Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

She thought of her last conversation with one of these people, a film production assistant on her lunch break. “Stephanie,” she said, “you’ve simply got to cut your hair. I know it sounds superficial, but really, things like that matter. Editors are very busy people; they can only see you for twenty minutes, so they have to act on impressions, and that includes style. Long hair is college — ideals, finding yourself, and all that. Nobody here has long hair.” She dug smartly into her pile of refried beans.

She thought of Jackson, an ex-lover whom she had especially wanted to impress, and was perversely glad that she never did get a professional position. She remembered what a curious relief it had been to take her first job in a whorehouse, where a real job didn’t matter, where males and females performed the ancient, primal and wonderfully elementary dance of copulation, blandly, predictably and by appointment.

“Is something wrong?” asked Bernard.

“I was just thinking of someone.” She hesitated. “Someone I knew in college. I had a pretty awful relationship with this person and I couldn’t have sex for over a year afterward. The first time I fucked anybody else after him was my first trick in my first house.”

“You’re kidding!”

She laughed. “It’s too corny, isn’t it? Girl has heart broken by callous swine and turns to prostitution.”

“Your life is very dramatic,” he said pleasantly.

“It’s not so dramatic. These things happen. I mean, I’m over it now.”

Bernard walked her back to her building, but to her surprise he didn’t want to come up to the apartment, even though she would have liked him to. In fact, they didn’t fuck until the second time she had dinner with him. It was a calm, affectionate event (“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, referring to his problematic size as he lay on top of her, gripping her firmly about the hips). The evening was marred only when he handed her a hundred dollars on his way out the door.

She stared at him, stricken. “I don’t want that,” she said. “That’s not why I’m seeing you.”

He looked embarrassed. “I know it’s not why you’re seeing me. It’s not why I’m seeing you. But I think you should have it.”

“I don’t want it.”

He sat on the bed. “Stephanie, it’s very simple. I have a lot of money. You do not. You need money. I can give it to you. Please take it.”

“You didn’t give me money when we went out to dinner.”

He groped for an explanation for this and gave up. “Well, the next time we go out to dinner, I’ll give you money.”

“I won’t take it.”

“If you don’t, I’ll just mail it to you.”

Accepting the money became less troublesome than arguing. She stared at the cash sitting on her dresser after he left and thought: So now it is my real life. Then she got up and put it in her wallet.

The next few times she saw him, the cash factor didn’t seem so bad. It even felt perversely glamorous; it made her think of Babette’s friend Natalia, a dark, striking girl who was trying to be an actress. Babette was always telling Stephanie, with a certain awe, how Natalia collected men who bought her clothes and gave her money and drugs. If only Bernard would buy her a dress or something, perhaps it would seem less dubious, but she enjoyed his company, he was sexually pleasant, and she rather relished the novelty of the situation, much as he probably did. She told her friends that she was seeing a married man who “gave her money sometimes.”

“Stephanie, that sounds really good for you,” said Sandra. “Sometimes it’s good to have somebody who will just come over to your house and be nice to you.”

“I like that,” said Bernard as he held her in his arms. “I’m a person who comes over to your house and is nice to you.”

Besides, it had been three weeks since she’d quit Christine’s, and she still hadn’t found a job, so the money was useful to her. Sometimes it was a hundred, sometimes two or even three hundred, depending on nothing but his mood.

Her days began to slide together in a passive slur of afternoon movies, galleries and nightclubs. Babette would ask her if she’d started writing and she’d say that she was taking notes, which was true. She was content to drift, confident that her unconscious was unconsciously gathering information.

She was having coffee in Soho one afternoon when Jackson walked into the café. He had the same mincing, narrow walk, the same rigid pelvis, the same uptilted chin. He looked at her and she at him. She held her breath. He quickly examined her, from foot to eye, and sat down on the other side of the room without answering her nod.

She thought of something Babette had said when Stephanie had told her about her first hooking experience. “Oh, Stephie, don’t you know this is exactly what Jackson said you’d do? How can you fall into that horrible idea he had of you?”

She had stiffly explained to Babette that this had nothing to do with Jackson, and she was sure that it didn’t. But it made her feel bad to think of Jackson’s reaction if he ever heard about it. The last time she’d seen him in New York, she had called him. He said they should meet for lunch, but lunch turned out to be a plastic glass of orange juice in a coffee shop while Jackson waited for his laundry to come out of a machine. He didn’t have much time, he said. He was meeting his fiancée’s parents at five. Their forty minutes of conversation were filled with pauses and downward looks. “People in New York are very busy,” he said. “I divide my time sparingly between my work and my social life. I find myself associating primarily with other young professionals.”

She told Bernard about seeing Jackson that night, as they sat in a loud bar having BLTs and drinks.

“It sounds romantic in a way,” he said. “Silently passing each other in a crowded room.”

“It was awful.”

“What was so terrible about what happened between the two of you?”

She shrugged. “It’s hard to describe. I guess it’s basically that corny thing I talked about. I loved him, I trusted him too much and he turned out to be a dreadful person.” She realized that Bernard was being distracted by a plump blonde with loopy earrings and white go-go boots. She paused until he turned toward her again. “But it was more complicated. He had a lot of power over me. He was bisexual — don’t worry, I test negative — and he was seeing this guy André at the same time that he was seeing me. Sometimes he’d literally get up out of my bed and go be with André. Then he decided André and I should be friends and that we should all go out together.”

“Why did you go along with this? Did you like it?”

“Yeah, that was part of it. I wanted to be open. I wanted to experience everything. And I loved Jackson, or thought I did. Eventually, I wound up in bed with both of them, and that’s when it got ugly. I freaked out, Jackson decided I was boring and dropped me. That’s it.”

Bernard stared at her more intently than he ever had, with a deepening, almost gloating shade of something she couldn’t read in his dark eyes. He clasped her hand under the table and held it tight.

“Even after he left Evanston, I felt as if the whole tone of my time there was set by my thing with him. Everybody there knew about the three of us. Everywhere I went I got these looks. Jackson had a lot of friends who weren’t the most compassionate people in the world and … it was painful.”

“But didn’t such a complex liaison make you all the more mysterious and interesting to people?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t give a shit about being interesting and mysterious. I wanted him to love me.”

For a second, he looked as though she had said something truly strange. Then his face smoothed over with fatherly tenderness. He stroked her cheek. “You really are a classic,” he said. “You don’t look it, but you are.”