Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème

Another twenty centimes pinged into the giant clamshell. Matthew bookmarked his Zola and slid down the bedspread into a seated sulk on the rug. There were so many ways to blow Paris, he thought, as he eavesdropped on his roommate Bruce telephoning yet another actual French person in the front hall. This one, Martine, needed less convincing than Béatrice or Poucette or Gaby to meet up later near the Boulevard Raspail for an impromptu confabulation.

Bruce was expert at threading his speech with casual, idiomatic connectives, the eh bien’s, the tout à fait’s, the m’écoute’s that mark the native speaker and are impossible to pick up in a language lab, whereas Matthew still sometimes forgot to say “Comment?” instead of a surly-sounding “Quoi?” when he needed something repeated, which was more often than he cared to admit. Bruce used mealtimes with their host parents, Giselle and Roger Sirjean, as language practice, chattering away about the pretty flowers or stern newscaster or remarkable laundry soap on the television screen while Matthew traced the J.C. embroidered on his napkin, as if the spirit of Jesus Christ, or Jean-Christophe, the black sheep Sirjean, could furnish him with the one withering phrase to silence them all, plus the television.

Bruce Teakel, the most fluent of the one hundred and seventeen students spending their junior year in Paris on the Sweet Briar program, owed his linguistic prowess to God and the War in Indochina. After the fall of Saigon, several loads of boat people had wound up in Asheville, North Carolina. As prayer leader for the youth ministry of his father’s church, Bruce had taught the refugees English, strengthening his French and becoming fluent in Vietnamese along the way. Matthew Aiken, a last-minute major, fell somewhere in the lower third of the 1980–81 Sweet Briar cohort and, after three months in the City of Light, was dismally aware that the reduced lexicon and constrictive syntax of the French language had stripped him of wit and nuance. Madame and Monsieur Sirjean called him Matt, rather than Mathieu—an appropriate reduction, he thought.

“Bon ben, Martine, à ce soir,” Bruce said, ringing off. The slangy elongation of her name—“Martín-uh”—made Matthew want to upend the bottle of ink on the desk between their beds. Not content with French and Vietnamese, Bruce was now taking Chinese at the Paris III campus. When he wasn’t out cultivating that most elusive of creatures, the actual French friend, he spent his evenings filling grid paper notebooks with columns of brush-stroke characters.

Matthew pulled his duck boots from under the stereo console and slipped them on. He would leave before Bruce had a chance to ask him if were free that night. Tagging along was not something Matthew Aiken did, not in America and certainly not here. He tucked a sweater into the waist of his overalls and reattached the straps to the bib. Going for his overcoat, he caught the reflection of Bruce’s Bible in the mirrored closet door rather than look at the angry red knots comprising his own face. Then he circled the salon and liberated a piece of marzipan from a box next to Madame’s thumb-worn pile of royalty magazines.

They could eat all they liked for breakfast and dinner, but snacks weren’t part of their contract. Bruce and Matthew were Giselle Sirjean’s second pair of “bébés américains,” and she hadn’t bothered to conceal her disappointment in them. How short they fell of Doug (pronounced Doog) and Leslie, the lumberjacks of ’79–80 who, in her accounts, were virtual Hemingways, always returning at dawn reeking of women or drink. When Giselle had made them soup, she would stand a spoon upright in the tureen and dare it to fall. Those were the soups, she’d say, to satisfy Doog and Leslie’s hungers. Bruce, one hundred and twelve pounds and prone to chills, couldn’t be fattened up, and Matthew resisted pleasing her with his appetite almost on principle.

“Où vas-tu?” asked...