8

Tactics to learn French via shock immersion: Accept and make telephone calls. Do this despite a crippling fear of conducting phone calls in French, terror so real you begin to experience it in nightmares about speaking French on the phone—your daily life repeated at night with no embellishment. Still, do it, call strangers. Answer telemarketing calls and delay the person on the line. Or book your wife, as she requests, un shampooing avec une styliste qui parle anglais. Which is not easy to find in Paris. Nor easy to explain to hairstylists who do not speak English why they should desire to do so for your wife’s sake.

Keep a notebook in your pocket for words or phrases you don’t recognize, so later you can ask your boss or other friendly Parisians to define them for you. For example, Ça m’énerve. (That annoys me.) C’est classe. (That’s classy.) Dégueulasse! (Vomit!)

At the coffee machine, entrance coworkers with descriptions of your apartment when you say things like, “There is a kitchen,” or “There is a table for the time to eat,” or “There is a bedroom.” You can also try rendering American idioms into French. Coworkers will stand flamingo-still when you so casually drop Moi, je ne donne pas une merde (I don’t give a shit). Because other people might pass along feces as gifts, but never you, cool you.

Finally, when you are unable to indicate what you want, explain what you do not. For example, say you desire a Coke. Specifically a can of Coke, because the can version is colder than the bottle, in your opinion. But the vendor, from his booth near the Luxembourg Gardens, is selling Coke by the bottle and the can. And you don’t know the French word for “can.” So, request un Coca, but specifically un Coca qui n’est pas dans une bouteille. Or not the sandwich that is made of ham, nor its neighbor of tuna, but oui, that one, what? Ah, you call it dinde, which means turkey? Super.

Soon I hoped I could express what I wanted, not merely its negation. Until then I had migraines. The sun rose and I woke up feeling raw. Living in Paris while barely speaking French was like drinking coffee through a veil. Within a month, I blew three projects’ deadlines due to miscommunication. Account supervisors frowned at me with their whole bodies, leaning forward while exhaling poofs of air. What had they done to deserve this American?

One morning during my commute, a squad of police officers blocked the exit when I got off the Métro. Two cops in blue uniforms waved me over. Behind them, in the sky, clouds with gray snouts were materializing like an armada.

“Where is your identity?” the first cop said.

I showed her my New York driver’s license. At that point, Rachel and I were still waiting for our residency papers to arrive.

“No,” cop number two chided, “your identity for the Métro.”

The first one said, “If you buy a monthly pass, you must also construct an identity. It is the rule.” Then she said something I couldn’t follow—“Père framboise, Day-Glo glass, Narragansett Bay.”

I interrupted, “What? Why?”

“It is the law,” the second cop said, with exhaustion. I said, What law? Quelle loi? Though, really, who knows what I said? All of us were aware that, in French, we belonged to different armies, perhaps weren’t even engaged in the same battle.

“You’re getting a ticket,” the first cop said.

“But the machine, the machine that sold me the ticket,” I said, “the machine did not tell me about my identity to construct.”

I believe I was saying “car” in lieu of “machine.” It probably didn’t make a difference.

“There was an office in the station,” said cop number one, staring me down. “There you would have received an identity card after the completion of your dossier. This you must have in order to use a monthly Métro pass.”

“A dossier?” I said.

She didn’t even reply to that, as if I’d said, The sky is blue?

“But me,” I said, “how do I know to ask about an identity card and a dossier I do not know to construct, when there are not directions that say I should construct the card and dossier?”

“You will pay forty euros,” the first cop said, and handed me a summons.

At the office, Bruno and I had a meeting with our infant-nutrition project managers. Afterward, he translated my Métro ticket during his second morning smoke break. We stood in a sunny patch on the Champs-Elysées. The long allées of chestnut trees reverberated in the breeze. Bruno said I would need to give the Métropolitan Police my checking account number and routing codes, and afterward they’d siphon off my fine.

I said it sounded like Big Brother. Couldn’t I just write them a check?

That’s how it’s done, Bruno said. But why hadn’t I assembled an identity in the first place?

I said in French, “I try forever to construct my Parisian identity.”

It was the first time I’d made Bruno laugh. Which was nice, but a little sad, actually, considering how lame the joke was.

*   *   *

Same evening I got my transit fine, there was un pot, an office party, organized for an employee who was leaving us, a tall man named Guy who wore flip-flops. Around seven p.m., about forty people assembled in the canteen around the cube of toilets. There were towers of salmon sandwiches, and terrines, and small cakes. Plus champagne from the office champagne refrigerator. I hadn’t seen it yet, but a refrigerator just for champagne was kept upstairs, in a small room off the agency’s terrasse. Anyway, André was standing at a counter, grinning at me while he squeezed a lime wedge into a cocktail, his smile a bank robber’s bandanna. I saw Keith, a Scottish copywriter I’d come to know, across the room and started threading my way toward him. Then I slipped in a puddle and went down in a split, and knocked a small cake off a bench while my drink shot out of my hand and exploded rum on the feet of Guy, the guy in whose honor we’d gathered, the one in flip-flops.

I picked myself up and shrugged. I knew just what to say to him, because nothing else fit: “C’est la vie.” There you have it, that’s life in Paris for us bumblers, what could we do?

No reply from Guy.

For months, I’d feel like an infant wandering into rooms that filled with tension the moment I appeared: What is the giant baby doing here?

That weekend, I purchased a cell phone. I followed the instructions to set up voice mail. A computer voice, in French, implored me to taper dièse. I was confused. Taper sounded like “to tap,” but what should I tap? I knew the names for numbers 0 –9. Star was étoile. Perhaps dièse meant pound? I tapped pound. There were more commands. A question this time? What do you want from me? I pressed another button, and the voice said something about voice mail, something about cinq. So I pressed five, cinq. The voice said, “Jacques Cousteau château trois, en flâneur, mettez deux.”

I pressed deux, two. Nothing happened. I pressed two again, another time—and that turned out to confirm that yes, I did want to operate my cell phone solely by voice command, no buttons, in fluent French.

The next day I needed Pierre to unlock it.