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  Praise for French Like Moi

  “A delightful read...essays filled with levity and grace. A winning and witty collection offering humor and insight into the French way of life.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Carpenter captures the ironies, oddities, and attractions of the French capital in a way few writers have achieved—which is saying a lot, considering how many have tried their hand at conjuring the City of Light…. French Like Moi is a delightful romp through French life and Midwestern sensibilities, all combined in one compelling story.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Sit back with a croissant and an espresso—or better yet, du vin et du fromage—and treat yourself to the delights and dilemmas of being a Midwesterner in Paris. Scott Carpenter’s tales of life in the French capital will make you laugh, marvel, and daydream about amping up the adventure in your own life. Merci Monsieur Carpenter!”

  —Lorna Landvik, author of Chronicles of a Radical Hag

  “Deeply French but also deeply Midwestern—and thus rather perfect.”

  —Alethea Black, author of You’ve Been So Lucky Already

  “French Like Moi is not only full of spot-on cultural observations and the laugh-out-loud-yet-self-deprecating humor Minnesotans do so well, it’s also beautifully written with a timeless literary flair.”

  —Heather Stimmler-Hall, author of Naughty Paris,

  editor of Secrets of Paris

  “I laughed until my sides hurt at Carpenter’s lighthearted and self-deprecating take on living in l’Hexagone. For loyal lovers of Paris and France, and anyone who’s moved abroad or is thinking about it, French Like Moi is a jovial reminder to pack your patience and your dictionary, and gobble up every single, butter-soaked morsel of the journey.”

  —Kimberley Lovato, author of Walnut Wine & Truffle Groves

  “Carpenter greets the language, cuisine, culture, and daily details of life with a wit and honesty that makes for a rollicking read. We encounter vivid characters, impossible scenarios, and such hilarious tableaus that soon we all feel French like lui!”

  —Erin Byrne, author of Wings: Gifts of Art, Life, and Travel in France

  “A hilarious look at…figuring out life.”

  —Readers’ Favorite, five-star review

  Copyright © 2020 Scott Dominic Carpenter. All rights reserved.

  Travelers’ Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc., Palo Alto, California

  travelerstales.com | solashouse.com

  Art Direction: Kimberly Nelson

  Cover Design: Kimberly Nelson

  Illustrations: Liam Golden

  Interior Design and Page Layout: Howie Severson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  978-1-60952-183-7 (paperback)

  978-1-60952-184-4 (ebook)

  978-1-60952-185-1 (hard cover)

  First Edition

  Printed in the United States

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Paul and Muriel.

  You guys always have my back.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE: Came

  Chapter 1: Murders in the Rue Bobillot

  Chapter 2: Either/Or

  Chapter 3: La Modification

  Chapter 4: City of Light Bulbs

  Chapter 5: The Immigrant

  Chapter 6: The Tab (Or: How to Get in Trouble Without Really Trying)

  Chapter 7: The General Assembly

  PART TWO: Saw

  Chapter 8: French Like Moi

  Chapter 9: The Acute and the Grave

  Chapter 10: Squirrel Pie and the Golden Derrière

  Chapter 11: Some Assembly Required

  Chapter 12: The Medi-Morphosis

  Chapter 13: The Cartesian Method

  PART THREE: Conquered

  Chapter 14: Cock-o-Van

  Chapter 15: War of the Worlds

  Chapter 16: Underground Man

  Chapter 17: Too Soon, Too Close

  Chapter 18: Invisible

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Scott Dominic Carpenter

  A Note on Publication

  Acknowledgment is made to the following publications, where various pieces from this book first appeared (often in modified form or under a different title): The Rumpus: “French Like Moi” (including the image reproduced in this edition); Mark Twain House Royal Nonesuch Prize: “Squirrel Pie and the Golden Derrière” (later published in Lowestoft Chronicle); Catapult: “The Medi-Morphosis,” “War of the Worlds”; Ducts: “Too Soon, Too Close”; JMWW: “La Modification”; Lowestoft Chronicle: “The Acute and the Grave,” “Squirrel Pie and the Golden Derrière”; Secrets of Paris: “The Tab,” “Underground Man,” “Either/Or,” “The Cartesian Method.”

  “What can’t you find in a large city

  when you know how to walk and how to look?”

  —Charles Baudelaire

  PART ONE

  Came

  Murders in the Rue Bobillot

  “TO BE HONEST,” Madame C replied in French, “the problem is the neighbors. They refuse to die.”

  The comment sent my tea gurgling down the wrong pipe. While I hacked and wheezed, our hostess pinched her brow with concern. Her sandy-haired partner, Patricia, tendered a napkin in case my insides came out.

  “Ça va, Monsieur Carpenter?”

  “Ça va,” I croaked, flapping my hand to keep her at bay. Repeating it seemed a good idea. “Ça va, ça va.”

  Anne, who’d been off inspecting the kitchen, returned to the living room for the chore of pounding her husband on the back. Madame C watched from the sofa, and Patricia added cubes of sugar to their tea. The mood was far from homicidal.

  This kind of situation occurred with distressing frequency in Paris: I’d start a conversation on one topic only to find it veering into another. While I squinted at the butcher’s explanation about cutlets, the road would somehow fork off to plumbing. At the post office I’d be learning about air mail options, only to feel the clerk had hairpinned to the subject of Etruscan pottery. Swerves like this generally meant I’d misunderstood some crucial word, had careened off the conversational cliff, and had gone airborne for an undetermined amount of time. So, when Madame C mentioned murder as the reason for selling her apartment, I recognized the floating sensation and braced for impact.

  Where, I wondered during the fall, had I gone wrong? After all, the verb mourir had definitely whizzed by, calling to mind the deathiness of mortgages and mortuaries. And I was pretty sure she’d said something about neighbors. Of course, there’d been a slew of other words, too, some of them possibly significant. It’s always hard to tell which parts of a foreign language are the engines and axles, and which are the hood ornaments and air fresheners.

  Sometimes, if you play along, you can avoid a crash landing.

  “So why do you suppose that is?” I said. “I mean, why is it the neighbors won’t…?” And here I made a rolling gesture with my hand, inviting Madame C to fill in the gap with a clarifying comment.

  She shrugged. It was inexplicable. Monsieur and Madame Pottard were old and infirm, but they simply “refused.”

  “You mean they refuse to…?” My hand swirled.

  They refused to partir, she said—that is, to “leave.”

  “Like, to an old folks’ home?”

  “No.” Her look went steely. “To the grave.”

  Ordinarily that’s where this story would end. Madame C’s apartment had promise, but I was burdened with these pesky things called principles. I frowned upon stuffing bodies under the floorboards—not just because o
f the stench, but also on account of it being morally questionable.

  Problem was, we were running out of options. After deciding to move our family to Paris, Anne and I had started our search in the center of town. But prices had nudged us outwards, farther and farther into darkness, like NASA’s Mariner probe. If Notre-Dame Cathedral represented the center of the Parisian solar system, we were now prospecting between Uranus and Neptune, also known as the thirteenth arrondissement. This was one of the less glamorous parts of the capital, which explained why Madame C’s compact abode on the Rue Bobillot was within reach of our budget. It was a tad on the small side—co-zee as the realtor put it in his best franglais—but what did we expect? Your average Parisian makes do with quarters the size of an American bedroom. In some parts of town, immigrants carpet their floor with mattresses and sleep in shifts. It doesn’t get any more co-zee than that.

  Which, it turned out, is why they wanted the neighbors dead.

  “The apartment is too small for us,” Madame C said as Patricia gestured at the walls, nearly spanning them with her outstretched arms. For years now, they’d wanted to buy the place next door and add it on for a little elbowroom. There was just one problem: Monsieur Pottard’s stubborn existence.

  Madame C raised her arms to the heavens. “The man has had cancer for years. He can barely make it up the stairs.”

  Patricia chimed in. “And that wife of his!”

  “Mon dieu! Bedridden as long as we’ve lived here. A decade! But she won’t let go. Neither of them will.”

  I blinked. It seemed so heartless, so crass, so…well, so much like a French novel.

  In Le Père Goriot, Balzac proposes a moral test: you can have infinite wealth if you’re willing to sacrifice the life of an old fogey in China. Agree to push one geezer off the ledge, and a boundless future is yours. Do you accept? Of course not! But then temptation creeps in. A little infinite wealth could be handy. And China is so far away. Besides, that grandpa might not care. Maybe he’s been waiting for someone to give him the old heave-ho.

  Madame C had looked this moral quandary in the eye and stared it down. How her fingers must have itched each time that ancient man approached the edge of the stairs.

  What to do? We could either enrich this charming murderess or resign ourselves to lesser accommodations—such as a tent below an underpass. Our daughter’s socks might get gritty, but at least our conscience would be clear.

  The doorbell rang, and Patricia ushered in more shoppers. The wife hadn’t even removed her gloves before her eyes went to the woodwork. The husband—a little pucker of a man—was sizing up the walls, framing them in the square of his hands. They were nodding their heads in that ça va sort of way. Another thirty seconds and they’d be moving in furniture.

  Anne gave me an urgent look, and I concurred.

  “We’ll take it,” we cried.

  So began our move to the edge of the fringe of Europe’s most glorious capital.

  Ah, Paris.

  Whether you’re talking last tangos, midnights in, red balloons, hunchbacks, French connections, Jean Valjean, Ratatouille, or Amélie Poulain, Paris is the place where it all goes down—and where the it is big and heart-stopping, something that never leaves you, that you’ll always have, like the Paris of Casablanca. It’s a layered pastry of romance, adventure, and elegance, coated with a glaze of chic!

  And also, a tax dodge. Turns out that if you leave the US for most of the year, you glide between the incisors of the IRS. So, when a sabbatical came my way, I dragooned Anne into the idea of France.

  Because dragooning was how it had always worked. As a kid my parents had dragooned me into French classes, and when this prepared me for no other career, I was dragooned into teaching the same language to other poor saps, ones who would eventually be dragooned into their own slot in the vicious cycle we call education. To polish my credentials, I’d been dragooning my family for extended stays here for years, lodging us in rat traps, each more squalid than the last.

  Buying a place, I contended, meant we’d never again have a dining room table made of plastic. Sitting on the toilet would no longer interfere with shutting the bathroom door. Our kids—well, only our daughter was still at home—could have a dresser instead of a stack of cardboard boxes.

  “All that would also be true,” Anne pointed out, “if we stayed home.”

  I love my wife, but her trenchant observations can be a little unbecoming.

  “What is it you’re really after?” she said. “Why is it so important?”

  I struggled for an answer.

  “Right,” she said. “Let me know when you’ve figured it out.”

  All of which led to that day we scribbled our offer on a paper napkin, snatching up Madame C’s apartment before the other couple could unholster their wallet.

  On our way out we crossed paths with a twig-like man heaving a pull-cart of groceries up the stairs. It was none other than Monsieur Pottard, the old man whose life we were in the process of saving. Since we’d soon be living next door, I introduced myself and offered him a hand with his burden.

  When the poor fellow clutched his heart in surprise, I realized my mistake: I’d taken this man for a neighbor when he was, instead, a voisin.

  In the Midwest, neighbors tend to be chatty folks who wave from their barbecue. They’ll lend you a cup of sugar or rent out their kid to mow your lawn. But a French voisin is a different creature altogether. He may live next door, but that’s his fault, not yours. Proximity is the mother of contempt. A good voisin should leave you the hell alone, and the best voisin is a dead one—especially if his passing allows you to purchase his apartment and blow out a wall.

  Which explained why my offer of assistance pushed Monsieur Pottard to the brink of cardiac arrest.

  I leaned forward. “Ça va, Monsieur Pottard?”

  “Oui,” he croaked, “ça va.”

  Ça va. “It goes.” This expression is the Swiss Army knife of the French language. When used as a question (ça va?), the phrase contains its own answer (ça va!). Moreover, it can bat away any query slung in your direction. Should a pal inquire how your weekend was, you can shrug and say ça va, which means, “It was OK, but nothing special.” If the rental car guy asks if you’d like a green Renault, ça va will again do the trick, communicating that the vehicle will be satisfactory. Should someone offer you a second serving of calf brains at dinner, you can pause, reflect, and say, ça va, merci, which translates as “I couldn’t eat another bite, thank you.” And if ever the questions get too hard (Who’s the president of France? How do you like your eggs?), there’s a special peremptory version that goes Oh! ça va! You hold up both palms at the same time, and this means “Enough with the questions already.”

  The phrase has no English equivalent, which is a common manufacturing defect in French. Even simple things here have a way of turning strange. For example, un car is pretty obviously a car—until it turns out to be a bus. Un coin is not a coin, but a corner, and the word actuellement doesn’t actually mean “actually.” (It means “at present.”)

  French is filled with elephant traps such as these—deep pits masked by foliage, with stakes pointing up from the bottom, ready to shish-kebab foreigners as they topple in. Some of the pits get rather crowded.

  How is it down here? the newly impaled ones ask.

  Oh, someone drawls from the darkness, ça va.

  And it’s not just language. Lots of things in France are weird, and it’s up to you to determine which ones are genuinely strange and which are just the way they do it here.

  For example, to buy Madame C’s apartment, we needed a mortgage. Back in the States, mortgage bankers resemble parole officers, severe and world-weary. So, when our Parisian banker looked like a debonair middle schooler—the cuffs of his navy-blue suit coming down to his hairless knuckles—it made me wonder: cultural difference, or just your run-of-the-mill bad idea?

  When I asked this youngs
ter if he had any experience with foreigners buying property, he swept away my concerns like so many crumbs.

  “Ça va aller, Monsieur Carpenter!” he scoffed, deploying a variation on the standard expression—not “it’s going” in the present, but “it’s going to go,” sometime, maybe, in the future. All would be fine, he assured me, as long as I filled out the forms without error, provided copies of documents that do not exist in the US, and coughed up the appropriate fees.

  Meanwhile, another person was demanding documents: the notaire.

  Now, to the American brain, this one seems obvious enough: if an adversaire is an adversary, and a salaire is a salary, then surely a notaire must be a notary.

  Welcome to the elephant pit! You’ve just landed on a special skewer—where the translation is both right and wrong at the same time.

  In the States a notary is a person who bought himself a rubber stamp on the internet, whereas the French notaire is a creature with supernatural powers—a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from lawyers and bureaucrats, joined at the wallet. They specialize in real estate and wills, and it’s impossible to purchase property or die without their assistance.

  Our notaire was Maître Le Bivic, and the man cut a suave figure in his office on the rare occasions he was present. The walls were decorated with pictures of the Breton coast, replete with lighthouses and sailboats, including one particularly elegant two-master that hinted at what our fees were paying for. Clerks swarmed about like deck hands.

  I should clarify that Maître was not his first name. You address a notary as Master, which leaves you feeling a bit like Gollum.

  While straightening his cufflinks, Master Le Bivic explained the steps—the required documents and the waiting periods, and how the two notaires representing buyer and seller would engage in shuttle diplomacy, as though annexing a small nation.

  Americans like things to be snappy, and in the US it’s possible to close a real-estate transaction in a couple of days. In France, however, the process takes at least six months. After all, Paris was settled long before Julius Caesar added it to the map of the Roman Empire, so the title search alone can take a while. Then there are tests to be performed—geometers measuring the surface area down to the closest centimeter, pest controllers checking for termites and rats, technicians detecting lead levels. Is the ground under the building riddled with old quarries? Are fungi blooming in the walls? How’s the asbestos doing?