The Learning Curve

by Mandy Berman

  She stood from the bed, paced around the small room. She took a pillow to her face and shrieked into it. She watched for a change on the screen; no change came. Although she was not much of a smoker, she wanted a cigarette. She left her laptop open and took her key and ten euros and walked to the tabac on the corner. There was a line of several Parisians, in their thirties, in expensive suits and dresses, buying their cigarettes before the tabac closed in ten minutes. When it was her turn, she ordered a pack of Camel Blues and the woman handed it to her without flinching. It never ceased to excite her that she could make herself understood in another language, even for a thing as minor as buying cigarettes. “Et un briquet, s’il vous plaît,” she added, pleased with herself for remembering the French word for “lighter.”

  She smoked outside the hotel, leaned up against the painted blue exterior. Smoking was supposed to calm one’s nerves, though she supposed that only applied to people who were addicted. It made her more jittery. She couldn’t finish the cigarette, so halfway through she stubbed it out and ran back upstairs to check her computer.

  And, voilà! A new message had appeared below hers. She stood squinting at the bright screen, reading the message as fast as possible, then reading it again, and again.

  Berlin also has its challenges. The transition at home hasn’t been quite as smooth as I’d hoped.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she wrote back immediately, not bothering now to wait. He was at his computer, and so was she, and they were having a live conversation. “Transitions are hard.”

  OLIVER: Indeed, they are.

  FIONA: how long have you been back now?

  OLIVER: Two weeks or so. At least I’m not jet-lagged anymore.

  FIONA: haha, yeah are you traveling or anything this summer?

  OLIVER: Maybe to Paris. Don’t think I’ll overlap with you, though. Do you leave soon?

  She was foggy headed from disbelief but struck with a sense of purpose so clear it felt compulsive. He was baiting her. Wasn’t he? Was this allowed? Was this simply the kind of person he was, pouncing on his students the minute they left his class? Or had he been having issues in his marriage since he’d gotten back, and she was the first, easiest girl to flirt with? Was he fishing for some sort of temporary hit during some temporary marital problems?

  Or was it her, and only her, that he wanted?

  It suddenly all seemed so easy, so obvious, what she needed to do next. She had money left. She had time, no job, no responsibilities back home. Flights were easily changeable. And besides, if she came home from Berlin rather than Paris she wouldn’t have to see Liv again. Maybe ever.

  What was stopping her was some small voice in the back of her head that said: This is dumb. Don’t do this. She had only two days left, after which she could go home and try to forget about this awful trip. She could tell her mother everything—and Marley, and Lula, they were still her friends—and get a summer job. Maybe it wasn’t too late to get work at the Post through Ed’s brother, but she could go back for her final semester and move forward with her life, leaving Liv and the promise of Oliver Ash in the past, where they were meant to stay.

  And then there was a second, louder voice that said: You could stay here another two days, exploring the city you felt alone in all week, or you can do what you’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. And this voice was so loud, so insistent, that she felt she had no choice but to listen to it right away. She was losing time by the second and she had only now to seize on it. She pulled out her cellphone.

  “Lula!” she texted. “More catching up later, but you have friends in Berlin, right?”

  She watched the computer screen, desperate to respond to Oliver, worrying that he was sitting on the other side of the screen waiting for her answer, near to giving up. Maybe he’d already signed off and she’d lost her only chance. Her phone dinged, and she jumped at the sound. It was Lula texting her back.

  Lula: miss you too, asshole ;) yeah, i do. why? you going?

  Fiona: do you think you could put me in touch with them? do you think they’d let me stay with them for a few nights?

  Lula: course.

  Then Lula forwarded the number of Avi, one of her best friends from New York, who had graduated a year above her at their prep school.

  Fiona went back to her Facebook messages. Oliver’s question to her was still hanging there.

  “I’m actually coming to Berlin this weekend!” she typed. “Visiting friends. Sort of last-minute.” She went back, deleted the exclamation point, turned it into a period. Read it over once more. Hit Enter. Waited. Thought of texting Avi, to introduce herself and check if it was okay to stay with him for a night or two. Thought of looking at flights. Then decided it was best to see what Oliver said first. He probably had weekend plans with his family. It was already Friday, after all. Maybe he was going to say he was busy, and she would say, “No big deal,” and then she could go home and put this whole Oliver Ash thing to rest, telling herself that at least she’d tried. She was starting to get used to this idea, patting herself on the back for asking, and already preparing for—and beginning to welcome—his rejection, when his message appeared below hers.

  Wow, that’s wild. Well, you’ll have to let me buy you lunch.

  Lunch?

  Just lunch?

  Was “lunch” lunch? Or was “lunch” a euphemism?

  She supposed he couldn’t exactly say over the Internet if he wanted anything more than lunch. Berlin seemed worth visiting anyway. Didn’t it?

  In fact, she knew little about it. She knew of its reputation as a young city, famous for its clubs and its artists and its grit. She knew it was cheap. She knew you didn’t really need to know German to get by.

  And she knew, looking at flights on Ryanair right now, that it would cost only 76 euros to fly one-way from Paris to Berlin at six the following morning.

  23.

  SIMONE STAYED AT the hospital for a few more hours. Alex didn’t leave Danièle’s side. In the waiting room, Henri complained that he was hungry. Simone realized she hadn’t fed him since breakfast, and it was now early evening. She was, she decided swiftly, a terrible mother.

  She said good night to Danièle, who was still fast asleep, got a key to the apartment from Alex, and took a cab back with Joséphine and Henri, Joséphine insisting she stay at Danièle’s apartment with Simone and Henri.

  “I won’t be able to sleep anyway,” she said.

  At home, Simone fixed them all pasta with olive oil and dried herbs from Danièle and Alex’s limited pantry—it was too late to go shopping, and she was too tired to make anything else. Henri fell asleep mid–pasta bowl, facedown on the dining room table.

  She tucked him into his bed and watched him sleep, his chest rising and falling, his little lungs doing their work. Her one and only baby. If he came from a broken home, would he survive it?

  She shut the door quietly; her mother was doing the dishes, the television tuned to Canal+ in the background, on mute. She thought about calling Oliver, but what was there to say?

  Joséphine saw Simone coming into the kitchen. She dried her hands on a dish towel and took her daughter into a long hug. Simone began to cry. At first she was able to hide her sobs but soon they came out in violent, gasping jags.

  “Oh, my love,” Joséphine said. “I’m scared, too.”

  She pulled her head away from her mother’s neck and wiped her eyes. “Are you okay here with Henri for a little while?”

  Joséphine nodded.

  24.

  THE APARTMENT FELT so big, and Liv so small. Fiona had been gone for several hours now; it was becoming clearer with each passing minute that she wasn’t coming back.

  Liv thought about calling Paul, the guy from last night, then decided against it. The first person she’d slept with since Brandon, and though it was sup
posed to be fun and carefree—a rebound!—it had just felt sad. Paul’s roommates had still been awake when they arrived at his apartment around one in the morning. The roommates were playing a video game, and rather than take Liv directly to his bedroom, Paul sat down with them. His roommates only briefly looked up and said hello to her, intent as they were on the screen in front of them. Paul offered Liv a beer, which she took to have something to hold while she sat on the stained corduroy couch and watched them play in silence, some shoot-’em-up game in a series of gray brick rooms where enemies hid in dark corners. Paul yelled advice at his roommates, called out in anguish when one of their characters got shot. One of them rolled and lit a spliff; Paul partook, then remembered to pass it to Liv only as an afterthought. She knew, more or less, where she was—far, far north of Aunt Lacy’s apartment—but wasn’t sure she could find a cab at this time of night. They’d taken the Métro there, Paul complaining the whole time about how Gabriel had made them travel halfway across the city to see him. She didn’t know when the trains stopped running.

  She had sensed that she was about to make a bad decision by sleeping with Paul, that he had not earned it, had not done anything to deserve sex with her. She supposed, as she tuned out the hyper-fast, slang-ridden French the boys spoke to one another, that she could be wrong. Sometimes bad decisions turned out to surprise you, turned out to be rewarding, fun, memorable. No matter how it went, this was a story she’d always be able to tell. Sleeping with a gorgeous Frenchman who picked her up at a Parisian bar a month after her breakup with Brandon, proof of the fact that she was over him, that she was resilient, that she’d bounced back like a rubber ball.

  In a few long gulps, she drained the beer she’d been holding, then grabbed Paul’s hand and told him to lead her to his bedroom. At least she would always have the power to be more alluring than video games. She saw the hint of jealousy in his less attractive roommates’ eyes as they briefly glanced up at her when she said good night.

  It was, unsurprisingly, not good. He finished too fast, then made a half-assed manual attempt on her that exhibited a shocking lack of skill. Or perhaps it was fitting: the really good-looking ones had to try even less than the average man did. She told him it was fine, and he seemed relieved to be off the hook, kissing her once and falling asleep on his back. She laid her head on his chest, and he made a sort of satisfied stirring noise. He wasn’t anything, but she could, for the time that she was awake and he was asleep, pretend that he was. It was a warm body. It was something.

  Now, in the windowsill of her aunt’s empty apartment, she drank a glass of Sancerre by herself, watching people move along Rue Vieille du Temple—mostly tourists, mostly Asian, eating falafel and snapping pictures of themselves. It made her think of Paris syndrome, a phenomenon Kimiko swore that her sister, Liv’s aunt Ayumi, who fetishized Paris, had experienced in full when she first traveled to the city back in the nineties: she’d reportedly become paranoid that French policemen were following her, and so physically ill—vomiting, becoming dehydrated, hallucinating—that she’d had to be hospitalized. The physical manifestations seemed like bullshit to Liv, and she doubted that Ayumi, who was prone to hyperbole, had actually suffered from the syndrome, considering how rare it was. Still, she understood the psychology behind it: severe culture shock at the discovery that the city was not as glamorous as it was supposed to be. There were tourists, just as there were in every city, and trash on the sidewalks, and neighborhoods that got worse the farther you moved from the Seine, and plenty of French people who did not look like they’d just stepped out of an editorial spread.

  Paris was not, she knew, what Fiona had hoped it would be, either. Liv had only wanted them to have a good time, to forget about their problems and the fact that their lives were about to go in separate directions. Fiona didn’t want that, it seemed. Liv couldn’t fix Fiona’s problems by wishing them away, much as she wanted to.

  So let Fiona think that Liv was a grief vampire. Liv knew it had never been about that. It was about the externalization of pain, which she herself never learned how to do. Liv both admired and feared Fiona’s ability to put all of her hurt on the table. It fascinated her. Liv had always curbed her own pain: through hard work, through forgetting, through telling herself that everything was all right. Everything could be all right if you made it so. She really believed this.

  The thing about Gabriel—Liv didn’t know what to believe. She had warned Fiona about him back in the fall, but Fiona hadn’t wanted to listen. So Liv had been right. But why wait a whole year to tell her what had happened? Because Fiona hadn’t wanted to admit that Liv was right? That felt unnecessarily spiteful. Then again, who knew what she even remembered? She had been so drunk that night, which made the whole thing more complicated. Liv didn’t know the line, that murky gray area, where consent started and ended. She found the talks the administration had given them during freshman orientation laughable. “No means no.” But what about when no meant yes? What about when refusal could be sexy, when the fun lay in the gray area itself? Or, the reverse: what about when you allowed sex to happen, and it was terrible, and regrettable, as last night had been?

  It was nine P.M. and the sun was still setting, the Paris sky a dusky gray-blue, the street lamps just turned on. Liv hadn’t eaten dinner yet. She was craving a juicy, rare steak.

  She drained her Sancerre, leaving the glass on the windowsill, and made her way down the stairs and toward the main drag of Rue Vieille du Temple. She walked down the street for a few blocks, looking for somewhere to eat. These nights, the weather had been perfect, with the slightest chill in the air. Soon she found a busy bistro on a corner, people drinking and smoking at outside tables, a tea-light candle on each one, and a chalkboard listing the evening’s specials: magret de canard, moules-frites, entrecôte bordelaise.

  She took a seat at an empty table outside, next to a woman who was also by herself, and ordered a martini from the server. She lit a cigarette while she waited for her drink. Smoking, these past few weeks, was the only thing that allowed her a deep and unwavering sense of calm. It was meditative, how she was able to focus on only the cigarette, its glowing orange tip when she sucked in, the ash that cumulated before she gracefully tapped it away. She exhaled, contented. She worried she was getting addicted.

  The server brought her a rocks glass filled with ice, a rosy red drink inside and an orange rind floating on top. It wasn’t what she had been expecting. She took a sip; it was overly sweet, and musty, what she imagined mothballs tasted like.

  “Excusez-moi,” she said to the server, as politely as she could. “I asked for a martini.”

  “Oui,” he said. “This is a martini.”

  “Like with gin?” she tried. “And vermouth?” She did not know the French word for vermouth, so she said that in English, and he didn’t understand it.

  “You asked for a martini. This is a martini.”

  “Excuse me?” she heard the woman next to her say in English. Liv turned: she was one of those French women who looked glamorous without a hint of makeup. She had a long, elegantly defined nose, and she wore head-to-toe black linen, her dark curly hair cut into a blunt bob. The tables were only a whisper away from each other. “Are you American?”

  “Yeah,” Liv said.

  “When you order a martini here, they bring you sweet vermouth. You have to order a martini sec for what you want.”

  “Oh.” Liv looked into her glass, not wanting to drink what was in front of her and not wanting to send it back with the snooty server either. She was annoyed that she’d outed herself, that she hadn’t thought about this before. Of course the French didn’t drink the same martinis that Americans did.

  “I’ll take it if you want,” the woman said, gesturing to her own empty wineglass. “I quite like it.”

  “Oh,” Liv said. “Really?”

  “Sure.” The woman ordered a gin martini from th
e server.

  “With a twist?” Liv said.

  “Avec un zeste de citron,” the woman added.

  “That’s very kind,” Liv said. “On me.”

  The woman shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

  When it came, they swapped their drinks, and clinked the glasses.

  Liv went back to her cigarette, and the woman to her sweet vermouth. Liv took the first sip of her martini. It was not quite as good as in the States—too heavy on the vermouth—but it still had that hard bite she loved, almost industrial in its flavor. It reminded her, fondly, of her father. She used to ask him for sips of his martinis and he would oblige her. She was regularly disgusted by them, but she loved the burn in her chest, the sensation of heaviness lifting from the top of her head. Her father was impressed that she liked them, so he started making them for her when she was in high school, during the cocktail hour that preceded dinner. She pretended to enjoy the taste until, eventually, she did. Learning to drink martinis was, like life, hard work that paid off.

  When she thought of her father now, she thought of what Brandon had asked her, on their ride home from the ski lodge. Whether her father had ever hurt her. The memory would always leave her as quickly as it arrived, intruding for a simple, gut-stabbing second, and then going back where it came from, into the ether where it best remained unperturbed.

  She would savor the martini first, and then order the entrecôte, paired with a glass of Bordeaux.

  A couple of men sat down at the table on the other side of her. The one closer to her turned and began to appraise her.

  “Hello,” he said. He was young and unattractive, with greasy black hair, wearing a faux-leather jacket. She could smell his cigarette breath, and began to feel self-conscious that her breath smelled the same. “What is that you’re drinking?”