Adverb to the Wise

I turn right at the top of the stairs: first floor flat 1c. I don’t ring the bell. I knock: the drum roll of a marching snare. All my students say this is my military knock. But for this knock, and my most un-hispanic punctuality, they would swear I lie about my time in the service. The doctor is in.
Of course she is; it’s our weekly English lesson. She swings the door wide,
‘Good morning.’ She enunciates.
‘Good morning, Inez… You look…’ What? Good? Glamorous? I settle for,
‘…very smart today.’
‘Thank you.’ She says stiffly.
And she does look good. I follow her down the corridor to her consulting room. I think of another word I couldn’t use. Inez is wearing a white coat over her street smart, lunch-date clothes. It’s more a short jacket really, nipped at the waist. Her name is embroidered over the breast pocket. I often think it looks vaguely military. I wonder idly if she has a lover; someone to lunch with after surgery hours.
Inez takes her seat opposite me at her desk. We start with general chat; ‘what did you do at the weekend?’ She talks, I’m supposed to listen, file away any mistakes for practice later. Before I know it, I’ve lost concentration and she is saying:
‘I don’t do it normally.’ The rhythm is Hispanic, breathless, no pauses: the stress and intonation fall, or are pushed, onto the ‘-ly’ at the end.
‘How do you do it, then?’ It just slips out.
Inez lifts a quizzical eyebrow and shrugs, expectantly.
‘Normally, we say I don’t normally do it.’
A blank look is my deserved reward.
- ‘The way you said it’ I keep digging.’ It means you do it but in an unusual way.’ She leans back, tilting her head to look at me:this must be what askance looks like.
I try Spanish:
- ‘Tu lo haces, pero lo haces en una manera… rara o perversa.’ This provokes a very earthy laugh, and I guess that I have made one of my not infrequent errors.
Inez likes to sit on my side of the desk when we do reading practice; I decide against doing any today, although I’ve spent 2 hours preparing something. Racking my brains for something else to do, I plump for some pronunciation practice. Certain combinations of letters are difficult for Spanish speakers to reproduce. ‘Wo’ is one of them.
‘Repeat after me, “Woman”. I say seriously.
Inez has trouble with this one: the sound comes out closer to a hard “g”.
- ‘OK, you need to put your lips in position for a kiss.’
‘What kind of kiss?’ There is a half-smile.
Several answers flash through my mind: Soul, French, un beso negro, but I say:
‘ A normal kiss, like when you greet some one.’ I pucker up to demonstrate. She does the same. I bring my lips back and flatten the shape of my mouth ‘Wuh, wuh, wuh’ is the sound that comes out. From both our mouths.
‘ Right, we’re going to try some tongue twisters, D’you know what a tongue twister is, Inez?’
At this point Inez pokes her tongue out an extremely long way and twists it quite alarmingly, whilst crossing her eyes.
‘ Well, I suppose that’s one definition, I mean rhymes, sentences and phrases which are diffic-‘
‘I know,’ she says. I blush.
‘Sorry.’ And she laughs.
I get through the lesson somehow. Inez escorts me to the door, as she always does. As I’m turning to leave, she lays her manicured hand on my bare forearm:
- ‘I am glad you do not give the English normally.’