I'll Never Be French (no matter what I do) Page 8

  We get back in the car and head home. Madame turns the radio on so she won’t have to talk to me. I’m relieved. My word has been tested, and I passed the test. I made the effort and looked for a house. It just didn’t work out. “C’est dommage, c’est dommage. Je suis désolé.” I try to sound like my heart is broken and I’ve lost my fondest wish, but I’m delighted. What the hell would I do with a house in France?

  This is what I’m thinking when we drive past Madame and Monsieur’s house. It’s also what I’m thinking when we pass Chez Sally. At the mairie, Madame veers left onto the one-lane country road I’ve been walking twice a day. The road hugs the river, and as far as I know, dead-ends. I walk it in the daytime to watch the fields of wheat changing color with the light, sailboats moving up-and downriver, cows grazing, and salmon leaping for joy. At night, I see streaking meteors and shooting stars and constellations I’ve seen only in planetariums. I walk as far as the viaduct, a huge Roman-looking structure of hand-cut rectangular granite stones, built in 1866. The first time I saw it I was astonished. Every time I see it, I’m astonished. It’s megalithic, and I wonder who would build a stone bridge four football fields long three years before the Brooklyn Bridge was begun? It’s at least fifteen stories tall, with twelve arches connecting one side of the valley to the other, all so a tiny one-or two-car commuter train that looks like the Little Engine That Hoped It Could can cross the river. We drive under one of the arches and Madame toots her horn, which echoes all the way to the other side, to an area called Kostez Gwer, where I’ve never been, and stops in front of a house hidden by a cluster of bushes and trees.

  I get out of the car and look around. All I can see is a detached house on about three-quarters of an acre of land, across the street from a small park facing the river. Two sailboats idle near the quay. I cross the street to the river and see the lock, l’écluse, and think: location, location, location. Every boat has to sail in front of the house. Madame stands next to me as the two boats, one flying the French flag and the other the English, move forward into the lock. Both families wave to us. The French boat is shipshape, neat, propre, spiffy right down to perfectly coiled ropes and shiny decks. The Brit boat has clothes—underclothes, bras the size of balloons, panties like skiffs, skimpy briefs, and long johns—hanging from the rigging like clotheslines, all blowing in the wind, drying. The difference between the French and the English, proper versus practical. Madame inhales sharply, making that whistling sound that tells me she takes the English boat as a personal affront mocking everything French, and also as confirmation of everything she knows about the Brits and cleanliness and Chez Sally. Once again, proof of biological casting and the great French naturalist Lamarck.

  I walk along the quay trying to see the house, but most of it is hidden by a thicket of small trees. The lawn is cut, and there’s a car in the driveway—so the house is occupied, and maybe even kept up. I cross the road to get a better view and am surprised to see it’s an old stone house made of granite and slate woven together like a fine Harris tweed of tans, blues, black, grays, and rust. It is the kind of house—old, stone, lonely, a survivor—I’ve been admiring and ogling all summer. Sometimes they look medieval, like there ought to be a moat around them. Other times, like now, in the sunlight, they are wavy patches of light: silver, gray, white, blue, twinkling and winking, seemingly as surprised as I am that they’re still here. And with good reason. Most of them have been torn down or have tumbled down, or the stone has been covered by a thick, white, stuccolike concrete for the same reason people in the 1950s painted their oak and maple furniture: to make it look more classy and refined and finished, less natural and raw. The house is a find, the only old, stand-alone, exposed-stone house on the quay.

  That’s what I’m thinking when Madame walks past me, pushes the driveway gate open, and walks down the driveway. I’m aghast. I want to hide. Even I, a renter-for-life, know this is a no-no: do not disturb the occupants. I start to walk back to the car when I hear her call, “Marc.”

  Merde. I walk back and stop at the gate. She’s at the front door and she’s going to knock. Holy merde.

  She knocks.

  No one answers.

  Good. Bon. I hope no one comes to the door so I can leave, satisfied I gave it my best, upheld my word, and proved my worth. She knocks louder and calls out something that sounds like “Cuckooo, cuckoooo,” which is exactly how I feel. In the U.S., I’d be afraid of being shot. Here, I’m afraid of ridicule.

  A man finally opens the door and peeks out. His shirt is half in, half out. He looks perplexed and annoyed. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, and he’s either been doing something very important or napping. I can’t tell if he’s tired, angry, or bored. For the first time in my life I feel like a Jehovah’s Witness. Madame begins talking to him. I can’t hear her, but I know she’s talking because of the expression of dismay on his face. He says something back. She says something else. Clearly, she wants in, and he doesn’t want to let her. I stand at the gate, waiting, knowing the poor guy doesn’t have a chance. After a few minutes, she turns around, calls “Marc,” and waves me over.

  I shuffle down the path like a dead man walking and stop and stand behind Madame. Monsieur is barefoot and curling his toes. I have no idea what this means, but neither one is speaking, and this is France, so I know it’s not good. I can’t tell if they know each other and don’t want to talk, or if they don’t know each other and don’t want to talk. I later learn they know about each other, as does everyone else in the village: names, lives, problems, failures, fortunes, illness, success; what people eat; when they drink; who they sleep with, but they don’t actually know each other and have never formally met, which is common. As egalitarian as France likes to think it is, people from different backgrounds do not socially mix. I, however, a helpless stranger in a strange land, have brought my neighbors together, either from their natural, native goodwill, their savoir-faire, or their fear of being prosecuted under France’s tough Good Samaritan Law, which requires them to offer assistance in an emergency—and to any reasonable French person, I’m an emergency just waiting to happen.

  Madame introduces me. “Marc. C’est Monsieur Nedelec.”

  I don’t know what to do. He obviously doesn’t want to see us now, and he doesn’t want to show his house. He holds out his hand like an American and says “Hello.”

  I shake it and doubtfully ask, “Parlez vous anglais?” I once waited three hours for a tour of a château because I was told it would be conducted in English and I’d enjoy it so much more. The guide said “ahlo” and “good-bye,” that was it. Since then, whenever I’m addressed in English, I don’t assume anything, I ask. “You speak English?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Bon.”

  “You’re a writer?”

  “Yes,” I say, and wonder what else Madame told him.

  “Américain.”

  “Oui.”

  “You’re leaving in a week?”

  “Oui, oui.”

  “The house is not clean. My wife is not here. I will show you quickly, if you like.”

  I look at Madame, shrug, and say “Bon.”

  He opens the door and I walk in. Madame stays put. The change inside the house is palpable. Outside, it is bright, sunny and hot—unseasonably hot in the high eighties—but inside, in the front hallway, the house is dark, cool, refreshing. It’s like walking into an air-conditioned theater on a hot sunny day, only this isn’t air-conditioning, it’s what happens when you have three-foot-thick granite walls.

  I follow Monsieur over a brown-and-ocher star-patterned tile floor that I find out later is early twentieth century, up the stairs, past the first-floor landing to the second, the attic, which is startlingly bright. It has three skylights and is huge, running the entire length and width of the house, and jam-packed full with cartons, newspapers, a mattress, box spring, books, papers, and clothes. Bisecting the room diagonally is either a wire clothesline or a garrote. “We don�
��t use this very much,” he says.

  No kidding. The ceiling is an A-frame that peaks at under six feet in the center and drops to less than two at the sides. Hundreds, maybe thousands of long rusty nails poke through the roof, making the room some sort of medieval torture palace and a haven for tetanus, a shot I haven’t had in thirty years. To my right, I see a sink so stained and spotted it looks like it has leprosy. Monsieur sees me looking at it and pulls a string hanging from a single light bulb in the center of the room to show me the room has electricity. Then he turns the light off and leads me down the stairs to the first-floor landing, where there are four doors, all shut. He points to two on the opposite side of the landing. “That’s the toilet, and that’s the bathroom.” Then he opens the door to his left for me to look in. It’s dark, like a cave, the shutters are closed and no lights are on. I’m unable to see a thing.

  Monsieur leads me down the stairs, back to where we started at the front hallway. He points to the right, showing me the kitchen, letting me know I am not to enter. It has a large window facing the river and a red rose bush in bloom, the same turn-of-the-century tile floor as the hallway, a beamed ceiling, and old, dark-wood paneling that looks as if it came from a church, covering what once was a huge, stone cooking fireplace. Monsieur turns me left and points me into a small dark room with a fireplace, beamed ceiling, hardwood floor, and beautiful granite-and-slate stone wall. It’s like a miniature hunting lodge with its smell of smoke, burnt wood, maybe game, or an old library with its built-in bookshelves overflowing with books. It’s nice, I think. I like this house. It has three floors, if you count the tetanus attic, plenty of room to live in and to write.

  “There’s one more room, if you’d like to see.”

  “Sure,” I say, Mr. Polite.

  He leads me through the dark library–game room, to the darkest spot, where I see a black door I hadn’t seen before. It’s less than five feet high and cut through the three-foot thick stone wall. He opens the door, and I trip over a step I don’t see and fall into another world.

  Facing me is a forty-foot-long wall of shimmering granite and slate bathed in light. Built into the wall are two huge—large enough to walk into—fireplaces, each one big enough to roast a pig. Between the fireplaces, a double window looks out at a five-foot-high slate wall that separates the rear of the house from an open field. I step into the room, gaga. To my left, forty feet away, is another stone wall of granite and slate with a window that looks at the yard and a strand of thirty-foot-high cypress trees more than one hundred feet away. The wall to my right is white plaster and has a window that looks onto more yard, a stone shed, and another strand of thirty-foot cypress trees at least one hundred fifty feet away. The ceiling has four skylights, beams, and a double cathedral roof in the shape of an M, peaking twice at twenty-five feet. The floor is terra-cotta tile. In the middle of the room, forming a perpendicular, are two old, bent wooden beams. One runs the width of the room, at the bottom of the M, to brace the roof. The other runs from the crossbeam to the floor. I later learn Plobien was a working port until the 1950s, and every home along the quay was also a café, which is why this room was added onto the house. That’s why there are two steps to enter the room and two fireplaces, and why the interior wall separating this room from the small dark room is three-foot-thick granite and slate instead of quarter-inch plywood.

  Monsieur starts walking, leading me out. I look around to take it all in, already picturing myself here, La Fontaine, Chateaubriand, medieval feasts with goblets, banners, shields, and family crests; a long wooden table covered with pheasants and game, stained with wine and candle wax; full-bosomed wenches everywhere. I see Bloomsbury, Antibes, a garden room, trellises with ivy growing up the walls, lots of wicker and wrought iron, big floppy hats, frilly dresses, and linen suits à la the twenties, Scott and Zelda. As I leave the room, three sheep are grazing in the field out back.

  Out front, Monsieur tells me the house will be clean tomorrow and his wife, who speaks better English, will be there. “Come back tomorrow at three if you like.”

  I go back to the car where Madame, never one to waste a second, is crocheting. She looks up when I open the door, not missing a stitch. I rock my hand back and forth, comme ci, comme ça. I know I should tell her I don’t have any money—but then why did we look at the other two houses and why did I point out this one, and what am I doing here, living the good, carefree, rich-looking American life? I have only one way to honorably put an end to this. I turn my hand into a telephone and say, “Ce soir je telephone les États Unis.”

  “Bon,” Madame says. “Bon,” I say, and she drops me at Chez Sally, ready to call the French Welcome Wagon. I go in and forget about it for the rest of the day, until Madame knocks on the door and turns her hand into a telephone. I shake my head no, and she looks like I kicked her dog, stole her bread, ate her tomatoes, and cut her roses. I tap my wrist, which doesn’t have a watch, hold up one finger, and say “Une heure,” and go back to reading The New Yorker. Then at three o’clock, 9:00 a.m. in New York, when she’s likely to be out, I do what every self-respecting, independent baby boomer who wants to buy a house or needs an excuse does. I call my mom, collect.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “How are you, dear?”

  “Fine, fine. I’m having a wonderful summer. This place is beautiful.” I tell her about the sailboats and the river, the incredible light, Monet and Matisse, Signac and Gauguin, all of whom lived and painted in Brittany, the leaping salmon, the northern California–like coast, Madame P and her family, everything. I even ask about relatives I don’t know and listen when she answers. When there’s nothing else to say, I say it.

  “Ma, you won’t believe this, but I think I found a house in France I want to buy.”

  I’m waiting for Are you crazy, nuts, what’s the matter with you? “That’s nice, dear,” she says.

  That’s nice. Holy shit! Doesn’t she get it, the code for Get me out of this! Stop me! I have to raise the ante.

  “Well, the thing is I can’t do it without help on the down payment, probably ten thousand.” That’ll do it, giving me money, even a loan, which she knows she’ll never get back, to buy a house in France. Ha.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  I don’t get it. No Have you thought about this? or Did you check the roof, floor, foundation, heater, water, weather, gas, electricity; for leaks, cracks, breaks, bugs, fire, water, heat, or cold damage? Nothing. She asked me more questions when I borrowed (and never paid back) two hundred dollars to buy a suit when I got married.

  My plan to tell Madame I couldn’t get a loan was falling apart. Of course, I could lie and say I couldn’t get the money, something I regularly do in the U.S., but for some inexplicable reason I want to do what’s right, which means no lying. Ce n’est pas propre. Everyone I’ve met has done right by me. I want to do the same with them. It’s one of the things I like about being in France, it brings out the best of me, and always surprises me—and even when I think it won’t be good for me, it is. It’s a lesson I forget and relearn every day.

  The next day I go back to the house with a plan to knock ten thousand dollars off the asking price. Why? Because it’s the way my family does business. I settle on ten thousand because it’s large, round, and even. The plan is to follow my dad’s tried-and-true used-car buying method. Every five years, when it was time to buy a new used car, Dad would line up the ads in The New York Times, and then he’d line up the family. Mom was assigned the interior, and my sister, the youngest, the tires. My brother got the exterior—body, paint, fenders, chrome. My job was to follow Dad around and repeat what he said in a voice loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

  On the chosen day, we all pile into the old used car and drive to some godforsaken place because Dad was always certain we’d get a better deal in the country. “Less competition,” he’d say, “less demand, lowe
r price. That’s capitalism for you.”

  We always arrive at the destination in a sudden, well-planned, stomach-flipping stop to show this is whimsy, and we haven’t been heading here for the past three hours. Then we leap out of the car like the Keystone Cops and hover over the quarry like locust. Mom opens the door, always unlocked, peers in, shakes her head in dismay, and says, “The headliner is ripped (dirty, stained). The dash is cracked. Right front passenger seat needs fixing. Door panel is loose.” Meanwhile, my brother circles the car, calling out scratches and dents. “Rear bumper, dented and rusty. Three-inch dent in passenger-side rear door. Holy shit [this is the one time we’re encouraged to use bad words], the hood is totally wrecked.” My sister walks around the car kicking the tires, saying things like “tread,” “wear,” and “uneven.” She’s too young to know what she’s saying, but she says it very convincingly. I wait for Dad to go into action. He looks under the car and sees a dry oil patch. “Oil leak,” he says. “Oil leaking all over the place,” I yell. “Could be water too,” he says. “Water too,” I yell.

  When the guy finally sees us and comes out—we never knock at the door, we wait for them to see us—he proudly opens the hood to show off what he has—350 horsepower, dual carbs, Webers, chrome manifold—Dad really starts in. “Really dirty engine. Corrosion around the battery. Looks like blow-by. When was the last tune-up?”

  “The car’s filthy,” I yell. “Needs lots of work.”

  “Tires, too,” my sister says.

  “Interior.”

  “Body.”

  At which point, Dad asks about price.

  This is how he bought two beach houses, a penthouse in Florida, two apartments in New York City, a ’72 Stingray, ’56 Thunderbird, and ’68 Shelby Cobra, all at far below market price. It is also how I intend to lower the price of this house in France by ten thousand dollars, whether I buy it or not.