Ugly Behavior (18 page)

The woman looked up, gasping as she peered into Jane’s face. The
scissors slipped and cut through the face of the silhouette.

Jane ran back out into the rain. Music crashed inside her head.
The storm sounded like the same music. She gazed past the gray buildings,
searching, intent on returning to her apartment. The rain slackened some. She
entered the park. Blades of leaves, blades of grass. Children had gathered by
the north gate and were playing with a lizard. There was no sign of the man
selling combs. Another bright, soft explosion, but Jane didn’t bother to look
up this time. She gazed more closely at the children. Their lizard wriggled
madly, nailed through its neck to a board. She suddenly burned hot with shame.

The centerpiece of the park was an arrangement of giant metal
sculptures with razor-thin planes, broad fields of metal. At first glance the
sculptures appeared curvilinear, but closer examination revealed hidden points,
sharp edges residing within the folds of illusory soft steel and brass.

She ran past the sculptures as another bright flash almost blinded
her, and suddenly a pigeon was flapping at her side, caught on the huge button
of her coat sleeve. Its claws came out and dug a ridge into the flesh covering
the back of her hand.

She finally shook the bird loose, crying loudly as it pecked her.
No one came to her aid. The world was full of too many sharp edges. It was
pointless to get too deeply involved. You risked your own death. She ran the
few remaining blocks, the rain beating the blood away as it struggled to escape
her cuts.

She slammed the apartment door behind her. Someone had dropped a
shiny, brightly-colored magazine through her mail slot. She picked it up.
Inside, nude photos of women had been scored horizontally repeatedly with a
razorblade, turning their flesh into venetian blinds.

Maxwell used up all his film, and he would have loved to have had
several more packs. The passion in her face as she ran away from the man with
the cane, the trapped bird—he would have given anything to have had such
passion directed at him. He loved her more with each stolen glimpse of intense
emotion. He hoped the magazine he had left for her demonstrated just how much
she made him feel, how badly he wanted to reach her, make contact, and banish
his loneliness forever.

When Jane threw the magazine to the floor a note fell from its
pages. She ripped the envelope open frantically, jerking the folded letter out
with shaking fingers. His handwriting consisted of thin, jagged uprights,
virtually unreadable.
 
Love…
 
sharp… you… reach: these were the only
words she could make out.

A crashing in the alley. Garbage can lids banged out a crazed
musical. She crept to the back door that led to the fire escape and pulled it
open. The alley was silent, empty.

She closed the door and turned back into the hallway which ran the
length of her apartment. She stepped on something soft and pliant. She reached
down and picked up the worn leather glove. A man’s glove: who was responsible
for it? It was stained here and there a dark color, a shade of red like ancient
rust.

Bright neon from the hotel sign outside the window at the end of
the hall washed the walls a more brilliant red. The tall curtains on either
side of the window swept the floor, gliding in and out as if the window were a
mouth, breathing. She knew there were sharp blades behind the billowing
curtains, an erect penis behind the soft gabardine swaddling the crotch of the
man who might be hiding there.

She could not stay here any longer. In her makeup mirror she paid
particular attention to the jagged patterns in her eyes, but no cosmetic could
smooth these. It was all a part of being in the world, she supposed, but now
she did not know if she wanted to be a part of the world or not. She glanced at
her clock: impossibly, it said she had been back in her apartment for hours.

She finally gave up on returning a semblance of normalcy to her
face, put on her coat again, and left her apartment to go see a movie. At least
she could be assured that in the movie theatre, nothing is real.

Maxwell wondered if Jane had read his note yet, if she had glanced
through his magazine, if she had discovered his intentionally dropped glove.
Simple things, but they had the power to agitate the imagination of those
vulnerable enough to suggestion. The innocent knew that the world was a
dangerous place, but they were incapable of fully appreciating the
implications.

In the two hours since he had left Jane’s apartment, he had been
quite busy. The close proximity of her things had aroused him, so he
immediately went out looking for a substitute for her.

The woman hadn’t wanted to return home with him, but it never
ceased to amaze him how easily obstacles could be gotten rid of by means of a
simple act of murder.

He enjoyed dancing. It was the only time he could hold a live
woman with safety. But death made this one an even better dancing partner than
he was used to. He had to tie her body to his waist and legs, but once this had
been accomplished she followed him perfectly, now and then rolling her head
onto his shoulder in affection. A pity he was already taken.

He hadn’t caught her name before, but he preferred making up his
own names anyway. “Janice,” for this one, as she was to be Jane’s substitute
for the moment. With the wound in her face, Janice was completely
possessable
: a marred masterpiece, a “second” available for
a reduced price, reduced effort. But she remained a great work of art for all
that.

As the music rose to a crescendo, he recalled the moments of
Janice’s creation: how he had heard her heart in his head, beating, struggling
to escape the point of his knife (but not Jane’s knife—he would never
betray Jane in that fashion), how again and again he had thrust the point into
the center of her beating, until the sound had faded from his head.

She had struggled, but all too briefly. She had kicked a bit; as
if in a dream he had felt her high heels puncturing his flesh, marking him in
subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Now the dance was over. The music ran down. Maxwell grasped the
knife handle still protruding from Janice’s chest. He pulled down on the knife.
Her flesh split like rotted silk. He gasped with pleasure as the blade sliced
through blouse, slip, skin.

He gasped again and again, louder than the music screaming in his
head.

As she walked to the movie, the passersby whispered among
themselves, too loudly for comfort, in fact far more loudly than was possible.

She might have gone to the police, but what could she tell them?
She’d received a garbled note, a damaged magazine, and someone had lost a
glove, someone had stolen a knife from a local restaurant. Her co-workers would
be questioned, and they would talk about how nervous “Poor Jane” had always
been, how high-strung, how no one in the office really liked her. She would be
embarrassed in front of the police; they would be disappointed in her.

She put on her glasses before entering the movie, intending to
wear them for the rest of the night. She’d always felt protected behind the
thick lenses. Even when she witnessed something terrible—a workman’s hand
slashed open on a dagger of glass, a young boy stabbed just above the groin in
a schoolyard fight—she felt shielded by that thickness from the full
weight of these incidents. They could not touch her on the other side of the
glass. The images would not adhere to the filmy surface of her eyes.

But there was also this accompanying sense of danger: glass that
so shielded her might break if the images came too close.

The theatre darkened; the previews came up with amplified color
and volume. What little light remained reflected off all the sharp edges hidden
in the theatre. A few minutes into the movie she realized she had seen it
before, but she knew she wouldn’t be watching the screen anyway. Instead, she
gazed at the backs of people’s heads, the placement of their arms on
companions’ shoulders, their small open displays of affection, and observed how
they reacted to the murders taking place on the screen.

Maxwell had always enjoyed the company of mannequins. So intent on
looking a certain way for their male customers, they did not speak back. He
envied their makers.

He bundled Janice, the mannequin he had created, into a bag and
brought her back to Jane’s apartment during the movie—he had passed Jane
on the way over, and followed her until he was sure of her destination. If he
worked quickly, he knew he could be outside the movie theatre when the film
ended.

The lock on the apartment door had jimmied easily. Poor, naive
Jane. Her lack of informed caution filled him with a renewed tenderness toward
her. On the bed, blood dripped down the mannequin’s arm, paused in the openness
of the relaxed palm, then leapt from the forefinger to the carpet below.

He took the
Polaroids
he had made of
Jane and spread them carefully across her dining room table. He laid one
against the other, matching patterns, shadows, stances, expressions. He
permitted one image of her to kiss another image of her. His fingers lingered
over her glossy surfaces. He meditated on the silkiness of her image. He took a
pair of scissors from the drawer and laid one blade across a photograph,
bisecting her face. He moved the blades together until her head disappeared. He
raised one of the photographs, poised the twin points of the scissors over the
image of her breasts, and pierced them simultaneously with one quick jab. He
then began cutting through each of the photographs, disassembling each image of
her until he had a large pile of shiny pieces. A bottle of bright red nail
polish, retrieved from her vanity, sat poised on the edge of her fragmented
poses. He took this and began painting the pile of clippings with red swirls,
arrows, and bright red hearts.

He picked up a meat cleaver from her kitchen counter and used it
to dismember the graceful lines of the bed stead, the side table, the dresser.
He slashed through the bed clothes and started on the contents of her closet.
He arranged the mannequin within the destroyed womb of her bed, then began
hacking on it as well, imprinting it with all his secret signatures. Then,
seeing himself in the mirror of the vanity, the glittering blade in his
upraised hand, he started smashing his own image in the mirror.

Jane felt a heightened self-consciousness leaving the movie
theatre. She thought they must see her awkwardness, the wrongness in her. The
crowd seemed subdued, as was often the case when people departed this sort of
entertainment, as they attempted to extricate their thoughts and eyes from the
webs and tendrils of fantasy. She felt as if she herself were too well-defined
today, her terror too palpable against the crowd’s backdrop of oh-so-gray
emotion. It made her too-involved, vulnerable, an easy target.

A dark murmuring in the crowd off to her left, but Jane was
determined not to look. She and the others around her crunched through powdered
glass on the sidewalk, no doubt the remains of some wino’s refreshment.

Soon she was at the edge of the park, an unusually bright streetlight
mounted on the entrance above her. The sharp edges of light dropped painfully
through the narrow, dark tree branches. In the distance, she could see women
running away from the park. Beyond the sharp sculptures, Jane thought she could
hear women screaming in windows.

He saw her stumbling through the park toward him, drawn along like
a fly on the web of his personality, her face contorted as if from some
massive, internal noise. He enjoyed the feel of insects blown against his skin,
scratching across his arms and face, dancing. He withdrew the table knife from
his pocket, its blade sharpened to a thin blue edge. He stroked it slowly,
ready to make contact, ready to make love to her.

Jane saw him standing in front of the sculptures, their metal edges
surrounded by clouds of dark insects as they attempted to tear holes in the
sky. People were fleeing the park. Why was she just standing there? It was the
dapper older man from the restaurant, the one who had stolen her table knife,
the one who had been pursuing her. She wondered if perhaps a kiss, or even just
a hug, might satisfy him and make him leave her alone.

His teeth gleamed. She turned and ran. Away from her apartment,
away from the park, and as he pursued her, running ahead of her here, heading
her off there, she realized she could only go where he wanted her to go.

She ran down an alley with the man pacing steadily behind her. She
barked her left knee against a torn metal drum; dampness spread rapidly down
her leg. Cats scattered madly as she escaped the alley, as she crossed one
street and then another, as she entered a shattered block of buildings, all
condemned for the cinema complex to be erected there soon, a third of the
buildings already gnawed into submission by the parked machinery.

She made her way through the jumbles of debris which filled the
ruins, tormented by wood splinters and insect bites. Nails protruded from raw
wounds in the wood, anxious to match their scars with her own.

She stopped, staring into the night in front of her. Suddenly his
eyes peered from two holes carved out of the darkness. She spun right and broke
through a flimsy door, into a building with dim yellow lights in its cracked
windows, the only such lighting on the block.