English as a Second Language

by Megan Crane

  “What’s it on?” I asked plaintively.

  “Do you ever read anything in your mailbox?” Toby demanded.

  I experimented with both the British two-fingered salute and the more internationally recognized middle finger.

  “Look!” I said, switching back and forth between the two. “I’m bilingual!”

  “You,” Toby replied, “are a complete idiot.” But he was fighting a grin.

  Jason and I smoked our cigarettes in the cold before we trudged into the lecture hall, which was surprisingly full. Maybe everyone was aiming to impress, like us. I snagged a seat in the back and watched the professors file in to various seats closer to the podium, laughing among themselves. I saw Suzanne in a seat directly in front of them—an act of unnecessary courage, I felt. What if you were expected to take notes? What if one of the professors read your notes from behind you and thought you were a moron unfit for graduate study?

  Which you clearly are, I berated myself. Having just won the prize for the most appallingly stupid thing ever said in a graduate-level seminar. You’re lucky they don’t ask you to leave.

  I slumped into my seat.

  I was scoring points, I reminded myself, trying to rally. I was procrastinating and scoring points. All was well.

  The man I knew to be head of our department, who always seemed to be in between his tenth and eleventh drinks, offered some blurry introductory remarks, and we all clapped dutifully as the stage was taken by a perky-looking woman who, Toby had informed me scornfully, was a very well-known Shakespearean scholar from Cambridge. She rustled her papers and then launched into her lecture. Which concerned—and it took me a few moments to process this—toilet sign-age. Signs in public places announcing the placement of public toilets.

  Yes.

  The girl passed out next to me was beginning to emit faint snores. The professors, all in their little clique, were making faces at one another. It occurred to me that they might have been forced to attend just as we graduate students were. The lecture droned on. And on. I stared at Professor Toilet Signage in awe and found myself thinking the words “toilet signage” over and over and over and over . . . Toilet signage. And I was concerned about my ability to succeed?

  Sean Douglas, I noticed, was sitting apart from the professor clique and looked even more bored than I felt. I could see the glaze over his gorgeous eyes from halfway across the lecture hall. He never even glanced around, just stroked his chin as if he was considering the merits of a goatee and stared off into the space above the lecturer’s head.

  The only thing that broke through my coma was Sean’s voice, as he asked his dutiful question when the lecture finally reached its end and we had all turned to stone.

  “Tell me,” he said in that silky smooth voice of his. “How does one reconcile the placement of signage with societal preoccupations of waste? What, if any, ramifications do you think the modern psychological disassociation from waste will spur in the conception of signage?”

  Okay, what?!

  I had to force myself to stop gaping across the lecture hall at Sean’s little smirk as the perky professor dove into the question with gusto.

  Who thought like that? Who would even want to think like that? My conviction that I was unfit for scholarship was only growing with every class, and every word that came from other lips, Sean’s lips in particular.

  “Thanks,” I snapped at Toby as we straggled out when the irritating questions were finally over. “That was a complete waste of my time.”

  “Because you might otherwise have done sweet fuck-all?” Toby retorted.

  “I’m off to the library,” Jason announced, ignoring us, “and don’t either of you disturb me with any pub calls tonight. I have work to do.”

  Toby was off to check his email, I didn’t care to wait, and so, filled with righteous indignation—and a bit of pique that Sean Douglas hadn’t noticed my conscientious presence, though I would have denied that if questioned—I took off for home and my waiting paper. The way home involved the dark English night and the slightly dangerous, unlit path through the woods to my house. I took off at a fast pace.

  Cristina jumped a little bit in her chair and studied me when I burst into our kitchen, flushed from the long walk home. She had books spread out before her and in the corner, my mother’s latest care package. Like its predecessors, it was filled with my mother’s version of my favorite American foods. Like Twinkies, which had indeed been my favorite food. In the second grade. I had taken to leaving the packages out on the kitchen table for the amusement of the international community.

  “Look at you,” Cristina said mildly. “It must be really cold out there.”

  “I just wasted an hour and fifteen minutes I will never get back, and I have three to five hundred words left to write,” I announced in an extremely aggressive tone. “None come to mind.”

  I threw myself in a chair and shook out a cigarette, shrugging out of my coat and scowling at my care package. The Twinkies were gone. I blamed George. No self-respecting European would ever voluntarily consume such a thing.

  “The whole house is aware of your paper,” Cristina said nonchalantly. “You’ve been stamping around and smoking even more than usual.”

  I smirked at her, and lit my current cigarette with her lighter and an unnecessary flourish. She wrinkled her nose and waved a regal hand.

  “You’ll find the right words, Alex,” she told me, “all three to five hundred of them. I have every confidence.”

  Despite all the items I’d managed to sneak past British customs in the nine duffel bags I’d brought with me, from pots and pans to a coffeemaker and an electric toothbrush, to say nothing of stray cans of vegetables, it had never occurred to me to tote a printer with me. I had never had cause in recent years to evaluate my writing style, so I’d failed to prepare for the fact that I required numerous drafts. Write some, print, read, revise, write some more. Words on my computer screen were all very well, but I couldn’t trust them there. I needed to see them on paper.

  The nearest university printer was located on the main campus, a good ten-minute walk (at a brisk pace) from my room. In order to print anything, I had to save my work to disk and storm across the fields and the dark. Once on campus, I had to contend with the inevitable queue for available computers. Once at a computer, I had to go through the laborious process of logging on to the university network and sending my paper to the printer. Once in the networked printer queue, the paper was ready, but I usually had to wait on yet another line for my turn to log on to the single printer they had in each computer room. Then the closing down of my computer, the trek back home . . . The whole thing could take anywhere from a half hour to an hour, depending on what time of night I went, and it always enraged me.

  “This,” I would shout at Cristina when she was unwise enough to accompany me, “is absolutely outrageous! How can the university pretend to be cutting edge when it doesn’t even have computer facilities anywhere in Fairfax Court?”

  Cristina would laugh. “Does the university pretend to be cutting-edge? That is indeed outrageous.”

  It was almost midnight, and I was in a foul mood. Cristina was nowhere to be found, which, while not unusual, was annoying me. She seemed to know nine out of ten people on campus and fluttered about like a social butterfly. She was all Spanish eyes and glossy dark hair, and everybody was drawn to her. I wandered up the nearest stairs in search of her.

  I moved along the empty corridor, which was dark and spooky. There was another staircase that led down into the college bar—more of a canteen, really—where I spent most of my days hanging out with Toby and Jason while we waited for our classes to begin. Sometimes we just met for very bad lunches. It, too, was dark, with only a few emergency lights in far corners. Cristina was there, just straightening up from the soda machine. She smiled at me.

  “Ah, Alex,” she said grandly. She tossed a diet Coke at me. “Caffeine,” she said.

  I debated being snippy about
her disappearance, but decided against it when she presented me with a packet of cigarettes she owed me. I was easily bought.

  We sat at one of the tables near the big windows, where we could look out at the college’s interior courtyard. The college, like the rest of the campus, had been built in the sixties and was a triumph of concrete over aesthetics. The entire university was deeply and profoundly ugly. Despite being advantageously situated around a lake. You could sometimes sense the enthusiasm and original vision of the architects when you walked across the little bridges that spanned the water, and squinted so as to avoid looking at the nearest hulking concrete monstrosity. The university was far better in concept than in practice.

  Cristina and I watched the clouds shoot past the nearly full moon and had a contemplative cigarette. All the lights in the section of the college before us were out, save one. We both stared at it. I was pretty sure that was the professors’ wing, filled with their offices and a handful of seminar rooms. The single light flickered and went dark. Cristina was telling me a story about her latest crush—the Physicist—when we saw the figure stride through the doors and start down the opposite pavement. Cristina’s voice trailed away into nothing.

  He was tall and imposing and gorgeous, wrapped in a black coat that looked like a cloak and with the eerie wind blowing through his dark hair. The courtyard lights picked up his angular face and those incredibly clear eyes. I had the sensation of free fall, of being transported into one of those books I’d wept and dreamed over as a child. He was Heathcliff, Darcy, Rochester, all rolled into one lean man with intelligent eyes against the night. My mouth went dry. I lost feeling below the knees.

  “Wow,” Cristina murmured from beside me. “Who is that?”

  “That’s him,” I managed to say.

  He never glanced our way, just swept around the corner and was swallowed up in the dark. Cristina and I stared after him, mouths ajar.

  “Him?” Cristina echoed weakly. Her fingers, I noticed through my daze, were gripping my forearm.

  “Sean Douglas,” I said quietly. I met her gaze and smiled. “My teacher.”

  Four

  After some angst, some drama, several more trips to the printer, and a very short, very troubled sleep, I was finished. Or at least I had written all that I could, had ceased caring, and was ready to take my chances. I handed in my paper in the early afternoon and was immediately elated.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Toby snarled from the computer station he’d commandeered sometime the night before. His hair was standing up in dirty-blond spikes all over his head. “I’m having a nightmare involving footnotes and I can’t discuss it. Please take your triumph somewhere else.”

  I took my triumph to lunch with Cristina. She was glowing with excitement, having had an interaction with her Physicist, which had seemed to indicate he was sane. Sanity was no small thing in our village of the damned. We talked strategy. Melanie joined us, taking a break from her dutiful studying, and it became a summit meeting.

  “You should do something about your teacher,” Cristina said, when we’d exhausted strategic maneuvers and were enjoying a postprandial cigarette.

  “Like what?” I laughed. Not that I was likely to get that vision of him out of my head. Sean and the elements. Heathcliff for the new millennium. Too cool to rage against the night, too gorgeous to—

  Right. Get ahold of yourself, Alex.

  “You should definitely do something,” Melanie agreed, after Cristina finished a lurid description of Sean’s appearance the night before. She picked up her bag and grinned at me. “I think I have a crush on him too.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Cristina sighed. She made a theatrical gesture with both hands. “He is epic!”

  I was mulling that over as I walked back across campus, heading for Jason’s favorite pub, in which, he’d claimed, he would be taking up residence the moment his paper was in the possession of the departmental secretary and he was thus free again. I didn’t actually feel as if I had a crush on Sean; I felt as if he was beyond the reach of mere crushes. Sean loomed a little too large. Cristina was right: he was epic. You couldn’t actually have a crush on an epic. You just appreciated, sighed, and went about your less epic life.

  Toby had sunk further into misery while I’d been at lunch and was even less approachable when I dropped back into the computer room.

  “I have thirty minutes left to produce genius,” he spat at me, “and no time at all for conversation.”

  I didn’t bother responding, and decided I would head over to the pub on my own. I ran right into Suzanne and a handful of other classmates just outside the room.

  “Finished?” Suzanne asked me, her green eyes glittering.

  “I finished earlier,” I said. I glanced over at the open door of the computer room, through which I could see Toby, hunched over his keyboard and typing madly. “But maybe,” I continued in a whisper, tilting my head back toward Toby, “we shouldn’t talk about this here.”

  We walked over to the pub, sharing our various war stories. Only Suzanne claimed to have had no nightmares and no difficulties in the paper-writing arena.

  “It was only a small paper,” she said, frowning. “And it isn’t even graded.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but Sean will read them and decide whether or not you’re an idiot. Far more terrifying than a simple grade.”

  “I’m not an idiot,” Suzanne retorted. I arched a brow at her.

  “I didn’t say you were,” I replied mildly. “It was the universal ‘you.’”

  We had reached the pub, which was already doing a brisk Friday afternoon business. Jason was slumped in a corner booth, smoking and reading the paper. He smiled as we surged through the door.

  “Jason is the cleverest person I know.” Suzanne sighed. I felt my eyebrows hike even higher.

  “‘Cleverest’?” I repeated, laughing, in the same almost-English accent she’d employed. “Suzanne, come on now. You haven’t been here long enough to pick up an accent!”

  She smiled—a bit frigidly, I thought. “I pick up accents quickly,” she said.

  Many supposedly sensible pints later, with Toby in attendance and marginally calmer, the class as a whole decided that it would be an excellent idea to attend, en masse, the party the English department was throwing as a kind of welcome for new students.

  “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Toby complained, staggering slightly as we poured ourselves into the night. “I haven’t slept in days. I just drank loads of pints on an empty stomach. At any moment I could slump over.”

  “That’s fine,” I reassured him, patting him on the arm. “We’d pick you right up again.”

  This is what I remember. We all barreled into the room, a surprisingly lovely one in the single pre-1960s building on campus. Our professors were sipping terrible wine out of plastic cups and mingling with the horde of graduate students. At first, intimidation kept us all in tight student groups. Jason kept up a running, quasi- hysterical commentary on the professors, almost under his breath.

  “The head of the department is quite clearly drunk. Uh-oh, Brennan, Jessica Ferrar is here with what appears to be her life partner, best hide. Ooh, someone’s just approached Sean Douglas—no, he didn’t smite the poor bloke down with a single glance—”

  “He’s a complete nutter.” Toby sighed, rolling his eyes at Jason. I smiled at them both.

  “More like a hyperactive little elf,” I said. Which was true. Jason was all blue eyes, dimples, and a mischievous smile that seemed so at odds with the intimidating intellect he unleashed only in class.

  Jason and I tripped outside to have a cigarette, with a knot of other similarly intimidated—and much less drunk—students. Jason declared he had to rest, which meant slumping down to the ground right there and tilting his head back against the stone wall. I went back in alone.

  Toby and I loomed about near the drinks table, which led to innumerable refills, which led, inevitably, to my belief that I should make sp
ontaneous decisions while quite severely impaired.

  I lurched up to Sean Douglas, his mouth in that fascinating little smirk and those eyes gleaming with suppressed laughter, and launched into an impassioned monologue.

  “Postmodernism,” I ranted at him, “is absurd and irritating. It’s the emblem of the intellectual bankruptcy of academia.”

  “Indeed,” Sean murmured, in the same deceptively silky tone he used in class. In class he would stare at you with that condescending smirk lurking around his mouth and in his eyes, as you labored to make some attempt at a point. He would laugh slightly when you wound down and say, in the tone: “Well—no. Moving on . . .” It was a tone calculated to make you feel like a deeply stupid child. It was a tone that usually produced respectful silence and a clenched gut.

  I completely failed to heed it.

  I was very, very drunk. Sean was not. I carried on without pause for what seems, in my fuzzy recollection, like roughly two thousand years.

  “Perhaps,” Sean murmured at one point, when I was presumably taking a breath or swilling back more wine I didn’t need, “you might wish to read a bit more widely before roundly condemning an entire theoretical school of thought.”

  I remember that with perfect clarity, yet the humiliation that should have accompanied that obvious slapdown eluded me. I blinked and charged ahead, and only stopped talking when Toby appeared and trod on my foot. I yelped and looked away, and Toby decided to question Sean about opportunities for doctoral study within the department.

  It was only then, as I limped away to tend to my foot and to swill back some more anesthetic in the form of boxed wine, that the horror began to take hold.

  For the love of God and all that is holy, I thought in a sudden swirl of panic, what have I done?