Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

Lesly was desperately writing a trite, boring screenplay that he could barely bring himself to face, even with a bottle of Scotch at his side and the TV companionably talking in the background. His failure in this regard was highlighted for him—he knew it was petty, but he couldn’t help it—by the recent success of the woman he loved, Nicki Piastrini, who had just made her film debut in a thing called Queen of Night and was now being invited to glamorous parties. His normal misery over this was exacerbated by the fact that, after having wild, drunken sex with him three times, little Nicki had decided that they should just be friends.

The drunken sex and her terrible decision, expressed in a pause-strewn phone conversation, had occurred over a year ago, and he’d since been hanging around, meeting her for coffee after maddening coffee, plotting her eventual change of heart, which now seemed, in the light of her impending celebrity, unlikely. Obviously, his only hope was to sell the screenplay and become a celebrity himself, and time was running out.

Thus, fighting on through failing hope, he sat down before a hostile piece of paper every night, drunk or sober, even when exhausted by his degrading restaurant job, plowing through senseless sex, monsters, exploding heads, and the like, all to no avail.

Lesly’s apartment was not an inspiring place to work, especially for someone who saw himself hanging over an abyss by his finger-nails. He’d moved in after graduating from film school. He’d perversely dwelt on the ugliness of the place, romantically seeing himself as the alcoholic hero of some seamy detective series available only in the bargain bins of used-book stores, bitterly turning his back on the world of success for mysterious reasons. He’d been forced to romanticize it; after as many fruitless interviews as his spirit could bear and one job as a gofer for the deranged producer of a tiny slasher-movie outfit, he’d sunk into the dark glamour of the “King Farouk Room,” which is what he’d almost immediately named his apartment.

It was a gloomy rectangle on the ground floor of a reeking Greenwich Village tenement with smeared linoleum walls. The ceiling sagged as if it were about to cry; plaster from the crumbling walls gathered in little heaps on the uneven floor. His dresser looked like a hiding place for dismembered corpses, his throw rugs emphasized the sad state of the splintering floor, his mattress was beset by a mean snarl of blankets.

“Welcome to the more-than-Oriental splendor of the King Farouk Room,” he’d debonairly sneered as he ushered Nicki in for the first time.

He’d met her at the West Village restaurant where they’d both worked. He’d been instantly taken with her unconventional beauty—her wide, long-lashed green eyes and luminous skin were the only normally pretty features on her bony, angular face. Her thin brown hair would’ve been mousy on another girl, but it accentuated her Botticellian frailty. Her unfashionably thin lips and eyebrows, which could’ve made her face too spare, instead added an arresting severity that offset her expressive eyes, giving her the piercing intensity of a small cat. Her body was merely pretty, but it was made beautiful by the invisible electricity that she discharged like a sweet, grainy odor as she ran from kitchen to dining hall with her hands full of plates.

He had spent a year developing the courage to ask her out, had been rejected twice, and then, as he was resigning himself to casual flirtation, she’d asked him out. They’d had dinner, during which she chatted happily, dropping silverware and flicking mustard. They saw a movie and then went to a cheerful Eurobar, where romantic music flew from the sound system in bright ribbons, and Nicki got sloppy drunk in the middle of his impressive analysis of the film. He’d thought she was joking until she brained herself opening the door to the ladies’ room. This was an odd development in view of his courteous relative sobriety; he decided he’d better get her out before she keeled over.

“Listen,” he said, gripping her jacket as she slid giggling down the side of the building next to the bar. “Do you realize I’ve been adoring you for over a year, from afar, and now here you are, falling on your face? Pull yourself together; it’s idiotic.”

She giggled, sighed, and put her cold fingertips on his face. Clearly, there was no choice. He bundled her into a cab and bore her off to his lair, gloating yet slightly disappointed that it had been so easy after all. At least he could put to rest his worry that her delicate sensibilities would be offended by the ambience of the King Farouk Room, as she would probably barely see it.

He was mistaken about that. As soon as they entered, her suddenly clear eyes moved alertly from crumbling wall to collapsing bookcase, and then she excused herself to go to the bathroom, where she crashed around for several minutes, peeing, running water, probably going through his medicine chest. He was thinking he’d made a mistake bringing her there and that he should take her home, when she emerged without her pants and bore down on the bed. She wore a pair of cream-colored panties over which peeped curly brown hairs.

“Well,” she said, “as they say, I’m much too drunk to fuck.” With that she climbed under the blankets and curled into a sleeping position.

He politely turned off the light over the bed, got a bottle of vodka, and sat down to contemplate the small bundle on his bed. Her thin shoulder in its T-shirt was exposed; it looked both winsome and pathetic in the King Farouk Room. This would be cute, he thought, if they were anywhere between eighteen and twenty-five. But they were both over thirty; they had lines under their eyes, stains on their teeth, faces that more and more showed their essential confused mildness.

He finished the bottle, then crawled into bed with his clothes on and eased into a consoling blackout with his arm around the gently breathing body of his coworker.

He woke up feeling the granules at the foot of the bed with his clammy feet; she turned into his arms and smiled with her mascara-smeared eyes. Their clothes came off. She reached between his legs and stroked him fore and aft. With sodden hands he groped her breasts and genitals; he mounted and pasted her through a pounding headache.

He made them tea, and they clawed off hunks of Italian bread to have with butter and jelly. She sat with the blanket wound about her hips, crumbs and a blob of purple jelly ranging nicely across her breasts. “I haven’t done this for years,” she said. “The last two people I was with were married, so they never spent the night. This is fun!”

The next date was more seemly. They had dinner at a Thai restaurant; Nicki sat erect as a fourth grader practicing penmanship and gestured with her skewered meat while talking about her most recent casting-call failures as if they were hilariously funny. He asked her how she felt about their night together. She seemed surprised; she shrugged and said she didn’t know yet. He didn’t want her to think he was sensitive, so he didn’t pursue the subject. Instead, he listened to her talk about her therapists, psychics, and healers, and the progress she was making on all her problems, the great upswing her life was about to take. Her talk had the aggressive charm of someone who has just met you and wants to make a good impression, as well as the false candor of someone who doesn’t want to reveal herself yet wants to give the impression of doing so. Hey, he wanted to say, I just fucked you. Then he was embarrassed that he’d even thought such a thing.

Still, he walked with her to her apartment for “tea.” This meant roughly fifteen minutes of conversation, after which they rolled around, poking each other’s faces with their tongues. It was fun, but he had not recovered from the sense of remove her dinner chatter had caused him, and besides, at this moment he didn’t want to fuck Nicki. He wanted to find the vibrant girl he’d seen running around at work, but she didn’t seem to be present in the body of this agreeable but somehow inaccessible person who was pulling off his pants. Watching her, he felt that he could chain her to the radiator and per-form on her every obscene act possible and still not possess her.