Bad Behavior: Stories (6 page)

They were staying in his grandmother’s deserted apartment in Washington, D.C. The complex was a series of building blocks seemingly arranged at random, stuck together and painted the least attractive colors available. It was surrounded by bright green grass and a circular driveway, and placed on a quiet highway that led into the city. There was a drive-in bank and an insurance office next to it. It was enveloped in the steady, continuous noise of cars driving by at roughly the same speed.

“This is a horrible building,” she said as they traveled up in the elevator.

The door slid open and they walked down a hall carpeted with dense brown nylon. The grandmother’s apartment opened before them. Beth found the refrigerator and opened it. There was a crumpled package of French bread, a jar of hot peppers, several lumps covered with aluminum foil, two bottles of wine and a six-pack. “Is your grandmother an alcoholic?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” He dropped his heavy leather bag and her white canvas one in the living room, took off his coat and threw it on the bags. She watched him standing there, pale and gaunt in a black leather shirt tied at his waist with a leather belt. That image of him would stay with her for years for no good reason and with no emotional significance. He dropped into a chair, his thin arms flopping lightly on its arms. He nodded at the tray of whiskey, Scotch and liqueurs on the coffee table before him. “Why don’t you make yourself a drink?”

She dropped to her knees beside the table and nervously played with the bottles. He was watching her quietly, his expression hooded. She plucked a bottle of thick chocolate liqueur from the cluster, poured herself a glass and sat in the chair across from his with both hands around it. She could no longer ignore the character of the apartment. It was brutally ridiculous, almost sadistic in its absurdity. The couch and chairs were covered with a floral print. A thin maize carpet zipped across the floor. There were throw rugs. There were artificial flowers. There was an abundance of small tables and shelves housing a legion of figures; grinning glass
maidens in sumptuous gowns bore baskets of glass roses, ceramic birds warbled from the ceramic stumps they clung to, glass horses galloped across teakwood pastures. A ceramic weather poodle and his diamond-eyed kitty-cat companions silently watched the silent scene in the room.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I hate this apartment. It’s really awful.”

“What were you expecting? Jesus Christ. It’s a lot like yours, you know.”

“Yes. That’s true, I have to admit.” She drank her liqueur.

“Do you think you could improve your attitude about this whole thing? You might try being a little more positive.”

Coming from him, this question was preposterous. He must be so pathologically insecure that his perception of his own behavior was thoroughly distorted. He saw rejection everywhere, she decided; she must reassure him. “But I do feel positive about being here,” she said. She paused, searching for the best way to express the extremity of her positive feelings. She invisibly implored him to see and mount their blue puffball bed. “It would be impossible for you to disappoint me. The whole idea of you makes me happy. Anything you do will be all right.”

Her generosity unnerved him. He wondered if she realized what she was saying. “Does anybody know you’re here?” he asked. “Did you tell anyone where you were going?”

“No.” She had in fact told several people.

“That wasn’t very smart.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t know me at all. Anything could happen to you.”

She put her glass on the coffee table, crossed the floor and dropped to her knees between his legs. She threw her arms around his thighs. She nuzzled his groin with her nose. He tightened. She unzipped his pants. “Stop,” he said. “Wait.” She took his shoulders—she had a surprisingly strong grip—and pulled him to the carpet. His hovering brood of images and plans was suddenly upended, as though it had been sitting on a table that a rampaging crazy person had flipped over. He felt assaulted and invaded. This
was not what he had in mind, but to refuse would make him seem somehow less virile than she. Queasily, he stripped off her clothes and put their bodies in a viable position. He fastened his teeth on her breast and bit her. She made a surprised noise and her body stiffened. He bit her again, harder. She screamed. He wanted to draw blood. Her screams were short and stifled. He could tell that she was trying to like being bitten, but that she did not. He gnawed her breast. She screamed sharply. They screwed. They broke apart and regarded each other warily. She put her hand on his tentatively. He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for him to get inside them and, once there, smear himself all over their innermost territory until it was no longer theirs but his. His wife did not have this empty quality, yet the gracious way in which she emptied herself for him made her submission, as far as it went, all the more poignant. This exasperating girl, on the other hand, contained a tangible somethingness that she not only refused to expunge, but that seemed to willfully expand itself so that he banged into it with every attempt to invade her. He didn’t mind the somethingness; he rather liked it, in fact, and had looked forward to seeing it demolished. But she refused to let him do it. Why had she told him she was a masochist? He looked at her body. Her limbs were muscular and alert. He considered taking her by the neck and bashing her head against the floor.

He stood abruptly. “I want to get something to eat. I’m starving.”

She put her hand on his ankle. Her desire to abase herself had been completely frustrated. She had pulled him to the rug certain that if only they could fuck, he would enter her with overwhelming force and take complete control of her. Instead she had barely felt him, and what she had felt was remote and cold. Somewhere on her exterior he’d been doing some biting thing that meant nothing to her and was quite unpleasant. Despairing, she held his ankle tighter and put her forehead on the carpet. At least she could stay
at his feet, worshiping. He twisted free and walked away. “Come on,” he said.

The car was in the parking lot. It was because of the car that this weekend had come about. It was his wife’s car, an expensive thing that her ex-husband had given her. It had been in Washington for over a year; he was here to retrieve it and drive it back to New York.

Beth was appalled by the car. It was a loud yellow monster with a narrow, vicious shape and absurd doors that snapped up from the roof and out like wings. In another setting it might have seemed glamorous, but here, behind this equally monstrous building, in her unsatisfactory clothing, the idea of sitting in it with him struck her as comparable to putting on a clown nose and wearing it to dinner.

They drove down a suburban highway lined with small businesses, malls and restaurants. It was twilight; several neon signs blinked consolingly.

“Do you think you could make some effort to change your mood?” he said.

“I’m not in a bad mood,” she said wearily. “I just feel blank.”

Not blank enough, he thought.

He pulled into a Roy Rogers fast food cafeteria. She thought: He is not even going to take me to a nice place. She was insulted. It seemed as though he was insulting her on purpose. The idea was incredible to her.

She walked through the line with him, but did not take any of the shiny dishes of food displayed on the fluorescent-lit aluminum shelves. He felt a pang of worry. He was no longer angry, and her drawn white face disturbed him.

“Why aren’t you eating?”

“I’m not hungry.”

They sat down. He picked at his food, eyeing her with veiled alarm. It occurred to her that it might embarrass him to eat in front of her while she ate nothing. She asked if she could have some of his salad. He eagerly passed her the entire bowl of pale leaves strewn with orange dressing. “Have it all.”

He huddled his shoulders orphanlike as he ate; his blond hair stood tangled like pensive weeds. “I don’t know why you’re not eating,” he said fretfully. “You’re going to be hungry later on.”

Her predisposition to adore him was provoked. She smiled.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” he asked.

“I’m just enjoying the way you look. You’re very airy.”

Again, his eyes showed alarm.

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel like I’m seeing a tank of small, quick fish, the bright darting kind that go every which way.”

He paused, stunned and dangle-forked over his pinched, curled-up steak. “I’m beginning to think you’re out of your fucking mind.”

Her happy expression collapsed.

“Why can’t you talk to me in a half-normal fucking way?” he continued. “Like the way we talked on the plane. I liked that. That was a conversation.” In fact, he hadn’t liked the conversation on the plane either, but compared to this one, it seemed quite all right.

When they got back to the apartment, they sat on the floor and drank more alcohol. “I want you to drink a lot,” he said. “I want to make you do things you don’t want to do.”

“But I won’t do anything I don’t want to do. You have to make me want it.”

He lay on his back in silent frustration.

“What are your parents like?” she asked.

“What?”

“Your parents. What are they like?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have that much to do with them. My mother is nice. My father’s a prick. That’s what they’re like.” He put one hand over his face; a square-shaped album-style view of his family presented itself. They were all at the breakfast table, talking and reaching for things. His mother moved in the background, a slim, worried shadow in her pink robe. His sister sat next to him, tall, blond and arrogant, talking and flicking at toast crumbs in the corners of her mouth. His father sat at the head of the table,
his big arms spread over everything, leaning over his plate as if he had to defend it, gnawing his breakfast. He felt unhappy and then angry. He thought of a little Italian girl he had met in a go-go bar a while back, and comforted himself with the memory of her slim haunches and pretty high-heeled feet on either side of his head as she squatted over him.

“It seems that way with my parents when you first look at them. But in fact my mother is much more aggressive and, I would say, more cruel than my father, even though she’s more passive and soft on the surface.”

She began a lengthy and, in his view, incredible and unnecessary history of her family life, including descriptions of her brother and sister. Her entire family seemed to have a collectively disturbed personality characterized by long brooding silences, unpleasing compulsive sloppiness (unflushed toilets, used Kleenex abandoned everywhere, dirty underwear on the floor) and outbursts of irrational, violent anger. It was horrible. He wanted to go home.

He poked himself up on his elbows. “Are you a liar?” he asked. “Do you lie often?”

She stopped in midsentence and looked at him. She seemed to consider the question earnestly. “No,” she said. “Not really. I mean, I can lie, but I usually don’t about important things. Why do you ask?”

“Why did you tell me you were a masochist?”

“What makes you think I’m not?”

“You don’t act like one.”

“Well, I don’t know how you can say that. You hardly know me. We’ve hardly done anything yet.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I can’t just come out and tell you. It would ruin it.”

He picked up his cigarette lighter and flicked it, picked up her shirt and stuck the lighter underneath. She didn’t move fast enough. She screamed and leapt to her feet.

“Don’t do that! That’s awful!”

He rolled over on his stomach. “See. I told you. You’re not a masochist.”

“Shit! That wasn’t erotic in the least. I don’t come when I stub my toe either.”

In the ensuing silence it occurred to her that she was angry, and had been for some time.

“I’m tired,” she said. “I want to go to bed.” She walked out of the room.

He sat up. “Well, we’re making decisions, aren’t we?”

She reentered the room. “Where are we supposed to sleep, anyway?”

He showed her the guest room and the fold-out couch. She immediately began dismantling the couch with stiff, angry movements. Her body seemed full of unnatural energy and purpose. She had, he decided, ruined the weekend, not only for him but for herself. Her willful, masculine, stupid somethingness had obstructed their mutual pleasure and satisfaction. The only course of action left was hostility. He opened his grandmother’s writing desk and took out a piece of paper and a Magic Marker. He wrote the word “stupid” in thick black letters. He held it first near her chest, like a placard, and then above her crotch. She ignored him.

“Where are the sheets?” she asked.

“How’d you get so tough all of a sudden?” He threw the paper on the desk and took a sheet from a dresser drawer.

“We’ll need a blanket too, if we open the window. And I want to open the window.”

He regarded her sarcastically. “You’re just keeping yourself from getting what you want by acting like this.”

“You obviously don’t know what I want.”

They got undressed. He contemptuously took in the mascular, energetic look of her body. She looked more like a boy than a girl, in spite of her pronounced hips and round breasts. Her short, spiky red hair was more than enough to render her masculine. Even the dark bruise he had inflicted on her breast and the slight burn from his lighter failed to lend her a more feminine quality.

She opened the window. They got under the blanket on the fold-out couch and lay there, not touching, as though they really were about to sleep. Of course, neither one of them could.

“Why is this happening?” she asked.

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Her voice was small and pathetic.

“Part of it is that you don’t talk when you should, and then you talk too much when you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.”

In confusion, she reviewed the various moments they had spent together, trying to classify them in terms of whether or not it had been appropriate to speak, and to rate her performance accordingly. Her confusion increased. Tears floated on her eyes. She curled her body against his.