When in French: Love in a Second Language. Lauren Collins

the relatively bustling streets of Lyon. It seemed sad, though, that the main selling point of the place where we lived was its proximity to places where we’d rather live. And while the mountains that surrounded us were magnificent, the twenty-five or so times a year that we managed to take advantage of them didn’t make up for the three hundred and forty times we didn’t. On Sunday nights, after an outing, we’d return to our stockpiled supper and take out the recycling, casting bottles and cans into the maw of a public bin. This was our version of indulging in an imprudence: you could get fined for recycling—for recycling, I had not missed a negative adverb—on the day of rest.

      Behind its orderly facade—the apartment buildings with their sauerkraut paint jobs; the matrons in furs; the brutalist plazas; the allées of pollarded trees—Geneva was, if anything, faintly sinister. Its vaunted sense of discretion seemed a cover for dodginess, bourgeois respectability masking a sleazy milieu. What was going on in those clinics and cabinets? Whose money, obtained by what means, was stashed in the private banks? What was a “family office,” anyway?

      One day I received an e-mail from the Intercontinental Hotel Genève, entitled “What You Didn’t Know about Geneva.” I did not know that the Intercontinental Hotel Genève “continues to cater to the likes of the Saudi Royal family and the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates,” that the most expensive bottle of wine sold at auction was sold in Geneva (1947 Château Cheval Blanc, $304,375), that the most expensive diamond in the world was sold in Geneva (the Pink Star, a 59.6-carat oval-cut pink diamond, $83 million), or that Geneva “has witnessed numerous world records, such as the world’s longest candy cane, measuring 51 feet long.” I developed a theory I thought of as the Édouard Stern principle, after the French investment banker who was found dead in a penthouse apartment in Geneva—shot four times, wearing a flesh-colored latex catsuit, trussed. Read any truly tawdry news story, and Geneva will somehow play into it by the fifth paragraph. Balzac wrote that behind every great fortune lies a crime. In Switzerland, behind every crime seemed to lie a great fortune.

      Around us Europe was reeling, but the stability of the Swiss franc, combined with the influx of people who sought to exploit it, made the city profoundly expensive. The stores were full of things we neither wanted nor could afford. I reacted by refusing to buy or do anything that I thought cost too much money, which was pretty much everything, and then complaining about my boredom. Geneva syndrome: becoming as tedious as your captor. The expanses of my calendar stretched as pristine as those of the Alps.

      Olivier didn’t love Geneva either, but he didn’t experience it as an effacement. He said that it reminded him of a provincial French town in the 1980s—a setting and an epoch with which he was well acquainted, having grown up an hour outside Bordeaux during the Mitterrand years. His consolations were familiarities: reciting the call-and-response of francophone pleasantries with the women at the dry cleaners; reading Le Canard enchaîné, the French satirical newspaper, when it came out each Wednesday; watching the TV shows—many of them seemed to involve puppets—that he knew from home. He was living in a sitcom, with a laugh track and wacky neighbors. I was stranded in a silent film.

      WE HAD ESTABLISHED our life together, in London, on more or less neutral ground: his continent, my language. It worked. Olivier was my guide to living outside of the behemoth of American culture; I was his guide to living inside the behemoth of English.

      He had learned the language over the course of many years. When he was sixteen, his parents sent him to Saugerties, New York, for six weeks: a homestay with some acquaintances of an English teacher in Bordeaux, the only American they knew. Olivier landed at JFK, where a taxi picked him up. This was around the time of the Atlanta Olympic Games.

      “What is the English for ‘female athlete’?” he asked, wanting to be able to discuss current events.

      “ ‘Bitch,’” the driver said.

      They drove on toward Ulster County, Olivier straining for a glimpse of the famed Manhattan skyline. The patriarch of the 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 an ambi-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.

      “A medium popcorn, a Sprite, and a Pepsi, please.”

      “Wait 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.

      “They don’t have very good capillarity,” Olivier said.

      “Huh?” I replied, continuing to dab at the puddle.

      “Their capillarity isn’t very good.”

      “What are you talking about? That’s not even a word.”

      Olivier said nothing. A few days later, I noticed 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