by Mandy Berman
The Learning Curve is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Mandy Berman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers and Faber and Faber Limited for permission to reprint twenty lines from “The Babysitters” from The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath edited by Ted Hughes, copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Plath, editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers and Faber and Faber Limited.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Berman, Mandy, author.
Title: The learning curve: a novel / Mandy Berman.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Random House, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045609| ISBN 9780399589348 | ISBN 9780399589355 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3602.E75864 L43 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045609
Ebook ISBN 9780399589355
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Rachel Ake
Cover illustrations: Shutterstock
v5.4
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Two
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Three
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Mandy Berman
About the Author
I have not yet determined to seduce her, though, with all her pretensions to virtue, I do not think it impossible. And if I should, she can blame none but herself, since she knows my character, and has no reason to wonder if I act consistently with it. If she will play with a lion, let her beware of his paw, I say.
—PETER SANFORD IN THE COQUETTE, HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER (1797)
And it doesn’t make sense
I should fall for the kingcraft of a meritless crown
—FIONA APPLE (2005)
Prologue
Paris, 2002
SIMONE SAT ALONE at the bar and felt herself being watched. She didn’t have to turn her head to confirm it: the glare coming from behind her registered like a blast of cold air to the back of her exposed neck. She’d noticed the man when she first walked into the crowded bar on the border of the third and fourth arrondissements; he was sitting by himself in a banquette toward the front door, nursing a clear drink on ice. He’d looked up at her like he wanted to tear her in half.
On her barstool, she brought a glass of red wine to her lips and took a more delicate sip than she would have had she not known she was being watched. She was waiting for her sister in the trendy bar, not one she would have chosen herself. Vintage chandeliers hung low from the ceiling with half the bulbs burned out; the carelessness felt intentional. A bassist and a trumpeter and a drummer played jazz in a back corner, though it was hard to discern a melody of any kind below the din of the young bohemian crowd.
She felt a finger trailing down her bare neck, and in turning found herself hoping for someone other than Danièle.
Her sister gave her three bises, then pulled her head back to appraise the expression on Simone’s face. “Were you expecting someone else?”
“Of course not.” Simone took her blazer from the stool beside her and hung it on a hook underneath the bar.
“What are you drinking?” Danièle removed her leather motorcycle jacket with its array of unnecessary pockets and gold zippers. It had probably cost more than one month of Simone’s rent. They were both wearing black dresses. Simone’s was made from a cheap jersey material, sleeveless, one V cut in the front and another in the back. Tight. Simple enough to fool perhaps one person into thinking it might be expensive, Danièle not being that person. Danièle’s dress was from the opposite realm—inordinately expensive yet not immediately obviously so (though obvious to Simone, who knew better): satin and loose-fitting, with lace detailing and spaghetti straps, like a flimsy piece of lingerie. No bra underneath, the nipples of her small breasts pointed beneath the satin. Chunky-heeled boots to structuralize the look. The gigantic diamond engagement ring on her left hand answered the money question, had it been left unanswered.
“A Côtes du Rhône,” Simone said. “ ’Ninety-five, I think.” She did not pay for drinks when she went out with her sister.
Danièle lifted the glass, stuck her nose deep into its mouth, and sniffed. “Good.”
The bartender perked to attention as if he’d been waiting for her, regardless of the several other patrons on either side of them trying to order drinks. She told him she would have the same. Simone turned her head slightly, to see if she could spot the man by the front door. He was still sitting there, still alone, wearing a pressed suit that suggested he had come directly from work. She imagined him sitting in an office in a high-rise in the tenth, barking orders over the telephone. He seemed like he had the capacity to be mean. He looked up at her, as if on cue.
“Who are you looking for?”
Simone turned quickly to respond to her sister. “No one.” She had thought she was being subtle, and around anyone else she might have been, but Danièle knew Simone better than most.
Danièle shrugged, lifted her glass. They clinked.
“Okay,” Danièle said after swallowing her first sip. “You said you had news.”
Simone steeled herself. She smoothed out the lap of her dress.
“Ariel proposed this morning.”
Danièle’s face brightened and widened, eyes and mouth open to capacity as she transformed into Simone’s giddy little sister again—the excitable, affectionate girl she so often kept hidden now. She let out a high-pitched squeal, jumping up from her barstool as she did so. It hurt Simone to see Danièle lose all cool abandon in that moment; she let the façade down only on rare occasions. Perhaps Simone should have rephrased this news. Danièle went to throw her arms around Simone’s neck but Simone stopped her, taking her sister’s hands into her own.
Danièle took her hands back but still stood. There remained a glimmer of romantic hopefulness in her expression as she waited for Simone to say something else, eyes still glittering as she held out, against all reason, for a happy ending.
“I refused him,” Simone said. It came out like that—not “I said no.” She’d refused him, because that was the truth. It felt that dramatic, the way his face and body had instantly aged and crumpled when she told him she didn’t want to get married, as if she had sucked all the oxygen out of him.
Finally, Danièle sat. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
“It’s okay,” Simone said, clutching her hand. “I’m okay.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Why are you so upset about this?”
“Because,” Danièle said, wiping a tear away. “Ari is a good man. I want you to be with a good man.”
“He was a good man,” Simone agreed. “Is. But when he asked this morning…I think you are supposed to feel happy when they ask.”
Danièle shook her head, as if what you felt in the moment was a minor by-product. Happiness was not the point.
“Dad wanted you to marry him,” she said. Ari was a scholar, a Jew. Serious and respectable. He and her father were one and the same. “When he got sick—”
“Ari was there. And I think that was the reason I was keeping him around all these years.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say. You’re thirty-four, Simone. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“I don’t know,” Simone said, even though it did.
“I took this seriously. As a woman, as a Jew.”
“You don’t even believe in God.”
“I believe in giving back.”
“By marrying someone I don’t love?”
“You do love him!” Danièle exclaimed. “He may not fill your storybook notion of what love looks like, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love him. You wouldn’t have lived with him for four years otherwise.”
Danièle did not love her own husband, a British banker who traveled half the year. Simone had always suspected this, but what she hadn’t understood until now was that Danièle had not married for money, not really. She married because Alex was the man she was dating when their father died. Because their father had approved. Convincing yourself of why and how you loved someone was an easy game, if you needed it badly enough.
“I’m sorry, but I won’t play this game,” Simone said.
“What game?”
Simone drained her glass and placed it on the bar. She gathered up her things.
“Thank you for the drink,” she said, and headed toward the door.
The man in the banquette, too, was gathering up his things. Simone saw now, up close, the details of his face: pockmarked and tired, sallow bags underneath his eyes. Nonetheless, he was handsome; he would have almost been boyish looking had it not been for the obvious signs of exhaustion and age. He could have been her age, or fifteen years older: there was no sure way to tell.
He looked at her now with that same intense, almost dangerous glare as when she walked into the bar. She took his hand, in hopes that Danièle would see, and led him out through the front door. He would ravish her, and she would let him.
PART ONE
1.
FIONA DRANK FROM her bottle of Diet Coke diluted with Smirnoff and skipped ahead of her roommates when she saw the old train tracks. Already the bottle was almost empty. She finished the last gulp and chucked it in the overgrown weeds next to the out-of-service tracks. She did a cartwheel, a roundoff. She hopscotched between the rails, singing to herself—that Sleater-Kinney song Lula always blasted when they were getting ready, the last song that was in her head—as she heard the chattering of the girls somewhere behind her. She turned when the voices got close.
“Play with me!” Fiona called to them.
They laughed gamely, humored her for a minute, Lula lighting a cigarette, Marley sipping from her own soda bottle, Liv standing in silence with her arms crossed while Fiona spun, flipped, skipped. When Lula was done smoking, she crushed the butt into the ground and made for the sidewalk. Truckstop was a few more blocks that way. Marley stood and followed. Only Liv waited.
“Fiona,” she said. “Time to go.”
Fiona did more cartwheels. Her face felt delectably warm, her body as light and bright as if sunshine had been pumped directly into it. She looked up, dizzied, to see that Liv had also walked ahead. She ran, out of breath, toward her friend. “My baby loves me, I’m so hungry!” She sang loudly into Liv’s ear. “Hunger makes me a modern girl!”
“Fiona, stop it,” Liv said, turning her head away from the singing. She looked down at Fiona’s empty hands. “You finished that drink already?” She said this less like a question and more like an expectation.
There it was: that air of judgment had been emanating off Liv all month like a bad smell. As if getting a boyfriend this summer suddenly made her the most virtuous of them all. But instead of delving into the shame, Fiona felt it sweetly rolling off her as if she were a duck emerging from the water.
“It’s Saturday night, Livvy Loo,” she said, kissing her friend on the cheek. She ran ahead to Marley and Lula, knowing that Liv was too afraid to walk in these parts of town alone, and would quickly be forced to follow.
* * *
—
Buchanan College, which came in at number nineteen on the 2008 U.S. News & World Report list of Best Liberal Arts Colleges, was in a small city in central Pennsylvania with a motley population. Besides the college community—rich liberal arts kids, the dippy professors and their mildly rebellious offspring—there was a healthy mix of townies, Amish people, working-class families, gang members, meth heads, artists who couldn’t afford Philadelphia, and then, in the suburbs just outside, staunch, often religious conservatives in their gated communities. Truckstop, in a more desolate area of town—about a fifteen-minute walk from campus and ten minutes from their house—hosted an array of these groups on any given night, meaning the atmosphere was never dull. Sorority girls bought low-grade cocaine and snorted it with the dealers in the bathrooms, the floors slick from leaky plumbing, both parties leaving behind tracks of mud from the dirt-crusted soles of their high heels and their Timberlands. Lacrosse players took townies home, got them pregnant, paid for their abortions. Most recently, the quarterback of the football team, a celebrity on campus for bringing the once terrible team to more victorious seasons than they’d had in decades, had drunkenly failed to leave a tip on a pitcher of Bud Light for himself and his teammates; the bartender, all yellow teeth and shifty eyes, called the quarterback a racial slur under his breath, and a white teammate heard it and punched the bartender in the nose so hard that the crunch of his bones stopped the bar cold. Rumor spread that blood splattered directly into the pitcher, and the teammate had poured the bloody beer straight down his gullet on his way to being thrown out.
Truckstop was surprisingly hard on IDs, and there was always an unsmiling bouncer standing out front who looked more fit for a dance club than for the sticky dive bar inside. What a privilege to all be twenty-one, finally! To not have to hold breaths as Fiona, who had had her birthday in July, pulled out another fake ID to be inevitably taken from her. At some point last spring, Marley, Lula, and Liv had started playing rock-paper-scissors over who would have to accompany Fiona to a frat or loft party, lousy with underclassmen, while the other two stayed at the bar. It wasn’t a nice bar—none of them believed otherwise—but it was a bar, which kept away the pimply eighteen-year-old pledges, the freshmen field hockey players who already thought they were such hot shit, and that in itself was a privilege.
Inside, they ordered their five-dollar vodka tonics, which the bartender, muscle-T’d and tribal-tattooed, handed to them in plastic cups. Lula put her card down, and told the bartend
er to keep the tab open.
“To senior year!” Fiona said, as if the others might forget that she was a semester behind them.
“To senior year,” they all said back, and every time she was grateful for their kindness in not clarifying the truth.
In the back, there was a pool table, where Brandon, Liv’s boyfriend, was playing against another Zeta brother. Liv went over there to greet him, giving him a chaste kiss on his tanned cheek, while Lula watched the game, probably calling the next one. Zetas liked psychedelic drugs and jam bands, had scruffy faces and wore tie-dye; they were the least aggressive and most tolerable of the frat boys.
Boys loved Liv and Lula, both entirely beautiful and entirely unavailable. Lula was the first femme lesbian most of them had ever known, radiating Manhattan sleekness and money, with her tight Afro, her tight black dresses, her expensive black leather boots. Then there was mysterious, racially ambiguous Liv, with a confusingly formal affect to her speech, as if she hadn’t grown up in America (she had). She was in the a cappella group on campus and known for her voice, for her haunting cover of “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. Boys would come up to her and sing, “And Iiiii-eeee-Iiiii had a feeling I could be someone! Be someone!” and she would laugh, humor them. She dated some of them, but never for long, always becoming as quickly bored as she had become infatuated. She was picky, and prided herself on her pickiness. The relationship with Brandon—they’d been dating for nearly six months now—was her longest yet.
Marley and Fiona drank their drinks quickly and got another round for themselves on Lula’s tab. (Lula’s wealthy and mostly absent father paid off every card, this his one true form of commitment, a dynamic Fiona herself was starting to understand with regard to her own father.) They looked around at tonight’s crowd: rowdy, mostly guys. They stood in place as they got jostled by a big group of Sigma juniors making their way toward the bar. (Underage, most, with good IDs—it was easy for them to get real ones passed down from an older brother, especially because Sigmas had attended the same four elite Northeastern boarding schools and were bred exactly alike: narrow, deerlike faces; WASP-y pink skin and light brown hair; smarmy, moneyed grins.)