The Learning Curve

by Mandy Berman

  “Where did this all come from?” Danièle asked her sister as they were sitting on the couch, grabbing one of her own breasts with one hand, and a handful of her hair with the other. Simone had arrived that night; they’d just put Henri to bed. “Did this happen to you?”

  “My hair changed texture. It used to be sort of wavy.”

  “And now it’s completely flat.”

  “Yeah, a real joy. And you remember how huge my boobs were.”

  “They were massive.”

  “Massive,” Simone confirmed. She took a sip of her wine, then handed the glass to Danièle. She was far enough along now, almost in her third trimester, that it was safe to have small amounts here and there. Danièle savored her sip, then passed the glass back to Simone.

  “Oliver must have liked that.” Danièle said this with a certain challenge in her voice, knowing full well that things were strained between Oliver and Simone right now.

  “He did.”

  For a moment, they were quiet. But Danièle brought out a more talkative side to Simone than she allowed anyone else to see. She had the capacity, with a simple raised eyebrow or pursed lips, to engender in Simone a certain pressure to express herself, to say what she was thinking, when every other person on earth—except Oliver, sometimes, at least at the beginning—only made Simone want to retreat further into those thoughts, and spend time alone in them. Danièle was not an intellectual in the same way that Simone was, but she wasn’t stupid—she wanted to talk about thoughts and feelings, swim around in them together.

  “We only had sex twice when he was here over the holidays,” Simone said.

  “That’s not so crazy. Every couple is different.”

  “After not having seen each other for three months?”

  Danièle considered this.

  “You know how we used to be.”

  “All over each other.”

  Simone nodded.

  “Maybe it’s a phase,” Danièle said.

  “It doesn’t feel like a phase.”

  “Sometimes when couples don’t sleep together for a while it creates this kind of no-sex homeostasis. It’s harder to start having sex again after you’ve lost your momentum. What about phone sex? Or, there’s Skype now.”

  Simone didn’t want to say that she had asked Oliver once or twice to have phone sex, and that he had turned her down for some reason or another—the time difference, too tired, there was always something.

  “I guess I’ll try it,” she said.

  Danièle sighed.

  “What?”

  “He makes me mad. It makes me mad that he’s probably not concerned about any of this, keeping the relationship healthy, maintaining your sex life.”

  “That isn’t fair.” What about your nonexistent marriage? she wanted to ask her sister. Simone wasn’t the only one abandoned, and she wasn’t six months pregnant. Yet here they were, married women who only seemed to have each other for company.

  Danièle reached out for the wine, took another sip, gave it back.

  “I guess I don’t understand why you don’t ask for more from him.”

  “Well, what do you want from your husband?” Simone tried.

  Danièle looked uncomfortable. “What do you mean?”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that he hasn’t been around more during the pregnancy? This thing you guys have been wanting for so long?”

  Her face flushed. “He’s working.”

  Simone wanted to say, On the weekends? Dani wasn’t dumb; she knew, of course, that Alex probably wasn’t working—not on all of the weekends that he was gone, anyway. But it made her upset that Dani, her kind, caring, beautiful sister, would end up with someone who wasn’t caring for her constantly—who, in fact, did quite the opposite.

  “I chose this, Simone,” she said, as if to thwart whatever accusation Simone was about to lob about Alex. “Don’t think I don’t know what I got myself into.”

  How did Danièle come to terms with that? How could she choose money and affairs and absence over a real, living and breathing relationship? How could she be this person who seemed so concerned with healthy relationships and communication, and yet who ended up with an entirely absent partner? It was always so much easier for Danièle to talk to other people about their problems than to deal with her own. This had always been their dynamic: Danièle as the teacher, the one who knew best, the sister who had it all together, and Simone as the lost and confused one, the overthinker. In actuality, they both knew that Simone only seemed to have a lot of problems in comparison to her sister because she was the only one facing them.

  Simone didn’t actually know if Danièle wanted Alex to be around more. She’d never asked.

  Danièle lifted up her shirt, showing Simone her stomach. They were having a girl. “Look,” she said.

  Simone looked at the stretched flesh, the knots and bones of the fetus moving around in there. She put a hand over the round of Danièle’s belly. She felt the baby churning violently inside, as if desperate to get out.

  17.

  EVERY THURSDAY NIGHT during that spring semester they went for drinks at the bar at the new boutique hotel down the street. Liv had christened it Fancy Lady Night. A farm-to-table movement had sprung up in their college town; downtown, there were at least three restaurants with organic local kale on the menu, and young artists were beginning to move to the small city for the cheap studio space. The hotel, called the Jefferson, was only a ten-minute walk from their house; it had opened right around Christmastime. The converted cork factory was now outfitted with red deco furniture in its lobby, where the original wooden rafters and exposed brick were intact; it cost $195 a night to stay in one of the uniquely designed rooms. The hotel attracted mostly visiting parents of Buchanan students, and businessmen passing through the city. But for Fiona and her roommates, and a select few other seniors and professors, the bar continued to be a well-kept secret.

  Lula had discovered it originally, going for a drink by herself after her senior anthropology seminar one Thursday afternoon, as she sometimes did. It made sense that she of all of them had found it: Lula had a way of seeking out the more upscale corners of a city, of finding the most creative and innovative people in a particular place and being invited into their ranks. After all, Lula had that air about her: she was New York rich. She didn’t wear her money like a badge; she was more refined than that. It was as if you could smell it on her instead, or pick it up little by little: from the way that clothes accentuated her gamine legs, her delicate features, her Lula-ness—she wore her clothes so naturally that even the most expensive items appeared disposable—from the way she kept up with the cultural events of the city, like the current opera season at the Met or a Shaw revival at the Public, expecting everyone else to follow her as if they were as much part of the common conversation as, say, the NBA playoffs or a Batman movie that had been recently released.

  The difference between Lula and the other city kids at Buchanan, though, was that, though her peers seemed continually disappointed by an America that did not live up to their hometown, Lula knew that New York would always be in a league of its own, and so she allowed herself to be charmed by small-town pleasures. And even though the Jefferson was hardly glamorous by the standards of what Lula had experienced in her lifetime, she enjoyed that they had beer on tap that was brewed right here in the county, that she could be surrounded by other well-dressed people, and that their happy hour menu allowed her to drink a top-shelf martini for $7.

  Fiona always ordered a drink called the Colonial—a raspberry margarita, a specialty of Joseph, the bartender. It was not on the menu; Joseph had offered it to Fiona one day when she had trouble picking something on the happy hour list that appealed to her. Now she relished her Thursday-night cocktails: flirting with Joseph, who was tall and tattooed up and down his biceps, and spending time with he
r roommates. The opportunities for such evenings were quickly diminishing.

  Now that it was April, and graduation for the rest of them was on the horizon, time seemed to move exponentially faster. She wanted desperately to hold on to it. Senior year of college was meant to be the best, but she felt she could not enjoy it anymore because she was so focused on the inevitability of it ending. Once her friends were gone, she alone would be back at this school. She hoped she could go unnoticed, could walk through campus like a ghost. She would need to take only three classes that semester; she could stay in her room the rest of the time, or go home on the weekends, or go stay with Lula and Liv in the city. As of now, she was trying to take advantage of the time they had left.

  Thursday nights were her favorite nights to dress. Tonight she wore a black bodycon dress, high heels, and a faux-leather jacket (which she’d bought at Marshall’s after wearing Lula’s real one that night at Zeta). This was one of the points of Fancy Lady Night—to look nicer and more refined than you would at, say, Truckstop, and to be treated in a nicer and more refined way, too.

  Fiona watched Joseph’s upper arms flex as he shook her drink. He was in his usual head-to-toe black—well-worn black jeans, leather boots, and a black Hanes T-shirt that ran tight around his biceps. A bit of dark chest hair peeked out from the V-neck. His tattoos, which he had designed himself, seemed random—there was a wolf in a pink tutu; a broken umbrella with cobwebs drawn between the spokes, like a spiderweb; a dead ladybug, oversize, the red on her shell mingled with spatters of her blood, so you couldn’t tell which was which. His left hand had BITE spelled out on it, one letter on each knuckle. It must have been really hard to think of a tattoo that felt original. Everything had been done already.

  “To us,” Lula said, once Joseph had finished making their drinks, and the four of them clinked their glasses. Fiona took a hearty first sip of her Colonial. The first sip was always the best; she missed this drink pretty much every other time she drank something different, and she didn’t know if it was because of the taste, or because of the bartender who had made it, or because of the place where she drank it, feeling dressed up and unencumbered.

  Fiona asked Liv, “What’s Brandon up to tonight?”

  Liv took a sip of her own Colonial. “Zeta pledge stuff.”

  “Elephant walks?” Fiona asked, smirking.

  “What’s that?” Liv asked.

  Marley made a face. “You know, think of elephants—four legs, and their tails…”

  “Ew,” Liv said. “No. Nothing like that.”

  “Just good old-fashioned toxic masculinity, then,” Lula said.

  “I don’t know,” Liv said. “I don’t ask, actually. I don’t really care.”

  “Drinks all right, ladies?” Joseph asked, wiping down the space on the bar next to them.

  “Great,” they all said in unison. Fiona locked eyes with him and smiled.

  When she turned back to her friends, Liv was batting her eyelashes at Fiona.

  “Stop,” Fiona said, quietly.

  “What?” Marley asked.

  “Nothing,” Fiona said, because truthfully only Liv was privy to Fiona’s crush. Fiona hadn’t even told her; she had picked up on it one Thursday night, and now Fiona felt as if she were under Liv’s microscope. What was all the judging for? It wasn’t like Liv hadn’t made some misguided romantic decisions herself, hadn’t been secretly emailing with Oliver Ash all those months ago, too. Not that Fiona had ever told Liv she knew about that.

  At that moment, Liv turned her head to the door, and Fiona followed her gaze: Professor Ash and Professor Roiphe were entering the bar together—Ash in a charcoal blazer, and Roiphe in a satin vest over a button-down shirt, pressed tightly against her breasts as if to flatten them. It never ceased to amuse her that her English professors dressed exactly as if someone in a novel were writing them.

  “Look who it is,” Marley said quietly to her friends, and brought her beer to her lips as she watched the two of them move toward two open stools. It was a square, open bar, with the bartender station in the middle, and so by the time the professors found seats, they were directly across from the girls, where they were impossible not to notice.

  “Hi, ladies,” Professor Roiphe called out, lifting a convivial hand. Professor Ash smiled with his mouth closed, seeming entirely displeased by the encounter. Liv said hello back, and Fiona lifted her drink in salute. Then the girls turned away from the professors, and toward one another.

  “You better not make a scene, Marley,” Liv said.

  “Come on. Give me a little credit.”

  “How’s your class with him, anyway?” Lula asked quietly. “Is he any good?”

  “Yeah, he is,” Fiona said. “He’s really smart.”

  “He’s not bad.” Liv shrugged. “A little harsh, maybe.” Fiona knew that Professor Ash had given Liv less than glowing notes on her most recent short story.

  “I think he’s fair,” Fiona said. She had not told Liv about his comments on her story. Though he had apologized to her for being harsh, she had, in fact, treasured the criticism. He was right.

  “I don’t know how he lives with himself,” Marley said.

  “Marley,” Liv hissed. “He’s right there.”

  “We don’t know what really happened,” Fiona said. “It could have been consensual, for all we know.”

  “Consent doesn’t really exist when there’s that kind of power dynamic,” Marley said.

  “How old was she again?” asked Lula, who actually couldn’t care less about Oliver Ash and was clearly impatient for a subject change.

  “Seventeen.”

  “Not proven,” Liv whispered. “She turned eighteen that fall, and it’s unclear when exactly he was sleeping with her.”

  “I mean, he implicated himself in his book,” Fiona said. “I’m actually shocked he didn’t get into bigger trouble.”

  “It was technically fiction.”

  “Seventeen!” Lula said too loudly, and Liv shushed her. Lula lowered her voice. “I was having threesomes by the time I was seventeen. Seventeen-year-old girls are far more mature than any of you are giving them credit for.”

  “It’s wrong,” said Marley, definitive in her assessment of the matter.

  Fiona looked over at him, sipping a brown liquid from his rocks glass, nodding intently at what Professor Roiphe was saying. It surprised her that the two of them were friendly, Professor Roiphe being such a feminist. She felt this was a boon to Professor Ash’s reputation, maybe even proof that he wasn’t as bad as Marley thought he was. Fiona lifted her empty glass to Joseph, and he nodded, began making her another.

  Marley straightened on her barstool. “So, I actually have news.”

  “Oh my God,” Fiona said. “Schools?”

  Marley nodded, beaming. “I got into Duke.”

  They erupted: they jumped up, drinks still in hand, splashing over the rims and onto their hands and onto one another, hugging her around the neck, the waist, wherever they could get their hands on her.

  “I’m soaked!” Marley shrieked.

  “Joseph!” Lula reached across the bar. “A bottle of champagne, please!”

  He smiled, revealing the tiny gap between his teeth that Fiona was so charmed by. “Any preference?”

  “Your finest!” Lula said with aristocratic affectation, which meant that she would be putting it on her father’s credit card.

  “What are we celebrating?”

  Fiona practically had her arms around Marley’s neck in a choke hold. “Our girl just got into her first-choice medical school.”

  “Impressive,” Joseph said, raising his eyebrows. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” she said, her cheeks pink.

  When he popped the cork they cheered, already tipsy from their first drinks, and he poured it into gl
asses, the foam rising exactly to the top and no further.

  “Joseph, take a glass!” Lula said, and he did, clinking his glass against theirs.

  “So, where to, then?” he asked Marley.

  “Only one of the best schools in the country,” said Fiona. “This girl is going to save lives.”

  Fiona realized that her second Colonial had come, sitting fresh and untouched alongside her glass of champagne, and she pulled it toward herself. She heard Professor Ash’s voice carrying from across the bar, and looked up to see that he was speaking to them.

  “What?” Fiona called back.

  “I said, What are we celebrating?”

  “Oh,” Fiona called, “Marley got into her first-choice med school.”

  Professor Ash lifted his glass.

  “Congratulations,” said Professor Roiphe.

  “Join us!” Lula called out.

  “No, no, that’s all right,” said Professor Ash.

  “There’s tons of champagne,” Lula said. “Right, Joseph?”

  He lifted the bottle from the ice bucket to reveal that there were still a few glasses’ worth left.

  “Yeah, come over,” Lula said, beckoning to him. Whether she had momentarily forgotten Marley’s vendetta against him or was trying to use this moment to bridge some kind of a divide, Fiona was unsure. Or perhaps Lula was just bored, as she was wont to be, and was trying to make the night more interesting.

  Professor Roiphe was the one who assented. Well-loved professor to Fiona and Liv—and also to Lula and Marley during their forays into lit classes freshman year—she had nothing to lose from a friendly celebratory drink with her outgoing seniors. Professor Ash stood up and followed.

  They were in a row—Lula, Marley, Fiona, then Liv—and the professors took the two seats to Liv’s right. Joseph poured two more glasses of champagne. Immediately, it was awkward.

  “Again, congratulations, Marley,” Professor Roiphe said across the bar, and they all lifted and clinked. “And what will you specialize in?” she asked. “Or is it too soon to know?”