Bad Behavior: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

paroxysm of fantasy.

who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night.

The perfume of wealth graced her casually, like grass stains on the skin of a lazy child sleeping in a garden.

“Things are always less important once you’re assured of having them.”

querulous

insouciantly

coiffed

desultorily,

This part of her wanted to help Leisha, but only out of duty and the pleasure of condescension; their friendship had ended angrily.

She snapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth, making the classic junior-high-schooler’s noise of contempt for her own sentimentality,

then-current

bouffant-haired

affectation

I’m not directed yet.

she’d had fewer affairs than Leisha but spent twice the time brooding over them.

Then he’d generously explain how and in what ways, somehow managing to leave his kinkiness out.

insouciance

solipsistic.”

She wanted to remain loyal to Leisha, but she was floundering so thoroughly herself that when they talked they seemed like drowning people clinging to each other for life.

Their fantasies had changed, their tastes in props had diverged, and neither one could satisfy the other’s needs any longer.

ablutions

I really don’t know. How any grown man can accept what happens here as sex is beyond me.

where males and females performed the ancient, primal and wonderfully elementary dance of copulation, blandly, predictably and by appointment.

He would say, “Type this letter,” and my sensibility would contract until the abstractions of achievement and production found expression in the typing of the letter. I was useful.

even though it was so mushy that when she sat on it it felt as if her internal organs were collapsing into one another.

“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.”

to have the sensations and their emotional entourage that came under the heading “sex.”

“What I don’t want to hear is how I don’t deserve this,” said

Was Carla’s job in this office a set of symbols for her too, or was it an entity complete in itself, an efficient series of movements and interactions that emerged wholly and naturally from her needs and abilities like a bouquet of trick flowers, opening when you least expect it?

They stood looking in slightly different directions as the connective tissue began to dissolve in an anomaly of music and party chatter.

made more stunted hugging gestures and settled for hand squeezes.

She was not particularly pretty, but her alert, candid gaze and visible intelligence made her more attractive than most pretty girls.

She couldn’t tell whether Jarold was repeatedly deciding to drive somewhere and then changing his mind, or if he was just keeping warm.

Magdalen and Camille hugged each other constantly during the visit. On Christmas they wore their pajamas and slippers all day.

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.

“That’s wonderful,” he said. “It shows you’re still excited by life. And that’s the most important thing to keep through the years, more important than money or success. A lot of us lose it.”