Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

“Really?” the little girl asked, wide-eyed.

“Really.”

“So what did she do?” She seemed genuinely interested. He’d never had a child so relaxed in his arms before, despite all that had happened. Perhaps this would be the one child who really understood. Perhaps she would go easily, with no need for a struggle. He stretched his fingers and spread his huge hands (watch out! watch out!). He brought his fingers closer to her neck (when he comes), closer to her tiny, grape-shaped eyes (when the sackman comes).

“What did she do, you ask? Why, she visited the sackman, of course.”

“That was stupid!” she squealed, and rammed a long splinter of wood up through his belly until it found the sackman’s chest.

As the sackman felt himself falling into bits and pieces, his legs tumbling one way, his arms and belly another, he tried to think of the word he’d want the little girl to write down for pasting into his sackman heaven.

She let him pull her closer. He could see her leaning over his lips with an anxious expression on her face, ready to hear and record. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth, and felt her eager fingers tearing at his tongue.

The first visits had been straightforward enough. He’d started going there to meet women. His wife had been gone almost a year and the women at work seemed too old for him. It had been a long time since he’d thought about how a woman might see him, the kind of messages he sent out. Did he even send out messages? Everyone did, according to the articles in the women’s magazines, which had become his secret vice. After Clara left and he’d been so stupefied by the whole thing he’d thought reading them might help him understand—certainly she’d spent more time reading them than telling him the truth.

“How To Tell Your Man What He’s Doing Wrong.” He wondered if she’d read that one and if so, why she hadn’t followed its recommendations. Maybe she’d decided he wasn’t worth the aggravation.

He didn’t go to Jack’s to meet women anymore. To see them, yes, to smell them. To be in their presence.

“I tell you, the women go crazy there!” Mark had thought going to Jack’s was the best thing Jim could do. If he wanted to meet women, and what man didn’t? “It’s either Jack’s, or a church, or even better a funeral at a church. But Jack’s is where they really let loose, where they really get crazy.” Jim didn’t actually want a crazy woman, but maybe momentary insanity was as good an ice-breaker as any.

Dating had this vaguely disturbing terminology—breaking the ice, sending messages. It seemed strangely science fictional, contact between two alien species. He couldn’t imagine his parents being this way, but he couldn’t remember much communicating taking place there, either. Maybe it had always been this way and he’d just never noticed before. Marriage protected you from the real terrors of relationships.

“I don’t think I’ve danced in years—how about you?”

The fellow—about his age, maybe a little older—made this opening statement and waited for an answer. Some people might have been tempted to make fun of him, but Jim wasn’t one of them. Something had to be said first and perhaps this was as good a thing to say as any. The first thing you said in any relationship had little long-lasting meaning. The first thing you said could even be a lie. The woman’s eyes moved slightly down and up again, almost imperceptibly, a sizing up and a conclusion. She had to determine if this guy was at least in the ballpark and if she didn’t do it now she might be stuck with a major incompatibility for half the evening. Not as cruel as it sounded—she was doing both of them a favor.

At their age the standards were a bit looser, of course. At their age even a man years out of shape might interest an ex-prom queen.

The woman smiled, always an encouraging sign. Good for you, fellow, Jim thought. Good for you.

Mark had stopped coming to Jack’s several years ago, having found a girlfriend and then moving to Seattle where he thought people were friendlier. “It’s the rain and the gloom that brings people closer together.” Mark had theories about all varieties of human behavior. Nothing strange about that, of course. Theories were pretty much all most of us knew about being human. Mark’s problem was that his theories were a bit further off the beam than most, and his need too obvious, too painful to observe.

“Look at them,” Mark had said, gesturing toward the variety of women crowding the dance floor, heads drifting up and down. “It’s just like sex.”

Jim had understood then that Mark knew very little about sex. Not that Jim was an expert. But during the course of his eight-year marriage to Clara they had had three different kinds of sex, all of them authentic in their own way.

Initially there had been the pretense of passion and exhaustion while they attempted to understand the real passion that lay beneath: the bellies sucked in, the dramatic breathing and groaning and sudden cries, the collapse at the end and the various half-true declarations, and the final separate awarenesses that they had not quite found the complete release they’d always dreamed of, but they knew it was there.

Then there had been two years or so of slow comforts, a joining in weariness at the end of the day, and the easing out of tears and the almost-desperate final embraces. These were the times Jim would always recall with fondness, and think of as love.

And then there came that last year of marathon exhaustion, as if both of them were in training for the new life to come, using each other like exercise equipment, a race into oblivion before turning over and falling asleep.

Mark had no idea of any of this. All he had seen out on the dance floor were tides of women. It had been ladies’ choice and the ladies had chosen to move together as one, not so much displaying themselves as keeping themselves alive, for to stand unmoving when you could still hear the music was to harden into something ailing and sad.

“I’m on the road a lot,” the tall sandy-haired man said to the woman he was dancing with.

Jim’s partner was a short, pale woman several years his senior. She never smiled; dancing with strange men was a serious assignment for her, self-assigned or based on recommendations from friends or a therapist.

“That must be very interesting, to be able to travel all the time,” the woman in the red dress replied.

The man laughed a little too hard, on the edge of being offensive. Jim saw the woman frown. Do you think I’m stupid? was in her face but she didn’t voice it.

The man might have told her about his time on the road because it was the only thing he could think of to say or because he wanted to quickly signal his lack of interest in a long-term relationship. The woman’s assessment that this information was somehow interesting was probably a lie, but it gave her an excuse to express a desire to travel which might have also encouraged further conversation about distant places and times. The man might have truly found her to be stupid, or boring, but more than likely he had laughed as an anxiety release. Jim heard more nervous laughter out on the dance floor than in any other setting he could think of.

Some time during this assessment Jim had changed partners, without being fully aware that it was happening. The woman across from him now didn’t look at him, one of the many advantages of a fast song. Fast songs also afforded the opportunity to release sexual tension, an important mechanism for avoiding violence when there were a lot of young single men in the club at one time.

“She did you a favor, leaving you,” Mark had said that first night at the club, a little too loudly. “At least now you can get yourself good and properly laid.” Jim had barely controlled the urge to punch him. He had never punched anyone, and now it seemed appropriate, dealing with a fool. But he didn’t.