Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

She lay in the chair like a starfish and imagined the sound of his voice, the clink of the instruments and the squeak of chairs penetrating her body with thin rays of light, piercing through her bones and traveling gaily up and down her skeleton. She imagined the very life force of the universe, in all its horrific complexity, penetrating her every pore, charging her body with millions of tiny beams. She sighed and inhaled deeply; she loved nitrous oxide.

“Okay, we’ve really got you flying now. Feel pretty good, doncha, Connie?”

Connie tried to surmount the saliva in her mouth and managed to make an affirmative noise. She could tell from the little oil slick on Dr. Fangelli’s voice that he enjoyed seeing his patients helpless and openmouthed in his chair, that it made him feel powerful, and in fact, at this moment he was sort of powerful. Well, that was all right. The universe needed spaces for power to move into. It liked those spaces and valued them.

“Just a little pinch … there we go.” He grabbed her lip and wriggled it. “You feel great, don’t you? I bet we could take all your teeth out today and that would be fine with you. But of course, we’re not going to do that.” He patted Connie’s shoulder. “It’s just a small job that won’t take a minute.”

The problem was, if you’re lying there like a starfish letting the universe seep through your pores, all kinds of stuff can get in. How do you keep out the bad things? “Don’t be such a Christian,” said Franklin. “Things aren’t good or bad; they just are.” Well, that was a whole other line of thought. She pictured it as a wriggly, purple organism entering her space, and brusquely pushed it away. She tried to imagine a selective gray force field coming down at the various points on her body where the bad things were trying to enter. She became confused. Franklin wasn’t altogether wrong. Buddhists and other people agreed with him. Anyway, even if you didn’t agree with him, how could you tell for sure which things were bad? The tiny rubber hose sucking the spit from her mouth felt bad to her, as did the sound of the drill. But they weren’t inherently bad, they were just dry and shrill. How did dryness and shrillness translate in terms of the universe? Surely these elements were affecting her nitrous oxide experience, but how?

Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?”

Then there were the basic things. She thought of Deana’s soft, slightly fleshy embrace, the pale skin, the severe mouth, the tilt-eyed, heavy-framed glasses that made the composed, dignified face almost ludicrous. This was also one of the basic things: to lie in the dark under a blanket in an embrace with a tender lover, to have the sensations and their emotional entourage that came under the heading “sex.” This was something that she contemplated with a feeling almost like relief, similar to how an exhausted person would view a vast, infinitely trustworthy pillow. You know what this is, everybody does. Like everybody knows what “job” and “success” mean. People who struggle for success are doing a primal thing. She had read something once about lab rats fighting for dominance, even under conditions where cooperation was needed for survival. She thought of herself at her desk reviewing manuscripts. She saw herself on the phone, talking to the editor of a piece that she’d recently completed. She felt detached as she viewed these images, which seemed more abstract than snapshots in a slide projector. They were like reminders scrawled on the square white days of a calendar. Like the imperative “call Fangelli for appt.,” they were merely the most visible emblems, the crudest symbols for something too complex to describe in the given space. The image of herself at her desk, typing, became a scrawled notation for “job,” but job was only another notation for something she barely sensed as a dark area of elements crossing and recrossing one another in an unreadable grid.

She made an effort to get out of the “work” area and saw herself lunching with her friend Helen, in the area marked “social life.” Helen was talking about her boyfriend Patrick, who had strangled her a little bit the night before. “What I don’t want to hear is how I don’t deserve this,” said Helen. “Last year when George hit me I remember telling some girl who kept saying, ‘Helen, you deserve better than this,’ which is just such a stupid thing to say, I mean, what does it mean?” Connie tried to remember if she had been the person to say this to Helen; it sounded like something she might say. Maybe it was a stupid thing to say, but it seemed as though something should be said. Helen still had faint blue bruises in her neck. “I said to him afterwards, like, were you trying to hurt me or something just now?”

This image — Helen frozen in her gestures with utensils and cigarette — receded into another dark corner of her fluid mental field, so that other scenes could crowd the picture. There was Connie, sometimes with Deana, sometimes alone, at a nightclub where a man was saying to her, “With that hat on, you look like you’ve got a piece of the world in your pocketbook,” or at bars and parties, surrounded by well-dressed strangers who wielded their personalities like weapons and shields when they approached her, drinks in hand.

In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide — induced, she might’ve cried.

She opened her eyes and looked at the stiff black hairs on Dr. Fangelli’s chin, and then at his placid, daydreaming gray eyes. Past them was the shiny, drab-colored machinery that was so forbidding to her but probably so familiar and homey to him. She shifted her gaze and met Carla’s kind, squirrel-bright brown eyes. Was Carla’s job in this office a set of symbols for her too, or was it an entity complete in itself, an efficient series of movements and interactions that emerged wholly and naturally from her needs and abilities like a bouquet of trick flowers, opening when you least expect it?

“Doing all right, aren’t you?” asked Carla.

Connie made a faint affirmative half moan.

Carla made a small sensual laugh in her throat. “She’s really enjoying herself now,” she said.

“And we’re allllmost done,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Just a little …” He did some dull, painful thing that caused a nasty taste in her mouth.

She returned to her office in a mildly muddled state that was both combative and uncertain. She stopped in the ladies’ room to look at herself in the mirror and saw with an unhappy loss of confidence that one side of her face had fallen into a jowly state of despair and that her eyes looked terribly tired and sad. She put on more makeup and entered the office. Luckily, there were only three people there, two assistants and an associate whom she liked.

On her desk was a copy of a story being considered for publication. She read it twice and took it into the associate editor’s office.

“Steve,” she said, “do you like this?”

“What’s wrong with your mouth?”

“Ignore it. I look spastic, but I’m not, I just went to the dentist. Do you like this?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s—”

“No, I mean really. Tell me the truth. Do you like this?”

Steve looked provoked, then cornered, then he marshaled himself. “Yes, Connie, I like it. It’s terse, it’s quirky, it tricks you into thinking you’re safe, and then you find yourself on the edge of a cliff.”