The Learning Curve

by Mandy Berman

  * * *

  —

  She slept on the couch, and in the morning, awoke to a text message.

  “It’s Oliver,” the message said—in French, although they’d been speaking mostly English the night before. “You forgot your necklace.” Wrong gender assigned to “necklace.”

  The emerald necklace, the one that contained the gem from her maternal grandmother’s engagement ring. She couldn’t leave it, much as she didn’t want to see him.

  “I’ll be over in a little bit,” she replied in English.

  Late in the afternoon she took the Métro back to his apartment. When he answered the door he was wearing glasses, a nice V-neck sweater. Without a word he beckoned her toward him and clasped the necklace around her bare neck.

  “I was wondering if you’d like to go to dinner with me tonight,” he asked.

  * * *

  —

  He took her to an upscale bistro in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and ordered a 1991 Saint-Émilion.

  “Did I give you my number last night?” she asked. “I don’t remember doing so.”

  “You did,” he said, swirling his wine.

  “That’s extremely disconcerting,” she said. She rarely blacked out.

  “Your English is extremely good,” he said.

  She asked him what he did.

  “I’m a writer,” he told her.

  “What do you write?”

  “Novels, mostly,” he said.

  Family money, perhaps. “Anything I would know?”

  The escargot they had ordered arrived at the table. Oliver took his time in answering, first picking out a snail with the miniature fork.

  “My first book was a novel called Adolf,” he told her.

  She took her own escargot, chewed, swallowed, feigned a look of searching into the far reaches of her memory. God, she’d read that book when she was, what, twenty-four? They were around the same age; he must have been so young when he wrote it.

  “I think I did read that,” she finally said. “Quite dystopian, no? Darkly funny?”

  “Pitch-black,” he said. “Did you really read it?”

  “Yes,” she admitted, putting her fork down. That book was everywhere in the midnineties, and as a graduate student in Holocaust studies, she practically had an obligation to read it. She was a harsh critic of most fictional Nazi or Holocaust narratives, because alternate histories of the subject matter brought about a whole new slew of problems. As long as there were Holocaust deniers, it was dangerous to reimagine the history at all—fidelity to and respect for the whole truth were of the utmost importance when it came to something as monumentally serious as the slaughter of nearly an entire race of people. And yet—she had liked Adolf in spite of herself. She’d felt as if she’d been in confident hands, ushered through a novel by an American Jew who had done his homework. The satire, some critics argued, co-opted Eichmann to make a statement about American capitalism and identity politics. She disagreed. She thought that this second coming of Eichmann was perfectly rendered as an American; it made sense, seeing him as a boy in rural Pennsylvania, working his way through college and up the American political ladder, and capitalizing on the economic recession of the early 1990s. It ultimately, she felt, made the argument that any man with great enough ambition, at the right place and the right time, could be dangerous. Fascism wasn’t only in the past; it wasn’t exclusive to Germany in 1939—or Italy in 1925, or Russia in 1931. It happened before, and here was how it could happen again.

  “I liked it,” she told him, with pointed, measured approval, this being all that she would, for now, allow.

  * * *

  —

  The day after that dinner—and the night that was rather more tender, the night she accidentally fell asleep in his bed—she bought his second novel, Dispatches from a Half-Breed, and read it in one sitting. Had his father really killed himself? Had his mother, a shiksa, really abandoned him when he was a toddler to start a new life? Had he really slept with a seventeen-year-old student, and lost a tenure-track job at Columbia because of it?

  She wanted to hate the protagonist—almost definitely a proxy for Oliver himself. She’d known men like Oliver, men who used women and drinking as a cure-all, men who got away with wretched behavior because they were charismatic and handsome and intelligent. Usually, she detested these kinds of men.

  Only, she felt too sorry for Oliver to hate him. It was the following paragraph that had punched her in the gut, and had made her rethink the man who had seemed sexy and full of himself and slightly chauvinistic as, in fact, deeply wounded:

  I remember my father’s face as he drove us to shul every week in his Ford Fairmont: grim and gray, as if he were driving us toward our own deaths. He sat through services with clenched teeth and fists. He complained constantly about the duties that Judaism imposed on him. But when I asked him, when I was old enough to understand his hatred for the religion, why we kept going to shul, he looked at me as if I’d just slapped him across the face. “It’s not an option,” he had said. “And don’t you dare begin to treat it like it is.”

  Simone also went to shul with her family every Saturday as a child, but her parents’ relationship with Judaism, though still dutiful, was filled with reverence, too. They taught her the things they loved about the religion along with the responsibilities: the sense of community, the meaningfulness of ritual. They leaned back on Pesach and drank goblets of wine, and ate honey and apples on Rosh Hashanah, and dressed up for Purim, and there was joy along with the sorrow, celebration amid the loss.

  Simone’s mother, Joséphine, had been born after the war to parents who were able to hide in Paris due to the kindness of their fellow countrymen, and therefore considered herself French first and Jewish second. She moved seamlessly through the non-Jewish world in a way that Simone’s father, Hugo, never quite could.

  Hugo had spent his childhood and adolescence in a children’s home in Geneva that was funded by wealthy Jewish donors, and attended one of the best schools in the city, also at the donors’ expense, eventually coming back to Paris for university. During Hugo’s time in Switzerland, the Jewish refugee children he lived with became his family, as did the rich Swiss Jews who housed them. He was freer to be Jewish there, removed from everything happening at home, even though he never stopped thinking of his parents, about the rumored gas chambers and crematoriums, never stopped hoping those rumors weren’t true. He lived better in Switzerland than he ever had as a child of Austrian immigrants in Paris; he ate better, went to better schools—and it was thanks to the benevolence of well-meaning Jews, and, paradoxically, to those poor immigrant parents, who managed to find a contact with the underground Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants in the first place, who saved his life but lost their own. Though he was grateful for their sacrifice, he could not cut off the thoughts he had of them dying of starvation or exhaustion, or suffocated in a gas chamber, or shot for sport. He didn’t even know where they had died, whether they were eventually taken to Auschwitz or killed right away at Drancy. Which was worse: an immediate death, or a prolonged uncertainty? How did one believe in a God who had saved him but hadn’t spared his parents? He never came up with an answer to that, but what was certain, at least, was that Jews saved his life, and Gentiles killed his parents. Judaism would always be, for him, synonymous with goodness.

  So when Hugo had his own children, he did whatever he could to make sacrifices for them, in the way that his parents had sacrificed for him. This was, Simone came to realize later, a quality of her father’s she respected deeply, and she hoped to repeat his selflessness when her time came.

  Oliver’s father, on the other hand—or, at least, the father in Dispatches—had a directly opposite approach to parenting Jewish children. The protagonist’s father escaped to America from Berlin with his mother in 1938; his father and his older brothers stayed behind to
work, because there wasn’t enough money for all of them to go. They, of course, never made it to America.

  The unnamed father in Dispatches constantly tells the narrator that his own problems aren’t big enough, that nothing can compare to the pain of saying goodbye to your father and brothers. Nothing compares to not knowing what happened to those family members: maybe they were gassed to death, or worked to death, or starved to death; maybe, for all they knew, one of the brothers had to bury the other before his own time came.

  The father treats the boy with disdain whenever he complains: about missing his mother, who left when he was young; about not wanting to do his homework, or go to shul, or scrub the bathroom clean; about wanting to see his friends, which the father rarely allows him to do. The boy thus grows up believing that he deserves nothing, that he should want nothing, simply because he should be grateful to be alive, a Jew in America in the 1970s and not decades earlier, across the Atlantic.

  And then, when the narrator is in his midtwenties, his father hangs himself. The narrator then sleeps with a seventeen-year-old student at Columbia, loses his job, and runs away to Paris, which is where the book ends.

  * * *

  —

  Simone began sleeping at Oliver’s place most nights, mostly as a way to avoid Ariel and put off having to find a new apartment, despite the fact that she knew it was wrong to sleep with someone she felt sorry for. She wondered what it was about these damaged men that made them so good at sex. It was almost like he was not fucking her, but fucking away something that haunted him, some ghost looming in the middle distance. She noticed his drinking, of which there was always a bit too much, and the Xanax he had to take to fall asleep every night. She was not in love with him, but he was smart, and kind, and great in bed, and she enjoyed his company. Rebounds were, by necessity, supposed to be a little bit unhinged.

  Simone was terrible at remembering to take her birth control pills; she often forgot to take them at the same time every day, and sometimes she skipped several doses altogether. With Ariel, at least, she would tell him that he needed to pull out on days she suspected she was at a higher risk. With Oliver, though, there had been a few drunken nights when she hadn’t been as careful as she could have been. It was part of the allure with him, the knowledge that she was making one long bad decision. The reckless sex was simply an extension of that.

  When she first realized her period was late, she was surprised to find that she didn’t feel dread. She hadn’t known that she ever wanted a child, and never really put much thought into the matter. But once she knew she was pregnant, the idea of aborting it—which had seemed, at first, to be the obvious option—set her into a fit of uncontrollable, violent vomiting. It was the morning sickness, of course, but it was almost always set off by those thoughts: imagining a fetus being wrenched from her, her baby, bloody and lifeless in a kidney-shaped steel pan. Once she knew the baby was there, she couldn’t reckon with the idea of its absence. She couldn’t help but understand that this was her baby.

  She was thirty-four. If she didn’t have this child now, then when would she? At thirty-eight? Forty? Her chances of a healthy pregnancy were only going to diminish as time went on.

  She knew that having a baby with this man she hardly knew was misguided, to say the very least. A child was a lifetime commitment, and she treated it as such. She thought of raising it by herself, with Joséphine and Danièle’s help for childcare. She was in her third year of professorship, still building a career for herself, but she technically had the money if they lived modestly. She still had some of her inheritance from her father. She thought of simply disappearing from Oliver’s life before she began to show. He wouldn’t even miss her when she went.

  Toward the end of her first trimester, right before she would start showing, she admitted to Oliver that she had read Dispatches from a Half-Breed. Before disappearing for good, she wanted to know how much of that book really reflected the life he had lived.

  “Oh,” he said. He sounded terrified.

  “Is it all you?”

  He let out a sigh, as if he’d seen this conversation coming and had been dreading it.

  “More or less.”

  “Your father? He was really like that.”

  He nodded.

  “And the girl?”

  He nodded again.

  “And your mother?”

  “I just said it’s all true.” It was the first time he’d raised his voice with her. He got up and went to the bathroom.

  When he returned, several minutes later, his face was mottled and red.

  “I’m sorry I yelled,” he said, standing at the foot of the bed in his boxers. “Do you want to ask me more questions?”

  She wasn’t sure she did.

  He sat down on the bed next to her. “I thought writing it all down would help me heal, or absolve me. Then these editors wanted to give me a bunch of money for it, and I took it. It only made everything messier.”

  “So you sold yourself out.”

  “Something like that.” He smiled at her, and as she looked at his face, she felt a wave of nausea overcome her. She got out of his bed, ran to the bathroom naked, and barely made it to the toilet.

  He followed in right behind her, held her hair back.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said, head hanging over the toilet.

  He took a washcloth from under the sink and dabbed around her mouth, wiped the sweat from her forehead. He ran a glass of water under the tap and lifted it to her lips. He sat cross-legged on the floor, silent, periodically giving her sips of the water. He didn’t fuss over her the way Ariel would have, didn’t ask what was the matter. He waited for her to tell him.

  Didn’t they also stay up for hours sometimes, talking about Kafka and Modigliani and every artist and writer that Ariel, a biochemist, had not known a thing about? Wasn’t Oliver, in fact, very kind? Didn’t he make her laugh sometimes, too? Didn’t he also give her more orgasms more often than any man she’d ever been with? Were those things not enough, strung over a lifetime, to make her happy? Compounded with the happiness that this child, this thing she suddenly felt she couldn’t imagine life without, would bring? Wasn’t it possible that they might, actually, make very good parents together? Their child would be smart, and bilingual, and Jewish. Their child would know so much about where his people came from. Their child could have two parents, like she did—not one parent, the way Oliver had had. She could not bear the thought that she, alone, might fuck parenthood up the way his father had. Two parents could atone for each other’s mistakes.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  His face softened, became putty, glowed.

  She couldn’t help it; she was crying, and she wasn’t sure if it was from happiness or resignation or a mix of the two.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, pushing a strand of sweat-matted hair away from her forehead. “For what it’s worth, I would be here. If you wanted me to be.” Then he kissed her, vomit on her breath. She had not imagined such a uniformly positive response, not an ounce of anxiety or dread seeping from him. She supposed she hadn’t felt any anxiety or dread, either. Was it meaningful that the two of them were ready at the exact same time?

  And so she ignored the gnawing thing, the thing that said his trauma would be passed on to their child like bad blood. The thing that said he might have wounds himself that had yet to be healed, that might never be healed. And she said okay, and they had the baby, and got married so Oliver could stay in France, and for a while, actually, they were really quite happy.

  * * *

  “I thought we both understood that I was doing this for us,” Oliver said now on the other end of the line.

  “After today,” she said, “I feel abandoned.”

  It was quiet on the other end.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  “I mi
ss you, too,” he said. “It’s only a few more months until Christmas. Why don’t we Skype later this week, all three of us?”

  “All right,” she said, even though she knew seeing his face would only make her more resentful.

  * * *

  —

  A few hours later—she had let Henri out of his room to watch television—Simone called Danièle, after she would have gotten home from her school day in Paris. She was a primary school teacher at a posh private école in the tenth.

  “Horrible day,” Simone said when Dani picked up.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Not particularly. I only wanted to hear your voice.”

  The sisters’ kinship was singular: they were each other’s best friends. They were the kind of women who tended not to make many other female friends, because—Simone knew—they were somewhat intimidating, closed off with new people, hard to get to know. Simone was distrustful with strangers, and her sister was the only person she really confided in. She missed her tremendously.

  “How are you?” Simone asked.

  “Trying to teach European geography to nine-year-olds is an uphill battle.”

  “Did your period come?” Simone asked, as tentatively as she could. When they had talked over the weekend, Dani had been a few days late, which was met with cautious excitement by both of them. Like Simone over this past year, Danièle was having trouble conceiving—although Dani and Alex didn’t have any children at all, and had been trying for several years now. There were no pregnancies to speak of, no miscarriages. She’d been on hormones for years, and most recently, they had gone through a few rounds of IVF treatments.