Ugly Behavior (20 page)

Right then I knew I was supposed to correct her. No, hon. You’re
one smart lady, you are. Don’t let him put you down. He just doesn’t understand
you. That had always been my role. But I just couldn’t do it. Maybe it was
because she smelled so bad. How could you tell a woman she was smart when there
was crap all over the walls and the floor and she smelled so bad? “You better
get yourself cleaned up.” It was all I could think of to say. “Maybe I can help
you.” I prayed she’d say no. I was trying to figure out a good exit line. I
wasn’t liking being alone in the dark with her, even though before that night
I’d wanted it all the time. You and me in the dark, hon. And then she’d be
kissing me all over, her lips wet, her teeth scraping just enough to excite me.
Wet kisses in the dark. She’d been so good at that. Who cared that she was a
lousy housekeeper? I wasn’t her husband.

“I can’t get clean. Not this time. No, not going to work this
time.”

“C’mon, Liz. How much you have to drink, anyway? He’ll be back.
Probably bring you some candy and roses. Walter’s got no spine. You told me
that yourself.”

She started laughing again, and I just wanted to leave. I couldn’t
stand being in that room. I thought I was going to be sick. “No, not this time,
lover,” she said. “You’re lying about that one. And you were always so good at
lying. Guess you’re losing your touch.” She clamped her lips over my mouth
then, and stuck that thick, salty tongue of hers inside me, and then I was so
full of the sad smell of her I couldn’t breathe anymore. I started to choke and
I pushed her away. My hands came away from her shoulders warm and sticky.

“Christ! What is this stuff? You throw up on yourself, Liz? Jesus!
It’s like you’ve been swimming in garbage!”

“Oh, I have, lover. You and me… pure garbage. Walter knew that,
too. My Walter wasn’t such a dumb man after all. He knew garbage when he
smelled it. That’s more than I can say for you, lover.”

“I don’t need this crap.”

“Oh? You get this ‘crap’ at home, lover? Is that why you’re with
me three nights a week? Not enough crap at home?”

“I’m outta here.” I pushed myself off the damp carpet and leaned
onto the edge of the bed. That’s when she grabbed my ankle and twisted, trying
to pull me back down. I jerked myself away from her and sprawled across the bed.
On top of somebody else.

A hand caught in the lining of my coat. Trying to unsnag myself I
rolled over a face. The lips were wet, smearing across me. The chest was wet.
Liquid had pooled in the hollow of the belly.

“
Whaaa
… !”

Liz’s damp chuckle stopped me before I could get all the way off
the bed. Then she had her hands around my ankles again. “You like threesomes,
lover? Walter’s not
gonna
mind.”

I cried out and tried to kick her but it only made me lose my
balance. Before I knew it the dark came up and slammed me in the face. The fuse
blew. And I was out.

I don’t know how long I was unconscious. Probably not all that
long, but long enough for Liz to crawl up on top of me, pinning me to the
floor. She was a small woman, but right then she felt like she weighed three
hundred pounds. Her clothes were soggy, heavy against my skin. She’d gotten my
coat off. And my shirt. My pants were unzipped and something cold, something
metal, was rubbing up against me down there.

“Liz…” I knew it came out like a hiss, like I was all excited. It
scared me, that was all. I couldn’t help it.

“Make love to me, lover. That’s what you do. Love me, now. Garbage
against garbage.”

“Liz.” I sucked air. She’d jabbed the cold metal hard into me.

She laughed, then she moaned, like the noises I was making excited
her. But I couldn’t help it. “Shut up and kiss me,” she said, and her wet lips
moved across my face and found my mouth, and then I recognized that taste.
Maybe I’d recognized that taste all along and just couldn’t admit it. That
warm, salty, metal taste. That coppery smell.

I turned my head away. “No.”

She slapped me across the face and jabbed harder with the cool
steel. Something thick dripped off her head onto my nose, into my eyes. She
bent down and she kissed me. She forced my lips open with her teeth and she bit
them. “Walter likes to watch,” she said. “We’re going to let him watch now.
Usually he does it from the closet, in the dark. He told me all about it. We
had no idea; Walter’s not so dumb. But watching us from the bed is better. That
way he won’t miss anything.”

“Liz…” My throat hurt; she’d clogged it with her own blood. “I
cared about you.”

“Liar!” She tried to scream it but she couldn’t. “Walter told me
all about it while he was using the knife on me, the one that was lying by the
roast beef just waiting for him. I always tried to get him dinner on time. He
told me how he’d watched you with your wife and kids, how happy you looked, how
you kissed her every morning. The way she smiled. Walter knew all about men, he
told me all about men. How they’re always looking for something on the side.
And how it isn’t personal. How it isn’t personal at all.”

“Liz, please…” I started to choke. Then I started to cry.

“Please yourself, lover. Make love to me. Make love to me with my
husband watching us. Make it good because it’s the last time. Walter saw to
that. He’s hurt me bad.”

She jabbed the gun into my groin. “Oh, Jesus, don’t hurt me!”

“I’m not going to hurt you, just slip out of these pants. I’ll
help you, if you help me. Take your pants off.” Wiggling, squirming in panic, I
did. “Good. Good. I won’t hurt you. Just make love to me and I won’t hurt you.
I won’t shoot you. I promise. You’ll have a good time. Make love to me while
Walter watches from the bed. I’m dying, lover. I’m dying hard. Make love to me
hard. Do it right and all the time you won’t be able to tell if I’m still
alive, or if I’m dead yet. You won’t be able to tell.”

She was right. I couldn’t.

It is the smell of the body laboring for survival. It is the stink
of fear. It is the odor of cooking and cleaning and the lingering aroma of sex
in darkened rooms. It is the reek of poverty and the sharp tang of desperation.
It is the sour bouquet of bodies aging into death, the whiff of illness and the
fragrance of failing organs. It is the scent and the sense of sadness that
comes with realizations hard won. It is the stench.

Riley had no use for uncleanliness. He’d been raised by
grandparents who by the end of their lives had lost their sense of smell. They did
not know how unpleasant the odors from their bodies had become, although he
thought his grandmother sometimes guessed, judging by her periodic and frantic
binges of scrubbing and scouring on hands and knees as if praying before some
ferocious god. But these spells would pass and when next he was in her
proximity his nose would hum and his eyes water from the smell of her dying in
the small rooms of their farmhouse.

His grandfather claimed that food had turned on him years back,
barely able to nourish him and unpleasant in both taste and digestion. He’d
spent long hours each day locked in the bathroom, and walking around the house
smelled like a leaky oil furnace ready to explode.

Riley had left his grandparents at a relatively young age,
unwilling to wait with them to some inevitable and unpleasant conclusion. He’d
felt compelled to travel to the city in order to secure employment, even though
it was the most unsanitary place he could imagine. Here you were forced to walk
closely with other people, breathing the air directly from their mouths,
rubbing against their sweat and touching what tens of thousands had touched
before. Whenever possible he bundled up well, covering as much skin as he
could, wearing gloves when he thought he could without drawing too much
attention. For the last thing he wanted to do was to draw attention to himself.

“A quarter, please, sir? All I need is a quarter.”

At first he couldn’t find the source of the request and wondered
if he’d imagined it or caught a stray fragment of conversation from some
passing car. Then he saw the rag-wrapped figure, so close to him he should have
not only seen but smelled it.

A woman. There were no obvious signs of femininity, only a patch
of unwashed face peering from the rags, but somehow unmistakably a woman. “What
was that?” He was too off-balance to think of stepping away.

“A quarter, a dime, whatever you can spare?” A rank scum on
corn-colored teeth. Riley could not imagine what she could have eaten to create
such a stench. Her eyes were lightly shielded by the worn cloth covering her
head. Riley thought of untouchables, lepers, blind beggars in some Asian slum.

“You’ll just… you’ll just drink it away!” he stammered, then
stepped back, shocked by his own boldness. He’d always followed a simple policy
regarding the city’s homeless population: for him they would not exist. He
wouldn’t talk to them; he wouldn’t even see them.

The beggar’s grin cast a yellow glow over the lower part of her
face. She couldn’t have looked more frightening if she’d transformed into some
sort of animal. And the stench, like half a dozen things dying in her mouth. “A
simple coin, sir? It’s all I ask. Little trouble for you, yet such great
benefits will it bring to me.”

For pity’s sake. He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of her
statement: what good would a quarter or a dime do her? She couldn’t even buy a
candy bar for that.

But still he found himself reaching into his pocket, pulling out
what jingled there: a quarter, two quarters, a dime and a few pennies. He
shoved them into her outstretched palm and turned to escape. But she grabbed
his wrist, her hand a claw-like thing malformed by layers of callous and stain,
and to his amazement pulled him to her, and pulled him into the alley behind,
where in the darkness she surrounded him with her rank lips and sour laughter
and reeking thighs, and took him out of his own head for an unknown period of
time.

And when he struggled his way back, she lay dead at his feet, rags
torn away and bits of cloth scattered like flesh after a predator’s feast, and
he saw how lovely she had been under her rags, and wondered how she could have
influenced him to do such a terrible thing.

He could not think of such things for long; there was too much to
do. He picked up her body—acutely aware that her smell had subsided, that
in death she smelled rather pleasantly—and struggled with it into the
darkest recess of the alley, where torn boxes and cloth all the colors of mud
and a range of garbage resided, where some awful creature might have made its nest,
and laid her there, and covered her with what was available, even though it
repulsed him to have his hands in such filth.

He made his way out of there as quickly as he could and did not
look back.

The smell of fingers was the absolute worst, because they were
what touched the world most often and delved into the quiet, hidden places of
your body. Sometimes he saw people sniffing their fingers upon exiting public
restrooms. Some of them actually appeared to take satisfaction in what they
were smelling.

He supposed feet were second, encased in their cloth tubing all
day, falling asleep and dreaming of better places to go.

For the next few days, Riley treated his memory of the incident
with the same distance and detachment he applied to all things of these
odiferous streets. In a place the size of this city, events were occurring at
all times, stories were being made, individual dramas were playing and
replaying at a bewildering rate. Life in the city was like television: you
turned it on and left it on for hours at a time, while you ate, while you
talked on the phone, while you made love. You paid no more attention to one
program than any other. It was all background noise.
 

Once, while waiting for a bus near the spot of the incident with
the beggar, he had a stray thought that at least with her gone there might be
one less foul smell to contend with. Testing his theory, he sniffed. In fact
the city appeared to smell worse than ever.

Living in the city, Riley had found it necessary to shower two and
three times daily simply to wash away the grime before it interacted with
everyday bodily secretions to create a smell. He tried out various kinds of
body scrapers, every variety of loofa. Sometimes his skin bled. It was amazing
how deep the filth could go. Even after hours of scraping, he could rub his
thumb across the back of his heel and a little pellet of skin and dirt and
smell would appear like some sort of spontaneous egg. An egg of smell, smell
made solid.

Sometimes he was so aware of the smells that he forgot to speak,
and people thought him rude. But when the smells were at their strongest there
was no need for words.

Riley traveled from restaurant to restaurant for his meals, tried
not to repeat himself. He distrusted them all but figured he was less likely to
receive a fatal dose of food poisoning if he avoided repeat dining. He liked to
travel by alley, which he supposed was actually the dirtiest route a person
could take, but gave him a chance to check out the dumpster of the restaurant
he intended to eat in before entering the door. That way if he found some
insurmountable violation of cleanliness—say the carcass of a cancerous
cow—he could simply avoid that particular restaurant.