Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

Three weeks after she’d started seeing Bernard, a month after she’d left Christine’s, an unexpected thing happened. Someone from a magazine she had interviewed with when she had come to New York three years before called her about a position as an editorial assistant. They had found her résumé and clips from the Evanston college paper in an old file and wanted to know if she was available. It was an architectural journal — not a subject she cared much about, but she remembered the magazine as being well written and beautifully designed. Besides, she was becoming desperate for a job, so she had the interview and was hired two days later.

Babette and Sandra seemed to think that it was the most wonderful thing in the world. (Now Sandra no longer had to stretch Stephanie’s connection with the Voice , and could introduce her as “in editorial.”) Stephanie wasn’t sure that it would in fact be a lot better than working at Christine’s; she no longer cared about being a “young professional” for Jackson’s sake.

Meanwhile, her odd relationship with Bernard was beginning to trouble her. Their conversation, although they spoke of many things, seemed mostly polite and for the benefit of fantasies they had about each other. Sexually, they seemed to be on the same level. She couldn’t tell if this was disappointing to him or not. And the money issue was beginning to disturb her again, now that she was working for the magazine. He’s not someone who comes to my house and is nice to me, she thought as she lay alone in bed. He’s someone who pays me to fuck him. She had an image of herself, sprawled half on and half off a bed at Christine’s, her upside-down head patiently looking back at her from the mirror as some galoot humped her. This vision blended discordantly with the idea of herself at her desk at the magazine and she was unable to separate them.

Despite this ambiguity, she was curiously reluctant to drop the affair. He only saw her once or twice a week, he was not demanding, he liked her favorite authors and was somehow very reassuring. Reassuring of what, she didn’t know, but it was connected to her old feeling that he thought of her as a representative of the exciting avant-garde — although it also seemed that if he had any brains at all, he would’ve realized by now that she was just a bewildered human.

“I think I know why you go to places like Christine’s,” she said.

“I’m all ears.”

“One of the times I was there, I was watching this girl called Marissa, a skinny, not very attractive girl with blank brown eyes. It was almost the end of the night and she was squatting on the floor with her skirt hiked up to her waist, counting her money with a little furry-animal look of concentration, and I thought about how she must look to someone like you, despite her nasty personality — like this cute little beast who can be swept up and fondled and experienced and then put down.”

“That’s fabulous.” He looked deeply entertained. “You have such a wonderful way of expressing things.”

She thought: If he says “fabulous” one more time tonight, I may punch him in the nose.

It was a cool autumn evening. Clawlike leaves smelling of ashes rasped and scuttled across the pavement as they walked to her apartment.

They were silent and she felt uncomfortable about it. They were returning from a dinner that should’ve been nice but wasn’t. Bernard had been distracted and (she felt) bored by her. He had flirted subtly with their waitress, which she’d observed with a detached sense of disappointment, a cold and lifeless form of jealousy. As they mounted the stairs, she felt they were heading toward a destination simply because it was more trouble than it was worth to avoid it.

Once inside the warm apartment, though, she felt better about him, and she sensed a similar change in his mood. They lay snuggled on her bed and told short stories about their lives. He mentioned a girl he’d had a particular passion for in college, a headstrong dancer with long red hair, and told how he had finally seduced her one night after a party. “It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. At the last moment she panicked and said, ‘No, let me just take you in my mouth.’”

“Why didn’t she want to screw?”

“Because she felt too vulnerable and didn’t want me to enter her.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I fucked her.” Pause. “And that was the beginning of a long and intense relationship.”

“Did you ever consider marrying her?”

What a silly idea, said his face. “No, no. I wasn’t thinking about that then.”

“Did you ever feel a passion like that for your wife?”

“No, I really didn’t. She was by far the most beautiful of all the women I’d been with, but I wasn’t nearly as attracted to her as I had been to the others.” He touched her nose. “You’re really concerned about that, aren’t you?”

They kissed and petted, and her absurd bed creaked. Then they separated and talked again. She told him about the time her sister’s boyfriend had tried to seduce her in the middle of their breakup.

“What happened?” He smiled.

“Nothing. I didn’t want to. I mean, I wasn’t attracted to him and he was obviously doing it out of hostility to my sister.”

“Oh, no. That probably had nothing to do with it.”

“Well, maybe not. I think part of it was that he was intrigued by me as a variation of her.”

“Exactly!” He said this with great emphasis, as though she’d hit upon something important. “I almost seduced my wife’s sister the first time we separated, but we both balked at the last minute, mostly her. We were at the kitchen table, drinking gin.” He smiled. “Of course your sister’s boyfriend wanted you. One wants them all.”

She began to talk about an old lover of hers who reminded her of Bernard, but as she talked she kept imagining Bernard on a clean tiled kitchen floor, humping his blond wife’s blond sister. It reminded her of the stories in The New Yorker about decent professional people having extramarital affairs. The more she contemplated this picture, the more difficult it was to imagine sex with this man … this customer. She had a quick feeling of sympathy for his wife, lying in her single bed, in her separate room, next to the room of a man who wanted them all. She started to feel something like guilt, and to forestall it, she began to kiss him. The bed creaked and he parted her legs.

From that moment on, the same sense of disaffection that she’d felt in the restaurant overtook her. Afterward, they spoke some more, but the conversation didn’t work. They even had a strangely snide argument about whether or not Nabokov was a good writer. In the frequent silences, she felt that he sensed her sudden disapproval of him. She was a little sorry, because she liked him, but at the same time she was relieved when he got up to go. When he said “Take good care of yourself,” she knew that she wouldn’t hear from him again.

It wasn’t until half an hour after he’d left that she realized that for the first time he hadn’t left her any money. This had an entirely unexpected effect on her; she sat on her bed and cried.

She couldn’t have said what she was crying about. Christine’s, Brett, Jackson, her first miserable, lonely year in New York and Bernard the lawyer all seemed to have something to do with it, although she couldn’t tell if she was just pulling anything available into her sadness. She cried until she was sure she was absolutely finished. Then she got up, put on her shoes and went out for a walk.

It was a beautiful Halloweenlike night, and there were exuberant people on the streets. She walked happily, admiring faces and haircuts. She looked at people, dogs, cars and buildings, and everything pleased her. She stopped at a Korean grocery store and looked at the fruit. She was struck by how neat and beautiful it was in its organized, traditional piles. She thought of herself coming here every week and buying fruit, vegetables, bread, cereal and milk, and it seemed like a wonderful idea. She bought herself an apple, and walked home eating it.