Bad Behavior: Stories (22 page)

Connie turned and put her stomach and breasts against Deana’s warm back. She thought about the first woman she’d had a crush on, a beautiful stripper with black hair and bitter blue eyes. She had gone to see her strip and was irretrievably moved by the resigned but arrogant turn of her strong chin, the way she casually offered and rigidly withheld her body, as well as her tacky black lingerie.

“You don’t love women. You’re just trying to live out some kind of porno fantasy invented by men with the corniest props you can find,” a gay woman had told her.

She turned again and placed her back in a matching curve against Deana’s. When she was a child, her mother had said, “When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it’s all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.” She remembered herself as the new girl in elementary school trying to belong with the bony-legged clusters of little girls snapping their gum and talking about things that she never discovered the significance of. She saw herself sitting alone in a high school cafeteria eating french fries and a Cap’n Crunch bar.

She opened her eyes and could barely see the big-eared outline of the tiny ceramic Siamese cat that her aunt had given her when she was twelve. At the time she had thought that it and its brood of ceramic kittens were the height of taste and elegance, and even though its face had been broken in half and Krazy-glued back together, it still seemed faintly regal and glamorous. It had been one
of the items that Alice had in mind when she looked at Connie’s dresser and said, “One of these days you’re going to wake up and look at all this stuff and say, ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with me,’ and throw it out.”

But it does have something to do with me, thought Connie.

The next day she had to leave the office because of a sudden and painful toothache. She thought it might’ve been psychosomatically induced by the memory of the exposed-nerve episode with Alice in the theater, but the dentist assured her that it was not.

“Nope, nope, nope. This is the real thing, all right. You’ve just got a lulu of a mouth, is all. Just one thing after another. But this isn’t a root canal. Just a deep, nasty filling.” He jabbed her tooth with an instrument and she gasped with pain. “I’m surprised that it hasn’t hurt you before. It’s practically into your navel.” He jabbed her again; she groaned and tried to close her mouth. “Don’t worry, though, we caught it in time.” He swiveled robustly in his chair and began to manipulate his precise, needle-nosed implements. Dr. Fangelli had very large forearms heavily strewn with hair; his hands seemed weirdly placed on his wrists, and his unevenly spaced fingers suggested undue activity in impossibly varied directions. He wasn’t a big man, but when he walked his arms and shoulders rolled like a tank tread, and he seemed to suddenly require a lot of space.

“Okay, now, we’re going to inject you with a little—” His face zoomed at her, and she had the disturbing thought that its happy, porous proximity could unhinge her jaw with the projected, exuberant desire that she open wide.

“What about the nitrous?” she asked.

He backed off. “Oh, I forgot, you like that. I keep telling you it kills your brain cells, but if you want it—” He swiveled violently away. “Carla! Carla, get me some nitrous in here, will you?”

Carla, a dark, small-nosed girl with mascara-crusted eyelashes, entered pushing the familiar gray machine, and a cool rubber, none-too-clean mask was placed over Connie’s nose. “There we go,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Crank her up, Carla. We’ll let you get nice and relaxed. Carla, get the cream two-six base.”

Connie closed her eyes. A balloon of warm air slowly expanded in her head. She thought of the commercials for Wonder Bread that she’d seen as a kid, in which a lucky little boy was borne by friendly butterflies to Wonder Bread Land, a place full of flowers and clouds and loaves of bread.

“So, Connie, are you married yet?” asked Dr. Fangelli.

“No.”

“No? I’m surprised. How old are you?”

She lay in the chair like a starfish and imagined the sound of his voice, the clink of the instruments and the squeak of chairs penetrating her body with thin rays of light, piercing through her bones and traveling gaily up and down her skeleton. She imagined the very life force of the universe, in all its horrific complexity, penetrating her every pore, charging her body with millions of tiny beams. She sighed and inhaled deeply; she loved nitrous oxide.

“Okay, we’ve really got you flying now. Feel pretty good, doncha, Connie?”

Connie tried to surmount the saliva in her mouth and managed to make an affirmative noise. She could tell from the little oil slick on Dr. Fangelli’s voice that he enjoyed seeing his patients helpless and openmouthed in his chair, that it made him feel powerful, and in fact, at this moment he
was
sort of powerful. Well, that was all right. The universe needed spaces for power to move into. It liked those spaces and valued them.

“Just a little pinch … there we go.” He grabbed her lip and wriggled it. “You feel great, don’t you? I bet we could take all your teeth out today and that would be fine with you. But of course, we’re not going to do that.” He patted Connie’s shoulder. “It’s just a small job that won’t take a minute.”

The problem was, if you’re lying there like a starfish letting the universe seep through your pores, all kinds of stuff can get in. How do you keep out the bad things?
“Don’t be such a Christian,” said Franklin. “Things aren’t good or bad; they just are.”
Well, that was a whole other line of thought. She pictured it as a wriggly, purple organism entering her space, and brusquely pushed it away. She tried to imagine a selective gray force field coming down at
the various points on her body where the bad things were trying to enter. She became confused. Franklin wasn’t altogether wrong. Buddhists and other people agreed with him. Anyway, even if you didn’t agree with him, how could you tell for sure which things were bad? The tiny rubber hose sucking the spit from her mouth felt bad to her, as did the sound of the drill. But they weren’t inherently bad, they were just dry and shrill. How did dryness and shrillness translate in terms of the universe? Surely these elements were affecting her nitrous oxide experience, but how?

Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?”

Then there were the basic things. She thought of Deana’s soft, slightly fleshy embrace, the pale skin, the severe mouth, the tilt-eyed, heavy-framed glasses that made the composed, dignified face almost ludicrous. This was also one of the basic things: to lie in the dark under a blanket in an embrace with a tender lover, to have the sensations and their emotional entourage that came under the heading “sex.” This was something that she contemplated with a feeling almost like relief, similar to how an exhausted person would view a vast, infinitely trustworthy pillow. You know what this is, everybody does. Like everybody knows what “job” and “success” mean. People who struggle for success are doing a primal thing. She had read something once about lab rats fighting for dominance, even under conditions where cooperation was needed for survival. She thought of herself at her desk reviewing manuscripts. She saw herself on the phone, talking to the editor of a piece that she’d recently completed. She felt detached as she viewed these images, which seemed more abstract than snapshots in a slide projector. They were like reminders scrawled on the square white days of a calendar. Like the imperative “call Fangelli for appt.,” they were merely the most visible emblems, the crudest symbols for something too complex to describe in the given space. The image of herself at her desk, typing, became a scrawled notation for “job,” but job was only another notation for something she barely sensed as a dark area of elements crossing and recrossing one another in an unreadable grid.

She made an effort to get out of the “work” area and saw herself
lunching with her friend Helen, in the area marked “social life.” Helen was talking about her boyfriend Patrick, who had strangled her a little bit the night before. “What I don’t want to hear is how I don’t deserve this,” said Helen. “Last year when George hit me I remember telling some girl who kept saying, ‘Helen, you deserve better than this,’ which is just such a stupid thing to say, I mean, what does it mean?” Connie tried to remember if she had been the person to say this to Helen; it sounded like something she might say. Maybe it was a stupid thing to say, but it seemed as though
something
should be said. Helen still had faint blue bruises in her neck. “I said to him afterwards, like, were you trying to hurt me or something just now?”

This image—Helen frozen in her gestures with utensils and cigarette—receded into another dark corner of her fluid mental field, so that other scenes could crowd the picture. There was Connie, sometimes with Deana, sometimes alone, at a nightclub where a man was saying to her, “With that hat on, you look like you’ve got a piece of the world in your pocketbook,” or at bars and parties, surrounded by well-dressed strangers who wielded their personalities like weapons and shields when they approached her, drinks in hand.

In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide–induced, she might’ve cried.

She opened her eyes and looked at the stiff black hairs on Dr. Fangelli’s chin, and then at his placid, daydreaming gray eyes. Past them was the shiny, drab-colored machinery that was so forbidding to her but probably so familiar and homey to him. She shifted her gaze and met Carla’s kind, squirrel-bright brown eyes. Was Carla’s job in this office a set of symbols for her too, or was it an entity complete in itself, an efficient series of movements and interactions that emerged wholly and naturally from her needs and abilities like a bouquet of trick flowers, opening when you least expect it?

“Doing all right, aren’t you?” asked Carla.

Connie made a faint affirmative half moan.

Carla made a small sensual laugh in her throat. “She’s really enjoying herself now,” she said.

“And we’re allllmost done,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Just a little …” He did some dull, painful thing that caused a nasty taste in her mouth.

She returned to her office in a mildly muddled state that was both combative and uncertain. She stopped in the ladies’ room to look at herself in the mirror and saw with an unhappy loss of confidence that one side of her face had fallen into a jowly state of despair and that her eyes looked terribly tired and sad. She put on more makeup and entered the office. Luckily, there were only three people there, two assistants and an associate whom she liked.

On her desk was a copy of a story being considered for publication. She read it twice and took it into the associate editor’s office.

“Steve,” she said, “do you like this?”

“What’s wrong with your mouth?”

“Ignore it. I look spastic, but I’m not, I just went to the dentist. Do you like this?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s—”

“No, I mean really. Tell me the truth. Do you like this?”

Steve looked provoked, then cornered, then he marshaled himself. “Yes, Connie, I like it. It’s terse, it’s quirky, it tricks you into thinking you’re safe, and then you find yourself on the edge of a cliff.”

“Yeah, so does everything else we publish here.”

“Connie, what do you want me to say? I know you feel frustrated about what we’re publishing, but this is what Fulford likes. I don’t have a problem with it.”

“But I thought you liked the thing I showed you a few weeks ago.”

“I did like it! I liked it a lot! But Fulford didn’t.”

“He never likes anything I like. I don’t know why he hired me.”

“You don’t like many things. If you did blurbs for novels they’d read ‘Mediocre! raves Constance Weymouth.’”

“You like everything.”

“I’m ready to like things. That’s true.” He leaned back in his chair and tipped his head backward as if he were on a talk show hosted by an obnoxious crank. Then he banged his chair forward again and smiled.

They talked a little more; Steve said the quality of a text depended largely on the frame of reference you imposed on it. Connie disagreed. They made a few jokes and Connie went back to her cubicle. She sat quietly as her jaw woke up, and watched the coarsely sweatered back of an assistant move from side to side at her desk. Another assistant, a young, pretty woman who believed in what she was doing, distracted her by walking from one spot in the office to another, and Connie reflected that in a better state of mind she would be comforted by the slow, predictable sight of people engaged in meaningful activity. Now it induced ragged reverberations of her nitrous oxide experience, and she had an exhausting flashback of her haggard self carrying large chunks of her life, compressed into brightly colored packages that were marked “Constance the writer,” “Constance the social being,” “Constance as part of a couple”—all layering plain Constance alone in her apartment, waiting for Deana in the dark, under a blanket, arms wrapped around herself. She saw each marked package as a weight she carried back and forth, setting one down in a random spot so she could pick up another and stagger off in a new direction.

She put her head down on her desk.

On her way home from work she decided that she would go to Franklin’s party.

“Why?” asked Deana. “After all this talk?”

“Because I feel like I need to end a cycle or something. Maybe I can get drunk and sock Alice.”

“You’re not serious, I hope.”

“No. But I might stare her down.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t go with you if it’s tomorrow. I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won’t be fit for human society.”

The party had apparently reached its peak an hour or two before she came. People looked as though they were bunched according to who grabbed whose arm on their way to the bathroom, and were leaning against walls, the women nodding their heads a lot. Some of them turned toward her and smiled with vague goodwill as she walked to the center of the room. She thought she recognized the lone couple dancing in a corner, eyes lowered in benign concentration as they shifted their weight from hip to hip and jogged their hands around their waists. She did recognize the man with hysterically bright blue eyes who was aggressively pacing around with a handful of greasy peanuts, and looked the other way.