Illustration by Naomi Ann Clarke
When my friend Brian and I arrived at my pen pal Delphine’s house on the broad plain of central France in the summer of 1998, her parents first offered us a shower. Whether it was customary to offer one to all visitors, or whether French lore had it that Americans were fussy about bathing, I couldn’t say. Other families we stayed with on this 10-day trek from Paris to Narbonne offered the same upon our arrival. In any case, we demurred, figuring we could take showers in the morning, the American way.
The family — whose members’ names I have changed — soon offered us much more than a chance to wash up. On a round picnic table in a field in front of their two-storied house, they set out canapés stuck with toothpicks, each of them flying a tiny American flag. We sat down and ate. Delphine’s stepfather, Jacques, held out a bottle and asked, “Un peu du whisky?” Mais oui! And he emptied a third of the bottle into my glass. I was drunk immediately. Of course, he served wine with dinner, too. That first night, we ate rascasse — scorpion fish — and steamed potatoes. When it came time for the cheese course, Delphine and her father brought out the Camembert on a large piece of plywood, as if on a royal litter.
Three whole days were like this: hours of gorging on everything the family had to offer and speaking about God knows what, with Delphine as translator. I remember a great deal of laughter. And always more Scotch. I have no idea how many bottles Jacques had on hand. They seemed to go fast, but he always had another. Once, he pointed to the propane tank and said it was his liquor supply.
I had met Delphine two years earlier at a summer school for foreign university students in England. The three-week experience combined the emotional intensity of summer camp with the intellectual intensity of a graduate seminar. It was the first time I became friends with people from other countries. Groups of us spent hours every night in the pub of our medieval college, downing ciders and talking about T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
Delphine was quiet, but great company. She had a formal manner that I attributed to the Napoleonic discipline of the French public school system. Her posture and English grammar were perfect; I could all but see her careful sentences diagrammed in the air between us when she spoke.
We rode together on a bus to Stratford-upon-Avon, a grueling two hours for Europeans accustomed to high-speed rail. We took in an outdoor production of Richard III one evening and drank mulled wine. I had a crush on Delphine, and maybe she did on me, too, though I found her emotionally hard to read, and I had a girlfriend at college anyway.
When the summer ended, Delphine and I began exchanging monthly letters, often long ones. Judging from one of her replies in looping script, I must have written about seeing the movie Dead Man Walking and the ideas about mercy it prompted for me. I had bought decent stationery so she wouldn’t be insulted by my notebook paper. She took pity on my cheap, disposable American pens and mailed me a Waterman for my birthday. When I told her Brian and I were planning a nine-week Let’s-Go-and-Eurail trip, she invited us to visit.
Other than eat, there wasn’t much for tourists to do in the vicinity of her home. According to the painfully self-important journal I kept on the trip (sample sentence: “After a long journey, here I am on the continent”), we visited the château of George Sand, the 19th-century novelist. We walked to the nearest town — Saint-Something — and went to Mass at a dark, stone church, where we were the youngest people in attendance by decades. Jacques took us for a ride in his 1935 Renault Celtaquatre. On Sunday afternoon, la télé remained on and tuned to the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race; I appreciated learning that even the French watch sports while they dine.
One lunch featured the tenderest ham I have ever eaten, shaved and placed in delicate rosettes on the plate. I asked Delphine’s mother, Marie-Louise, if it had been smoked. Delphine translated my question, and the answer came back: “No, it’s just raw.” Probably this was a jambon cru — literally, “raw ham,” but not in the sense I understood the word — from the nearby region of Auvergne. I fretted briefly about trichinosis but figured my hosts knew what they were doing. Of course, all was well.
Every meal was five courses. Lots of pork and potatoes. Cheeses: Saint-Nectaire, pavé d’Affinois, Vieux Pané, Roquefort. Everything fresh, no reheated leftovers. Marie-Louise cut winter lettuce for our salad minutes before dressing and serving it. Dessert one afternoon was Paris-Brest, a fluffy, cream-filled pastry in the shape of a wheel, named for a round-trip bicycle race between the two cities. Delphine’s mother made all these dishes; she also, like magic, made her labor invisible to her guests.
By the third day, I woke up with a mild dread of these meals. Brian complained of persistent heartburn. We had become like the hogs across the countryside, living only to eat and waddle a bit.
On Monday morning, Delphine drove Brian and me to town so we could catch a train to Bordeaux. Near the station, we stopped for pizza — atrocious. Delphine, I think, wanted to eat American food with us. She fanned her mouth at the spiciness; it was not spicy to my palate. Afterward, she walked us to our train, and we embraced and cheek-kissed goodbye. I’m sure I pledged to keep in touch. On the platform, waving, she choked up. In my seat on the train, I didn’t.
I never wrote to her again.
It’s not that I never meant to. In my most self-flattering interpretation, that weekend was a culmination, the final episode of a beloved one-season series that didn’t get renewed. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that I was just a jerk. I feel guilty, because I imagine Delphine remaining the sad girl on the train platform. I imagine my name mentioned year after year in that home with increasing bitterness. Of course, this guilt is a form of egotism. She may have been as glad to be rid of me as I was to get on my way. I don’t think she wrote to me, either.
The end of our correspondence also put a hard stop on my gratitude for the tremendous hospitality the family had shown Brian and me. It was excessive, in the way the Louvre or Sedona is excessive. You don’t need all this beauty, this nourishment, this love, but you’re getting it anyway. I have since grown suspicious of such gratuitous generosity. I still drink whiskey, but I would now view someone who poured me four fingers of it as wishing me ill.
We tell our hosts things like, “You shouldn’t have,” or “I could never repay you.” There’s an edge of moral menace, of accusation, to these niceties. To say you could never repay someone’s hospitality is to posit a future version of yourself who remains as much a moral failure as you are now, in a permanent state of default. It can also sound a bit like saying you could never harm an innocent kitten or buy from Amazon, as if your host is the one who has committed a grave sin.
The family’s hospitality seemed to me a burden, so I ran from it. What would have happened if Delphine and I kept up our correspondence? Would she have wanted to visit me in the sleepy college town where I lived? And then what? What would we do? What would we eat? And what would she say about me when she returned home?
Decades later, as my wife and I planned a trip to Paris, I felt again the weight of the inconclusive ending to this friendship. I scoured the internet for evidence of Delphine’s life and work. She left little trace — or perhaps had long since married and changed her name.
Still, I found an address for someone of her name on the outskirts of Paris. Perhaps she had lived there at one point; perhaps she still did. I took a chance and sent a card, asking in English if she was the one I used to correspond with and who had granted Brian and me such hospitality. If so, I said, please email me. In the following weeks, I again imagined how she might be reacting to this note, which did not even contain an apology for not writing for so many years. I imagined old resentments welling up again. No reply came before we left for the trip.
Sometime after we returned home, the card came back, unopened. Affixed to the envelope was a sticker from the French postal service, printed with reasons for why it was not delivered. A box was checked: “Destinataire inconnu à l’adresse.” Addressee unknown.
Jonathan Malesic’s essays have appeared in America, Commonweal, The Atlantic and The New York Times. His 2022 book, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, is being translated into 10 languages.