Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Fred was the same. Once I watched in admiration as he carried a sleepy dinner party on his back, keeping the conversations moving despite the social ineptitude of the guests and hosts who’d invited us in the first place. Usually, when parties get boring, I take it upon myself to do the extrovert’s heavy lifting—sometimes disastrously—but this time I could sit back and watch a maestro at work. One of the stories Fred spun involved a skiing trip in Italy near the Matterhorn, where he and friends went down the wrong slope at the end of the day, only to realize they were stuck in Switzerland, and the lift to go back up was closed. With no credit cards and no money, Fred’s aristocratic panache and connections saved the day, securing the group a suite in a swanky hotel, with a promise to call back the next day with the credit card number, “but only after noon, not before. We want to take advantage of the beautiful snow tomorrow, as you can understand.”

  Although it turned out he wasn’t close enough on the bloodline to be considered family, Fred was positive our chance meeting wasn’t by hasard. Certain aristocrats, he felt, were just like the French masons or graduates from France’s grandes écoles; they had a way of identifying one another. And whatever you think of your noble name and history and regardless of whether you take it seriously, Fred felt you shared, at least, a common way of looking at the world. He’d grown tired of always being yoked to Paris’s bobos, the bourgeois bohemian sub-strata every clickbait article needs to describe at length when discussing the Tenth’s gentrification and kale bars and the link between the two. He considered himself more an ari-bo, which works in French because it’s pronounced exactly like Haribo—the German gummy bear company. According to Fred, the ari-bo differed from the bobo in that he voted a bit more left, didn’t have a nine-to-five, probably had a château but didn’t declare it on his taxes, worked, but not too much, and lived in diverse neighborhoods, preferring a place like the Tenth to the bourgeois fiefdoms of the Sixteenth or Versailles or wherever else the classic aristos lived.

  “Ari-bos may lead similar lives to bobos,” Fred told me. “But we don’t have the same problems. We don’t need to do the rat race thing because we’re already at the top, at least in our mind. And that’s the most important, right?”

  I never gave Fred’s theory much credence (assuming it was the Côtes du Rhône talking more than anything) until I found myself boarding the subway with Bibi last year on our way to her horseback-riding lesson in the Bois de Boulogne.

  Ever since she’s been able to walk, Bibi has been on a horse, which is odd considering she’s grown up in a neighborhood where the population density is the highest in Western Europe and where the only green for blocks is a sliver of grass near the Canal St. Martin. Regardless, she’s always been drawn toward riding, partly because Anaïs’s family are horse people (Hughes played polo between rock concerts, making him the ultimate oxymoron; Anaïs’s stepfather once played on the same team as her father, and all of Anaïs’s sisters ride) and partly because pony clubs, as they’re called, rank at the top of the list of parental aids when people ask me how we manage child care in France.

  Pony clubs have saved my life on several occasions during hellish weeklong vacations that by now we all know I hadn’t thought to organize for ahead of time. Pony clubs are babysitters, time outs, and cocktail parties for millions of French parents. Plus they’re everywhere in France, even in Paris, where you can ride your bike to either the Bois de Vincennes or, in our case, La Villette in the Nineteenth, and within minutes’ walk amidst hay and stables while you answer email on your phone and your kids learn to ride. Classes run twice a week, and it’s during these times that I’ve watched other parents network and gossip and discuss school and camps and strategize about whatever else is needed to survive French society. I must admit, it’s worked for me, too. The woman who translates my articles? Pony club. Our best friends in the Perche? Pony club. Bibi’s first ninth-grade student internship? Pony club. It’s gotten to the point where if I ever write a second book, it will surely be titled Everything I Needed to Know about France, I Learned at the Pony Club.

  Bibi has since graduated from ponies to full-grown horses and she stars on a team that competes twice a month and for a week in July when half of France descends on the small town of Lamotte-Beuvron in the center of the country for the Championnat de France, the equivalent of the French Kentucky Derby. There, members of every pony club in the country jump obstacles and perform dressage while their parents walk through mud and work the connections they’ve been making since childhood.

  Bibi stands out on her team, not only because she’s the youngest, but also because she has the longest commute. While her teammates all arrive by car or scooter from the tony neighborhoods of Neuilly-sur-Seine or the chic banlieue (suburb) of St. Cloud, Bibi takes the subway each Wednesday and Friday with her riding helmet and whip.

  Watching her the other day I realized I would never be an aristocrat like Hughes or Fred. I worry too much about adjustable-rate mortgages and keeping my nose to the grindstone or what people think of me. In fact, the only thing I inherited from my black sheep ancestor (which he passed on the moment he stepped on that ship to America) was a different way of looking at the world. True aristocracy, I’ve learned, isn’t in a title or a castle or a name or a secret handshake, but in the ability to live a life full of contradictions, which now becomes your new family crest.

  * * *

  After so many years now in France, the clique I’ve found best fits me are the misfit ari-bos I live with: Anaïs, Bibi, and Otto, who flashed his own style of nobility one night last summer when he became certain that the neighborhood Bastille Day fireman’s ball was a real ball and insisted on wearing his most cherished outfit for the occasion, his Paris Saint Germain track suit. I think he even brought flowers.

  “Otto von Sothen?” my dad said when he first heard the name of his grandson. “Sounds like a damn James Bond villain.”

  It’s true Otto’s name is a mouthful. It has such aristocratic oomph to it, I wonder sometimes if he’s destined for great things simply on account of the name. There was the tenth-century Holy Roman Emperor, I tell him, plus the Bavarian Otto who became the first king of Greece. There was Otto von Bismarck. Otto Preminger.

  “And Otto Porter, Jr.,” Otto proudly adds, citing the name of the Washington Wizards’ starting small forward.

  Like his grandfather, Otto’s already going against type. He has three types of hair gel to give him that perfect Cristiano Renaldo soccer star coiffe, and he’s happiest when walking in gym shorts, socks, and shower sliders to buy a kebab down the street, holding our mutt Bogart close at the collar to give off the air he’s a pit bull. This is the same kid who managed to sneak a water-based decal onto his neck for his French passport photo.

  Often I think my children will be blessed or cursed by their names. It’s hard to convince me Otto won’t inherit Saxony one day or that Bibi won’t be a New York/Parisian socialite known for her long parties and longer cigarette holders, the sort of “gal” whose name social climbers will drop when they’re trying to one-up each other. “Jim and I met at Bibi von Sothen’s Christmas mixer—the one you weren’t invited to.”

  Only time will tell.

  * * *

  Years back, over Christmas, we found ourselves again at Anaïs’s grandparents’ house, and during a sleepless night caused by too much silence and not enough streetlight, I wandered groggily down the upstairs hallway near our bedroom to once again stare at the illustrations of Robert and Hyacinth and Arnaud Parfait. What I hadn’t noticed before was a framed, illustrated family tree hanging there next to the portraits. And if you looked close enough higher on the tree, you’d find great-grandfather Guy’s name on a thick branch, then Anaïs’s grandfather, Alain, curving off to the right of him. There you could run your finger farther along the line and eventually hit Hughes, at which point two twigs would grow north and northwest, Anaïs, and her younger sister, Leïto.<
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  As I stared out of the window into the oil-slick darkness, at my Picasso cubist face staring back at me, reflected in the glass, I tried to imagine what the aristo von Sothen tree might resemble. It wouldn’t be the perfectly symmetric oak like Anaïs’s family, more a haphazard thorn bush of different stems starting somewhere and ending somewhere else.

  The trunk might be German, sure, but early at the base an odd long stem would stretch out horizontally left, forming what would be the American branch, where my grandfather and father and cousins and their children would all take root. From there, though, one branch would U-turn its way back, creating what would be known as the French branch, where I, Bibi, and Otto, and, I hope, their children and their children’s children, might spring. Oh, and the Brazilian branch? It would be there, too; just so we could conveniently call it the fake branch and blame anything vulgar and tacky or worse on it.

  And with every branch of every tree, a story might sprout; one that over time would grow more and more embellished and aristocrat-ish and whatever else you wanted it to be—just like my predecessor’s on the Canary Islands. And the pitch might be something similar: An immigrant black sheep flees the reign of Mad King George Bush II, where he lands in France and marries a countess he hit on over brunch one morning in Brooklyn. Legend has it he learned French well enough upon arrival that he wrote funny articles for magazines.

  And perhaps someday in the future, in a hard-to-find house in a faraway town, there’d be an illustration of this very hero hanging on a wall; one of a young man standing there awkwardly in his Stan Smiths with that look of general confusion I wear most weeks. John the ari-bo, it would read below; the first of his name, the one in the Uniqlo sweatshirt, the one holding an iPhone he probably used somewhere in the Tenth to text something snarky to friends.

  Bringing Up Bibi

  My friends in the States love me, but they’d never, ever looked to me for advice before I moved abroad. If anything, I am the canary in their life lesson coal mine. Knowing me has helped them avoid jumping into frozen lakes naked or playing three-card monte in truck stops or leaving boarding tickets on the bar while they head to the bathroom.

  However, since I moved to France, the tables have turned slightly. I’m a French father now, and in their eyes this makes me some child-raising guru, one who personifies all those Bringing Up Bébé techniques they’ve read about but haven’t yet seen in practice. “Share with us, O wise one,” their eyes plea, and it’s only as I look back and produce vague responses like “To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that hard,” or, “It’s pretty logical if you think about it,” do I realize how disingenuous I’m being.

  Like them, I, too, assumed the vaunted système and méthode française was like some genius super computer; all I had to do was plug my kids into it and watch it work. Bibi and Otto would have manners, dress tastefully, and harbor the astonishing capacity to sit through an adult dinner while also doing my taxes. And while my American friends were wringing their hands over how many time outs to give and riffling through books on how to determine how behind your kid is with those early milestones, I’d be in France, where the only thing they make better than wine is children. In a way, I felt like the idiot son who’d inherited his father’s Forbes 500 company, the one whose sole job was just to not drive it into the ground.

  In reality, my role the past sixteen years has waffled between that of the local super fan (the one who roots and cheers and attends each game while the professionals on the field do the work) and that of a World War I grunt (the one who thought it would be a cakewalk, but who’s found himself in a long campaign he didn’t anticipate, bogged down in the trenches of teacher strikes and empty Wednesdays typing on his laptop during horseback-riding class, the one hunched over homework he can’t help his kids with, or the one lost in the weeds during some incomprehensible parent-teacher meeting).

  * * *

  My recollection of the early years, as for any parent who didn’t sleep, is muddled. By the time we arrived in France, Anaïs was already très pregnant. And during the final trimester, while we looked for an apartment after the wedding and applied for my French residency, we found time to consult with doctors, arrive on time for final checkups, and research what to expect. The only books I remember buying were name books, though, and whenever Anaïs asked me if I thought that a burping technique had been debunked since Dr. Spock or whether we should sing to the baby while it was still in the womb, my replies were one-worded: “Ella? Sinead? Alistair! I haven’t heard that one in a while!” The name, for me, counted and was more important than any holistic environment we could ever provide. A good name could ward off mumps. Also, the naming part was an activity and contribution I understood.

  During the doctor consultations, I found myself checked out half the time, and it was probably for the better. I’m sure I would have freaked if I grasped the risks of an amniocentèse or the “what-if” scenarios for a potential cesarean. Instead I smiled and waved through all the garbled French, entranced by the ultrasound printouts. “Anaïs, that’s the skull of a Lars, don’t you think?” My choice to fly on autopilot was also a defense mechanism to counter being overwhelmed. Adapting to a foreign country had already flooded my hard drive. If you’d met me at the time, you wouldn’t have seen a stressed-out person but someone looking as though he’d just been tasered.

  Normally when someone’s feeling as useless as I was, he or she finds a way to chip in somehow. But since I didn’t have a car, or a French driver’s license, and since shopping for a stroller or one of those baby bathtubs seemed too daunting, I plunged into needless tasks instead, such as asking my mother to ship over the chestnut crib I slept in as a baby. Suddenly I found the resolve to discuss with an ébéniste (carpenter) how I wanted the crib sanded and what tint it should be lacquered. And when Anaïs waddled into the apartment days before we left for the hospital asking if I’d packed that overnight suitcase, I, of course, said no, and showed her instead a wooden crib straight out of a Dickens novel. There were no blankets, nor a mattress. “But,” I said, “won’t it be awesome to take a picture of the baby in this and compare it with my photo when I was a kid?” I was still thinking a lot about myself.

  Anaïs insisted her doctor be her longtime ob-gyn, Marie-José, whose clinic was located in the western suburb of Le Chesnay, one of those Paris seventies planned developments cut out of a Jacques Tati film, a place where everything looks a bit too organized and manicured to be human. The plant beds are there. The cul-de-sacs wind here. And that lawn in front of the office building has never been walked on, ever. While we waited for our appointments, I’d find myself strolling around Le Chesnay looking for a café, feeling like a clay figurine on a 3D model. This wasn’t at all where I expected to become a French father. I’d pictured, I don’t know, something more French—a hospital steps from the Seine where nurses in white headscarves would lead me down hushed mahogany-trimmed halls past smoking doctors to see my beautiful newborn. Instead, Bibi’s official place of birth would be this, a French Scottsdale, Arizona.

  Whatever problems I had with Le Chesnay were shelved when I met Marie-José, who looked like an older Brigitte Bardot. She sported tasteful gold jewelry and a solid tan, and although she was on-call en permanence, she never deigned to wear Crocs, and her blond shock of hair was impeccable. She also carried index cards, one for each patient, which she kept nestled in the front pocket of her scrubs. It was as if they were cue cards and she was an actress shooting the role of a doctor. Marie-José also happened to be very sympathetic to my plight. She’d speak slowly to both of us, sometimes even in English, and she always called Anaïs “ma biche” (my dear, but deer in the animal sense). I found this adorable. It was as if Marie-José were making a play on words in English for my sake.

  Bibi was born on a beautiful late June afternoon. I remember it, because I was taking banal pictures of trees and flowers in the clinic’s garden five minutes before her arrival
. Sure, I probably should have been at Anaïs’s side, but I also felt it important to document the last vestiges of life as I knew it. By the time I wandered into the operating room, Anaïs was midlabor, and before I could put my mask on, Marie-José had handed me a pair of scissors to cut Bibi’s ropelike umbilical cord. I was a part of the process now. Waiting on the sidelines was over.

  Minutes later I was whisked into a room filled with couveuses (rectangular glass pod incubators) with babies inside. When I scanned the room, I saw five or six swaddled newborns and one miniature 1920s actress. Bibi had round eyes the size of saucers, chalky white skin, and dainty fingers that seemed already capable of needlepoint. There wasn’t an ounce of baby fat on her, not a touch of red or rash.

  “Elle est si fine (she’s so delicate), so girly,” friends who dropped by would say, “she looks just like John!”

  The day I’d become an official patriarch, the so-called summit of a man’s virile and masculine life, I was told I resembled Lillian Gish.

  My role would expand soon after, when it came time to register Bibi’s name at the mairie (town hall). French law demands this be done no later than three days after the birth, and usually the chore falls on the father, who’s not convalescing. Again, I strolled down that soulless cul-de-sac past the single Le Chesnay mailbox, to where a woman at the mairie asked me to fill out forms and print the name Bibi clearly, and asked for the first time the one question I would hear thousands of times in the future, “Is that her real name or a diminutive?” Then, the woman handed me ten copies of Bibi’s birth certificate plus a welcome packet, as if Bibi had just booked a cruise. It was silly, but at the same time, this pomp and circumstance and traditional fluff meant something. Just like how the mayor of the Tenth wore his sash when he oversaw our civil marriage, there was an old-school formality to registering my child’s name that I appreciated. It made a father feel needed. I could be helpful! Look. I’m signing stuff.