Mary Gaitskill: Bad Behavior

JOEY FELT THAT his romance with Daisy might ruin his life, but that didn’t stop him. He liked the idea in fact. It had been a long time since he’d felt his life was in danger of further ruin, and it was fun to think it was still possible.

He worked with Daisy in the clerical department of a filthy secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The department was a square-tiled space between morose gray metal stacks of books and a dirty wall with thin white pipes running along the bottom of it. There were brown boxes of books everywhere, scatterings of paper, ashtrays, Styrofoam cups, broken chairs, the occasional flashing mouse. Customers roamed the boundaries of the area, searching for the exit. Daisy, who sat nearest the bordering aisle, was always leaving her desk to sweetly assist some baffled old man with a sweating face and cockeyed glasses.

Joey’s desk was a bare diagonal yard from Daisy’s, and he would pace from there to the watercooler staring at her, rattling the epilepsy identification plates he wore around his neck and sighing. Then he would sit at his desk and shoot rubber bands at her. She usually wouldn’t notice what he was doing until he’d surrounded her typewriter with red rubber squiggles. She’d look up and smile in her soft, dopey way, and continue shuffling papers with slow, long-fingered movements.

He had watched Daisy for almost a year before making a pass at her. He had been living with Diane for eight years and was reluctant to change anything that stable. Besides, he loved Diane. They’d had such a good eight years that by now it was almost a system.

He had met Diane at Bennington. He’d been impressed by her reputation in the art department, by the quality of the LSD she sold and by her rudeness. She was a tall, handsome thirty-three-year-old woman with taut, knit-together shoulders, and was so tense that her muscles were held scrunched together all the time. As a result, she was very muscular, even though she didn’t do anything but lie around the loft and take drugs. He supported her by working in the bookstore as an accountant and by selling drugs. She helped out with the government checks she received as a certified mentally ill person.

They got high on Dexedrine for three and a half days out of the week. They’d been doing it religiously the whole time they’d been together. On Thursday morning, Joey’s first working day, they would start. Joey would work at the store all day, and then come home and work on projects. He would take apart his computer and spread it all over the floor in small gray lumps. He would squat and play with the piles for hours before he’d put it back together. He’d do other things too. He once took a series of blue-and-white photos of the cow skeleton they had in the living room. He’d make tapes of noises that he thought sounded nice together. He’d program the computer. Sometimes he would just take his wind-up toys out of the toy chest and run them around while he listened to records. In the past, Diane would work on her big blobby paintings. By Sunday the loft floor would be scattered with wax papers covered with splotches of acrylic paint, sprayed with water and running together in dull purple streams. She used to work on a painting for months and then destroy it. Now she didn’t paint at all. Instead she used her staying-up time to watch TV, walk the dogs or work out biorhythm charts on the computer.

On Sunday Joey would come home from work with bags under his eyes and his tendons standing out in funny ways. Diane would have two small salads ready in matching red bowls that her grandmother had given her. There would always be a moist radish neatly sliced and split apart on the top. They would eat the salad and go to sleep until Monday night. Then Diane would order sushi from the Japanese take-out place on the corner and arrange it on a long wooden chopping block when it came. They would cover it with salt and lemon and eat it with their fingers. Sometimes people would come over to buy drugs and they would play them records and chat. Then they would sleep. By Thursday morning they would be refreshed and ready to stay awake again until Sunday.

They made love about once a month. It didn’t last long because they both thought it was monotonous and because Diane was disgusted by most of the things people do to stretch it out longer. However, when Joey started to think about Daisy he stopped making romantic advances to Diane at all, and she resented it.

She resented other things too. She was annoyed by his wind-up toys. If he left them out on the floor, she’d kick them. She didn’t like the frozen pecan rolls he ate on Wednesday morning. She would complain about how revolting they looked, and then eat half of them.

Daisy was living with somebody too, but she ran around the bookstore babbling about her unfaithfulness as if it were the only thing she had to talk about. He liked to watch her pattering from desk to desk in her white sneakers, her jeans rasping softly between her small thighs with each narrow stride. She had to know what Evelyn and Ariel and everyone else around her thought about so-and-so not calling when he said he would. Then she wanted to know what they thought of her calling him and swearing at him. Or something like that. Her supervisor, Tommy, tolerated her because he was the kind of gay man who liked to hear about girls’ romantic problems. He disapproved of her running around behind her boyfriend’s back, but he enjoyed having the chance to moralize each time some new man dragged her through the dirt, as she put it. Daisy would say, “Tommy, I’m trying to make him leave. He won’t go. I can’t do anything about it.”

Joey had once heard Tommy admit to another supervisor that Daisy was a terrible worker. “But she’s a very special case,” said Tommy. “I’d never fire her. What else could she do?”

Joey felt a pang of incredulous affection. Could she actually be less competent than the other bums in the typing pool? Everyone in it was a bad worker, except Evelyn. Evelyn was the only other girl there. She was an energetic, square-jawed woman who would type eighty words a minute. She wore tight jeans and cowboy shirts and thick black eyeliner that gathered in blobs in the corners of her eyes. Her streaked blond hair hung in her face and made her look masked and brutal. She had a collection of books about various mass murderers on her desk, and she could tell you all their personal histories.

The other three typists were fat, morose homosexuals who sat at their desks and ate from bags of cookies and complained. They had worked in the bookstore for years and they all talked desperately of “getting out.” Ariel had been around the longest. He was six feet three inches tall and had round, demure shoulders, big hips and square fleshy breasts that embarrassed him. He had a small head, a long, bumpy nose and large brown eyes that were by turns sweetly candid or forlorn, but otherwise had a disturbing blank quality. He had enjoyed a brief notoriety in punk rock circles for his electric piano music. He talked about his past success in a meek, wistful voice, and showed people old pictures of himself dressed in black, wearing black wing-tipped sunglasses. He was terribly sensitive, and Tommy took advantage of his sensitivity to make fun of him. “Ariel is the spirit of the typing pool,” Tommy would chatter as he ran from clerk to clerk with stacks of papers. “Whenever any of you are craving inspiration, just gaze on Ariel.”