The Learning Curve

by Mandy Berman

  The guy working the bar took her coconut. “You’re in my modern lit class, right?”

  He was wearing a purple-flowered lei and a fake grass skirt, with shorts on underneath. He was tall and smiley, skinny, Asian American, with black hair buzzed close to his scalp. He talked often in that class, sometimes offering to Fiona what seemed like pretty obvious insights, but he seemed nice and genuinely interested in the course. She wouldn’t have pegged him as a frat boy.

  “Yeah, I am,” she said. “What’s your name again?”

  He ladled the bright red punch into her coconut and handed it back to her.

  “Ben,” he said. “And you’re Fiona.”

  “Yeah.” She was surprised. “Good memory.”

  He shrugged. “You’re a senior, right?”

  “I am,” she said. “What about you?”

  “Sophomore,” he said. “That’s why I’m stuck manning this table. Go tear it up on the dance floor in my honor, okay?”

  “Okay.” She smiled at the phrase: “tear it up.” Who said that? “I’ll see you later,” she said.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder then, and perked up, hoping it would be Dave. It was only Liv.

  “Fee-bee!” Liv’s cheeks were blotched pink, as they always were when she drank even a few sips of alcohol. She, too, was sipping from a filled coconut. “Did you see your Mountain Man yet?”

  “Not yet,” she said. She looked up at Ben, who was already serving punch to another girl, and smiling at her, too. “Is he here?”

  “I dunno.” Liv shrugged. “Let’s go dance!”

  Marley and Lula joined them on the dance floor when their favorite song came on: I fly like paper, get high like planes. They cocked their fake pistols at the sound of the gunshot in the chorus: And take your money. The four of them were grinding up against one another, taking each other’s hands, spinning and twirling and dipping. Marley was doing silly pantomimes now, her versions of the running man, but with everyday activities: the microwave (ticking a finger to her chin, to the beat of the music, as she waited for her invisible food to be ready), the shopping cart (pulling down canned goods from invisible shelves, inspecting them). They were in stitches, they were drunk, they were gleeful, they were just kids. Fiona forgot, just for a moment, that she was at the party to see someone, at the party to do anything but dance with her friends.

  The joyfulness that came with forgetting inevitably ended every time she remembered: that is, every time she thought of Helen. Fiona could never be happy for long, because whatever Fiona was doing that brought her joy, Helen would never do. Helen would never have a senior year of college. She would never go to a frat party hoping to see a boy. Fiona kept dancing, to do what Helen could not, though it was not out of happiness now but out of guilt. Helen would want you to be happy, so many people had said to her over the past two years. Helen doesn’t want anything, she always wanted to say back to them. Helen is dead. Why should she, of all people, be the one to understand this? Because people didn’t want to dive deep into the specifics of loss, least of all the loss of a thirteen-year-old girl. That was why her parents had had Helen cremated. No one wanted to look at a miniature coffin.

  “You okay?” Marley mouthed to Fiona.

  Fiona’s heart was pounding, a sign that her anxiety was starting up, even though the alcohol was supposed to counteract that.

  “I have to pee!” she yelled over the music.

  “Me too.” Marley took Fiona by the arm. They wound through the crowd, which had thickened, past the bar, where Ben was no longer serving drinks, and up the old steps to the main floor.

  “You really okay?” Marley said when they could hear themselves.

  “Really,” Fiona said. “But thank you for asking.”

  They had to go up another flight of stairs to the bathroom, where there was a long line of girls waiting, as always. “No toilet paper!” a redheaded girl shouted as she left the bathroom, crookedly winding her way past Fiona and Marley.

  “Wanna see if Brandon’s up here?” Marley asked.

  “Genius idea,” Fiona said, and they walked down a hallway that smelled like marijuana, all of the bedroom doors closed. Fiona stopped at the third door on the right. “I think it’s this one?”

  “Let’s try.”

  Marley knocked on the door.

  “Go away,” they heard on the other side.

  “It’s Marley and Fiona,” Marley tried.

  “Who?”

  “Marley and Fiona!” she yelled again.

  The door cracked slightly. It wasn’t Brandon but a tall, overweight guy they only vaguely recognized.

  “Is Brandon here?”

  “Wrong room.” The guy was about to shut the door on them when Fiona spotted Dave sitting on a futon on the floor next to another frat boy, taking a bong hit.

  “Dave!” Fiona yelled through the crack in the door. “Hey!”

  She watched him exhale a giant puff of smoke.

  “Dave, you know these girls?”

  He coughed, squinted his eyes at them.

  “Oh, hey, yeah. It’s cool, Stretch,” he said. “You girls wanna toke?”

  Stretch looked at the girls and shrugged, opening the door wide and letting them in. “It’s your weed,” he said to Dave.

  “Can we use your bathroom first, please?” Marley asked.

  “It’s there,” Stretch said, gesturing to the doorway on the opposite side of the room.

  They went in together. There were two doors—one, presumably, to Brandon’s room on the other side—and they locked both of them. And there was toilet paper, mercifully.

  “That’s him,” Fiona whispered as Marley sat down to pee, letting out a deep sigh of relief.

  “Who?” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Mountain Man? Which one?”

  “Shh,” Fiona said. “Dave,” she mouthed.

  “Well, he doesn’t know that’s his nickname.”

  “It’s a pretty obvious nickname.”

  “He’s cute,” Marley said, wiping, standing up to give Fiona her turn.

  “Will you stay and smoke with me?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  They sat in a circle on the futon, Fiona and Marley squeezing in between Dave and Mike, his roommate, who was also a Zeta brother. The room was plastered in posters—mostly Grateful Dead bears and Tarantino movies. Stretch and his girlfriend, a petite underclassman, were taking hits from the bong. Fiona wondered about the mechanics of them having sex: he was about three times her size.

  “ ‘Sample in a Jar,’ ” Marley said about the music playing, some live album of a jam band. “I love this song.”

  “Right on,” Mike said. “This girl knows her Phish.” Mike was also cute—scruffy like Dave, though not quite as unkempt. He had dark features and thick eyebrows, and he was wearing a bright pink Talking Heads T-shirt.

  The bong—a gigantic one, the biggest Fiona had ever seen, green glass painted over in swirling reds and blues—was passed to Dave, and then to Fiona, who took it awkwardly with both hands, trying to set it down sturdily between her crossed legs.

  “Careful,” Stretch said, looking at her suspiciously. “That thing cost me two hundred bucks.”

  “Can you light it for me?” she asked Dave, and he assented. She was mostly used to bowls and joints.

  “Pull in,” he coached her, as he took the bowl from the stem, and she did, a bit too hard, erupting with a hacking, smoky cough, like this was her first time getting high. He laughed, though it felt a bit more like he was laughing at her lack of expertise than in any inclusive, good-natured way.

  She passed it to Marley, who was a natural at the bong and needed no help whatsoever from any man. Fiona watched the way Mike watched Marley: with admiration and interest. Marley, for her part, seemed unaware that his attention was fixed on h
er. She looked at Fiona after inhaling and laughed a little bit at her sudden highness, squeezing Fiona’s hand.

  Then Mike asked Marley another question about Phish, and Marley turned to answer, a conversation that Fiona could not participate in if she wanted to. Dave, on the other side of her, was staring straight ahead.

  “This stuff is good,” she said to him.

  “Yeah, it’s all right.” He seemed to hear what Mike said about a certain Phish show, and began arguing with him across Fiona. Soon the three of them—Mike, Dave, and Marley—were in a heated debate about which of two performances of some song was better, and Fiona tried desperately to follow it but could not, even if she had been sober. Her mouth was dry; she realized she still had her coconut with her, and she sipped from it. The sugary Kool-Aid tasted so good. Sometimes all she ever wanted to do was eat and drink, forever and ever. She wanted a snack but she felt too high, and too embarrassed that she was high, to ask Stretch if he had anything to eat.

  She watched Dave, engaged in the Phish conversation, watched the way his mouth moved, his pink lips surrounded by a full, dark beard. She resisted the urge to take a finger and trace them.

  “What?” he said to her when he noticed that she was staring.

  “Nothing,” she said, and shifted her gaze straight ahead.

  Marley put a hand on Fiona’s leg. “You okay?” she asked quietly.

  Fiona nodded. “I’m too high,” she whispered back.

  At a certain point, Stretch and his girlfriend starting making out.

  “Hey, can you guys leave?” Stretch said, his girlfriend now sitting on his lap.

  They all made their way downstairs to the main floor, which was now sticky with punch and filled with careening girls and red-faced boys, many of them making out, and Mike and Marley kept heading toward the basement. The bass from downstairs sounded even louder now, and was vibrating the floorboards beneath their feet.

  “Dude,” Dave said, grabbing Mike’s arm before he was out of reach. “I’m gonna go.”

  “All right.” Mike barely glanced back at Dave, fixated as he was on Marley. “See you at home.”

  “Oh,” Fiona said. “I was gonna see if you wanted to dance.”

  “I’m pretty tired,” Dave said. “I’ll see you later.”

  In one fluid moment, convinced that this was her only chance, Fiona grabbed Dave by the arm, pulled him toward her, and pressed her lips against his. She felt his beard against her face, wiry and itchy. But before she could open her mouth and he could open his and they could really kiss, he pushed her away.

  “What are you doing?” He extricated himself entirely from her, taking a giant step back.

  “Kissing you?”

  “I have a girlfriend.”

  “Oh.” She was mortified. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I thought—”

  “Thought what?”

  “Well, I invited you tonight. I thought you came to see me.”

  He looked confused. “You did?”

  “Yeah, when we were walking back from class the other day.”

  He tried to recollect. “I don’t remember,” he finally said. “I just came to smoke from Stretch’s bong.”

  “Oh,” she said again.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said, and made his way out through the front door.

  She felt that she might begin crying at any moment, but she wasn’t quite sure where to go. She couldn’t go outside yet, because he had just done that. She couldn’t go downstairs, because that was where all her friends were, and she couldn’t bear to pretend that nothing had happened, or worse, tell them the truth, so she stood there in the middle of the lobby. She felt the rum punch heavy and thick in her gut, the cloying sweetness in her mouth, her face hot from drunkenness or shame or some combination of the two. She walked over to the alcove where all the coats were and tried to find Lula’s motorcycle jacket. It took what felt like hours of wading through identical black North Face fleeces before she found it.

  “Going so soon?” said the extremely tall fraternity brother manning the front door. There was a line of underclassmen waiting to get in, the girls barelegged and shivering. Fiona made it all the way down the front steps before throwing up a deluge of bright red, Kool-Aid-flavored vomit all over Lula’s spotless suede shoes.

  * * *

  When she woke up on Sunday, her head pounding, her mouth parched, the house was silent. She checked her phone to find a missed call and several texts from Marley:

  where did you go?

  did you leave with dave?

  shit, mike says he a has a gf. i’m sorry :(

  are you ok? i hope you got home safe.

  ok, i’m staying @ mike’s. PLEASE text me when you get these.

  Squinting, Fiona typed into the screen:

  got home fine. just hungover. will give deets in person. hope you had fun ;)

  In the kitchen, she filled a cup with water from the tap. The house was silent. Liv must have crashed in Brandon’s room at Zeta, and who knew who Lula had gone home with. She fixed herself two rice cakes with peanut butter and jelly smeared on top. She sat at the table, eating silently, downing her water. The light streamed in from the one window in the kitchen, which looked out onto the puny plot of grass behind their house. The sky was completely blue.

  Fiona returned to her room. Marley hadn’t texted back. She watched several hours of TV on her laptop in bed, her brain turning soft and spongy, until she decided she might as well do something she felt good about. The final project for Professor Roiphe’s class—a thirty-page research paper, plus a presentation—was due in less than a month, and she’d hardly made a dent in it. Still in bed, she opened her laptop and googled the Starr Report.

  Fiona had been only eleven during the Lewinsky scandal; she’d more or less learned what “sexual relations” were because of the repetition of that phrase in the media, the constant replaying of that particular sound bite, the president dismissing Monica as “that woman” in his Arkansas accent. When Roiphe announced the assignment on the first day of class—to write about a woman who’d been publicly shamed by the patriarchal society in which she lived—she’d immediately thought of Monica. They were supposed to support their papers, on whichever woman they chose, with evidence from the novels they read: seduction novels from two hundred years ago, like The Coquette, that warned against the devilish temptations of sexual impulses (or, depending on how you read it, subverted that warning). Over two centuries later, women were still being punished for sleeping with too many men or sleeping with the wrong man—or, in the case of Monica, falling in love with that wrong man.

  Fiona couldn’t help but feel that same kind of judgment pressing down on her. She thought of the conversation with Marley the day she drove Fiona to get her car—Marley saying she wasn’t worried about Fiona sleeping with all these guys but about the reasons she was doing it. As if that made some kind of difference. She thought about Dave; about Oliver, who was forever sitting in the back of her head like her threat to herself: You could do this, you know. She felt like mourning Dave, but knew there was nothing of any substance to mourn. It had all been in her head, in her active fantasy life. Still: she felt pain from it, from the shame of his rebuffing her, from vomiting in front of all those people. She felt pain that Gabriel had never called her and neither had that lacrosse player that she’d given a blow job to. And then, different from all of these rejections was Oliver Ash’s last email to her, still hanging there. She had never responded.

  The Starr Report was all legalese, hard to get through, and she found her eyes glazing over a lot of the content. What was becoming most interesting to her was the Linda Tripp aspect of the story. Linda had betrayed Monica by taping their conversations about the affair; as Monica was confiding in her friend about the love she felt for the president, and the heartbreak when he broke
off their affair, Linda was using this information to boost her own reputation in Washington. When Monica told Linda that she was being encouraged to lie about the affair under oath, Linda contacted the notoriously right-wing Kenneth Starr. Although Linda’s recording of their phone conversations without Monica’s knowledge was illegal, Starr encouraged her to continue recording them, and agreed to grant her immunity from prosecution if she did so.

  This was news to Fiona—she had had no idea that there was also an element of betrayal here, that Linda Tripp, supposedly one of Monica’s closest friends and confidantes, ended up stabbing her in the back in order to save her own ass. Fiona spent nearly an hour sifting through the transcripts of Linda and Monica’s wiretapped phone calls. She was floored by an exchange in which Linda convinced Monica to keep the blue Gap dress that had Clinton’s semen on it:

  Nov. 20, 1997

  MRS. TRIPP: O.K. So one other thing I want to say to you that you can do what you want with—

  MS. LEWINSKY: Oh.

  MRS. TRIPP:—but I want you to think about this—and really think about it, instead of always just dissing what I say, O.K.?

  MS. LEWINSKY: I don’t always dis what you say.

  MRS. TRIPP: Well—

  MS. LEWINSKY: But sometimes you’re such a—

  MRS. TRIPP: You’re very stubborn. You’re very stubborn (sigh). The navy blue dress. Now, all I would say to you is: I know how you feel today, and I know why you feel the way you do today, but you have a very long life ahead of you, and I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. Neither do you. I don’t know anything and you don’t know anything. I mean, the future is a blank slate. I don’t know what will happen. I would rather you had that in your possession if you need it years from now. That’s all I’m going to say.

  What if, every time Fiona confided in her friends, they were using her confidences for their own benefit? Sometimes she felt that was the case—not that they were going to use her words in a court of law, but that they gave her shit about her grief and her drinking and her sex life because doing so meant they were able to exercise a certain amount of control over her. As a way to prop themselves up, to feel better about their own lives.