Sex as a Second Language

by Alisa Kwitney

  A mystery, but not the one he’d been hired to solve.

  Shutting the underwear drawer, Magnus glanced at the clock. He figured he had, at most, another hour before Katherine was due back from the infomercial. Standing up to stretch his right knee, Magnus wondered why his brain was being so uncooperative. He felt thick and slow, unable to make connections. Was it because he’d skipped his daily run to get back to the apartment sooner? Or was he just getting dulled with age?

  Think. Where would Katherine put something personal? Under the bed? Nothing but what appeared to be gerbil droppings. Inside a book? He flipped through the pages of a book called Suspects on Katherine’s bedside table, but nothing fell out but an old credit card bill. In the bathroom? Nothing but makeup, medicines, and a tube of contraceptive gel that had passed its expiration date.

  Taking one last look around Katherine’s bedroom, Magnus was about to turn off the light when he thought to check the closet.

  After a few moments, Magnus discovered three wigs (one short and black, one shoulder length and red, and one long and blond), two dental appliances, a box of broken jewelry, a breast pump, and finally, tucked all the way in the back of a shelf, a drawstring bag.

  Pulling the bag down, Magnus removed one curious object after another. There was something that resembled a silver and purple baton, something else that resembled brass knuckles, and an electrical appliance that appeared to be a strange, modernist toothbrush, except for the fact that it had three attachments, two of which were sausage-shaped. Magnus didn’t have to be told that those weren’t intended for periodontal care.

  They probably weren’t concealment devices either, but Magnus tried to unscrew the baton, just in case. There was nothing inside but batteries, two of which had corroded. Not her favorite toy, then. Experimentally, he plugged in the electric toothbrush and observed with some alarm the speed with which the bristles moved.

  Jesus, if this was what it took to satisfy her, what chance in hell did he have? He could just picture what would have happened if he’d followed through on Saturday night: Oh, yes, faster, harder, harder, faster, a little to the left, no, not your left, my left—oh, dear. Don’t worry, sweetheart, but would you mind going over to the closet and bringing down that bag for me?

  Even Guthrun hadn’t possessed an entire arsenal of sex toys. Magnus switched off the vibrator. Putting aside all questions of ethics and morality, the whole point of having sex with a potential source would be to leave her happy and pliable, not crabby and disappointed. And Guthrun had made it abundantly clear that Magnus did not have good instincts as far as sex was concerned. He was always touching her the wrong way, being too gentle or too rough, too fast or too slow, and never in the right place at the right time. Worst of all, he actually liked the missionary position, a clear indication that he didn’t really like sex all that much.

  The last accusation was the only one that Magnus had challenged. He didn’t think he had a low sex drive. If memory served, he had liked sex plenty before he had learned to associate it with criticism.

  In any case, better to leave Katherine with an illusion of wanting him, because there was, after all, a bit of power in that.

  Just as Magnus was replacing the bag of vibrators, the phone rang. He froze, waiting for the answering machine to pick up, which it did on the fourth ring.

  “Mommy? Mommy, are you there? I got hurt and the school needs you to come right away.” There was a sniffle, and then the sound of an adult, female voice in the background, asking a question. “I don’t think she’s there,” Dashiell replied. He sounded younger than nine. He sounded frightened.

  Without considering it further, Magnus reached over and picked up the phone. “I’m here,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Daddy, I broke my nose,” said Katherine’s son, and then promptly burst into tears.

  chapter twenty-eight

  w hat are you doing?” Dashiell gingerly removed the ice pack from his nose.

  “Taking another look at your hands.” In addition to a bruised nose, the boy had splinters in his palms. “Okay, I’m going to need to get this one out with a needle.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Afraid so. Hang on a moment while I sterilize the tip.” Magnus turned on the stove and held the needle to the flame of the gas burner. “By the way, I think your nose has stopped bleeding. You can take the tissue out of your nostril.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s still gushing.”

  Magnus didn’t argue the point. He thought that some of the child’s stubbornness might have been a form of protest. The boy had barely blinked when he’d seen that it was Magnus and not his father there to greet him as he got off the school bus, but Magnus was well aware that he’d been a major disappointment. “I’m sorry that your father and mother aren’t here,” he’d said, taking the boy’s blue backpack. “But it’s okay. We can wait for your mother at home.”

  No visible reaction. “Where did my dad go?” Said with perfect matter-of-factness.

  “I’m afraid that was me on the phone earlier.” The school nurse had explained to him that she was calling because Dashiell wanted his mother to pick him up. She’d tried Katherine’s cell phone first, but had only succeded in leaving a message. Not sure how to get in touch with Katherine, Magnus had told the nurse that the boy should go home on the school bus as usual, and that he would take care of him.

  “Where’s my mom?”

  “She’s on her way home now.”

  “Oh.” The tissue had gone back in the nose, a barrier against further communication. Magnus hadn’t inquired about the schoolyard fight, so all he knew was what the nurse had told him: two other boys, a minor altercation over a game of tag, no one sure who’d started it.

  The needle’s tip glowed red for a moment as Magnus turned to Dashiell, who was sitting on a kitchen stool, wearing a dirt- and bloodstained polo shirt and a look of trepidation. “Okay, ready to get those splinters out of your hand?”

  “Why do you need all that?” Even sitting directly in a pool of late afternoon sunlight, the boy looked pale.

  “The tweezers are to grab the splinter and the alcohol is to sterilize the site.”

  “Oh.” The boy fidgeted on the stool, almost falling off. “Will it hurt?”

  Magnus grasped the child’s right hand, which had two slivers of wood embedded deep in the palm. “A little. But it has to come out.” As he tried to gently lift the first two layers of skin from the larger splinter, the boy nervously shifted his weight and came sliding off the stool. Magnus quickly moved the needle away. “Careful,” he said. “You have to keep still.”

  “It wasn’t on purpose!”

  Magnus regarded the child, trying to see something of Katherine’s strong features in this boy’s delicate face. He was a good-looking child, almost pretty, with startlingly green eyes and thick, wheat-colored hair, but he seemed a different breed from his mother. “Ready to try again?”

  “Sure.”

  Watching the boy wriggle back onto the stool, Magnus was reminded of Lefty, who’d been his bunkmate in basic training. Lefty had been one of those skinny, uncoordinated kids who was always fumbling with the covers right before morning inspection, dropping his tray while on line at the cafeteria, stumbling and tripping during marches. Magnus still wasn’t sure what Lefty’s problem had been; all he knew was, no matter how hard anyone yelled at him, he still couldn’t seem to keep his mind on where his body was going. And Lefty had gotten yelled at by everyone—the drill sergeant, the guys in the mess tent, his fellow bunkmates.

  Magnus had a feeling that Katherine’s son was the Lefty of his class. Feeling the tip of the splinter, Magnus pressed down hard with the needle.

  “Ow!” The kid yanked his hand away. “That hurt!”

  Magnus looked at the boy with a combination of surprise and disapproval. “Dashiell, we have to get that splinter out or it will get infected. There’s no choice involved. And it’s going to hurt a bit. No choice about that,
either. So your only choice is, how are you going to handle it? Because if you remain calm, I can get this done faster.”

  Dashiell thought about it. “I can tough it out.”

  “Good thinking.” Magnus managed to get the tip of the splinter loose, then used the tweezers to extract the rest. As he prepared to start on the next splinter, Dashiell asked, “Do you think my nose is broken?” He was trying to sound calm, but his voice was high and thin.

  Magnus, whose nose had been broken twice growing up, did not look up. “What did the school nurse say?”

  “She said she couldn’t be held responsible.”

  Hearing the boy on the verge of tears, Magnus put down the needle and put his hand under the boy’s chin. “It’s swollen, but it’s still straight.”

  “You’re sure I don’t need to go to the hospital?”

  “I’m pretty sure you’ve just bruised it. But your mother will have to decide that.”

  “But where is my mom? Why isn’t she here?” The boy’s eyes brightened and Magnus thought, Christ, if I’d have cried at that age, my father would have gone through the roof.

  “I don’t know.” Should he add something reassuring? “I’m sure she’ll be back shortly.” The instant he said it, Magnus found himself wondering if something truly worrisome had happened. Why wasn’t Katherine calling on her cell phone? It didn’t seem in keeping with what he knew of her character for her to simply not show up.

  Mainly to distract Dashiell, he asked, “Want to tell me what happened?”

  “Riley, who’s supposed to be my friend, just pushed me off the jungle gym for nothing.”

  Magnus dug a little deeper with the needle, and Dashiell winced, but didn’t pull his hand away. “Sorry. Nobody ever pushes anyone for nothing.”

  “I didn’t do anything! I was minding my own business, not even playing tag with them.”

  Magnus met the boy’s eyes. “I’m not saying you did something on purpose. I’m not saying it’s your fault. And I’m sure not saying it’s fair. But there’s always a reason for why things happen.”

  “Yeah, right. The reason is they all hate me. Riley was my friend until Jamal came, and now he and Jamal are in a club I can’t join, and when I play tag with them I always have to be it. So I said, fine, I’m just not playing, and then Jamal called me a crybaby and Riley pushed me.”

  Magnus had finished removing the last splinter without Dashiell even noticing. As he swabbed the boy’s palm with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol, he tried to remember what he’d read about Katherine’s son from her file. Diagnosed with language-processing issues at age two, can miss the intended meaning in casual conversation. Has difficulty in reading social cues. On the other hand, adept at math and verbal puzzles, consistently able to beat adults at chess and Scrabble by the second half of third grade.

  On paper, he sounds a lot like me, Magnus thought. No wonder I’m not getting along with him. He knew from his own experiences growing up that adults find it hard to tolerate in children the things they dislike most about themselves. He paused, considering what to say next. “You ever see a bunch of puppies together?”

  “Like in a pet store? Sure. I want a dog, but my mom won’t let me.” Dashiell’s cheeks flushed bright red. “She says it’s too much work for her right now! But I would do anything, everything, she wouldn’t have to even feed him or walk him.” Dashiell’s voice rose to a high wail. “I mean, don’t my feelings count at all? Don’t I get a vote? I hate my mother.”

  Magnus had no idea what to say to this. He figured the kid really hated his dad, but it wasn’t easy to hate people who weren’t around, especially when you weren’t finished longing for them yet.

  Dashiell put his hand to his face. “Oh, no, my nose is bleeding again.”

  “Hang on,” said Magnus, “here’s a tissue.” He blotted the boy’s nosebleed while Dashiell looked at him steadily out of clear green eyes, and suddenly Magnus remembered his own puppy, left at ten months to fend for itself when his father was posted Stateside again. People thought being a kid meant having no responsibility; the truth was, it meant having no control over your own life. “I could talk to your mother about getting a dog,” he offered. “It probably won’t do any good, though. At the end of the day, she can’t take on any more than she’s ready for right now. And whether or not she admits it, Dashiell, the divorce is hard on her, too.”

  Dashiell looked like nobody had been using the word “divorce” in front of him.

  “Anyway, the reason why I asked about dogs is, you can learn a lot from watching a litter of puppies that are still with their mother. Once they get to be about seven weeks or so, they spend all their time play fighting, and some of that play fighting gets pretty rough. After awhile, the pups sort it out, and they know who’s top dog, who’s in the middle, and who’s at the bottom of the heap. But you know what happens if you add a new puppy into that mix?”

  “They start fighting again?”

  “That’s right. Because one new member can shift all the old relationships. If he’s a strong, active, dominant dog, then he’ll challenge everyone, and everyone will have to challenge everyone else until it all gets settled again.”

  Dashiell took a deep breath. “Is there any way a puppy can become a middle or top dog once he’s on the bottom?”

  Magnus remembered being nine in Egypt, a big, slow American surrounded by smaller, faster kids, all of whom played a kind of football that required agility rather than strength. That was the year he’d found the stray puppies. “Sure you can,” he said. “You can become the dog that’s calm and confident and doesn’t get involved with all the fighting.”

  Dashiell furrowed his brow. “How do you do that?”

  “Good question. You learn to read the signals that tell you when somebody’s going to pick a fight. You figure out how to stand like someone who knows how to throw a punch. And you pretend.”

  Dashiell smiled broadly, revealing two front teeth that appeared slightly too large for his face. “So it’s like people have a secret code you have to figure out.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m great with codes. I just figured one out for my mom, because her dad sent her this letter that was all in code. Well, actually it was a cipher. Do you know the difference between a code and a cipher?”

  Magnus felt his heart rate speed up. Easy, easy, don’t sound too interested. “Do you?”

  “Sure.” Spoken with all the assurance of a professional cryptographer.

  “Do you remember what the letter said?”

  “Just when they were supposed to meet.” Dash put his small, slightly moist hand on Magnus’s shoulder. “I hate to tell you this, but spy stuff really isn’t as cool as you think.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Nah. You know how my mom said they send messages back and forth? With chewing gum.” Dash rolled his eyes. “I mean, that doesn’t even make sense. What kind of message can you send in a wad of pink chewing gun?”

  “It’s not a message,” said Magnus. “It’s a signal.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. So when your mom put the pink chewing gum…”

  It only took Dash a moment to recall. “On the phone booth outside the Turkish place.”

  “Left or right side? High or low?”

  “Um, left. I think.”

  “So when your mother puts the gum there, it signals your grandfather to check inside the dead drop for a message.”

  “Oh, I get it. But what’s a dead drop?”

  “A place where you exchange notes without having to be there.”

  Dash nodded. “Okay,” he admitted, “that’s kind of cool.”

  And then, with perfect timing, Magnus heard the sound of a key turning in the front door.

  “Mom!” Dash flung himself into her arms. “I thought my nose was broken. Where were you? Magnus removed some splinters from my hand.”

  “Thank goodness for Magnus,” Katherine said, hugging her son. “You have to te
ll me everything.” She looked at Magnus over Dash’s back, her eyes bright with unshed tears. Thank you, she said, silently forming the words. Magnus forced himself not to look away. He’d finally gotten the break he needed. And it wasn’t as if he’d tricked the kid or bribed him into telling what he knew.

  So why did he feel as if he’d played a mean trick on a defenseless puppy?

  chapter twenty-nine

  k at bent her head so the shower could pound the back of her neck with warm water. The five hours between getting home and putting Dash to bed had felt interminable, but here she was, with the rest of the night free to wallow in guilt. Jesus, she still couldn’t believe Dash had been hurt while she’d been unreachable.

  What was happening to her? For years, she’d fretted over every minor detail of her son’s life, carefully arranging all his classes, his therapies, his playdates. She never forgot class snack, like some of the other mothers did, and she never palmed them off with store bought crackers or pretzels. She baked fresh brownies and blondies, hoping that if the other kids liked Dashiell’s mom’s baking, they might treat him better.

  She always showed up for school plays and sports events, she always volunteered to chaperone class trips, and she was always home in time to greet Dash when he got off the schoolbus.

  Until now. What if Magnus hadn’t been here to receive Dash? What if her child had arrived home, bleeding and upset, only to find the apartment empty? The school had Lia’s phone number, but Kat’s mother didn’t get off work till five-thirty or six. Dashiell would have had to sit in the lobby with Pedro while all her neighbors stopped and asked him what was wrong.

  Oh, God, Kat thought, I really am a terrible mother.

  She tilted her head up, letting the shower spray her directly in the face. It didn’t help. She still felt wretched, her head still ached and she kept fighting waves of dizziness. And no matter how many times she tried to convince herself that there had been extenuating circumstances, she couldn’t forgive herself for not being there for Dashiell when he needed her.