Sex as a Second Language

by Alisa Kwitney

  “You’re wrong about me. But even if I had cheated, how could you lie to my face and not feel any guilt?”

  Not a flicker of remorse crossed Zandra’s carefully made up face. “The part of me that was your friend was completely separate from the part of me that became his lover.”

  Kat shivered, both from cold and distaste. “All those self-help courses and spirituality weekends, you really did need them, because there’s something missing in you. You don’t have a conscience.”

  “Come on, Kat.” Logan sounded irritated and impatient, a familiar combination. “I mean, here you are, shopping with your boy toy, so stop making out like you’re Mother Teresa.”

  Kat had forgotten Luc was even there, but the comparison brought her back to life. “It’s hardly the same thing.”

  “Of course it is,” said Luc, and underneath his sly, provocative tone, Kat heard something she hadn’t before. A hint of steel. “He is cheating on you, you are cheating on him—it’s just the way of the world. Am I right, my friend?”

  Logan did not look thrilled at being called Luc’s friend.

  “Although I have to say about your choice, quelle horreur. But, let’s face it, most of the time, we wind up fucking someone we know—a co-worker, a wife’s friend, a friend’s wife. It’s not nice, but it’s real life, eh?” Luc dropped his bantering tone completely. “But when you leave the child along with the mother, you do harm.”

  Logan narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, well, if I’m such a shit, maybe the kid’s better off without me.”

  Kat put her hand on Luc’s shoulder, silently thanking him. “You know what, Logan? Maybe he is. But it’s hard for me to watch him when he’s in pain, and he is in such pain over losing you. Even if you’re mad at me, how can you take it out on your son?”

  “Now, look, Kat.” Logan was using his reasonable, even-tempered, North Madigan voice, the one he’d used when she’d start to cry, sleep-deprived and overwhelmed, that it was always her turn to go to the baby. “You’re the one who has turned this into a fight. You know what you need to do to make things right between us.”

  “Are you talking about putting the apartment up for sale?”

  “Look, it’s not the money. It’s the principle of the thing. You’re sitting on our single biggest asset and pretending that the apartment hasn’t gone up in value, and that it shouldn’t even be considered as part of the settlement.”

  Kat wondered if she looked as disgusted as she felt. Had Logan changed, or had he always been like this? “How can you talk about principles? Your son asks for you, and I don’t know what to say to him. ‘Sorry, Dash, your dad’s too busy screwing my best friend to see you for an hour.’”

  “Maybe I would find time if you weren’t such a suffocating mother. I guess you couldn’t help it, since your mother never gave you room to breathe. Quite frankly, I’m doing you a favor by making you move away from that apartment.”

  The pain and anger were so overwhelming that Kat was blindsided. She couldn’t find a single thing to say. This, she thought, was the kind of rage that led women to reverse their SUV’s over their husbands, put their cars into drive, and then shift back to reverse in order to do it all over again.

  And Logan wasn’t finished yet. “After we’ve sorted out this divorce, then I’ll be free to form my own relationship with Dashiell.”

  “You mean after I cave in to your demands. How much is it going to cost me to have you spend an afternoon with your son? What’s the going rate for your personal appearances?”

  Logan sighed. “This is why I kept trying to communicate through my lawyer. There’s no way to speak rationally with you.”

  For a moment, there was a ringing in Kat’s ears, and then she became aware of her surroundings—the hum of the store’s air conditioner, the canned soft rock coming from hidden loudspeakers, the shoppers pretending they weren’t listening to every word.

  “You know what, Logan? You may sound calm and logical and like you simply have an alternate point of view, but let’s boil it all down to actions. You’ve abandoned your son both emotionally and financially. You want to fight this out with lawyers? Fine. I can’t really afford it and it’ll hurt Dashiell, but you know what? It’s going to hurt you, too. Because you play nice guys on TV and in the movies, but in real life, Logan, you are a piece of shit.”

  Kat turned to Zandra. “And as for you, I hope you know he has other women. He’s not in love with you, because he’s not capable. But as far as I’m concerned, you both deserve each other because you’re both morally bankrupt.”

  Whatever Zandra or Logan might have wanted to say in response was cut off out by the sound of Luc, slowly clapping his hands.

  After a moment, a heavyset woman joined in. “That’s right,” she said in a big voice. “You tell it, sister.” One of the other shoppers gave a sharp whistle of approval. As if that were a signal, other people began applauding, and shouting out things like “deadbeat” and “he’s not even that good-looking in person.”

  Her burst of angry adrenaline spent, Kat closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Logan and Zandra were gone, and Luc was smiling. “Brava,” he said, “well done. How do you feel now?”

  Kat put her arms around her stomach. “Like I’m going to throw up.”

  chapter thirty-five

  t wenty minutes after her initial bout of post-traumatic stomach disorder, Kat turned the key in her lock. Dear God, she thought, finally home and finally alone. Getting rid of Luc had been the high point of her day. He had kept smiling at her as if she’d performed a scene from some romantic farce for his benefit. Were all young men that oblivious? And if so, how could any woman over thirty-five endure it?

  Kat let the front door slam behind her, taking stock of herself as if she’d just walked away from a terrible accident. Strangely enough, she didn’t seem to be feeling anything in particular. Not hurt. Not angry. Not even terribly upset. In fact, Kat felt a little as if she’d been given a shot of Novocain, only it wasn’t her mouth that felt thick and numb, it was her whole being.

  Dropping her pocketbook on a chair, Kat discovered that she wasn’t queasy anymore. In fact, she thought she might have regained some appetite. Which was good. Appetite was good. Kat consumed a cinnamon bun, a peach, and four slices of turkey bacon before it occurred to her that maybe the hollow feeling in her stomach wasn’t hunger.

  Perhaps this sudden burst of compulsive eating was really a displacement activity, in which case the healthy thing to do would be to slow down and find some other way to take care of herself.

  Kat found a box of individually wrapped low-calorie cookies and tore open a packet.

  The phone rang, startling her. She listened as the answering machine picked up. “Kat? Is that you? It’s Marcy. Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

  Kat waited for her friend to hang up. All she wanted to do was disappear inside herself. She took off her jeans, which were cutting into her waist, and lay down in bed. The sheets were cold, and the windowpanes were rattling. Across the street, Kat saw that the slender trees on the penthouse opposite were swaying in the wind. With each gust, a few more leaves blew away.

  Kat burrowed under her covers, shivering. It had been bad enough to know that her friendship with Zandra was broken and couldn’t go on, but this loss was worse. This was the loss of everything that had gone before, because now the past had to be reinterpreted to make sense of Zandra’s betrayal.

  Kat remembered the two of them pushing baby carriages down Broadway, struggling to eat lunch in a diner while the boys threw food on the floor, learning how to fold strollers before the bus drove away. Those fraught, early days of motherhood had been like boot camp, creating an instant, wartime intimacy.

  God, she’d adored Zandra back then. All the other new mothers she’d met had taken it all so seriously: buying the right diaper, making homemade baby food, speaking to their child in clumsy college French so the kid would grow up bilingual. Zandra had been different—fun, irr
everent, relaxed, playing old Beatles tunes instead of nursery rhymes, shouting out the chorus to “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” with vindictive delight.

  In retrospect, Kat conceded, vindictive delight didn’t seem like such a terrific quality.

  But at the time, Kat had taken a great deal of comfort from Zandra’s tart sense of humor. She’d been so frank and funny about being on her own, and since Kat had basically felt like a single mother herself, they had joked about how irrelevant men were, how they really needed to be married to each other. She’d told Zandra about hating her postpregnancy breasts; Zandra had talked about her own adolescent insecurities about her looks. She knew that Zandra had been put in a mental hospital for two weeks when she’d been sixteen.

  So how could Zandra have slept with Logan? For some reason, it didn’t surprise her that Logan had cheated on her with her best friend. If a man could justify dropping out of his son’s life, then he could justify anything. But Zandra had come to her house, eaten her food, offered advice. Being capable of that level of duplicity was a talent. Maybe Zandra should get a job with Magnus.

  Kat rolled over in bed, clutching her bloated stomach. She didn’t want to think about Magnus. It stung too much, remembering how she’d dismissed him at first as some big, earnest clod, a nice guy, but not smart or edgy enough to really push her buttons.

  The wind blew hard against the windows again and Kat pulled the covers over her head.

  You had to hand it to the CIA; they might not be able to distinguish a weapon of mass destruction from a goat farm, but they sure had seducing women down to a fine art. First, find a guy who could slide right under her defenses. Then, let him slowly reveal his intelligence and sensitivity and strength, giving her the impression that she was the one peeling back the layers. Boy, had that been effective. Maybe the U.S. government should try that as an interrogation technique. Amnesty International couldn’t really object to a lot of lovelorn prisoners complaining that their feelings had been badly hurt, and that their pride had suffered irreparable damage.

  As far as Kat could recall, dumping your lover was not proscribed under the Geneva Convention, no matter how humiliated and ill-used the dumpee felt afterward.

  The phone rang. “Kat? Are you home? It’s Daphne. Listen, I meant to call you to find out how the infomercial turned out, but I also have to tell you that we’ve just had a rather unusual offer. I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this, but the Hollywood Report TV show wants to interview you for their segment on messy divorces. I hope you’re not offended, but I did feel I ought to relay the message, since they’re offering a nice sum of money. Well, call me back.”

  Oh, crap, somebody must have already found out about the supermarket incident. Kat wondered if there were going to be photographs in the tabloids tomorrow.

  The phone rang again. “Katsala? Honey, are you there?” Great. Her mother. Kat put a pillow over her head and muttered, “Leave me alone.”

  Silence. Kat sat up. And then, just as she was swinging her legs out of bed, she heard the front door slam. Kat walked out into the hall and found her mother carrying a meatloaf pan.

  “Mom? What are you doing here?”

  Lia smiled broadly. “Oh! Honey! You’re here! I called, but no one answered. I was reading manuscripts from home today, and I thought we could eat dinner together.”

  “So you just decided to waltz into my apartment and stick food in my fridge?” Kat knew she was being bitchy, but she couldn’t stop herself. Today, she felt fifteen again, filled with a roiling mixture of irritation and anguish and, underneath it all, the sneaking suspicion that there must be something very wrong with her, because why else would so many people be treating her so badly?

  “No need to take that tone with me, Katherine. You have more room in your fridge, and it’s not like you ever cook. Besides, I wasn’t expecting you. Aren’t you supposed to be teaching today?”

  “I was fired.”

  “Oh, honey.” All trace of irritation was gone from Lia’s voice.

  “And I ran into Logan. With Zandra. Turns out they’ve been having an affair.” The words came out stiffly, like badly rehearsed lines. I’m going to have to learn how to tell this better, thought Kat.

  “No wonder you’re so upset. Your father had a fling with our landlady in Rome, and I remember how mad I was.”

  Kat buried her face in her hands. She didn’t want to hear this. She was already on emotional overload. The last thing she needed was more information to process. “Mom, please, why are you telling me this now?”

  “It seemed pertinent. Tell me something. Are you beginning to have any signs of perimenopause? Because sometimes mood swings can be brought on by hormone surges.”

  On the verge of tears, Kat found herself laughing. “I think I still have that to look forward to, Mom. Listen, I am sorry if this sounds harsh, but at this particularly horrible moment in time, I would like to be able to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling without having to deal with anybody.”

  “I understand completely,” said Lia, heading into the kitchen. “I won’t be a sec.” Kat counted to three before following. She found her mother regarding her refrigerator shelves with clear disapproval.

  “You have no space in here. Don’t you ever organize things?” Lia pulled out a Tupperware container. “What’s in here, for example? I bet this can be thrown out.”

  Kat started to tremble. Suddenly, the sight of her mother poking around in her fridge seemed a symbol of all the ways in which her life was not under her control. “Mom.”

  Lia, her head still inside the fridge, waved the container behind her. “Just smell it. If I know you, it’s probably old tunafish.”

  “Mom, I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. And I also want to suggest that instead of just knocking and entering, which is considered polite in France, you knock and then wait to be invited in, which is considered polite in this country.”

  This brought Lia out of the refrigerator. “Well, excuse me for worrying about you.”

  Translation: I don’t think you’re competent to handle your life right now. “I don’t need you to worry about me, Mom.”

  “Oh, yeah? When is the last time you and Dash had red meat?”

  “Mom, I do not want to eat your meatloaf tonight!”

  “Fine,” said Lia, her accent becoming distinctly chilly and vaguely British. “Maybe Dash would like some. I’ll just come by around six to take a little for my dinner. We don’t even have to eat together.”

  Kat felt like a very small boat bobbing along in the wake of an ocean liner. And then she remembered what Logan had called her: a suffocating mother. I guess you couldn’t help it, since your mother never gave you room to breathe. Quite frankly, I’m doing you a favor by making you move away from that apartment.

  Ouch, Kat thought, finally able to identify the strange, hollow feeling in her middle. It was the sensation of a criticism that had hit its target. Logan might be a selfish, self-serving bastard, but in this instance he was not entirely wrong. Of course, loving your child so much that you tended to get a bit too involved wasn’t a mortal parenting sin. In fact, it wasn’t a sin at all. But it wasn’t completely benign either. Because when you tried to do too much for a grown child, you wound up sending some unintentional messages.

  Or maybe you didn’t send the messages. Maybe “excuse me for worrying about you” didn’t really mean “I don’t think you’re feeding your son properly.” Kat’s advanced English students often got confused at the distinction between implied and inferred, and with good reason. When you get too close to someone, you can forget that all forms of communication are fraught with mixed signals, errors, misunderstandings. What you think is a hint of anger in someone’s voice might be nothing more than fatigue. What seems like indifference might be caution. What feels like criticism could be concern. What if I’ve been assuming all the wrong things about my mom?

  Kat realized that her mother was talking to her. “But if you do decide
to eat the meatloaf, all it needs is half an hour at three hundred degrees.”

  “Mom, this isn’t going to work.”

  “What? The meatloaf? It’s delicious, I put in a packet of dried onion soup and Worcestershire sauce.”

  Kat reached out and took her mother’s hand. “Living next door. I can’t do this.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Talk about your wild overreactions! Katherine, think for a minute. You’re in the middle of a divorce. How many changes do you think you can take on at once?”

  Kat took a deep breath and looked her mother in the eye. “As many as I have to.”

  To Kat’s surprise, Lia didn’t argue. Instead, she cocked her head to one side, as if trying to make sure she was hearing everything correctly. “I see. Do you know what your next step will be?” Her tone was carefully neutral.

  For some reason, her mother’s calm acceptance made everything seem perfectly clear.

  “I’m going to call my lawyer and tell him that I’m willing to put the apartment up for sale, provided that Logan is willing to agree to alimony in addition to child support.”

  “I thought you’d decided against asking for alimony.” Lia had been quite vocal in her disagreement with Kat on the subject.

  “Well, I’m reconsidering. At the time, I thought I’d be able to pick up my career where I left off. Now that I know better, I figure I’m in the same position as any woman who got off the career ladder in order to raise her child. If Logan wants to be symbolic about selling this apartment, fine—so long as he provides me with enough money to buy a place in the neighborhood. I’ll make sure we’re still in easy walking distance, so Dash can visit you on his own when he’s a little older.”

  “That sounds lovely, but have you considered what you’ll do if Logan simply moves back overseas and reneges on his side of the bargain?”

  No, she hadn’t, but Kat wasn’t about to admit that to her mother. She smiled, and it felt a little crooked on her face. “Well, I’ve just gotten an offer to sell my story to tabloid TV. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it remains an option. And a way to threaten Logan.”