Sex as a Second Language

by Alisa Kwitney

  “Thanks,” Katherine said in a dry tone, “but what I meant was, I’m not really prepared to do something that makes my adrenaline flow today.” As Katherine slid her arms into her leather jacket, Magnus realized he should have offered her a hand. “But that’s just the kind of thing you should do with women. There are lots of sporty things you can do in this city so you don’t have to worry about sitting around and talking.”

  Okay, now she was giving him advice on how to pick up other women, never a good sign. “That’s a good idea. What sorts of sports do you like?”

  “Oh, don’t go by me. I don’t do anything anymore. But try the rock climbing wall. That was a great idea.” Katherine reached down and handed him a napkin. “By the way, you have a little lettuce on your front tooth.”

  “Oh. Thanks.” Magnus swiped at his tooth with his tongue, feeling as if he’d been catapulted back into adolescence.

  “I hate it when people don’t tell me,” Katherine said apologetically as she stepped away from the table. “All right, see you in class tomorrow. No more playing hooky. That’s an idiomatic expression for being absent without an excuse.”

  Magnus picked up the menu and pretended to study it until he heard the little bell over the door jingle, signaling that Katherine had left.

  The instant he knew he was alone, Magnus buried his head in his hands. Jesus Christ, he was screwing it up. And there weren’t going to be any second chances. After this, he was going to wind up in some dead-end job, a gray man at a gray desk, shedding flakes of dandruff and smelling of failure. From time to time, younger, brighter analysts would drop off their gruntwork, pretending to respect his years of ineffectual service. And finally, when the monotony became too much to bear, he would get an indoor cat and spend all his spare time calling the vet and worrying about its urinary tract health.

  The bell on the diner’s door jingled and Magnus felt a blast of cool air. He looked up to see Katherine walking toward him. “I forgot my pen,” she said, picking a Cross ballpoint up from the table. “Hey, your eyes look red.”

  Magnus tried to collect himself. “Do they?”

  “Are you all right?” A few strands of dark hair had fallen out of her ponytail, and she absently brushed them aside.

  “Well…” He had absolutely no idea what to say to her.

  “Oh, God, your ex-wife is getting remarried. Of course you’re upset.”

  “And she’s pregnant, too.” That was a legitimately upsetting thought, although Magnus wasn’t sure why. He and Guthrun had tried to have a baby early on in their marriage, but when Guthrun hadn’t conceived, they’d simply accepted it. Or at least he had. It suddenly struck Magnus that there had, of course, been other choices.

  On the heels of that thought came another realization: I must be the one with the problem.

  Katherine reached out her hand. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?” Magnus was feeling a little stunned. Why hadn’t he considered going to a fertility doctor? Why hadn’t he talked things over with Guthrun?

  “I don’t have long, but if you want to climb that indoor wall, I’ll try it with you.”

  Magnus stood up, trying not to let his immense relief show. He still had a shot at making this work. He could make a connection with this woman. All he had to do was have a little confidence in himself.

  Which would’ve been a lot easier if he hadn’t just woken up to the fact that his ex-wife had been right all along. He was sleepwalking through his life.

  chapter nine

  i ’m going to fall.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Oh, God, I’m going to fall. I can’t believe I let my son do this.” Katherine had climbed ten feet above the floor before the fear had set in. Now she was stuck in an awkward position on the indoor wall, her left foot supported by a small amoeba-shaped protrusion, her right foot somewhere beneath it, while she clung with both hands to a red plastic flipper. Despite the harness around her waist, she didn’t feel in the least secure.

  And if all this weren’t bad enough, she had the sneaking suspicion that her low-waisted jeans were riding down, giving Magnus a good look at her panties. How could she face him in class after he’d seen her panties?

  “Hey,” she called over her shoulder. “I think that’s far enough, don’t you?”

  “Kids do this without even thinking about it. You’re doing fine, just straighten out your left leg.”

  Katherine glanced down at Magnus, who was standing on a foam mat, controlling the rope attached to her harness with casual assurance. His self-consciousness from the diner had vanished, and Katherine could see that the man carried himself with an athlete’s energetic stillness—obviously, there was no rational basis for her fear. She was hooked up to a safety rope, Magnus clearly knew what he was doing, there was no way she could plummet to the ground like an injured bird.

  Tell that to her frantically pounding heart, which was pumping adrenaline into her trembling limbs. Katherine squeezed her eyes shut. I refuse to give in to panic. When she opened them again, she saw that two or three people had come into the atrium, and were enjoying the spectacle of her fear as they ate their brown bag lunches.

  “I want to come down now.” This had been a terrible idea. She couldn’t believe she’d agreed to this just because Magnus had seemed a little socially awkward. Didn’t she have problems enough of her own without risking her dignity and her bones?

  “You’re fine,” said Magnus, sounding infuriatingly nonchalant. “The climbing shoes allow you to grip with your feet, and the key is to get them sorted first. That’s it, straighten your left knee.”

  To her right, Katherine saw that another woman was beginning to scale the wall, picking her way up a more difficult route. Within moments, the woman’s gray head was level with Katherine’s. “Come on,” she said as she passed Katherine, “you can do it. I started climbing at age fifty!”

  I will never forgive myself, Katherine thought, if I back down now. Slowly straightening her left knee, she searched for a better place to rest her right foot.

  “Good, Katherine, good,” said Magnus, some twelve feet below her. “There’s a good hold just there, to your left. Yes.” Kat reached up with her left hand, gained a couple of inches, then started the whole process again. Her fingers and thighs were shaking, and she could feel herself sweating with the effort.

  “You’re doing really well.”

  “Yeah, great, but now I’m stuck again.” She remembered watching Dashiell do this last year, her usually unathletic son clambering almost effortlessly from handhold to handhold, laughing when he lost his grip and the rope connected to his harness swayed him out twenty feet above the floor, then back to the wall again. It was the one sport that hadn’t made Dash feel uncoordinated or frustrated; she hadn’t realized how fucking difficult it was.

  “Move to your left,” said Magnus. “Up there, the blue hold.”

  “Where? I can’t see it.”

  “That’s how I feel in conversations,” Magnus called up, sounding cheerful. “I never know how to get from point A to point B.”

  “Yes, but you can’t break your leg falling off a conversation.”

  “You can’t fall off this wall,” said Magnus, and she made the mistake of looking down at him. He made an adjustment to the black pulley device attaching her rope to his harness, picking up some slack. “See? If you let go, I’ll lower you down.”

  “Why am I not reassured?” Seen from this height, Magnus wasn’t so tall. In fact, he looked rather puny and insubstantial. Kat felt her stomach do a small, unsettled flop, and she could taste the burger she’d half-eaten in the back of her throat. Before Dash was born, she had hiked, ridden horses, gone white-water rafting. But now she felt incredibly vulnerable. “I want to get down now.” She hadn’t realized how much having a child had changed her. It wasn’t just that she hadn’t had the time to pursue her old interests; she’d also lost her nerve. “I mean, I really, really, really want to come down.”<
br />
  Forget pride, forget determination. Kat would gladly have paid Broadway ticket prices just to be standing on the ground again.

  “So come down. Just hold on to the rope with both hands, lean back, and push off with your legs against the wall.”

  The part of Kat’s brain that knew this was a good idea had ceded the stage to the part of her brain that wanted to curl into a fetal ball. “I don’t think I can.”

  “Katherine, what is it you’re most scared of?”

  “Afraid of,” she corrected him. “And what do you think I’m afraid of? Falling.”

  “So fall.”

  “What if the rope breaks?”

  “I checked it. The rope is fine. It could hold a grand piano.”

  “If I kill myself, you’re going to fail my class.”

  “Let go, Katherine. I’ve got you.”

  It occurred to Kat that there was something liberating about having the worst imaginable thing happen. At least you had nothing left to dread. Leaning back, she let go, and just like that, she stopped being frightened. She hummed the tune to the old Batman TV series to herself as she bounced gently down the wall. When she got to the ground, she wobbled a little on the foam mat.

  “There you go,” Magnus said, steadying her for the second time that day. Without thinking, Kat threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, God, thank you.” He felt wonderfully solid under her hands, so tall and broad that she felt almost childlike by comparison.

  Then Magnus gave her an awkward pat on the back, making her aware of how inappropriate this close physical contact was. “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “It certainly took my mind off my other problems.” Kat moved back, fumbling with the catches on her harness. “How do I get out of this thing?”

  “What other problems?” Magnus gestured at the clasp near her crotch. “You, um, you undo this thing…do you need me to, uh, help?”

  “That’s okay, I think I have it.” Kat stepped out of her harness. “I am going to have something fun to tell my son when he gets back from school. Hey, what time is it?”

  “Almost two.”

  “I have to get home. Well, thanks for the experience, Magnus.” Talk about your awkward moment. I can’t believe I just hugged him. What is wrong with me?

  “You have to go right now?”

  “Afraid so.” She felt sorry for him as he stood there, looking at her as if he desperately wanted to say something more. Don’t worry, she felt like saying to him, You’ll find a girlfriend here in no time. She thought about who was in her class at the moment, and was sorry that the nice Israeli woman had gone back to her country. He would have liked Seigal.

  As Kat walked away, she saw a slight young man in a climbing harness walk up to Magnus, and as she watched, they made some adjustments to their equipment. The young man, who looked to be less than half Magnus’s weight, let some rope out as Magnus took a different, more difficult route up the wall than the one she had taken. He maneuvered himself until he had his fingers at the edge of an overhang, and then began to pull himself up by sheer upper-body strength.

  Well, Kat thought as she headed toward the subway, this was an unexpected ending to the day. In a strange way, though, the encounter with Magnus had made her feel better. Even though she wasn’t in the least tempted by him, the fact that an attractive, sweet-natured man seemed to find her attractive was a balm to her ego.

  At Seventy-second Street, Kat saw her bank and realized that she was nearly out of cash. As she opened the door, she wondered whether she would have considered Magnus as a romantic option if he hadn’t been her student. Probably not. She’d always been suspicious of relationships based on mutual misunderstanding, and there were enough potential pitfalls between two people who actually spoke the same language and shared the same basic cultural assumptions.

  Besides, Kat thought as she slipped her bank card into the ATM, Magnus wasn’t her type. She’d always gone for extremely verbal men. With her, banter had been up there with kissing as preferred foreplay. Although, she had to admit, there was something exhilarating about doing something physical with a guy who looked strong enough to catch her before she hit the ground.

  But even if he weren’t in my class, Kat thought, I’d need to have some kind of mental connection, even if all I wanted was hot sex. And Magnus, while sweet, lacked a certain edge, a hint of spice, a dark side. Although, God knows Logan had a dark side, and look where that got me.

  Punching in her PIN, Kat requested a hundred dollars. As an afterthought, she decided to check on her balance.

  What she saw made her break out in a cold sweat for the second time in an hour. Only this time there was no one around to lower her gently to safety. She had no money left. Heart racing, Kat picked up the phone beside the ATM. “Hello,” said a young man with an Indian accent. “May I please have the number on your card or account?”

  “My money is gone. I want you to explain where all my money went.”

  “First I will need your information, please.”

  Kat told him, feeling as if she were in shock.

  “Yes, you have a negative balance of one hundred dollars, ma’am.”

  For a moment, distracted by the lilting cadence of the man’s speech, Kat didn’t process what he was saying. “A negative balance? You mean I owe the bank for the money I just withdrew?”

  “Not until the end of the month.”

  When there would be interest due as well. “I don’t understand how this could be possible. Can you check for some kind of an accounting error?”

  “Just one moment, ma’am, while I check this out.” Kat looked wildly around her. An old woman with a collapsible wagon and a small dog on a leash was tucking her purse into a fanny pack. A young man in slouchy jeans and a tailored shirt was withdrawing money without incident. Everything normal, except for her.

  “Well? What have you found out?”

  “One more minute, ma’am, and I can tell you exactly…” Across a telephone line and a continent, the young man paused. “Are you the only signer on this account?”

  And suddenly, as her stomach knotted up like a fist, Kat realized what must have happened. “Logan Dain, my ex…my husband. Did he make a withdrawal?” This had always been her checking account, but now that she thought about it, she had signed Logan on back when Dash was a baby. So that he could make deposits and withdrawals for her on occasion. So that he could help her out.

  “There was a withdrawal earlier this afternoon for the full amount.” The young man sounded cautious. “Are you claiming this was an unauthorized transaction?”

  “Yes! If it was the other person signed on to this account, he can’t just close down the account without consulting me, can he?”

  “Actually, I believe…I’m just verifying the password and…yes, he can.”

  “Oh God.” Kat hung up the phone, ignoring the looks she was getting from the bank’s other customers. She wasn’t just low on funds anymore. She was broke. And unless she could find a way to boost her income before the maintenance was due on the first of the month, she was either going to have to give in to Logan and lose her apartment, or give in to her mother and lose her mind.

  PART TWO

  getting information

  Every day we are confronted with situations that require us to obtain information from strangers. In most cases, if you need information, you can ask someone directly. However, there are some topics considered personal and private that Americans are hesitant to discuss. You can “soften” direct questions by asking indirect questions to show an interest and to gain information.

  —SPEAKING NATURALLY:

  COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH

  chapter ten

  w hat do you mean, you didn’t remember that he was still signed on to the account? How could you forget a thing like that?” In her purple caftan and matching turban, Lia Miner resembled an infuriated psychic, but instead of reading tea leaves, she was examining the bank statements Kat had left on
the kitchen counter. “Honestly, Kat, that’s the first thing you and that lawyer of yours should have taken care of.”

  “Please stop yelling at me, Mom. My stomach is in knots as it is.”

  Lia sat down on a stool next to her daughter and poured Kat a Campari. “Here, drink this, it’ll settle your stomach.”

  “Shouldn’t I take an Alka-Seltzer?”

  “Trust me, right now you need alcohol.”

  Kat sipped her glass of bitters. “No, what I need is an acting job. I’ll call my agent and tell her I won’t say no to commercials anymore. No product too cheesy. Adult diapers, canned ravioli, estrogen creams—I’m desperate, I’ll take anything.”

  Lia patted her daughter’s hand. “Don’t worry, I’m here to take care of you. Including a loan, if you need it. And if money remains tight for a while, you know we could always move in together. This apartment is big enough for the three of us.”

  Kat clutched at her stomach. “Thanks, Mom, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.”

  “Of course you will. By the way, what’s Dashiell doing right now?”

  “He’s playing Game Cube in the living room.”

  “Did he have dinner yet?”

  Kat gave her mother a look. “Mom, it’s eight o’clock on a school night. What do you think?”

  “Don’t be defensive, I’m just asking. What about you? Because I have some leftover meatballs.”

  “I think Logan’s given me an ulcer.” Kat undid the top button of her jeans and massaged her belly, which wasn’t quite as taut as it had been a few years ago. I should find the time to do Pilates again.

  “My friend Hilda has an ulcer. Take it from me, this is just heartburn compounded by heartache.” The two women sat companionably for a moment without speaking. Through the open window, sounds filtered up from the street below—a car horn, a barking dog, a mysterious shriek.

  Lia held up the Campari bottle. “Want some more?”