Dr. Leopold Takes French

Abstract

Dr. Leopold Takes French Joann Kobin (bio) Edgar practically sprints from the classroom. Outside night has blotted out all but a luminous strip of fiery pink in the western sky. In the dimness of the high school parking lot, all the cars look alike. He finds his Camry, is glad he ended up driving. He needs a fast getaway. “It was excruciating,” he tells Lisa when he gets home. Excruciating, he quickly remembers, is the kind of hyperbole that Lisa is beginning to find objectionable. He takes a deep breath. “Not easy,” he qualifies, in his reasonable psychiatrist voice. She’s settled on the living room couch, making a bead necklace for his daughter Gabriela’s forty-sixth birthday. Glancing up, she reassures him it was only the first class and probably everyone else was squirming. She offers a cup of tea or a thimble of cognac. “Nobody else looked like they were squirming.” He declines the tea, considers the cognac, more than a thimbleful. A couple of logs in the fireplace smolder comfortably. Of course he knows it was only the first class but he hasn’t had a chance to tell her the extent of his classmates’ superior performance, how everyone had to read from a novel Madame Guiet passed around so that she could evaluate their accent and pronunciation. “She wasn’t testing for comprehension,” he explains. “The novel was too difficult for a beginning class — she told us that upfront. But everyone read with fluency and had a superlative accent except me, and they chuckled because the passage was apparently quite funny — some contemporary satire about the seamy side of French political life. Their comprehension was apparently fine. I didn’t get a word.” “Hard to believe,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “My accent, as they say, sucks. When it was my turn Madame Guiet didn’t smile. She looked offended.” “It was just an evening class at the local high school,” Lisa insists. “So who cares if you weren’t the best and the brightest!” Her eyes are focused on the beads she’s arranging. “It’s no fun being the dumbest,” he mumbles, prodding logs in the fireplace. “Just try saying ‘psychiatrist’ in French. You have to pronounce the P first. You don’t start with the ‘Sy’ sound. I froze.” [End Page 512] “There are synonyms, Edgar. You could’ve said you’re a therapist or a doctor.” “Why didn’t I think of that?” he says with a glaze of sarcasm, and with a shrug drops into the armchair. It’s almost nine; the class ended at eight and his vanity and confidence are still shaken. Learning to speak French was a dream he’d postponed since his first year of college, when all the pre-med courses had hours of lab work trailing them. Before he and Lisa married, his second marriage almost twenty-five years ago, he was in Paris for a professional conference, and his high school French utterly failed him. He met an attractive, smart Parisian psychiatrist, Yvonne Piquette, and he couldn’t come up with one complete sentence. His strong suit was menu-ese. Very strong on legumes and meat, he knew his cassoulet from his côtelettes. In the intervening years other languages had taken on far more cachet but somehow he still wanted to speak French, even though Paris itself was no longer the city of light. It was the city of unwarranted snobbery and chilly “hauteur,” of religious tension, of lecherous public officials. And yet this class still drew ten people intent on improving their French. Ten people under sixty-five or even under sixty. He was almost seventy-five, and his anxiety unnerved him. It had been almost traumatic — a word that’s lately become trivialized in the field of psychiatry, now everything is considered a trauma. Let’s face it, the class was difficult but it wasn’t traumatic. He’d be the last to make a case for that. He can’t stop ruminating about it. The very air of the classroom — the lingering recycled breath of perhaps three hundred adolescents with all their struggles and hormones — had made him...