Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

“Miss Roe, are you still with me?”

“Yes.”

“What all this is leading up to is that we have reason to believe that you could reveal information about your ex-employer that would be damaging to him. This information would never be connected to your name. We would use a pseudonym. Your privacy would be protected completely.”

The vacuum cleaner shut off, and silence encircled me. My throat constricted.

“Do you want time to think about it, Miss Roe?”

“I can’t talk now,” I said, and hung up.

I couldn’t go through the living room without my mother asking me who had been on the phone, so I went downstairs to the basement. I sat on the mildewed couch and curled up, unmindful of centipedes. I rested my chin on my knee and stared at the boxes of my father’s old paperbacks and the jumble of plastic Barbie-doll cases full of Barbie equipment that Donna and I used to play with on the front porch. A stiff white foot and calf stuck out of a sky-blue case, helpless and pitifully rigid.

For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. One of the more obvious questions he had asked me was, “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” I hadn’t at the time, but I did now. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all.

CONSTANCE WAS DISCONCERTED by her meeting with Franklin in the East Village, partly because two years before he’d spent exactly one week ardently trying to seduce her, and then had abruptly dropped her to get married to a hitherto undisclosed fiancée. But there were other factors. “Constance!” he yelled. “God, it’s great to see you! You’re looking good! In fact, you’re looking beautiful!”

The last time she had seen him had been at his wedding party; he’d been lip-synching to Grand Master Flash and doing an arm-flapping dance that threatened to tear the armpits out of his rented tux. Since then his nose seemed to have grown larger and lumpier, his face broader and his eyes more prone to wander frantically over the head of whomever he was talking to. But he still had his kind demeanor and his air that whatever he was talking about and whoever he was talking to were both equally and desperately important. She remembered something he had said to her sometime before: “Don’t worry, Connie. In fifteen years, I’ll be doing my retrospective at the Whitney and you’ll be publishing regularly in The New Yorker .” He paused. “But by then we’ll be ugly.”

She smiled at him on the crowded street and they yelled cheerfully back and forth. He was busy, very busy, writing art criticism for three publications, teaching part-time and painting. She was doing free-lance journalism, and was currently huddled in a cranny of stability as a part-time editor for a slick literary quarterly. They linked arms and went for coffee.

“God,” he said, hunching over his tiny brown cup of espresso, “it’s good to see a new face. For weeks I’ve seen nobody but friends of Emily’s who’ve come in from Dallas — these really incredible women who’re all painters, all in their forties, incredibly intelligent and — would you believe it? — all single . They’re great, but I feel like I have to constantly be telling them how attractive and talented they are — and they are attractive! They’re incredibly attractive! — because they’re in their forties, and they’re not married, and they’re not successful.”

“What makes you think you always have to tell them how great they are?”

“You just do. It’s obvious.” He lifted the little brown cup in his big hands and delicately inserted the tip of his tongue, put it down and played with his napkin.

“You wouldn’t have to tell me that if I was forty.”

He didn’t respond to this, but stared fixedly into a corner for several seconds and then said, “So, whose heart are you laying waste to now?”

“You mean who’s trashing me these days? I’m not so extreme anymore, Franklin.”

Franklin smiled in the sly, flatly pleased way he contrived when she simultaneously ridiculed and accepted his flattery.

“Actually, I have a girlfriend.” She picked up her croissant as if she were going to bat her eyelashes from behind it. “We’ve been together for a year and a half. We live together.”

“Connie, that’s great. That’s really super. Is this a new predilection?”

“No, it’s always been there. This is just more serious than usual.”

“You know, if she were a boy, I think I’d be jealous. Where’d you meet her?”

They burrowed into a conversation that skimmed over the present, then tunneled back through the five years since they’d met in a proofreading booth, where exhausted, languid Connie would sleep on the floor beneath her desk, using Franklin’s balled-up sweater as a pillow. They had nested in that booth every weekend for months, surrounded by literary supplements, plastic take-out containers, boxes of cookies and notebooks in which they furiously scribbled between jobs. It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it — or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away.

Connie stopped a moment as Franklin talked and put her head up to survey the outside world; the dark café was crowded with young people in big jackets and neat, mincing shoes. A grotesquely beautiful girl in pink leather seemed to be staring at them. Did they look like pathetic aging hipsters? Was her hair wrong? Was their conversation too loud? Franklin was talking very loudly about a nasty exchange he’d had with another critic at some club. She winced, then took shelter in his apparently inexhaustible confidence and burrowed again. Then other factors raised their heads.

“You know, I had dinner with Alice and Roger last week,” he said, tearing a bite out of his little sponge cake.

Constance halted in her burrowing. “I thought you didn’t see them anymore.”

“What? Why?”

“What about that big fight you had with Roger?”

“What big fight?”

“The one about the article you did on him in Art in America .”

“Oh, that . It was just a spat. I see him all the time. You wouldn’t believe their new loft. It’s perfect.”

This person, thought Connie, does not have one deep feeling about anything. She felt like a crabbed, bitter woman in a brittle curl over her coffee.

“You should give Alice a call — she’d love to hear from you.”

“Alice was the one who stopped calling me, in case you don’t remember.”

“Connie, Alice loves you. She really does.”

“Horseshit, Franklin. She stabbed me in the back.”

“God, you girls are unbelievable. Girls are unbelievable.”

They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad.

But it had been. She cringed as they walked to the cash register, convinced that everyone was watching them and rolling their eyes.