Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  For any marriage to be official in France, the grand tradition of laïcité (the French concept of secularism) requires each couple to first pass before la mairie (town hall) regardless of one’s religion or gender. There you stand before the mayor of your arrondissement (in our case the Tenth) who’s wearing a tricolored sash and swear an oath of civic union while the portrait of the French president (in our case, Jacques Chirac) beams down on you both.

  Since the mayor (you hope) has other stuff to do during the week, weddings are held on select days, and since there’s no way around a town hall marriage, there’s a cattle call–type crowd in the lobby of each mairie Saturday mornings. If you’re getting married in the diverse Tenth, you’ll wait your turn with Indian, African, Orthodox Jewish, and Arabic brides all decked out in traditional wear standing next to each other or milling around with cellphones, taking turns smiling in group photos on the red carpeted steps leading up to the main hall. It’s what city planners dreamed of when they imagined integration, and yet it’s all still very bureaucratically French. Lots of IDs are passed around. You sign a lot of stuff you don’t understand, and at the end, you receive a livret de famille (family notebook), a family passport of sorts, which you’re called on to present at the most solemn or dire of life events. There’s a page for births (and deaths) of children, births and deaths of parents, naming of children, and divorce judgments. Basically, the livret houses the only info people will ever remember you by two hundred years from now, and since there’s only one livret per family (and there are no copies), there’s the obligatory biannual panic in our family to find it, with Anaïs hysterically screaming “Le livret de famille est perdu!!” (“We’ve lost the livret de famille!”)

  Following our swearing-in ceremony, our entourage migrated across the street, where we commandeered part of a café. Champagne was brought out and everyone drank a little too fast considering it was only 11:00 a.m. Cops and deliverymen, rummies, and old pensioners raised their cups of coffee and glasses of Chablis to the jeunes mariés in the back. Anaïs sat on my knee, and all I wanted to do was stop time in that little hole in the wall and let the rest of the marriage finish itself.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. Our formal wedding was across town in the posh Seventh Arrondissement on the Quai d’Orsay, the thoroughfare that runs along the Seine’s Left Bank in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. It was a fifteen-minute metro ride that felt as if it took two hours by car.

  There Pastor Rogers called me John for the first time, and I was so thrilled I kissed Anaïs to celebrate. We left the church to music Anaïs’s father composed for the event, and from the steps, Anaïs tossed a giant bouquet into the frisky April air toward a pile of French and American single women each trying to be so polite to the others that nobody bothered to reach up to catch it. The bouquet hit the ground with a thud, followed by a groupwide sigh of pity. We were hitched.

  We topped off the ceremony aboard a péniche drifting up and down the Seine long into the next morning, the boat brimming with Parisians and New Yorkers alike, all of whom were enjoying something in Paris they’d never seen or done before. Apart from Notre Dame and the Louvre, the Parisians weren’t very helpful in identifying many of the illuminated landmarks we were drifting by, which led to awkward misunderstandings.

  “What’s that? French parliament?” the American would ask.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?” the French person would say.

  “Are you being sarcastic?” the American would then reply.

  The highlight of the night was watching my parents seated next to Anaïs’s grandparents, simply because they were the same age and had much in common. Since my mother had lived in Paris in the fifties, she knew Paris quite well, and she and Anaïs’s grandmother compared neighborhoods, nightclubs, and styles, trading lines both in French and in English. Their husbands (both veterans of World War II) concentrated more on Paris in the forties: the liberation of Paris and D-Day, the merriment of the night prompting my father to quip, “Yeah, but Alain, six weeks and you guys fold? I mean jeez!”

  Meanwhile my father-in-law, Hughes, sporting a cape he’d worn to the wedding, had left the table to roam the boat with his wife, who was younger than Anaïs.

  I should probably explain at this point that Hughes resembles Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, and inside France, he has almost the same notoriety. He led a rock group in the seventies called Malicorne, which could be best described as a French Jethro Tull; a band whose Druid influences mixed bagpipes with heavy guitar and gave the group a cultlike following it still enjoys today. Anytime Anaïs works on a play or film, there’s invariably the roadie/gaffer/lighting grip who stands slack-jawed when he finds out who her dad is, asking if he can have a signed copy of something, anything. Malicorne is the group sound engineers who bought good weed listen to.

  My father-in-law lived the cliché you’d expect from a successful ex–rock star. He had an insane apartment in Montmartre that overlooked Paris. He was on wife number four, and in the years to come, he’d father two more children, who’d be only slightly older than ours. Hughes was hardly the overbearing beau-père so many of my friends who’d recently married were lamenting about. When they’d complain about their fathers-in-law, citing the age-old tropes of pressure to earn more money or the feeling of not measuring up, I could only sit back and smile at what fortune had bestowed upon me. Hughes had known the fallow periods of being an artist. He’d written jingles for ads and had gone out of pocket to produce albums his labels didn’t want. He’d also spent his fair share of time on the beach, so the fact I was currently unemployed didn’t really faze him. Was he going to be the dad who shows up on Christmas Eve with a reindeer sweater to take the kids to the Gallery Lafayette shop window decorations? Of course not. But he would jump into a Kuala Lumpur pool fully clothed with you on New Year’s Eve at 12:00:03 or treat you to a four-hour Montmartre lunch, then walk you around Paris to see his old haunts, all the time insisting we let our respective wives’ calls go to voice mail.

  During Hughes’s toast, I assumed every wedding we’d attend from here on out would be this romantic and this Parisian. Hell, I assumed they’d be even better. I was an American who’d just arrived, and considering how things were hustled along, you could say we kind of winged it. Imagine what someone who’s actually French could do, with time to prepare, family to chip in, and a knowledge of the lay of the land I didn’t have.

  Little did I know, our wedding, for years to come, would be the one people most talked about. Not because it was any more memorable or elaborate, but because it was peculiarly in Paris, ten metro stops away, which to my new French friends was a typically American thing to do.

  Had I been French, our wedding would have certainly been held deep in the foothills of rural France, where young Parisian couples return to a drafty old church and then a tent in a field in a hard-to-find hometown to plant the seeds of their future togetherness in the terre whence they came. And it was only after my own wedding that I got to experience what French ones are really like.

  * * *

  First off, French weddings start with a sober index card sized RSVP with a return envelope, whereas the American invitations always need to go that extra buck wild yard. I’ve received “save the date—heads up!” cards a year and a half in advance, which were then followed by e-cards with passwords linking me to websites that asked me the song I wanted to dance to, along with my dinner seating preference, almost as if the wedding were an airline seating reservation. There were vouchers for golf and registry lists that were so precise there was no room left for improvisation or personal touch. It was either the sleeping bag for the trip to the Andes or the Coleman cooking stove for the trip to the Andes. With such tact, I almost expected a third option of paying down the Amex card for that trip to the Himalayas. (I’ve heard this is actually done.)

  But you get what you pay for in the States. I’ve been to American we
ddings on private islands where the kids wear life vests the whole night. Others had photo booths and twenty-member big bands. One had a fireworks show, and one had an upstairs cocaine room.

  The French gift demands are usually more modest. They’ll ask you to chip in for a trip they want to take eventually or the Charles Eames chair they’ve been eyeballing for the living room. And that’s it. Fifty euros or less, which is great when you’re a guest, not so great when it’s your wedding. For ours, we forgot to specify what we wanted people to contribute to, so they assumed we didn’t want anything at all.

  But with the French invites, I scratched my head about where they were. I had nothing to go on. Villeneuve-lès-Avignon? Vitry-le-François? Saint-Remy-en-Bozeman-Saint-Genest-et-Isson? Where the fuck were these places? Not in Paris, that’s for sure. In fact, the more hyphens a place in France has, the less likely you’re able to find it on a map.

  I’d conveniently forgotten, of course, these were the towns my friends had told me they’d come from when I’d asked naïvely if they were from Paris. “Bien sûr que non, John,” they’d reply, then rattle off some convoluted name while I sipped my drink, having no idea where that was, but already fully convinced it sucked. You know a place is forgettable when the person describing it says what it’s close to, and you don’t even know that place. “It’s close to Vierzon, John. It’s close to Mulhouse. You know Béthune? It’s right near there.” Got it.

  Honoré de Balzac was right. In the end, Paris is a city full of people from the provinces, most of whom, if they had their druthers and didn’t need a job, would move back to the small town or village they came from. Unfortunately, in France, there’s no other city that offers as many good-paying jobs, so Paris it is. Americans may think of it as “the city of light,” but for a lot of Parisians, Paris is an upscale jail, one that allows you to leave on occasional weekends to marry your concubine.

  There’s also the economic side. No French person wants to spend a lot of money renting a large wedding venue in Paris when you can easily glom a giant manor from an uncle or profit from a cousin who has a farmhouse with a big field. And if that’s the case, the invitation will feature the key words soirée champêtre, which is a fancy way to say bucolic or rural, but which I’ve learned really means “tent out back.”

  And I must admit, the idea of champêtre is romantic. I imagined lanterns and candles hidden in acres of high grass, women and girls with wildflowers in their hair, men with daisies on their lapels, dogs running freely, and forest elves passing out hors d’oeuvres.

  As the years have gone by, I’ve grown accustomed now to my friends’ pitches. I wait like clockwork for the moment they’ll promote the facility of on-site child care, how they’ll have a crew of babysitters around the clock and how we’ll be able to dance into the morning without worrying about noise. “And you know what, John?” they’ll finish. “We’re even going to cook a pig in the ground!” Sorry?

  The pig-cooking couple in question had been dear friends for ages. They lived in Paris near us and had been at our wedding, so not attending theirs was simply hors de question. They, too, were a couple who’d gotten the order of operations mixed up. Their children were our children’s age. We’d attended baptisms, housewarming parties, and now ten years later, we were going back in time to attend their wedding.

  With any champêtre wedding, accommodations are going to be limited. And since we weren’t part of the happy few who’d reserved the three rooms at the inn two kilometers from the reception a year in advance, we found ourselves staying at a wild-card B&B a windy thirty-minute drive away. This happens to unorganized people like us often, and since we don’t want to stay at these second-choice, dingy bed and breakfasts too long (meaning more than one night), we usually leave Paris by car Saturday morning with the goal of being at the church service in the afternoon. Sure, we risk arriving late or missing the service altogether, but I’m okay with that. Usually French ceremonies are not “kiss the bride and we’re out” affairs. They’re an entire Catholic service with a wedding tacked on at the end. The churches are pretty strict about what they allow during a service, too, meaning it’s rare to find a Joan Baez acoustic guitar solo sung by an old friend from university, rarer to find a church that’s actually warm.

  French churches were not built for comfort. There are no handicapped ramps, or well-identified fire exits, or carpeted aisles. If anything, country churches are allegories of tasteful decay. On an altar, there leans a painting that may be a Giotto original, and yet next to it sits a pigeon nest, and that paint that’s chipping on the ceiling above you is actually from a relief dating back to the Papal Schism.

  What’s impressive about these places is that you feel the appreciation of time passed, but not the weight of history. You forget the countless services held for those claimed by unending plagues and wars, along with all those silent prayers whispered by those who suffered from God knows what during the Middle Ages or World War I. All that’s left is the quiet light of the stained-glass windows, the smoothed-over alabaster entryways, and the arctic chill that rains down upon me whenever I sit in those hardwood pews. There are other Parisian attendees in a similar bind, and I can spot them easily. The men have those typical scruffy Zach Galifianakis, Right Bank Parisian beards and are usually looking at their phones, gyrating their legs as a way to keep their white Conversed feet warm. At least that was the look of the man sitting in the pew in front of me, the one who’d curiously leaned a trumpet on the wall next to him, which would foreshadow his whipping it out following the service, leading a cortege of sorts through the village to the reception, tooting us the whole way there.

  This wasn’t my first cortege. Hughes had shepherded one up the slopes of Montmartre beginning at the mairie of the Eighteenth Arrondissement (where Anaïs’s sister was married) and ending at his apartment atop Sacré Coeur, beating a drum while others trumpeted and clarineted next to him. The tourists who’d come to visit Sacré Coeur that day took photos. Some even threw money.

  In our case, the locals of the village were less enthralled by our Parisian Chuck Mangione. He wasn’t from the famed group Malicorne. This was certain. He also played alone and hadn’t practiced much, so the toots grew tired by the time we reached the boulangerie. Soon he was holding up traffic to get wind, and by the time a local mentioned he should get a job, we’d abandoned him en masse, ducking into cars that would take us the remaining five hundred yards to the cocktails that awaited us.

  Any French meal, large or small, features what’s called an apéro—short for apéritif, which usually involves drinks and olives or saucisson sec or chips of some sort served in small portions in an informal setting. Apéros are a way to meet your fellow dinner guests while sipping on something bubbly; champagne or a kir or a beer before you get down to the business of eating.

  Each French wedding has its own apéro, which is usually in the form of a giant champagne orgy. Whatever money the marrying couple saves on renting a space in Paris proper, they plunge into the champagne. There are no half measures with this ritual, since they know their wedding will be judged not on the decor or on the meal or even on the locale, but on the quality of champagne.

  Wedding apéros are also the combustible moment when you drink the most and eat the least, thanks to a rural setting where the meal usually arrives very late. The problem with champêtre is that logistics are not on your side. It’s difficult heating up three hundred plates from a small truck in a muddy field. I’ve watched rotisseries implode, truck batteries run out of juice, or in our case this time, the pig in the ground not cooking as fast as our hosts thought it would.

  My groom friend explained to me that cooking a pig in a dirt pit comes from French Polynesia, and that it’s a complicated process that can take several days of preparation and time. It involves digging the pit, firing it up, dressing the pig with rubs and oil, and cooking it for approximately nine hours, depending on its size. My concern wa
s that, after the second hour of the apéro, we weren’t yet on hour nine of the pig process. But since the sun was out, the news didn’t particularly worry the groom. The champagne was flowing, and it was a perfect chance to enjoy the mountain views. Two hours later, though, the sun was gone, and the fun was over. A damp cold had set in, and we found ourselves still clinging to champagne glasses as we ran to the car to heat up while the dinner continued to cook.

  At country weddings, the temperature yo-yos. The church will be cold. The walk from the church will be hot. The reception will be hot, then cold, and the late-night dancing will be frigid. The challenge is dressing accordingly while maintaining a certain look. Women will often bring shawls or sweaters that they somehow hold onto discreetly. But since men are kind of stuck with a blazer and tie (and there’s no way a Patagonia fleece is acceptable), I’ve started sporting the sweater vest underneath the blazer. It’s borderline, but passable, and it’s saved me countless times.

  When the pig was ready and we’d been seated at our table, Anaïs was no longer hungry, and I was cold drunk. Since things were running late, the wedding speeches kicked off immediately, even while the food was being served, and this was a relief, seeing as there’s nothing more appetizing for me than watching people bomb onstage.

  For reasons I still don’t understand, the French have never been able to find that happy alchemy of funny and serious. French toasts are either tear-felt emotional or lampoon tacky, but nothing in between. I’ve seen a woman read a four-page cheat sheet that lasted an extra twenty minutes because she wept the whole way through. I’ve also watched five men strip down to jock straps with rainbow Afro wigs and dance to “It’s Raining Men,” urging us to clap along. I’ve watched skits performed in shark costumes, the actors bent over double, laughing at their inside joke, while the audience stares on, their faces looking as if they had just smelled ammonia.