Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

Connie shrugged and sank into the mattress again. “I ran into somebody … not somebody I dislike really, just somebody I associate with anxiety.”

“Who?”

“Somebody I haven’t seen in years. Do you remember me mentioning Franklin Weston?”

Deana snapped off the end of a carrot. “Was he the guy you used to proofread with, who became some sort of quasi-famous art critic or something?”

“Yeah.” Rat Fink, the male cat, came into grabbing range, and Constance scooped him into her lap like a large plush bunny, his eyes agog, paws helpless and limp in the air. “He’s connected with some people I used to know before I met you. One person who — who hurt me, who rejected me in fact. Did I ever tell you about Alice?”

“A bit,” said Deana, quietly crunching.

“Well, she came up in conversation and it depressed me. That’s all.” Rat Fink squeaked and flailed in her arms, wildly swatted his helpless tail, then jumped from her lap and hit the female cat on the nose. “The last time Alice and I talked was three years ago. It was when I was doing horribly, everything was going wrong, my writing was a disaster, I couldn’t breathe, and I got so depressed that I couldn’t eat. I was afraid to say anything about it to anyone and finally I decided to trust Alice enough to talk to her. Franklin kept saying ‘Connie, Alice loves you,’ in that stupid way he has, and I thought, Well, we’ve been friends for two years, so I told her. And she said, ‘Connie, nobody wants to be around somebody who’s unhappy.’ She told me I should see a therapist, and never called me again. She didn’t return my calls either.”

“Why didn’t you call her and yell at her?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have the spirit, I guess. I felt pretty ravaged.”

“It sounds like she was afraid of being unhappy herself,” said Deana.

“Except that she didn’t have anything to be unhappy about. She had — still has — a rich husband, a beautiful apartment, a prefabricated social life—”

“Oh, come on. Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it. She sounds like one of those.”

“All those clothes, those trips to Europe — sheer terror, I’m sure.”

“Well, in any case, it doesn’t sound like she was much of a friend. I’d say you were well rid of her.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Connie pulled herself out of the mattress, readjusted her weight and sank in at another angle. “It’s just … the whole conversation was a vivid reminder of what it was like for me back then. Because of the thing with Franklin too. I don’t remember if I ever told you about him, but just before the thing with Alice happened, he made this monstrous come-on to me, saying how much he loved me, going on and on about how beautiful and special I was, literally trying to drag me onto his mattress — it was bewildering, and I didn’t quite trust it, and as it turned out, I was right. After a week of this he suddenly disappeared, and the next time I spoke to him, like two weeks later, he told me he was getting married to somebody named Emily, which he did.”

“Another fine human being.”

“But the thing about Franklin was that he had been a friend of mine up to that point. He virtually got me published in New York magazine. That’s why it felt so awful. It was as if he and Alice had simultaneously decided—”

Deana left her carrots and, putting her fingers on Connie’s lips, pitched the two of them into the center of the mattress. “God, you must be really depressed. I haven’t heard you talk like this for ages.” She stroked Connie’s hair and smoothed her eyebrows. The mattress rasped and squeaked as they curled against each other like kittens in a shoe box.

“Franklin invited me to a party where Alice will be. I don’t know what to do.”

“Are you still thinking about that?”

They had just finished their take-out Chinese meal. Small white containers ranged over the table with fork handles protruding erectly from their centers; little balls of hardening rice trailed from container to plate; the cats circled beneath them with stiff, ardent steps. Deana was still lazily eating her spareribs and drinking her Vita-C.

“Connie, if this woman is such a bad memory, why don’t you just forget it? Why dwell on her? She isn’t in your life anymore.”

Connie looked at the bright, cold flower of broccoli splayed prettily on the edge of her plate. “The thing is, Alice and I had a good time together. We’d go out to the movies, and then go for coffee and talk about the movie for hours, analyzing every character and gesture and the use of music and so on. I can remember when she ordered an anchovy sandwich and one of those sweet almond drinks and said, ‘Whenever I’m with you I feel like eating stuff that’s really fun and really bad for me.’”

“Hmpf,” said Deana.

“And then there was the time that she and Roger paid for my airfare so I could visit them at their summer cottage in Pennsylvania.”

“So why don’t you go to Weston’s party and see her?”

“Because there were other times when I felt she wasn’t my friend at all. I remember her telling me about some big party she had that she didn’t invite me to. She was complaining because she had wanted to have an equal number of highly successful males and females and she couldn’t find enough successful females. It suddenly occurred to her that it was sort of rude to be talking about this in front of me when she hadn’t even asked me to come, so she said, ‘I didn’t think of you because you’re not in the field and you would’ve been bored anyway. I know you can hold your own on your own terms, but you couldn’t deal with these people on their level.’ Can you imagine?”

“Connie, were you in love with this woman?”

“What?”

“Did you have a thing for Alice?”

“No. Not at all. Why do you ask?”

“Because of the way you talk about it.”

Connie paused and admired the graceful interaction of three long cold sesame noodles lying on her plate. “Well, it wasn’t love, at least not romantic love. I’m just particularly sensitive to being betrayed by women. It’s always been easy for me to be vulnerable around men because you’re allowed to be. And I can make myself vulnerable to women sexually, but it’s really hard to do with a woman friend. I did it with Alice and she rejected me.”

Deana meditatively sucked a sparerib bone and limpidly blinked her large eyes.

Connie curled one leg up on the chair and sat on her ankle. “Once we went to see a movie about a dumb, trusting girl who gets involved with a whiny, sleazy psycho guy who tortures and kills her in the end.”

“Great movie.”

“Well, we wanted to see it because the actress had silicone implants and we wanted to see what they looked like. Anyway, Alice was so upset by this movie. She kept saying, ‘That girl was so stupid, she deserved to die. You couldn’t have any sympathy for her, she was so weak.’”

“That’s not such an unusual reaction, you know.” Deana plucked another slender red rib from its white box and began to delicately strip it of meat with her teeth.

“Okay, maybe not, but she got so obsessed about it, it was as if she was terrified at the mere idea that somebody could be a victim.”

“Well, it is frightening.”

Deana’s voice was assuming the annoyed, panicky tone it got when she was having something ugly thrust upon her.

Connie turned and looked out the narrow window that opened onto an air shaft, a blackened brick wall and a wretched little window smothered in filthy cardboard and the scabrous rag of a dead curtain. The usual fat, dirty pigeons with bleary, beady eyes gathered on the opposite window ledge like unregenerate pimps. When they had first moved here, Constance worked very hard at seeing this view as something other than horribly depressing. “Just look at it,” she’d tell herself. “Don’t make a judgment.”