Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Years later, luck would have it that Jim and I would be neighbors for a week. Anaïs and I had rented out our apartment in the Tenth and were living in the Fourteenth for ten days, as part of our annual Paris staycation.

  Upon our arrival, as we walked down an ivy-covered footpath leading to our rental, our host pointed out Jim’s apartment on the right.

  Like all the apartments in the co-op, Jim’s was a brick two-story turn-of-the-century atelier, originally constructed and reserved for artists, where sculptors (because their material was too heavy to lug upstairs) would take the ground floor and where painters would take the top. Each atelier opened up onto the same path, which Parisians call a villa, and which is usually hidden behind iron gates and giant doors so you don’t die of jealousy. Villas are rarely seen, but every arrondissement has them, the hidden jewels of Paris, in my opinion, tiny traces of twentieth-century countryside still growing wildly behind the scenes, offering an oasis to a lucky few who scored them half a century ago for the price of a juicer.

  During that week, I read up on my famous neighbor, learning he’d been born in Louisiana and later lived in Venezuela, Edinburgh, London, and finally Paris, each time bringing a homey, down-to-earth warmth to the avant-garde art scene of the sixties. Jim’s bookstores in Scotland or film festivals or fringe happenings in London attracted the likes of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and David Bowie, and when he landed in Paris, the party continued.

  The Sunday night before we were scheduled to move back to the Tenth, Anaïs and I reserved two seats at Jim’s table and walked through the garden, wondering where all of this would lead. We made sure to feed Otto and Bibi early, telling them they could watch Netflix for an hour, and since they had school the next day, that they should go to bed by nine. “But don’t worry,” I told them, “we’ll probably be home by 9:30.”

  I was skeptical. The idea of knocking on the door of a stranger’s apartment just to meet another group of strangers scared me. At best, I predicted, we’d all be standing there with a bowl of chili cupped in our hands making small talk and watching the clock. At worst? We’d be drugged and robbed.

  Jim had recently suffered health issues and was confined to a wheelchair he positioned near the door where we entered. He took our names, checked us off the guest list, and collected our contribution. His loft was simple and whitewashed, with a smattering of books on the wall mixed with tiny photos of Jim walking in a Dior fashion show as a seventy-year-old or with James Baldwin and Allen Ginsberg in the same garden. He no longer did the cooking. Guest chefs, he told me, would make appearances or a friend would chip in, depending on the week. This time it was Seymus, an Irishman who organized Paris’s first St. Patrick’s Day. He was serving a borscht he and his Russian friend had made, followed by ribs prepared by Randy, who’d come to France in the 1970s and who’d started a barbecue restaurant in Paris in the Fifth.

  Randy was one of those talkers who, when he starts, you first think “Dear god, what have I gotten into?” But as he spoke on, I became intrigued. He told me how he and his wife had driven from Burkina Faso to the Central African Republic right after the dictator Bokassa had been thrown out in the seventies, and how they made their way by “bush taxi,” riding in the back of a pickup, stopping only when the driver used the truck to run over an antelope that would be dinner that night. Randy touched on what it was like to travel as an interracial couple in central Africa in the seventies, then segued into a trip he’d taken to the Ganges River where he wanted to dispose of the personal items of a recently deceased friend and how he’d been shocked by the gory scene, bodies of people and cows floating on the water, eaten by turtles, with other bodies burned on the banks—just the kind of stuff you don’t want to hear when you’re eating ribs.

  Some of the guests, like Randy, seemed to know their way around. They were regulars who’d dined with Jim since the eighties. Others were freshly arrived jet-lagged Seattle residents, not sure really what to do, standing next to the box wine smiling the way I’d pictured myself doing thirty minutes before. Rounding out the cast were two premed students from Minneapolis, an actor from Boston, a philosopher from Lisbon, and a dandy from Argentina who was hitting on the three fifty-year-old divorcées from Philadelphia who were on a Girls Gone Wild tour to Paris, following the death of one of their exes.

  While Anaïs mingled, I found myself sitting next to Jim, flattered he’d chosen me to talk to. Even after forty years, the exercise of hosting, I could tell, wasn’t a chore for him. “Who knows what will come of this night,” Jim told me, eyeing the Argentinian making his move. “All the stories and interactions that spin from this moment can lead to anything. Don’t you think?” There was a genuine gravitational pull to the guy, an aura I’ve only noticed in famous people I’ve interviewed, and while we talked, I realized that what Jim had embraced, I’d been fighting this whole time. I’d wanted each dinner to follow a script I’d written beforehand, the one where I shine and the others are clever and the food we eat is delicious and the affair goes long into the night. It was the kind of script Thierry Ardisson could shoot and edit.

  For Jim, though, a dinner was more improv, a sit at the roulette wheel where the bouncing ball can go any number of ways, and regardless of the outcome, the time spent together was what made it memorable. Although you came from everywhere and anywhere, Jim told me, your mere presence that night meant you were agreeing to play the game and make an effort. And that was the most important thing of all. It showed you were still alive. Jim confided later he’d never really had a job, and yet, he’d had a remarkably rich life. And while we chatted, I watched him in his wheelchair surrounded by people a third his age, wondering where I’d be at eighty. Would I have the same spirit and openness, the discipline to always look toward the light in people? Or would I be in some retirement home, staring at Fox News? Following Jim’s dinner, I was determined to judge less and make more of an effort, and yes, embrace the chaos of dining with people I barely knew.

  * * *

  This, of course, all backfired on me months later when we dropped in on Camille and Guillaume’s beach house in Cap Ferret as part of a stopover leg on our way back from Spain in August.

  Over the previous summer at their house, I’d won the heart of an older neighbor, Gérard, who lived across the street. Gérard had taken a particular shine to me, probably because I did what I often do in French social situations: laugh on cue, be the amiable American who’s lived in Europe and “gets it,” ask pointed questions about someone’s family’s history, all while reacting with a series of well-timed “ah bons” and “vraiments?”

  News had reached Gérard that we were in town, so, on the night of our arrival, after eight hours of driving, I found myself sitting next to him at an impromptu cocktail, which, of course, he’d dropped by unannounced to attend. The apéro later morphed into a dinner, then a digestif, me once again hauling the heavy lumber of listening to another round of summer season traffic congestion problems or septic tank issues facing the island, my new seventy-five-year-old buddy rushing back to his house to fetch a couple more Bordeaux bottles, which I absolutely had to try.

  I admit I was flattered by Gérard’s attention. I have a soft spot for older people who like me. If just for a night, they make me feel like a precocious child invited to sit with the adults. But by midnight, with the dinner party having dwindled to just three of us, my friend Guillaume, Gérard, and I sat under the pine trees, our huddled conversation lit by one candle. And I wanted out. But before I could subtly exit, I noticed Gérard laboring, twitching almost as if he were having a stroke. And although the light was dim, I could see him across from me, his bulging eyes looking like those of a gaffed bass, the back of his hand over his mouth. The poor man was stifling a vomit. Had he not tried to block it, it probably wouldn’t have caused as much damage, but by covering his mouth, Gérard halted the first breach as a spillway would a dam. This, of course, only increased the pressure of th
e second hurl, which broke through his fingers and shot across the table like an exploded paint can. Since it was drizzling that night, and because the table was poorly lit, and because I couldn’t imagine a seventy-five-year-old sweater-over-the-shoulders, penny-loafered former town clerk had just puked in my face, I assumed the moisture was the Cap Ferret mist and I wiped it from my eyes. It wasn’t until I saw Gérard heaving off to his right that I realized the full horror.

  Had I not made it such a point to win over this French stranger I probably wouldn’t have been lying in bed hung over and graffitied the next morning. Anaïs had little sympathy. She’d gone to bed knowing I’d dug my own grave, and this time, she hoped, the message was clear. I didn’t need to be friends with everybody.

  * * *

  Following Cap Ferret, we put a moratorium on dinners and kept to ourselves for most of a year, which actually created the inverse effect. When friends noticed they weren’t receiving their biannual invite chez nous, they doubled down on asking us over to their place, paranoid we were either angry with them or having couple issues. This, of course, led to more declinings, which then led to more invitations.

  “How about we just meet for drinks after work?” I’d propose. Work drinks had served me well in America. It came from a time-honored American tradition of keeping friends without having to go all in. But with Parisians, these invites routinely fell flat, often met with the response “But, John, what will we eat?”

  “Nothing. We’re drinking. That’s the point,” I’d respond, a bit annoyed I even had to explain.

  For my French friends, a drink without eating is something close to heresy and, if anything, borderline suspicious. My long sabbatical from the social circuit could have been for a variety of reasons. Maybe I was single now. Maybe I’d come out. Maybe both. “What does John want from me with these drinks?” I saw them asking themselves as they stared at my text in their cubicle. “Could it be sex?” The French didn’t like the spontaneity part either. Socializing involves more than just being social. They want a two-week heads-up to give them time to think of a tasteful dish and time to order that case of wine from the vineyard they loved in Burgundy. Plus, they always wanted more time with us—time, time, time, time, which beers and pretzels over a game at a bar won’t give them.

  Fine, I said. Dinner it will be. But just when I felt ready to dip back into French society, putting quality ahead of quantity this round—meaning just close friends and not all the time, the unthinkable happened: Trump was elected, and suddenly, I didn’t have an appetite. Dinner plans were scrapped and invites turned down. I couldn’t bear seeing anyone, and nobody, it seemed, could bear seeing me. If I wasn’t shutting myself in the house out of shame I was forcing myself to make those neighborhood rounds again, as a way to salvage the wreckage of America’s standing in the world. Yet every postelection interaction with a French person felt gross—like a thirty-second political anatomy class, me forced to explain for the n-teenth time why the liver of the Hillary campaign had so many spots on it or why people ignored the white working class or if the Russians really did have a pee tape.

  The bonjours I received now were different from before. They carried in them either open hostility—“I see you across the street, John. Bonjour, John. I know you see me!”—or perverse curiosity. People wanted to know more. Pourquoi, John, they’d ask. Pourquoi people in America were not going on strike? (The French would!) Pourquoi the Congress would let this man do what he was doing? Pourquoi, John? Pourquoi? But instead of knowing the answer to their pourquois or giving people the in-depth answer a supposed “journalist” should have, I froze and dug into my old bag of George Bailey tricks instead—asking if the croissants were warm or wondering if the new Beaujolais had arrived. But nobody wanted that shit anymore. America had spoken, loudly, and these French were done with the chitchat. Suddenly I was the one who was proposing an olive branch dinner chez nous.

  “Sure,” they’d respond, “but not this weekend, though, nor the one after.” Karma was a bitch.

  Anaïs felt the most cheated. She’d done nothing wrong, and now she was married to a man with the social status of a registered sex offender, a man shuffling around in slippers reading Trump’s Twitter feed.

  “Can I have my friends back, please?” she finally asked. She was calling in her debt.

  “By all means. Take them!” I told her.

  There’s a point in every expat’s life where you hit a wall. Where the role you think you’ve been playing living in a foreign land is just that, a role. I wasn’t John, I was learning, but Djohn, a manufactured Euro version of what I thought played better abroad. And those who had claimed to be my friends, I thought, only wanted a minstrel American version of me; someone happy to ape any stereotype or play the foil to that stereotype. These people had befriended me, sure, but for the same cynical reasons I had them—to have an ami Américain, a knockoff brand of the real thing. Maybe all of this dinner party having and French friend schmoozing was nothing but a sham masked as cultural assimilation.

  If Anaïs wanted a party, because she wanted back her friends, then fine, I’d give her a party. But I’d do it my way—a July Fourth barbecue with all the Trumplandia trappings these French fuckers could eat. As the date loomed, I chucked all I’d learned from Thierry Ardisson and his ilk. I filled up a plastic baby pool with ice and beer and worked on a playlist that featured lots of country music. I didn’t bother to give out the code to enter the building, nor did I specifically mention a firm starting time. Figure it out, I thought. People can come when they want, I said. Bring kids. I don’t care. And no. There’s no table placement. Just a big buffet and some cornbread. Don’t know cornbread? Don’t come then. And when I made these rough demands in a semipolite email that started with “Since you don’t want to have work drinks . . .” I was sure nobody would come.

  Then on the big day, with my ribs ready and my Merle Haggard playing and my father’s World War II American flag hanging in the living room, I waited with my feet up in the garden, which explains why I didn’t hear the buzzer. Anaïs did, though, and opened the door, and knock by knock, drip by drip, people did arrive with wine or with flowers or with both. Faces I hadn’t seen in years came through the door. There was the Turkish tailor, Mr. Gulak, who’d accidentally cut my suit pants into shorts once because his wife didn’t understand my French. There was Guillaume, who’d witnessed my vomited-upon face that night in the kitchen at Cap Ferret and was sworn to secrecy. There were people I’d blown off for ages or hadn’t seen since our wedding. There were the school moms and the wine guy and even Marie-Laure, the fellow dog walker I couldn’t bear small-talking with anymore, because she always had some stupid petition for me to sign.

  The bisous flowed, and so did the champagne. Everyone picked hors d’œurves from ze island, each skewering a pig in a blanket with toothpicks decorated with tiny American flags. Gone was the choreography I’d admired and then detested at French dinners past. Madame wasn’t servie. Madame was drunk. Our apartment was an exotic wonderland of kids running pell-mell and hot dogs cooking, a dog barking and Kid Rock blasting. And the French, who I’d assumed would detest this uber-American party, were loving it. This was the John they’d been waiting for, the John now living in his element, a bear released from the circus touching snow for the first time.

  As the night went on, instead of the national anthem, we held sparklers in the garden and sang Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday,” but in a way only the French can do, with a OPPY BAIRTHDAY TOOO UUUUU! OPPY BAIRTHDAY TOOO YOUUU. There was an air of resistance in the air, and those around me took my stiff, awkward body in their arms to let me know they understood my pain. They’d just suffered through a near Le Pen election, and each of us, American and French, had our own battles on the horizon. We danced and clinked our glasses, and as we formed a limbo line to the Wu Tang Clan, I yelled to all my new/old/reconciled French friends, “Plus on est de fous, le mieux on rigole
mon bébé!”

  * * *

  As the bobbing heads of French and Americans cracked through the cigarette-smoked ceiling of the living room turned dance floor, I revisited my dinner at Jim Haynes’s earlier that year. It, too, had ended with guitars being whipped out and people singing “La Bohème” by Aznavour and “Country Road” by James Taylor, and without anybody painfully trying to exchange business cards or write down numbers.

  Both events were more than dinners, I realized. They were performance art pieces, runway shows, ephemeral pieces of beauty. And whether they involved simple Foosball games or long nights under the pine trees, each was (as my friend Paul-Henri reminded me during our trou normand years before) a way to dilate time and push off death, if just for one minute more.

  Because what if the Ganges River scene Randy described was true? What if we all do finish up in the same muck, the current taking us under, the river mixing us up with cow and branch and car battery and tractor conveyor belt? What if all of us, Thierry Ardisson, Gérard, Shannon, my Casablanca crew, Mehdi and Yassine, even the French actress in the Seinfeld episode, are all linked somehow in the end just as we are now? If so, it seems our only option is to follow Jim Haynes’s lead: to break the bread, to pour the wine, and to shout out our random togetherness, until it really is time to go.

  Years and Years and Years in Normandy

  By the time Bibi had turned nine and Otto five, I’d dug myself into a Parisian dad rut. I’d done every museum Paris had to offer, every aquarium, every zoo, every stroll through every square, every shop at every market on Saturdays, every movie rental at every video club in the Tenth—not to mention having every conversation possible with every other stupid alterna-parent with a stroller and sippy cup along the Canal Saint Martin.