You must fill it from a bottle.” She’d demonstrated, twisting the top until a narrow metal tube protruded from behind the nib, lapped up ink from a glass inkwell, and retracted. I’d used the pen for years, filling it with violet ink and delighting in the scratch of the nib against paper. That same crisp rasp, as distinct as the sound of fingertips across razor stubble, always made me happy.

I scarfed down my
mousse
and looked back at the manuscript, thinking about the characters. There was no hesitating, no dawdling between them. Was this akin to the French aversion to snacking between meals? They went straight to her apartment, and boom, she already had her clothes off:
She stepped out of a pool of her clothes, dripping nakedness
.

I groaned. They’d spent the past few pages expressing dislike for each other, which would have been enough to discourage me, but no, now they were staring at each other like
ferocious animals
across an expanse of ironed sheets.

I read on and felt my face flush as I came to a vivid description of a certain sexual act. I put down my pen. This thing was going to flay me alive with mortification.

I picked it up again and doodled in the margin. This wasn’t going to work if I got prim. I reread it and got back to work.

I was going to have to work on that. I shook my hand out and continued.

“Vous aurez besoin d’autre chose, mademoiselle?”
a waiter asked.

“Huh?” I said, stupidly. I looked around: the restaurant was empty. He probably wanted to go home. I gathered my papers and left.

I strolled down the sidewalk, gazing in boutique windows: pinstripes and organza at Dior, open-toed platforms and capes at Chloé, black and pink chiffon at Chanel. The sun broke through the clouds, dappling the street. The air was thick and still.

I stopped at a crosswalk. My legs felt funny, and my skin was a little clammy. A bus went by, ruffling my skirt and filling the air with warm, sooty exhaust. When I crossed the street, I noticed another, heavier dampness. Son of a bitch, I thought. That odious, pompous, self-satisfied, self-congratulatory idiot of a writer, whoever the hell he was—

He’d managed to turn me on.