Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

The dream left him with a sense of irrational discouragement and a mosquito-bite feeling of loss. He moped as he brushed his teeth. He wished his roommate would come back from Italy. He had never been to Europe or anywhere else, and was sick of people going.

He walked the unusual route again. Again he saw her, in almost exactly the same place. This time she looked directly at him and even showed a slight smile on her face. She nodded shyly at him. Not meeting her look, he half nodded and she was gone. Her severely bobbed hair was pretty, but not as pretty as her long hair had been.

He had lunch with Cecilia that afternoon. They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like they’d met with utter disappointment and became attached to it. Cecilia was reassuring. She was not small or theatrical. Her shoulder-length hair was blond, her plump body calm. She had a long way of saying her words, a relaxed but vaguely predatory way of turning her head. She came from a wealthy family, and he supposed that was where she got her assurance. Her background was part of what made her attractive to him. He wasn’t after her money (although he wouldn’t mind, certainly, if one day she spoke to her parents about financing a film project of his own); there was simply something foreign and delightful about this rich girl who had been safely surrounded by money all her life. The perfume of wealth graced her casually, like grass stains on the skin of a lazy child sleeping in a garden. He pictured her as an adolescent, lounging on her huge unmade, canopied and silk-sheeted bed. She was in her underwear, she was reading Tolstoy, occasionally scratching herself and eating from a box of chocolates, although he knew that Cecilia didn’t like candy and never had.

“It’s so interesting,” she said. “Now that I’m closer to success, I’ve become much less interested in it. I’ve always known that I would be successful, that I just had to work for it. But it was always out of reach, so I obsessed about it all the time. It was a goal. Now it’s more like a natural outcome, another element of my life to be experienced. It’s not even important anymore. There are so many other things in life. It’s silly to be so narrow.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” he said. “Things are always less important once you’re assured of having them.”

“It’s not that it isn’t important, it’s just that I’m not focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else. But I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when it happens. If anything, it’s more real to me now, not like something I’m going to acquire.”

He chewed without answering, and she flicked the corners of her mouth with her tongue.

“I think I’m going to Italy in a few months,” she said. “I’m really excited about it. I want to meet an Italian film producer and have an affair with him.”

“My roommate is in Italy,” he said.

“You told me.”

In a few months he would say, “My friend Cecilia is in Italy.” He looked at her serene face, her resting throat, her slightly upturned chin. He had slept with her for almost two years. She had sucked him off with that mouth. He thought: My friend, Cecilia. My friend.

When he returned to his office he got on the WATS line and called Wilson. Wilson had been a close friend while they were in Ann Arbor. Now he was stuck teaching undergraduates in a geology department in Washington, D.C. Joel called him about twice a month to gossip about other people they’d gone to school with. He knew Wilson kept in touch with the woman he’d seen again this morning.

“Do you know what Sara’s doing? Do you know where she’s working?”

There was a breath of silence before Wilson answered. “She’s all right. I think she’s still working in a bar in the East Village.”

“Has she gotten anywhere with her painting?”

“I don’t think so. Not since the little show she was in at that club. Why?”

“I’ve seen her twice on the street this week. We haven’t had a chance to talk. I just wondered what she was up to.”

Wilson had disapproved of Joel’s relationship with Sara, even though he’d been morbidly fascinated by it. Even though it had raised Joel in his esteem.

Joel got off the phone and gazed at the morose buildings standing in a clump outside his window.

Interrupted, static-ridden commercials for memories of Sara flitted mutely through his mind, chopped up and poorly edited — Sara before he knew her, a small slender person walking down State Street with her books, wearing jeans and fawn-colored boots. She had a very stiff walk despite her round hips, a tight sad mouth and wide abstracted eyes. She was always alone whenever he saw her, and always appeared vaguely surprised by everything around her. He saw her propped up in his bed, reading a book about South Africa. He saw her sitting across a table, a sauce-red shrimp in her fingers, chatting about her experience as a hooker, oblivious to stares from the next table. She appeared seated in the dark of the film auditorium, her hand at her jaw, her booted legs tossed over the next few chairs, her tongue snapping sarcastically.

“It’s so dishonest, it’s so middle-class. Who does he think he’s shocking? It’s such a reaction to convention. It’s babyish.”

“You don’t understand the concept of subversion,” he said.

“I know more about subversion than anybody else in this stupid town,” she said.

The clips sped up and blurred into glimpses. Her melancholic paleness in the dark, the sheets rumpled to reveal her gray-tinged mattress. The stark lumpiness of her spine and shoulder blades as she reached across him to snatch a “snot rag” from its box. The dry toughness of her heels. The nervous stickiness of her fingers. “Hurt me,” she said. “Hurt me.”

He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy. His focus wobbled, he slipped out again. In Ann Arbor he had pierced his ear, he had worn a beret sometimes. He had written articles in the student paper on labor unions. He had brought Andy Warhol to Cinema I. He saw himself drunk on the curb outside the Del Rio, talking with Wilson and vomiting. They were talking about politics and sex, Wilson mainly talking politics, since he rarely fucked anybody. Joel had just met Sara. “She’s great. She’s every man’s dream. I can’t tell you how, because she made me promise not to.” He turned and barfed.

Everything was so important in Ann Arbor, so fraught with the tension held tight in the bud of fantasy before it bursts into gaily striped attempt. “I have this fantasy of becoming an anarchist on the Left Bank,” he said to Sara. “Throwing bombs and creating a disturbance.”

“I want to become a good painter,” she said. “Or a great painter.”

“Listen,” he said, raising himself above her on his elbow. “I want you to be strong. You’ve come so far in spite of everything. I want you to be successful.”

“I am strong,” she said. Her eyes were serene. “I’m stronger than anyone else I know.”

He cleared his eyes and looked once more at the querulous buildings sweating in the afternoon heat. Of course, she hadn’t been strong at all. He remembered the tremulous whine coming out of the phone during their last conversation. “I’m scared,” she’d wept. “I feel like I don’t exist, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything. I want to kill myself.”

“Look, I grew up in a normal, happy family,” he’d said. “I’m well adjusted. I can’t identify with this self-esteem crisis, or whatever it is you’ve got. Anyway, we’ve only known each other for a few months and I’m not obligated to listen to your problems. You should call a psychiatrist, and anyway I have to take a bath right now.”