Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

“Oh, Susan, come on.”

She reached for me, and I pulled away. My stingy tears went dry. Erin shrugged and self-consciously ate some tapioca off her hand. Then she rubbed her nose with the back of it.

“I’ll get some paper towels,” she said. “I’ll clean the carpet.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said. “I’m going to take a shower.”

When I returned, Erin was seated on the couch, her limbs held tight into her body. Even in the dark, I could see she wore the starved face I’d seen in the Polaroids the swinging heterosexuals had taken of her.

“Do you want me to go?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I knelt and put my hand on her foot. “I think so.”

“I’ll go if you want. But I don’t want you to think I’m a jerk. I didn’t do that to be a jerk.”

“I know, Erin,” I said.

“You know, you seem so vulnerable,” she said. “You say you want to be real. But you don’t. Not really.”

I took my hand off her foot and turned my head away. The silence held varied beats and long, slow pulses.

When she left, she held my face in her hand and kissed me. “I probably won’t call you for a while,” she said. “But you can call me, if you need to process.”

After she was gone, I lay on the floor until I noticed that my old cat was eating leftover tapioca from a dish. I got up to put the dishes away, and then got in bed. I had a puzzling sensation of triumph at finding myself alone, a sensation that took me happily into sleep.

But I woke in two hours, sweating and throwing off the blankets. I wondered if Erin had thrown the tapioca at me because she had been angry. Or perhaps what had felt like anger was just the random overspill of a ceaseless internal spasm. I imagined the terrible moan inside her, like an endless, coughing dry sob. I imagined it so acutely that I was transfigured by it. The pain of it was so ugly it was almost revolting, and yet there was something desperately vital about it. I tried to think what “it” was. My kitten woke and touched me with her small muzzle. She allowed me to stroke her; even in her slumberous state, her small body was quick and fierce with life. She felt her life all the way down to the bottom. Everybody wants it, I thought. Erin has it, but she can’t bear it. Again, I saw her low internal organs, parched but tough and fiercely alive, holding on.

An acquaintance of mine, a philosophy professor at a neighboring university, had finally succeeded in selling one of the many screen-plays he had bitterly toiled over and was giving a big party to celebrate. Friends of his, a married screenwriting couple, gave me a ride to the party. The woman was a thin, excitable person who appeared to be keeping a strict inner watch on an invisible set of perfectly balanced objects, lest any of them fall over or even fractionally shift position. The man seemed to inhabit a benevolent, functional daze. It apparently disturbed the woman that I was single. “You can’t just stay at home,” she said, gripping the seat back as she torqued herself around to face me. “You’ve got to go to classes and lectures and meditation groups, places where there might be single men.”

“I’m really not interested in that kind of thing,” I said. “I’m more of a drinker.”

She released the seat back and adjusted herself face-forward. Rather testily, we discussed the current cinema.

The party took place in a spacious studio in Palo Alto. Splendid vases of celebratory flowers stood on short white pillars shaped like building blocks. Almost immediately upon entering, I became engaged in a conversation about antidepressants, which I inadvertently started by casually remarking that I thought a certain administrator at Berkeley was so cranked up on Prozac that he didn’t know what he was doing.

“Prozac doesn’t crank you up,” said a classics professor. “Prozac makes you like you should be.”

Her voice was plaintive but resolute. She told me that if it weren’t for Prozac, she wouldn’t be alive. I told her that sometimes I felt so unhappy that it was hard to live, but that I preferred to sit through it.

“It’s like being your own mom sitting beside you on the bed when you’re sick,” I said.

The woman who had given me a ride poked her head around the corner. “Is one or both of your parents depressed?” she asked.

“I don’t know if they’re depressed, but they’re certainly miserable.”

“Then it’s genetic and you should take Prozac.”

I excused myself and sought out the host. I don’t really like him, at least not in the usual sense. In our first conversation, he had asked me why I’d never been married and then told me that he had been married four times, even though he never wanted to get married. He had done it, he said, only because “they wanted it so badly.”

“How could you get married for that reason?” I asked.

“Haven’t you ever done anything you didn’t want to do?” He’d virtually snarled the question.

“Not four times,” I’d snarled back.

Whenever I see him socially, I experience a violent psychic hiccup that finally makes me wave my arms and loudly tell him off, even though I’m alone in my apartment and it’s days later. Then when I see him again, the bodily memory of the disturbance is roused and starts feebly moving its little feelers, trying to engage the source of the problem and straighten it out. He grabs the tips of those little feelers and locks on. It’s an emotional bond, sort of.

I noticed that his two children, each from a different marriage, had come to the party and were standing around, as if presenting evidence of his good and fruitful life. The handsome teenage son lounged affably in a corner. The daughter, a stoic young woman from the particularly ugly first marriage, was serving hors d’oeuvres. A mournful tendril of brown hair played limply against her cheek. I felt a quiet throb of affection for her. I had met her before, at another party. She had gotten drunk and told me that her father had said to her, when she was fifteen, that if he ever found out she’d had an abortion, he’d kill her. “He’ll do that,” she said. “He’ll just spew shit out. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s pretty awful anyway.”

I said hello to her and selected a canapé with turmeric on it. Her father was standing nearby, railing at some people who were nodding in accord. He was complaining about how nobody wanted to be responsible anymore, particularly those people who went to “therapy” instead of squarely facing the truths of Freud. “They talk about ‘really getting to know themselves,’ as if they can come up with a little answer for everything,” he said fiercely. “As if any of us can know ourselves, as if any of us can ever explain the brutality of sex. If we ever ‘got to know’ ourselves, we would be sickened. It is the essence of decency to acknowledge that and keep going.” His jaw seemed about to split sideways in a rictus of frustration.

I turned away and fell into gossiping with a fellow who had made his reputation by proving that male and female genitals are really a social construct. He had once been quite a hotshot, but he had since gone to seed in the manner of an old cat who knows where to find the food dish. He entertained me with the details of a spat between two linguistics professors, one of whom had thrown a glass of wine at the other at a recent barbecue.

“We inhabit a nest of vipers,” he said, with a happy little movement of his neck and chin.

“Low-grade vipers,” I agreed. “But vipers nonetheless.”

He vaguely smiled and turned away. I walked through the room, having partial conversations. The public faces of these people were so familiar to me that they were as abstract as a word repeated too many times in rapid succession. Their half-expressions—the gradations of approval or attention or retraction in their eyes as they politely nodded or scratched their noses—were like the surface of quick-moving water, all shiny, slippery pieces. A woman’s bright dress flashed with her efficient strides. A department chair from yet another university tucked one arm protectively about her soft, protruding abdomen, while her other arm flailed the air valiantly to exaggerate the argument she made to a man apparently in complete agreement. He laughed with stiff, gaping jaws.