Mary Gaitskill - Don't Cry

And suddenly there were long distances between one tent and the next, and I found myself walking under the stars, alone on dark wet grass.

Dani sipped her martini and nibbled at a dish of nuts. She talked about Yasmin, with whom she had lived for the last three years— longer than anyone else. Her posture was erect and alert, her small shoulders perfectly squared. But her hair was rough by then, not glossy. She was swollen under the eyes, and there were deep creases on either side of her mouth and between her brows; her lips were bare and dry. Her once-insouciant slenderness had become gaunt and somehow stripped, like a car or motorcycle might be stripped to reveal the crude elegance of its engine.

“I don't want to be unfaithful anymore,” she said. “I want to stay with Yasmin. I want to take care of her.”

I smiled and said, “You're like a man. You've always been that way.” Her smile in return was like a blush of pleasure. “Yeah, I guess it's true,” she said.

In San Francisco, I wandered into a maze that was sometimes peopled and sometimes empty sometimes brightly lit and sometimes so dark that I had to grope my way along it with my hands, heart pounding with fear that I would never find my way out. I quickly became lost, and it seemed like almost everyone I met was lost, too. Sometimes it seemed to me an empty life, but that wasn't really true. It wasn't empty; it was more that the people and events in it were difficult to put together in any way that felt whole.

Before she met Yasmin, Dani said, she did not court or date or screw any girls for over a year. She was thirty-six and she felt very old. She did not want to be the “older lesbian” going after young girls. She did not have the heart for it. But she was very lonely more lonely than she had ever been. She felt she didn't belong anywhere. She thought she would die. I didn't ask her why she hadn't called me, because I already knew. Instead, I glanced down at my watch, saw that I needed to go, and ordered another drink.

At the end of the show, the magician goes home. And so does the girl who was sawed in half. She changes out of her costume into her jeans and sneakers and leaves by the back door, crushing a cigarette under her foot as she goes.

It is a low form of performance, and a tawdry metaphor for any kind of affair. And yet shows are wonderful. Even for jaded performers, they have a sheen of glamour, no matter if the sheen is threadbare and collecting dust. And in that sheen, there may be hidden, in the sparkle of some stray rhinestone or store-bought glitter, the true magic that will, as the synthetic curtain opens, reveal a glimpse of something more real than one's strange and unreal life.

The curtain opened again at a boring book event in LA.; I walked in, and there was Dani, lying eel-like on a leather love seat, nodding at someone I couldn't see. She must've felt my gaze, because she turned, saw me, and said, “Of all people—,” her voice loud enough for me to hear her across the room. I knocked down a lamp as we stumbled into her room, a funky little box that my fun-house memory has given three walls instead of four. To steady me, she took my hair in her fist. “We really don't know each other now,” she said. The next day, I woke alone in my room, where a lustily roaring hotel shower brightly stippled my bruised flesh. The curtain opened again that evening; silently she offered me her smartly clad arm, and silently I accepted.

Halfway through her second martini, Dani asked, “Does David take care of you?”

“Yes,” I said. “We take care of each other.”

“Good,” she said. “I'm glad.”

In the back of the restaurant, the elderly couple slowly rose from their seats, the man taking the woman's arm at the elbow. We paused to watch them. Ceiling fans with large wooden blades solemnly turned over our heads.

Each scene covers and is covered and shows through the others, fractured, shifting, and shaded, like bits of color in a kaleidoscope. I moved to Houston to teach; she moved to New York to work for a former jazz singer who wanted to write a memoir. She traveled often to L.A. to visit a woman she was courting there; I traveled often to New York to visit no one in particular. We were nothing to each other, really. I rarely thought of her, and although she said otherwise, I doubt she thought of me except when she saw me. And yet from time to time, in a little pit with a shimmering curtain, we would discover a room with a false back, and through the trapdoor we would willingly tumble, into a place where we were not a mere addendum to another, more genuine life — a place where we were the life, in this fervid red rectangle or this blue one. Slowly, the elderly couple moved past our table, the man still holding the woman's arm, the woman's small silver handbag dangling a little rakishly from her gentle, wrinkled hand. Dani watched them, her eyes softening even in profile.

Her strength, her social identity had been stripped from her as time had stripped her youth. But her private world had moved forward to fill the empty space. I thought, This is why I always trusted her. Because my private identity was my strength, I could sense hers even when I couldn't see it, and I knew it could be trusted.

Time and again, the curtain parted: Served by stylish hostesses, we sat in ornate chairs, drinking martinis and eating caviar on toast. A lurid dream of music surged around us, mixed with the globule voices of strangers bent double, triple with personality We held hands and kissed across the table; Dani said, “If we have sex again, I don't want us to be drunk.” Drunk already, I took a ring out of my pocket, a flat amethyst I had bought that day. I had not bought it for her, but I gave it to her. “I love you,” I said. “We can't be together, and maybe we'll never even have sex again. But I love you.” Rosy young heterosexuals burst into laughter, gobbling olives and peanuts and beautiful colored drinks in shimmering glasses. Another time, we sat side by side in a modest music hall, my arm around her low back, feeling the knobs of her fiery spine. We were there because Dani knew the singer in the band, a sexy blonde no longer in her first youth. She sang “Today I'm Yours” and the music made shapes for her words: a flower, a rainy street in spring, an open hand, a wet, thumping heart. Each shape was crude and colored maybe a little too vividly with feeling. But we wanted those shapes and that feeling. My father was dead, and the writer Dani had once left me for was dead, too. We were not young anymore. “Today I'm Yours.” It was a crude and romantic song. But human feeling is crude and romantic. Sometimes, it is more vivid than anyone could color it. In some faraway badly smudged mirror, Dani's striking arm flashes again and again; her face is in an almost featureless trance, and my twisted mouth is the only thing I can see of myself.

“Here,” she said, handing the taxi driver a bill. “Wait until she gets in the door, okay?” The cab bucked forward, and her hard, dear face disappeared in a rush of starless darkness and cold city lights. I woke sprawled half-naked in a room with all the lights on, the phone in one hand, my address book in the other, open to the page with Dani's number on it.

“I'm sorry about something,” she said. “I've always wanted to tell you.” We were waiting for the check. Playfully laughing waitpeople lingered at the warmly lit kitchen door; for them, the evening was about to begin. “I wish I'd been a better friend to you,” she said. “In San Francisco, I mean. I knew you were lonely. But I couldn't. I was too young and I just couldn't.”

“It's all right,” I said. “It would've been difficult.” I looked down at the table; it was gleaming and hard, and there was a shining drop of water or alcohol graying the tip of Dani's spotless napkin. Soon my husband and I would be making chicken for five people. There would be little bowls of snacks and flowers and drinks. But how private the knobs of Dani's spine had been when she was next to me and my arm was around her low back. How good it was to sit across from her and see the changes in her face. How heartless and foolish we had been together, how obscene. How strange if ten years from this moment, David and Yasmin were gone and instead Dani and I were living together. The image of this, our life together, winked like a piece of glitter with a whole atomic globe whirring inside it, then vanished like the speck it was. The check came. We counted out the money I paid the tab; Dani left a generous tip.