Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  Cleveland, I thought anxiously. Cleveland was suddenly looking pretty good to me.

  Geneva is in the French-speaking sector of Switzerland. As luck would have it, I’d studied French for years in school, visited Paris twice, and made out with several Frenchmen, all of which, I assumed, qualified me as bilingual. No doubt, plenty of Swiss citizens would be happy to engage me in lengthy discussions about “Totour and Tristan, the two wooden soldiers” who I’d studied ad nauseam in grade school, then listen raptly as I informed them that “whenever Pierre and Simone go to the market, they purchase a pair of shoes, a cauliflower, and a small brown monkey.” Drawing upon the French literature I’d read in my high school Advanced Placement class, I could then impress the hell out of them by concluding each conversation with a quote by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, L’enfer, c’est les autres.

  L’enfer, c’est les autres translates to “hell is others,” and it was an idea, I saw quickly, that the Swiss were only too willing to agree with after listening to my French for five minutes. For all my schooling, I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to say such basic, things as “lightbulb,” “extension cord,” and “Can you please help me? My husband is stuck in the bathroom.”

  Our first day at Studio House, Bob accidentally locked himself in the toilet. As I ran downstairs to find the concierge, it occurred to me that Madame Bovary had never needed a locksmith. Seized by linguistic stage fright, the only thing I could manage to say was, “la clef, il ne travaille pas,” which roughly translates into “the key, it is not doing its work” creating the distinct impression of a key slacking off and lounging around a pool with a daiquiri when it was supposed to be manning a cash register and answering telephones.

  Stupid things I’d never given a second thought to in the States—buying a carton of skim milk, operating an intercom system—soon took on a whole new level of exoticism and frustration as I attempted to do them in French. Determined to adhere to the old “When in Rome” adage, I spent my days butchering the French language with the dexterity of a fry cook, routinely asking the local grocer if he had any “low energy yogurt” and if it was possible to “disgust the cheese” before buying it.

  The first item we purchased in Geneva was a cell phone, and I walked around quite proud of myself for recording our personal voice mail greeting in French. The English speakers who left us messages were genuinely impressed. “My, aren’t we parlez-vousing franÇais like a native,” they remarked.

  But it was the Swiss-French themselves who seemed truly moved by my fluency. Before they left a message, they invariably preceded it with an appreciative laugh. “Bonjour, Suzanne,” they sang out, charmed.

  “See,” I bragged to Bob triumphantly. “Fifteen years of French weren’t a waste after all. In just two weeks, I’m totally acculturated.”

  The next day, a Swiss woman I’d met at the Geneva Welcome Center stopped me in a cafe. “I have to tell you, your answering machine message is just so adorable,” she said, lightly touching my arm. “Everyone at the center thinks it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.” It turned out my voice mail message was instructing callers to “please speak at the tuna.”

  Hoping to improve our vocabulary, Bob and I surfed the television channels for an English program with French subtitles. We found exactly one. The Jerry Springer Show. After watching this every night for a week, we learned how to say two whole sentences in French: “You slept with my sister, you big fat whore” and “Don’t you call me a pimp, you lying bitch.”

  Incredibly, I’d somehow assumed that as a white American, all I’d need to do to blend in in Switzerland was to speak French. Yet everything I did, I soon discovered, marked me as a foreigner.

  Europeans are by nature more reserved than Americans. Crowded into hilltop villages and ancient, ingrown cities—and having spent much of the last two thousand years attacking, raping, and pillaging one another—they are not inclined to greet each other by bellowing, “Show me the love, Big Fella!” or to say goodbye by cheering, “Okay, everyone! Group hug!” They would never dream of walking around in a sweatshirt reading “Ask Me About My Grandchildren” or of sending a national television show a videotape of themselves driving a golf cart headlong into a swimming pool by accident.

  With my big, confident strides, I discovered, I walked distinctly like an American. Draping my arms across the back of a couch and sprawling luxuriantly, I sat like an American. I talked loudly, like an American, and laughed loudly, like an American. Effervescing with self-revelation, I was more than happy to crack jokes at my own expense, like an American, informing everyone in great detail about my latest hilarious drugstore snafu or dining faux pas.

  As a New Yorker, I’d always considered myself more sophisticated and urbane than the rest of America, whom I’d once referred to as “the yokels across the Hudson.” But once I was in Geneva, I saw that I, too, was a yokel.

  I didn’t understand that the city’s “no smoking” signs were only meant to be ironic. Compared to the French-Swiss women—who’d don bustiers, Fendi boots, and pancake makeup simply to buy a box of laundry detergent—I dressed like a bumpkin suffering from depression. Compared to the French, my cynicism was superficial. Compared to even the Italians, my friendliness was outsized. Compared to the Scandinavians, my politics were reactionary. Compared to virtually everyone in Europe, I was naive, buoyant, and annoyingly transparent in my desire to be liked. No matter what I did, everything about me was quintessentially American. On the streets of Geneva, I was an enormous, star-spangled, overzealous puppy.

  Growing up as I had, you’d think I’d have gotten used to feeling like a misfit. But in America, even misfits get their own television shows. In Geneva, if I entered a neighborhood store and said, “Bonjour, madame,” I immediately felt invisible. As I stood there, awaiting acknowledgment, the shopkeeper’s eyebrow would arch, then her lips would purse, and in an instant, her entire face would be like a crab retreating into its shell: Oh, a foreigner.

  In the mildest, most pampered way possible, I was experiencing the degradations and frostiness that immigrants, minorities, and refugees have experienced throughout history. I was constantly aware of people speaking in a sort of code around me—exchanging knowing glances and gestures that were impossible to interpret except for the fact that they were definitely not saying: My, this young stranger is lovely. Let’s make her feel as welcome as possible.

  More than once, I’d see prices listed in a local salon or photocopying service, only to be presented with a much higher bill afterward. When I questioned it, I always received an impatient, rapid-fire explanation by the cashier: did Madame not know that those prices did not apply to the services she’d requested?

  Each time this happened, I thought shamefully of all the times in the States when a cab driver had asked me, “Repeat please the address?” or a busboy at Ruby Tuesday’s had smiled uncomprehendingly when I’d asked him for a napkin. Each time, I’d been huffy with them, my tone ripe with frustration: Christ. Can’t you people speak English? Now, I was both the cab driver and the busboy.

  As the saying goes, payback is a bitch.

  Yet the biggest challenge Bob and I faced was housing. In Geneva, apartments are in notoriously short supply, and the rental process is like a Miss America contest for real estate. You have to apply for each apartment; landlords then review all the applications to decide whom if anyone, they’d like to rent to.

  When employees for private companies are transferred to Geneva, they’re given hefty housing allowances and the services of relocation agencies. Bob, however, was working for a nonprofit agency. The only relocation expert we had at our disposal was me.

  Armed with classified ads downloaded from the Internet, I tromped all over the city feeling like a world-class idiot. When I came across places that were actually available, I was invariably lost within a pack of other desperate apartment hunters. My French repeatedly failed me. Trying to ask the proprietor if the rent included he
ating, I asked him instead if it came with “unemployment.” Once I realized my error, I then inquired if the rent included “shoes.”

  “WE ARE NEVER GOING TO FIND AN APARTMENT,” I yelled at Bob when he arrived home from his second day at the office. “WE ARE GOING TO WIND UP LIVING IN A FUCKING PUP TENT IN THE PARK.”

  “A pup tent in the park,” Bob said with a sigh. “And you know this after exactly two days?”

  Every day that week, Bob came home to discover he’d married not a citizen of the world but a lunatic. As I prepared frozen ravioli on our hot plate, I ranted to him how I’d seen fourteen apartments that day, and each one was either more hideous or more unobtainable than the next.

  When Bob replied helpfully, “But you saw fourteen places. So there are some apartments out there, no?” I immediately began yelling at him, “HAVE YOU NOT LISTENED TO A SINGLE WORD I’VE SAID? PUP TENT! PUP TENT! PUP TENT!”

  A real estate agent had told me that getting an apartment in Geneva depended upon relationships, upon “knowing someone.”

  All the other apartments hunters, I sobbed to Bob, were Swiss. They were rich. They had relocation experts taking them around in a Smart Car. What did I have? A bus pass and an accent that, judging from people’s faces, made me sound like the French-speaking equivalent of Latka Gravas on Taxi.

  Ernest Hemingway, I continued, had probably never had to tour an apartment decorated from floor to ceiling in burgundy bathroom tiles. Henry James, as far as I knew, had never had to come up with the French phrase for “How come this place is missing a kitchen?” Why, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived in France during World War Two as two Jewish lesbians, and yet, I cried, you never heard about them going insane trying to find a one-bedroom with a working toilet.

  What the hell were we doing here? Why on earth did we ever think this would be fun? Why hadn’t we just stayed in America, where everything was familiar, and people knew and loved us? Why weren’t we living someplace convenient, full of Cracker Barrel restaurants and narcotizing strip malls? Someplace homey, and middlebrow, where we didn’t need a goddamn French-English dictionary just to figure out how to operate a washing machine?

  “Why did moving abroad seem so much easier for everyone else?” I cried. “They never talked about this stuff on the goddamn Love Boat.”

  When I eventually calmed down, however, I realized that while I didn’t have money or connections, I did have one thing going for me that probably no other apartment hunter in Geneva had: utter shamelessness. As a native New Yorker, a former child outcast, a wannabe gonzo journalist, and an aspiring slut, I’d developed a near-immunity to embarrassment. Totally lacking any sense of social propriety, I would to talk to just about anyone. If apartment hunting in Geneva depended upon relationships and engaging people, well then, I decided, I’d treat it not as an apartment search, but an apartment seduction.

  The next day, my first appointment was to see a one-bedroom not far from Bob’s office. The landlady, a Madame Duvalier, wore a leopard print dress and chain-smoked as she climbed nimbly up the stairs in high heels to show me an attic apartment. With an old slate roof and tar-papered balcony, it was a place guaranteed to feel like a pizza oven.

  Still, revving up my engines, I complimented her on her earrings. Jewelry is an excellent icebreaker among women; every piece inevitably tells a story. Madame Duvalier’s earrings, it turned out, were a gift from her second husband. When I complimented her on her brooch as well, she informed me that it came from her third husband. Her necklace, she volunteered, was from her fourth. Husbands were clearly a “thing” with Madame Duvalier. “Oh,” I said politely. “How many have you had so far?”

  “Six,” Madame Duvalier said airily. “And each one of them was a piece of shit.”

  “Men, Their Infinite Shortcomings, and How to Exploit Them,” turned out to be a pet topic of Madame Duvalier’s. For the next forty-five minutes, I listened to her bad-mouth her ex-husbands, explain the intricacies of Swiss marital law, and extol the virtues of surveillance cameras. The only conversation required on my part was feigned comprehension. “Vraiment?” I nodded. Really?

  My next appointment was for a two bedroom in the heart of downtown. The apartment itself was the epitome of old Europe: it had high ceilings, transoms, elegant moldings, and not a single closet. The owner who greeted me at the door was wearing rope sandals and holding a trumpet. With his floppy hair and poignant acne, he could not have been older than twenty.

  “Bonjour, my name is Jacques,” he said in French. Then he added, in English, “Oh. You’re American? Then please, call me Miles.” From the way he said this, it was clear he’d secretly been testing this out in his head for years. Saying it out loud, he seemed shocked by his own audacity.

  Jacques/Miles, it turned out, was showing the apartment for his parents, who had obviously been gone for a while because every room was a landslide of CDs, jazz books, sheet music, and strategically discarded plates full of pizza crusts. Jazz was playing on a boom box in the kitchen. “Oh, Herbie Hancock,” I remarked, trying desperately to make conversation. “My mother went to college with him.”

  Upon hearing this, Jacques/Miles looked stunned, as if Herbie Hancock himself had materialized right there in front of the refrigerator. “Vraiment?” he cried. Really?

  “Oui,” I nodded. And it was true. My mother had actually gone to college with Herbie Hancock.

  “Did your mother ever speak to him?” Jacques/Miles fairly begged.

  “Of course,” I said.

  Then, seeing the reverence on his face and sensing my advantage, I couldn’t help it. Before I knew it, I was creating the writer’s equivalent of a jazz riff: it began plaintively enough, with a few opening notes of truth, before quickly giving way to full-blown improvisation.

  My mother had, in fact, attended a small land grant college in the Midwest during the Eisenhower administration. Although the school had a reputation for liberalism, its farm-raised students routinely sang earnest songs about “taking Jesus as your savior” and “the darkies picking cotton” before saying grace each night in the dining hall. Herbie Hancock had been the only black student on campus; my mother had been the only New York Jew. Their “friendship,” I gathered, was based not on actual conversations, but on fleeting looks of sympathy and mutually acknowledged dread across the green.

  Since it was hard to convey all of this to Jacques/Miles in French, however, I simply told him that my mother and Herbie Hancock had been extremely close. Why, if I remembered correctly, she’d listened to him compose several of his earliest pieces. And of course, I added, she always did regret turning down his marriage proposal.

  “Herbie Hancock asked your mother to marry him?” Jacques/Miles exclaimed.

  “Well, practically,” I said.

  “C’est incroyable!” Jacques/Miles cried ecstatically. Then, looking at me as if I were a jazz deity myself, he yanked a frozen pizza out of the refrigerator and said, “Please, you will stay for lunch, no?”

  The next apartment was in a modern high-rise that might as well have been in Cincinnati, yet it was quiet with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake. The current tenant was a dapper Italian businessman named Vincenzo. “Oh, you’re Italian?” I said. I then felt compelled to share with him every Italian phrase I’d ever memorized. Good morning, I parroted. Thank you. I’d like to make a reservation. Where is the Vatican? Where is the toilet? Toothbrush. Motor scooter. Don’t touch that. He’s not my husband, he’s my little brother, you idiot. After exhausting this repertoire, I proceeded to recite a list of my favorite gelato flavors.

  To my great relief, Vincenzo spoke fluent English and not a word of French. Unfortunately, it turned out that he himself was not the owner of the apartment; he was only a renter.

  “But you know, there’s this amazing American woman next door,” he said. “She’s also a writer. Beautiful woman. She’s eighty, but she looks sixty and she knows the landlady. Would you like to meet her?”

 
Any polite, decent person would’ve said, “Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly disturb a stranger in her home.” Instead, I followed Vincenzo across the hall, asking, “You really think she’ll pull some strings for me?”

  An hour later, Ruth and I were still sitting in her kitchen, drinking gimlets and discussing art, literature, and politics. Amazingly, Ruth herself had been born and raised in New York City—in the same neighborhood, in fact, as my grandmother. Her father had been a rabbi, and during the 1950s, Ruth had spent summers working with the activist folk singer Pete Seeger, whom my parents had revered as a deity. Now, her living room was strewn with the same novels I was reading and with stacks of New Yorker magazines. Like my grandmother, she had a penchant for hard liquor and dirty jokes, as well as for referring to certain politicians as “shitheads.” Among the four hundred thousand people in Geneva, I’d managed to find the only one to whom I could’ve possibly been related.

  “What are the chances of this?” Ruth marveled. “My God, you’re like my long-lost little bubehluh.” Then she cupped my chin in her hands and smiled. “You do know what a bubehluh is, don’t you?”

  By the time I arrived back at Studio House, it was nearly 8:00 P.M.

  “Where were you?” asked Bob, as I wobbled in grandly, reeking of gin.

  “Apartment hunting,” I said, flopping merrily onto the couch. “Yee-ha.”

  “You’re in a freakishly good mood,” said Bob. “Did you have any luck, or are you just drunk?”

  “I started off the day with a husband collector who spent forty-five minutes educating me about Swiss divorce law,” I said. “Then, I had frozen pizza with a twenty-year-old trumpet player after telling him that my mother was engaged to Herbie Hancock. I spent the afternoon reciting Italian ice cream flavors to an Italian in Italian. Then, I drank three gin gimlets with an eighty-year-old former leftie from Brooklyn.”