Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

“I’m giving a party the day after tomorrow,” said Franklin as they walked out. “It’s Emily’s birthday. You’ve got to come. And bring your amour.”

“Roger and Alice will be there.”

“Oh, come on!”

“All right, I’ll probably come. Give me your address.”

He found a scrap of paper — the folded edge of a torn envelope — and scrawled his address in purple pen while the March wind raised his hair in an elegant, multidirectional headdress. A boy walked by in black leather, his bleached hair shaved into one strip down the center of his skull, painstakingly waxed and sculpted into the shape of a dragon’s back. She felt a pang of affection and reassurance, knowing that kids were still doing the same things they’d been doing for years, tinged with a touch of incredulousness that they hadn’t yet been able to think up anything else.

“Here.” Franklin looked at her as he pressed the paper into her hand. “And Connie, I want you to know”—his eyes got that vague yet sincere and noble look they took on when he was about to talk about art or something—“I’ve thought about you a lot in the last year or so. I’ve really wanted to see you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Really.” His eyes looked so intensely vague, yet so sincere and so noble, she had the sense that the brown orbs could detach from their centers and wander all over his eyeball, slowly, with a certain majesty, each movement expressing the depth of his sincerity.

“You could’ve called me.”

“Yeah, I could have. But I was too ashamed.” He dropped his eyes and actually did look sincere for a minute.

She cupped his face with her hand and kissed his cheek. “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

They squeezed each other’s hands, communicated some sexual comradery and goodwill, and then walked away.

Well, she thought, it was good to see Franklin, but she certainly wasn’t going to his party. It would be too depressing. It was strange to realize that the depressing part wouldn’t be her memory of his dizzy seduction attempt — she was never romantically interested in him anyway — but the presence of her ex-friend Alice, the mere mention of whose name had plunged her into a slight rancor. She eyed with disaffection and contempt the neatly hatted and booted, dyed and moisturized strangers marching toward her.

Alice and Roger had been the first New Yorkers she had met in Manhattan. They had met accidentally, when Constance had sublet their loft with two other girls. She had been very impressed by them. They were so handsome — Roger, blond and tall, his potentially annoying symmetry broken by the stubborn cowlick on the back of his head, and Alice, tiny and sleekly dark, her short hair like the shiny, pleated wings of a beetle, her clothes fully color-coordinated and accessorized — very poised, and apparently secure. Alice had asked her a lot of questions about her plans, and seemed to be scrutinizing her answers for signs of acceptability, while Roger smiled and nodded affably. At first Constance resented it, but soon, to her embarrassment, she found that she was flattered by Alice’s eventual approval. Alice had been especially kind when Constance was thrown out of her first apartment after two days of tenancy with a psychotic roommate, rushing to her assistance with advice and a huge garbage bag of Salvation Army — bound clothes. “Don’t leave New York because of this,” she said. “Everybody gets mangled a little during the first few months.”

She huffed up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, dropped the keys, swore unattractively and opened the door to find that the heat was too high, the cats were running around with mysterious desperation, and Deana wasn’t home. The cats moiled loudly around her legs as she wrestled with can and opener; they squabbled for position as she put the blobs of cold meat-and-cornmeal byproducts before them. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You guys aren’t that hungry. Pigs.”

She went into the living area, turned on the radio to her favorite noncommercial station and was assaulted by horribly optimistic fiddle music. She thought: This must be the folk music slot. She snapped her tongue, turned it off and paced around the room. Their downstairs neighbor was whistling in a pealing, urgent way that usually drove her crazy but now seemed homey and reassuring simply because of its familiarity. She began to mentally list all the mean things that Alice had ever said or done to her. For example, the time Constance was overcome by a severe toothache, which turned out to be an exposed nerve, and had to walk out of a movie that she was watching with Alice. Alice had insisted on leaving with her, then complained all the way home about missing the movie. “Well, it was great riding the subway with you,” she snapped as Constance staggered toward her building clutching her jaw.

But Alice wasn’t just a straight-out bitch. It wasn’t that simple.

Her neighbor rattled his castanets with ominous urgency. Constance slumped on the miserable old mattress that she and Deana had covered with fabric and large pillows and used as a couch. The mattress depressed her because it was like something that hippies would have in their apartment and because it was the same silly mattress that, in another life, had squeaked and rattled under the various activities of the two thousand and one dates. Yet, somehow she’d become attached to it, even though it was so mushy that when she sat on it it felt as if her internal organs were collapsing into one another. She collapsed across it now, supporting herself on one elbow planted deeply in the mattress, and surveyed the dustballs collecting under the desk and chair. No matter how often she and Deana swept, these animate-looking things slunk from corner to corner and left their residue on the cats’ whiskers. The late afternoon light filtered in, eerie and faded through the gauzy float of dust, and cast an odd perspective on the room, at least from where she lay, making it look elongated and stark. The splintery floor looked craggy and forsaken with its dead dustball vegetation.

The cats, suddenly alert, ran to the door. There were footsteps, a key in the lock: Deana entered, encumbered by the cats.

“Boy, the guy downstairs is going bananas today,” she said. She tossed her hair off her forehead with the usual nervous gesture. “Didn’t you feed these guys?”

“Yeah, they just got their faces out of the dish two minutes ago.” Connie rolled up and out of the mattress as gracefully as possible and put her arms around Deana’s waist and her head on her shoulder.

“What’s this?” Deana tenderly felt the lumps of Connie’s spine, lingering in the spaces between the bones.

“Nothing. I was just spacing out and the room was beginning to look like a set for Giant Ants from Pluto or something.”

“What?”

“I was in a weird mood.”

“I guess so.” Deana rubbed her briskly, let go and turned toward the refrigerator. “I’m starving. I have to have some carrots or something.”

“What do you want for dinner?” Connie put one foot on the other knee and stood like an aborigine in a textbook photograph.

“I was thinking that we could order Chinese food from Empire. I’m too cranky to cook. And you’re too weird to cook, apparently.” She got the bag of carrots out of the refrigerator’s vegetable bin and began scattering the sink with bright orange peels.

“Why are you cranky?”

“The same garbage. If I’d known I was going to work for a clone of my mother, I never would’ve taken the job.” Deana rinsed her three shaved carrots meticulously, then went into the bathroom to tear off a large piece of toilet paper, folded it on the counter and put the carrots on it to drain. (One of her idiosyncrasies, which still caused Connie a pang of tender amusement, was her aversion to eating wet vegetables or fruit; she routinely dried pieces of cut fruit before putting them in her cereal.) “So what’s your problem?”