I go to France. I go because I am researching a novel that takes place in a château in the middle of nowhere in Normandy. I chose my topic wisely but not conveniently. It’s tough to locate “the middle of nowhere” in a country the size of France, but I managed to do it.
My friend Charlotte, a photographer interested in unmarked WWII graves, accompanies me. Charlotte is the kind of magnetically stunning, deeply chill person who lives on Earth, true, but on a parallel Earth. Hers is a planet where people stock your phone with adoring text messages at all hours and pump your gas for you even when you’re not in New Jersey. This would be infuriating if it weren’t for the fact that Charlotte so thoroughly inhabits her version of Earth that her mind will not allow for a lesser version. Of course you live here, too, she thinks, slipping on special jeans meant for people with stilts for legs. Why wouldn’t you easily finagle a free trip to Japan? Why wouldn’t the coffee shop accept your credit card even though there’s a 10 DOLLAR MINIMUM CHARGE sign? Why wouldn’t every member of the opposite sex realize that they had never known beauty before they laid eyes on you?
The family who owns the château agrees to let us stay in their guest quarters at a discount. I tell Charlotte the good news.
“Did you mention the novel?” she asks.
This is Charlotte math. Free is the favor. The discount is what comes with existing.
Twenty-four hours into our stay, Charlotte decides the place has bad juju. She’s not wrong. The château’s been around since the 1300s—someone definitely got the rack here—but her spiritual awareness has a way of appearing at convenient times. Such as when she would like to take the car for a week to go to Deauville, an artists’ resort by the sea, to have impossibly hot sex with an impossibly good-looking sculptor. In the world I inhabit, the words artist, resort, and good-looking have never met before. In Charlotte’s, they’re old friends. I make her feel bad about this for a full minute before confessing that being alone is actually more conducive to writing. But it’s too late—the seeds of guilt have been sown. She is abandoning me. She feels compelled to stock up on provisions so I don’t have to Les Miz scraps of bread from the kitchen.
We go supermarket shopping and split up. I return to the parking lot to discover my friend is a Jewish mother trapped in a model’s body. She has purchased a gallon of peanut butter, a wheel of cheese, crackers, frozen shrimp, chocolate bars, several bunches of root vegetables, dried apricots, three baguettes the size of pool noodles, and a 24-pack of bottled water. I tell her that the war is over. She, of all people, should know this.
“But what if you get hungry?” she asks.
She worries about this condition I have that requires me to eat food. I encourage her to take a baguette for the road.
“It’s okay,” she says. “They only charged me for one.”
Back at the château, the impossibly good-looking sculptor calls. Charlotte takes the call, languidly leaning on a stone wall as I unload the trunk. A young tour guide emerges from the gatehouse and offers to help me with the groceries. My head in the trunk, I accept, but when I look up, I see she is sporting a neck brace from chin to chest. There was no neck brace this time yesterday.
“Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?” I ask her.
Between my bad French and her bad English, I gather that last night she was backing her car out of a barn, moved to avoid a horse—or possibly a pile of hair—and rammed straight into a tree.
“It’s okay,” she concludes, reaching for a bag. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“No, please.” I shoo her away.
“It’s okay, really,” she insists.
I shoo, she lunges, and we go back and forth like this—shoo, lunge, shoo, lunge—for whole minutes. Imagine trying to hold open a door for someone who refuses to take you up on the offer but now replay that exchange for the duration of a presidential debate. I don’t know if it’s the language barrier or stubbornness or what, but the conversation morphs from charming joust to forceful assertion to performance art. Meanwhile, Charlotte is pacing around a topiary, giggling and saying something enthusiastic about green tea.
I let the guide win. If carrying a 24-pack of water makes her feel empowered against trees, so be it. With a big grunt, she lifts several bags from the trunk. Just then, the owner of the château comes charging out of some French doors. Or, as they say in France, doors.
“Non, non.” She waves. “She is injured! Can’t you see?”
We freeze. There’s really no arguing with this. Of course she is injured. I am American, not Martian—I know what a neck brace looks like. Muscles pumping with anger, the woman yanks the bags out of the girl’s hands and speed-walks toward the house without so much as looking me in the eye. I want the girl to explain how I refused her help and the conversational tug-of-war that followed. But the phone starts ringing in the gatehouse and so she turns around to attend to it as if nothing happened. I am left standing in the driveway at the center of a triangle of women, all walking away from me at different paces. I lift the remaining bag from the trunk and shuffle toward the main house, where I will live for the next seven days, the Ugly American sitting in her room, her wheel of cheese taking up an entire shelf in the refrigerator.