Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  While the night’s speeches wore on, I spotted the best man at the bar. His name was Yves, and he was looking distressed, staring in frustration at the cocktail napkin bearing his speech. Having watched many toast hari-karis in past years, I’d promised myself that if I ever saw someone in need of a quick punch-up or encouragement, I’d help. I’ve been told I give a pretty good toast; I’ve even thought about penning a screenplay à la Wedding Crashers about a professional toast maker, hired by couples to make their famous wedding speech. In the film, the main character would spend a week with the couple to get to know them and learn their stories, which he’d then incorporate into his speech. The twist would come, of course, when the toast maker falls for the bride, and all hell breaks loose. But Seriously was the working title, and currently those are the two words I’ve written of the script.

  Soon, Yves and I were chatting, me advising him that the best speech he could give would be something simple and heartfelt. “Don’t worry about following the napkin,” I told him. “Napkins always trip you up. C’est nul, les serviettes!”

  “T’as raison” (you’re right), he snorted in his glass, “Ça s’improvise,” at which point I left him to gather his thoughts, convinced I put him on the right track.

  Unfortunately, a train without brakes he was. Once onstage, our man did indeed toss the napkin aside, then he unscrewed the microphone from the podium and walked into the crowd like a nightclub act. Before I could take my seat, he’d launched into criticizing the father of the groom’s speech (which had preceded his) as one “filled with sappy nostalgia.”

  “But are we even surprised by this merde from Monsieur Daddy Nostalgie anyway?” he squeaked through the feedback, aping the father of the groom as if he were a dithering fool.

  The speech went gruelingly on. An enculé (whose translation is fuckhead but which literally means “done in the ass”) was thrown out; an enfoiré (whose translation means shithead but which literally means “covered in excrement”) soon followed. It was a poetic speech, sure, and for a crowning coup de grace, as several moved in to seize the microphone, the bard told my friend, the groom, in front of his stunned table, that he’d like a crack at his daughter (who was seventeen). Then he proceeded to dive into the nearby pool, in full tux. Music came on. Everyone applauded mercifully, then quickly turned to their plates, which were now getting cold, letting the best man make his way on his own to the shallow end where he’d exit the pool and the wedding altogether.

  Seeing a toast end up in the water was shocking, not just because it was so audaciously punk, but because it was so cold out. A mild hypothermia had seized me by then, which no buried pig fire in the world could thaw. The cake was cut, and soon the faint drumbeat of music began emanating from another tent, in another part of the cow field.

  With it being champêtre and all, I scampered through the high grass thinking I’d find a warm whiskey, only to catch the groom pitted against an intransigeant, locally hired DJ who’d conveniently forgotten to bring a converter, which would have synced the amp to my friend’s iTunes. The two were on the verge of blows—the DJ unable to understand why my outraged friend didn’t have confidence in his “trusted CD collection.”

  Little did both men realize their collections or mixes (pronounced meeks), if put side by side, were fairly identical. Each was eighties French pop fused with eighties French disco fused with eighties French crooner. Songs that refuse to go away, songs that everyone says they hate but everyone knows the lyrics to. In a way, watching the two men argue gave me a glimpse into what it must be like for a far right and far left voter watching current French politics. Although they duke it out, the left and the right resemble each other more than they think, and the songs they sing have sounded the same since the Mitterrand era.

  At the outset I danced, only because I wanted to warm up, but soon, the floor was taken over by those doing le rock, the fifties-styled lindy hop you see mostly in Frank Capra films, one which involves twirling your partner around as if you were at a Princeton tea dance. Americans invented le rock, but not one American under seventy knows how to dance it. I’ve been in France for fifteen years, and I’m still lost. Bill Haley and the Comets comes on, those around me pivot in unison and dance in time, and all I can do is fake smile and hold Anaïs by the hands while spinning her around in a circle as if it was “Hava Nagila.”

  The one wedding song I’m able to sing from start to finish is Jacques Brel’s “Ne me quitte pas” (Don’t Leave Me), and it’s only because Brel pronounces each triste mot slowly and with perfect clarity. Plus there are only four or five words per line. Any time I hear Brel’s simple piano chords begin the song, I pipe up. And although it’s rather dreary, I treat it like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” belting out each Ne me quitte pas as if it’s my last. It’s a sad spectacle. The rest of the time I’ve been told “Tu chantes yahourt, John,” which means I sing with “yogurt in my mouth”—mumbling words, slurring others, all while smiling as if I know the song perfectly, because in my mind I do.

  I soon broke from the fun and went outside the tent, where I spotted a younger group in their twenties huddled together, and I could tell by their snickering that they, too, hated the music. They were also high as shit. It’s always an odd feeling when you’re over forty and you’re trying to smoke weed with people half your age, especially when they don’t speak your native language. Since you have seniority, they’re sort of obliged to make room, but it’s rarely done with enthusiasm. You’ve crashed their moment and suddenly transformed a joint with friends into one of polite obligation. And you know this, but you’re puffing with them anyway, because as an older person, you’ve earned the right to invade people’s personal space in the pursuit of getting high.

  So I butted in, and before I knew it, I was passed a cigarette the size of an asparagus stem. The hashish high hit like lightning, and soon I was too paranoid to go back into the tent. Oh, and the young people I felt so close to five minutes ago? They’d bailed, leaving me to wander aimlessly in my rumpled suit looking for our car while Scorpion’s “Winds of Change” played in the distance to a raucous crowd.

  This wasn’t the first time Anaïs and I had experienced French wedding blackouts, the kind that left one spouse frantically looking for the other for the better part of the night, convinced they’d probably drowned.

  At one wedding, a decade ago, Anaïs ducked away to put Bibi down for bed, making me promise to check in on them after thirty minutes to make sure Anaïs hadn’t drifted off to sleep with our child. Promises like these are made in the moment and tend to fall by the wayside when you’re smoking outside of a tent, which is where I was thirty minutes after Anaïs and Bibi’s bedtime departure, this time with Jules, a friend from Paris.

  “Oh, I put some cocaine in it.” Jules casually assured me when I laid into my third toke.

  “Sorry?” I asked, eyes wide.

  “Oui, it’s just that I can’t sniff that stuff. My nose won’t let me.”

  Apparently the immorality of handing me a hard drug without warning hadn’t dawned on my friend. Within moments, it was I who was on the dance floor dancing le rock, throwing a woman through my legs and swinging her around my shoulders like an MMA fighter, all to the claps of an impressed crowd. I’d not only forgotten I didn’t know le rock, I’d forgotten to wake Anaïs, who surfaced toward the end of the party with cloudy eyes and bed hair, bitter at me for not holding up my end of the bargain.

  All of this I fondly reflected on as I sat hunched over in our car with the heat blasting, picking pig out of my teeth, the windshield now fogged up, making it look as if a couple had been making out inside. Soon Anaïs was tapping on the driver’s side window, holding a coffee, Otto and Bibi trailing behind her. It was over, and she was driving us home. There was a dense mist out now, and because the GPS couldn’t find our coordinates (probably because I couldn’t find hyphens on the keyboard), we crept at the speed of a
buggy, the five-mile distance to our second-rate B&B taking us an hour. It was so quiet in the country that night, you could still hear the throbbing music miles away pulsing behind us as we rolled through the fog, giving the scene all the trappings of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

  * * *

  The next morning, we returned to the scene of the crime for a follow-up brunch inside the same tent, which reeked now of smoke and wine. Everyone looked too hung over to talk, and half were sick now from last night’s chill.

  Even if we’d wanted to stay longer—which we didn’t—we couldn’t. We’d decided to take a day trip around the region, the typical fiasco one mistakenly embarks on when invited to a rural wedding. The hopes are always the same: unspoiled patrimoine (French heritage), country roads, and a chance maybe to discover a part of France we may want to live in during our senior years.

  We’d eyed a nearby town whose tourist pull was a restored château promoted as being on par with those near Paris like Vaux-le-Vicomte or Château de Chantilly, equipped with a collection of Middle Age tapestries, a moat, and a “historically restored” dungeon that I thought the kids might dig. I hadn’t briefed them yet on the plan. They were still sleeping in the warmed car while we picked through our cold eggs and said our good-byes and congrats.

  It turned out the château was still partly occupied by the family who’d inherited it. Often, French château owners will open their doors as a way to finance the château’s upkeep. The French don’t have the equivalent of the British National Heritage Collection, which is a national charity that leases castles from families and in turn maintains them and opens them to the public. So our visit that day was limited to a downstairs foyer and a couple of upstairs bedrooms, each of which had been cordoned off with velvet rope to keep the period piece decoration in its original state. The only hiccup was a beam of light pouring through the crack of one of the far doors, which revealed what seemed to be an adjoining bathroom. You could overhear a running shower and someone singing along to a Katy Perry song.

  The dungeon had been restored, that’s for sure. It was a lavender soap store now. Lavender soap is the French equivalent of American funnel cake. You can find it pretty much everywhere in France, especially outside of Provence, and yet every time you come across it, you think “Well, I haven’t bought lavender soap since . . . ,” forgetting, of course, that time at L’Occitane in duty free, when you were frantically trying to come up with a lame gift for American friends. You also conveniently forget lavender soap kind of smells like bad detergent.

  Since we were returning north through the Loire Valley, as a last-ditch effort to save the day, we thought to stop by a vineyard. Vineyard visits rank up there with going to museums and swapping spouses, something you think you’ll be doing a lot of in France, but you never really find the time for.

  During my château research, I’d spotted a vineyard on our route that looked promising, but unfortunately the GPS again kept us driving in circles. Eventually, we pulled into a parking lot of what seemed to be a vineyard. I say “seemed to be” because I saw rows of vines out back, but apart from an open garage, everything looked closed. It was Sunday, of course.

  When I knocked on the garage’s coiled steel shutter an old man appeared, looking as if he had stepped out of a Cartier-Bresson photo. He took off his beret and shook his head. No there weren’t any tours, nor were there any cases of wine I could buy that would help exaggerate a lie I planned to tell friends back home. “Oh, this wine we found on site at a winery in the Loire Valley. We visited the barrels in the cave, and no you can’t find it in stores.” What the vintner could offer though was vin en vrac, pointing to a selection of 5- or 10-liter plastic containers that looked like gasoline drums. He was happy to sell us a jug, and no it didn’t have the prestige of the bottled variety, but it was correct and perfect for “day-to-day consumption.” I admit I liked the idea of having a sort of wine water fountain at the house for “day-to-day consumption,” so we bought a 10-liter container and filled it up with a hose as if the wine were unleaded gas.

  By then, Anaïs had returned to the car to separate the kids, who’d grown restless, each having poked the other in the eye with the Made in China plastic swords we’d bought at the dungeon shop. The jug was tossed in the trunk, and soon we were on the road joining the thousands of other travelers returning to Paris after the long weekend.

  By the time we hit Paris it was night, our car skirting along the Berges de Seine, the Parisian west-east artery that hugs the Right Bank and provides the best views of Paris, that is if you’re not driving. Now, the Berges de Seine are closed, transformed into an impromptu jogging promenade as part of Paris mayor Anne Hildago’s war on cars, which has met strong resistance by those who refuse to abandon their vehicles for the subway, opting instead to sit in traffic for hours clogging and polluting Paris as a form of protest.

  But six years ago, the Berges were open, and we leisurely drove past the Christmas-tree-twinkling Eiffel Tower, then the small replica of the Statue of Liberty near the Pont de Bir Hakeim, then the Louvre on our left. I gazed longingly at all the péniches of packed parties and weddings floating up and down the Seine, thinking the only way we were going to enjoy a French wedding would be to renew our own vows in ten years.

  And perhaps that’s where I was wrong.

  The same way I was looking at those péniches from a comfortable distance, not noticing perhaps that someone was throwing up overboard or someone had just sat down next to an incredible bore, or that the filet mignon was toast, I’d been expecting all of these French weddings to properly befit some pristine moment my then naïve American mind was still clinging to, that each moment should be infallible, thoughtfully prepared, and one that ticked and tocked with tasteful continental precision.

  I hadn’t realized that these French weddings were fraught with error for a reason. They were dry runs for the real thing. In any marriage (mine included), things don’t have a proper starting time, your music’s sometimes off, there are cold patches, bouts of paranoia, and tons of sheets you walk over that are mud-stained by the end. By so thoroughly noting each wedding’s faults as I had, I’d missed the beauty, too. Because it was there, somewhere in the mud next to the tent.

  Eventually we stopped at a light, right below the Pont-Neuf, which had been refurbished since our famous embrace, its sandblasted Parisian beige stone now radiating over the water.

  What I could have missed suddenly flashed in my mind had I not kissed Anaïs that fateful night: none of the hard-to-find churches, none of the plastic jerry cans of wine, none of the odd toasts in dreary tents in rain-soaked Chuck Taylors and rumpled suits, and maybe not even the two ratty kids in back would exist. None of these beautiful things would have come to pass had the sleeping woman riding shotgun next to me not assured me that night, in all her French frankness, that yes, we could always just get divorced.

  The Aristocrats

  I didn’t know it when I first met her, but Anaïs is technically a countess. She comes from an illustrious French aristocrat family, the kind whose name has two des and one la in it, the kind whose tradition of having at least one male relative in the military every generation dates all the way back to the Fifth Crusade.

  I learned this last fact because her ancestors are all up on the wall at her grandparents’ home in the north of France in a region called the Pas de Calais. Her grandfather built the house right across the road from the château that’s been in the family for centuries.

  I’d stare at the illustrations for hours, fascinated, not just by the uniforms—Napoleonic, Colonial, and knight’s armor—but by the names they had: Arnaud Parfait (Arnold Perfect) and Hyacinth and Placide, and yes, even plain-named Robert, the one from the Fifth Crusade, the one in the ironclad outfit holding the mace he probably used somewhere near Tripoli to bludgeon a Moor.

  It’s always a reckoning for an American to come face to face with such an o
ld family, especially someone whose American mother was always so proud of her Waspy family history. While my Murdoch ancestors were crossing the Atlantic huddled in rags in the early 1700s, Anaïs’s people were probably celebrating the family’s thousandth birthday by renovating the footbridge that crosses the moat. But in just over a decade, the awe I felt about all of this history has already faded for me. I found out recently our country house is older than the Declaration of Independence, but I rarely think of it that way, until of course I try to heat it in the winter.

  The proud military lineage of Anaïs’s family, which included the famous General Leclerc, who liberated Paris with De Gaulle, was broken—of course—by her father, Hughes, who became the first male not to fall in line, choosing instead the second-best option: French folk rock star. Anaïs grew up very differently from how I imagine a French aristocrat would. Her childhood wasn’t one of running around the château in a Burberry dress chased by a British nanny for harp lessons, but more of following her dad’s group on tour, sleeping with her sister on leather restaurant banquettes during postconcert band dinners.

  None of Anaïs’s aunts or uncles or cousins were portraits of what I expected the noble French to be, either. They were more like the Kennedys actually, meaning everyone voted left, each liked to drink, and there were a few tragic deaths here and there. Like poor British uncle Tony, who, after arriving from London at Gare du Nord, was run over after he stepped off the sidewalk, because, as a Brit, he was looking the wrong way.

  According to Anaïs’s grandmother, the family charm I’d grown so attached to was genetic, handed down by ancestors whom she’d describe to me at the kitchen table around a glass of wine after dinner: There was a Russian wife of a captain saving great-grandfather Guy from execution during World War I, eccentric ambassador wives living in Turkey and Ottawa, uncles who had world-renowned vineyards in Burgundy, and benevolent counts and countesses with names like Mamichette and Grandpa sunning at the ultra-chic Cap Ferrat in the south of France. The common denominator in each of these illustrious relatives was that they accepted their rank but were far from snobby. In fact, the only people I ever heard them look down on were snobs themselves. Anaïs’s kin were probably the kind in the Middle Ages who would hold a party for the town they’d just sacked, and if you were a villager you’d be so smitten, you wouldn’t even realize you’d just become their serf.