Bad Behavior: Stories (9 page)

The fifth night he came to see her, she wasn’t sitting in the waiting room with the other girls. “Where’s Jane?” he asked the stretch-pants woman nervously.

“Jane? You must mean
Lisette
. She’s busy right now,” she answered in her placid, salad-oily voice. “Would you like to see another lady?”

A very young girl with burgundy hair smiled brightly at him. She was clutching a red patent-leather purse in purple-nailed hands.

“I’ll wait for Lisette.”

The stretch-pants woman widened her naked-lashed eyes in approval. “All right, Fred, just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?”

She brought him a horribly flat, watered-down Scotch in a plastic cup. He held it, smiling and sweating.

The burgundy-headed girl curled her legs up on the couch and turned back to her Monopoly game with the contemptuous black-haired girl, who lay across the couch like an eel on a market stand. The stretch-pants woman tried to talk to him.

“Do you work around here, Fred?”

“No.”

“What kind of business are you in?”

“Nothing. I mean, I’m retired.” The patches of shirt under his arms were glued with sweaty hair-lace. Jane was being mauled by a fat oaf who didn’t care that you could feel her innermost life on her skin.

The stretch-pants woman asked him to step into the kitchen. This house advertised its discretion and made sure men did not meet each other. He saw only the man’s dismal black-suited shape through the slats of the swinging kitchen door as he stood there holding his drink, the ice cubes melting into a depressing fizz. He heard the black shape’s blurred rumble and Jane’s indifferent voice. She sounded much nicer when she said good-bye to him. The pale-eyed hostess opened the swinging door and gave him a flat smile. “Okay, sir, would you like to step out?”

Jane stood smiling in her checked dress, her hands behind her back, one white-socked ankle crossing the other, her chin tilted up. He remembered how he had seen her first, how she could’ve been any girl, any bland, half-friendly face behind any counter. He felt a funny-bone twinge as he realized how her body, her voice, her every fussy gesture had become part of a Jane network, a world of smells, sounds and touches that found its most acute focus when she had her legs around his back.

The minute she came into the room, he went to her and put his arms around her hips. “Hello, Jane.”

“Hi.”

“It was strange not seeing you out there waiting for me.”

She looked puzzled.

“I guess I somehow got used to thinking of you as my own little girl. I didn’t like the idea that you were with some other guy. Silly, huh?”

“Yes.” She broke away and snapped the sheet out over the bed. “Do you say things like that because you think I like to hear them?”

“Maybe. Some of the girls do, you know.”

He could feel the sarcasm of her silence.

He watched her pull her dress off over her head and drop it on the aluminum chair. “I guess it’s only natural that you’ve begun to get jaded.”

She snorted. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

She didn’t answer. She sat on the bed and bent to take off her heels, leaving her socks on. When she looked at him again she said, “Do you really think it’s a good idea for you to come to see me every night? It’s awfully expensive. I know lawyers make a lot of money, but still. Won’t your wife wonder where it’s going?”

He sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you see how special you are? No other girl I’ve seen like this would ever have thought to say something like that. All they can think of is how to get more money out of me and here you are worrying about how much I’m spending. I’m not trying to flatter you, you
are
different.”

“Aren’t you worried about getting
AIDS
?”

“From a girl like you? C’mon, don’t put yourself down.”

She smiled, sad and strained, but sort of affectionate, and put her hands on his shoulders. She felt to him like one of his puppy patients embracing him as he carried it across the room for a shot.

“I’m sorry I’m being so shitty,” she said. “I just hate this job and this place.”

“Here,” he said. “I’m going to buy two hours, so we can just relax and unwind. You just lie down and get snuggled up in the sheet.” He got up and turned off the light. He found a romantic jazz station on the radio. He undressed and got under the sheet with her, wrapping them both in a ball. He held her neck and felt her forehead against his shoulder. Her limbs were nestled and docile, as if all her stiff, pony-trot energy had vanished. The dim light of the gurgling fish tank cast an orangy glow over the room. “This is so nice and glamorous,” he said.

“When is your wife coming back?” asked a voice from the nuzzling bundle on his arm.

“In three days.” He sighed and stared at the stupid, lovely slivers of fish darting around their ugly castle.

Of course he knew that concern for his financial situation wasn’t the only reason she’d suggested that he shouldn’t see her so often. She was probably sick of him. He remembered dating well enough to know that women didn’t like to be pursued too closely. It could seem sappy, he supposed, to come grinning in there after her every single night. The next night he would stay home, and read or watch television.

He enjoyed making dinner for himself. There were still a lot of good things left in the refrigerator—herring, a chunk of potato salad that was only slightly rancid, cream cheese, a jar of artichoke hearts, egg bread. It was too messy to eat in the kitchen—the counter was covered with encrusted plates and pans filled with silverware and water.

He arranged the slices and oily slabs on two different plates and carried the stuff into the living room to put on the coffee table. He clicked on the TV with his remote-control device, flicked the channels around a few times and then ignored it. He ate with his fingers and a plastic fork, mentally feeling over the events of the day, like a blind person groping through a drawer of personal effects. There had been the usual parade of cats and dogs, and
one exotic bird with a mysterious illness. He had no idea what to do with the crested, vividly plumed thing, which was apparently worth a lot of money. He had pretended that he did, though, and the bird was sitting in his kennel now, gaping fiercely at the cats with its hooked beak.

Then there was the dog that he had had to put to sleep, a toothless, blind, smelly old monster with toenails like a dinosaur’s. He thought the dog was probably grateful for the injection, and he said so, but that didn’t console the homely adolescent girl who insisted on holding it right up until the end, tears running from under her glasses and down her pink, porous face. Poor lonely girl, he thought. He had wanted to say, “Don’t worry, dear, you’re going to grow up to be a beauty. You’re going to get married and have lots of wonderful children.” Except it probably wasn’t true.

He picked up his remote-control device and switched channels thoughtfully. What would Jane think when he didn’t show up? Would she think he’d gotten bored with her, that he was never coming back? Would she go home wondering what had happened? He tried to picture her in her apartment. She had told him it was very small, only one room with a tiny bathroom. She said the bathroom had big windows and a skylight, and that she had so many plants in there that you couldn’t use the toilet without arranging yourself around the plants. She said she didn’t have a chair or a couch, that she sat on the floor to eat. When she came home from work she often ordered Chinese food and ate it straight from the cardboard boxes set out on the floor between her spread legs.

“What do you have for breakfast?” he asked.

“Ice cream, sometimes. If it’s warm.”

“What do you find to do in that little room?”

“I read a lot.”

“What do you like to read?”

She named a few writers, one that he’d been forced to read in college and others he’d never heard of.

He picked up a tiny bit of herring and mashed it with the edges of his front teeth. Maybe he could start seeing Jane in her apartment. It would be more money for her certainly. He would like
to spend time in that funny little place. He could buy her a chair. Maybe even a table.

He wouldn’t be able to see Jane much at all once Sylvia got back. He thought of his wife getting on the plane in her green-and-white dress, the handle of her wicker suitcase in hand, her gray hair wound into an elegant bun that displayed her graceful neck and gently erect shoulders. Her smile was beautiful when she turned to wave good-bye.

He pictured Sylvia sitting in her favorite armchair across from him. She would be relaxed but sitting up straight on the tautly stuffed, salmon-colored cushions. Her legs would be crossed at the ankle. She would have her pale beige glasses on her nose, she would be in a trance over her latest book catalogues. If he stood up and put his hand on her shoulder, he would feel how slender and strong she still was, how well defined her small bones were.

He thought of her collection of rare books, arranged and locked in the glass cabinet in a sunny corner of her study. They were beautiful to look at and extremely expensive; other book dealers had offered her thousands of dollars for some of them. Every time he looked at them, he felt depressed.

One Christmas, he bought Sylvia a book entitled
Beautiful Sex
. It made him unhappy to remember that night when, with
Beautiful Sex
lying open on their bed to reveal a series of glossy pink-and-white photos, she cooperatively arranged herself into one of the more conventional positions illustrated, sighing as she did so. “Now, honey,” she said, “tell the truth. Don’t you feel foolish doing this?”

He clicked off the TV and left the room, making a mental note to put the plates in the dishwasher before he went to bed.

The next day he drove to Manhattan right after work, without stopping at home for a shower. Perhaps Jane would notice the vague animal smell on him. She might ask him about it and he could tell her the truth about what he did.

It was already dark when he reached the city. He drove slowly through Times Square, fascinated by the night’s ugliness. He
stopped for a red light and looked up at a movie marquee towering on the corner, its dead white face advertising
The Spanking of Cindy
. There was a short man in a black leather jacket standing by the box office, hunching his cadaverous shoulders in the wind. “Now there’s a queer,” thought Fred. “Wonder what he’s doing in front of that movie house?” He looked at the marquee again, and noticed that the billboard next to it was painted with a girl in jeans thrusting her bottom out, her blond hair swirling across her back, her mouth open in laughter. It was an ad for jeans, but it suited the movie; he vaguely wondered if it had been arranged that way. He turned his head to look at the other side of the street and saw a broken old woman lying unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk with her face against the concrete, her ragged dress spattered across her ugly thighs. He was disgusted to see a young man pissing against the wall not two feet away from her. People were stepping over her as if she were an object, vicious people, it seemed to him, swinging their arms and legs in every direction, working their mouths, yelling at each other, eating hot dogs or Italian ices. What would it be like to be among them? He watched a couple of hookers in miniskirts and leather boots kick their way through a pile of garbage, screaming with laughter.

As soon as he got to a different neighborhood, he stopped at a Chinese flower store and bought Jane a single long-stemmed rose.

“Just so you wouldn’t think I’d forgotten you,” he said when he handed it to her.

“Thanks.” She laid it on the night table, between the bottle of baby oil and the flowered Kleenex box. “Were you sick?”

“No. I just had some … things to do. Did you miss me?”

“Yeah.” She began undoing her buttons.

“Listen, Jane. Tomorrow night will be the last night I can see you for a while. I was thinking maybe we could do something special.”

“Like what?”

“Like you could call in sick and we could meet somewhere for dinner.”

She put her hands in her lap and stared at him with something like alarm in her wide, smudged eyes.

“We could have dinner, go to a movie or a concert—whatever you’d like. Then we could go to a hotel—or maybe your apartment—and spend the night together.”

She looked at her nails and picked them.

“Of course I realize that I can’t ask you to take a night off work without making it worth your while. You’d do all right.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred.”

She didn’t say anything.

“It could be very nice. We’d have time to really act like people in a relationship. What do you say?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are your reservations?”

“I don’t think people in these circumstances can act like people having a relationship.”

“Well, maybe you’re right about that. But still it might be fun. I’d love to talk to you about a movie we’d seen or …”

“I think you’d be surprised if you found out what I’m like outside of here.”

“I can’t believe I wouldn’t like you.”

“You’d think I was weird.”

“I’m not as closed-minded as you think.”

“It’s just that we might not have anything to talk about.”

She didn’t notice the animal smell.

He waited for half an hour at their appointed meeting place. He wasn’t surprised when she stood him up. He was somewhat surprised when he called the escort service to make an appointment and they told him she’d quit. She’d often told him she hated it and that she was going to quit soon, but girls talked like that all the time and stayed for months, even years.

Sylvia returned the next day, smiling and suntanned, happy to wash the dishes on the kitchen counter and pick up the damp, scrunched-up towels that were wadded up on every rack in the
bathroom. She told him nice stories about the Arizona desert and the book fair she’d gone to there. He made love to her in a quiet, respectful way. She put her slender arms around his shoulders and held him tight. But when he tried to show her some of the things he’d done with Jane, he could feel her body become docile and patient.