Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Page A

in his bed, reading a book about South Africa. He saw her sitting across a table, a sauce-red shrimp in her fingers, chatting about her experience as a hooker, oblivious to stares from the next table. She appeared seated in the dark of the film auditorium, her hand at her jaw, her booted legs tossed over the next few chairs, her tongue snapping sarcastically.
    “It’s so dishonest, it’s so middle-class. Who does he think he’s shocking? It’s such a reaction to convention. It’s babyish.”
    “You don’t understand the concept of subversion,” he said.
    “I know more about subversion than anybody else in this stupid town,” she said.
    The clips sped up and blurred into glimpses. Her melancholic paleness in the dark, the sheets rumpled to reveal her gray-tinged mattress. The stark lumpiness of her spine and shoulder blades as she reached across him to snatch a “snot rag” from its box. The dry toughness of her heels. The nervous stickiness of her fingers. “Hurt me,” she said. “Hurt me.”
    He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy. His focus wobbled, he slipped out again. In Ann Arbor he had pierced his ear, he had worn a beret sometimes. He had written articles in the student paper on labor unions. He had brought Andy Warhol to Cinema I. He saw himself drunk on the curb outside the Del Rio, talking with Wilson and vomiting. They were talking about politics and sex, Wilson mainly talking politics, since he rarely fucked anybody. Joel had just met Sara. “She’s great. She’s every man’s dream. I can’t tell you how, because she made me promise not to.” He turned and barfed.
    Everything was so important in Ann Arbor, so fraught with the tension held tight in the bud of fantasy before it bursts into gaily striped attempt. “I have this fantasy of becoming an anarchist on the Left Bank,” he said to Sara. “Throwing bombs and creating a disturbance.”
    “I want to become a good painter,” she said. “Or a great painter.”
    “Listen,” he said, raising himself above her on his elbow. “I want you to be strong. You’ve come so far in spite of everything. I want you to be successful.”
    “I am strong,” she said. Her eyes were serene. “I’m stronger than anyone else I know.”
    He cleared his eyes and looked once more at the querulous buildings sweating in the afternoon heat. Of course, she hadn’t been strong at all. He remembered the tremulous whine coming out of the phone during their last conversation. “I’m scared,” she’d wept. “I feel like I don’t exist, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything. I want to kill myself.”
    “Look, I grew up in a normal, happy family,” he’d said. “I’mwell adjusted. I can’t identify with this self-esteem crisis, or whatever it is you’ve got. Anyway, we’ve only known each other for a few months and I’m not obligated to listen to your problems. You should call a psychiatrist, and anyway I have to take a bath right now.”
    He couldn’t stand weak women.
    He went to a nightclub in the evening with his friend Jerry and two of Jerry’s hulking lawyer friends. They went to a club that made them and a lump of other people line up outside the door for inspection by a haughty doorman who might or might not admit them, depending on whether or not he liked their appearance. Joel and Jerry, with the lawyers, had to wait an inordinate length of time while a series of habitual clubbers insouciantly gained entrance. It could’ve been humiliating, but instead it was an intriguing form of entertainment, a piece of behavior to be observed. One of the lawyers kept saying, “I don’t want to go in there anyway. This is a drag. Let’s go somewhere else.”
    “No, it’s really good in here,” said Jerry. “You’ll see.”
    They eventually gained admission and roamed the three floors of the club, greedily looking around. Joel drank one paper cup of watered-down