Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior

Daisy leaned into the corner of the booth and looked at him solemnly.

“When she first told me over the phone that she was getting married to Uncle Tom, I was happy. At least I’d get to come home instead of staying with my Christian Scientist relatives who made me wear those retarded plaid pants to school.”

“She never should have sent you away like that,” said Daisy. She sat up and pulled her drink closer, latching on to the straw with a jerking motion of her lip.

“She thought it was the right thing to do after my father died. Only she never knew how much my relatives hated me.”

“I don’t know how she could’ve thought it was the right thing to let him throw you out of the house when you were sixteen.”

“He didn’t throw me out. I just knew the constant fighting over whether or not I was a faggot was hurting my mother. I realized that I was more of an adult than they were and that it was up to me to change the situation.”

Daisy leaned back with both hands on her glass as she sucked the straw, her cheeks palpitating gently. There were dainty gurgle noises coming from the bottom of her glass as she slurped the last of her drink. He smiled and took her hand. She squeezed his fingers. He gulped his alcohol, his pulse beating wildly to and fro. He hadn’t really been thrown out of the house when he was sixteen. He had been eighteen when Tom went berserk at the sight of his anti-Vietnam poster and broke his nose.

Daisy put her glass on the table with a slurred movement. She leaned against him. He cradled her head and ordered more drinks.

“They couldn’t believe it when I got that scholarship to Bennington. I didn’t even tell them I applied. They already felt inferior to me.”

“Did you drop out of college to get back at your mother?” Her voice was blurry from his shoulder.

“I dropped out because I couldn’t stand the people. I couldn’t stand the idea of art. Art is only good at the moment it’s done. After that it’s dead. It’s just so much dead shit. Artists are like people trying to hoard their shit.”

She sat away from him, reaching for her new glass. “I’m an artist. Diane is an artist. Why do you like us?”

He kissed the blue vein on her neck and enjoyed the silly beat of his heart. “You’re like a pretty shadow.”

Her eyes darted with worry. “You like me because I’m like you.”

He smiled tolerantly and stroked her neck. “You’re not like me. No one is like me. I’m a phenomenon.”

She looked tired and turned away from him to her drink. “You’re a misfit. So am I. We don’t belong anywhere.”

“Aww.” He reached under her shirt and touched her small breast. She put her forehead against his neck, she put her hand between his legs. Her voice fluttered against his skin. “David has a gig out of town next week. Will you come stay with me?”

“Maybe.”

Sometimes, though, he thought Daisy was sort of a stupid little thing. He thought it when he looked at Diane and noticed the stern, distinct line of her mouth, her strong nose, the muscles of her bared arms flexing as she furiously picked her nails. She didn’t ask annoying questions about drugs. She never thought about being a misfit, or having a place in society. She loathed society. She sat still as a stone, her heavy-lidded eyes impassively half-closed, the inclination of her head in beautiful agreement with her lean, severe arm and the cigarette resting in her intelligent fingers.

But it was too late. Diane wouldn’t talk to him anymore, except to insult him. She changed her medication days so she wouldn’t be on schedule with him. Sometimes she didn’t medicate at all. She said it made her cry.

He found her crying one day when he came home from work. It was so rare to see Diane cry that it was several minutes before he realized there were tears on her face. She was sitting in the aging purple armchair by the window, one leg drawn up and bent so that her knee shielded her face. Her shoulders were in a tight curl, she held her long bare foot tightly in her hand. She watched him walk past her. She let him reach the doorknob before she said, “You’re seeing someone.”

He stopped and faced her, thankful and relieved that she had said it first. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “I didn’t know how.”

“You cowardly piece of shit.”

“It’s nothing serious,” he said. “It’s just an obsession.”

“It’s Daisy, isn’t it?” She said the name like it was a disease.

“How did you know?”

“The way you mentioned her name. It was sickening.”

“I didn’t intend for it to happen.”

“What a slime-bag you are.”

It was then that he identified the glistening on her cheeks and chin. The tears were wrenching and poignant on her still face. He dropped his bag of jelly beans and moved toward her. He sat on the fat arm of the chair and put his arms around her rigid, shivering body. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s like before,” she said. “With Rita. It’s so repulsive.”

“If you can stay with me through this, just wait it out …”

“I want you out of here by the end of the month.” The tears shimmered through her voice, which quivered like sunlight in a puddle. He wanted to make love to her.

“You’re the cruelest person I’ve ever known.” Her voice almost broke into panting. She yanked herself out of the chair and walked away, kicking the bag of jelly beans as she passed, spraying them across the floor. He waited until she was out of the room and then went to scoop up a handful of the red, orange and green ones. He ate them as he looked out the picture window and down into the street. There were two junkies in ugly jackets hunched beside the jagged hole in a wire fence. I am a slime-bag, he thought.

He went to his room to think about Daisy.

The next morning he went to Daisy’s desk and sat near her on a box of books bearing an unflattering chalk drawing of the shipping department supervisor. She held her Styrofoam cup of tea with both hands and drank from it, looking over its rim with dark-shadowed eyes.

“She said I was the cruelest person she’d ever known.”

“Oh, you’re not so bad. She just doesn’t get out of the house much. She doesn’t know what’s out there.”

“You don’t know me.”

She put down her cup. “I talked to David last night. He cried too. He just lay there and stared at me with those big eyes. It was awful.”

She picked up a piece of cardboard and began sweeping the mouse droppings on her desk into a neat pile. “So now they both know.”

“And we can go to the opera tonight. I have tickets to Die Walküre . You can medicate and we can stay out all night.”

“I don’t want to medicate.” She pulled the sticky, coffee-stained wastebasket out from under her desk and showered the mouse turds into it with a deft swish of cardboard.

Daisy had never been to an opera. “Will there be people in breastplates and headdresses with horns?” she asked. “Will there be a papier-mâché dragon and things flying through the air?” She looked hard at the curtained stage.

“Probably not,” he said. “I think this production is coming from a German Impressionist influence, which means they’ll eschew costumes and scenery as much as possible. They’re coming from an emphasis on symbolism and minimal design. It was a reaction against the earlier period when—”

“I want to see a dragon flying through the air.” She took a pink mint from the box of opera mints he’d bought, popped it into her mouth and audibly sucked it. She shifted it to her cheek and asked, “Why do you like the opera?”

“I don’t know, I like the music sometimes, I like to see how they put productions together. I like to watch the people.”