English as a Second Language

  “I don’t know how you can make everything into a joke,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid I don’t find it funny at all.”

  Sigh. Spare me.

  “What I think is funny,” I said, “is that you have no qualms wrenching me from a sound sleep and then expecting me to be able to decipher your drama with a single glance. What I think is funny is your unbelievable self-centeredness in assuming I care at all about whatever trauma has you so overwrought. What I think is funny is, in a word, you.”

  Of course, I just wish I said that.

  Instead, I just sighed a little bit. “What’s going on?” I asked again. I put down my coffee and lit up a cigarette. Suzanne required as many vices as possible as a filter. I would have started chugging down some wine if I hadn’t suspected that it might make me violently ill. Not that I was ruling it out entirely, depending on how the conversation went.

  “I don’t know how to say this,” Suzanne said. I arranged my face into something I hoped was more encouraging than bored. She turned her head and looked directly at me. “I think you and I are in competition.”

  “You and me?” I echoed. “Competition?”

  “I think it’s a direct competition between us,” she said, in that low voice. “We seem to have the same kind of appeal. We both went to really good colleges. I assume you also graduated with honors.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I almost didn’t graduate, actually.” I gave her a big smile on that one. “And I never tested very well, either.”

  “Well.” Her eyes shifted away from me, no doubt to conceal her pleasure at her academic superiority. “We’re clearly the two most intelligent women on our course. I think that we have to come to terms with the fact that everything between us is a power struggle, based on the fact we’re so similar.”

  “Suzanne.” I struggled to keep my voice even, and not to let myself get snide. “I really don’t think we’re at all alike. Also,” I said, “I don’t think we can discount the intelligence of our classmates. Who knows what kind of papers they write? If my intelligence was determined by my performance in class, I’d be asked to leave.”

  “Come on, Alex,” she said, frowning at me. “You know there’s been this weird energy between us since the day we met. How else would you describe it if not a battle for supremacy? I’m willing to admit to it; why can’t you?”

  I didn’t think that was the right question. I thought the right question was probably—why wasn’t I asleep? I took a drag of my cigarette.

  “I really don’t feel any competition with you at all,” I said. “And as far as any energy . . .” I took a breath. “Suzanne, I know you’re upset about Toby. Why are you making this about me?”

  “You say you don’t want him,” she said immediately. “Maybe that’s true. But I think you definitely don’t want anyone else to have him.”

  “I don’t care who has him. And I don’t have anything to do with the decisions he makes.” But was that really true? Because I actually hadn’t been all that excited about Toby being with Suzanne. Maybe I just thought that what Toby and I had as almost-entirely-platonic friends was much deeper than Suzanne’s stupid snog-and-then-bail scenario. After all, Toby and I had also snogged, nothing had come of it, and we were still close. Maybe I was more proprietary than I thought.

  “So you had nothing to do with what he decided about us?” Suzanne’s eyes narrowed. “Because I would have thought he mentioned it.”

  “Of course he mentioned it.” I took a big gulp of my coffee. “So did you. And there ends my involvement.”

  “You didn’t tell him what to do?” Her voice was rich with disbelief. I stared at her.

  “If you mean, did he ask me my advice, yes. And I gave it. I would have given it to you too, had you asked.” I shrugged. “You never asked.”

  “You can’t play both sides against the middle, Alex,” Suzanne snapped.

  “Hey!” I raised a palm. “I don’t have a side.”

  “This is exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. “You won’t even admit how embroiled you are in this thing!”

  “I don’t understand what you want me to say.” I watched her face. “You came over here the moment I got back from Christmas break to tell me all about how you and Toby were together. I haven’t been running around telling him to get rid of you or trying to come between the two of you. If anything, it seems as if you maybe misread the situation.”

  “And you just love it, don’t you?” she said, with tears in her throat. “It just plays right into your hands.”

  “Suzanne,” I said, with a definite edge to my voice. “I don’t know how many more ways I can tell you I don’t care. I didn’t care if you were together and I don’t care if you’re not. I’m sorry if you find that harsh, but it’s true. I. Don’t. Care. Okay?” I softened. “I am sorry you’re so upset. But I don’t see how that has anything to do with me.”

  Suzanne snuffled and wiped at her nose. She stared at me. I busied myself with my coffee and with lighting a new cigarette, having left the first to smolder out.

  “Maybe that’s it,” she said finally, when I had started wondering if she’d turned to stone and I would be stuck with a Suzanne statue in my room for all time. The upside of that being that I could go back to sleep immediately.

  “Maybe what’s it?” I asked. I was losing tone control and sounded weary even to my own ears. I wished that she would leave. More than that, I wished that I had the guts to tell her what I really thought of being emotionally accosted at the crack of dawn.

  “The mystery of you,” she said, and laughed hollowly. “You’re completely emotionally unavailable. No wonder Toby finds it compelling. He’s British, isn’t he.”

  “Emotionally unavailable?” I didn’t like that at all.

  “Sure.” Suzanne shrugged. “You’ve never let me in. Or anyone else, I’m sure. You lock yourself away. People tend to find that intriguing.” Though her tone was more scathing than intrigued.

  I thought: Too much Psych 101, not enough common sense. Suzanne was almost breathtaking to behold. The part of me that didn’t want to throw something at her almost wanted to hug her and tell her everything was going to be all right.

  “Really,” I said. What absolute gall. Maybe I’m emotionally unavailable to you, Suzanne, because I don’t actually like you.

  “I feel for you,” she told me. She gave me a tremulous smile. “I think I might just be starting to understand you, Alex.”

  “Sweetheart, please,” Michael said dismissively. “What sort of availability are you supposed to have? This girl sounds like she just spews out emotion like some kind of lawn sprinkler. Are you supposed to model your emotional health on that? I can’t believe we’re having a serious discussion about what some insane child thinks of you in between her fits of jealousy.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Suzanne’s a nutcase but she’s not dumb. She may see things about me that I don’t want to see myself.”

  “Let’s add the necessary grain of salt, shall we?” Michael retorted. “This is not someone who likes you. I do like you, so I’m hardly qualified to judge your flaws as they appear to others. You’ve always been emotionally available to me.”

  “I don’t know.” I was unconvinced.

  “Look,” Michael said. “If she thinks you’re emotionally unavailable—well, good. Right? You actually don’t want her close. She’s just obviously too self-involved to realize that probably you’re not emotionally frigid, you just don’t like her.”

  “I guess,” I muttered.

  “What do you mean, you guess?” Michael sighed. “Alex, you know I love you, but why do you spend so much time on these losers? That Evan creature, for example, don’t think I’ve forgotten him. And this Suzanne chick. The fact that people are around you and aren’t actively heinous isn’t a good enough reason to hang out with them. You have to learn how to be picky.”

  I thought about that long after I hung up. I sat and I smoked and let the hours crawl by. What
was it that bothered me so much about what Suzanne said? Because Michael was right—I didn’t want her close.

  The day wore on and I fell into a sulk. The shadows lengthened and still I sat there, chain-smoking. It wasn’t that I was upset, or even that I thought what Suzanne said was valid. It was that I couldn’t entirely refute it. It bothered me.

  “Suzanne sucks,” was Robin’s concise email response to the voicemail I’d left earlier. “I don’t want to hear that name again.”

  Everything was fading to black outside the window, and my stomach was insisting that I get up and get back to my life. I wasn’t one of those people who could suffer quietly or in isolation. I wasn’t the kind who dropped fifteen pounds every crisis. My body never let me go too long too lost in my head. Usually it demanded chocolate instead.

  I climbed out of bed again and stared around the small room as if I’d never seen it before. I stared at myself in the mirror as if I’d never seen me before. I searched for signs of alteration, but there were none. I wondered if people had spent a lot of time staring at themselves in mirrors before movies came along and taught us that that was how people registered confusion and change.

  Stupid Suzanne. And stupid Toby, too, when it came to that. I didn’t want to hear those names together anymore. And I definitely didn’t want to have another round of My Flaws According to Suzanne. I needed to concentrate on other things.

  I shuffled down the stairs and smelled garlic frying as I pushed through the door. Melanie and Cristina were milling around the stove together, chopping vegetables and talking. They both looked up when I came in.

  “We’re having a stir-fry,” Melanie said. “If you fancy it.”

  “You must eat,” Cristina said sternly. “You need vitamins.”

  “I was planning on cigarettes and coffee,” I muttered. I was surprised to hear my own voice.

  “Stir-fry and then cigarettes and coffee,” Melanie said easily, sweeping more vegetables into her wok.

  “You had a very bad day, I think,” Cristina said, coming over and tossing an arm around my shoulders. She grinned. “This calls for whiskey and whingeing, my specialties.”

  Ten

  The path we took to campus at night added an extra five minutes or so to the journey, but avoided the muddy black hole of the footpath. When you were all dressed up for a night out, the mud and the dark did not appeal. Cristina and Melanie were collapsing with laughter all over each other, stumbling as if they were already significantly intoxicated, and it was barely eight o’clock. I was feeling virtuously sober, having decided to go without the preliminary glasses of wine Melanie and Cristina had indulged in back at the house. I knew that I could have fun without the demon liquor, but I felt it was always a good idea, periodically, to prove it.

  “It’s true,” Cristina said, turning to grin at me. “If you jump a little bit you can see directly into David’s bedroom. He is normally alone.”

  “After that whole Fiona the Vulture thing, I would have thought you’d outgrown reconnaissance missions,” I said. “Or at the very least feared arrest.”

  “Shh!” Cristina made a big show of looking all around. “We must never speak of that night again. I am sure that Fiona the Vulture has spies where we least suspect it!”

  “David the Physicist knows you,” Melanie pointed out, still laughing. “And he’s eventually bound to recognize your little head popping up and down outside his window.”

  “You would be surprised how seldom people really look out their windows,” Cristina said philosophically. “Especially men.”

  “You think it’s a gender issue?” I asked. But it had given me an idea. A delightfully bad idea.

  “Men are fools,” Cristina pronounced. “Every woman in every country knows this is true. American men, Spanish men, and especially British men. Idiots, all of them.”

  “I agree completely,” Melanie said. “Think of all the wonders of civilization, all brought about by men. Imagine how much more impressive it all could have been if it had been done by women instead?”

  “Whatever,” I said impatiently. “Then we would have had to fight all the wars and go race around the tundra after woolly mammoths, which is frankly not my idea of a good time. I think women had the right idea. ‘Yes, honey, you’re a big bad mammoth hunter. You go on with your bad self and I’ll just stay here and dig up a few roots and lounge by the fire.’ ” I warmed to the topic. “And what was so horrible about staying at home and eating bonbons? All you had to do was clean the house and bake a few cookies for the kids and you got a paid vacation for life. I never asked anyone to burn my bra.”

  “The not being allowed to vote, though,” Melanie said. She grinned. “And Alex, not to be picky, but I’ve seen the state of your room. Cleaning the house might well have presented a bigger challenge than you imagine.”

  “True.” I sighed. “And I don’t really like kids.” I looked at them both. “But follow me, please. Since you’re so into stalking, Cristina, I thought we’d add a little to the night’s entertainment.”

  She caught on immediately. “Your teacher!” she breathed. Melanie’s eyes widened.

  “You stalk him? I thought you were joking!” She sounded thrilled. “Let’s go!”

  We made our way with unnecessary drama and much flattening of bodies to walls like bad B-movie spies. Cristina kept pausing to perform martial arts moves against imaginary assailants. Melanie was shaking so hard from repressed laughter that I thought she might just topple over.

  “Could you stop that?” I asked Cristina, snickering.

  “You must never let your guard down,” she informed me solemnly.

  “I can see why no one has tried to recruit us into any spy organizations,” I muttered. “Which I thought was practically de rigueur at British graduate schools.”

  “Yes,” Melanie said quite seriously. “But I think you have to be proficient in languages or bomb making or something. I don’t think literature is really—”

  “There’s his house,” I hissed, cutting her off. “I think he might actually be home for once.”

  Excited, we crept closer and peered inside.

  Sean was standing in all his lean and delicious glory, propped against the counter in his kitchen—the very counter where he had prepared me a meal. Propped against him was a woman. A woman who was not me. They were talking to each other with the kind of smiling awareness that led directly to the nearest bed. I could see the heat in his wonderful eyes.

  I was crushed.

  The woman was the kind of woman that the British find breathtakingly sexy and I could never figure out why. She had short dark hair that was a little bit spiky on top and a curvy little body. She was cute, I supposed, but was no goddess. She wasn’t worthy of him. And yet Sean looked like he wanted to eat her up.

  “Let’s go,” I said, but I didn’t move.

  And so we sat there, in the bushes outside Sean’s house, and stared in through the window as he and Miss Sexy Only in Britain flirted and smiled and eventually began some serious kissing that made my mouth drop open. Whether in shock or profound envy, I couldn’t tell.

  “Oh my,” Melanie whispered, impressed.

  And actually, I could tell. I was painfully, surpassingly jealous. I could feel it like arthritis in my bones.

  A door opened nearby and we all jumped. I toppled over backward.

  “Bloody hell,” Cristina hissed. “This is no time to swoon, Alex. It was just a kiss.”

  She and Melanie each took an arm and yanked me to my feet. In Sean’s kitchen, the kissing went on uninterrupted, and I saw his hand—

  “Alex!”

  I ran for it.

  We approached the college pub, where we’d agreed to meet the others. We hadn’t said much since running away from Sean’s, mostly because we were all out of shape and had to concentrate on breathing.

  “Are you very upset?” Melanie asked me.

  “Why would I be upset?” I retorted. As my retort hung in the air, I r
ealized, sheepishly, that it had been a tad on the aggressive side. “He’s my professor,” I said with tremendous dignity. “His romantic choices are no business of mine. If I were less of a lunatic and hadn’t felt the need to lurk in the bushes and peer into his windows, I wouldn’t even know about them. So.”

  “Men,” Cristina said darkly. “Idiots.”

  We walked inside and picked our way through the crowded college pub. It was like walking into a wall of noise. There was some kind of disco-like event going on, in celebration of nothing in particular, and the place was packed and heaving.

  “You’ll see,” Melanie shouted in my ear. “A little eighties music and you’ll be as good as new!”

  The British, I had discovered, loved to dance. Even the men. Granted, they drank immense quantities of alcohol before taking to the floor, but they danced. I couldn’t think of a single straight American man of my acquaintance who voluntarily attended dancing events. Much less leaped out onto the dance floor and boogied, which was the only way I could describe what the people around me were doing. The British had many fancy dress parties, which often seemed to be nothing more than an excuse for straight boys to doll themselves up in drag and for the girls to get tarty. Or, as the case was for many this far north, tartier. In the middle of such displays, it was easy to see why drinking too much and making scenes was considered a very minor social sin.

  We found Toby and Jason in a corner, tossing back drinks and delighted to be joined by three females.

  “I believe my masculinity was being called into question,” Jason said. “Which is difficult to combat when dancing with another bloke to ‘It’s Raining Men.’”

  “Gay is good,” I told him.

  “Not when you’re not gay,” he replied.

  “Tequila shots!” Cristina cried. “I will get us some, and the dancing will begin!”

  She returned with a tray of double shots for all. I decided a double shot only slightly compromised my no-alcohol plan, and then decided what the hell, screw the no-alcohol plan. I’d just seen my teacher and major crush stick his tongue down another woman’s throat and his hand up her shirt. With tremendous finesse, but even so. We clanked plastic glasses and downed the shots on the count of three.