Bad Behavior: Stories (10 page)

He drove into Manhattan about once a month to pay for girls. He went to different establishments each time, hoping to find Jane. Every time he saw a new girl he suffered from nostalgia and the irritating nag of unfavorable comparison.

When he thought of her he didn’t feel love or anything like it. He felt a sort of painful fondness. He remembered having a similar feeling when he ran into a girl he’d been crazy about in college and saw that she’d gotten fat and was buying a box of Pampers. It was strange to be having that feeling now for someone he met in a brothel.

It was almost a year later when he went into Manhattan one afternoon to do Christmas shopping. The city had a different quality during the day. When he thought of daytime Manhattan, the first thing he imagined was a pretty young woman with dark, wavy hair and an unnatural burst of red on both cheeks, walking down the wide, crowded sidewalks more quickly and sharply than anyone had to, her worn, brightly colored shoes marching in close, narrow steps, her cheap, fashionable jacket open to show her belted waist, her handbag held tightly under her arm, her head turned away from anyone who might look at her, turned so she could skim the window displays as she clipped by, one hand jammed into a pocket of her jacket, nothing swinging loose. And then he thought of a lumbering, middle-aged man in a suit, his glasses on the tip of his nose, a lace of greasy crumbs on his lapels, his briefcase clutched at his side, rolling down the street as fast as his plump body would go, jacket flapping open, his bored eyes skimming quickly over the girl and every other girl like her as he rushed to the office.

There was something sad and poignant about this image, but that didn’t prevent him from spending as much time staring at girls
as he spent shopping. At the end of the day he’d found only two gifts—a sweater-guard made of twin silver bunnies for a teenaged niece and, for Sylvia, an elegant old-fashioned wristwatch from a Village watch shop.

By the time he had found these gifts it was late afternoon and he was hungry. The watch shop was close to a particular café he liked because the food was good and because he enjoyed looking at the strangely dressed young people who often went there.

The hostess, a tall girl with a high, perspiring forehead and pleasantly freckled cheeks, smiled as she ran toward him with a long plastic menu, and immediately raced him to a corner table that had yellow flowers in a green bottle on it. “Enjoy,” she panted, and ran off. He shook off his heavy coat and looked over the crowd with relish. He picked up the menu and glanced at the table on his left. From then on the rest of the people in the room became a herd of anonymous colored shapes that could’ve been eating their fingers for all he cared. Jane was sitting next to him. She was with a boy. She glanced at him too quickly for him to see her expression. She immediately put her elbow on the table and her hand to her face.

He looked away. He squeezed the laminated menu between his fingers. He read the description of cold pasta three times. He turned his head and stared at her. She’d grown her hair out and was wearing it up in a ponytail that looked like a ball of brown wool. Even with her hand blocking her face, he could see that she wore almost no makeup, that her skin looked fresh and rosy in daylight. She was wearing an old cream-colored sweater with pink and blue tulips woven into it.

He stared at the boy who sat across the table from her. He was a homely kid in his early twenties with a thick thatch of badly cut sandy hair that roared up over his forehead in a hideous bush. His crooked tortoiseshell glasses had one arm held on by a piece of grayish masking tape, and he wore a brown sweater thick enough to be a coat. His complexion was ruddy and coarse, his expression horribly cheerful.

On a cruel impulse, he leaned forward and leered at the kid.
The boy glanced at him affably and buried his spoon in the bowl of stew he had before him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Simone’s been experiencing a lot of rejection from her old friends.”

“I’m not really rejecting her,” said Jane. “I just want to put some distance between us emotionally. Enough so that she doesn’t feel compelled to call me every time her psychotic girlfriend starts slapping her around.”

She was going to sit there and continue her conversation.

“How many times has it been now?” asked the ugly kid through a mouthful of stew.

“Five, counting the last girlfriend, three times at six in the morning. I mean, my God, where does she find these women? I didn’t think lesbians were into beating each other up.”

A waitress in a short black leather skirt and leopard-skin tights charged his table. “Are you ready to order?”

“No, no, not yet.” She smiled and roared off. He lowered his head to the plastic menu. He was not sure why this experience was such an unpleasant one.

“I mean, her life is her life,” said Jane. “But the last time she called she actually got me over there to mediate between her and this crazed, muscle-bound black belt in God knows what, and they’re screaming at each other and Simone is threatening to cut her wrist, and oh, it was a mess.”

“It sounds very theatrical.”

“It’s like not only is she going to be a masochistic asshole, she wants an audience. I know I’m being cruel.”

“I don’t think you’re cruel. Most people wouldn’t have put up with it as long as you did.”

“It’s so tragic, though. She’s such a great person. And I know at least two really attractive, charming girls who’re dying to get into her pants, but she’s not interested. She likes bitches.”

“Look, Simone sets herself up for disaster. She always has. Then she tries to drag anyone within range into it.”

They gnawed their food righteously. Jane still had her elbow up and her hand blocking her face.

“How’s the job search going?” she asked.

“It looks good so far. Like I said, I think I did all right at Ardis films. And I know somebody who used to work there. The only thing about that place is that the people are so pretentious. Everybody there is a ‘close personal friend’ of Herzog or Beth B. or somebody. Everybody has this certain pompous accent, especially when they say ‘film.’”

“That’s professional New York,” said Jane. “People who work in the arts are always that way.”

“Maybe I’ll just come work in the museum with you.”

“If we’re not on strike. And it looks like we’re going to be.”

“Could you survive on free-lance work if that happened?”

“Maybe.” She dropped the hand at her chin, exposing her face to him. “I don’t know.”

He got up from the table, looking straight ahead, and slowly gathered his coat around his shoulders. He could sense no movement of her head turning to look at him as he left the restaurant. He wouldn’t realize that he’d left the bag containing the bunny sweater-guard and Sylvia’s watch under the table until he arrived home in Westchester.

W
HEN HE SAW
her on the way to work in the morning, he ignored her, even though he hadn’t seen her for four years. They had met at the University of Michigan. It had been such a brief, disturbing affair that he didn’t even think of her as an old girlfriend. His memory of her was like a filmy scrap of dream discovered on the floor during the drowsy journey from bed to toilet, or a girl in an advertisement that catches in the cluttered net of memory and persists, waiting to commit sex acts with you later that night. Her slight body and pale movements intensified his impression. He had his Walkman on when they passed each other, and his blotted hearing made it easier for him to ignore her. She approached, her face tilted toward him, quizzical and apprehensive. She passed him and vanished, replaced by a girl in a suit and two staring, striding men with briefcases. She did not seem to notice that he ignored her; in fact she might have ignored him too. Their affair had ended badly.

He descended into the dank grayness of the subway, relishing slightly her surprise appearance. He had never gone to work this way before. It was probably the route she always took.

He wondered what kind of job she had; she had been wearing blue jeans stuffed into short, scuffed black boots and a tweed coat with a purple scarf folded around her neck. He wondered if it had embarrassed her to encounter him in a suit, obviously the holder of the better job. In college they had often discussed how one should deal with the world in order to become successful. He saw her ghost lying on its side on his rumpled sheets, resting on one elbow, her then-long hair lying randomly on her shoulders, telling him what she thought about success. He smiled a little. The subway
banged harshly into view, and he pressed forward with the sleepy, odorous mass he joined each morning.

He emerged in a cleaner area of Manhattan and entered the spinning glass doors of a gray building that was as grainy and oblong as a cartoon drawing of an office building in
The New Yorker
. He worked for an independent film distribution company that dealt mainly in foreign films. It was a prestigious place to work, and he was proud of himself for getting the job right after graduation. When he first started there, it had thrilled him to know that he could attend screenings of important films, take his friends to see them free, and meet famous people every now and then.

The office was small and contained mixed knotty-legged furniture and the square orange desks of secretaries and assistants. There was a bulletin board tacked with magazine headings and photographs slabbed together. “Hi, Joel,” said the receptionist. She was echoed by two other assistants as he walked by. He stopped to chat with Cecilia, a colleague with whom he had had an affair during his first two years at the company. Now that it was over, they were friends and often had lunch. She talked to him about her date the night before.

“I’m intrigued,” she said. “He’s done work for”—she named two fashionable directors—“and next summer, he’s going to France to work with Eric Rohmer. He’s very good-looking. And funny and intelligent. Everything.”

“Sounds perfect. Where did Mr. Wonderful take you?”

“The Gloucester House. That seafood place around Fiftieth?”

“And then what?”

She returned his playful leer and told him.

He didn’t feel belittled by Cecilia’s wealthier, more prestigious boyfriends, partly, he supposed, because he felt that he had somehow joined their ranks sheerly by virtue of his affair with her. He did feel slightly humiliated by Cecilia’s speedy rise in the company, however, which had left him behind in the same job he’d been doing for three years. “My inner time clock isn’t the same as everyone else’s.” It occurred to him that he’d said that a long time ago to the phantom girl he’d seen on the street.

He sat at his desk, looked through yesterday’s mail and then, bracing himself, he got on the phone. He spent a great deal of time calling student film groups and guilds across the country, trying to interest them in Ariel films. He had always been very good at it, but now he had to fend off the idea that it might be depressing. One of the women he currently went out to dinner with also did most of her work on the phone. She had once said to him, in her nervously irritated way, that doing most of her business by phone had begun to seem strange to her. “Think about it,” she said, gripping her noodle-bearing fork in tight, elegant fingers. “All day long you’re in that room by yourself, talking to disembodied voices. Hundreds of ’em during the year. You’re immersed in floating utterances. You don’t know these people, you don’t even know what they look like. There’s no handshake, nothing. Just a pattern of sounds coming out of a plastic thing with holes.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he said. “For comic effect.”

“Barely. I never should’ve taken this job. I’ve always hated talking on the phone.”

Why was he always attracted to these small, dramatic women?

He got on the phone and began selling Ariel’s latest release—an American film he disliked and didn’t want to distribute. The plot was ridiculous; he was surprised when it was met with such a friendly critical response. It concerned a young Chinese woman working in a Japanese geisha bar in San Francisco, who is trying to find a relative she has never seen, an uncle who disappeared shortly after a murder that took place during a meeting of an obscure, crackpot Chinese political group. The woman never finds her uncle, although someone keeps leaving photos of him in her path, along with impossible excerpts from the
I Ching
. It was idiotic, but popular with college students. “It’s not a political film per se, although there is a political element present. It’s more about communal identity and illusion,” he said to buyers.

After lunch there was a meeting about several new films under consideration. One of them was based on a novella by a famous South American writer about a child forced into prostitution by her grandmother. Listening to the discussion of the film reminded
him again of the girl he had passed on the street that morning. The subject of child prostitution almost always did, even after all this time. This was because she had told him, almost on meeting him, that she had left home at the age of fifteen and had, when she was sixteen, become a hooker for two months. She was a twenty-two-year-old college junior when they met, but the information had formed a fascinating gauze that floated over her for the entire time that he knew her.

He went to a screening of the South American film after work. It was a beautifully photographed political allegory, the kind he nearly always liked. But the frame that stayed with him had nothing to do with politics. The dark child, raped by her brutal first customer, turns her head to avoid his kiss, and a flat, brilliant fish swimming in imaginary water is superimposed, with rippling subtlety, over her face, a memory, perhaps, of the pretty fish tank in her grandmother’s demolished mansion.

When he got home he called one of the women he dated. “Nothing special,” he said. “Just checking up on you. Seeing how you are.”

She was pleased by his call, and told him she’d been depressed all week because of an agent’s reaction to her writing. He lost interest in the conversation sooner than he’d expected. He told her he had to go, but that he’d call her soon. Then he called the woman who hated telephones. She was depressed too. Her father had been calling to talk to her about how awful his life was, sometimes before she made it out of the apartment in the morning. That was a little more entertaining, but he cut that short too.