Bad Behavior: Stories (21 page)

She went into the living area, turned on the radio to her favorite noncommercial station and was assaulted by horribly optimistic fiddle music. She thought: This must be the folk music slot. She snapped her tongue, turned it off and paced around the room. Their downstairs neighbor was whistling in a pealing, urgent way that usually drove her crazy but now seemed homey and reassuring simply because of its familiarity. She began to mentally list all the mean things that Alice had ever said or done to her. For example, the time Constance was overcome by a severe toothache, which turned out to be an exposed nerve, and had to walk out of a movie that she was watching with Alice. Alice had insisted on leaving with her, then complained all the way home about missing the movie. “Well, it was great riding the subway with you,” she snapped as Constance staggered toward her building clutching her jaw.

But Alice wasn’t just a straight-out bitch. It wasn’t that simple.

Her neighbor rattled his castanets with ominous urgency. Constance slumped on the miserable old mattress that she and Deana had covered with fabric and large pillows and used as a couch. The mattress depressed her because it was like something that hippies would have in their apartment and because it was the same silly mattress that, in another life, had squeaked and rattled under the various activities of the two thousand and one dates. Yet, somehow she’d become attached to it, even though it was so mushy that when she sat on it it felt as if her internal organs were collapsing into one another. She collapsed across it now, supporting herself on one elbow planted deeply in the mattress, and surveyed the dustballs collecting under the desk and chair. No matter how often she and Deana swept, these animate-looking things slunk from corner to corner and left their residue on the cats’ whiskers. The late afternoon light filtered in, eerie and faded through the gauzy float of dust, and cast an odd perspective on the room, at least from where she lay, making it look elongated and stark. The splintery floor looked craggy and forsaken with its dead dustball vegetation.

The cats, suddenly alert, ran to the door. There were footsteps, a key in the lock: Deana entered, encumbered by the cats.

“Boy, the guy downstairs is going bananas today,” she said. She tossed her hair off her forehead with the usual nervous gesture. “Didn’t you feed these guys?”

“Yeah, they just got their faces out of the dish two minutes ago.” Connie rolled up and out of the mattress as gracefully as possible and put her arms around Deana’s waist and her head on her shoulder.

“What’s this?” Deana tenderly felt the lumps of Connie’s spine, lingering in the spaces between the bones.

“Nothing. I was just spacing out and the room was beginning to look like a set for
Giant Ants from Pluto
or something.”

“What?”

“I was in a weird mood.”

“I guess so.” Deana rubbed her briskly, let go and turned toward the refrigerator. “I’m starving. I have to have some carrots or something.”

“What do you want for dinner?” Connie put one foot on the other knee and stood like an aborigine in a textbook photograph.

“I was thinking that we could order Chinese food from Empire. I’m too cranky to cook. And you’re too weird to cook, apparently.” She got the bag of carrots out of the refrigerator’s vegetable bin and began scattering the sink with bright orange peels.

“Why are you cranky?”

“The same garbage. If I’d known I was going to work for a clone of my mother, I never would’ve taken the job.” Deana rinsed her three shaved carrots meticulously, then went into the bathroom to tear off a large piece of toilet paper, folded it on the counter and put the carrots on it to drain. (One of her idiosyncrasies, which still caused Connie a pang of tender amusement, was her aversion to eating wet vegetables or fruit; she routinely dried pieces of cut fruit before putting them in her cereal.) “So what’s your problem?”

Connie shrugged and sank into the mattress again. “I ran into somebody … not somebody I dislike really, just somebody I associate with anxiety.”

“Who?”

“Somebody I haven’t seen in years. Do you remember me mentioning Franklin Weston?”

Deana snapped off the end of a carrot. “Was he the guy you used to proofread with, who became some sort of quasi-famous art critic or something?”

“Yeah.” Rat Fink, the male cat, came into grabbing range, and Constance scooped him into her lap like a large plush bunny, his eyes agog, paws helpless and limp in the air. “He’s connected with some people I used to know before I met you. One person who—who hurt me, who rejected me in fact. Did I ever tell you about Alice?”

“A bit,” said Deana, quietly crunching.

“Well, she came up in conversation and it depressed me. That’s all.” Rat Fink squeaked and flailed in her arms, wildly swatted his helpless tail, then jumped from her lap and hit the female cat on the nose. “The last time Alice and I talked was three years ago. It was when I was doing horribly, everything was going wrong, my writing was a disaster, I couldn’t breathe, and I got so depressed that I couldn’t eat. I was afraid to say anything about it to anyone and finally I decided to trust Alice enough to talk to her. Franklin kept saying ‘Connie, Alice
loves
you,’ in that stupid way he has, and I thought, Well, we’ve been friends for two years, so I told her. And she said, ‘Connie, nobody wants to be around somebody who’s unhappy.’ She told me I should see a therapist, and never called me again. She didn’t return my calls either.”

“Why didn’t you call her and yell at her?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have the spirit, I guess. I felt pretty ravaged.”

“It sounds like she was afraid of being unhappy herself,” said Deana.

“Except that she didn’t have anything to be unhappy about. She had—still has—a rich husband, a beautiful apartment, a prefabricated social life—”

“Oh, come on. Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it. She sounds like one of those.”

“All those clothes, those trips to Europe—sheer terror, I’m sure.”

“Well, in any case, it doesn’t sound like she was much of a friend. I’d say you were well rid of her.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Connie pulled herself out of the mattress, readjusted her weight and sank in at another angle. “It’s just … the whole conversation was a vivid reminder of what it was like for me back then. Because of the thing with Franklin too. I don’t remember if I ever told you about him, but just before the thing with Alice happened, he made this monstrous come-on to me, saying how much he loved me, going on and on about how beautiful and special I was, literally trying to drag me onto his mattress—it was bewildering, and I didn’t quite trust it, and as it turned out, I was right. After a week of this he suddenly disappeared, and the next time I spoke to him, like two weeks later, he told me he was getting married to somebody named Emily, which he did.”

“Another fine human being.”

“But the thing about Franklin was that he had been a friend of mine up to that point. He virtually got me published in
New York
magazine. That’s why it felt so awful. It was as if he and Alice had simultaneously decided—”

Deana left her carrots and, putting her fingers on Connie’s lips, pitched the two of them into the center of the mattress. “God, you must be really depressed. I haven’t heard you talk like this for ages.” She stroked Connie’s hair and smoothed her eyebrows. The mattress rasped and squeaked as they curled against each other like kittens in a shoe box.

“Franklin invited me to a party where Alice will be. I don’t know what to do.”

“Are you still thinking about that?”

They had just finished their take-out Chinese meal. Small white containers ranged over the table with fork handles protruding erectly from their centers; little balls of hardening rice trailed from container to plate; the cats circled beneath them with stiff, ardent steps. Deana was still lazily eating her spareribs and drinking her Vita-C.

“Connie, if this woman is such a bad memory, why don’t you just forget it? Why dwell on her? She isn’t in your life anymore.”

Connie looked at the bright, cold flower of broccoli splayed prettily on the edge of her plate. “The thing is, Alice and I had a good time together. We’d go out to the movies, and then go for coffee and talk about the movie for hours, analyzing every character and gesture and the use of music and so on. I can remember when she ordered an anchovy sandwich and one of those sweet almond drinks and said, ‘Whenever I’m with you I feel like eating stuff that’s really fun and really bad for me.’”

“Hmpf,” said Deana.

“And then there was the time that she and Roger paid for my airfare so I could visit them at their summer cottage in Pennsylvania.”

“So why don’t you go to Weston’s party and see her?”

“Because there were other times when I felt she wasn’t my friend at all. I remember her telling me about some big party she had that she didn’t invite me to. She was complaining because she had wanted to have an equal number of highly successful males and females and she couldn’t find enough successful females. It suddenly occurred to her that it was sort of rude to be talking about this in front of me when she hadn’t even asked me to come, so she said, ‘I didn’t think of you because you’re not in the field and you would’ve been bored anyway. I know you can hold your own on your own terms, but you couldn’t deal with these people on their level.’ Can you imagine?”

“Connie, were you in love with this woman?”

“What?”

“Did you have a thing for Alice?”

“No. Not at all. Why do you ask?”

“Because of the way you talk about it.”

Connie paused and admired the graceful interaction of three long cold sesame noodles lying on her plate. “Well, it wasn’t love, at least not romantic love. I’m just particularly sensitive to being betrayed by women. It’s always been easy for me to be vulnerable around men because you’re allowed to be. And I can make myself vulnerable to women sexually, but it’s really hard to do with a woman friend. I did it with Alice and she rejected me.”

Deana meditatively sucked a sparerib bone and limpidly blinked her large eyes.

Connie curled one leg up on the chair and sat on her ankle. “Once we went to see a movie about a dumb, trusting girl who gets involved with a whiny, sleazy psycho guy who tortures and kills her in the end.”

“Great movie.”

“Well, we wanted to see it because the actress had silicone implants and we wanted to see what they looked like. Anyway, Alice was so upset by this movie. She kept saying, ‘That girl was so stupid, she deserved to die. You couldn’t have any sympathy for her, she was so weak.’”

“That’s not such an unusual reaction, you know.” Deana plucked another slender red rib from its white box and began to delicately strip it of meat with her teeth.

“Okay, maybe not, but she got so obsessed about it, it was as if she was terrified at the mere idea that somebody could be a victim.”

“Well, it is frightening.”

Deana’s voice was assuming the annoyed, panicky tone it got when she was having something ugly thrust upon her.

Connie turned and looked out the narrow window that opened onto an air shaft, a blackened brick wall and a wretched little window smothered in filthy cardboard and the scabrous rag of a dead curtain. The usual fat, dirty pigeons with bleary, beady eyes gathered on the opposite window ledge like unregenerate pimps. When they had first moved here, Constance worked very hard at seeing this view as something other than horribly depressing. “Just look at it,” she’d tell herself. “Don’t make a judgment.”

“You have a way, you know, of shoving your vulnerability right into people’s faces. Or something that you call vulnerability, anyway. You sometimes do it immediately upon meeting them. You force people to deal with it.” Deana was speaking excitedly but precisely, her words like clean-cut vanilla-colored chips.

“Deana.”

“No, listen to me. Don’t be angry with me for saying this; you don’t do it as much as you did. But you used to do it a lot, and it’s kind of strange to be confronted so aggressively with somebody
else’s frailty. Some people will want to protect you, as I did, but some people will want to hurt you. Others will be merely afraid of you, for the obvious reason that it reminds them of their own frailty, which sounds a lot like your friend Alice.”

Connie drew up her legs and sat with her arms around both knees and looked out the window again. It was true that in the summer the air shaft had an oddly poetic aspect. On days when the apartment air was heavy and stifling as a swamp, noises and smells came floating up it on clouds of heat, lyrical blends of voice and radio scraps, drifting arguments and amorous sighs, the fried shadow of someone’s dinner, a faded microcosm that lilted into their apartment and related them to everyone else in the building. Of course, whether or not this relationship was a pleasant sensation depended largely on one’s frame of mind, as well as on other factors; last summer the apartment below them had been sublet to a boy who would drunkenly imitate their voices when they made love.

“Have I upset you?” asked Deana.

“No, no.” Connie looked up. “I understand what you’re saying, but that wasn’t the case with Alice. I never acted vulnerable around her. And actually I don’t really agree with you. I may have done that to you because I responded to you sexually, but in general, I don’t.”

Deana shrugged. “Well, I only know what I’ve seen. I’m just trying to come up with an answer for you because you seem so distressed.” She stood and collected the dishes. Her fingers and hands, Constance thought, had an exposed, strangely cold and receptive quality, like the nose of a puppy. As she was watching her clear the table and take the dishes to the kitchen, she could see the many aspects of her lover come forward and shyly recede with each movement; her rigid, stubborn arms, her strong shoulders positioned in a soft, demure curve, her stern chin, her luminous forehead, her odd way of stiffly holding back and gently, curiously moving forward—all spoke of her radial gradations of tenderness, sorrow and radiant, fanlike intelligence.

She woke up in the middle of the night, slumberously thinking of Franklin.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you in a way I’ve never loved
anyone.” “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “He’s just crazed,” said his friends. “Frank’s hyper, that’s all.”
What would happen if she went to his party? Would he fall all over her and rave about how glad he was to see her, then disappear for the rest of the night? Would it hurt her feelings? She imagined Alice standing near a table of ravaged snacks, holding a plastic cup of alcohol, a little hat neatly sitting on her blow-dried head. It wasn’t true that Alice had no unhappiness. She had a schizophrenic mother who lived in a state mental hospital (Alice’s family wasn’t wealthy) and who sometimes didn’t know her. Alice felt that she wasn’t accepted as an artist by her circle, and sometimes would get so upset about it that she’d scream and throw things. “I feel like a piece of shit,” she once said to Connie.