Bad Behavior: Stories (20 page)

I received my last paycheck from the lawyer in the mail. It came with a letter folded around it. It said, “I am so sorry for what happened between us. I have realized what a terrible mistake I made with you. I can only hope that you will understand, and that you will not
worsen an already unfortunate situation by discussing it with others. All the best.” As a P.S. he assured me that I could count on him for excellent references. He enclosed a check for three hundred and eighty dollars, a little over two hundred dollars more than he owed me.

It occurred to me to tear up the check, or mail it back to the lawyer. But I didn’t do that. Two hundred dollars was worth more then than it is now. Together with the money I had in the bank, it was enough to put a down payment on an apartment and still have some left over. I went upstairs and wrote “380” on the deposit side of my checking account. I didn’t feel like a whore or anything. I felt I was doing the right thing. I looked at the total figure of my balance with satisfaction. Then I went downstairs and asked my mother if she wanted to go get some elephant ears.

For the next two weeks, I forgot about the idea of a job and moving out of my parents’ house. I slept through all the morning noise until noon. I got up and ate cold cereal and ran the dishwasher. I watched the gray march of old sitcoms on TV. I worked on crossword puzzles. I lay on my bed in a tangle of quilt and fuzzy blanket and masturbated two, three, four times in a row, always thinking about the thing.

I was still in this phase when my father stuck the newspaper under my nose and said, “Did you see what your old boss is doing?” There was a small article on the upcoming mayoral elections in Westland. He was running for mayor. I took the paper from my father’s offering hands. For the first time, I felt an uncomplicated disgust for the lawyer. Westland was nothing but malls and doughnut stands and a big ugly theater with an artificial volcano in the front of it. What kind of idiot would want to be mayor of Westland? Again, I left the room.

I got the phone call the next week. It was a man’s voice, a soft, probing, condoling voice. “Miss Roe?” he said. “I hope you’ll forgive this unexpected call. I’m Mark Charming of
Detroit Magazine
.”

I didn’t say anything. The voice continued more uncertainly. “Are you free to talk, Miss Roe?”

There was no one in the kitchen, and my mother was running the vacuum in the next room. “Talk about what?” I said.

“Your previous employer.” The voice became slightly harsh as he said these words, and then hurriedly rushed back to condolence. “Please don’t be startled or upset. I know this could be a disturbing phone call for you, and it must certainly seem intrusive.” He paused so I could laugh or something. I didn’t, and his voice became more cautious. “The thing is, we’re doing a story on your ex-employer in the context of his running for mayor. To put it mildly, we think he has no business running for public office. We think he would be very bad for the whole Detroit area. He has an awful reputation, Miss Roe—which may not surprise you.” There was another careful pause that I did not fill.

“Miss Roe, are you still with me?”

“Yes.”

“What all this is leading up to is that we have reason to believe that you could reveal information about your ex-employer that would be damaging to him. This information would never be connected to your name. We would use a pseudonym. Your privacy would be protected completely.”

The vacuum cleaner shut off, and silence encircled me. My throat constricted.

“Do you want time to think about it, Miss Roe?”

“I can’t talk now,” I said, and hung up.

I couldn’t go through the living room without my mother asking me who had been on the phone, so I went downstairs to the basement. I sat on the mildewed couch and curled up, unmindful of centipedes. I rested my chin on my knee and stared at the boxes of my father’s old paperbacks and the jumble of plastic Barbie-doll cases full of Barbie equipment that Donna and I used to play with on the front porch. A stiff white foot and calf stuck out of a sky-blue case, helpless and pitifully rigid.

For some reason, I remembered the time, a few years before, when my mother had taken me to see a psychiatrist. One of the more obvious questions he had asked me was, “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” I hadn’t at the time, but I did now. And it wasn’t such a bad feeling at all.

C
ONSTANCE WAS DISCONCERTED
by her meeting with Franklin in the East Village, partly because two years before he’d spent exactly one week ardently trying to seduce her, and then had abruptly dropped her to get married to a hitherto undisclosed fiancée. But there were other factors. “Constance!” he yelled. “God, it’s great to see you! You’re looking good! In fact, you’re looking beautiful!”

The last time she had seen him had been at his wedding party; he’d been lip-synching to Grand Master Flash and doing an arm-flapping dance that threatened to tear the armpits out of his rented tux. Since then his nose seemed to have grown larger and lumpier, his face broader and his eyes more prone to wander frantically over the head of whomever he was talking to. But he still had his kind demeanor and his air that whatever he was talking about and whoever he was talking to were both equally and desperately important. She remembered something he had said to her sometime before: “Don’t worry, Connie. In fifteen years, I’ll be doing my retrospective at the Whitney and you’ll be publishing regularly in
The New Yorker
.” He paused. “But by then we’ll be ugly.”

She smiled at him on the crowded street and they yelled cheerfully back and forth. He was busy, very busy, writing art criticism for three publications, teaching part-time and painting. She was doing free-lance journalism, and was currently huddled in a cranny of stability as a part-time editor for a slick literary quarterly. They linked arms and went for coffee.

“God,” he said, hunching over his tiny brown cup of espresso, “it’s good to see a new face. For weeks I’ve seen nobody but friends
of Emily’s who’ve come in from Dallas—these really incredible women who’re all painters, all in their forties, incredibly intelligent and—would you believe it?—all
single
. They’re great, but I feel like I have to constantly be telling them how attractive and talented they are—and they are attractive! They’re incredibly attractive!—because they’re in their forties, and they’re not married, and they’re not successful.”

“What makes you think you always have to tell them how great they are?”

“You just do. It’s obvious.” He lifted the little brown cup in his big hands and delicately inserted the tip of his tongue, put it down and played with his napkin.

“You wouldn’t have to tell me that if I was forty.”

He didn’t respond to this, but stared fixedly into a corner for several seconds and then said, “So, whose heart are you laying waste to now?”

“You mean who’s trashing me these days? I’m not so extreme anymore, Franklin.”

Franklin smiled in the sly, flatly pleased way he contrived when she simultaneously ridiculed and accepted his flattery.

“Actually, I have a girlfriend.” She picked up her croissant as if she were going to bat her eyelashes from behind it. “We’ve been together for a year and a half. We live together.”

“Connie, that’s great. That’s really super. Is this a new predilection?”

“No, it’s always been there. This is just more serious than usual.”

“You know, if she were a boy, I think I’d be jealous. Where’d you meet her?”

They burrowed into a conversation that skimmed over the present, then tunneled back through the five years since they’d met in a proofreading booth, where exhausted, languid Connie would sleep on the floor beneath her desk, using Franklin’s balled-up sweater as a pillow. They had nested in that booth every weekend for months, surrounded by literary supplements, plastic take-out containers, boxes of cookies and notebooks in which they furiously scribbled
between jobs. It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it—or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away.

Connie stopped a moment as Franklin talked and put her head up to survey the outside world; the dark café was crowded with young people in big jackets and neat, mincing shoes. A grotesquely beautiful girl in pink leather seemed to be staring at them. Did they look like pathetic aging hipsters? Was her hair wrong? Was their conversation too loud? Franklin was talking very loudly about a nasty exchange he’d had with another critic at some club. She winced, then took shelter in his apparently inexhaustible confidence and burrowed again. Then other factors raised their heads.

“You know, I had dinner with Alice and Roger last week,” he said, tearing a bite out of his little sponge cake.

Constance halted in her burrowing. “I thought you didn’t see them anymore.”

“What? Why?”

“What about that big fight you had with Roger?”

“What big fight?”

“The one about the article you did on him in
Art in America
.”

“Oh,
that
. It was just a spat. I see him all the time. You wouldn’t believe their new loft. It’s perfect.”

This person, thought Connie, does not have one deep feeling about anything. She felt like a crabbed, bitter woman in a brittle curl over her coffee.

“You should give Alice a call—she’d love to hear from you.”

“Alice was the one who stopped calling me, in case you don’t remember.”

“Connie, Alice loves you. She really does.”

“Horseshit, Franklin. She stabbed me in the back.”

“God, you girls are unbelievable. Girls are unbelievable.”

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.

“I’m giving a party the day after tomorrow,” said Franklin as they walked out. “It’s Emily’s birthday. You’ve got to come. And bring your amour.”

“Roger and Alice will be there.”

“Oh, come on!”

“All right, I’ll probably come. Give me your address.”

He found a scrap of paper—the folded edge of a torn envelope—and scrawled his address in purple pen while the March wind raised his hair in an elegant, multidirectional headdress. A boy walked by in black leather, his bleached hair shaved into one strip down the center of his skull, painstakingly waxed and sculpted into the shape of a dragon’s back. She felt a pang of affection and reassurance, knowing that kids were still doing the same things they’d been doing for years, tinged with a touch of incredulousness that they hadn’t yet been able to think up anything else.

“Here.” Franklin looked at her as he pressed the paper into her hand. “And Connie, I want you to know”—his eyes got that vague yet sincere and noble look they took on when he was about to talk about art or something—“I’ve thought about you a lot in the last year or so. I’ve really wanted to see you.”

“Yeah?”

“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 could’ve called me.”

“Yeah, I could have. But I was too ashamed.” He dropped his eyes and actually did look sincere for a minute.

She cupped his face with her hand and kissed his cheek. “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

They squeezed each other’s hands, communicated some sexual comradery and goodwill, and then walked away.

Well, she thought, it was good to see Franklin, but she certainly wasn’t going to his party. It would be too depressing. It was strange to realize that the depressing part wouldn’t be her memory of his dizzy seduction attempt—she was never romantically interested in him anyway—but the presence of her ex-friend Alice, the mere mention of whose name had plunged her into a slight rancor. She eyed with disaffection and contempt the neatly hatted and booted, dyed and moisturized strangers marching toward her.

Alice and Roger had been the first New Yorkers she had met in Manhattan. They had met accidentally, when Constance had sublet their loft with two other girls. She had been very impressed by them. They were so handsome—Roger, blond and tall, his potentially annoying symmetry broken by the stubborn cowlick on the back of his head, and Alice, tiny and sleekly dark, her short hair like the shiny, pleated wings of a beetle, her clothes fully color-coordinated and accessorized—very poised, and apparently secure. Alice had asked her a lot of questions about her plans, and seemed to be scrutinizing her answers for signs of acceptability, while Roger smiled and nodded affably. At first Constance resented it, but soon, to her embarrassment, she found that she was flattered by Alice’s eventual approval. Alice had been especially kind when Constance was thrown out of her first apartment after two days of tenancy with a psychotic roommate, rushing to her assistance with advice and a huge garbage bag of Salvation Army–bound clothes. “Don’t leave New York because of this,” she said. “Everybody gets mangled a little during the first few months.”

She huffed up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, dropped the keys, swore unattractively and opened the door to find that the heat was too high, the cats were running around with mysterious desperation, and Deana wasn’t home. The cats moiled loudly
around her legs as she wrestled with can and opener; they squabbled for position as she put the blobs of cold meat-and-cornmeal byproducts before them. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You guys aren’t that hungry. Pigs.”