Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (45 page)

Lying on the futon, looking at Bob, I saw a man who would not fault me for my own contradictions, but rather, see their humor and encourage me to live with them.

If I married him in a big, pouffy white dress, he’d appreciate equally the irony and the beauty of it. We would stand before our lesbian Wiccan priestess and our highly elastic rabbi, surrounded by our innermost circle of family and friends. Michelle would be there, plus Jill, Vanessa, Jeff, Maggie—all my childhood friends who’d seen me through so much of my life. It would feel like the grand finale of some great, epic musical, but also like a lavish, opening overture to one. I would stand there shimmering, regal and self-assured, because the wedding gown, like Bob, fit me uniquely—because it, like him, brought out my best qualities in spite of myself. Adorned in that dress, I’d go on to become who I wanted to be, regardless. I would let hope vanquish fear. I would grasp Bob’s hand tightly. I would say clearly, “I do.”

Chapter 15

Speak at the Tuna

BEFORE I MET
my husband, the Amazing Bob, I dated a guy who dreamed of living in the suburbs of Cleveland. He painted pictures for me of big, family barbecues we’d have in our backyard and of trips we’d take to Disney World. As he waxed rhapsodic about his own suburban childhood—in which his mother spent hours in the kitchen preparing twice-baked potatoes and homemade chocolate cake—it became clear what my role in his scenario would become. When I told him I didn’t want to spend my life driving kids around in a minivan, he put his arm around me reassuringly.

“Don’t worry, hon,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. “You can always car-pool.”

The first time I met Bob, I made a point of asking him where he ultimately wanted to live.
Please say “a city,
” I prayed.
And please, by a city, don’t mean Cleveland.

I shouldn’t have worried. His answer was even better than I could’ve imagined.

“Where do I dream of living?” Bob said. “Abroad, I guess.”

When I was in elementary school, I spent every Saturday night transfixed before the TV watching that paragon of romantic propaganda,
The Love Boat,
followed by the equally preposterous
Fantasy Island.

“Love—exciting and new!” I’d sing along to the lounge-music-y theme song of the first show, before shouting and pointing, “Look, boss. Zee plane! Zee plane!” along with Herve Villechaize during the opening sequence of the second. Both TV programs had a nearly criminal effect on my imagination, but one episode of
The Love Boat
in particular made a lasting impression. Its story line featured a sophisticated older couple (Shelley Winters and Bob Goulet, perhaps?) who’d spent their entire married life traveling the world. For three days on the Lido Deck, they regaled Julie, Doc, and Gopher with tales of their foreign adventures.

The husband would say things like, “Once, when we were riding yaks in Kathmandu—” His wife would interrupt, “Remember, dear? That was right after we had dinner in Monte Carlo with the Aga Khan.” Showing off their snapshots of Florence and Cairo, they modestly referred to themselves as “citizens of the world.”

Never mind that these characters had been cooked up to resuscitate the careers of C-list movie actresses and struggling soap opera personalities. Watching them, I felt a bolt of recognition and desire:
that
was how I wanted to live. Adventurously. Wildly. Like a character in a great novel. When I grew up, I vowed, I’d travel the world. I’d ride camels across the Sahara and drink absinthe in Parisian cafes. I’d take up residency in exotic-sounding cities like Sparta and Perth. My husband and I would celebrate our wedding anniversaries with three-day Princess cruises to Puerto Vallarta. Our glamorous, international lifestyle would be devoid of ring-around-the-collar, PTA meetings, and all the other banalities adults seemed to worry about.

It was a childhood dream that far outlasted my tutu. A few months after we were married, Bob came home from work and said, “So. How’d you like to move to Switzerland?”

There was a temporary posting in Geneva, he explained, that his boss was encouraging him to take. If I could arrange a sabbatical from my job, we could spend a year or two living out our fantasies, then paying for them in Swiss francs.

Hearing the news, I took a few steps backward. “You want us to move to Geneva?” I said. I then proceeded to do what people often do when they realize a lifelong dream is about to come true: I had a full-blown anxiety attack.

Stupidly, belatedly, it dawned on me that for all the years I’d said I’d wanted to live abroad, what I’d really meant was
live abroad in London or Paris.
What the hell did I know about Geneva? Not much, except that it had something to do with the treatment of war prisoners, which hardly sounded promising. A huge disconnect existed between bragging to people that I “lived abroad,” and actually moving to a foreign country, which was enormously migratory and difficult.

Yet Switzerland was not exactly a “hardship post.” A nurse I’d known had spent three years in the Amazon rain forest caring for indigenous tribes; in her e-mails home, she’d described how rats ran up the ropes of her hammock each night to bite her while she slept. Switzerland, by contrast, had laws forbidding people to flush their toilets after 10:00
P.M.
lest the sound of the plumbing wake up the neighbors. Moreover, it had the highest per capita chocolate consumption of any population on earth. If that alone wasn’t a reason to move someplace, what the hell was?

I then thought of Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Truman Capote: so many great writers had lived abroad in Europe, it practically seemed like a rite of passage. If we moved to Geneva and I ever managed to fulfill my delusions of literary grandeur, critics could refer to this time in my life as “Her Switzerland Period.” How cool would that be?
Her years in Geneva,
I imagined my biography reading,
proved to be enormously inspiring for her
—
not only literarily, but also in terms of dark chocolate truffles.

“Okay, let’s do it,” I said to Bob resignedly. “I mean, it’s not like we have anything better to do, right?”

“There you go,” he laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

In the months following our wedding, life had thrown us a few proverbial curveballs. Several of our family members had undergone major surgery, and the September 11 attacks had literally hit us where we lived. For weeks after 9/11, I’d staggered around Washington like a mental patient, traumatized and paranoid. I couldn’t eat, sleep, write, or concentrate. Amazingly, people told me I’d never looked better in my life.

“Oh my God,” they cried. “You’ve lost so much weight. You look fabulous! How on earth did you do it?”

We had to resume living, I knew—and living courageously. Bob and I would move to a foreign city we’d never been to before, where we knew no one, where we had no place to live, and where, from all reports, a pound of ground beef and a box of macaroni could easily set you back $146,000.

Oddly, many of our friends didn’t understand the appeal of this.

“Why on earth would you want to move to a country where it’s dark all the time and everyone’s an alcoholic?” they said. “Why move to a place whose entire culture consists of ABBA and meatballs?”

They’d confused Switzerland with Sweden, but we didn’t bother to point this out. Geneva was smack-dab in the center of Europe. It was possible to wake up there each morning, then go to France for lunch and a former Axis power for dinner. No doubt, in Switzerland, we’d live in a quaint little cuckoo-clock house overflowing with geraniums, then take off each weekend for some incredibly thrilling international destination. If our friends ever knew this, we assumed they’d commit hari-kari out of jealousy.

The day our Swiss adventure finally began, Bob’s new boss, Shiv, picked us up at the Geneva airport and installed us downtown in a modern, concrete residential hotel called Studio House, where Bob and I would have to live until we found ourselves an apartment.

The narrow corridors smelled of fried onions and sizzling meat. As we passed doors to other studios, we could hear televisions blaring from inside, couples arguing in indistinguishable languages, babies crying shrilly. A barefoot man in a batik robe stood in a doorway, eating a plate of curry. The hotel was a holding pen for transients and foreigners—a category which, I realized suddenly, Bob and I now fell into.

Shiv set down our suitcases. “I hope this is all right,” he said, gesturing to the small living area that looked like a dentist’s waiting room. The bed was in an alcove partitioned by a rubberized curtain. The room smelled of vinyl, of cigarettes.

“It’s fine. It’s great,” said Bob, nodding. “We really appreciate this.”

“Okay then,” said Shiv, clearing his throat. “Come by the office tomorrow, and we’ll get your residency permits in order.”

Residency permits.
Right now, technically, we were aliens. Watching Shiv leave, I felt a jolt of panic.
Please, don’t go!
I wanted to dash after him, shouting,
Don’t abandon us here!

Blearily, Bob and I plunked down on the miniature couch. For a while, we just sat there, listening to the purr of the hotel’s ventilation system and the unrelenting growl of traffic. The name of street we were on translated to the Route of Acacias, but I was already mentally rechristening it as the Route of Little Fucking Motorcycles because it was overrun with mopeds, scooters, Vespas, Harley-Davidson wannabes, and dirt bikes, every single one of which sounded like a turbocharged leaf-blower.

Ambulances whooped by. People disembarked from hissing city buses, women in high heels pushed strollers over the pavement—
click, click, click.
An entire world was thriving beyond our window, thoroughly indifferent to us. There was nothing for us to do, nowhere to go. Back home—we kept checking our watches, subtracting six hours, mentally transporting ourselves back to Washington—everyone was asleep. We were in uncharted territory, beyond any radar, suspended between worlds.

“I guess this is it,” Bob said after a moment.

“Yep,” I said. “Here we are.”
Internationals. Expats. Citizens of the World.

Surveying the modular European light fixtures, the incompatible wall sockets, the 1970s plastic furniture, I suddenly wondered: Did Hemingway ever have to stay in a residence hotel like this? Did F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda ever feel so disoriented and out-of-place when they first arrived overseas? Probably not, I surmised, if only because they’d had the foresight to stay drunk all the time. Funny how glamorous stories about people going abroad always conveniently seemed to leave out this part—the unnerving schizophrenia of arrival—the panic you can feel in a strange city when you realize: whoa. This is it. You’re not going home next week with a bagful of snow globes to hand out at the office.

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.”