Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  Whether it was linked or not, my health had been failing, too. There was a period where it seemed I was on antibiotics every other month for bronchitis I couldn’t kick. The antibiotics were routinely prescribed by the SOS Médecins, the French roving doctor who, yes, actually comes to your house at any hour of the night for free.

  After fifteen years, it still remains a giant mystery to me how SOS Médecins is at all possible. Each time I call, I expect to get a disconnected message, and each time they knock, it feels like Christmas. I scamper down the stairs like a kid, often forgetting I’m actually sick. And sometimes I’m not. I just call SOS Médecins to boost my feelings about having chosen to live in France.

  “Look, Anaïs! He has that old black leather bag and stethoscope, too!” I turn back to look at her, wide-eyed.

  “And this check I give you for forty euros,” I ask the doctor each time before he leaves. “I’m reimbursed at the end of the month, correct?”

  He nods and I giggle, asking Anaïs to pinch me again.

  The only downside to SOS Médecins is that they prescribe amoxicillin for anything more than a cat scratch, preferring, I assume, to nuke whatever’s going on inside me, so they don’t have to return in three days to witness me mince around the living room again. And I’m fine with that. It’s gotten to the point where even if a doctor starts prescribing anything homeopathic at first, I’ll stop him mid-write-up with a “Why waste time? Let’s just bring out the big guns, shall we?”

  SOS Médecins is kind of like the pizza delivery guy who arrives each time with an eighth of weed hanging out of his shirt pocket. You’re happy he’s there, you always take both, but you’re deluded into thinking it’s the great pizza that keeps you calling back. The pizza, it just isn’t that good.

  As the Paris dinner parties wore thin, it occurred to me that while I loved our friends, I wanted to see them in larger doses. I was tired of getting the PR firm version of their life over a three-hour dinner; the career conquests, the many wins and few losses, the kids shining at school stories. I wanted forty-eight hours embedded, where by the second day, they’re happy to tell you where their life went off the rails. And the French, I might add, are willing to give you that. They’d just rather tell you in the countryside, so when you shriek in astonishment, the neighbors won’t complain.

  And, no, I wasn’t looking at the country as a way to get back to basics. For me, the country wasn’t where you toiled the earth or lived a subsistent, noble life. It is where you created. My mother’s family owned a farm outside Pittsburgh, but she rarely picked up a hoe. Instead she painted on easels while my grandmother made stained-glass windows and welded steel sculptures. Aunt Louise, the “acclaimed artist” in the family, would drop by once a week to paint them painting. Nobody cared two bits that the cherries or pears around them were dropping and rotting. This was what you did on a farm, a philosophy handed down by my great-grandfather, F. C. Murdoch, who also was a painter. He’d bought the place in the late 1800s to pursue his craft and painted prolifically until mental illness forced him to retreat to the garden, where he finished his days cutting the grass with scissors.

  When Paris got rough around the edges, I’d allow myself to envision leading a similar country-gentry idle life: one where I’d change into my city clothes once a week and take the train into Paris for the day. Maybe in the morning I’d see my lawyer for an update of my various business concerns, then follow it up with buying a hat. I’d share a two-bottle lunch with a writing compère in a tiled bistro somewhere near the Montparnasse station, where he’d complain to me about deadlines and how editors were giving his pieces what I call humor-ectomies. I’d stare back at him with pity, wish him and his Stan Smith haggard face good luck, then hotfoot it back to the train and the countryside where a nice fire and warm soup awaited me.

  Anaïs’s vision of countryside life was less romantic, probably because she’d grown up in a family that owned châteaus and knew the perils of roof repair and septic tank installation and lawn maintenance and rural isolation, stuff that lurked in the shadows of all this bucolic bliss I fantasized about. For her, the big pull wasn’t having a country house, it was having a country house all to yourself.

  Often in France, country houses like mine are what the French call maisons de familles (family houses), a place where nobody lives full time, but which is calendared up by various cousins, uncles, and second cousins, each of whom owns a 10 percent share, and all of whom constantly fight over the prime dates for usage. The ones who have the February dates bitch that the June date holders should pay more. And the May daters won’t go unless the April date people have dewinterized the house at their own cost.

  The reason that most of these houses have remained in a family for so long has less to do with family pride and more to do with the houses’ being unsellable. Not only are they expensive to maintain and renovate, each usually has ten or more owners who all have to agree on a measly price. And if you stand to receive 10 percent of not so much, you may just choose not to sell, assuming it’s more chic to say “My family has a house in the Pyrenees” than to buy a midrange mountain bike.

  For estate planning purposes, maisons de familles also tend to be tangled up in perverse French legal arrangements where the house is left to one kid and the droit de l’usufruit to the other. Usufruit I love because it looks like use your fruit, but it’s pronounced like “use it free.” And it literally means that. Usufruit is the term describing the right to use property, even if you don’t own it, for free! Not only is this the coolest coincidence word I’ve ever come across, I see it everywhere in France, even in the minutes of our co-op meetings. In our apartment building in Paris, there’s a terrace that belongs to the co-op although it’s attached to our neighbors’ apartment. And although our neighbors are the only ones who have access to the terrace, it’s the condo’s responsibility to maintain it, meaning we pay if there’s a leak, we pay the taxes, but only they can use it . . . for free!

  Deep down, though, what pushed Anaïs and me to take the country plunge was that I wanted to become the male Mimi Thorisson, a stunning American expat living somewhere in the Medoc region, whose idyllic life has become a much-followed blog and book of healthy living, thoughtful cuisine, and multikid fashionable delegation, all of which revolve around refined clothes, stone chimneys, and a professional photographer/husband who captures it all.

  If Mimi could do it, so could John, I thought. But the cruel irony has been that after embarking on this country house fiasco, I’ve found myself checking Mimi’s site from time to time to gauge my progress and compare and contrast our lives, our sense of design, our number of dogs, and our overall lifestyle choices. And without fail, if Mimi isn’t stirring up a country stew with a stock drawn from her own vegetable garden, she’s stirring up negative feelings inside John, proving again and again that she can accomplish what I’ve never been able to do, which is bend the countryside to my will.

  And I think I know why.

  For as euro-cultivated and continental as she looks, Mimi, I can tell, from her Swiss-watch efficiency and steel-eyed optimism, is deeply American. I, on the other hand, with my half-assed compromises and defeatist outlook since acquiring this money pit, have become mediocrely French.

  Before I go any further, I feel I need to make a point here. Publishers, on occasion, should take out extra liability policies on books they think might pose dangers to readers. Sure, it’s just a book, but sometimes books lead to ideas, which then lead to actions, which could lead to disastrous consequences. Books are more dangerous than swimming pools. Only a few books come to mind that fit my gross negligence threshold. One being Eat Right for Your Blood Type, a book with the kooky premise that we all have a unique blood type, therefore we must all have a unique diet, that convinced me, since I’m O negative, to eat only steak, fish, and rain water for a month. No, I’m not Java man, but eating like one cost me pounds I didn’t need to lose, and l
eft me generally languid despite that cinderblock of protein each day. Another is Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, the bible of expat living that gassed up the head of every Anglo-Saxon male, convincing him that, if all else goes to shit, he could always move to the French countryside, buy an old farmhouse, and start fresh.

  No, Peter Mayle and his publishers didn’t force me to buy my country house in Normandy, and if I hadn’t read the book, I probably would have done it anyway. But A Year in Provence definitely gave me (and others) a nudge when instead we needed a slap, and seeing that I’m currently in the final stage of French buyer’s remorse (which is, I may add, much more depressing than normal buyer’s remorse), I’ve gained enough distance now to know it’s okay to blame others for my mistakes.

  * * *

  The area we chose for our country living experiment was a piece of Normandy two hours southwest of Paris called Perche, an area straddling three départements: the Eure-et-Loir, the Orne, and the Sarthre, all of which form a bigger region called La Basse Normandie (Lower Normandy). An ancient fiefdom in the fourteenth century, the Perche no longer exists in legal form. It’s as if eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southern Kentucky called itself Rocky Mount. People may say they’re from there, you might be able to find a T-shirt with the name on the front, but you won’t find it on a map, birth certificate, or driver’s license as such.

  I’d stumbled upon the area as part of a last-minute panic-induced February vacation that ended with us renting an apartment in a tacky timeshare golf resort, a thing Americans know how to do fairly well and the French do really poorly. Although the insides were a sham, outside there was a mysterious February fog that lingered into the late morning. Cows grazed over Scotland-esque rolling hills, and there was a light drizzle that felt clean as a church suit. I also slept well for the first time in years, the kids rode ponies, I wasn’t coughing, and for once, I could walk around without feeling molested by Paris.

  In July, we rented a house nearby, but this time for four months, the idea being we’d pass the summer in the countryside, instead of taking a three-week vacation like all the other schmucks. And since the rental was close to Paris, we’d have the luxury of returning to the city, if need be, for work. The French have a word for this, actually, villégiature, so that summer, we told people we weren’t going on vacation, but choosing to live instead en villégiature. It sounded chic, kind of like the way certain East Coast people use the word summer as a verb.

  On the lease, I saw that our village was technically a hameau, meaning hamlet, a French word I love because it fit our house so well—a thin eighteenth-century Normandy farmhouse called a longère, where the barn and the stables are all under the same roof and where Frodo Baggins could have lived in his early years.

  Although that summer was somewhat of a disappointment weatherwise, the autumn was pleasant, and we’d made enough friends and planted enough flowers and gotten the lay of the land just enough that we decided to continue renting for the rest of the year, just to see what it would be like to spend Christmas there, and if we could survive unforeseen stuff like heating bills or rodent infestations.

  * * *

  I’d learned from the rental agent that our house was a bizarro form of maison de famille. The owners weren’t French, but expats who lived most of the time in Africa. For them, the Perche was a summer destination while it was winter back home, and Normandy, they said, was close (kind of) to England, where some of their children lived.

  Judging by their names, Prudence and Rupert, and all the books about hedge growth and variations of grass and floral composition that stood on the shelves, not to mention the immaculate state they’d left our garden in, I took it that the owners had green thumbs.

  As part of a gentleman’s agreement separate from the lease, we agreed to lend them the house for three weeks to a month each year, and like worker bees, Rupert and Prudence would transform the backyard, allowing the grass to grow knee-high wild in parts, but with a pathway through the patch for the children to run through. They’d cut the hedge short at certain points, allowing you to gaze over the hills and into the valley. They brought in rhododendrons and wisteria and azaleas, and by the time they’d leave, our backyard looked like a tasteful outdoor living room—one we’d eventually trash.

  Because unlike Rupert and Prue, who had time and talent and patience, I had thirty-six hours each weekend, and I was damned if I was going to spend that time trimming trees. Instead, once a month, I’d jump on the tractor an hour before departure and drive wildly over the grass and flowers, leaving a scorched earth of patchy zigzags behind me.

  And each time they returned, I’d cower behind them watching Prudence’s face turn white. “What happened to my garden?” she’d say, looking out over the Golden Globes actress I’d just given a bowl cut. They’d find all their garden trowels and rose-cutting gloves in the garage, staring back at them like untouched china. And I was okay with the frowns, only because I knew Rupert and Prudence would not only bring the garden back up to snuff by the time they left, but they’d fix all the leaks and deal with the broken appliances, stuff I would eventually inherit once I bought the house from them a year later.

  Friends told me we’d made a smart decision to buy a country house, not because they thought of it as a great place to relax, but because it could come in handy when the shit hits the fan in Paris. And considering all the social unrest and terrorist attacks these past years, I’m starting to think maybe they’re right. One friend told me Paris could last only 2.4 days without a replenishment of food and water, confiding to me over the weekend (they always confide over the weekend) that he has a survival kit stowed away in his basement and a three-pronged exit strategy to leave Paris if need be.

  “But you can’t walk to the Perche, so get that out of your head tout de suite,” he told me. It had never occurred to me to walk to the Perche, but I let him continue anyway.

  “It would take four days minimum, and where are you going to get water. Huh?”

  My look showed him I had no answer.

  “And if you do have water, others are going to want it.” He gave me one of those self-satisfied winks and moved on to the topic of gun ownership.

  I’ve been told by other friends that I should hire a sourcier (well finder) to find the old well that’s surely out back somewhere. Others have advised us to start a potager (vegetable garden) just to make sure we’ll have something to eat once the state collapses. On separate occasions, I’ve been instructed where to collect rainwater, where to set up solar panels, how to make a bee colony, and, of course, build some extra rooms where all my survivalist friends could sleep should Day Zero arrive. All this “end of days” planning makes it difficult to relax over the weekends and gives me the impression that I’m not just a Parisian who’d bought a rundown country house but someone in eighteenth-century Versailles before the déluge.

  Home ownership also brought with it the chance to become involved in the sordid affairs of locals. Six months after we closed on the house, our twice-a-month cleaning lady called me in a panic. What I gathered through the blubbering over the phone was that her husband had written a check from my checkbook, which had apparently been left in the living room cupboard. I told her to calm down first, letting her know this wasn’t the end of the world, that she’d done the right thing to call, all the while casually asking how much she thought the bad check had been written for so I could call the bank.

  “Sixty thousand euros, John.”

  “I’m sorry,” I squeaked, “I don’t think I heard you correctly.”

  “Soixante mille!!” she cried.

  Her husband, the story goes, had used her keys to enter our house and had taken a check. The weird thing (and what made this a far from open and shut case) was that he didn’t steal anything else and he never tried to cash the check. Instead, he took an inordinate amount of time whiting out my name and my bank’s name,
replacing it with his own local bank’s name, sloppily and even handwritten in places. The goal, I’d later learn, was to show his wife and her family that his drunken gambling days were behind him, and that he had, in fact, the wherewithal to be a solid upstanding husband moving forward. “Look! I’ve just been issued a bank check for soixante mille to prove it!” The problem with this “bank check” was that it was so cheaply doctored that anybody could have seen it was fake, even his wife.

  To add to the insult, I found a couple of photocopies of the check on the glass of our photocopier, which meant he hadn’t just taken the check and scrammed. No, he stayed here, perhaps even into the night, probably hunched over the dining room table, making a couple of photocopies here, X-Acto knifing something there, whiting out something in the corner there. Maybe he even browsed fonts before taking a break to go through our drawers, never fearing in the slightest the possibility of someone coming home.

  Since the check in question was more or less a prop used in a lie, I didn’t think of it as that heinous a crime. My bank did, though, and when I called to see if anyone had cashed a sixty-thousand-euro check on my account, they were more upset by my blasé attitude than by his act.

  “Monsieur von Sothen,” the employee stuttered. “The fact you call us so late is concerning. Of course, we never would have cashed it. You have nowhere near those funds. You know that.”

  “I do know that,” I replied. “And thanks for reminding me.”

  I became a sort of local legend in town following Checkgate, and the story took on a life of its own. One version had me with a couple of uncashed sixty-thousand-euro checks lying around and the thief had taken one of them. I surely didn’t help my cause when I nonchalantly joked to a neighbor weeks later, “Can you imagine the balls? That’s almost a month’s salary, for crying out loud!”