The only reason I was able to succeed in studying French for six years was because I had mastered the accent. I could only say a few things—où est le magnetophone? Il y a un rat dans le grenier. Venez voir ma ferme, elle est très belle—but I could say them with such certainty, such perfect inflection, that no one questioned my aptitude, even when I declared French as my minor in college. How could I not do well in French when, while everyone else was struggling with their bonjour, comment-allez vous? and their il fait frais, I was mounting puppet shows on the crowning of Charlemagne and filming lessons on how to properly prepare crème brulée? I took great joy in vocabulary lists, little Rosetta Stones that allowed me more insight into this code of which it seemed I was the only master. By the end of high school I had committed them all to memory and more, teaching myself to tell people that they smelled like an elephant’s butt, that gumbo made me nauseous. I learned donnez-moi quarante francs ou je vais assassiner votre president.
 
I dreamed in French.

 But when I got to college, my interest in French began to wane. Elle est plus grande que lui, I repeated, il a eu mon coeur—where were the words I needed to be eloquent? Where were the phrases, the tenses that would allow me to say what I meant, instead of building Tinker Toy frames around my ideas? I sat in the language lab every other afternoon and repeated stock phrases into a microphone while the lab assistant filed her nails—Philip cherche un appartement, nous ne gagnons pas le grand prix. I wanted to know why Philip didn’t look in the classifieds, I wanted to tell everyone why we were happy we had not won the grand prize. But if you said anything out of sorts while you were kissing the microphone you had to start over from the beginning, and an hour in the language lab seemed like five when it was just me and the assistant and the sound of her nails being sharpened for attack.

When I sat down to write to my high school French teacher after my first semester revisiting the passé simple, I couldn’t even tell her how I felt, and the letter was embarrassingly short: je suis peu satisfait de ma classe française, mais j’aime bien le bifteck au cafeteria. And even that was a lie—I didn’t like the steak, had never even tried it, but it was all I could remember how to say. Without the benefit of my accent to make the words swim like tadpoles into her ear, my letter was flat and simple, written at the first grade level. She wrote me back that the class would get better, and yes, she liked steak, too, and after a year I dropped my French minor.
 

I wrote my first story at age ten to get my science teacher to fall in love with me. It didn’t work. But the story, concerning two rocks, one igneous, one sedimentary, from two very different geological eras, who meet in a gravel parking lot and spend most of their rocky romance trapped beneath the wheel of a Honda Civic, sparked something inside of me that needed to create, and I’ve never been able to stop.

So it seemed like an easy choice, after that first year in college, to unburden myself from this French elephant that followed me wherever I went, this bag of foreign words tied to my foot that caused me to stumble, to forget their stronger, Liberty Bell-clear English counterparts. After my last French class I shed my manufactured classroom name—Kim, I was always told, would never translate properly—and skipped into fictional worlds where the people said what they meant, or didn’t say it, and then paid. My characters were strong, and they had no accents at all.

Two years whipped by me like subway trains, their hot breeze carrying away the last of the old debris and bringing more, scattering it at my feet and in my hair. I graduated from college early and, clutching my degree in creative writing like a cracked floatation device, I mimed confidence in the future. But I hadn’t written a thing in months.

I had tried. I had half a short story, in which the science teacher whose anvil-shaped head had sparked my interest in writing in the first place played a small part. I had essays grazing in my stomach. But nothing ventured into my fingers, into my pen. No one wanted to come and play in the Yukon wasteland of my paper.

So I feigned writing the way others feign sickness. I sat at the computer and did my best imitation of thought when others were around, and did nothing at all when I was alone. I bought books for "research" and read them during the time I had set aside for work. I took drives. I sang songs I hadn’t written to packed audiences that weren’t there. I did everything but write a single word.

Two months before the end of the summer, there was a message on my answering machine from a girl I had been friends with in my first year at college. She needed a French tutor, the message said, and she needed one bad. Without my help, she wouldn’t graduate.

I didn’t call her back right away; instead, I visited my parents and thumbed through my old French dictionary, the corners of pages with words like "cerulean" and "anatomically" dog-eared for reasons that I couldn’t begin to remember. How could I tutor someone in a language I didn’t even remember, that I had never really known in the first place?

I called her back and told her mother no, I would not be able to help. I don’t speak French anymore, I said. And when it came time to say what I meant, in any language, I barely spoke at all.
 

The last time I was in the language lab, Philip was still looking for an apartment; he had searched over the course of a school year, but had never found one that was parfait. He had seen ones that were trop grand, or trop petit, but he had never found one that was très bon, as he himself described his idea living arrangement. I sympathized with him, poor, homeless Philip. I too was looking for quelque chose, and I couldn’t find it. After agreeing with the microphone that Philip’s search had been sans fruit, I shut off my computer with a twinge of sadness, the cacophony of many voices practicing as many languages quietly and embarassedly  into their mikes creating a pleasant white noise.

The plan was, originally, to relocate to Quebec. I don’t know what I was going to do once I got there—wait tables by day, spend the nights singing the entire catalogues of Jacques Brel and Luc Plamondon, Edith Piaf, if I could handle it, in local bars, where the people would wear berets at jaunty angles and complain about the government as their cigarettes dangled precariously from complicated holders. I was going to be a French Canadian, an American ex-pat, too scared to cross the ocean, but still close enough to Paris to suit my needs.

 What I didn’t realize then was that I knew nothing about this place I wanted to go. I knew their national anthem, memorized in one night during a Toronto Argonauts game, and I had their flag, four feet by six feet, hanging in my living room. But I didn’t know what I expected to find there, how I thought things would be different. I had no reason to leave America. And when it came right down to it, I didn’t really want to.

 I just liked the dream.

 At the time, French was able to take me to a place I could never really be, not Paris, not Canada, but a dream world where everyone spoke differently and the accents were much more soothing. It wasn’t until I realized that I couldn’t speak the language that I abandoned it, keeping only meaningless banter about the weather and songs taught to French first-graders. I held the accent like a banner, but had no bones to drape it on.

 And I lied when I said my characters had no accents.

 It was all they had, in fact, their accent, my banner, my window dressing to disguise the fact that I didn’t know what the characters wanted to say, I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I had the tone, I had the voice. But I had no words to convey them with.

 The problem hadn’t been French at all. My dictionary had words for whore, it had words for despondent and livid and exuberance. I had run from a language that I thought could never express my feelings into the arms of one that wouldn’t.

 I can tell you that when I am sad, it scrapes like a shovel against the front of my chest, but that’s not it. I can tell you that when I’m happy it’s the absence of weight, but that’s not it, either. I can build vast towers of words with accent and tone as its mortar, but all you’ll see is a concrete shell, still harboring its secret treasure deep inside.

 But how do you put these abstract things, happiness, sadness, friendship and liberty and disgust and the feeling that your legs burn to run and betrayal, life and death, how do you put them on paper, if not with words? Metaphorical light shows, anatomically correct representations of the real thing, they still don’t touch the gray nerve at the center of heartbreak. I can build a scale model of triumph, but I can’t make it run.

 These models, these metaphors and smoke and mirror acts, are the closest I will ever be able to come to saying what I really mean, and really meaning it. My tower of words imprisons them, if only briefly, and even if they hide, you can see where they live.

 There are no real words for sadness except sadness, no better word for happiness than happiness. No one has given me a Rosetta Stone for these ideas, and no one ever will. So I build around them as best I can, and sometimes, if my tower is tall enough to block the light, it is in its shadow that you will see what I really mean.
 

 Once I had a chance to use my French again when I worked as a motel clerk. It was the middle of the afternoon, and although the sun was shining, a storm was following potential guests down I-71. That day our rooms, which normally sat mostly vacant in the middle of the week, were filling fast, and I was almost out of spaces and patience when a thick-looking man and his dyed-blonde wife entered our lobby. These were the kind of people I would charge more, people who hassled me about rollaway beds and television reception like gnats around a fire. They would not be getting a Triple A discount from me.

 The man approached the counter, laying two hands so large they looked edible face down on its freshly wiped glossy coat. "Sprechen sie Deutsch?" he asked, his face disappointed, as if he could already tell I spoke no language at all.

 "No, sir, I’m sorry." I mentally prepared my pantomime: a victorious V for our last two rooms, then brought to the lips to signify smoking; a hacking cough and flailing arms for non-smoking. For the price, I would count by fives on my fingers. I would walk them to their room personally to avoid giving directions.

 He turned to his wife and shrugged, his shoulders like mountains. She pushed him and nodded at me—they could pantomime, too. And he turned back.

 "Et français? Parlez-vous français?"

 And to my amazement, I did.

 "Oui," I said, the word escaping my mouth like the creak of a rusty door hinge. "Nous avons deux salles, on fumant, on non-fumant."

 He repeated my statement to his wife in German, and she nodded at me again. "Et le prix?"

 Give me forty francs, or I will assassinate your president, I thought. "Quarante neuf dollars."

 He and his wife took the non-smoking room. On their way out he thanked me in German and I answered in English, and for a wavering moment the air was soft again with languages in pink-powdered accents, not really saying what we meant, but getting the job done.