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  “Pinteresque … Ms. Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real … [her] reportorial candor, uncompromised by sentimentality or voyeuristic charm … underscores the strength of her debut.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  Now a classic, Bad Behavior made critical waves when it was first published, heralding Mary Gaitskill’s arrival on the literary scene and her establishment as one of the sharpest, erotically charged, and audaciously funny writing talents of contemporary literature.

  Set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and peopled with working-class drug addicts, intelligent hookers, stable housewives, smug yuppies, and sensually deprived professionals, Bad Behavior depicts a cruel and tender world where romance and modern perversity go hand in hand. Gaitskill delivers powerful stories of dislocation, longing, and desire that depict a disenchanted and rebellious urban fringe generation groping for human connection.

  “Ferocious, terrifying stories, skillful as they are scary. Gaitskill’s voice and talents are wonderfully new, as honest as rain, and as welcome in a long, dry season.”

  —Alice Adams

  “A thrilling journey into the deep anxieties of romance and desire … Stunning.”

  —Frederick Exley

  “Stubbornly original, with a sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don’t expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read.”

  —Alice Munro

  MARY GAITSKILL is the author of Don’t Cry; Veronica, a national Book Award finalist; Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award; and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

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  COVER DESIGN BY MARK ABRAMS · COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BENNO FRIEDMAN

  Praise for Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior

  “Mary Gaitskill [is] a vital and gifted new writer whose work has unusual importance at this time. This is a collection I urge you to read and to read right—from beginning to end. When you get to the glorious last story, denser with life than many novels, you will have to be cold-blooded indeed not to find yourself crying, as much for the joy of art as for the pity and sorrow at the secret heart of all living things.”

  —George Garrett, The New York Times Book Review

  “Stubbornly original, with the sort of rhythm and fine moments that flatten you out when you don’t expect it, these stories are a pleasure to read.”

  —Alice Munro

  “Gaitskill writes with such authority, such radar-perfect detail, that she is able to make even the most extreme situations seem real. She takes us on a meticulously observed documentary tour of [her characters’] inner and outer lives, giving us fierce portraits of individuals rather than a gallery of eccentric types.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Intriguingly tart … urban true grit.”

  —People

  “Riveting. Gaitskill has managed to lyrically reveal life’s underside.”

  —Newsday

  “Gaitskill’s prose is taut, tense; sentences snap with quick twists of logic and rhythm…. Bad Behavior vibrates with constant analysis, self-doubt and delightfully morbid analogies.”

  —Village Voice

  “Funny, touching, fiercely honest, with an intelligent eye and sensitive ear on every page.”

  —Leonard Michaels

  ALSO BY MARY GAITSKILL

  Don’t Cry

  Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 (editor)

  Veronica

  Because They Wanted To

  Two Girls, Fat and Thin

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1988 by Mary Gaitskill

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition July 2009

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Designed by Kyoko Watanabe

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gaitskill, Mary.

  Bad behavior : stories / Mary Gaitskill.

  p. cm.

  1. City and town life—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  2. Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.A36B3 2009

  813'.54—dc22 2009015579

  ISBN 978-1-4391-4887-7 (print)

  ISBN13: 978-1-4516-8707-1 (eBook)

  To my sisters, Jane and Martha

  All the conventions conspire

  To make this fort assume

  The furniture of home;

  Lest we should see where we are,

  Lost in a haunted wood,

  Children afraid of the night

  Who have never been happy or good.

  —W. H. Auden, September 1, 1939

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  Contents

  Daisy’s Valentine

  A Romantic Weekend

  Something Nice

  An Affair, Edited

  Connection

  Trying to Be

  Secretary

  Other Factors

  Heaven

  Daisy’s Valentine

  JOEY FELT THAT his romance with Daisy might ruin his life, but that didn’t stop him. He liked the idea in fact. It had been a long time since he’d felt his life was in danger of further ruin, and it was fun to think it was still possible.

  He worked with Daisy in the clerical department of a filthy secondhand bookstore on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The department was a square-tiled space between morose gray metal stacks of books and a dirty wall with thin white pipes running along the bottom of it. There were brown boxes of books everywhere, scatterings of paper, ashtrays, Styrofoam cups, broken chairs, the occasional flashing mouse. Customers roamed the boundaries of the area, searching for the exit. Daisy, who sat nearest the bordering aisle, was always leaving her desk to sweetly assist some baffled old man with a sweating face and cockeyed glasses.

  Joey’s desk was a bare diagonal yard from Daisy’s, and he would pace from there to the watercooler staring at her, rattling the epilepsy identification plates he wore around his neck and sighing. Then he would sit at his desk and shoot rubber bands at her. She usually wouldn’t notice what he was doing until he’d surrounded her typewriter with red rubber squiggles. She’d look up and smile in her soft, dopey way, and continue shuffling papers with slow, long-fingered movements.

  He had watched Daisy for almost a year be
fore making a pass at her. He had been living with Diane for eight years and was reluctant to change anything that stable. Besides, he loved Diane. They’d had such a good eight years that by now it was almost a system.

  He had met Diane at Bennington. He’d been impressed by her reputation in the art department, by the quality of the LSD she sold and by her rudeness. She was a tall, handsome thirty-three-year-old woman with taut, knit-together shoulders, and was so tense that her muscles were held scrunched together all the time. As a result, she was very muscular, even though she didn’t do anything but lie around the loft and take drugs. He supported her by working in the bookstore as an accountant and by selling drugs. She helped out with the government checks she received as a certified mentally ill person.

  They got high on Dexedrine for three and a half days out of the week. They’d been doing it religiously the whole time they’d been together. On Thursday morning, Joey’s first working day, they would start. Joey would work at the store all day, and then come home and work on projects. He would take apart his computer and spread it all over the floor in small gray lumps. He would squat and play with the piles for hours before he’d put it back together. He’d do other things too. He once took a series of blue-and-white photos of the cow skeleton they had in the living room. He’d make tapes of noises that he thought sounded nice together. He’d program the computer. Sometimes he would just take his wind-up toys out of the toy chest and run them around while he listened to records. In the past, Diane would work on her big blobby paintings. By Sunday the loft floor would be scattered with wax papers covered with splotches of acrylic paint, sprayed with water and running together in dull purple streams. She used to work on a painting for months and then destroy it. Now she didn’t paint at all. Instead she used her staying-up time to watch TV, walk the dogs or work out biorhythm charts on the computer.

  On Sunday Joey would come home from work with bags under his eyes and his tendons standing out in funny ways. Diane would have two small salads ready in matching red bowls that her grandmother had given her. There would always be a moist radish neatly sliced and split apart on the top. They would eat the salad and go to sleep until Monday night. Then Diane would order sushi from the Japanese take-out place on the corner and arrange it on a long wooden chopping block when it came. They would cover it with salt and lemon and eat it with their fingers. Sometimes people would come over to buy drugs and they would play them records and chat. Then they would sleep. By Thursday morning they would be refreshed and ready to stay awake again until Sunday.

  They made love about once a month. It didn’t last long because they both thought it was monotonous and because Diane was disgusted by most of the things people do to stretch it out longer. However, when Joey started to think about Daisy he stopped making romantic advances to Diane at all, and she resented it.

  She resented other things too. She was annoyed by his wind-up toys. If he left them out on the floor, she’d kick them. She didn’t like the frozen pecan rolls he ate on Wednesday morning. She would complain about how revolting they looked, and then eat half of them.

  Daisy was living with somebody too, but she ran around the bookstore babbling about her unfaithfulness as if it were the only thing she had to talk about. He liked to watch her pattering from desk to desk in her white sneakers, her jeans rasping softly between her small thighs with each narrow stride. She had to know what Evelyn and Ariel and everyone else around her thought about so-and-so not calling when he said he would. Then she wanted to know what they thought of her calling him and swearing at him. Or something like that. Her supervisor, Tommy, tolerated her because he was the kind of gay man who liked to hear about girls’ romantic problems. He disapproved of her running around behind her boyfriend’s back, but he enjoyed having the chance to moralize each time some new man dragged her through the dirt, as she put it. Daisy would say, “Tommy, I’m trying to make him leave. He won’t go. I can’t do anything about it.”

  Joey had once heard Tommy admit to another supervisor that Daisy was a terrible worker. “But she’s a very special case,” said Tommy. “I’d never fire her. What else could she do?”

  Joey felt a pang of incredulous affection. Could she actually be less competent than the other bums in the typing pool? Everyone in it was a bad worker, except Evelyn. Evelyn was the only other girl there. She was an energetic, square-jawed woman who would type eighty words a minute. She wore tight jeans and cowboy shirts and thick black eyeliner that gathered in blobs in the corners of her eyes. Her streaked blond hair hung in her face and made her look masked and brutal. She had a collection of books about various mass murderers on her desk, and she could tell you all their personal histories.

  The other three typists were fat, morose homosexuals who sat at their desks and ate from bags of cookies and complained. They had worked in the bookstore for years and they all talked desperately of “getting out.” Ariel had been around the longest. He was six feet three inches tall and had round, demure shoulders, big hips and square fleshy breasts that embarrassed him. He had a small head, a long, bumpy nose and large brown eyes that were by turns sweetly candid or forlorn, but otherwise had a disturbing blank quality. He had enjoyed a brief notoriety in punk rock circles for his electric piano music. He talked about his past success in a meek, wistful voice, and showed people old pictures of himself dressed in black, wearing black wing-tipped sunglasses. He was terribly sensitive, and Tommy took advantage of his sensitivity to make fun of him. “Ariel is the spirit of the typing pool,” Tommy would chatter as he ran from clerk to clerk with stacks of papers. “Whenever any of you are craving inspiration, just gaze on Ariel.”

  “Please, Tom, I’m on the verge of tears,” Ariel would answer funereally.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about!” Tommy would scream.

  When Joey first noticed Daisy, he wondered why this pretty young woman had chosen to work in a filthy, broken-down store amid unhappy homosexuals. As time went on, it seemed less and less inappropriate. She was comfortable in the typing pool. She was happy to listen to the boys talk about their adventures in leather bars, where men got blow jobs in open wooden booths or pissed on other men. She told jokes about Helen Keller and sex. She talked about her boyfriends and her painting. She was always crouching at Evelyn’s desk, whispering and laughing about something, or looking at Evelyn’s back issues of True Detective magazine. She wore T-shirts with pictures of cartoon characters on them, and bright-colored pants. Her brown hair was bobbed in a soft curve that ended on either side of her high cheekbones. When she walked, her shoulders and long neck were erect in a busy, almost ducklike way, but her hips and waist were fluid and gently mobile.

  The heterosexual men were always coming to stand by her desk and talk to her about their poetry or political ideas while she looked at them and nodded. Even the gay men developed a certain bravado in her presence. Tommy kept on reassuring her that her prince was just around the corner. “I can feel it, Daisy,” he would say exultantly. “You’re on a collision course with Mr. Right!”

  “Do you really think so, Tom?”

  “It’s obvious! Aren’t you excited?”

  Then Ariel would get up from his desk and lumber over to her and, bending from the waist, would put his large fleshy arms around her shoulders. Joey could see her small white hand emerge on Ariel’s broad flank as she patiently patted him.

  And, as if it weren’t enough to be the heartthrob of the basement crowd, she was kind to helpless, repulsive people. There was a grotesque old woman who would come into the store from time to time to seek out her kindness. The woman was at least sixty years old, and covered her face with heavy orange makeup. She bought horrible best-sellers and self-help books with lurid red covers. She’d stand by Daisy’s desk for half an hour and talk to her about how depressed she was. Daisy would turn off her typewriter and turn toward the woman with her chin in her hand. She’d listen gravely, agreeing sometimes, letting the woman give her small bags of hard candy an
d kiss her on the cheek. Everyone made rude comments about Daisy and “that crazy old dyke.” But Daisy remained courteous and attentive to the distressed creature, even though she often made fun of her after she left.

  Joey didn’t think of having sex with Daisy, at least not in detail. It was more the idea of being near her, protecting her. She was obviously so confused. She looked everywhere for answers, for someone to tell her what to think. “I just want your perspective,” she’d say.

  There was a customer she called the “answer man” because he claimed that he could predict the future through “automatic handwriting.” He was a handsome elderly man who wore expensive suits and looked as though he’d had at least one face lift. He had been coming into the store for years. Every time he came in, Daisy would walk him off into a corner and ask him questions. He would scrawl down answers in thin red ink and hand them to her with an imperious, terribly personal look. She would become either stricken or joyous. Later she would run around talking about what he’d said, examining the red-scrawled pieces of store stationery. “He says my painting is going to start being successful in a year and a half.” “He says there are no worthwhile men around me and that there won’t be for months.” “He says David will move out next month.”

  “You don’t take that stuff seriously, do you?” asked Joey.

  “Oh, not really,” she said. “But it’s interesting.” She went back to her desk and stuck the papers in her drawer and began typing, her face still glowing and upturned because someone who was possibly crazy had told her that she would eventually be a success.

  He began thinking about her at home. He thought of her body resting against his, of his arm around her. He thought of her dressed in a white kimono, peeking from behind a fan, her eye makeup crinkling when she smiled. Diane became suspicious.