CHAPTER 16
“I AM A PIZZA FOR KATHLEEN”
LESSON HIGHLIGHTS: THE DIFFICULTIES OF ORDERING A PIZZA IN PARIS, AND A BAD GROUP BLIND DATE
From the day the first outpost opened on avenue de l’Opéra, hip young Parisians thronged to the comfy couches and €4 cappuccinos. Many predicted the French would scoff when Starbucks finally came to Paris. Hardly. By contrast, uncomfortable American tourists unsure how to ask for a double-shot soy latte in French instead line up to buy Paris Starbucks mugs and flee.
For fun, Mike and the twenty-somethings from his class head there not long after it opens to study their early French lessons. One of his classmates is a young, blond missionary from Texas who’s studying French as part of her endeavor to “convert” the French to Christianity. She’s oblivious to that bloody part of French history in which the devout Christians battled over whether they were Protestants or Catholics.
“Hey, did y’all get POO for DOO?” she asks in her thick Texas drawl, meaning the peux (puh) for question number deux (duh). Then A.J. sits up excitedly.
“Wow, I get it!” A.J. says. “I get the Creole Lady Marmalade song! You know,” she sings, “Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi.” The whole group murmurs to one another.
“I see, ‘VOULEZ-VOUS’ means ‘would you’ . . .” says Tia.
“Oh yeah, coucher, the root verb ‘to sleep,’” picks up Mike.
“AVEC MOI CE SOIR, ‘with me, this night!’ I get it, I do!” Jackie exclaims.
They go around the table repeating the phrase. It’s like when Helen Keller suddenly understood W-A-T-E-R. They say it over and over, animatedly shifting the emphasis on different words, toying with the nature of the question. “Voulez-vous coucher avec MOI ce soir?” “Voulez-VOUS coucher avec MOI ce soir?” “Voulez vous coucher avec moi CE SOIR!” Even the missionary chimes in, drawling. “Non, VOO-LAY voom coochie ah-vect moi sir sour?”
Mike notices a hush has fallen over the Starbucks. The French patrons are fixated on the group, though pretending not to be, as that would be rude. He realizes that to their ears and eyes, it must appear that he is surrounded by a group of young women so desperate to sleep with him that they’re nearly begging, nay, vying to be chosen. “Would you go to bed with ME tonight?” “Would you go to bed with me TONIGHT?” “Would YOU go to BED with me TONIGHT?”
A young Frenchman in a business suit lifts his mug and offers a salute in the air to Mike, and goes back to his newspaper with a smile.
Although I studied French for one year in college and Mike studied Spanish in high school, we’re not exactly soaking up the French language. The primary problem appears to be that we’re older than twelve. That’s the age some researchers believe that people’s ability to learn language begins to decline. Research suggests that it’s almost impossible for an individual past their midteens to learn a language and speak it without an accent.
I quickly tire of relearning “bonjour” and learning to conjugate “être” in the beginning class that I eventually signed up for as a “false beginner.” So I start to sit in on Mike’s classes, and sometimes I study with a private tutor. We listen to French music, watch French TV, and attempt to read French newspapers. I start listening to the chef’s instruction, trying to figure it out before the translator gets to it.
But the real problem we have with French isn’t French itself. It’s English.
At Le Cordon Bleu, cliques form not by nationality but by language. For instance, the Spanish speakers from Mexico, South and Central America, and Spain hang out together. The Japanese students form a tight-knit, almost impenetrable circle. Students from the United Kingdom, the United States, and most of Europe, however, typically speak in English. At home, Mike and I speak to each other only in English. In Paris, if you ask someone something in bad French, they often answer you in English.
So it’s fine, I suppose, that we’re stunted learners. Until we really need to speak French to, say, report a problem with the electricity to the power company. When we moved in, Arturo called the power company to shut off the power in his uncle’s name, but he did not have it reinstated in ours. So one day, the power just went out.
Utility companies are universally unhelpful anyway. For forty minutes, Mike sits with the phone cradled to his ear, a pile of phrase books and French dictionaries on the table. The operator continually batters him to repeat everything. When he hangs up, shaken and exhausted, he prays she’s understood. The electricity comes back on a few hours later.
Mike moves past me in comprehension. His brain works differently than mine. As a technical person, he’s used to taking in masses of data and then shifting them into comprehensible information for decision-making purposes. But his problem is that he’s having real trouble speaking.
One day, an old man sidles up next to him at Mike’s favorite escape, the massive hardware area in the basement of the BHV department store. The man is apparently keen to chat about handsaws and wrenches in French. Mike tells him that he doesn’t speak French very well. The old man tries relentlessly to be helpful and speaks louder and slower.
“But I’m sure your French is fine,” he says to Mike in French. “Tourists don’t visit hardware stores in Paris.”
Like me with the chef and the orange sauce, Mike can’t think of a word to say. He feels a sense of panic and makes an awkward excuse to leave. He comes home out of sorts and paces the flat.
“I guess I’m just a perfectionist. The more I learn, the more I realize just how much I don’t know,” he tells me.
I’ve had days like that, so to cheer him up I make a call in my semi-confident faux-beginner French and place an order with Speed Rabbit Pizza. Although Mike will try everything I bring home from Le Cordon Bleu, pizza remains his favorite food. It turns out to be harder than I think. For ten minutes, I struggle on the phone to place an order for a large pepperoni with mushrooms. I hang up, frustrated yet proud of my French.
“Did you tell them the name on the buzzer?” Mike asks.
Um, no, I’d forgotten that vital piece of information. Seeing that I’m reluctant to call back, Mike runs downs four flights of stairs and the six blocks to their store to intervene. As he bursts in, four guys behind the counter in the small storefront look at him expectantly. He exclaims, “Je suis une pizza pour Kathleen!” The puzzled workers exchange glances, then smile. He whacks his head, realizing he’s said “I am a pizza for Kathleen.”
“Kathleen? Ah, la folle!” they say, making circles next to their head with their fingers. They start to explain something about “another pizza” to Mike, but he doesn’t completely understand. A teenager returns from one of the mopeds they use for delivery. Like a lot of teens in Paris, he speaks English perfectly.
“Since you live with a crazy woman, they want to give you a second pizza for free,” the teen says. I thought the order had gone all right; they hung up thinking I was crazy. So much for my French.
Undeterred, I sign us up online for a promising monthly event. “Practice French language skills and meet new friends in a non-threatening environment,” the description reads. Photos on the site had nothing but smiling, happy people holding up glasses of wine or waving at the camera.
It turns out to be a horrible blind date with ten people.
We meet in the dank basement of Le Petit Châtelet, a hotel near Les Halles. Everyone sits with folded arms. Mike suggests we make a round of introductions.
“I am from Sweden,” says a square-jawed chap at one end of the table who wore an unrelenting scowl. He is dressed entirely in black. “I work here in Paris, but I have no friends and no one at work likes me, so I thought I would try this.”
Mike gets enthused. “Where are you from in Sweden? One of my best friends is from there.”
His scowl intensified. “You’ve probably only been to Stockholm.” “Yes, a couple times for work, but his wedding was in Linköping in the south, and then a group of us traveled to Åre, up north.”
The Swedish guy jeers at him. Silence.
Mike fills in the gap. “Actually, it’s funny, he’s this really nice guy named Hakan, who—”
The Swedish guy interrupts, “Oh, I bet you think I know him.”
Suddenly, a chubby American at the other end of the table pipes up. “I hate that, when people assume that you know someone just because you’re from the same country. ‘Oh, you must know Joe’ since you’re from America. No, I don’t fucking know Joe! Why the fuck would I know Joe? So stupid.”
Silence.
“Does anyone want another drink?” I ask. The drinks arrive at a glacial pace.
By then, we’ve excruciatingly met the rest of the crew. Highlights include Louisette at one end of the table, a pretty, slight woman who was born to a French mother but raised in the American Midwest. As part of her introduction, she goes into rapturous detail about the beef-tongue sandwiches her mother made her as a child. Inexplicably, she’s with Ralph, the sweaty American chubster who doesn’t know Joe. There’s Jalor from Malta who refuses to provide any personal details.
Shaz from Tunisia is the only normal one in the bunch. He engages in friendly banter to practice his English. He’s reading Jennifer Government, a novel set in the near future, when corporations rule the world. Peoples’ identities eventually unite so closely with their careers that they adopt their employer’s moniker as their own last name.
“What happens to the people who are unemployed?” I ask.
“They don’t have last names, because without a job, they have no identity,” he says. “It is a very scary book.”
As if that were a cue, they ask about us.
Mike dreads two questions: “So where are you from?” and “What do you do?” or its foreign variation, “What are you doing here in France?”
An Air Force brat, he was born in Texas but then lived in five other states, including Alaska. He’s between careers, living off income from wise investments. But this complicates his answers and for some reason often prompts interrogation.
“So you’re just here to be with your girlfriend?” asks the Swedish guy.
“Well, yes,” he says.
Ralph asks, “Yeah, but what do you do? I mean, for a living?”
“I’m just taking some time off,” he says, not wanting to explain further.
“So you’re not from anywhere and you don’t do anything,” Ralph says.
We leave before one of us strangles the sweaty American.
Two nights later, we have our first real clash when Mike wonders aloud that maybe he should return to the United States and get a real job. I react like the crazy woman the Speed Rabbit Pizza people expected. I storm around the flat, upset. Doesn’t he know how lucky he is to be in Paris? That he can just be free to have time to enjoy it? Do you know how many would kill for just such an opportunity? And he wants to go home to rainy Seattle? The scene deteriorates into me sobbing.
“Is it me? Am I not making you happy?” I ask, always a dumb question from a woman in the midst of a tantrum.
He takes my hands and sits me down on the couch. “I love you and love being with you. But this isn’t about you,” he says calmly. “It’s not about Paris, either. I love Paris, but I feel like I’m on the verge of becoming a perpetual tourist here. I feel like I am just spinning but in no direction and not going anywhere. I’m not used to this. You of all people should understand that.”
I do understand. This calms me. If we are to survive a life together, I have to start seeing the world from his point of view. We talk about Jennifer Government. I realize that when I discuss my former company, I still say “we,” as if I remain a part of it. Life is so much easier when you can wrap yourself within the veil of a big company’s identity. People assume that so much of what you do is who you are, and it’s easy to believe that yourself. There’s a stamp of worth that you get automatically by association.
Without jobs, neither of us has that anymore. On top of it, we’re in a foreign place without even the safety net of a familiar language. We went to the meet-up looking for a “non-threatening environment,” but in the end even that wasn’t safe.
I suppose it’s like some tourists who go into a Starbucks in Paris. Do they really let themselves experience what it truly means to be foreign?
Pizza Grillée, Sauce Tomate aux Herbes et à l’Ail
GRILLED PIZZA CRUST, GARLICKY HERB TOMATO SAUCE
Makes two pizzas; serves four
This recipe was inspired by a pizza Mike and I ate in a small hamlet in southern France. Grilling the dough results in puffy, lopsided pies; such imperfections signal true artisanal pizza. Don’t start the coals before you start prepping the dough, as it takes an hour to rise.
DOUGH
1 package (¼ ounce) active dry yeast
1 cup (250 ml) warm water (about 100°F/38°C)
2 cups (220 g) all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon Italian herbs
2 teaspoons sugar
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
Extra flour, for kneading
SAUCE
¾ cup finely chopped onion
1½ teaspoons mixed Italian herbs
4 tablespoons olive oil
5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 (16-ounce) can tomato sauce (about 2 cups)
½ cup water
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 bay leaf
TOPPINGS
Any selection of pepperoni, artichokes, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, and so on.
2 teaspoons mixed Italian herbs
4 ounces fresh buffalo mozzarella, sliced thin
Put yeast in warm water and let rest for fifteen minutes. Mix the flour, oil, seasonings, sugar, salt, and garlic powder in a bowl. Make a well in the center and add the yeast and water, then stir to mix in. Gently knead for a few minutes on a floured surface. The dough should feel elastic; if it doesn’t, add a few drops of water. Shape into a ball, put into an oiled bowl, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until nearly doubled in size, about an hour.
For the sauce: In a saucepan over medium heat, cook and stir the onions and herbs in olive oil until tender. Add garlic; cook and stir for one minute. Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to a boil, then simmer uncovered on low heat for twenty minutes. Taste, and adjust seasonings. Set aside.
Prepare the grill to a medium-hot fire. Organize all toppings. Set aside.
Divide the dough in two. Roll each piece on a floured surface to a disk about the size of a dinner plate. (Thicker crusts are easier to handle.) Spray grill with cooking spray. Grill dough two to three minutes per side. Remove to a baking sheet. Smear with sauce as desired, add the toppings, sprinkle with Italian herbs, and put the cheese on last. Place under a broiler until cheese melts.