When in French Read Free Page A

piece of paper lying in the printer tray. It was a page from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary:
    capillarity noun
    1:the property or state of being capillary
    2:the action by which the surface of a liquid where it is in contact with a solid (as in a capillary tube) is elevated or depressed depending on the relative attraction of the molecules of the liquid for each other and for those of the solid
    Ink to a nib, my heart surged.
    There was eloquence, too, in the way he expressed himself physically—a perfect grammar of balanced steps and filled glasses and fingertips on the back of my elbow, predicated on some quiet confidence that we were always already a compound subject. The first time we said good-bye, he put his hands around my waist and lifted me just half an inch off the ground: a kiss in commas. I was short; he was not much taller. We could look each other in the eye.
    But despite the absence of any technical barrier to comprehension, we often had, in some weirdly basic sense, a hard time understanding each other. The critic George Steiner defined intimacy as “confident, quasi-immediate translation,” a state of increasingly one-to-one correspondence in which “the external vulgate and the private mass of language grow more and more concordant.” Translation, he explained, occurs both across and
inside
languages. You are performing a feat ofinterpretation anytime you attempt to communicate with someone who is not like you.
    In addition to being French and American, Olivier and I were translating, to varying degrees, across a host of Steiner’s categories: scientist/artist, atheist/believer, man/woman. It seemed sometimes as if generation was one of the few gaps across which we weren’t attempting to stretch ourselves. I had been conditioned to believe in the importance of directness and sincerity, but Olivier valued a more disciplined self-presentation. If, to me, the definition of intimacy was letting it all hang out, to him that constituted a form of thoughtlessness. In the same way that Olivier liked it when I wore lipstick, or perfume—American men, in my experience, often claimed to prefer a more “natural” look—he trusted in a sort of emotional
maquillage
, in which people took a few minutes to compose their thoughts, rather than walking around, undone, in the affective equivalent of sweatpants. For him, the success of
le couple
—a relationship, in French, was something you were, not something you were in—depended on restraint rather than uninhibitedness. Where I saw artifice, he saw artfulness.
    Every couple struggles, to one extent or another, to communicate, but our differences, concealing each other like nesting dolls, inhibited our trust in each other in ways that we scarcely understood. Olivier was careful of what he said to the point of parsimony; I spent my words like an oligarch with a terminal disease. My memory was all moods and tones, while he had a transcriptionist’s recall for the details of our exchanges. Our household spats degenerated into linguistic warfare.
    â€œI’ll clean the kitchen after I finish my dinner,” I’d say. “First, I’m going to read my book.”
    â€œMy dinner,” he’d reply, in a babyish voice. “My book.”
    To him, the tendency of English speakers to use the possessive pronoun where none was strictly necessary sounded immature, stroppy even: my dinner, my book, my toy.
    â€œWhatever, it’s
my
language,” I’d reply.
    And why, he’d want to know later, had I said I’d clean the kitchen, when I’d only tidied it up? I’d reply that no native speaker—by which I meant no
normal person
—would ever make that distinction, feeling as though I were living with Andy Kaufman’s Foreign Man. His literalism missed the point, in a way that was as maddening as it was easily mocked.
    For better or for worse, there was something off about us,