Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

“Hi,” he said.

She stared at him. She was holding a copy of his script; she dropped it on the floor. “Why,” she said, “did you do this?”

“Nicki,” he said, “no one will know it’s you.”

“Only everybody in the restaurant. But that’s not what matters.”

“It isn’t you, Nicki. It’s an imaginary person. It’s a cartoon character with some of your traits.”

“A lesbian cartoon character who was molested by her uncle. Couldn’t you think up anything by yourself? God, you’re the cartoon character.”

“You’ll have to forgive me, but that sounds a little funny coming from a woman who brags about wearing lingerie and getting fucked by a dyke.”

“I wasn’t bragging, you idiot. I was talking to my friend, or at least I thought I was. You’re a coward and a rip-off. I respected you and—”

“You never respected me. I was a fixture for your vanity.”

“Spare me the masochism. I don’t respect you now.” She turned, manhandled the door, and walked out.

He followed her out onto the sidewalk. When she heard him she turned; he thought he saw a flicker of relief on her face before it went indignant again.

“Nicki, come on. It’s not that bad. I did not rip you off.”

“And what was that shit just now about me and Lana? What was that?”

“I was just responding to—”

“Let’s be honest for a second. The reason you wrote that bitchy piece of junk is that I wouldn’t fuck you. We both know that. You were mad at me because you ran around my heels like a little dog for months and—”

He slapped her hard, clipping her across her cheekbone and nose. She staggered and froze in disbelief. Remorse dilated his heart. The busy tableau of daytime Manhattan became a gray backdrop for the hugeness of Nicki’s face and the disembodied heads of strangers turning to stare in disgust at the swine who’d struck this small, fragile woman. “Watch it, buddy,” said someone. He turned with an impulse to explain himself, and then she was on him, punching his face and body, hammering his shins with her feet.

“You little piece of shit!” she screamed. “You nothing! You dare to hit me, I’ll kill you!” She sprang away and ran down the street, her handbag flapping at her side.

He fled to the King Farouk Room.

That day and the next were rent with sadness. He was mortified that he’d hit her and glad she’d hit him. Perhaps he had done the wrong thing; perhaps he had stolen her life. Perhaps he should rewrite the screenplay, modifying her character. Then he would think, Why should he? What about artistic license? What about the way she’d led him on?

He went out and got drunk alone for the first time in weeks. On his way home he emptied his pockets of dollars, to the delight of the homeless who received them. He considered passing out on the side-walk but went home instead.

The next day he crept out to find stabilizing carbohydrates for his listing body. He went into a coffee shop and, while he was waiting for his muffins and coffee, had the irrational wish that he’d never sold his screenplay, that he could just be sitting here among these bleary people, sharing coffee with Nicki. The sun poured through the smeared window, and a swarm of dust churned visibly in the air. A woman’s eyeglasses became fierce shields of opaque reflection, an old man’s hair turned inhumanly silver.

His imagination opened in a dark, fecund slice. He imagined himself five years thence, living in a sun-desiccated white bungalow in L.A., a sought-after scriptwriter. One day he would get a call; there was renewed interest in Kiss and Tell. Why? Because Nicki Piastrini wanted the lead. Once the years had passed and her anger had faded, she had seen that the script was not only brilliant but the role of a life-time, written by—basically—loving hands, for her and only for her.

He took a swallow of the cold, dirty ice water that had been placed before him, not even noticing the long black hair clinging to the lip of the glass. In his mind he heard the climactic finale of a song about doomed love, the singer crying, “Jamais! Jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais!”

His fantasy did not include a reunion with Nicki or even a conversation. Instead, he fast-forwarded straight to an image of himself at a preliminary screening of Kiss and Tell, at which Nicki was strangely absent. He sat in the plush privacy of darkness, feeling intensely replete and resolved, waiting to see the lover who had slipped away, caught in his net of words. In his fantasy the script had not been rewritten, the way scripts always are, and his words fell on him in a rain of affirmation. Nicki’s huge, cinematically beautified face bloomed violently before him, sprung from some part of his psyche that was too dark for him to see. The character—his character—was a mutable androgyne wearing glittering psychic armor over its woman’s form, beautiful and seemingly without substance, yet impenetrable. When she was brought low in the film, it was with fabulous erotic drama, the realization that her armor was torn and her defeat could be boundaryless. He imagined the pivotal scene, her confrontation with the magazine editor. The blood rushed to Lesly’s crotch as the editor circled Nicki, her delicious look of fear increasing with each circle. The scene became sexy. Close-up: Her eyes looked into the camera, inviting penetration through the openness of her expression. His sense of triumphant possession would be mitigated only by his admiration for her acting. He inhaled and leaned forward as if to grab something in his hands—when, like an eel turning around on itself in a tiny space, his fantasy changed direction. Nicki faced the camera as the editor, seen from behind, greedily seized her. Close-up: By sensual gradations, her vulnerable expression became hard and predatory. Irrationally, the scene held static, as Nicki seemed vampirically to draw the editor’s aggression from him, to make it her own. The man whom Lesly had invented to violate Nicki was alchemically subsumed by her, as she swallowed Lesly’s triumph whole. Except that in his fantasy, her triumph felt like his. His grabbing hands closed on air. From inside his head, Nicki smiled at him and pinned him to his seat. Involuntarily, he smiled back; smiling, he let her go. He came back into the coffee shop as if waking up and, in doing so, releasing a dream into the world. A cloud covered the glaring sun, and someone violently blew his nose.

He did move to Los Angeles and he did write many more screen-plays, some of which were actually produced. There was, however, no renewed interest in Kiss and Tell. Although he saw her in several films, he never saw Nicki in person again.

Today the clerk in the fancy deli next door asked me how I was, and I said, “I have deep longings that will never be satisfied.” I go in there all the time, so I thought it was okay. But she frowned slightly and said, “Is it the weather that does it to you?” “No,” I said, “it’s just my personality.” She laughed.

It’s the kind of thing that I enjoy saying at the moment but that has a nasty reverb. I want it to be a joke, but I’m afraid it’s not.

Last week a woman I have not spoken to for years called to tell me that someone I used to have sex with had died of a drug overdose. I was shocked to hear it, but not especially sorry. He’d had a certain fey glamour and a knack for erotic chaos that was both exhilarating and horrible, but he was essentially an absurdly cruel, absurdly unhappy person, and I thought that, in the end, he was probably quite relieved to go. I had not seen him in ten years, and our association had been pornographic, loveless, and stupid. We had had certain bright moments of camaraderie and high jinks, but none of it justified the feelings I’d had for him. Even now he occasionally appears in my dreams—loving and tender, smiling as he hands me, variously, a candy bar, a brightly striped glass ball, a strawberry-scented candle. In one dream he grew wings and flew to South America with me clinging to his back, ribbons flying from our hair and feet.