Bad Behavior: Stories (13 page)

Her relationships with men at that time were disturbing; she had conversation after conversation with Leisha, agonizing over why she always wound up with these terrible people. She remembered them all in an embarrassing blur: the pretty, delicate drug addict, the masochistic Chinese boy, the pretentious Italian journalist, the married professor, the pompous law student, the half-crazy club owner who almost strangled her one night with his belt. The guy she met and screwed in the rest room of some tiny East Village bar, the one who later involved her in an exhausting ménage à trois with his Italian girlfriend. Leisha had violently (and primly, Susan thought) disapproved of that one. Strangely enough, after fleeing what she contemptuously labeled “conventional” and “suburban” for anything “unconventional” she could safely lay her hands on, Leisha had performed an indignant and sudden about-face, calling the bohemia she’d adopted “pretentious” and “fake.” When Susan didn’t follow, Leisha had said things like “It’s just horribly painful to even be around you when you’re involved in this adolescent, self-destructive garbage.”

It was too bad Leisha couldn’t see her now, with her steady job, her matching housewares, her kind and gentle boyfriend. It was also annoying to know that Leisha would come to some happy conclusion about her based on the current trappings of her life (“How wonderful it is that Susan has become so stable”) and then compare her favorably with the younger Susan. Susan examined her clearly lined face as she stood before the mirror. There had been changes in her during the last six years, and she thought most of them were good. But she was still, for better or worse, the same woman who had drunkenly screwed a stranger in the reeking can of a tacky bar and then run out into a cab, smiling as she pressed her phone number into his hand.

She sighed and went into the “living area,” leaning against an exposed brick wall to look out a curtainless window. It seemed as
though her friendship with Leisha had never been what she would now call a friendship at all, but a complex system of reassurance and support for self-involved fantasies that they had propped up between them and reflected back and forth. Susan now identified her early fascination with Leisha as a vicarious erotic connection with the ex-lover they had both slept with. She did not fantasize about Leisha and this man together, but she had been oddly gratified to experience secondhand the dynamic between him and this throaty-voiced little bad girl, and to reflect this dynamic back to Leisha, making it more of a drama by becoming another character in the story. Leisha had done the same, clearly enjoying her two-way link with their lover and the mysterious, contrary, perverse woman he had described to her, this tackily glamorous icon of a dirty-magazine woman who was also her reliable friend Susan. During the first year of their friendship they discussed and described him, pro and con, right down to the blond pinkness, the raised, strangely exposed quality of his genitals, and they were both greatly amused to discover that the sight of them talking and giggling together unnerved him.

She had dinner that night with her old friend Barbara. They went to a restaurant on Bleecker Street that served neat little dinners to predictably soothing music. Barbara was a jeweler who had never quite been able to become a big name in the industry, but whose work was a persistent presence in fashion magazines and department stores. She had recently separated from her husband of twelve years, a sculptor whom Susan had known. Barbara didn’t seem so much upset by the separation as appalled.

“I can’t say that suddenly we didn’t know each other, or anything like that, because I actually know John very well. It isn’t even that we don’t love each other anymore, because I do love John, even if it’s more of a sisterly love at this point. People say that it gets that way after you’ve been married awhile.” She cut her salmon steak into pieces with polite, relaxed moves, as though pausing in a discussion of art or film.

“Well, what is it, do you think?” asked Susan.

Barbara sat back. “I’m not sure how to describe it. It was like everything that supported the relationship was coming from the outside. Judging by all the signs, we were a perfectly successful couple and John was an ideal husband for me—rich, blond, tall, sensitive, ad nauseam. But even worse, it seemed as if our most intimate conversations were based on what we were supposed to be saying, and what we were supposed to be. Nothing seemed to come directly from us. Do you know what I mean? I sound like a hippie, I know.”

“No, I know what you mean.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see it that way at the time. He was just driving me crazy and I guess I was driving him crazy too.”

“I don’t know anymore how much a relationship can be based on what comes from the inside,” said Susan. “With Steve and me, it’s all based on us, and it’s very genuine and very sweet but sometimes it seems as if we’re involved in a fantasy that has nothing to do with the real world. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t know, but it can begin to feel solipsistic.” She remembered what her father had said to her during an argument when she was fifteen years old: “You want to suck people dry, you expect them to pour out their guts to you and you to them over and over and over until you know everything, and it just doesn’t work that way. Relationships are built from ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ and ‘I’m fine.’” He had said this last word like a stake was being driven through his heart.

“Do you remember Leisha?”

“I sure do. The nutty one with the musician boyfriend. Why?”

“I thought I saw her on the street today. There was this bag lady who looked just like her.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I didn’t realize that it wasn’t her until I was an inch from her face.”

“What did you do?”

“Gave her five dollars.”

She lay on Bobby’s futon and thought of Steve. He was a quiet man whom she considered brilliant. He worked in the public relations department of a magazine neither one respected. They saw each other almost every night, they had keys to each other’s apartment. They had private jokes and several cute nicknames apiece. Sometimes it seemed as if they spoke a language foreign to other people, that there was something closeted and defeated in their closeness. But they made each other happy. There was, in magazine-speak, a “real connection.” She opened her eyes. “Connection” was a vague word when applied to humans. What did it mean? She remembered a man she’d had a short affair with before she’d met Steve. He was a sweet, practical person who never read books, rarely went out, and didn’t seem to care strongly about anything except a few close friends and a martial art he practiced with fanatic zeal. They had nothing in common. In most ways he bored her. Yet when she touched him she felt a sensitivity in his body, a sense of receptivity that she rarely encountered in men. When he held her against his chest, she felt secure and protected in a way that had nothing to do with his muscular body. She felt that they were nourishing each other in some important, invisible way. But they could barely hold a conversation.

At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people—intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete. During the months that her friendship with Leisha was beginning to wane, she would think, Well, I can’t talk to her and I don’t respect her, but she has a beauty that can perhaps only be appreciated on a nonintellectual level. Like a sudden flame of piercing movement in an unexceptional dancer, or the grace and spirit of an animal.

She remembered them walking down St. Marks together doing an acting-class exercise. One person would say something and the other person would repeat it, with slight changes in words or expression. Susan thought it was pointless, but Leisha loved the exercise.

“I love to walk down the street and look at people,” began Leisha.

“You love to walk down the street looking at people.”

“People look at me when I walk down the street.”

“You like it when people look at you.”

“You like it when people look at you.”

“I’m scared when people look at me.”

“I’m scared when people look at me.”

“But you like it.”

“Do you like it?”

“It makes me nervous and I pull my earrings.”

“You pull your earrings all the time.”

“I hate to pull my earrings.”

“I want to pet your earrings.”

“You want to pet my earrings.”

It was like nursery rhymes; they were two cute girls walking down the street talking harmless nonsense, while all around them the world was in full operation. Desperate vendors displayed miserable items arranged on dirty blankets—T-shirts, ratty sweaters and vinyl belts, wrinkled old magazines, faded books and records. Garbage flapped in the streets and humans walked up and down the sidewalks, on their way to perform hundreds of actions in a remarkably orderly fashion. The sun was evenly warm and pleasant and it seemed as though this was all that anyone could expect out of life. Susan felt an ache of futile tenderness for Leisha and she impulsively reached out and stroked her four serial earrings the way she would pet a cat.

It was sometime during her second year in New York that their conversations began to seem like frantic attempts to wring each other for support that neither could give. Leisha became involved with an abusive rock musician. She called Susan, it seemed, only when she was hysterical in a phone booth after a fight with him. When he left her for a singer, Leisha went to Bellevue, was discharged, slit her wrists, went home to Michigan and returned in a state of quasi-hysteria that remained constant for the rest of the time Susan knew her. She immediately moved back in with the musician, who had been dumped by the singer. She was dropped by most of her Michigan friends, who said that she was too self-indulgent and theatrical
to cope with. Susan didn’t know if what they said was true or not, but it seemed unkind. She wanted to remain loyal to Leisha, but she was floundering so thoroughly herself that when they talked they seemed like drowning people clinging to each other for life.

The first time the musician walked out, Leisha called her at five in the morning, sobbing and pleading with her to come over. Susan got out of bed and took a cab down to Eighth Street, where ghostly men and women were tipping over garbage cans to better examine the contents. She sat in Leisha’s grandly rumpled, granule-ridden bed, holding her tight in her arms, as though the pressure of her grip should equal the intensity of Leisha’s trembling. “I feel so empty, Susan, I feel so rotten and empty inside.” Susan kissed her forehead and stroked her hair and held her until her arms were sore, but she did not know what to say. Eventually, Leisha’s trembling subsided and she slept, and Susan sat completely still, watching some fat, hideous pigeons stump around on a neighbor’s filthy window ledge while Leisha’s skin became stuck to hers and her limbs went gradually numb. Why did Leisha feel empty? What did empty mean? What should exist in Leisha that didn’t? Was it a quality that other people had? She tried to imagine what Leisha looked like inside and pictured a set of dull-colored wires, some dead, others short-circuited and flickering in the dark, discharging a profusion of heat and bright color that sparked wildly, blew fuses and went dead.

There were more of these calls and Susan began to resent them, particularly because when Susan needed someone to talk to Leisha would not return her calls. Leisha was too upset, it seemed, to do anything but fight with the musician, but she liked having Susan available as a witness. Susan felt like an accessory, especially when Leisha invited her to a dinner party that ended with Leisha and the musician flinging pasta and otherwise slugging it out while a plump drummer tried vainly to separate them. Eventually he left her for the singer again and Leisha began seeing someone else. Sometimes the three of them would go out, but the evenings would invariably conclude with Leisha drunk in a phone booth, screaming at the musician’s answering machine while her new boyfriend stared into space.

The really annoying thing about this was that just as Susan was getting ready to tell Leisha that she was feeling used, Leisha told her that she felt Susan only called her when she was depressed. Susan was flabbergasted and outraged, and so was Leisha when Susan told her why. They didn’t speak for almost a year. It was apparently during this time that Leisha finally got rid of the musician and began dating the lawyer.

The friendship resumed when they ran into each other on the street and found that they couldn’t stop talking. They began having lunch. Leisha grimaced and shrugged her shoulders and said “I don’t know” a lot when she talked about her acting. She said that she wanted to have a baby. When they walked down Eighth Street she would say, “Oh, don’t you hate these people with their standard-issue green hair standing straight up?”

“No,” said Susan.

“But it is so passé, I mean, can’t they do anything else?”

“I think teenagers need these things.”

Susan refrained from pointing out that barely a year ago Leisha’s hair also had stood straight up, but soon they argued about other things.

“We have to talk,” said Susan, and they met in a cappuccino bar frantically decorated with annoying statuettes and candelabras.

“I feel drained by you,” said Leisha. “Every time I’m around you I feel like you’re hanging on to me, that there’s something you want and I don’t know what it is, and I can’t stand it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I want from you is friendship. If you feel drained by that, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Maybe some of this is old stuff, because you seem more positive now than you did before, but I still feel the effects of those phone conversations we used to have when you would call me and say that you felt like dying.”

“Wait a minute. Don’t you remember when you’d call
me
at six
A.M.
and tell me that I had to come over right away or you were going to kill yourself?”

“You used to tell me that you didn’t see how people could stand to live. Any people.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, this is stupid. Who was the one who started all those depressing conversations, Leisha? You did, after—” She started to say “you went into Bellevue” and couldn’t.