This was also the first time I took the Metro. As a native New Yorker, I found it remarkably clean and quiet, but wasn’t bowled over – again, this was Paris and one just expected things to be different. I had a little trouble deciphering the colored lines of the maps and so asked two men, strangely confident in my high school French, where to find the Metro stop: the Opera. Despite the standard horror stories about rude Parisians, they were friendly enough, but didn’t understand what I was looking for. I tried sounding it out slowly until one smiled and said, “Ah, the OH-pera.” My first gleaning that just because a word was spelled (roughly) the same way as in English, didn’t mean it was pronounced that way. Having pointed out the lines to take, he asked me, “You are American?” “Yes!” I said brightly, “how did you know?” He and his friend exchanged amused glances. “Oh,” he said, “One can hear it.” I was taken aback, though not crushed, to discover my French was less than perfect.
I would later learn that not everyone took such realizations with equanimity. The following year, studying there, I was walking around with my guitar when a man in a white shirt and shorts – not really standard Paris streetwear – came up to me and said, “Voo joo-eh?” Though this was close enough to “Vous jouez?” (“You play?”) for me to understand, I responded in English: “Yes, I do.” He then told me he played flute. “Do you play well?” He looked me hard in the eye: “I’m a SUPERB flautist.” To which I must merely have nodded. Then he asked, “How did you know I was American?” Not to this day being a master of tact, I said, “You have an accent.” (Luckily, I didn’t say, as I might have, “a STRONG accent”.) He raised his eyebrows, less in anger than with pity, as he patiently explained: “Oh no, I speak excellent French!”
In later years, I would learn to refrain from delivering such revelations, especially back home, where others, over the years, have proved equally confident in their disastrous French. I would find it harder however to hold my tongue with French people who confidently told me how things were in America, briskly dismissing my attempts to correct them. (When I asked one woman how much time she had actually spent there, she said blithely, “Oh, I’ve never been. But my friends have told me all about it.”)
I don’t recall my subsequent visits to American Express that first year, but almost a decade later I had occasion to visit a banker there. Though I was running an office at that point, my look was still on the arty side. While sitting in the waiting room, I found myself between two Texans who were virtual caricatures of their state: solid, florid individuals who as I recall were even wearing ten-gallon hats. They began a conversation. Sitting as I was between them, I tried to join in – only to have them ignore me. Not even make a face like, “Do you hear a noise in here?” They just kept talking like there was not so much as a breeze in the room.
My encounter with the actual banker was memorable for another reason. His English pronunciation was not only imperfect but overlaid with the American accent he most often heard in his work. The result was a French-Texan English which left me struggling to keep a straight face as we did business.
About a decade ago, I had occasion to return to American Express only to find it reduced to a pair of teller’s windows. No one seeing those glass panes would imagine the rows of wooden mail cubbies which once so warmly greeted Americans far from home.
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