The taste of chewed Emmental cheese on someone else’s tongue

The summer I turned 16, my parents drove me from Minneapolis to O’Hare Airport to help me board a flight, by myself, bound for Luxembourg. My mother thought I should do it alone, exercise creativity and resourcefulness. She wanted to stay home and paint in her studio. My father didn’t trust me to make a connection in the international terminal.

My father won this argument.

My parents argued about most things most of the time and the entire way to Chicago.

My father often said “Allah provides” to which my mother always responded, “Eh hmm, the evidence is still too weak”.

My mother believed the world was defined by centuries of artists and great art.

My father believed the world was defined by the Federal Reserve Bank and yesterday’s interest rates.

“I wonder what’s worse,” my mother would say while glaring at my father’s lunch, “killing an animal or eating it.”

“Be serious!”, my father would bark his non sequitur back at her, “The free market economy.”

When I was 12 or 13 years-old I worried my parents felt no love for each other and would get divorced. But at 16, I wondered why they stayed together. It was a long drive to Chicago.

The summer I turned 16 my father had arranged for me to live with a family, isolated in rural France near the Swiss border so I would become fluent in French and make true a lie he often told his friends - that his son was trilingual.

A letter had arrived from Besançon, France - par avion, as letters traveled back then - from Lucien, a friend of a friend of a friend of my father’s. Lucien wrote that he was a conductor on the French railway who had mastered 9 languages without formal education and that he would make me fluent in French in two months - roughly the amount of time it had taken him to master each of his languages.

My father sent a response to Lucien - par avion - informing him that I would spend June and July of that summer in France; that I would fly into the Luxembourg airport, arriving at 8:35 AM on Wednesday June 1; and from there I would figure out how to take the eight hour train journey along the eastern border of France south into Besançon. That - in the days before Google - was the full extent of the plan.

On the flight, I sat next to a couple of guys - a Moroccan and an Algerian, Zaki and Mojo - a decade older than me. Because I was underage, they shared their wine with me. When we parted ways at baggage claim, I asked them if they knew how I could get to the train station.

They had a friend who owned a car, they told me, and could give me a ride or, if I preferred, I could come to their apartment where they had good hashish. Today, we all know now that these stories don’t end well. But back then Nixon had been disgraced out of the White House and the wounds of the Vietnam War felt like they maybe possibly might heal and Cat Stevens - “glide on the peace train” - was always on the radio and the world felt pretty good, so I went with Zaki and Mojo in their friend’s car.

They took me straight to the station (no apartment or hashish), helped me navigate the purchase of a second class ticket to Besançon, bought me a bag of snacks and water as a gift, and waited on the platform until I had boarded. They waved as the train left the station; a scene from Dr. Zhivago that might instead have been one from Midnight Express. To this day, whenever I am in doubt, it is my hour with Zaki and Mojo that restores my faith in humanity.

In the next town, a woman boarded the train and took the seat right across from me. She carried a briefcase and a straw basket overflowing with vegetables and fruit, wine and baguette; a manifestation of Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

She wore a white sundress that exposed her shoulders; her bare shoulders. From my limited knowledge of French cinema I calculated that if I stared at her long enough with beguiling eyes like the actor Alain Delon, then she would take me home and together we would be a Francois Truffaut film.

My eyes were glued to her the entire trip. She never looked at me once even though I must have been a ruggedly irresistible pubescent adolescent in my Britannia denim patch sport jacket and Frye harness boots; a thick coating of Clearasil masking my acne.

It was nearly midnight when the train arrived in Besançon. We both exited onto the platform. She moved into and through the terminal. A station master locked up gates. The train pulled away. No Lucien. No one. Then empty, dark, and finally silent as the clicking of the woman’s heels disappeared.

Alone, I sat on a bench, opened the par avion letter, and did my best to translate my mistake.

Then I heard the click of heels coming toward me, the woman in the white sundress with the bare shoulders returning, approaching. Approaching me. She had seen a young Alain Delon.

I stood. She reached out, touched my chest near my heart. “You? Alone?”, she cooed.

“Uh huh”, I said, my voice awkwardly cracking with adolescence, and exponentially louder than her whisper.

“Come. Avec moi.” She reached for my duffle bag, carried it through the terminal as I followed, my heart pounding, fantasizing how Truffaut would film all that was about to happen. Master shots? A series of close-ups? His new Spring-Autumn love story.

At the curb, an idling car waited for us. Her husband leapt out, introduced himself - Émile! - and sandwiched me in the middle of the backseat between two young children who giggled the entire way to their apartment where they made up the sofa in the sunroom and I woke at dawn to find my clothes washed with a lavender scent, my Brittania denim patch sport jacket ironed with creases.

The woman in the white sundress with the bare shoulders made breakfast - orange juice, tartine with unsalted butter (who knew? I was of the margarine “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature” generation), and my first ever café au lait - as Émile spoke on the phone. He made notes in the margins of my par avion letter and scribbled a crude, stick map on the outside of the wispy blue envelope. I later realized he was speaking to Lucien, confirming directions.

When he ended the call, the two kids squealed with delight because a song came on the radio sung by a man I would come to know very well that summer - Johnny Hallyday, France’s answer to Elvis Presley. It took a few bars because it was so different, and sung in French, of course, but ultimately I recognized it as Love Me Tender.

I had seen Elvis live in concert earlier that year, coincidentally on my 16th birthday at the old Met Center in Bloomington, Minnesota; home of the Minnesota North Stars. Elvis was a bloated Vegas act loved only by old ladies, but I was curious, so I bought a ticket and went to the Met Center which was filled with…old ladies. And me. And it enlightened me. When I saw Elvis live in concert, I had not yet been to Graceland eight times. I did not yet understand that it was Elvis who had parted the sea for the passage of all who followed - The Beatles, sure, but even Barack Obama - stay with me here. I did not yet understand that if Vernon Presley, Elvis’ father had not spent three years in prison for writing a bad check, forcing Elvis and his mother, Gladys to move to the “wrong” side of the tracks where young Elvis absorbed into his being the birth of the Mississippi Delta Blues and the gospel music of the Missionary Baptist churches then he would not have become the cultural bridge connecting the black and white youths who lead the courageous Freedom Rides of 1961 and then Martin Luther King, Jr.’s movement would never have gained the traction it did and then President Lyndon B. Johnson would never have signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law and then Barack Obama would never have been elected president.

But none of that is why Émile pulled his wife - the woman in the white sundress with bare shoulders - into a slow dance on the kitchen floor. He kissed her. Sang to her.

Enchanted me in ways my parents never could.

The family drove me to Lucien’s home, which, it turns out, was not “just outside Besançon”, as the par avion letter suggested, but more like driving the 127 miles from Minneapolis to Brainerd. Johnny Hallyday came on the radio several times. Émile and the woman in the white sundress with bare shoulders kissed every time until we arrived in Lucien’s village.

Lucien was much shorter than I was. He walked with a silent film waddle while straightening his thin, Charles de Gaulle mustache. After the woman in the white sundress with the bare shoulders kissed me on both cheeks and drove away with her family, Lucien tossed my duffle in the hall and took me down into the basement, pulling the door shut - click! - behind us.

It wasn’t exactly Silence of The Lambs, but they could have shot the movie down there.

The basement had a cold, uneven dirt floor. Two wheelbarrows over there. A couple of shovels in the corner. And a hand-crank, portable cement mixer that still smelled wet.

In the center of the basement Lucien had built a 5-foot cube room with one-foot thick stone pebble concrete walls and a heavy wooden windowless soundproof door, like a film studio.

He tugged this thick door shut - thud! - and closed us into what was essentially a sound proof booth, cut off from the world. And the world cut off from me.

Pressed against one cement wall was a folding table that held two reel-to-reel decks, headphones, and a microphone. Lucien pushed play on the left. Record on the right deck. The two 12 inch tape reels - crepe, he called them - spun. Through the headphones, I heard the left deck - complete, complicated French sentences followed by a long pause, which allowed me to first write down that sentence in a composition book and then speak it into the microphone, recording my own stumbling pronunciation onto the right deck’s crepe.

Lucien left me down there alone for four hours. Then he returned, checked my composition book, listened to my recordings, made corrections, and released me for the day.

During long hours in the basement, seven days a week by myself - did I mention this was the summer of my 16th year? - I learned to pronounce many useless French sentences like:
Je ne peux pas te décrire ce sentiment d’amour autrement qu’en disant que c’est comme l’enfant Jésus en culotte de velours.

Later, Lucien waddled downstairs, into the booth, and translated the sentence as: I cannot express the feeling of love more than to say it’s like Baby Jesus wearing velvet underpants.

None of these words made sense to me, not in English nor in French. In my parent’s house, feelings were frowned upon; expressions of feelings were forbidden. My mother was an atheist and my father an Orthodox Muslim. This schizophrenic religious upbringing had exiled Jesus, infant or otherwise, to abstract concept status, reserved for the Catholic family across the alleyway. And never having worn a pair, I didn’t know if velvet underpants were meant to be a good thing or a bad thing; irresistibly sexy or intolerably sweaty.

One Sunday in the middle of my stay in Besançon, we skipped our session in the concrete cube and spent the day at a farmer’s market in a nearby village where we were joined by Lucien’s cousin, Jocelyne, a coiffeur from Dijon. She was only a couple of years older than I was but already a working adult. Her hair was so long and thick that when she moved it out of her eyes she used her entire forearm. She wore a white sundress - yes - that left her shoulders- indeed - bare.

Jocelyne stopped at the fromagerie and bought a wedge of cheese with holes in it and explained that near the Swiss border, where we were, they call it Emmental, not Swiss.

Uh huh, my voice cracked as she parted her lips and bit into the wedge of what until this moment I had thought of as disgusting coagulated casein. Until this moment.

In the late afternoon, Jocelyne took me aside, around the corner, away from the others. She caressed my face - still eating the cheese - pulled me to her lips - kissed me as deeply as I’d ever been kissed - or, well, honestly, it was my first real kiss.

Then Jocelyne - sotto voce - close to my ear - whispered - and not only did I know what she was saying, I knew what she was saying: “…c’est comme l’enfant Jésus en culotte de velours.”

Somewhere from someone’s radio on main street, Johnny sang Elvis’ Love Me Tender.

Jocelyne moved her hair out of her eyes using her entire forearm, then looked deep into me and said, “After we marry we will go to America and I will meet a wealthy man and he will take me to New York and I will make love to him on top of the Empire State Building.”

My first love lasted but seconds. Not long after this, my first real kiss, my parents collected me at O’Hare and we drove to Bemidji in Northern Minnesota to visit my mother’s family.

My aunt and uncle were building a home that was still mostly plywood and open stud wall - you could see right into and through the bathroom - so they sent the three of us to sleep in their pop-up camper, which they’d set up on level ground in the far corner of the backyard, still a construction site in need of landscaping. When it started to pour rain, my uncle laid out scraps of plywood that made a bridge across the mud for midnight visits to the bathroom.

The next morning, I woke on the top bunk of the camper. The sky was clear. The yard was a wet disaster. From inside the house, I heard the familiar sounds of WCCO’s news radio.

It was August 17th, 1977, the newscaster told us, the morning after the day of.

My aunt threw open the door and from the back step yelled, “Elvis Presley died!”

My father shot up out of his bunk, faced me, panicked, and screamed, “Oh, no! Oh, God!”

He always wore the same style of silky sky blue pajamas and never let anyone see him without a “dignified” matching silky sky blue robe. Slamming his way out of the camper, struggling to tie the belt of the robe, tripping in and out of his slippers, he stumbled across the soggy plywood that was now less of a bridge and more of an obstacle course, shouting, “Oh, God! Oh, no!”

He fell.

Mud covered his hands and face, his robe and pajamas. He rose again, “Oh, God! Not this! Not now!”, and raced toward the sound of WCCO and the news of Elvis Presley’s death.

He entered the house - stayed for only a second - came out - slowly picked his way across the swampy and jagged plywood - brushed mud from his hands and face -

Then climbed into the camper and grumbled, “I thought she said Jimmy Carter died.”

My mother goaded, “Well. I wonder which would have been worse - a president or a king”.

My father said, “- oh, God, be serious, the free market economy.”

A half century later, as my parents neared the ends of their lives, they would sit together in the common area of the nursing home and hold hands for hours while my father would explain to the nurses that his wife’s Alzheimer’s was the result of her having been an “artist”; and my mother, fading into Alzheimer’s, would lovingly tell the nurses that my father was her “shit bucket”; a disagreeable object, a haunting from her chores growing up on the farm that now shared attributes with my father, or he with it, somewhere deep in her breaking mind.

It occurred to me then that the feeling of love is just different for everyone. Mighty for those on the inside - maybe like Baby Jesus in velvet underpants. And mighty mysterious for those of us on the outside - maybe also like Baby Jesus in velvet underpants.

In Elvis’ words, Émile and the woman in the white sundress whose name I never knew had a grateful “love-me-tender-love-me-sweet-never-let-me-go” kind of love.

My parent’s was a more aggressive,“you-can-shake-an-apple-off-an-apple-tree-shake-a-shake-sugar-but-you’ll-never-shake-me” kind of love. It carried them all the way (with my mother serving divorce papers on my father only once, when she was 75 years-old) shaking through a marriage that lasted 58 years, 2 months, and 16 days until the day my father died.

I wonder what the feeling of love was for my parents and how they might have described it, if it is even possible to describe ethereal occurrences using earthly locution. The image of the Lamb of God in luxurious undies is one way, deeply meaningful to some while nonsensical to others. My parents babbling on about the “free market economy” or “shit buckets” seemed to work for them for nearly six decades in a supremely subjective and singular sort of system; a feeling of love I will never understand but one that, I acknowledge, remarkably made me.

And my first true love, Jocelyne’s was clearly an “only fools rush in” kind of love. I never saw her again after that one kiss and though I don’t think of her much, for me, the feeling of love will always carry with it the sensory overload of a savior in a white sundress, bare shoulders, and chewed Emmental cheese on someone else’s tongue.