How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  I said we never watched French TV movies in my family. “My brothers and sisters are strongly anti—”

  “Right,” Denise said. “I forgot you came from people of taste.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. She didn’t know anyone in my family but for some reason assumed we formed a perfect inverted model of hers, of which she was the only child and the only intelligent member (I wondered if that made me, to her mind, the only dumb member of mine).

  “We watch stupid American shows all the time,” I said, to make my family sound more normal.

  “Anyway, my parents obviously make me watch the Christmas special every year, and it was really bad once again, but guess what?”

  I couldn’t possibly have guessed what Denise would say next.

  “Do you remember those videos they showed us in fourth grade?” she asked, knowing I would. “With the kids who’d never seen the ocean?”

  “Of course I remember,” I said, a little too enthusiastically. “I didn’t think anyone had paid attention to those videos but me.”

  “You did put a lot of money in Miss Faux’s jar back then,” Denise noted.

  “You saw me?”

  “Everyone saw you. You must’ve dropped like thirty coins in there. Slid them in the slot one at a time, all solemn, like you were saying a little prayer after each coin drop.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said.

  “You really wanted those kids to see the ocean, I guess.”

  Denise was making fun of me. Her mood that day indicated school had just started again. She was always slightly less depressed after school breaks, because she felt she’d broken free from the “parental yoke” and experienced a rare sense of lightness, “like when you bike downhill after a tremendous effort going up,” she’d once explained. The feeling usually subsided by the third or fourth day back.

  “Well guess what?” Denise repeated, serious again. “One of the actresses in the Christmas special, the star of it, actually, I swear to God, she was in that video. She was one of the ‘poor kids’ seeing the sea for the first time.”

  “Which one?” I asked. “Juliette?”

  “Juliette,” Denise confirmed.

  She didn’t look surprised that I would remember not only the faces but the names of the kids in the charity video, but I still felt I had to justify it.

  “Juliette is actually the only one I remember,” I said. “I had a little crush on her.”

  “Me too,” Denise said, and it caught me so off guard that I pretended both our confessions had overlapped and I hadn’t heard hers.

  “So she’s famous?” I said. “That’s nice. I bet she’s able to see the ocean whenever she wants to now.”

  “You’re not following me,” Denise said. “I think Juliette was never a poor kid who hadn’t seen the ocean. I mean, I guess at some point early on in life, she was, unless she was born on the beach like those turtles or something, but anyway, my point is: I think those videos were entirely scripted. I think the kids in the videos were all fake. All actors.”

  “I don’t buy it,” I said.

  “You should look her up online. Juliette Corso. You’ll see.”

  I went up the stairs to check the door. It was locked.

  “It says she was already an actress four years ago?” I asked, and Denise said yes, that she’d spent a while doing research on Juliette these past few days.

  “Maybe both things are true,” I said, coming back down the stairs. “Maybe she was a child actor and had never seen the sea, and the charity helped her and her little brother.”

  “I guess it’s possible,” Denise said.

  I’d often wondered what had happened to the kids in the Let Them Sea video. Despite my donation, I was ambivalent about their work, the work of one-time charities in general, as opposed to the charities that helped people, the same people, over and over, for as long as they needed it. Of course, the one-time charities left you with a memory to cherish, you got to have something for a little while, but then you had to pass it on for the next guy to enjoy, and I couldn’t tell whether it was easier to live without something you’d never experienced or experience it once and go back to living without it. I hoped for the kids in the videos that they’d gotten to see the sea again and again, not just that one time. I realized I hadn’t seen the sea myself since the father had died. It made sense that the father’s being dead meant we would never take a road trip again. My mother hated driving.

  “So you like girls?” I asked, because I wanted to think about something else.

  “I don’t like anybody,” Denise said.

  I decided it was time to focus on school and getting smarter. My German had reached a plateau that year. Herr Coffin was less encouraging than he’d been, even though I was still among his best students. One day after class I decided to speak to him directly, ask him if he thought I had what it took to be a German teacher. I’d never talked to any of my teachers one-on-one before, the way my siblings had done since kindergarten. I believed only great students were allowed to stay in the classroom after the bell to chat with teachers while they packed their satchels. I believed details about the day’s lesson were discussed, points of view exchanged, extra reading suggested. But then in junior high I’d started seeing kids even dumber than me linger around after French or math hours. Did they think they were smarter than they were? Why did teachers allow their five-minute break between classes to be wasted on mediocre students? What did they have to say anyway? I’d asked Simone what she thought about this and she’d said that “regular kids” were only interested in talking about themselves, so she assumed the only reason they went to a teacher after hours was to seek advice about their future in a way they believed to be humble but was in fact a conspicuous play for attention, a way to verify they’d been noticed in spite of their lack of academic promise. “Even worse than that,” Simone had said, “they talk to a teacher in the hope that the teacher’s detected something unique about them. They know they suck, but they’ve been told everyone has a purpose in life, so they want to find out what theirs is. They think teachers have the means to decode the particular ways in which a student sucks and make them correspond to a career path the student should engage in. They think their sucking at something automatically indicates they’ll be good at another thing.”

  I didn’t think I fell into the category of students Simone had described. I didn’t suck at German, and I was planning to go to Herr Coffin with a reasonable question, not for a pat on the back. I wanted his honest opinion. As I walked toward his desk, though, after everyone else had left the classroom, I became nervous about what Herr Coffin would say. What if I didn’t have what it took to be a German teacher? What else was I remotely good at?

  “Herr Coffin,” I started, and I stopped awkwardly right there because I didn’t know if I should address him in German. He spoke French and allowed it in class now sometimes, when we did translation from German texts into our native language, but still. I would make a better impression, given the question I wanted to ask him, if I put it in German. Or would it just sound like I was trying too hard? As far as I knew, no one had ever stayed beyond the bell to talk to him. There was no precedent for me to refer to. I tried German.

  “Herr Coffin,” I started again. “Denken Sie, dass ich einen guten Deutschlehrer werden könnte?”

  Herr Coffin looked over his glasses at me.

  “Is that what you aspire to?” he replied, not in German. He seemed to be trying to make sure I wasn’t pranking him. “Are there any other lines of work you’re considering?”

  “Just German so far,” I said.

  Herr Coffin looked down at his satchel like I’d just delivered very sad news.

  “When did you know you wanted to be a German teacher?” I asked him.

  “Me?” Herr Coffin said after realizing there wasn’t a third person in the room, genuinely surprised, it seemed, to be asked a personal question. “I never wanted to teach,” he said. “The vocation of teaching is a rare and
precious thing. In thirty-seven years of teaching, I have only met a handful of passionate professors.” He paused there, as if to pay them a silent tribute. “The majority of my colleagues, though, are only passionate about the German language, the way I was. The way I am,” he said, correcting himself immediately.

  “So, what is it you wanted to do?” I asked.

  “I love German. I wanted to know everything about German, every subtlety, every possible double entendre. I wanted to read Schlegel all day,” he said, assuming I knew what he was talking about, “his own writings as well as his translations of Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and understand why he translated a certain thing a certain way and not another, figure out when it was that the sounds a German sentence made became more important than a word-for-word translation—”

  “So you wanted to be a translator?” I said.

  “No, not exactly. I just wanted to study, to keep studying. But it is a mistake to think that teaching a discipline is another way to keep learning about it.”

  Talking to Herr Coffin was starting to feel like talking to a sister.

  “I’m not a good teacher,” he added.

  “I think you’re great,” I said.

  The silence that sat between us at that point was made even more awkward when we heard one of my classmates, out in the hallway, distinctly call another a “fissured anus.” Herr Coffin played deaf and went back to his satchel.

  “I don’t think I am really passionate about German,” I admitted.

  “Good,” Herr Coffin said. “Then maybe you’ll like teaching it.”

  The only practical advice I got out of Herr Coffin as I inquired about ways to improve my German was that I should look for “conversation partners,” people who were fluent and would help me catch the rhythms of daily German and bask in its melodies.

  “School makes you believe one needs years and years of classes to learn a language when what it really takes is a few months’ immersion,” Herr Coffin had said. “Immersion will forge an internal compass inside your brain,” he’d added, moving his index finger left and right in the air to illustrate compass in a way that looked a lot more like metronome. “When the time comes for you to craft a sentence in German, the compass will tell you immediately if you’re heading in the right direction.” Herr Coffin hadn’t offered to be my conversation partner, though, and now that the father was dead I didn’t know anyone who spoke German, so I decided to place an ad on the Internet.

  It seemed, however, that all websites that put you in touch with other people were dating platforms. Even those that advertised their goal as “building a stronger community” had pictures of romantic sunsets or older couples holding hands. Some were very specialized, targeted at businessmen and young women who never wanted to work, for instance, or at widows and widowers. At Calvinists, even. I thought maybe the proportion of Calvinists who spoke German would be greater than that of the general population, but the Calvinist website was for dating only, and I didn’t want to date a Calvinist. Not that I had anything against Calvinists, but I’d been told they were serious people, and I didn’t want anything serious. I wanted to focus on my studies.

  I picked the website with the sunset. I had to create a profile first if I wanted to see anyone else’s. While I was at it, I thought it would be a good idea to look for “conversation partners” for Aurore as well (she still couldn’t drag herself out of the house). And for my mother too, maybe. By “conversation partners,” I meant boyfriends of course. I set up a profile vague enough that it could work for all of us.

  GENDER: n/a

  SEEKS: men/women, friendship/casual/lifetime partner/love/conversation

  AGE: undisclosed

  FIELD OF WORK: other

  CARE TO SPECIFY?: humanities

  HOBBIES: indoor activities

  SMOKING: occasional

  DRINKING: occasional

  SAY A FEW WORDS ABOUT YOURSELF [200 MAX.]: Hello! Guten Tag! Looking for bilingual friends (German, French) for conversations, and a boyfriend between ages 25 and 60. I would like to meet you if you like talking about life and books, if you speak German, or if you just want to have a good time. I have a yard and a big house. I have no pets but they are welcome if you have them. Looking forward to hearing from you!

  Once our profile was set, I started browsing through the people listed in our zip code. Only one person had mentioned speaking German in his profile, and it was Herr Coffin. Herr Coffin was seeking a life partner to have glasses of wine and take strolls with along the river on the weekends. I tried to picture him as a stepfather. I broadened the search to include the five zip codes adjacent to ours—there was a button just for that. While I reviewed the profile of a potential candidate for Aurore, I got my first alert. A red heart-shaped icon with a white envelope drawn inside it started beating in the right corner of the screen. I clicked on it. It was from Alex79#69, the first person I’d added to my favorites (you had to click a thunderbolt icon under the description someone had written of him- or herself if you liked it). “Hi,” the message said. That was it. I said hi back and Alex79#69 responded, “are you a boy or a girl? yr prfile is confusing.”

  “Girl,” I said, with Aurore in mind—Alex was a twenty-eight-year-old man, too young for my mother. “24 years old. PhD in history.”

  “Wow,” Alex79#69 said, and then he didn’t say anything more.

  OscarOscar showed more interest when I told him about Aurore’s academic achievements in first person, but then out of nowhere sent this: “would kill mother 4bj rite now.”

  “do you speak german?” I asked OscarOscar, just to make sure I wasn’t letting an opportunity go, though I guessed if he’d been of German descent, he would’ve called himself OskarOskar.

  “if u blow me good, i speak all language u want,” he responded.

  I decided to call it a day on the conversation partner hunt and looked up pictures of Juliette Corso, the destitute/child actor girl from the charity video, instead. Juliette had her own website but the Let Them Sea campaign was not listed among her “works.” It was a pretty short list, actually, a couple TV movies, one commercial for a soda I had never heard of (the commercial had only aired in Belgium), and the movie Denise had seen her in over Christmas break. Her bio said she was from Clermont-Ferrand but had moved to Paris the year before to pursue her acting career. There was mention of her having a dog but nothing about a little brother.

  Simone watched me struggle over math homework one evening and reminisced out loud about how easy life had been when she was in my grade.

  “I thought every grade was easy for you,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about the work,” Simone said, “but about the decisions that had to be made behind the work.”

  “What decisions?” I asked.

  “Exactly,” Simone said. “My point exactly. You’re in eighth grade: you have no decision to make. You can just do the homework and not question whether you like it or not.”

  “I know I don’t like it,” I said.

  I thought our conversation would end right there but Simone had an image she wanted to share with me.

  “We’re all in this funnel, see?” she said, and she grabbed my notebook and drew a funnel on a new page. “Here you are,” she said, drawing an X at the top of the funnel and naming it Dory.

  “Here I am.” She drew another X a little lower down the funnel.

  “What does the funnel represent?” I asked. “School?”

  “The funnel represents our lives,” Simone said. “The possibilities, the choices.” She put her pen to where I was on the drawing. “When you’re born, you virtually have an infinity of options, you get to swim at the top of the funnel and check them all out, you don’t think about the future, or not in terms of a tightening noose, at least.” She pointed at the bottom of the funnel. Then back at the top again, at the X that represented me. “You think, if anything, that the future will be even more of that, get you more freedom, more choices, because you see yo
ur parents pushing your bedtime farther and farther and you think, Well that’s swell, you think it means being an adult will just be super, but then little by little, you get sucked to the bottom. You don’t realize it at first. It starts with the optional classes you elect in high school. More literature or more physics? Should you start learning a third foreign language or get serious about music? And then choices you could’ve made for the future get ruled out without you knowing it, and you sink down to the bottom faster and faster, in a whirlwind of hasty decisions, until you write a PhD on something so specific you are one of twenty-five people who will ever understand or care about it.”

  “PhDs are not the only option,” I said.

  “But they’re the slowest possible way down the drain,” Simone said. “They buy you time, they allow you to believe for a while that the amount of specialization of your thesis verges on some kind of universality—and for the best academics, it does, or at least I want to think so—but then in the end it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, or that you think you can apply that brilliance to other areas of research: academia has already confined you to the one field you picked years before. That’s why Aurore is all depressed. Aurore is reluctant to go there.” Simone pointed at the neck of the funnel and made an X for Aurore right at the threshold.

  “Isn’t everybody?” I said.

  “Don’t be so sure, Dory. Some people enjoy being trapped. Some people need it.”

  The sound of her own words, or the thought of what she was about to say next, made Simone declare we were on to something and she requested that I start recording our exchange for her biography.

  “I was working,” I said.

  “Let me repeat myself: what you do in eighth grade is of zero consequence.”

  “That’s not what you used to say when you were in eighth grade.”

  “Well, I know better now. Trust me. That’s the whole point of having a big sister.”