The Remote Island by Bryan Christian The burning question of the day: Life on Mars or Eleventh Hour? Plus: Britney goes on the record, USA may not renew Monk, and our Grey's Anatomy recap.
I rely on my tongue. It opens doors and eases
my passage. It wins me friends and saves me from enemies. It starts a million
fires, then just as quickly puts them out. I may not always use it honestly,
but I try to keep my intentions pure, even when my words cannot be. Perhaps most importantly, I would be a single,
celibate wretch without my tongue. Some people flex their muscles to impress.
Others pull out their wallet. I open my mouth. My tongue is my only reliable
weapon in the clutch, and while it has failed me numerous times, it has almost
never abandoned me. But there is one problem with this vital organ. It only
works on one setting: English. Its powers simply do not translate.
The problem was German. Not the German people, who are
quite nice if you don't poke them, but the actual nouns, verbs and grammatical
structure of the Deutsche Sprache. I tried to explain my difficulty with
the language to my father, but he inexplicably valued our Bavarian heritage as
the only birthright my grandfather bothered to pass down. So Deutsch
joined the shortlist of things I couldn't talk my way out of. I was forced to
muddle through four years of high-school German, followed by two and a half years
of college German, but I remained hopelessly incompetent.
promotion
When it came time to send a crew of barely bilingual
scholars abroad to the Vaterland, however, the exchange-program director
discovered that her quota of Americans fell woefully short. I'd always wanted
to see Europe, so I put my tongue to use. Convincing her that my apparent German
ineptitude was actually a result of shoddy penmanship, I finagled a completely
unearned B-minus on my entrance exam and boarded an international flight to Munich.
I spent the next six months at the University of Regensburg.
Regensburg is a small city about an hour north of Munich, consisting of a gigantic
cathedral, one large department store, the university and little else. Just about
the only thing to do in Regensburg is drink large quantities of bier and
talk. But I couldn't talk. When I spoke German, my trademark verbal acrobatics
tumbled heavily to the ground. I couldn't banter, I couldn't subtly dig. Hell,
I could barely order my Löwenbräu. I became a mute American with a
big smile, completely missing everything being said around me. You know the guy:
He's the eternally friendly foreign-exchange student from all those teen comedies
who comes across as mentally deficient. I watch those movies now and shout at
the screen, "Leave him alone! He's probably Oscar Wilde in his hometown! Don't
trick him into sleeping with the elderly woman! Have pity!" But no one ever does.
Then I met Marie. She was the French exchange student
everyone chased in those same teen comedies, only here she spoke halting German
instead of English. With a sly smile and an eternal cigarette hanging seductively
from the side of her mouth, Marie
My greatest weapon had been rendered impotent.
seemed unapproachable. Especially since my
greatest weapon had been rendered impotent. I would sit with her and her equally
French friends and try to make pointed remarks about how Dutch hip-hop had left
out both the hip and the hop, but it came across as a dumbed-down version of See
Dick Run. Yet Marie didn't care. It took a while before I realized why she
continued to sit next to me and blow flirty smoke rings into my face. She could
barely speak German either. Neither of us had any idea what the other was saying,
so we simply assumed the best. When I chattered on in my pidgin Deutsch,
she heard Moliere. When she held forth in her pre-school German, my ears gave
me Dorothy Parker. It was the perfect situation. We were essentially flirting
with ourselves.
I never knew how important words were to my enjoyment
of sex. Many times during our three-week romance, Marie would stop me a few minutes into cunnilingus and never let me finish;
I couldn't ask why. It's not the kind of question you trust to a translator.
When she used her hand on me, she would whip my poor dick around like a truck
driver downshifting, and with no tongue to assist me, I had no clue how to stop
the violence without offending her. People can be touchy about their technique,
and slapping their hand while screaming "No!" can send the wrong message. Also,
during the act, Marie was prone to muttering in French under her breath.
French is a sexy language, but it made me feel like an outsider, as if I were
riding in a taxi and overhearing the foreign cabdriver talk on his cell phone.
I came to the conclusion that without the exchange of words, our sex
would be like our conversations: empty.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
