Bad Behavior: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

He walked half a block to a candy store with an orange neon sign, and bought several white bags of jelly beans. Then he caught a cab and rode home like a sultan. He ignored Diane’s bitter stare as he walked through the living room and shut himself up in the bedroom with his jelly beans.

The tables were clawed with knifemarks, the french fries were large and damp.

He kissed the blue vein on her neck and enjoyed the silly beat of his heart. “You’re like a pretty shadow.”

“You’re not like me. No one is like me. I’m a phenomenon.”

“Sometimes I have this fantasy that the opera house is suddenly taken over by psychos or terrorists or something, and that I save everybody.” She stopped sucking her mint and turned to look at him. “How?” “I jump from the balcony railing and scale down the curtain until I’m parallel with the cord. Then I jump for the cord, swing through the air—” “That’s impossible.” “Well, yes, I know. It’s a fantasy.” “Why would you have a fantasy like that?” She looked disturbed. “I don’t know. It’s not important.” She continued to stare at him, almost stricken. “I think it’s because you feel estranged from people. You want something extreme to happen so you can show that you love them, and that you deserve love from them.”

Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.”

It suddenly struck her that it would seem completely natural if he lunged forward and bit her face.

That image of him would stay with her for years for no good reason and with no emotional significance.

He could tell that she was trying to like being bitten, but that she did not.

His memory of her was like a filmy scrap of dream discovered on the floor during the drowsy journey from bed to toilet,

She liked this vicarious view of herself; it excited and reassured her. She wasn’t a directionless girl adrift in a monstrous city, wandering from one confusing social situation to the next, having stupid affairs. She was a bohemian, experimenting. The idea made rock music start playing in her head. She kissed him with something resembling passion.

He was bisexual—don’t worry, I test negative—and

like this cute little beast who can be swept up and fondled and experienced and then put down.”

“Well, maybe not. I think part of it was that he was intrigued by me as a variation of her.”

In the frequent silences, she felt that he sensed her sudden disapproval of him. She was a little sorry, because she liked him, but at the same time she was relieved when he got up to go. When he said “Take good care of yourself,” she knew that she wouldn’t hear from him again. It wasn’t until half an hour after he’d left that she realized that for the first time he hadn’t left her any money. This had an entirely unexpected effect on her; she sat on her bed and cried.

although she couldn’t tell if she was just pulling anything available into her sadness. She cried until she was sure she was absolutely finished. Then she got up, put on her shoes and went out for a walk. It was a beautiful Halloweenlike night, and there were exuberant people on the streets. She walked happily, admiring faces and haircuts. She looked at people, dogs, cars and buildings, and everything pleased her. She stopped at a Korean grocery store and looked at the fruit. She was struck by how neat and beautiful it was in its organized, traditional piles. She thought of herself coming here every week and buying fruit, vegetables, bread, cereal and milk, and it seemed like a wonderful idea. She bought herself an apple, and walked home eating it.

It wasn’t an unreasonable question, but the predictable and agitated delivery of it was annoying. It reflected his way of hoarding silly details and his obsessive fear I would meet my sister’s fate.

They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad. But it had been. She cringed as they walked to the cash register, convinced that everyone was watching them and rolling their eyes.

“Yeah. Really.” His eyes looked so intensely vague, yet so sincere and so noble, she had the sense that the brown orbs could detach from their centers and wander all over his eyeball, slowly, with a certain majesty, each movement expressing the depth of his sincerity.

“You have a way, you know, of shoving your vulnerability right into people’s faces. Or something that you call vulnerability, anyway. You sometimes do it immediately upon meeting them. You force people to deal with it.” Deana was speaking excitedly but precisely, her words like clean-cut vanilla-colored chips. “Deana.” “No, listen to me. Don’t be angry with me for saying this; you don’t do it as much as you did. But you used to do it a lot, and it’s kind of strange to be confronted so aggressively with somebody else’s frailty. Some people will want to protect you, as I did, but some people will want to hurt you. Others will be merely afraid of you, for the obvious reason that it reminds them of their own frailty, which sounds a lot like your friend Alice.”

Her fingers and hands, Constance thought, had an exposed, strangely cold and receptive quality, like the nose of a puppy.

Virginia’s life became a set of events with no meaning or relationship to one another. She was a cold planet orbiting for no reason in a galaxy of remote, silent movement. The house was a series of objects that she had to avoid bumping into. Food would not go down her throat. The faces of her husband and children were abstract patterns taking on various shapes to symbolize various messages. It was exhausting to keep track of them.