Sex as a Second Language

by Alisa Kwitney

  “Not right now, thanks. You know what I don’t understand, Mom? How did I spend so much time with a complete shit?”

  “I used to ask myself the same thing.” Lia opened the refrigerator door and took out a tray of cheese. “What does your lawyer say?”

  “About my taste in men?”

  “About the money.” Lia cut herself a slice of cheddar, silently offering some to Kat. “Not even a bite? No? Well, can’t you do something to stop him? He has so much money of his own right now, with that film he’s shooting.”

  “My lawyer says he thinks Logan is trying to force my hand.” Kat’s teaching salary brought in around $300 a week, one fifth of the apartment’s monthly maintenance. Which was due in two weeks. Oh, God, it was hopeless. How could she possibly raise that much money right away? Give acting lessons? Wouldn’t pay nearly enough. Sell her jewelry? She’d never gone in for expensive rings and necklaces. The only really valuable thing she possessed was the apartment.

  Kat sat straight up. “Mom, where’s today’s newspaper?”

  “On top of the microwave. Why?”

  “I just had an idea. I could rent out the maid’s room.” Kat riffled through the Times, looking for the real estate section. “Listen to this. One-bedroom rentals, Upper West Side—nearly two thousand dollars. Studio rentals—twelve hundred seems to be standard. Rooms for rent—look at this, only one listing, and they’re asking for nine hundred and fifty!”

  Lia stared at her. “What are you, crazy?”

  “Why is that crazy? It’s what you did when I was a kid.”

  “I did it because I had to. Do you remember that Lana, the hippie Barnard girl who kept burning curry in my best pan? Not to mention the time I came home to find the apartment reeking of marijuana.”

  “That was incense, Mom.”

  “Please. No one burns incense unless they’re trying to hide some other smell.”

  “Well, I liked her a lot better that that bearded guy who was always butting in when we had arguments.”

  “There you go.” Lia replaced the cheese in the refrigerator. “Having a boarder means losing your privacy.”

  “On the other hand, a boarder means I could probably pull in another two hundred a week.”

  “But I can help you with money!”

  Kat shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m going to try this first. If I put up a flyer at the institute tomorrow, I won’t even have to pay to place an ad in the paper.”

  “God, you’re stubborn.”

  “I know,” said Kat, beginning to feel a little better. “Look, Mom. A boarder might not be a perfect solution, but at least it puts some control back in my hands.”

  Lia sighed. “Fine. Do what you want. Only tell me one thing before I go, what did your father write?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t open the letter yet?”

  “I didn’t have time.”

  Lia crossed her arms under her breasts and gave Kat a profoundly skeptical look.

  “Okay, I admit it, I’m procrastinating. But it’s not so simple for me. It’s kind of emotionally loaded, his writing me after all this time, and I don’t have the energy to deal with any more complications in my life.”

  “Kat, this is your father we’re talking about. Believe me, he’s not capable of sending an emotionally loaded letter.”

  “Fine. I promise I’ll open it tonight. When I’m alone.”

  “All right then, I’m going home.” Lia stood up, holding on to the stove for balance as she pushed her feet into black net house slippers. Her toenails were nicely shaped and painted a glossy dark shade of red, making Kat aware of her own neglected feet. “Unless you want me to bring you back some meatballs?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I’ll leave you the Campari.” Kat kissed her mother goodbye, then sat for a moment, wishing she could rush out and find her boarder right away. Now that she’d made her decision, it was hard to just sit around, doing nothing. Well, maybe it is time to deal with that damn letter. Not sure why she was so reluctant to read what her father had sent her, Kat opened the drawer where she kept her bills and took out the envelope. Her address was neatly typed by an actual typewriter, but her father had written only his name, neglecting to include his return address. Kat took a knife and slit the top of the envelope.

  After this day of disappointments, it was tempting to imagine that her father might have sent her something valuable—an insight, an explanation, a check with a lot of zeros in it. Even knowing that life didn’t work like that, Kat found her heartbeat speeding up as she removed the letter.

  Growing up, Kat had only been mildly curious about her father. Other people always seemed to expect her to be terribly upset by his lack of interest in her, but for Kat, being fatherless was just a fact of her particular life, like living in the city. Then, when she had started acting in her late teens, she had discovered that it wasn’t quite that straightforward. Forced to dig more deeply and consider what drives a character to make certain choices, she’d come to realize that there were ways in which her personality had been shaped by her father’s absence. Her habit of choosing men who made Mr. Spock seem emotionally expressive was part of her father’s legacy. At first, Logan had felt like a departure from her pattern—after all, there they were, getting married, moving in together, making a home. But having a child had changed her life completely, while his role in the marriage had remained essentially the same.

  And now Logan had done to their son what her father had done to her. Was there a way to explain things to Dashiell that would minimize the damage?

  Kat unfolded the letter and stared at it in disbelief. The page was blank. She turned it over, trying to understand. Was it a joke? A mistake? Was it meant to be symbolic? Oh, for fuck’s sake. Crumpling the letter, she tossed it in the garbage.

  I refuse to waste my time and energy trying to analyze this, Kat thought as she washed her face and brushed her teeth. She had enough to figure out without trying to decipher the motives behind her father’s obscure behavior. The explanation was probably something simple, like the man had Alzheimer’s. Which was not her problem, thank God. Nobody expects you to take care of a parent who didn’t take care of you.

  Lying in bed, Kat found that even though she was exhausted, her body was filled with tension. Flicking on the TV, she tried to find something to distract her. There was John Ritter, alive and young, lusting after his nubile roommates. There was a toothless nun reciting scripture. There was an attractive blonde Italian in her mid-fifties, saying something about aging skin. Kat turned up the volume.

  “As your skin ages, it thins around the eyes and mouth. Fine lines become visible. The skin loses its suppleness and elasticity, and begins to look gray and tired. Your neck sags and your eyes seem sunken. Age spots appear, your lips become wrinkled like prunes, and you begin to pay for every moment you ever laid out in the sun on the beach. And menopause only makes things worse, ladies.”

  Seven hundred years ago, Kat thought, you could buy an indulgence that supposedly absolved you of your sins. Nowadays the only sin people worried about was looking old.

  “And the appearance of your skin affects everything,” said the blonde, pacing the stage and clenching her fists like an evangelist preacher. “It affects your love life. It affects whether you get hired or not. So staying youthful is not just vanity anymore. It’s a necessity. And just washing your face and using a moisturizing cream is not sufficient. Now, let me explain about what a deep surgical peel can do for you.”

  You mean, other than leave you looking as though you’d been flayed alive? Quickly switching channels, Kat tried not to think too hard about her rapidly aging, dulling, sagging flesh. Surely there was still some island in Greece where women were allowed to age naturally. Maybe she could retire there and let the sun shrivel her up as she tended a little vegetable garden, embalming her insides with retsina as she cackled out a rousing chorus of “I enjoy being a crone.”

  Kat�
�s hand stilled on the remote. She had just flicked past Logan’s face. Turning back to the previous channel, she watched as her almost-ex-husband leaned against a doorjamb, smiling his bad-boy smile. His bare chest was leaner and more muscular than it had been the last time she’d seen it, and his light brown hair was longer. “When’s the last time you had something this spicy for lunch,” said a sexy male baritone that Kat happened to know belonged to a short, bald man named Sid. “Turn on South of Heaven and turn up the heat.”

  You shit-eating asshole bastard, I’ll show you some heat! Turning on her computer, Kat fired off an email to Logan. Have heard you are in NYC. Please write or call to arrange a visit with Dash before he finds out you are around from someone else. As for the account you closed, I advise you to return the money before I make a call to the tabloids explaining why you have left me with no money to buy your son groceries or pay the rent.

  Shutting down her computer, Kat went back to the kitchen and poured herself a second Campari. After a few minutes of calming herself down, it occurred to her that it was a hell of a lot easier to send off a blank email than to mail a blank letter in an envelope. Opening up the garbage can, Kat fished out the crumpled paper and stared at it.

  Could it be some sort of practical joke? Was her father the sort of man who thought making people uncomfortable was funny? She had no idea. She had never really known him, even when he had been around.

  He would be gone for weeks or months on end, phoning in occasionally from some undisclosed location. When he came back, exhausted, he was not to be disturbed while he napped or read a book in the living room. And then he was off again.

  Kat could recall with perfect clarity the two times that her father had actually spent time with her, once when she’d been about three or four, when he had pretended to be a dragon, and once when he’d taken her to the zoo—she’d been five or six.

  Oh, and one other time did stick out in her memory, a summer afternoon just before her parents’ divorce when her father had taken her into the kitchen and shown her how to make invisible ink out of sugar, milk, and lemon juice. She’d singed her bangs on the candle, trying to warm the page up enough to make the secret writing appear. Not that she’d minded; Kat had been so ridiculously happy to be spending time with her father that it hadn’t bothered her that he wasn’t watching out to make sure she wasn’t going to burn herself. Even now, she could recall the distinctive smell of crisping hair, her father’s quick reaction, their conspiratorial laughter: Mustn’t let your mother find out!

  And suddenly it all made sense. Kat took her father’s blank letter and went into the kitchen, where she found the remains of Dashiell’s fat numeral nine birthday candle. Lighting it, she passed it underneath her father’s note, smiling with satisfaction as the letters became visible.

  Dear Katherine,

  I have no idea what kind of person you have become, but as I recall, you were a fairly intelligent child. I assume that you are not particularly curious about me, as you have never attempted to make contact.

  Perhaps you were simply waiting for me to express an interest in you. Well, fair enough. Being a father isn’t something that has ever come naturally to me, and the very things that have made me good at my job have probably made me a singularly awful parent. I’m sure your mother did right to remove you from my influence.

  If you wish to meet me, go to the Turkish restaurant on the corner of 99th and Broadway and sit in the far corner of the traditional section. There will be another message under the seat cushion. In the future, look for a piece of blue bubble gum on the right side of the phone booth by the restaurant. That will be a sign that I have left you a message. If you want to communicate with me, put a piece of pink bubblegum on the left side of the booth, and I will know to check the restaurant for your message.

  Because there are those who would do me harm, I must ask you not to tell anyone that we are in contact. Assume that everyone you meet is lying to you about who they are, why they are there, and what they want from you.

  Dad

  And that was it. No apology for all his years of neglect, both emotional and financial. No closing line of “love”—in fact, no mention of any sentiment whatsoever. And absolutely no acknowledgement of the fact that she had a son, his grandchild, whom he’d never seen. For some reason, it was this last omission that bothered Kat that most. Perhaps, she thought, children had some built-in protection against feeling the full force of their parents’ betrayal until they became parents themselves.

  She glanced at the clock: five past midnight. She was going to be exhausted in class tomorrow, but she couldn’t imagine being able to fall asleep now. Well, at least there was one nice thing about being up this early—the time belonged to you and you alone. Kat used her nails to scrape the melted wax from the kitchen table, then folded her father’s letter and put it in the drawer along with all the other bills and notes and receipts she hadn’t found time to file in the past six months.

  Then Kat ran herself a bubble bath and selected one of her mother’s books from a pile beside her bed. After all, when you’d lost all hope that men could act like human beings, there was nothing like a bit of transgressive vampire sex and the delicious fantasy that the guy was only cold and unfeeling until you came along and warmed him up.

  chapter eleven

  a vague feeling of having dreamt something pleasant evaporated the instant Kat opened her eyes. Before she could pin down the details of her dream—there had been a man in it, and she thought he might have been carrying her in his arms—her son let out a piercing scream from the other side of the apartment.

  Racing into the kitchen, Kat discovered that what she’d heard had actually been a shriek of fury. Dashiell’s gerbil, it turned out, had gnawed a hole in the box of his favorite cereal. After briefly expressing her sympathy and sweeping up multicolored crumbs, Kat tried to give five different reasons why Dash couldn’t just skip breakfast. In the end, she found herself yelling, “Stop making everything into a fight.”

  “But you’re the one who’s shouting,” Dashiell pointed out with impeccable logic.

  The morning did not improve from there. Just as Kat was apologizing for losing her temper, Dashiell recalled that he’d forgotten to complete his math homework. When Kat asked why she hadn’t seen the assignment in his backpack, Dash revealed that he’d also forgotten to bring his math homework home from school. Oh, and he needed her to make him a bag lunch today, for the school trip. Did she want to come?

  Looking into her son’s hopeful green eyes, Kat realized that her child did not have the luxury of allowing himself to be mad at her for more than an instant. It had been the same for her, growing up. When you only had one parent to rely on, you didn’t push them away too hard.

  Kat was acutely aware of her son’s disappointment as she explained that she’d just taken time off work and wouldn’t be able to act as a trip chaperone. No, he couldn’t play hooky. Yes, she did think it was important to see a bunch of old stuff. There were things you could learn better outside of a classroom.

  “Yeah,” said Dashiell, his jaded expression making him look years older. “You can learn that nobody wants to be your partner on line.”

  “I have a surprise today, class,” said Kat. “We’re going on a field trip.”

  The members of the Advanced Class glanced at each other in surprise. Maria put a hand on the firm swell of her abdomen. In her tight white “Sexy Baby” T-shirt, she appeared visibly more pregnant than she had two days earlier. “Which field? Will there be a lot of walking?” There were dark shadows under the young woman’s eyes, and Kat wondered how much longer Maria would be able to keep her job cleaning apartments.

  “We’re not really going to be walking around a field,” Kat reassured her. “A field trip is another term for an excursion. I thought we’d go to the Egyptian rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Kat let her eyes roam around the classroom. “Or has everyone been there already?”

  It turned out
that only Galina had visited the Met, but she had gone to see the Impressionists. It was not really possible to take in a whole museum properly in one day, Galina added, patting her short brown wig. Chieko said that she had meant to go, but had gotten confused and wound up taking a tour to the Cloisters, and Magnus said that it was on the top of his list of things to do.

  Kat smiled with relief. She’d been a little worried that the moment Magnus opened his mouth he might say something about having seen her outside of class. God bless Scandinavian reticence.

  “Excuse me,” said Chieko, “but Miss Marcy said we would go over nonprogressive verbs today?” She sounded as industrious as she always did, but for some reason, Chieko had come to class today dressed like the little girl from the Addams Family, in a black Victorian dress that hit just above the knee. Her eyes were heavily made up in dark colors, and she looked as if she had just been brought over by the powers of darkness.

  Kat glanced at her watch. Dashiell’s class was due to arrive at the museum at ten. “I think we can do a little review on the subway,” she said, deciding not to comment on her student’s transformation from clean-cut preppy to sultry Gothette.

  “Katherine,” said Galina, “I am understanding that the museum fee is covered by our tuition, yes?”

  “Actually, the verb ‘to understand’ is not progressive. You just say, ‘I understand.’” Great, the class did need to review that section. Kat felt a moment’s embarrassment that Marcy had spotted an area of weakness that she hadn’t detected. But then, Marcy had more experience, and was better at teaching formal grammar. Kat knew that her own talents lay elsewhere, in the creative, expressive aspects of language. In her opinion, fluency didn’t come from mastering syntax, anymore than acting came from memorizing lines. An imaginative leap was required.

  “So,” said Galina, a little tartly, “I understand that the museum fee is covered?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s not covered. But even though the museum posts a suggested donation, you can actually pay whatever you want—even a penny.”