Private Lessons

A/N: I apologize in advance for any of you faithful readers who might be saying “OK, enough plot. Where’s the next hot sex scene?” After all, I did put this in the “Erotica” category. The problem is this story is a little drama, a little comedy, a little romance, a little angst, and a little sex. Hard to know exactly where I should put this thing really, as there is no set genre for it. And the characters are sort of taking on a life of their own right now. But rest assured, more hot stuff will come...

------------------------------------

WEEK EIGHT - SICK DAY

If I were Marilyn Monroe, I would have groped for a bottle of pills and washed them all down with a healthy shot of Southern Comfort. If I were any Drama Queen worth her salt, I would have slit my wrists or hung myself in despair.

As it was, I was all too ordinary. I got sick with a cold.

Whenever I went through heartbreak, I tended to get sick. And not just a sniffle and a few coughs, either. Nothing as civilized as that. No, this was a horrendous and disgusting wheezing disease, complete with laryngitis. My chest hurt with every breath. My back ached from my lungs being so full of phlegm. Sleep was an utter lost cause.

And going to class on Sunday was out of the question. I guess it was just as well.

I called Dawn. We were always supposed to call the key student in the horrid event that we have to miss a sacred class.

“Dawn?” I rasped on the phone. “Hi, it’s Maggie.”

“Christ, Maggie! You sound awful!”

“Yes.”

“Needless to say, I guess you’re not going to come to class.”

“There’s no way I can sing. And I’ll infect everybody.”

“Take some Slippery Elm and drink lots of orange juice.”

I asked her if I thought Mr. C would boot me out of the class.

“What? Are you kidding?! He loves you!”

Yeah, right.

“He might bark at you a little and give you a hard time, but I’m sure he will understand.”

“OK.”

“Get some rest.”

“OK.”

I hung up the phone, staring at the walls of my room in bleak hopelessness.

What to do when a person is sick and emotionally distraught at the same time?

Because I felt so rotten and uncomfortable, I was not sleeping. I was just lying there in bed, mulling over what had happened with Mr. C. Remembering the things he had said, the things I had said, all of it playing over and over like a broken record...

Normally, I would just drown myself in a classics movie marathon on Turner Classic Movies. But to watch movies, you have to have peace of mind. Otherwise, scene after scene passes; and before you know it, you have no idea what plot you are watching or who the characters are because your mind has wandered. With a book, the words start to turn into garble and make no sense. In short, there was no peace. No peace anywhere.

I reached for my bottle of Tylenol PM, hoping that maybe this time the pills would overcome the misery. At least for four to six hours.

The phone rang again.

“Hello. This is Spartan Temp Agency. May I speak with Miss Spencer?”

“Speaking.”

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know that Goldman & Brothers gave us a ring. Apparently, they won’t need you anymore at this point. Are you available to take a new assignment?”

“I’m sick. Can I call you in a day or so?”

“Sure thing, sweetie.”

Great. Now I was dying, rejected, broke and out of a job. Could things get any worse?

As soon as I hung up from the temp agency call, the phone rang again.

Jesus Christ!

“Hello?”

“Maggie?”

Oh, God...it was Mom...

“Maggie? Is that you? You don’t sound like yourself!”

“Yes. I’m sick.”

“Well, I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

There was a reason for that. I simply had nothing to say to her. But she always liked to dwell on the negative. If I didn’t call her, it meant that I didn’t love her. But if I did call her, then she never hesitated to give me unwanted advice, insult me and make me feel like a huge disappointment and fuck-up. She would say that I didn’t love her. That it was horrible for a daughter not to love her own mother. But the fact of the matter is that enough bitterness and negativity and criticism could destroy any loving relationship. But apparently, she was more addicted to making me feel like shit than trying to work things out.

Back when I was a kid, I could tell my mom anything. Most of the time, she would understand and be a sympathetic ear. Then once I graduated from high school, she changed. Or I changed. One of us changed. Maybe we both changed. And now, there was no comfort in confidence with my mother. If I told her about Mr. C, for example, she would not pass the Kleenex and supply a shoulder to cry on. I could practically hear the insensitive response, complete with accusatory sulkiness: As long as you keep living your life the way you do, you’re never going to meet any worthwhile men. So what do you expect? Her definition of ‘living your life the way you do’ meaning my being an actress living in New York City and her definition of a ‘worthwhile man’ meaning some Prince Charming with a nice fat bank account who will marry me on the first date with no questions asked.

You see, once upon a time, before I was born, my mother had been a photographer. And a good one. If she had applied herself, she could have been very successful, I believe. She had gone from Texas to New York City on her own when she was eighteen, ready to set the world on fire. But she listened to her parents, who had guilt tripped her into essentially leaving the city and coming back to their Texas farm. She married my father, the nice young man who sat next to her in Biology Class at the University of Texas at Austin. I cannot say what they saw in each other. To this day, I have never figured it out. They never had anything in common. They never seemed to be madly in love with each other. The fact that both of them were Bible Belt virgins who didn’t have a clue about birth control did not help matters. I was born exactly nine months after their wedding day.

For most of my childhood, I was admittedly a spoiled rotten brat. When I became an adult, that was when the shit hit the fan, so to speak. My parents learned that I was all too human. I became equally disillusioned about them.

During my first semester at the community college, Dad left Mom. He did not leave her for another woman. He just wanted to pursue his passions for airplanes and hunting. At the time, I called him up on the phone and said all sorts of nasty shit to him. That’s because I was more or less trapped with a distraught woman who was having the temper tantrums of a 3-year-old and making me feel like killing her. And I blamed him for putting me in such a position.

As I get older, I can start to see things from his point of view. From both of their points of view, actually. They had both given up their dreams in exchange for the All American Dream. You know, the white picket fence, the cars, the kids and suburbia. Later on, they realized that their personal sacrifices were not worth the All American Dream. And when I was born, I was the glue that either held the marriage together or kept them in chains, depending on your point of view.

Which put an awful lot of pressure on me.

Yes, I had dreams of moving to New York City, even though I had very little except what money I had saved up from various part-time jobs and the clothes on my back. My mother’s repeated psychodramas with dialogue from the worst written soap operas simply fueled the flames of my ambition to leave for good. And unlike my father, I had the right to leave. I wasn’t married to anyone. And I was an adult.

So after college, I took off to the Big Apple. And to this day, Mom has never forgiven me for it. She would have been perfectly happy if I had become a pathetic old maid schoolteacher still living at home with her mother at the age of 40. Just the prospect of such a gruesome fate made poverty a little less hard to take.

The rest of the phone call was short and tense. I was always tense around Mom, never knowing if she was going to be sane or go off the deep end with me. It was truly a dysfunctional relationship. And always in the background were her damning words drumming in my head: You’re a fuck-up...You’re a fuck-up...You’re a fuck-up...although a nice Southern Baptist would never swear like that.

I said I was losing my voice and really shouldn’t talk anymore, cutting the conversation short.

I could tell that even that pissed her off, never mind the fact that I was fucking dying.

In some ways, my mom’s call was a shot in the arm, reminding me that life might not be paradise now. But it was still a whole hell of a lot better than where I had been. After all, a ‘two-ships-passing-in-the-night’ encounter with Mr. C was always preferable to hearing my mother go on one of her typical five-hour bitchfests.

I took my Tylenol PM, turned on TCM and laid back on bed, listening to the legendary dialogue from CASABLANCA. As Rick left Ilsa at the plane, I promised myself that tomorrow I would go to the library and pick out a new song.

I was an artist, after all; and I knew how to use pain to my advantage.