Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

The bar Frederick had chosen for our meeting was elegant and old, slightly rotted and faintly clandestine. It was furnished with little glass lamps hanging from the ceiling and small tables covered with long, seemly cloths. He was the only person seated there when I arrived. He stood and looked at me with the same stare of ersatz adoration that had made me notice him at the party. “You look like a movie star,” he said.

“And you look like a rock star,” I snapped. My sarcasm startled me; I hadn’t yet noticed how ashamed I felt, so I didn’t realize that his absurd compliment had touched my shame.

My tone seemed to startle him too, but he didn’t break stride. He helped me out of my jacket with a flourish. He bought me a pale-gold drink in a beveled glass. He took my hand and looked into my eyes and said, “I respect you.” He paused with excited relish and then continued. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you’re older. But I respect you.”

I tried to understand the feeling beneath his words. It felt as if he were saying two different things with equal force. It felt almost as if he were straddling something. My unease became harder to ignore.

“When I first saw you from across the room I thought you were an extraordinary person,” he continued. “And now you look. . . well, you look. . .” He gestured at me in my mother’s dress. “Ummm . . .” The hint of a smirk played through his eyes.

I was suddenly shocked and humiliated, too much so to say anything. I couldn’t tell if he was being elaborately cruel or very foolish or both. The proportions of the room seemed all at once strange and precious; the little tables looked like cleverly arranged decorations with no relationship to function. “Frederick,” I said. My voice was wooden and small. “I’m nervous. I’m scared, actually.”

He furrowed his brow slightly. “Why?”

He seemed genuinely puzzled. I tried to think of how to explain it to him, but it was too complicated. “I don’t know,” I said unhappily.

“Here,” he said. He changed chairs so that he was sitting at my side instead of right before me. “That’ll make it easier,” he said gently. “I’m not, like, staring at you.”

“Thank you,” I said. His gentleness touched me. Maybe, I thought, my fear was a grotesque projection; I decided I mustn’t let the past completely distort my experience of the present. I relaxed, and my tender feeling for him woke and breathed again. The tables looked like tables at which one might simply sit. He raised one hand and, very tentatively, almost as if he were frightened, touched my cheek. He asked if I would like another drink. “No, thank you,” I said.

He began talking about a woman he’d had sex with some weeks before. He had never wanted to see her again, so he hadn’t called her, even though he’d said he would. She, on the other hand, had been harassing him with phone calls he never deigned to return, demanding to see him. Finally, that afternoon he’d visited her. He’d just come from her, in fact.

“I was arrogant and controlling and cocky with her,” he said. “Which just made her want to have sex with me all the more.” He sighed as if exasperated. “I was totally different with her than I am with you. I don’t respect her, and I’m not interested in her.” He paused and lightly gripped the edge of the table with both hands, his long fingers soft and tense, like the paws of a young cat. “I like myself better with you,” he declared.

I was not only ashamed for myself, I was also ashamed for him, so much so that I was virtually paralyzed by it—yet I still hadn’t noticed it.

“I used to have a lot of relationships like that,” I said heavily.

“Like what?”

“With men who didn’t respect me. And I can tell you, without even knowing her, that this woman doesn’t respect you either. That kind of shit goes both ways.”

He looked puzzled, then wary. He retracted one hand slightly along the edge of the table.

“At the time, I would’ve told you that I loved these men,” I said. “But really, I didn’t even like them.”

“So why were you with them if you didn’t like them?”

“Those situations are often erotic. And it’s complicated. I mean, why’d you go to this girl’s house if you were so uninterested in her?”

“Oh, it’s definitely erotic. But I don’t like it.” He looked vaguely into space. “I don’t like it,” he repeated. He hesitated. “I want to be a nice person,” he said. He looked at me, expectant, almost childish. He looked as though he wanted me to tell him that he was a nice person, and although I would’ve liked to, I found I couldn’t. Silently, I lowered my eyes. The pause was terrible.

The conversation was over and we both knew it, yet neither of us wanted to admit it. With a great effort we changed the subject and lurched into a discussion about books, horror movies, and the construction of Frederick’s web sites. When one of us stumbled, the other would clumsily lend a hand, so that we gamely, even chivalrously, pulled each other along. The peculiar thing was, I think we actually liked each other—not that it did us any good.

“I was thinking,” he said. “Maybe you could suggest some poets for me to read. I don’t know anything about poetry.”

“I don’t know you,” I said. My voice was clipped and hard. “I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what you might like.”

There was another silence. I felt a shift take place in him. If he had been straddling something before, he had now chosen a position. He looked at his watch; he said he had made plans to go meet another woman. “We have some time,” he said, “so I can walk you home.” He stood and swung his jacket around his shoulders. “With leisure and pleasure.” His voice was voluptuous and charmed by itself.

“I just said that to somebody last week,” he added. “Only then I said pleasure and leisure.”

I wondered if he’d gotten the phrase from a Japanese merchandising outlet on cable, which went by the same name. I had noticed it on TV on the channel featuring the electronic program guide; it had a functional bleakness that was almost poetic. Numbly, I admired Frederick’s ability not only to appreciate the phrase but to use it as an implement of self-indulgence that doubled as a small, sharp weapon. I remembered his kindness as he held me in his arms just before he left my apartment; it was a feeble, flickering sense memory, and it quickly died.

He insisted on holding my jacket so that I could put it on. Two girls who had just entered the bar admired his gesture. I took his arm and we went out onto the street. He said he’d really enjoyed our evening together and that we would have to do it again. “The time went by so quickly,” he said.

“Well, there wasn’t much of it,” I replied.

We arrived at my apartment building. Frederick kissed me as if there were a television camera trained on us. I responded in a perfunctory daze. It was chilly, but his neck was bare and unprotected, like a little boy’s. “So,” he said, “what are you going to do with the rest of your night?”

“Read, I guess.” With the most hopeless gesture of the evening, I stretched up and brushed his exposed neck with my lips and nose. Faintly, but alertly, he stiffened; I could feel him remember our strange intimacy with a swift, barely perceptible inner twitch. In the dark, I felt his eyes dart uncertainly. “Goodbye,” I said. I turned and walked up my front steps.

“Wait,” he said. “Do you . . . do you have your keys?”

“Yeah.” I half turned to answer him; my voice trembled with anger. “I have my keys.” I went in and shut the door.

I went immediately into the bathroom and knelt over the toilet, thinking that I might be sick. But I could not discharge the bad feeling so easily. I sat on the floor and held my face in my hands. I uttered a soft animal moan. My old cat came and sat next to me, looking at me anxiously. “It’s all right,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not a big deal.”