Bad Behavior: Stories (17 page)

She thought of Jackson, an ex-lover whom she had especially wanted to impress, and was perversely glad that she never did get a professional position. She remembered what a curious relief it had been to take her first job in a whorehouse, where a real job didn’t matter, where males and females performed the ancient, primal and wonderfully elementary dance of copulation, blandly, predictably and by appointment.

“Is something wrong?” asked Bernard.

“I was just thinking of someone.” She hesitated. “Someone I knew in college. I had a pretty awful relationship with this person and I couldn’t have sex for over a year afterward. The first time I fucked anybody else after him was my first trick in my first house.”

“You’re kidding!”

She laughed. “It’s too corny, isn’t it? Girl has heart broken by callous swine and turns to prostitution.”

“Your life is very dramatic,” he said pleasantly.

“It’s not so dramatic. These things happen. I mean, I’m over it now.”

Bernard walked her back to her building, but to her surprise he didn’t want to come up to the apartment, even though she would have liked him to. In fact, they didn’t fuck until the second time
she had dinner with him. It was a calm, affectionate event (“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, referring to his problematic size as he lay on top of her, gripping her firmly about the hips). The evening was marred only when he handed her a hundred dollars on his way out the door.

She stared at him, stricken. “I don’t want that,” she said. “That’s not why I’m seeing you.”

He looked embarrassed. “I know it’s not why you’re seeing me. It’s not why I’m seeing you. But I think you should have it.”

“I don’t want it.”

He sat on the bed. “Stephanie, it’s very simple. I have a lot of money. You do not. You need money. I can give it to you. Please take it.”

“You didn’t give me money when we went out to dinner.”

He groped for an explanation for this and gave up. “Well, the next time we go out to dinner, I’ll give you money.”

“I won’t take it.”

“If you don’t, I’ll just mail it to you.”

Accepting the money became less troublesome than arguing. She stared at the cash sitting on her dresser after he left and thought: So now it is my real life. Then she got up and put it in her wallet.

The next few times she saw him, the cash factor didn’t seem so bad. It even felt perversely glamorous; it made her think of Babette’s friend Natalia, a dark, striking girl who was trying to be an actress. Babette was always telling Stephanie, with a certain awe, how Natalia collected men who bought her clothes and gave her money and drugs. If only Bernard would buy her a dress or something, perhaps it would seem less dubious, but she enjoyed his company, he was sexually pleasant, and she rather relished the novelty of the situation, much as he probably did. She told her friends that she was seeing a married man who “gave her money sometimes.”

“Stephanie, that sounds really good for you,” said Sandra. “Sometimes it’s good to have somebody who will just come over to your house and be nice to you.”

“I like that,” said Bernard as he held her in his arms. “I’m a person who comes over to your house and is nice to you.”

Besides, it had been three weeks since she’d quit Christine’s, and she still hadn’t found a job, so the money was useful to her. Sometimes it was a hundred, sometimes two or even three hundred, depending on nothing but his mood.

Her days began to slide together in a passive slur of afternoon movies, galleries and nightclubs. Babette would ask her if she’d started writing and she’d say that she was taking notes, which was true. She was content to drift, confident that her unconscious was unconsciously gathering information.

She was having coffee in Soho one afternoon when Jackson walked into the café. He had the same mincing, narrow walk, the same rigid pelvis, the same uptilted chin. He looked at her and she at him. She held her breath. He quickly examined her, from foot to eye, and sat down on the other side of the room without answering her nod.

She thought of something Babette had said when Stephanie had told her about her first hooking experience. “Oh, Stephie, don’t you know this is exactly what Jackson said you’d do? How can you fall into that horrible idea he had of you?”

She had stiffly explained to Babette that this had nothing to do with Jackson, and she was sure that it didn’t. But it made her feel bad to think of Jackson’s reaction if he ever heard about it. The last time she’d seen him in New York, she had called him. He said they should meet for lunch, but lunch turned out to be a plastic glass of orange juice in a coffee shop while Jackson waited for his laundry to come out of a machine. He didn’t have much time, he said. He was meeting his fiancée’s parents at five. Their forty minutes of conversation were filled with pauses and downward looks. “People in New York are very busy,” he said. “I divide my time sparingly between my work and my social life. I find myself associating primarily with other young professionals.”

She told Bernard about seeing Jackson that night, as they sat in a loud bar having BLTs and drinks.

“It sounds romantic in a way,” he said. “Silently passing each other in a crowded room.”

“It was awful.”

“What was so terrible about what happened between the two of you?”

She shrugged. “It’s hard to describe. I guess it’s basically that corny thing I talked about. I loved him, I trusted him too much and he turned out to be a dreadful person.” She realized that Bernard was being distracted by a plump blonde with loopy earrings and white go-go boots. She paused until he turned toward her again. “But it was more complicated. He had a lot of power over me. He was bisexual—don’t worry, I test negative—and he was seeing this guy André at the same time that he was seeing me. Sometimes he’d literally get up out of my bed and go be with André. Then he decided André and I should be friends and that we should all go out together.”

“Why did you go along with this? Did you like it?”

“Yeah, that was part of it. I wanted to be open. I wanted to experience everything. And I loved Jackson, or thought I did. Eventually, I wound up in bed with both of them, and that’s when it got ugly. I freaked out, Jackson decided I was boring and dropped me. That’s it.”

Bernard stared at her more intently than he ever had, with a deepening, almost gloating shade of something she couldn’t read in his dark eyes. He clasped her hand under the table and held it tight.

“Even after he left Evanston, I felt as if the whole tone of my time there was set by my thing with him. Everybody there knew about the three of us. Everywhere I went I got these looks. Jackson had a lot of friends who weren’t the most compassionate people in the world and … it was painful.”

“But didn’t such a complex liaison make you all the more mysterious and interesting to people?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t give a shit about being interesting and mysterious. I wanted him to love me.”

For a second, he looked as though she had said something truly strange. Then his face smoothed over with fatherly tenderness. He stroked her cheek. “You really are a classic,” he said. “You don’t look it, but you are.”

Three weeks after she’d started seeing Bernard, a month after she’d left Christine’s, an unexpected thing happened. Someone from a magazine she had interviewed with when she had come to New York three years before called her about a position as an editorial assistant. They had found her résumé and clips from the Evanston college paper in an old file and wanted to know if she was available. It was an architectural journal—not a subject she cared much about, but she remembered the magazine as being well written and beautifully designed. Besides, she was becoming desperate for a job, so she had the interview and was hired two days later.

Babette and Sandra seemed to think that it was the most wonderful thing in the world. (Now Sandra no longer had to stretch Stephanie’s connection with the
Voice
, and could introduce her as “in editorial.”) Stephanie wasn’t sure that it would in fact be a lot better than working at Christine’s; she no longer cared about being a “young professional” for Jackson’s sake.

Meanwhile, her odd relationship with Bernard was beginning to trouble her. Their conversation, although they spoke of many things, seemed mostly polite and for the benefit of fantasies they had about each other. Sexually, they seemed to be on the same level. She couldn’t tell if this was disappointing to him or not. And the money issue was beginning to disturb her again, now that she was working for the magazine. He’s not someone who comes to my house and is nice to me, she thought as she lay alone in bed. He’s someone who pays me to fuck him. She had an image of herself, sprawled half on and half off a bed at Christine’s, her upside-down head patiently looking back at her from the mirror as some galoot humped her. This vision blended discordantly with the idea of herself at her desk at the magazine and she was unable to separate them.

Despite this ambiguity, she was curiously reluctant to drop the affair. He only saw her once or twice a week, he was not demanding, he liked her favorite authors and was somehow very reassuring. Reassuring of what, she didn’t know, but it was connected to her old feeling that he thought of her as a representative of the exciting avant-garde—although it also seemed that if he had any
brains at all, he would’ve realized by now that she was just a bewildered human.

“I think I know why you go to places like Christine’s,” she said.

“I’m all ears.”

“One of the times I was there, I was watching this girl called Marissa, a skinny, not very attractive girl with blank brown eyes. It was almost the end of the night and she was squatting on the floor with her skirt hiked up to her waist, counting her money with a little furry-animal look of concentration, and I thought about how she must look to someone like you, despite her nasty personality—like this cute little beast who can be swept up and fondled and experienced and then put down.”

“That’s fabulous.” He looked deeply entertained. “You have such a wonderful way of expressing things.”

She thought: If he says “fabulous” one more time tonight, I may punch him in the nose.

It was a cool autumn evening. Clawlike leaves smelling of ashes rasped and scuttled across the pavement as they walked to her apartment.

They were silent and she felt uncomfortable about it. They were returning from a dinner that should’ve been nice but wasn’t. Bernard had been distracted and (she felt) bored by her. He had flirted subtly with their waitress, which she’d observed with a detached sense of disappointment, a cold and lifeless form of jealousy. As they mounted the stairs, she felt they were heading toward a destination simply because it was more trouble than it was worth to avoid it.

Once inside the warm apartment, though, she felt better about him, and she sensed a similar change in his mood. They lay snuggled on her bed and told short stories about their lives. He mentioned a girl he’d had a particular passion for in college, a headstrong dancer with long red hair, and told how he had finally seduced her one night after a party. “It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. At the last moment she panicked and said, ‘No, let me just take you in my mouth.’”

“Why didn’t she want to screw?”

“Because she felt too vulnerable and didn’t want me to enter her.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I fucked her.” Pause. “And that was the beginning of a long and intense relationship.”

“Did you ever consider marrying her?”

What a silly idea, said his face. “No, no. I wasn’t thinking about that then.”

“Did you ever feel a passion like that for your wife?”

“No, I really didn’t. She was by far the most beautiful of all the women I’d been with, but I wasn’t nearly as attracted to her as I had been to the others.” He touched her nose. “You’re really concerned about that, aren’t you?”

They kissed and petted, and her absurd bed creaked. Then they separated and talked again. She told him about the time her sister’s boyfriend had tried to seduce her in the middle of their breakup.

“What happened?” He smiled.

“Nothing. I didn’t want to. I mean, I wasn’t attracted to him and he was obviously doing it out of hostility to my sister.”

“Oh, no. That probably had nothing to do with it.”

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

“Exactly!” He said this with great emphasis, as though she’d hit upon something important. “I almost seduced my wife’s sister the first time we separated, but we both balked at the last minute, mostly her. We were at the kitchen table, drinking gin.” He smiled. “Of course your sister’s boyfriend wanted you. One wants them all.”

She began to talk about an old lover of hers who reminded her of Bernard, but as she talked she kept imagining Bernard on a clean tiled kitchen floor, humping his blond wife’s blond sister. It reminded her of the stories in
The New Yorker
about decent professional people having extramarital affairs. The more she contemplated this picture, the more difficult it was to imagine sex with this man … this customer. She had a quick feeling of sympathy for
his wife, lying in her single bed, in her separate room, next to the room of a man who wanted them all. She started to feel something like guilt, and to forestall it, she began to kiss him. The bed creaked and he parted her legs.

From that moment on, the same sense of disaffection that she’d felt in the restaurant overtook her. Afterward, they spoke some more, but the conversation didn’t work. They even had a strangely snide argument about whether or not Nabokov was a good writer. 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.