nuit of the cheese booger

This blog needs a humor makeover. The story that follows is my attempt. It is also true, I swear. I tried to sell it to David Sedaris, but he didn't want it.

My junior year of college, I went to France as an exchange student. Looking back, it was the life-experience equivalent of castor oil. To say I had a wonderful time would be a stretch. I lived in a cold, northern city, populated with the kinds of people who generally populate cold, northern cities, the kinds of people who wear navy blue and austere expressions and bark at you when you violate some sacred code of French bureaucracy, like trying to get money out of your checking account on a Tuesday. While I didn’t arrive there completely ignorant of the language—I’d lived in France before—I wasn’t fluent or confident. Even after several months of immersion, I went to bed every night exhausted from the work of living in a foreign language.

I lived in an apartment so poorly heated that I slept under my coat every night. The bathroom was constructed in such a way that you couldn’t lean forward to wash your face without getting your butt stuck against the wall. The hot water was sketchy. My roommate was an operatic soprano who lived for male attention (THAT doesn’t get old) and threw tantrums over things like overly pithy orange juice. In retrospect, I grant her more leeway. She was just feeling cranky and damp. Our other roommate was a French-Italian supermodel lookalike who routinely arrived home from clubbing to loudly cook herself enormous quantities of pasta at 3 AM, and that put us both in a pretty foul mood, too.

The Soprano and I were both part of an American exchange program that was responsible for four other women at the time. All of us were twenty or twenty-one years old. Our program director—I’ll call him K—was a man in perhaps his early forties, one of those hardcore expatriates who love France with a convert’s zeal, refusing to speak English in all but the most extraordinary circumstances and taking a cheekily smug Continental attitude when talking to fellow Americans about alcohol and sex. (Once, when we were all out for dinner, one of my compatriots, whom I’ll refer to as Pot Girl, asserted that she was quite sure my married “host father”—i.e. my landlord—had a crush on me, a repulsive thought. K, the adult responsible for securing my room and board, looked at me puckishly, and asked “Do you find him attractive?”)

K was married to a woman who directed the exchange program in a nearby city, a program much more popular than ours because its students got to live in dorms with other Americans and speak English the whole time. Unlike him, she still seemed American. Her French, while fluent, was marred by a brazenly awful accent. “AAh,” she would sigh when a girl did something particularly reckless, “L’EsPREE D’oon Fee AmereeCAN!” We could not, for the lives of us, figure out how on earth these two people came to be married. For one thing, how could someone as Frencher-than-thou as K suffer that accent? For another thing, he was straight? Stereotypes are dangerous, and gaydars have been known to fail, but none of us could quite buy that he was into women—except for the one girl who was a conservative Christian, and had a crush on him.

“God! I mean, can you imagine those two having SEX?” Pot Girl would say. “Just try and imagine it! I mean, can you imagine her giving him…” And then, God help us, we’d imagine it, because thanks to Pot Girl, we couldn’t help but do so. (Pot Girl was very popular in France.)

“POT GIRL! SHUT UP! GROSS!!” Crush Girl would yell.

K and his wife didn’t live together during the week; because they worked in different cities, he kept a small apartment separate from their shared one. ”J’ai un studio,” he explained, somewhat cagily, we thought. (“Yeah,” said Pot Girl, “He’s got a studio. I’ll bet he does.”) On the weekends, he joined her in her city, which was, if one were choosing, the nicer of the two. Given our completely inappropriate curiosity about their personal lives, we were enthralled when the two of them invited all six of us to join them for dinner at their apartment one evening while we were visiting the aforementioned nicer city.

The apartment was decorated much the way you’d expect: tasteful colors, modern prints, and framed photographs of K performing in various theatrical productions. Despite the fact that everyone in the room was American, we sat down to a standard multi-course French meal, which was fine with me. I was perpetually ravenous, and when left to my own devices, tended to scarf entire baguettes in one sitting—simple carbs being the primary refuge of bad cooks short on cash. Unlike most of the French people we knew, K and his wife were sympathetic to vegetarianism, which meant that for once, The Soprano and I were as well-fed as everyone else. The wine flowed freely. And we were allowed to speak in English. “No French tonight,” said K. “Just relax and enjoy yourselves.”

And we did. Until the cheese course, when it all went to hell.

To give you a sense of the nightmare that was the cheese course, allow me a quick digression: Once, in grad school, my friend Marie was sitting in on lecture for a course with which she was assisting. The professor, a distinguished teacher with whom she had a close relationship, was explaining to a room of one hundred undergraduates the rich cultural context of a local cherry festival. “So you see,” he said, “it’s not just about popping some cherries…” And then, there was silence. Bad silence. The silence of one hundred undergraduates, one teaching assistant, and one incredibly embarrassed distinguished professor trying to pretend as though he had not just inadvertently made what may be the worst possible sexual reference that a professor can make in front of a college class.

If you can imagine that awkwardness, then perhaps you can imagine the awkwardness that descended when K suddenly acquired a ball of cheese on the tip of his nose. It was roughly the size of a tapioca pearl, slightly over his left nostril, and had to have been something sticky, something like Brie. It was almost certainly a piece of cheese, and not the even more upsetting alternative, but it was there. It was very, very there. It was so there that we, the previously content and slightly giddy exchange students, collectively lost the powers of speech. We just stared at one another in horror. How were we to proceed? What should we do with our faces?

The key difference between this cheese booger situation and the cherry-popping situation was that K, unlike the deeply unfortunate professor, did not realize what was going on. He continued, with great animation, to offer us various cheeses, describing their provenance and flavor in detail. Several of us died, then wondered why God did not arrive to take us away. Others searched for profundities in the depths of their wine glasses. Pot Girl excused herself to use the bathroom, and we all wailed inwardly, wondering why we hadn’t beat her to the punch. (How do I know that everyone else wailed inwardly too? I know.)

After several excruciating minutes, during which K seemed to begin to sense that something was amiss, his wife asked him to help her with the next course in the kitchen. “Oh thank God.” someone whispered when they left the room. We breathed; our shoulders dropped visibly. Then we focused intensely on the next challenge, which was defusing the Laughter Bomb. We could feel it coming. Our throats were tightening. Tears were already rolling down a few cheeks. But we could handle it. Pot Girl returned, and we shushed her desperately before she could say anything. Breathe, I told myself. Breathe. Think about cats, or sunflowers. Breathe.

None of us even considered the possibility that K’s wife would not tell him about the cheese. Imagine, then, if you will, how we must have felt when both of them came back to the table and sat down, normally, as if K did not still have a cheese booger on his nose.

Pot Girl looked as though she might cry. Crush Girl and one of the others spurted giggles. I started chewing on my tongue.

K smiled at the gigglers. “Now, what’s this?” he asked, in his favorite are-we-being-naughty voice. “A little bit too much wine, peut-être?”

I honestly don’t remember how long it went on. It felt like about a month. At some point, he brought his napkin up to wipe his mouth, or something like that, and the cheese booger disappeared. The evening ended amiably, without anyone falling off her chair or spraying wine out of her nostrils or saying anything to our program director about the cheese. When we got back to our hotel, of course, we screamed and hyperventilated for a while.

“That’s it,” said The Soprano. “He’s gay. If they had any sexual relationship at all, she would not have let him leave the kitchen with that thing on his nose.”

It took me a few years to get over my fear of cheese courses, but I’m happy to say that I have recovered. I’m still working on my fear of boogers.