Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

I was seeing them in pieces, and I knew it. I knew that under their words and gestures they must be whole and deep-rooted, with faces and voices I did not know. I stood still, my wineglass a prop in my tense hand, and tried to feel them more fully. I imagined the gesticulating department chair asleep in her bed, her face in the mild fur-rows of middle age, her body private and innocent as an almond in its special shell. I imagined her, even in sleep, tunneling her way through phantom problems, twisting and turning and valiantly arguing. I knew that she was divorced and that she had a young child; I thought of her at breakfast, touching her child’s upturned face with her palm. I pictured the child struggling to make sense of the conflicts surging under her mother’s absent, tender gesture.

Meanwhile, light ran and flirted on glass and silverware. Intellectual discussion rose and devolved. A salsa band had arrived and was assembling itself in a slow and professional manner. A pleasant fellow with a hirsute face replaced a part on his horn and frowned as if to frown were delicious. His bandmates moved behind him with sleek, sensory ease.

The classics professor made right by Prozac came up beside me and put an arm about my waist. “I wanted to tell you how good it is to see you,” she said. “I like you so much, Susan.”

I was surprised to hear this, as we barely knew each other. Still, I put my arm about her. There was a little roll of fat at her waist, which felt sweet as cake.

“You’re like me,” she continued. “You think for yourself. You see life as it is.”

“Life as it is?” My fingers rested gingerly on her sweet fat. “What do you mean?”

She faltered and slightly retracted her embrace. “You know, no bullshit. You aren’t fooled by bullshit.”

I furrowed my brow.

“Oh, I can’t tell you what I mean right now,” she said. “I’m a little drunk. But you know.”

Her face was uncertain and fractured, but that little fat roll was live and full of feeling. The hell of it was, she was probably on a diet. I withdrew my arm from her, and we changed the subject.

When I got home, my apartment felt pleasing and almost festive in comparison to the party. I lay on my red couch and ate ham and white bean soup from a Styrofoam container. My cats sat happily with their little chests out. I thought of Erin. I wished that I could ask her to visit and that we could lie on the floor together. I remembered her blunt, full-throttle kiss, and a tiny, grateful love flowered in my chest. It had been a month since our stumbling, drunken affair had ended, and Erin was, tentatively, my friend. I could call her, but she probably wouldn’t be home. She had just fallen in love with a rambunctious girl whom I had once glimpsed in a crowd, insouciantly bare-legged in a tiny skirt and cowboy boots. She had dumped a glass of ice down Erin’s shirt and hopped back laughing, switching her bossy skirt. I smiled and put down the empty soup container. I lay on my back and held a small maroon pillow against my chest. I relished the slight soreness of Erin’s memory overlaid with that giddy burst of glimpsed laughter and bare, dancing legs; I felt the laughter almost as if it were mine.

The next day the screenwriting philosophy professor called me to ask if he could give my phone number to a friend of his who had noticed me at the party, a sociologist named Kenneth.

“Normally I wouldn’t do this,” he said. “But he was quite taken with you.”

“How? I mean, we didn’t talk.”

“He loved your red high heels and your dress. And he . . . well, he noticed this little bruise on your leg, and he thought it was striking against your skin.”

“I don’t even remember him,” I said.

“Well, let me tell you. He’s extraordinary. He’s a brilliant sociologist, and he’s very influential, very respected. And he’s a lot of fun. Every weekend he drives around to flea markets and finds the most amazing things. He’s got a real gift for it; people beg to go with him on his runs because he can find things nobody else could unearth. He’s separated from his wife—”

“I don’t date married men.”

“He’s getting divorced.”

I rolled my eyes, but at the end of the conversation I said that the sociologist could have my number. I put the phone down, feeling flattered and at the same time slightly embarrassed by my willingness to talk to someone I didn’t remember whose attention had flattered me secondhand. I watched guiltily as the two feelings paired up and slunk off together like snakes. Well, maybe I would like him.

The next day I called Erin. I could hear in her voice that she was glad to hear from me. She invited me to a tiny night haunt where Paulette, Lana, and Gina would be performing as The Better Off Dead Poets Society, which entailed Paulette and Gina’s reading poems with titles like “Just Because Your Strap-On Is Big and Brown Doesn’t Make You Denzel Washington” while Lana did ironic dances in a leotard.

There were several other acts up before the Poets appeared, so Erin and I refreshed ourselves with beer and Jägermeister. She said her new girlfriend, Dolly, was going to arrive in a few hours. They were going to pretend to be strangers, and Erin was going to try to persuade Dolly to go home with her, which Dolly might not consent to do. Considering the theatricality of their date, it seemed okay for Erin and me to make out, so we did. Her body greeted me with a loyal flicker. Her little hipbone was guileless and friendly against my fatter flank. A woman got on the stage and began to talk about spanking her girlfriend while their friends watched.

“I hope you don’t mind,” murmured Erin. “It just feels so good to go from you to Dolly.”

I said I understood, and I meant it. I imagined Erin rolling voluptuously between two large, fluffy, and unstable masses, blindly nuzzling with her little nose, enjoying the instability as much as anything. I put my hand on her supple low back. She released a burst of tender heat. The woman onstage described how she and her girl-friend had spanked and sexually tormented a third woman while some other people watched. Erin and I smiled nervously; we separated and she took a long drink of beer. She began telling me about her developing relationship with Dolly. The sprightly twenty-one-year-old, the disaffected member of a wealthy family, had already traveled throughout the world and shown in a local art gallery. She had never had intercourse with a man, which to Erin gave her the martial allure of a warrior princess. She had, said Erin, taken to the role of femme top with startling enthusiasm.

“Last night she whipped my upper back, right between my shoulder blades,” said Erin. “It hurt so much it was like she was whipping my heart. It connected me with all this deep mom pain and I really cried. My therapist described it as a moment of integration with the primary feminine.”

“That’s pretty fancy,” I said. “Is that what you think?”

She shrugged and drank from her bottle of beer. There was a noise from the front of the room, and she turned sharply. The line of her cheekbone was stark and pure against the darkness. The darkness was like an animal about to lick her with its rough tongue. Her posture was calm, but her mouth was pulled tight and the iris was hard and bulging in her eye. Her rough gold hair was declarative as a flag. Impulsively, I stroked it. She smiled at me, and through all the darkness and declaration I felt something small and intrepid respond to my stroke.

I rose from my bed late the next day, in an unstable mood. I was teaching a summer class that had just begun. I ate my apple and buttered roll without wanting them. When I emerged from the BART station in Berkeley, I purchased a large cardboard cup of tea from a little take-out venue pervaded by an enervated mechanical hum. I loaded it with sugar and cream and drank it as I walked to my classroom, soothed by the sweetness of the tea and mentally tickled by the mechanical hum. I arrived in the classroom several minutes early and sat brooding over my material. While I was sitting there, two boy students came in. They sat and began to talk about another boy, whom they hated.