English as a Second Language

by Megan Crane

  Toby looked away for a minute. It was after eight and the sky was still blue. He looked strange and suddenly unfamiliar standing there. He ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair, which I noticed was getting a little bit shaggy, then smiled wryly. His head swung back around and his eyes met mine.

  “If you remember,” he said. “I did warn you. Ages ago.”

  “Warn me?”

  “I told you that I treat every woman I come across like shit. I never pretended otherwise, did I?”

  “You told me,” I agreed. “But what do I care?”

  “That’s a very good point, Brennan,” he said. He laughed a little bit, though he sounded uncomfortable rather than amused. “What do you care?”

  “What I don’t understand—” But I stopped. I wanted to kill him for telling that little psycho about something I’d shared with no one. No one on either side of the Atlantic. But for some reason, I didn’t say anything.

  “Is what?” he asked, with a kind of weary hostility.

  “Is anything,” I said. “Why she’s so crazy.” I frowned. “Any of it.”

  The air between us seemed to stretch taut. I had the strangest sensation that Toby was different somehow. It was something in the way he stood there.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. He looked away again. “I really don’t know.”

  Fifteen

  The racket started up just before midnight. Someone was shouting, in a strange singsong rhythm that was so annoying I went over to the window and stared out, prepared to vent a little of my pent-up aggression.

  “Oh my God,” I told Cristina over the phone. “Get down here right now. Bring Melanie.”

  They arrived in a rush, and joined me at the window. All three of us crammed up against my windowsill and stared in wonder at the scene below.

  Fiona the Vulture, clutching a bottle of something in one hand and taking restorative nips every few seconds, was singing. At the top of her lungs. Up at George’s window.

  Well. “Singing”might have been overstating the case. She was very drunk, and very tone deaf.

  “I think this is one of those situations where the thought is what counts,” I murmured.

  “This is all very embarrassing,” Melanie whispered. Delighted.

  “And through it all, he offers me protection,” Fiona sang. “A lotta love and affection . . .”

  “I don’t know how I feel about the use of Robbie Williams for the seduction of George,” I said.

  “Everyone in the United Kingdom has seduced or been seduced to Robbie Williams,” Cristina said. “It is the natural choice for a serenade!” She made a face. “Even a Vulture serenade.”

  “Do you suppose this is their song?” I wondered. “Because I’m a little bit skeeved if so.”

  “You have no soul,” Cristina admonished me. “George is the Vulture’s troll angel. What could be sweeter?”

  Around the courtyard, people were hanging out their windows and watching the performance. Fiona kept right on going, plowing through another verse. George, I could see if I leaned out really far and craned my head, appeared to be cowering behind his curtains.

  “Now she’s beginning at the beginning again,” Melanie pointed out. She stared at us in sudden horror. “Do you suppose she plans to keep singing this song until George cracks? What if it goes on all night?”

  “What if she keeps skipping around in the verses?” Cristina asked. “It’s much worse.”

  But something else started to happen.

  Everyone was joining in.

  People were singing loudly, from window to window. Cristina, Melanie, and I exchanged looks, and then shrugged. Why not? We slung our arms around one another, tilted our heads back, and started belting out the words. It was impossible to live for any stretch of time in England and not know the words.

  Singing loudly and badly, I looked over and saw Toby standing at his window across the way. He was leaning out, resting his head on his arms, and I could see his mouth curve slightly when he saw me.

  The song got louder. Fiona nearly toppled herself at one point, but kept on singing. George appeared from behind his curtains. Toby and I stared at each other from across the courtyard and across all the voices.

  Fiona finished with her arms flung out, overbalancing herself and staggering to regain her footing as some mild applause floated down from the houses.

  “I want you back, George!” she shouted up at George’s window. “I’ve missed you!”

  There were catcalls and whistles. “Come on, George!” someone yelled. “Give it a go!”

  “I missed you too,” George finally admitted in a sudden shout. “I missed you too!”

  “Romeo!” Cristina cried with great drama.

  “Wherefore art thou, sweet Vulture?” Melanie replied in the same overblown tone.

  George threw down his keys. Fiona scooped them up and started for the front door, unsteadily. I could hear George rushing out of his room and down the stairs to greet his prodigal girlfriend. Cristina and Melanie were laughing so hard they had to sit down on my bed.

  But Toby and I stood there for another long moment, just staring at each other with all that dark and noise in between.

  August plodded along. Sometimes it was actually hot. Or, anyway, stuffy in the little Fairfax Court rooms. I produced a first draft of my dissertation, which I hated and which I set about editing according to comments my supervisor, whom I had yet to meet face-to-face, provided in a long letter. A very long letter, mailed from her summer digs in the south of France. We mostly communicated by email, by which I mean we barely communicated at all.

  “Well?” Michael asked one day.

  “Well what?”

  “When are you coming home?” He made an impatient noise. “It’s disgustingly humid here, and the city is awful and reeks of urine and body odor and garbage. Everything is sweaty and Manhattan is deserted. It’s summer. Aren’t you homesick?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ll stay here.”

  “Whatever for?” Michael sniffed. “And can your liver really withstand more time in the land of the lushes?”

  “A valid point,” I said. “But what am I going to do if I come home?”

  “What do people normally do with English MAs?” Michael asked. “Teach, right? Just think, you could bend young minds to your will. You could jump on chairs and inspire little Ethan Hawkes with poetry and eccentricity. What could be more fun?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or I could turn into one of the specters who taught in my high school. They were monsters, all of whom had a moment of joy sometime in the sixties, turned immediately bitter thereafter, and made it their life’s work to crush the spirit out of any teenagers they encountered.”

  “Where exactly did you go to high school?” Michael asked dryly. “Sunnydale?”

  “I’m just saying that teaching is good in theory, but it seems like no one ever remembers that it’s an actual job requiring actual skills. As if it’s all about the three-month vacation every year, and getting out of work at three every day.” I sighed. “How can this year already be over? I was supposed to have everything all figured out by now.”

  The fact was, I realized when I hung up, I didn’t have anything figured out. I hadn’t thought beyond this year. What came next? What did I want to come next? Why did it seem that I just careened along, made random decisions, and then dealt with the fallout while continuing to careen? Wasn’t I supposed to start planning things at age twenty-seven? And if that was all beyond me, shouldn’t I stop pretending that I had the slightest idea what I was doing and ask someone else for help—someone, for example, who had spent quality time as an adult and might therefore be expected to have some opinions on how to go about becoming one? I didn’t know too many of those, it was true. There was one, though, who had been making noises about my lack of foresight pretty much since I’d turned thirteen. If I’d learned anything this year, it was that just because someone was fighting with you and you didn�
��t agree with them, that didn’t make them completely wrong. I took a deep breath and called home.

  “Hi, Dad!” I said, very brightly, when he picked up the phone.

  It was exactly 9 a.m. in New York. The great thing about the five-hour time difference was that I could confuse people into thinking I actually got up in the morning because I called them in their morning.

  “Good morning, Alexandra,” my father replied dryly. “To what do I owe this honor? I was under the impression that you were dodging calls from home.”

  I rolled my eyes, but forced myself to smile so that I would sound upbeat and chipper. A well-known telemarketer’s ploy that actually worked.

  “Well,” I said. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library.” This was a big lie. I smiled winningly at the wall. “So I’ve been there, mostly.”

  “I suppose I can’t complain about that,” my father said. It sounded as if maybe he wanted to complain anyway, but was holding back.

  “Anyway,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut in anticipation of the horror that was about to come, that I was about to unleash upon myself. “I wanted to ask your advice, Dad.”

  There was a pause.

  “My advice?” my father echoed, in a strange tone.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. I charged ahead. “See, I’ve been accepted into the PhD program here, which is good, I guess. But I need to decide if doing a PhD is really what I want to do. If I should—or even could—stay in England for a few more years. Or if I should come home now. So I . . . wondered what you thought about it. What . . . um . . . you think I should do.”

  I realized I was a little red in the face. I had made it a strict policy years ago to avoid leaving myself open to attack, and here I was doing the human equivalent of rolling over and exposing my belly. Also I realized that I had no idea what Captain Corporate America was going to say about the very idea of further academic irrelevance. So what he actually did say took me completely by surprise.

  “Well,” he said a little gruffly. He paused again. “Do you know, Alex,” he said in a voice I’d never heard before, “I think this might be the first time you’ve ever asked for my advice. On anything.”

  “How weird,” I said to Melanie. “Maybe my entire tense relationship with my father is because my perspective has been all skewed. Is that possible?”

  “Why not?” Melanie asked. She was making herself a sandwich, and shrugged. “Relationships are odd, aren’t they?”

  “I mean, he’s definitely had his moments,” I said, fiddling with my cigarette. “But today it suddenly became entirely possible that I’d been approaching him in this defensive way . . . It was really weird.”

  “I know what you mean,” Melanie said. “I have the same sort of relationship with my mother.” She made a face. “It took me a long time to work out that she mainly reacts to what’s said to her, and I can therefore predict her responses. I think it’s part of accepting them as people and all that.”

  “It kind of made me feel bad for him,” I said. “And for me, for that matter.”

  Long after Melanie returned to her studies, I sat on my own in the kitchen and stared out at the sunshine. My father had asked for some time to consider, and although I still had no idea what my future held, I had the strangest feeling in my gut. Almost like regret.

  Maybe, it occurred to me, my very solid, very matter-of-fact father just hadn’t known what to do with me any more than I’d known what to do with him. My mother presented her façade of serenity to the whole world, and in fact I’d only ever seen her upset a handful of times in my life. Everyone in my family was either very calm or very good at pretending to be calm. And so I’d developed this hard shell, let no one too close, and deflected everything with the sarcasm and the wiseass remarks. Perhaps the contentious relationship I had with my father was almost entirely due to the way I approached him. Because I was too afraid to let anyone near me. I was too afraid to let people inside, too afraid that if I really risked myself, I wouldn’t survive the eventual ending.

  Could you really create whole relationships in your head? Could you force people into roles they never meant to play? Just by treating them in one way or another? I thought about my relationship with Evan, for example. He was just a guy. He wasn’t evil or even malicious, he’d just liked me. And I’d hated him for it. I’d made him an impetus for change, and scoffed about how little he knew me, but how well did I actually know him? He was supposed to be my real man. But I had never seen anything except his failure to play that role to my specifications.

  And Sean Douglas. God, yes, he was beautiful. He was sexy and aloof and brilliant. And epic. And completely untouchable. Not just because he was my teacher, but because he had zero interest. And yet the idea of him allowed me all kinds of emotions I could indulge in without any fear that they’d truly impact my life. Because it was really easy to prostrate yourself to love when you knew it would never work out. You weren’t really risking anything.

  The truth of that took my breath away for a moment.

  I thought about Suzanne’s accusation of emotional unavailability, and I thought about Suzanne herself. I didn’t like her, and I was glad that our relationship seemed over, but what the hell had I been doing?

  Sure—she was unhinged, but I’d encouraged her. I’d mocked her and moaned about her and suffered through her, but I’d never had the guts to just ask her to stop, had I? I’d known exactly what kind of person she was within hours of meeting her—within minutes, come to that—but I’d never avoided her. So if anyone was to blame for what had happened, it was probably me.

  Was I really so arrogant that something in me had enjoyed her doomed attempts to get close to me? Because while I’d known all along that she was never going to get there, she hadn’t known that. Removing the romantic and sexual element, had I really treated her any differently than Toby had?

  I’d called him a pig, and worse. I’d told him to tell her, straight up and to the point, and I’d thought he was an immature shit for avoiding it. So what did that make me? Was I any less guilty because I’d behaved much the same way?

  “I think I’m a friendship terrorist,” I moaned to Melanie.

  “I don’t,” she replied. “It’s not up to you to explain to the world why they can’t act in all the nasty ways they do act.”

  “No,” I agreed, “but it is up to me to tell the people in my life what I do and do not find to be acceptable behavior, right?”

  “I think you’re talking yourself into guilt,” Melanie countered gently. “Anyone with a brain—so you see I’m excluding that Suzanne creature—should have been able to realize from the way you responded that you were not interested in her. She didn’t want to know. She’s the friendship terrorist. She picks a target, bombards it, and then moves on when the damage is too intense.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure it’s that simple. I think there’s a gray area. I think I’m sinking in the gray area.”

  Melanie was quiet for a moment, and pulled her legs up beneath her chin to better settle into the chair.

  “What is that noise?” she asked, an appalled look on her face. I was sitting at my desk, and therefore right next to the wall I shared with George. The wall through which the noise came.

  “Oh,” I said innocently. “Are you referring to that thumping, squeaking sound?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes,” I said, grinning. “That would be George and the Vulture, celebrating their reunion. It’s been going on for weeks. He apparently wasn’t kidding when he said their relationship was based on sex.”

  Melanie was silent for a very long moment.

  She sucked in a noisy breath. “I think I may be ill. Excuse me.”

  My head was a little bit too full, and I couldn’t seem to let go of the notion that I’d managed—without even realizing it—to completely determine the outcome of all these various relationships, which had caused me so much grief. Did I even know how to have a real relatio
nship? Or was I condemned to love only the potential I saw, only the people I created in my own mind and sketched over the faces of the real people around me?

  I had been trying to wean myself off nightly Sean stalkings, but I decided I needed a fix. Maybe I needed to confirm his status in my life. Or be done with it altogether.

  I waited for dark and made my way over to the bushes, which were starting to feel a bit too comfortable. Sean’s lights were on, and he was tucked in his kitchen with Miss Sexy Only in Britain, eating a meal where he and I once ate a meal, when I was jet-lagged enough to think that meant more than kindness.

  I studied the woman from my stalker’s vantage point. I would never understand why women with mullet-like hairdos were considered attractive in this country, but so it was. It was like listening to middle-class English boys sing along to gangsta rap—an out-of-body experience, but ultimately sort of sweet.

  The British liked beauty they could touch. No magazine goddesses for them—they liked their celebrities to look like normal people, people you might see strolling down the street. They didn’t go in for the practically alien life-forms of Hollywood, all that golden glow and stardusted chic. Mullets were probably just par for that same course. Women were allowed to carry weight, to look as if they actually consumed food on a daily basis. I supposed that all of that was healthy and better for the rest of us. But in truth I couldn’t understand it. If anyone on the street could be famous, if almost everyone was considered attractive, surely that meant my own obscurity was even more upsetting. At least at home I wasn’t even involved in the competition.

  Sean, I noticed, stared at Miss Sexy Only in Britain as if he’d never seen a woman before. As if she were the only one alive. They laughed. Their hands touched across the table. There was no sign of the smirk, or that mocking glow in his wonderful eyes. Despite the fact that I felt Sean deserved a celestial creature—or me—it was hard not to be a little bit moved by their obvious delight in each other. And I found myself thinking that actually I didn’t even know him at all. He was a complete mystery to me, all images of Heathcliff and smart remarks, because he was all wrapped up in his professor persona and I, as a student, could never get beyond that. The personality I accorded him in my more lurid fantasies had nothing to do with who Sean Douglas really was. I couldn’t even begin to know him. I’d never even started.