Bad Behavior: Stories (15 page)

“I have a Workshop membership and every now and then I get invited to fabulous parties, where all the boys wear long coats and earrings, and all the girls have hair like yours.” He beamed.

She thought: At this rate, I’m not going to have to do anything.

They talked about her past, her coldly perfect father, her sad, passive mother, her sister on lithium, her college major, her first romance. He listened gravely. He began to stroke her arm hairs, and then her arm.

He had a seductive touch; she moved closer to him and he put his arms around her. He caressed her as if he were trying to discover the places she most inhabited—not romantically, but tenderly, with a sense of exploration. She was not aroused, exactly, but it was pleasant; it had been a long time since anyone had touched her like this.

She murmured, “The way you touch reminds me of my mother.”

“How so?”

“Her touch is very seductive. I don’t even like her, but when she starts to touch me, I suddenly become totally vulnerable to her. It’s frightening.”

He liked this a lot. “That’s beautiful,” he said.

The intercom buzzed, announcing that they had ten more minutes. She “took care of him” quickly, and they stood to dress. She stuck her feet back in her high heels, and cheerfully tore the sheets off the bed. He zipped up his pants, handed her an extra twenty and told her it had been a relaxing hour. She said yes, actually, it had been for her too, and then trotted off to stuff the wadded-up sheets in a reeking wicker basket. She walked him downstairs,
feeling ungainly and knees-out in her tight skirt. She was aware of him looming and lurking darkly behind her as she came under the speculative, moody gaze of three potential Romeos.

“And here’s Perry,” said Christine brightly.

“Hi,” she said, bobbing her head. She turned to Bernard and rolled her eyes as she walked him to the door, knowing that he would enjoy this open display of contempt.

“See you soon,” he said. He held her against him for a second, and she experienced a disorienting sense of comfort and safety that made walking back into the invading stares of her prospective boyfriends almost voluptuously exposing. She stood before them, and the canned laughter sounded once more.

That night she went to a group show at a small gallery in Soho that included work by her friend Sandra. As usual, she was one of the few non-artists there. Sandra, nervous and carefully chic in a bright blue pillbox hat and a long black velvet skirt, introduced her as “my friend Stephanie, who writes for
The Village Voice
.” This impressed people, even when Stephanie said, “I just wrote one thing for the
Voice
and that was a year and a half ago.”

“Yes, but you look like a writer for
The Village Voice
,” said a painter.

“That sounds like an insult to me.”

“It’s not an insult, but it’s not a compliment either.” He barked out a laugh.

Stephanie attached herself to another conversation about the embarrassing failure of an art gallery that she had never heard of, which, after a rapid shift of participants, became a discussion about somebody’s review in the
Times
versus somebody’s review in the
Voice
. Sandra rapidly crossed and recrossed the floor, darting in and out of conversations with apparent pleasure and animation. “Nobody’s
here
,” she hissed finally, near the hors d’oeuvres, even though there were dozens of people present.

Stephanie wandered from conversation to conversation, having an almost panicky feeling that although there were nice, interesting people in the room, the situation, for all its seeming friendliness
and ease, precluded her from connecting with the nice and interesting aspects of them. She tried to figure out why this was and could not, beyond the sense that the conversations around her were opening and closing according to the subtle but definite rules that no one had told her about. Then she saw Dara, Sandra’s other non-artist friend, standing regally alone. Dara was trying to become a fashion designer, and she looked unusually beautiful that night in a strapless satin dress that was dramatically faded in the middle where someone had probably spilled something on it a long time ago. Stephanie had always admired Dara, even though she was not friendly and had once been very rude to Stephanie on the phone. But Dara seemed pleased to see her and hung on to her presence throughout a shockingly dull conversation that stumbled awkwardly through Sandra’s work, Sandra’s husband’s work, a writer Stephanie liked and a movie. Still, Stephanie resolutely held on to her idea of Dara as an interesting person. She said, “You seem like someone who is at home in the world.”

A startled look flared in Dara’s eyes; she glanced at Stephanie with disappointment. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said shortly. “I doubt you know anyone less at home than me.”

They stood silently, Stephanie’s silence a disheartened one. She had thought she was making a penetrating remark that would impress Dara with her perceptiveness; instead she had revealed herself to be a person living in a dreamworld. This was always happening.

The next day at Christine’s, she felt like a person in a dreamworld, specifically a
Playboy
cartoon dreamworld inhabited by beautiful, moronic prostitutes in short pink negligees lolling about on cushions with white cats while large men in suits smiled at them. It was a strangely pleasant sensation. It had been a slow afternoon, and the women lounged on the couch with their high heels off and their feet up, watching TV and eating heavily salted french fries from damp carry-out containers.

Stephanie was talking to Brett, an alert Chinese girl with waist-length hair. Brett had been in “the business” for ten years, since she was seventeen, and she said she was ready to leave. She told
story after story about how customers were always trying to take advantage of her, humiliate her or intrude on her sympathies in some grotesque way. “It was just awful,” she said, concluding a particularly obnoxious story. “It was as if he’d done it almost, having to listen to him say it, you know?” She leaned forward for a handful of french fries, stuck some in her mouth and chewed meditatively. “When I was younger I had more energy to fight them off. No matter what they said or did, I could keep them away from my real self. But it gets harder and harder and I don’t know how much longer I can go on. I want to do something else anyway. I’m bored.”

The other women began to talk about the terrible things men had done or tried to do, and how they’d thwarted them or gotten them back. There was a tenacious sense of defended pride in the room, which Stephanie felt both distant from and very much a part of. She thought of how pathetic this pride would seem to someone like Sandra, who had once disgustedly described a brief stint as a cocktail waitress as making her feel “like a whore.”

The buzzer rang and Bernard the lawyer appeared, hands in his pockets, a sophisticated fellow playing the part, with mild amusement, of the casual businessman about to enjoy himself with a cheap woman. Stephanie smiled at him and sank back into the couch, feeling she was a sophisticated woman playing cheap. Soon they were back in the Shadow Room.

“Do you remember those cartoons in
Playboy?
” she asked as they lay, not yet touching, on the bed. “The ones about prostitutes with the same faces and bodies lying on pillows, wearing lacy nighties? And the men who were standing with flowers and chocolates in their hands?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It’s funny, because I used to look at those things when I was ten and eleven years old and—well, I didn’t really know what prostitutes were, but it looked like a good thing from what I could see in
Playboy
. They were beautiful and they didn’t have to do anything but sit on cushions and men loved them. So I told my mother I wanted to be a prostitute when I grew up.”

“That’s fabulous.” He smiled as though this was the most entertaining thing he’d heard all week.

“Naturally she freaked out, and my parents sent me to a psychiatrist.”

“Oh, good Lord.”

“But after a few visits the psychiatrist decided I was normal. I mean, I had good grades and friends and everything, so I didn’t have to go anymore.” She shrugged. “My poor sister wasn’t so lucky. He had her on lithium by the time she was eleven.”

“But the psychiatrist was wrong about you, wasn’t he?”

She laughed, but she thought: He was not wrong. I am actually pretty normal.

“So that’s what you’re doing. You’re playing prostitute.” He stroked her face and hair.

She was startled that he seemed to be thinking in the same terms as she had been downstairs. She pictured him with his orange-haired, chain-smoking performance artist, and she had an almost visual sense of his delight in this educated woman who flew in the face of society, deliberately taking on a role that he probably considered demeaning, and then analyzing it. “Actually, I’m not playing. This is for real. I’m not going to give you your money back.”

“You know what I mean.” He drew her against him and lightly scratched her head.

“But even as a kid I realized there were problems with the customer-hooker romance. Because once, when I was about twelve, I was in my father’s study rubbing his neck—I used to do that all the time for him—and there was this
Playboy
calendar over his desk and some babe was on it and I said to him, ‘Do you like her?’ and he said, ‘Sure I do,’ and I said, ‘Would you like to meet her?’ and he looked shocked and said, ‘No, she’s just a dumb broad.’ And I was appalled.”

Bernard’s smile almost became a laugh. “Well, but you know he was lying. He would’ve loved to meet her.”

“It’s not funny. I was hurt by what he said. I was hurt for her.”

“No, I know it’s not funny. I’m sorry.” He lay on top of her and kissed her, cupping her head tenderly in his hands. They kissed
and touched each other and then broke apart to talk some more. She told him about the conversation with Brett and how it made her feel. She told him about the opening she had been to the night before, leaving out her almost frightened sense of isolation. She asked what his wife was like.

“She’s intelligent, and very independent. She’s better at being alone than I am. And she’s adventurous in her own way. Last year she went to South America by herself, which isn’t something most woman her age would do.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“What does she do?”

“Teaches high school, which she likes very much. I enjoy her, even if it isn’t passionate. We actually have separate bedrooms.”

“I couldn’t be married like that,” she said. “There would have to be passion.”

“You’re very idealistic.”

“You’re not?”

“No, I’m not. Anyway, marriage isn’t about passion for me. We’re excellent company for each other. And I don’t want to be alone.”

They were silent for a moment; she gently felt his earlobes.

“Why do you come to places like this?” she asked.

“Why do you think?”

“I really don’t know. How any grown man can accept what happens here as sex is beyond me. You could have affairs if you wanted, I’ll bet. You don’t seem that interested in sex here, anyway. So why do you come?”

“To meet fascinating creatures I’d never meet in the usual course of my life. Like you.” He touched her nose and smiled.

Of course, she realized what he liked about her. He loved the idea of kooky, arty girls who lives “bohemian” lives and broke all the rules. It was the kind of thing he regarded with a certain admiration, but did not want to do himself. He had probably had affairs with eccentric, unpredictable women in college, and then married the most stable, socially desirable woman he could find.
This did not make her feel contempt or draw away from him. She liked this vicarious view of herself; it excited and reassured her. She wasn’t a directionless girl adrift in a monstrous city, wandering from one confusing social situation to the next, having stupid affairs. She was a bohemian, experimenting. The idea made rock music start playing in her head. She kissed him with something resembling passion.

“I would like to actually fuck you sometime,” he said. “But I don’t think you enjoy sex here. I don’t want it if you can’t enjoy yourself.”

She smiled and tweaked the light layer of flab at his waist. “But that doesn’t apply to blow jobs, right?”

After he left, the day suddenly became very busy. Most of the men she saw were unpleasant, and she found herself taking refuge in the idea of Bernard the lawyer as she endured their malodorous company.

That night Sandra called her. Stephanie was sitting on her bed eating orange sorbet from a pint box and trying to view her life in a positive way, and she welcomed the interruption.

“Hi,” said Sandra. “You’re not writing, are you?”

“No, in fact, I was avoiding it.”

“Again?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Sandra sighed. “Maybe you’re trying to write at the wrong time of day. Most people have times of day when they’re more productive than others. Have you considered that?”

“No, I haven’t. Anyway, I have a job, you know.”

“That’s right, I forgot. You don’t have as much leeway as I do.” Sandra was supported by her husband, a painter whose father had given him a building. Stephanie had told Sandra that she was working as a maid for an agency that had several apartments on the Upper West Side. In her mind, this was grubbily close to the truth, and it rendered her conveniently unreachable by phone. She felt that Sandra viewed her fictional job with a mixture of secret repugnance and respect, astounded that a person she knew could do such a job without any apparent loss of self-esteem.

Sandra began to talk about the opening. After Stephanie had left, an important East Village art critic had arrived, and Sandra had hoped he would pay attention to her. But he ignored her completely and openly admired the work done by her friend Yolanda.

“I know it’s petty, but by the end of the night, I could hardly speak to her. It’s not just this one incident either; she’s always getting attention—ever since she started putting those little beads in her hair and going out with that guy Serge. And I know what this sounds like, but sometimes I think people respond to her just because she’s black and they want to prove they’re not racist. I mean, I know she’s good, but I work all the time, and she only does one painting every few months. And her stuff is derivative as hell. I mean, I know everybody’s derivative in a way, but you know what I mean. It makes me feel like a piece of shit. Am I being awful?”