Mary Gaitskill - Because They Wanted To - Stories

The man at the next table glanced at Kenneth and then at me. He saw me notice his glance.

Zoe had told him on their first date that she liked to have friendships with “old men” because she knew that they wouldn’t “come on” to her. He had found this remark irksome, but it didn’t matter; just to be in her presence made him feel reverent and sensitive. They went on run after rapturous run, and he bought her carloads of stuff.

“Being with her was like nothing else,” he said. “It was like having a beautiful Cartier watch on your wrist.”

I wondered if he was trying to disgust me. I wondered if I had any right to be disgusted. The bald spot on his head appeared oblivious and vulnerable in the overhead light. The woman seated next to me sighed restlessly.

But then, he went on, he began to notice subtle character flaws. Once, when they were out on a stuff run, she asked him if he thought she should get breast implants. “It shocked me,” he said, “because I thought she didn’t take that modeling stuff seriously. I thought she wanted something more genuine. I told her that, and she didn’t really have an answer.”

It only got worse. They went to a dinner party and, on being introduced to “a European has-been director,” Zoe virtually dropped Kenneth and spent the evening fawning on the director. On another occasion, he was sure he saw her trade lewd winks with some absurd boy. Then, when they went to an art opening, she abruptly canceled their dinner afterward because someone she had just met had invited her to a screening. When he complained, she got snippy. “I decided I wasn’t going to see her again until she called me and apologized,” he said. “And she never did, so . . . like Phil put it, Cartier watches don’t hurt your feelings.”

“Cartier watches don’t have feelings, either,” I said. “Please, would you mind if I—excuse me—go to the bathroom?”

I sulked in the rest room, loathing Kenneth. My loathing was grating and frustrating. It made me feel like a small animal trapped in a maze as part of a science experiment. I thought about how everybody tried so hard and how it never worked. I thought of the woman at the next table brushing at imaginary crumbs. I remembered my mother standing in front of a mirror, trying to pull her short jacket down over her protruding abdomen, her face anxious and sad. I remembered the way Frederick had first looked at me, as if beholding an object that ideally filled a perpetually empty place. I remembered how I had touched him in quite the same spirit, except that my touch had been even more peremptory than his look. I pictured Kenneth pulling a comb out of his pocket and putting it back, over and over again. My loathing depressed me. It seemed arrogant and stupid.

I returned to the table. The people sitting next to us had gone, leaving a dainty wreckage of cutlery and waste. Kenneth looked diminished and sad, picking at his fancy dinner. He looked up mournfully. “You think I’m an asshole, don’t you?” he said.

“No,” I said. “No.” I sat down. “I just—”

“I told you that story because I thought you would like it. Believe me, I know I made a fool of myself over that girl. I learned my lesson. I thought you’d appreciate it.”

“I do. I mean, I understand.” My tone was obnoxiously kind and judicial. “I can fall for superficial things. Sometimes I wish every-thing could be like a pop song, like fine, like white sugar. But it just doesn’t work that way. And besides, that Cartier watch thing was a bit much.”

“But what I meant was that she was like magic. I mean, since I met her, I open the passenger door for every woman who gets into my car. It’s a tiny thing, but things like that create a sense of dignity and—”

“It’s just that pop song thing. Also, how come you like her exaggerated manners and you don’t like it that she wants fake boobs?”

We ate our food and discussed the complex allure of the artificial. He said he didn’t think his attraction to Zoe was entirely false, because he’d respected her law studies and her desire to excel mentally. I said I thought that was just another objectification, and he seemed to consider this. We were beginning to be excited by each other. The waiters enjoyed our excitement. When we finished eating, they brought us small, festive balls of cotton candy on cardboard sticks for free.

We walked back to his car, a subtle membrane of feeling spanning the air between us. With a sudden movement, he took my hand and held it. His palm was fleshy, but it felt brittle anyway. I held it and tried to ease its brittleness. But later, when we stood on my front steps and said good night to each other, he tried to kiss me on the lips and I turned my head. I glimpsed his limpid, bewildered eyes as his mouth lighted on my cheek and then drew back in an open, stifled purse. He coughed and looked away. “I’ll call you again,” he said.

A blurry impress of his eyes and his lips, open and moving away, was still on me when I lay down to sleep, and that may’ve been why I dreamed of kissing a boy I had known when I was thirteen. In life, he had looked down on me because I had been shy and plain, and I, in turn, thought him an empty-headed snot. But in the dream we were in love. We sat together and kissed. Our hands were at our sides, our shoulders just touched. He came near and drew away and nervously played with his honey-colored hair. His T-shirt had a rip under one faintly pungent armpit. He extended his mouth again, stretching his long, supple throat. He brushed his lips against my cheek, and the dream slowly fell into nothing.

I rode to Berkeley in a state of melancholy. The passenger seated sideways in front of me on the BART was a slouching, unhandsome young man with pale-brown hair and a weak, somehow derisive chin. Still, there was something pleasing in the dull brown stubble on his thin white skin and the sardonic loll of his head against the rattling plastic window of the car. He turned, met my eyes, then looked away, and I remembered my dream with a funny rolling sensation, almost as if, half asleep, I had turned over and rubbed my face against an unexpected softness. I remembered Frederick then, and to my embarrassment and mild sadness, it occurred to me that the dream had been at least partly about him. How maudlin, I thought, to have conflated two drunk, unhappy adults who had casually mistreated each other with tender, kissing children. I remembered how Frederick had touched my cheek, his hand sensitive and bare as the paw of a friendly animal. The memory was plain and blameless as a glass of water. It made me remember my fear and shame, also as something plain and blameless. Then it occurred to me that the dream had been, in some less clear way, about Kenneth as well.

Erin decided to stop seeing Dolly, because she had revealed herself as a shallow brat who “jerked people around.” We discussed it over drinks at a crowded boy bar.

“She decides she wants to see other people and we have to have this interminable discussion of it and I’m crying and tearing my hair and finally I agree. Then next week she wants to be monogamous. Then two days later she’s fucking some bitch down the street. Who needs it?”

Her voice was defiant, but her eyes were stunned and fixated, her chest hard and shrunken. She wore black cigarette-leg pants that were too short at the ankles and a black leather shirt that was too short at the waist, and the clothes made her look desiccated, almost ridiculous.

I remembered my glimpse of Dolly, dumping ice down Erin’s shirt; with a slight shock, I intuited her vagina, a rude girl that would’ve stuck out its tongue if it could.

“It’s really painful,” continued Erin, “but I’m trying to work with it in a creative way. I’ve done all these healing rituals with candles and shrines and stuff. I tore up the whole backyard and planted a garden with petunias and snapdragons and, um . . .” She looked into the room, trying to remember what she had planted.