When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,62

imagine they do. “Tell me, Jean-Claude, do you like the glaze I’ve applied to my shapely jug?”

Of the above, I can say, “Tell me, Jean-Claude, do you like the . . . jug?”

“Glaze” is one of those words that shouldn’t be too difficult to learn, and the same goes for “shapely.” I’m pretty good when it comes to retaining nouns and adjectives, but the bit about applying the glaze to the shapely jug — that’s where I tend to stumble. In English, it’s easy enough — “I put this on that” — but in French, such things have a way of biting you in the ass. I might have to say, “Do you like the glaze the shapely jug accepted from me?” or “Do you like the shapely jug in the glaze of which I earlier applied?”

For safety’s sake, perhaps I’d be better off breaking the one sentence into three:

“Look at the shapely jug.”

“Do you like the glaze?”

“I did that.”

If I spent as much time speaking to my neighbors as I do practicing imaginary conversations in the prison crafts center, I’d be fluent by now and could quit making excuses for myself. As it is, whenever someone asks how long I’ve been in France I wonder if it’s possible to literally die of shame. “I’m away a lot,” I always say. “Two and a half months a year in America, and at least two in England, sometimes more.”

“Yes, but how long ago did you come to France?”

“What?”

“I asked, ‘How. Long. Have. You. Been. In. France?’”

Then I might say, “I love chicken,” or “Big bees can be dangerous,” anything to change the subject.

What I needed was an acquaintance, and what I wound up with was Jackie. This was after his release, obviously. He’d been gone for close to three years when I walked past the hut one day and noticed a pair of little black socks hanging on the clothesline.

“Who do you suppose those belong to?” I asked the woman across the road, and she pulled an unusually sour face, and said, “Who do you think?”

I’d imagined that, like his wife and stepdaughter, Jackie would move away and start over, but it seemed he had no place to go and no money to go there with. After hanging out his socks, he picked up his rake and hoe and started getting his lawn in shape. It was strange. Were an American sex offender to return home, there’d be a big to-do. Here, though, it was all very quiet. No meeting was held that I was aware of, but somehow or other it was agreed that no one would look at or speak to this man. He would be treated as if he were invisible, and, with luck, the isolation would drive him away.

He’d been back in his hut for a week or so when I walked by and saw him inside his front gate, worrying something with the tip of his cane. Jackie had always been kind to me, so when he looked up and said hello I employed one of the formalities I’d learned years earlier in French class. “I am content to see you again,” I said. Then I shook his hand.

“What did you do that for?” Hugh asked later, and I said, “Well, what could I do? Someone says hello and sticks his hand out, and you’re just supposed to walk away?”

“If he’s a child molester, yes,” he said. But I’d like to see what he would have done in the same situation.

A few years later, after Jackie died of cancer, and the garden he so carefully tended had turned to weeds, I gave the baccalaureate address at a certain American university. When the speech was finished, I joined a procession of deans and distinguished fellows back to the president’s house, and it was there that a well-known politician approached and extended his hand, saying, “I just want you to know how much I enjoyed that.” Now, this politician — it’s not that I simply disagree with him. I despise him. I loathe him. My friends and I, the way we throw his name around, you’d think we were talking about the Devil himself. Spittle forms in the corners of our mouth as we denounce him, his party, and the people we refer to as his henchmen and cronies.

I hadn’t known that this politician was going to be in the procession that day; rather, I turned around and there he was, the two of us dressed in flowing