When in French Read Free

straining for a glimpse of the famed Manhattan skyline. The patriarch ofthe host family was an arborist named Vern. Olivier remembers driving around Saugerties with Charlene, Vern’s wife, and a friend of hers, who begged him over and over again to say “hamburger.” He was mystified by the fact that Charlene called Vern “the Incredible Hunk.”
    Five years later Olivier found himself in England, a graduate student in mathematics. Unfortunately, his scholastic English—“Kevin is a blue-eyed boy” had been billed as a canonical phrase—had done little to prepare him for the realities of the language on the ground. “You’ve really improved,” his roommate told him, six weeks into the term. “When you got here, you couldn’t speak a word.” At that point, Olivier had been studying English for more than a decade.
    After England, he moved to California to study for a PhD, still barely able to cobble together a sentence. His debut as a teaching assistant for a freshman course in calculus was greeted by a mass defection. On the plus side, one day he looked out upon the residue of the crowd and noticed an attentive female student. She was wearing a T-shirt that read “Bonjour, Paris!”
    By the time we met, Olivier had become not only a proficient English speaker but a sensitive, agile one. Upon arriving in London in 2007, he’d had to take an English test to obtain his license as an amateur pilot. The examiner rated him “Expert”: “Able to speak at length with a natural, effortless flow. Varies speech flow for stylistic effect, e.g. to emphasize a point. Uses appropriate discourse markers and connectors spontaneously.” He was funny, quick, and colloquial. He wrote things like (before our third date), “Trying to think of an alternative to the bar-restaurant diptych, but maybe that’s too ambitious.” He said things like (riffing on a line from
Zoolander
as he pulled the car up, once again, to the right-hand curb), “I’m not anambi-parker.” I rarely gave any thought to the fact that English wasn’t his native tongue.
    One day, at the movies, he approached the concession stand, taking out his wallet.
    â€œA medium popcorn, a Sprite, and a Pepsi, please.”
    â€œWait a second,” I said. “Did you just specifically order a Pepsi?”
    In a word, Olivier had been outed. Due to a traumatic experience at a drive-through in California, he confessed, he still didn’t permit himself to pronounce the word “Coke” aloud. For me, it was a shocking discovery, akin to finding out that a peacock couldn’t really fly. I felt extreme tenderness toward his vulnerability, mingled with wonderment at his ingenuity. I’d had no idea that he still, very occasionally, approached English in a defensive posture, feinting and dodging as he strutted along.
    I only knew Olivier in his third language—he also spoke Spanish, the native language of his maternal grandparents, who had fled over the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War—but his powers of expression were one of the things that made me fall in love with him. For all his rationality, he had a romantic streak, an attunement to the currents of feeling that run beneath the surface of words. Once he wrote me a letter—an inducement to what we might someday have together—in which every sentence began with “Maybe.” Maybe he’d make me an omelet, he said, every day of my life.
    We moved in together before long. One night, we were watching a movie. I spilled a glass of water, and went to mop it up with some paper towels.
    â€œThey don’t have very good capillarity,” Olivier said.
    â€œHuh?” I replied, continuing to dab at the puddle.
    â€œTheir capillarity isn’t very good.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about? That’s not even a word.”
    Olivier said nothing. A few days later, I noticed a