English as a Second Language

by Megan Crane

  My panic attack was interrupted when the door to the room swung open and a throng of students were let out. Dutifully, our group straggled in. It looked to be a group of about fifteen. I didn’t think the students who filled the room were much of an improvement on my initial analysis, though I allowed for the fact that I might just be scared. They were all strange and stiff. All dressed oddly. I tried to modify my expectations of what clothing meant about the wearer. I was probably the one dressed oddly. This wasn’t my country, what did I know? They were probably a group of fashionistas.

  The scruffy-and-yet-hot guy was no longer crouched on the floor—he was standing and I was staring at the big threadbare patch of sweater on his elbow. He looked bedraggled, including his hair, but I suspected gel was involved. What kind of affectation was that? I wondered. If you were that hot—and since he was standing there was no getting around it—why pretend to be scruffy?

  “Welcome,” he said. I jumped. “I’m Sean Douglas, and I’m the course convener of the MA in Contemporary Literature: Fictions of Choice.”

  I could feel the flush heating up my entire face and crawling down my neck. I was probably beet red. Worse, Sean Douglas, course convener, had a wicked little gleam in his hazel eyes, which suggested he’d tracked my thought process. Not hard to do, I snapped at myself, when he’s all of three feet away from you and you were staring at him.

  I missed whatever welcoming remarks he was making, and when I could look again he’d started a round-the-room introduction session, another one of my least favorite things. I didn’t have time to worry about my embarrassment, as a fresh one loomed. I hated all of that stuff. I never remembered anyone’s name, or even what they said, unless it was particularly funny. For one thing, I had a terrible memory even when not augmented by alcohol. And for another, who had time to listen while mentally rehearsing speeches?

  “Hi,” I said when it was my turn. I reminded myself to smile. “My name is Alex. I’m from New York and I don’t have a favorite book.”

  Short and sweet and to the point, I thought, and not annoying like Suzanne’s ode to some Salman Rushdie carnival of cleverness, delivered from behind a cascade of red locks.

  “We’ll have to see what we can do about that,” Sean murmured, smiling, in what felt like an incredibly intimate tone. I felt it in my toes.

  Oh no.

  He went on to talk about the schedule of classes, and to hand out photocopies of an article we were expected to read for our first theory seminar.

  I studied him. He was young, maybe thirty? Thirty-five? It was hard to tell. He didn’t look like any professor I’d ever seen. Sean looked like another graduate student. He had too-long dark hair and those disconcerting hazel eyes, and was wearing a pair of jeans that looked far too old to actually stay in one piece. And that threadbare sweater. And sure, everyone had a British accent, but that didn’t take away from the impact on my susceptible little American system. Sean’s accent sounded Scottish. Of course, I then allowed myself to notice that he appeared to be in excellent shape—

  Just stop right there, I ordered myself. Is there a bigger cliché? Get a grip.

  But there was no getting around it. Sean was way too hot for a teacher.

  I was happy to escape into the rain, away from his far too knowing gaze. I started the long slog toward Fairfax Court and was joined by Suzanne.

  “Wow,” she said, in that I have a secret tone. “I totally have a crush on our professor.”

  My first literature class finally rolled around, and I was excited. Literary theory was a muddle, but books I was confident I could do. Bring on the books! I found my way to my seminar room with only minor difficulty—the first floor in England, I discovered, is not the same as the ground floor. I exchanged polite smiles with the other people in the room, all eagerly anticipating our 2:45 class, and settled into an empty seat.

  We waited. And we waited.

  I doodled in my brand-new notebook. The only people speaking were two girls, far down the table from me. The rest of us stared dully into space, or out the window at the approaching dark, or flipped listlessly through the book we’d been instructed to read. At 3:10, a professor I’d never seen before rushed into the room to inform us class was canceled. Our regular lecturer was unable to make it, having mixed up the times and gone off to Edinburgh for the weekend.

  I wasn’t very impressed. I would one day have to pay my father a lot of money for that class I hadn’t just had. In my head, I started composing fiery emails I would inflict on my New York friends.

  People were filing out of the classroom, and the disheveled guy in front of me turned around and aimed a smile at everyone behind him. Which was just me and one other classmate.

  “Anyone fancy a pint?” he asked.

  As it turned out, we all did.

  “I’m Toby,” he told me as we walked down. “You’re American, aren’t you?”

  “Do I have a sign over my head?” I asked, smiling. He had dirty-blond hair and eyes like dark chocolate.

  “Not at all,” Toby said. “But you don’t look English.”

  “Is that a compliment or an insult?”

  “You’re from New York,” he said. “I can hear it.”

  The guy behind me finally chimed in. “Also, you prat, she announced she was from New York at our first meeting.” He grinned at me, displaying laser-blue eyes and dimples. “I’m Jason.”

  The three of us ended up arranged around a table in one of the campus bars. Jason plunked the first round of drinks on the table and grinned. He threw himself into his seat.

  “Right then,” he said. “First, a toast.” We all lifted our pints. “To lectures that never were and pints at three in the afternoon,” he intoned. Glasses clinked together. Jason took a healthy swig and waggled his brows at Toby and me. “Now—impressions. Is Sean Douglas a ponce? Was that book a waste of a decent, oxygen-producing tree? We’ll start with you, New York. Don’t feel you have to hold back simply because you’re a cultureless Yank.”

  Three

  And actually,” I said forcefully, some days later in one of the village’s two pubs, “I hate theory. Obtuse, circuitous, impossible stuff. We are all here because, at some point in our lives, we decided we loved books. It’s as simple as that.” I slapped my palm on the table for emphasis. Jason, in the midst of lighting his roll-up cigarette, flinched, and fixed me with a warning glare from his pretty-boy blue eyes.

  “Steady,” he warned, laughter spoiling his attempt at a stern expression.

  “It’s about love,” I ranted intensely. “Love of stories, love of novels, love of writing! It comes from love, this desire to pursue advanced degrees in something pretty much the whole world will never see as valid or useful! It comes from love, and in return they give you narrative theory! Love turns to semantics! It’s the tragedy of higher education!”

  “Brennan,” Toby sighed from his position in the corner, his head tilted back against the wall, “you’re pissed out of your mind and talking shit. Please reign in the philosophizing and tend to your pint.”

  “That’s very deep, Alex,” Jason agreed. He let out a stream of smoke and cocked an eyebrow at Toby through the haze. “No more vodka for Brennan.”

  “Obviously,” Toby said.

  I was entirely too far gone to care about vodka restrictions and waved them both off. Plus I was currently drinking a pint of delicious lager.

  Toby raised his head and focused on me, which took just long enough to indicate his own intoxicated state. “In any case,” he said, “you still have to write the paper, and I suspect a bit of literary theory would be appreciated. That being what we’re here for.”

  “Enough moaning about papers,” Jason decreed. He pointed his roll-up at me. “Get the drinks in, Brennan. I’m having coherent thoughts.”

  “That’s terrible,” I murmured in sympathy. I gulped down the remainder of my pint and set off to remedy the situation.

  The next day, however, I was completely out of cohe
rent thoughts as I sat in my little cell of a room and stared balefully at my computer screen. Our first assignment was a relatively short “position” paper. Its purpose was to allow our teachers to assess our standard of work, and it was left ungraded in case that standard was low.

  It was driving me crazy. I didn’t know how to write academic papers any longer—in point of fact, I wasn’t sure I had ever known how. I’d just winged it back in college. This time around, I felt drastic measures were called for and sat there in misery with the MLA Handbook on one side and the university’s Graduate Handbook on the other. Notes on style, format, and footnotes, however, weren’t terribly helpful when one had yet to write anything.

  Toby and I walked to campus on class days and were sometimes joined by Suzanne. All of us lived in connected houses around the same courtyard. Suzanne’s kitchen was directly across from mine, which I was already starting to find a bit wearying. She was nice enough, but had a tendency to both drop by and vent at great length. Within a few short weeks of meeting her, I knew far too many of her outrageous personal details and was amazed that there were any stories left for her to tell. But there always were. One night she kept Melanie, Cristina, and me up for hours as she shared, in detail and without solicitation, the experience of losing her virginity to a playboy named Jim at summer camp.

  “She seems very nice,” Melanie ventured when Suzanne had gone, and our kitchen seemed to echo her revelations. “But perhaps a bit lost. And even a little bit mad.”

  “She is always here,” Cristina groused, emptying the wine bottle into her glass. “Are you her confessor? Must the entire campus know that Jim claimed to love her in exchange for her body?”

  “And yet returned to Nina, his long-suffering girlfriend, despite their night of love,” I reminded her. Cristina rolled her eyes.

  Melanie sighed. “I had no idea American summer camps were so filled with intrigue. I was under the impression it was just sport and a lot of very agitated singing.”

  The three of us spent hours around that kitchen table, having coffee and cigarettes and watching our fellow students happen back and forth in front of our windows. It was better than television. When Suzanne came, Cristina would recede behind her accent and Melanie would simply smile. Not that it stopped Suzanne, who was the sort of person who believed intimacy involved the spilling of her soul at short notice, and without embarrassment. I thought Suzanne’s visits were a handy distraction from work, she certainly seemed to need friends, and we could talk about how hot Sean Douglas was—a subject Jason and Toby seemed understandably uninterested in, given their heterosexuality. And he was really hot. I tended to blank out whatever incomprehensible bit of theoretical nonsense he was talking about and focus only on that hotness. “Which is probably not a good plan,” Robin assured me in one of her daily emails from the advertising job she never seemed to leave, “as it significantly decreases any chance you might have of saying something intelligent in class.”

  “Yeah, he’s great, could you stop wittering on about it?” Toby groaned as the three of us slogged along the muddy footpath toward campus.

  “He’s a towering intellect,” I said. “You’re just intimidated by him.”

  “As if I’d be intimidated!” Toby retorted, and launched into mock bluster. “I’d like to sit him down and have a chat about the things a man ought to study, none of which are Thomas Pynchon.”

  “Come on, Toby,” Suzanne almost purred. “It’s manly to study literature. You do, don’t you?”

  “I find that the manliness depends on the man,” Toby said, grinning.

  “So you would be equally manly studying, for example, women’s studies?” I asked dryly. Toby laughed.

  “Men should study women’s studies,” Suzanne said, with sudden passion. “The more men know about women the better.” She looked at Toby as she tucked a chunk of her red hair behind one ear. “It can only improve male-female relationships.”

  I shot Suzanne a sideways look. Was that as flirtatious as it sounded? It was hard to tell: she was possessed of a little giggle that made everything sound flirtatious. I tucked the possibility away in the back of my head and went back to worrying about my paper.

  Literature class was grueling, once the professors actually turned up. I felt sluggish and dull, which I blamed entirely on Jason and his insistence on nightly excursions to the pub. Toby and I acquiesced, of course, and I spent most mornings hungover.

  Jason caught my eye from farther down the seminar table and rolled his eyes while one of our more earnest classmates was ranting on about some aspect of the latest book that I hadn’t even noticed while reading it. Toby kept his own eyes straight ahead and his serious face on. He was afraid to look at Jason or me, for fear we’d make him laugh and embarrass himself. We were deeply intimidated by the professors, who were all great intellectuals and brooked no inattention. Over our pints, we imagined them into huge monsters and looming figures. We created fanciful lives for them to populate, and I spent more seminars than I cared to admit with a hand over my mouth, trying not to laugh, while a particularly nasty suggestion from the previous night ran through my head.

  Most seminars broke for coffee in the middle—a stilted affair if ever there was one. The nicotine addicts puffed away, and everyone was on good behavior, following the lead of the professor. Some professors sat in silence, peering at us as if we were a separate species. Others attempted to have jolly conversations. Still others were waylaid by one of the students and compelled to answer questions or expound upon points. I always found the whole ten- or fifteen-minute experience excruciating. Only Sean ever interested me in the breaks, and that was usually because he behaved as if he couldn’t care at all if we sat with him. His amused and always aloof gaze took in all of our shuffling and awkward attempts at lecturer-appropriate conversation and did absolutely nothing to put anyone at ease. I thought he was probably laughing at us.

  Today, however, I was listening to my peers. Jason had gone from pulling faces to incisive argument in the time it took for our professor’s head to turn. He was giving a monologue about naturalism versus political allegory, making some deft comparisons and drawing intelligent parallels to our reading. Toby looked disgruntled. I’m sure I did too. Jason was entirely too silver-tongued under pressure for the committed lush I knew him to be.

  “And you?” Jessica Ferrar, the middle-aged battle-ax of a professor, was peering at me. “You haven’t contributed much to our discussion today.”

  “Well,” I stammered, turning crimson.

  I hated having to introduce myself to groups, but being forced to opine on the spot was a thousand times worse. What was I supposed to say? That Sean Douglas was hot and aloof?

  “Well,” I said in a much stronger voice, frowning thoughtfully and clearing my throat. I didn’t dare look at anyone. “What I found interesting in the reading was the . . .”

  In fact, I wanted to say, I didn’t find anything interesting in the reading. Had I found anything interesting in the reading you would have known, you evil old hag, because I would have offered a spontaneous contribution to this discussion.

  “Was the, uh, love story,” I said lamely.

  Had I really just said that? As if I’d opted to view the collected works of Meg Ryan while everyone else was researching political allegory?

  “What I mean,” I continued, and had a sinking feeling I identified as my vocabulary jumping ship. “What I mean is that the, uh, central relationship just didn’t work for me. I didn’t really buy it. Why would they be so into each other? Why would she care? So—”

  So? So what? Who cares? It’s a freaking novel about Northern Ireland! I felt as if I were hovering above the room, watching myself twitch and sweat and stammer. And there was no light to turn away from, just the shining bright beacon of my stupidity.

  “So,” I continued desperately. “So, ultimately, I found the novel ultimately empty. At its core. Which—”

  It was time to finish up and pretend I had ne
ver spoken. And then, possibly, kill myself.

  “Which was what I found the most interesting as I listened to everyone else’s comments.” I suppressed a moan and tried to become invisible. But at least I was finished.

  There was a small silence.

  “Thank you,” Jessica Ferrar said in a tone that didn’t have to bother lowering itself to sarcasm. “But let’s talk for a moment about the religious imagery.”

  “That looked painful!” Toby snickered as we hurtled down the stairs. I was taking them two at a time, desperate to put distance between myself and the scene of my humiliation. I was thinking a quick swim across the Atlantic might just be far enough.

  “I really can’t talk about it,” I moaned. I careened to a stop once I threw myself through the doors and into the inky darkness. It was just after 4 p.m. and already the dead of night.

  “Excellent work!” Jason exclaimed, sailing through the doors behind us. “Nice to see you maintain your calm under pressure, Brennan. Ultimately you found the novel ultimately empty? I was ultimately impressed.”

  “I hate you,” I said calmly.

  “Are we going to the lecture?” Toby asked impatiently. At my blank stare, he rolled his eyes. “There’s an important lecture tonight, and all the tutors will be there since it’s the new addition to the department speaking. Therefore we should also be there as proper graduate students, which might impress them.” He raised an eyebrow. “Which I should think you’d be keen on, after today’s display.” I ignored that.

  “But—” I’d had quite enough of the department. Also, I hadn’t ruled out suicide. “But our papers are due tomorrow!”

  “The less said about that the better,” Jason said, shuddering. He lit a cigarette and flipped me his lighter when mine failed to ignite. “I think this will be a pleasant interlude. The whole night stretches before us, in which I plan to clean my room for the eight millionth time and attempt to pull five thousand words from my arse. Might as well take in a lecture.”