Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  The Centre de Loisirs is a handy deterrent when they act up: “That’s it! You’re off to the Centre this break!” I’ve found myself screaming when they crack my iPad.

  It’s then that their faces turn white. “No! Papa, please! Pas le Centre!” they beg in French, thinking that will make them more endearing. “On sera sages, on promet!” (We’ll be good, we promise), they blubber, offering to paint the living room on top of getting straight A’s.

  So imagine Nathalie’s surprise when I couldn’t tell her where I was partir-ing to; not because I’d forgotten, but because I didn’t even remember there was vacation coming up.

  But how could I? Where I grew up, nobody vacationed in the middle of February for two weeks—a holiday created in France to support the ski industry in towns that rely on the tourism. Nobody went away during the Halloween period—again for two weeks—for something called Toussaint (All Saints). A week here, two weeks there, three weeks in August and loads of three-day weekends that pop up throughout the French calendar. May has four, sometimes five “long weekends” in one month, which is why I’ve recently coined it “the New August.” If it’s not May Day, it’s Victory Day. If it’s not Pentecost, it’s Ascension. And if you want to get freaky, you can take your RTT (sick days or off days—I don’t know, I’ve never qualified) on a Thursday or Tuesday and faire le pont (make a bridge) to, poof! a four-day weekend or even five-day weekend, depending on whether there’s a strike planned the following day. All of this thanks to France’s dubious honor of being a prolabor Catholic country that has fought in two world wars, and that is not afraid to push back with an employer.

  Nathalie was making small talk, sure, but it was French small talk, and although her question was put to me as an icebreaker, there was an angle to it. Vacations are not just times to relax in France, they’re subtle status symbols. Nobody gives a shit if you have a BMW, but a dad who trucks his kids off to the Atlantic coast island of Île de Ré for a week gets a second glance.

  “No,” I promised Nathalie. “Bibi won’t be doing the Centre,” knowing full well the sign-up period had long passed anyway. “I’m not sure what we’ll do,” I said, slowly getting annoyed at both her and myself. “If anything, we’ll just use this time to stay in town and get closer as a family.” I smiled and looked at my phone, wanting her to disappear.

  The future favors the bold, and French vacations favor those who plan. In a country with 0.1 percent annual growth, demand is high and supply is tight. I realize now why the French treat soldes (sales) invitations like concert tickets, willing to stand at the door hours before opening, and why purchasing fall school supplies needs to be done in June—meaning my kids have never had the cool Eastpak backpacks, but instead the leftover Dora the Explorer ones they’re too old for.

  I wanted France to be like the United States, but it is decidedly not. In the States, there is always a last-minute spot on an Amtrak train or a house in the Poconos to rent if it really comes down to it; the Hertz will have that Opel tucked away somewhere on the lot, and if you are up against the wall, you can always call the Great Wolf Lodge.

  But in France, there are no Cinderella stories. Countless times, I’ve called rental agencies or hotels only to hear there’s no vacancy. But whereas you’d expect a simple no and click, the French like to turn the knife.

  “April of this year?” they’ll ask.

  I could imagine them hanging up to recount my pathetic call to their coworkers at lunch. “A guy called this morning, foreign accent, asking for a room . . . get this, for next week!” They’d all roar, I’m sure, until their thoughts would turn to my kids and the wretched predicament the two of them faced—never having a planned vacation, never knowing ahead of time that a three-day weekend was about to drop, standing there in front of school in their Go Diego Go fanny packs.

  You can find last-minute vacation offers in France, but they are always suspect. They’re like the last remaining roast chicken you see turning on the rotisserie. Why is it still there? Is it uncooked? Was it dropped? There’s something too good to be true when you find a house available in France the week before you’re meant to leave. You get the feeling you don’t have all the information. Maybe April’s particularly rainy in Strasbourg, or there’s weirdly no snow in Chamonix in March, or maybe that charming house in Brittany actually had a murder in it.

  To say our vacations were awful our first few years in France would be an understatement. There was always a tragic element to them: broken collarbones, horrible storms, lost luggage. Sure, this could have happened to anybody, but the fact these mishaps were routinely visited upon us meant we were doing something wrong.

  I probably should have realized that unorganized people with young children and little sleep and not much money, rushing to destinations they’d done little research on, were doomed to fail. I was selecting random places in France only because there was a vacancy, and a two-bedroom with a garden featured. The fact that I couldn’t even find these places on a map didn’t matter to me, which, in retrospect, made me the equivalent of a French person living in America saying to his wife, “Look, honey, there’s a nice cottage in . . . where’s Allentown, Pennsylvania?”

  And to make matters worse, Anaïs could never tell me where these places were! She’d lived in Paris her whole life. She’s smoked since she was thirteen, and she’s such a city kid, I think she may possibly be part rat. One would have thought a French native would know the basics, but in Anaïs’s case, travel outside the périphérique (the Parisian beltway) for her was limited to a trip to Mont-Saint-Michel with her school. That and Spain, where her grandparents, who were French expats, had lived. Anaïs and her sister would join them each summer at a villa on a lake in the mountains near Madrid, heading directly to the airport the day school let out, to return only the night before classes started in September. For Anaïs, Paris was a gulag you lived in five-sixths of the year so you could go to Spain for two months and water ski on an artificial lake with cousins and American neighbors while parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles had cocktails and talked around stone tables under pine trees until 3:00 a.m.

  * * *

  I, on the other hand, was simply continuing a family tradition handed down by my parents, who themselves were Griswold-esque in their preparation and execution. As a child, I thought everyone capsized Boston Whalers in Cape Cod (which is apparently hard to do) or had their luggage stolen in Budapest, or unwittingly brought poison ivy into China. And no, moving now to a country where vacation was apparently respected and perfected and where I as the family patriarch would organize it all wouldn’t change that. I still flailed.

  My rookie error, though, was trying to stay in Paris one summer, naïvely thinking I’d beat the French at their own game. When everyone else left, we’d have Paris, a beautiful city in its own right, to ourselves. But if you spend an August here, something dark happens to you. You die a bit inside, and you simulate, if only for a brief moment, what life would be like following a biological attack. After July 15 the Left Bank—or what used to be the Left Bank—becomes an annexed protectorate of Wichita, Kansas. You drift by hordes of Reebok-wearing tourists looking for the Louv-ray on your way to or from another closed café wondering where you went wrong in life. And in the places that aren’t very touristy, my neighborhood, for example, everything is so closed you might possibly starve to death.

  Plus, my wife finds the touristy things creepy. She had not only never been up in the Eiffel Tower, she had never been to its base. For her, Paris isn’t supposed to be sunny and breezy. It’s supposed to be trench coat damp and foreboding, at least during the months she was used to being in Paris. Taking a tour down the sun-filled Seine on the Bateaux Mouches in August wasn’t a Parisian thing at all for her, it was a Vegas thing. “But at least with Las Vegas,” she remarked as I took a cheesy photo of her half-smiling, “we’d know that eventually we could come home to Paris. Whereas now, we can’t co
me home, because we’re already home.” It made more sense in French.

  Unlike me, Anaïs didn’t care where other people were vacationing, nor did she feel angry they had grandmothers who could lighten the babysitting load during these obscene amounts of time off, or that they always had stuff planned and things booked and knew where shit was. Because another thing Anaïs isn’t, is jealous, which makes for a good balance, because that’s all that I am. Whereas she’ll be polite listening to someone recount their trip to the Dordogne region, deep down, aside from hoping they had a good time, she really doesn’t care. Whereas I do, and much the same way a motivated social climber will mimic an accent he thinks is “proper,” I slowly began asking people exactly where the Dordogne was and what they packed for those three-day weekends and when they looked for houses for the summer, trying to find patterns and links that would help me crack the code on how the French pulled off vacations.

  “Well, we went with Raphael and Eleanor to Corsica last year, and Antoine and Sophia and their kids joined us,” I heard over drinks before dinner. “We skied in Megève this winter with Therese and her kids, and my mother joined us with her boyfriend, and Thibault came down for a few days,” I noted at the sandbox, where Bibi was stealing the shovel of another kid because I, of course, had forgotten to bring hers.

  The common thread throughout all this was there was never just a “we,” meaning the immediate family. There were always friends involved or cousins or neighbors or fellow parents from school. And now I know why. If you have six weeks of vacation and a slew of three-day weekends and a midrange salary, whether you like it or not, you’re going to be vacationing en groupe.

  Our holidays had been abject failures until now because we were bucking the trend, trying to go it alone. What if we became fully French and vacationed like the rest of them do, meaning with friends? It would be cheaper. Others more talented than us could plan. Plus, it couldn’t be worse than what we were doing already, could it? Could it?

  The French, I’ve found, ritually start their summer vacation planning as early as Christmastime. It’s almost as if they chant the New Year’s countdown 4-3-2-1 and start to look at farmhouses in Provence as the champagne pops. They do so because they know they’re about to enter the months of January and February, which are so dreary, you need to live vicariously through the photos of a vacation rental, just so you don’t shoot yourself.

  I should have known during a dinner with friends a few weeks into January that the vacation talk being bandied about the table would become more serious once we retired to the salon for a digestif (the ceremonial post dinner drink). I normally ignore the conversation during these kinds of sit-downs simply because I’m often too drunk to talk. But this time, I could still feel the warm glow of the music and the faces around me.

  As the laptop was moved to the coffee table and we all snuggled around the couch looking like an impromptu key party, our group began sketching out houses to rent. Greece was in play for an early part of the primary, then Spain made a run, but as choices were vetoed and prices compared, we coalesced around Italy, and the long shot of Umbria. It wasn’t so touristy as Tuscany, and it was cheaper. The house was bigger, and it featured one of those infinity pools overlooking the hills.

  What I didn’t know, though, was that by merely looking at the photos and parroting phrases like “c’est génial” and “pourquoi pas!” and “cool!” and “super cool!” I was signing a moral lease that bound us to these people eight months down the road, where we’d find ourselves driving from Rome into the hills of Umbria.

  * * *

  So that summer, as the von Griswolds (Anaïs, Bibi, and me) comfortably made our way through the Umbrian countryside, Herr Patriarch at the helm, lush chestnut groves and elm forests, and sweet wafts of lavender streamed through the sunroof. The Italian heat was dry and made crisp by the sound of cicadas. And as far as the eye could see, the ochre hills pitched and rolled, while the cypress trees that lined our road stood green and upright like soldiers saluting us.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I probably should have been flooring it.

  I say this because I didn’t know that on French vacation your bedroom isn’t decided by who draws the longest straw, or who pays the most, but by the time-honored French gentleman’s agreement of first come, first served. And I learned this only upon arrival, when nobody was there to greet us. Well, they were, but not in the house. Instead everyone was lounging by the pool, already unpacked and lazily chatting away. The move-in time had been merely twenty minutes ago.

  On our way to the last available room, we passed the airy and cool ones already taken on the lower floor, those with the big windows, which overlooked the pool and the hills behind it. Our friends already looked impressively settled in. Laptops were open, clothes were already strewn everywhere (on purpose, I’m sure) as if to say, “Look, I can’t just pick up and switch rooms with John and Anaïs now, I’m already installed.” I even saw a photo hurriedly tacked to a wall.

  The room that was to be ours, on the other hand, was up a long flight of stairs and at the end of a hall, and, of course, was darker and stuffier, thanks to its one window being covered in thick ivy. “You have great shade! I’m jealous,” our friend said as she left us to gripe. I kept a stiff upper lip while unpacking, knowing full well there’s nothing worse than a guest who makes a fuss the first day. Plus, there wasn’t time to stress about the room being an oven when there were tons of people downstairs I hadn’t formally met.

  Well, I’d met some of them, but not all, because what’s written in the fine print of French vacations is that you not only vacation with friends, you vacation with their friends as well. This can be good and bad. Sometimes the people are cooler than your actual friend, which gives you the option of upgrading. Other times, they’re so awful, it makes you question not only your friend’s taste in people, but also whether you’re the exception or the norm.

  And then there are surprise guests. It’s not until you’re in the car driving to the destination that you’ll receive a text explaining that someone’s mom is set to “pass through.” She’s not staying “the whole time,” they’ll explain, just ten of the fourteen days. Again you’ll shrug it off, because you don’t want to be the guy who complains about someone’s mother showing up. Plus, seventy-year-old French mothers are more sprite than their American counterparts. They probably saw the Stones live, they might own a Mapplethorpe, and you can talk about sex in front of them.

  Our friends from that initial dinner were Elizabeth and Stan. Both worked corporate jobs, which I assumed would be a benefit, because I didn’t see vacationing with skimping artists as much of a vacation. Better, I thought, to relax with people who hate their jobs enough to really want to go all out during their earned time off.

  Well, there was one artist actually. Bashir, a painter and sculptor who was so fit I called him “the sculpted sculptor.” Then there were the singles—François and Simone. No, they weren’t a recomposed couple, but maybe that’s what French vacations are for, I told myself. Maybe we were witnessing the beginning of a long relationship and it would be thanks to a small gesture on my part, such as allowing François to sit next to Simone during dinner the first night that would put in place the fireworks.

  By the way, and this cannot be underlined enough, we were the only ones with a child we had to bring along. Four-year-old Bibi was embarking on her first real vacation, too, and it turns out, she’d end up being the only friend I could count on during our stay.

  * * *

  Our infinity pool sat flat as a mirror the first day, the raft slowly drifting from one end to the other, and as the sun set over our house, it gradually cast a long azure shadow on the valley below. I didn’t see this, of course, because I was at the supermarket, then at the cheese guy in another village, then at a ham guy in another village five kilometers away. We were five or six adults cramming into a small car and the
n into small shops, half of us with our hands in our pockets doing nothing but looking like bored kids on a school outing. Once the food was gathered, the mission was to drive to another village to find the right wine, and since the market that sold the fish was closed on Sunday, it was decided we’d come back the next day, because why else would you go to Umbria if not to drive around in a clown car looking for tuna?

  For the French, the first twenty-four hours of vacation are reserved for the food shop. The food and the menu are so serious, if you’re not huddled in long debates about who wants what on the menu that week, you’re party to a soul-crushing slog through the badly lit cold aisles of chain supermarkets, only to find out you don’t buy the same things.

  “You eat that bread, John, really? Do you know how much gluten it has?”

  “Cocoa Puffs, wow! Look what John gives his kid!”

  Sometimes my French friends will come with recipes they’ve ripped out of Elle magazine. Other times, they’ll want to get the lay of the land before deciding what to try. Mostly, though, it’s climate-related: for winter, hearty dishes like a pot au feu (beef stew) or roti de porc (roast pork) or the cholesterol-filled widow-maker cassoulet. Lots of gazpacho, goat cheese mint salads, mozzarella, and melons in summer.

  The French are naturally good cooks; I’ll give them that. They’re like friends who grew up with dads who were gearheads and can fix a lawn mower engine as easily as I can tweet. Although it comes naturally to most of them, the French can also be a bit cocky sometimes, to the point where cooking restaurant-quality dishes isn’t, in their minds, a matter of experience and years honed in the bowels of a restaurant, but more of time, as in if they had more time in the week, they, too, could do that “osso bucco de folie” (an osso bucco that will blow your mind).