Mary Gaitskill: Bad Behavior

“You look like an idiot,” she said.

“I am.”

The next day he took Daisy out to lunch, although he couldn’t eat. He ordered a salad, which appeared in a beige plastic bowl. It was littered with pale carrot curls and flats of radish that accused him. He ignored it. He watched her eat from her dish of green and white cold noodles. They were curly and glistened with oil, and were garnished with bright pieces of slippery meat and vegetables. Daisy speared them serenely, three curls at a time.

“You can’t imagine how wonderful this is for me,” he said. “I’ve watched you for so long.”

She smiled, he thought, uncertainly.

“You’re so soft and gentle. You’re like a delicate white flower.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I know you’re probably not. But you seem like it, and that’s good enough for me.”

“What about Diane?”

“I’ll leave Diane.”

She put down her fork and stared at him. The chewing movement of her jaws was earnest and sweet. He smiled at her.

She swallowed, a neat, thorough swallow. “Don’t leave Diane,” she said.

“Why not? I love you.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “This is getting out of hand. Why don’t you eat your salad?”

“I can’t. I’m medicated.”

“You’re what?”

He forced himself to eat the pale leaves and shreds of carrot.

They left the restaurant and walked around the block. Daisy butted her head against the harsh wind; her short gray coat floated in back of her like a sail. He held her mittened hand. “I love you,” he said. “I don’t care about anything else. I want to cast my mantle of protection over you.”

“Let’s sit here,” she said. She sat down on an even rise of yellow brick in front of an apartment building that was an impression of yellow brick and shadowy gray glass shielding the sad blur of a doorman. He sat very near her and held her hand.

“I have to tell you some things about myself,” she said. “I don’t take admiration very well.”

“I don’t care if you take it well or not. It’s there.”

“But won’t it make you unhappy if I don’t return it?”

“I’d be disappointed, I guess. But I’d still have the pleasure of feeling it for you. It doesn’t have to be returned.” He wanted to put his hands on either side of her head and squeeze.

She looked at him intently. “I said that to someone recently,” she said. “Do you suppose it’s a trend of some kind?”

The wind blew away her bangs, baring her white forehead. He kissed the sudden openness. She dropped her head against his shoulder.

An old woman in a pink coating bearing a sequined flower with a disturbing burst of petals on her lapel looked at them and smiled. Her white face was heavy with wrinkles and pink makeup, and her smile seemed difficult under the weight. She sat on the short brick wall about two feet away from them.

“I’m not making myself clear,” said Daisy. She lifted her head and looked at him with wide, troubled eyes. “If you’re nice to me, I’ll probably make you unhappy. I’ve done that to people.”

“You couldn’t make me unhappy.”

“I’m only nice to people who are mostly mean to me. Once somebody told me to stay away from so-and-so because he beat up girls. They said he broke his girlfriend’s jaw.”

She paused, for emphasis, he supposed. The old lady was beginning to look depressed.

“So I began flirting with him like wild. Isn’t that sick?”

“What happened?” asked Joey with interest.

“Nothing. He went to Bellevue before anything could. But isn’t it awful? I actually wanted this nut to hit me.” She paused again. “Aren’t you disgusted?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

The old lady rose slowly, head down, and walked away with stiff, painful steps. Her coat blew open; her blue-veined legs were oddly pretty.

Daisy turned to watch her. “See,” she said. “She’s disgusted even if you aren’t. We’ve ruined her day.”

Every day after work, he walked Daisy to a corner two blocks away from her apartment so he wouldn’t meet her boyfriend, David. There was a drugstore on the corner with colored perfume bottles nesting in fistfuls of crepe paper in the window. The druggist, a middle-aged man with a big stomach and a disappointed face, stood at the door and watched them say good-bye. It was a busy corner; traffic ran savagely in the street, and people stamped by, staring in different directions, clutching their packages, briefcases and huge, screaming radios, their faces concentrated but empty. Daisy was silent and frail as a cattail, her fuzzy black mitten in Joey’s hand, her eyes anxiously scanning the street for David. She would say goodbye to him several times, but he would pull her back by her lapel as she turned to cross the street. After the second time he stopped her, she would sigh and look down, then begin to go through her pockets for scraps of unwanted paper, which she tore into snowflake pieces and scattered like useless messages in the garbage-jammed metal wastebasket under the street lamp, as if, trapped on the corner, she might as well do something useful, like clean her pockets.

That day, when he finally let her go, he stood for a moment and watched her pat across the street, through the awful march of people. He walked half a block to a candy store with an orange neon sign, and bought several white bags of jelly beans. Then he caught a cab and rode home like a sultan. He ignored Diane’s bitter stare as he walked through the living room and shut himself up in the bedroom with his jelly beans.

He thought of rescuing Daisy. She would be walking across the street, with that airy, unaware look on her face. A car would roar around a garbage-choked corner, she would freeze in its path, her pale face helpless as a crouching rabbit. From out of nowhere he would leap, sweeping her aside with one arm, knocking them both to the sidewalk, to safety, her head cushioned on his arm. Or she would be accosted by a hostile teenager who would grab her coat and push her against a wall. Suddenly he would attack. The punk’s legs would fly crazily as Joey slammed him against a crumbling brick wall. “If you hurt her, I’ll …”

He sighed happily and got another pill and a handful of jelly beans.

“My mother couldn’t understand me or do anything for me,” he said. “She thought she was doing the right thing.”

“She sounds like a bitch,” said Daisy.

“Oh, no. She did what she could, given the circumstances. She at least recognized that I far surpassed her in intelligence.”

“Then why did she let her boyfriend beat you up?”

“He didn’t beat me up. He was just a fat slob who got a thrill out of putting a twelve-year-old in a half nelson and then asking how it felt.”

“He beat you up.”

They were in a small, dark bar. It had floors and tables made of old creaking wood, and a half-moon window of heavy stained glass in one wall. The tables were clawed with knifemarks, the french fries were large and damp. The waitresses carried themselves like dinosaurs with ungainly little hands and had purple veins on their legs, even though they were young. They were friendly though, and they looked right at you.

Daisy and Joey came here for lunch and sat in the deep, high-backed booths. Joey didn’t eat, and by now Daisy knew why. He drank and watched her eat her hamburger with measured bites.

“I still can’t understand why she married that repulsive pig. I ask her and she says ‘because he makes me feel stable and secure.’”

“He doesn’t sound stable to me.”

“I guess he was, compared to my father. But then Dad was usually too drunk to make it down the stairs without falling, let alone hold a job. I mean, you’re talking about a guy who died in the nut ward singing ‘Joey, Foey, Bo-Poey, Bananarama Oh-Boey.’ Any asshole is stable compared to that. But Tom? At least my father had style. He wouldn’t have been caught dead in those ugly Dacron things Tom wears.”