Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

Then there was the dog that he had had to put to sleep, a toothless, blind, smelly old monster with toenails like a dinosaur’s. He thought the dog was probably grateful for the injection, and he said so, but that didn’t console the homely adolescent girl who insisted on holding it right up until the end, tears running from under her glasses and down her pink, porous face. Poor lonely girl, he thought. He had wanted to say, “Don’t worry, dear, you’re going to grow up to be a beauty. You’re going to get married and have lots of wonderful children.” Except it probably wasn’t true.

He picked up his remote-control device and switched channels thoughtfully. What would Jane think when he didn’t show up? Would she think he’d gotten bored with her, that he was never coming back? Would she go home wondering what had happened? He tried to picture her in her apartment. She had told him it was very small, only one room with a tiny bathroom. She said the bathroom had big windows and a skylight, and that she had so many plants in there that you couldn’t use the toilet without arranging yourself around the plants. She said she didn’t have a chair or a couch, that she sat on the floor to eat. When she came home from work she often ordered Chinese food and ate it straight from the cardboard boxes set out on the floor between her spread legs.

“What do you have for breakfast?” he asked.

“Ice cream, sometimes. If it’s warm.”

“What do you find to do in that little room?”

“I read a lot.”

“What do you like to read?”

She named a few writers, one that he’d been forced to read in college and others he’d never heard of.

He picked up a tiny bit of herring and mashed it with the edges of his front teeth. Maybe he could start seeing Jane in her apartment. It would be more money for her certainly. He would like to spend time in that funny little place. He could buy her a chair. Maybe even a table.

He wouldn’t be able to see Jane much at all once Sylvia got back. He thought of his wife getting on the plane in her green-and-white dress, the handle of her wicker suitcase in hand, her gray hair wound into an elegant bun that displayed her graceful neck and gently erect shoulders. Her smile was beautiful when she turned to wave good-bye.

He pictured Sylvia sitting in her favorite armchair across from him. She would be relaxed but sitting up straight on the tautly stuffed, salmon-colored cushions. Her legs would be crossed at the ankle. She would have her pale beige glasses on her nose, she would be in a trance over her latest book catalogues. If he stood up and put his hand on her shoulder, he would feel how slender and strong she still was, how well defined her small bones were.

He thought of her collection of rare books, arranged and locked in the glass cabinet in a sunny corner of her study. They were beautiful to look at and extremely expensive; other book dealers had offered her thousands of dollars for some of them. Every time he looked at them, he felt depressed.

One Christmas, he bought Sylvia a book entitled Beautiful Sex . It made him unhappy to remember that night when, with Beautiful Sex lying open on their bed to reveal a series of glossy pink-and-white photos, she cooperatively arranged herself into one of the more conventional positions illustrated, sighing as she did so. “Now, honey,” she said, “tell the truth. Don’t you feel foolish doing this?”

He clicked off the TV and left the room, making a mental note to put the plates in the dishwasher before he went to bed.

The next day he drove to Manhattan right after work, without stopping at home for a shower. Perhaps Jane would notice the vague animal smell on him. She might ask him about it and he could tell her the truth about what he did.

It was already dark when he reached the city. He drove slowly through Times Square, fascinated by the night’s ugliness. He stopped for a red light and looked up at a movie marquee towering on the corner, its dead white face advertising The Spanking of Cindy . There was a short man in a black leather jacket standing by the box office, hunching his cadaverous shoulders in the wind. “Now there’s a queer,” thought Fred. “Wonder what he’s doing in front of that movie house?” He looked at the marquee again, and noticed that the billboard next to it was painted with a girl in jeans thrusting her bottom out, her blond hair swirling across her back, her mouth open in laughter. It was an ad for jeans, but it suited the movie; he vaguely wondered if it had been arranged that way. He turned his head to look at the other side of the street and saw a broken old woman lying unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk with her face against the concrete, her ragged dress spattered across her ugly thighs. He was disgusted to see a young man pissing against the wall not two feet away from her. People were stepping over her as if she were an object, vicious people, it seemed to him, swinging their arms and legs in every direction, working their mouths, yelling at each other, eating hot dogs or Italian ices. What would it be like to be among them? He watched a couple of hookers in miniskirts and leather boots kick their way through a pile of garbage, screaming with laughter.

As soon as he got to a different neighborhood, he stopped at a Chinese flower store and bought Jane a single long-stemmed rose.

“Just so you wouldn’t think I’d forgotten you,” he said when he handed it to her.

“Thanks.” She laid it on the night table, between the bottle of baby oil and the flowered Kleenex box. “Were you sick?”

“No. I just had some … things to do. Did you miss me?”

“Yeah.” She began undoing her buttons.

“Listen, Jane. Tomorrow night will be the last night I can see you for a while. I was thinking maybe we could do something special.”

“Like what?”

“Like you could call in sick and we could meet somewhere for dinner.”

She put her hands in her lap and stared at him with something like alarm in her wide, smudged eyes.

“We could have dinner, go to a movie or a concert — whatever you’d like. Then we could go to a hotel — or maybe your apartment — and spend the night together.”

She looked at her nails and picked them.

“Of course I realize that I can’t ask you to take a night off work without making it worth your while. You’d do all right.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred.”

She didn’t say anything.

“It could be very nice. We’d have time to really act like people in a relationship. What do you say?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are your reservations?”

“I don’t think people in these circumstances can act like people having a relationship.”

“Well, maybe you’re right about that. But still it might be fun. I’d love to talk to you about a movie we’d seen or …”

“I think you’d be surprised if you found out what I’m like outside of here.”

“I can’t believe I wouldn’t like you.”

“You’d think I was weird.”

“I’m not as closed-minded as you think.”

“It’s just that we might not have anything to talk about.”

She didn’t notice the animal smell.

He waited for half an hour at their appointed meeting place. He wasn’t surprised when she stood him up. He was somewhat surprised when he called the escort service to make an appointment and they told him she’d quit. She’d often told him she hated it and that she was going to quit soon, but girls talked like that all the time and stayed for months, even years.

Sylvia returned the next day, smiling and suntanned, happy to wash the dishes on the kitchen counter and pick up the damp, scrunched-up towels that were wadded up on every rack in the bathroom. She told him nice stories about the Arizona desert and the book fair she’d gone to there. He made love to her in a quiet, respectful way. She put her slender arms around his shoulders and held him tight. But when he tried to show her some of the things he’d done with Jane, he could feel her body become docile and patient.