Bad Behavior

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 before 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 and 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.

“You’re a thousand miles away,” she said over the Sunday salad. “What is it?”

“I’m preoccupied.” His tone made it clear that her plaintiveness was futile, and she became frightened and angry. She didn’t say anything, which was what he wanted.

He did not lie down with her that evening, although he was exhausted. He walked around the loft, striking the furniture with Diane’s riding crop, annoying the cats, making them skitter across the floor, their eyes unnerved, their tails ruffled. His eyes dried in their sockets. His back was sore and balled into knots from staying up for three days.

He began doing things to attract Daisy’s attention. He told jokes. He slapped his face with eau de toilette. He wore red pants and a sheathed knife in his belt. He did full splits and handstands. He talked about his active role in the theater department at Bennington and his classes with André Gregory. He mentioned the karate class he’d taken once, and punched a hole in a box of books. She said, “Joey has done everything!” There was a thrilling note of triumph in her voice.

For a long time he just looked at her. That alone made him so happy, he was afraid to try anything else. Maybe it would be better to hold her winglike shadow safe in the lock of his memory than to touch the breathing girl and lose her.

He decided to give her a card on Valentine’s Day.

He spent days searching for the valentine material. He found what he wanted in an old illustrated children’s book. It was a faded watercolor drawing of three red poppies sharing a field with pink clover and some blameless little weeds. A honey-colored bee with dreamily closed eyes was climbing a stalk. An aqua-green grasshopper was flying through a fuzzy, failing blue sky, its eyes blissfully shut, its hairy front legs dangling foolishly, its hind legs kicking, exultant, through the air. It was a distorted, feverish little drawing. The colors were all wrong. It made him think of paradise.

He tore it from the book and covered it with a piece of fragile paper so that the scene, veiled by the yellowing tissue haze, became remote and mysterious. He drew five hearts in misshapen lines and senselessly alternating sizes on the bottom of it. He colored them red. He wrote “Voici le temps des assassins” under them.

He carried it to work with him for several days before and after Valentine’s Day. He decided dozens of times to give it to her, and changed his mind every time. He examined it daily, wondering if it was good enough. When he decided it was perfect, he thought perhaps it would be better to keep it in his drawer, where he alone knew it existed for her.

Finally, he said, “I have a valentine for you.”

She pattered around his desk, smiling greedily. “Where is it?”

“In my drawer. I don’t want to give it to you yet.”

“Why not? Valentine’s Day was a week ago. Can’t I have it now?” She put her fingers on his shoulders like soft claws. “Give it to me now.”

When he handed it to her, she hugged him and pressed against him. He giggled and put his arm around her. He sadly let go of his shadow captive.

That night he couldn’t eat his spinach salad. The radish, gaily flowering red and white, was futile enticement. Diane sat across from him, stonily working her jaws. She sat rigidly straight-backed, her throat drawn so taut it looked as if it would be hard for her to swallow. He picked at the salad, turning the clean leaves this way and that. He stared past her, sighing, his dry eyes hot in their sockets.

“You look like an idiot,” she said.

“I am.”

The next day he took Daisy out to lunch, although he couldn’t eat. He ordered a salad, which appeared in a beige plastic bowl. It was littered with pale carrot curls and flats of radish that accused him. He ignored it. He watched her eat from her dish of green and white cold noodles. They were curly and glistened with oil, and were garnished with bright pieces of slippery meat and vegetables. Daisy speared them serenely, three curls at a time.

“You can’t imagine how wonderful this is for me,” he said. “I’ve watched you for so long.”

She smiled, he thought, uncertainly.

“You’re so soft and gentle. You’re like a delicate white flower.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I know you’re probably not. But you seem like it, and that’s good enough for me.”

“What about Diane?”

“I’ll leave Diane.”

She put down her fork and stared at him. The chewing movement of her jaws was earnest and sweet. He smiled at her.

She swallowed, a neat, thorough swallow. “Don’t leave Diane,” she said.

“Why not? I love you.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “This is getting out of hand. Why don’t you eat your salad?”

“I can’t. I’m medicated.”

“You’re what?”

He forced himself to eat the pale leaves and shreds of carrot.

They left the restaurant and walked around the block. Daisy butted her head against the harsh wind; her short gray coat floated in back of her like a sail. He held her mittened hand. “I love you,” he said. “I don’t care about anything else. I want to cast my mantle of protection over you.”

“Let’s sit here,” she said. She sat down on an even rise of yellow brick in front of an apartment building that was an impression of yellow brick and shadowy gray glass shielding the sad blur of a doorman. He sat very near her and held her hand.

“I have to tell you some things about myself,” she said. “I don’t take admiration very well.”

“I don’t care if you take it well or not. It’s there.”

“But won’t it make you unhappy if I don’t return it?”

“I’d be disappointed, I guess. But I’d still have the pleasure of feeling it for you. It doesn’t have to be returned.” He wanted to put his hands on either side of her head and squeeze.

She looked at him intently. “I said that to someone recently,” she said. “Do you suppose it’s a trend of some kind?”

The wind blew away her bangs, baring her white forehead. He kissed the sudden openness. She dropped her head against his shoulder.

An old woman in a pink coating bearing a sequined flower with a disturbing burst of petals on her lapel looked at them and smiled. Her white face was heavy with wrinkles and pink makeup, and her smile seemed difficult under the weight. She sat on the short brick wall about two feet away from them.

“I’m not making myself clear,” said Daisy. She lifted her head and looked at him with wide, troubled eyes. “If you’re nice to me, I’ll probably make you unhappy. I’ve done that to people.”

“You couldn’t make me unhappy.”

“I’m only nice to people who are mostly mean to me. Once somebody told me to stay away from so-and-so because he beat up girls. They said he broke his girlfriend’s jaw.”

She paused, for emphasis, he supposed. The old lady was beginning to look depressed.

“So I began flirting with him like wild. Isn’t that sick?”

“What happened?” asked Joey with interest.

“Nothing. He went to Bellevue before anything could. But isn’t it awful? I actually wanted this nut to hit me.” She paused again. “Aren’t you disgusted?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

The old lady rose slowly, head down, and walked away with stiff, painful steps. Her coat blew open; her blue-veined legs were oddly pretty.

Daisy turned to watch her. “See,” she said. “She’s disgusted even if you aren’t. We’ve ruined her day.”

Every day after work, he walked Daisy to a corner two blocks away from her apartment so he wouldn’t meet her boyfriend, David. There was a drugstore on the corner with colored perfume bottles nesting in fistfuls of crepe paper in the window. The druggist, a middle-aged man with a big stomach and a disappointed face, stood at the door and watched them say good-bye. It was a busy corner; traffic ran savagely in the street, and people stamped by, staring in different directions, clutching their packages, briefcases and huge, screaming radios, their faces concentrated but empty. Daisy was silent and frail as a cattail, her fuzzy black mitten in Joey’s hand, her eyes anxiously scanning the street for David. She would say goodbye to him several times, but he would pull her back by her lapel as she turned to cross the street. After the second time he stopped her, she would sigh and look down, then begin to go through her pockets for scraps of unwanted paper, which she tore into snowflake pieces and scattered like useless messages in the garbage-jammed metal wastebasket under the street lamp, as if, trapped on the corner, she might as well do something useful, like clean her pockets.

That day, when he finally let her go, he stood for a moment and watched her pat across the street, through the awful march of people. He walked half a block to a candy store with an orange neon sign, and bought several white bags of jelly beans. Then he caught a cab and rode home like a sultan. He ignored Diane’s bitter stare as he walked through the living room and shut himself up in the bedroom with his jelly beans.

He thought of rescuing Daisy. She would be walking across the street, with that airy, unaware look on her face. A car would roar around a garbage-choked corner, she would freeze in its path, her pale face helpless as a crouching rabbit. From out of nowhere he would leap, sweeping her aside with one arm, knocking them both to the sidewalk, to safety, her head cushioned on his arm. Or she would be accosted by a hostile teenager who would grab her coat and push her against a wall. Suddenly he would attack. The punk’s legs would fly crazily as Joey slammed him against a crumbling brick wall. “If you hurt her, I’ll …”

He sighed happily and got another pill and a handful of jelly beans.

“My mother couldn’t understand me or do anything for me,” he said. “She thought she was doing the right thing.”

“She sounds like a bitch,” said Daisy.

“Oh, no. She did what she could, given the circumstances. She at least recognized that I far surpassed her in intelligence.”

“Then why did she let her boyfriend beat you up?”

“He didn’t beat me up. He was just a fat slob who got a thrill out of putting a twelve-year-old in a half nelson and then asking how it felt.”

“He beat you up.”

They were in a small, dark bar. It had floors and tables made of old creaking wood, and a half-moon window of heavy stained glass in one wall. The tables were clawed with knifemarks, the french fries were large and damp. The waitresses carried themselves like dinosaurs with ungainly little hands and had purple veins on their legs, even though they were young. They were friendly though, and they looked right at you.

Daisy and Joey came here for lunch and sat in the deep, high-backed booths. Joey didn’t eat, and by now Daisy knew why. He drank and watched her eat her hamburger with measured bites.

“I still can’t understand why she married that repulsive pig. I ask her and she says ‘because he makes me feel stable and secure.’”

“He doesn’t sound stable to me.”

“I guess he was, compared to my father. But then Dad was usually too drunk to make it down the stairs without falling, let alone hold a job. I mean, you’re talking about a guy who died in the nut ward singing ‘Joey, Foey, Bo-Poey, Bananarama Oh-Boey.’ Any asshole is stable compared to that. But Tom? At least my father had style. He wouldn’t have been caught dead in those ugly Dacron things Tom wears.”

Daisy leaned into the corner of the booth and looked at him solemnly.

“When she first told me over the phone that she was getting married to Uncle Tom, I was happy. At least I’d get to come home instead of staying with my Christian Scientist relatives who made me wear those retarded plaid pants to school.”

“She never should have sent you away like that,” said Daisy. She sat up and pulled her drink closer, latching on to the straw with a jerking motion of her lip.

“She thought it was the right thing to do after my father died. Only she never knew how much my relatives hated me.”

“I don’t know how she could’ve thought it was the right thing to let him throw you out of the house when you were sixteen.”

“He didn’t throw me out. I just knew the constant fighting over whether or not I was a faggot was hurting my mother. I realized that I was more of an adult than they were and that it was up to me to change the situation.”

Daisy leaned back with both hands on her glass as she sucked the straw, her cheeks palpitating gently. There were dainty gurgle noises coming from the bottom of her glass as she slurped the last of her drink. He smiled and took her hand. She squeezed his fingers. He gulped his alcohol, his pulse beating wildly to and fro. He hadn’t really been thrown out of the house when he was sixteen. He had been eighteen when Tom went berserk at the sight of his anti-Vietnam poster and broke his nose.

Daisy put her glass on the table with a slurred movement. She leaned against him. He cradled her head and ordered more drinks.

“They couldn’t believe it when I got that scholarship to Bennington. I didn’t even tell them I applied. They already felt inferior to me.”

“Did you drop out of college to get back at your mother?” Her voice was blurry from his shoulder.

“I dropped out because I couldn’t stand the people. I couldn’t stand the idea of art. Art is only good at the moment it’s done. After that it’s dead. It’s just so much dead shit. Artists are like people trying to hoard their shit.”

She sat away from him, reaching for her new glass. “I’m an artist. Diane is an artist. Why do you like us?”

He kissed the blue vein on her neck and enjoyed the silly beat of his heart. “You’re like a pretty shadow.”

Her eyes darted with worry. “You like me because I’m like you.”

He smiled tolerantly and stroked her neck. “You’re not like me. No one is like me. I’m a phenomenon.”

She looked tired and turned away from him to her drink. “You’re a misfit. So am I. We don’t belong anywhere.”

“Aww.” He reached under her shirt and touched her small breast. She put her forehead against his neck, she put her hand between his legs. Her voice fluttered against his skin. “David has a gig out of town next week. Will you come stay with me?”

“Maybe.”

Sometimes, though, he thought Daisy was sort of a stupid little thing. He thought it when he looked at Diane and noticed the stern, distinct line of her mouth, her strong nose, the muscles of her bared arms flexing as she furiously picked her nails. She didn’t ask annoying questions about drugs. She never thought about being a misfit, or having a place in society. She loathed society. She sat still as a stone, her heavy-lidded eyes impassively half-closed, the inclination of her head in beautiful agreement with her lean, severe arm and the cigarette resting in her intelligent fingers.

But it was too late. Diane wouldn’t talk to him anymore, except to insult him. She changed her medication days so she wouldn’t be on schedule with him. Sometimes she didn’t medicate at all. She said it made her cry.

He found her crying one day when he came home from work. It was so rare to see Diane cry that it was several minutes before he realized there were tears on her face. She was sitting in the aging purple armchair by the window, one leg drawn up and bent so that her knee shielded her face. Her shoulders were in a tight curl, she held her long bare foot tightly in her hand. She watched him walk past her. She let him reach the doorknob before she said, “You’re seeing someone.”

He stopped and faced her, thankful and relieved that she had said it first. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “I didn’t know how.”

“You cowardly piece of shit.”

“It’s nothing serious,” he said. “It’s just an obsession.”

“It’s Daisy, isn’t it?” She said the name like it was a disease.

“How did you know?”

“The way you mentioned her name. It was sickening.”

“I didn’t intend for it to happen.”

“What a slime-bag you are.”

It was then that he identified the glistening on her cheeks and chin. The tears were wrenching and poignant on her still face. He dropped his bag of jelly beans and moved toward her. He sat on the fat arm of the chair and put his arms around her rigid, shivering body. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s like before,” she said. “With Rita. It’s so repulsive.”

“If you can stay with me through this, just wait it out …”

“I want you out of here by the end of the month.” The tears shimmered through her voice, which quivered like sunlight in a puddle. He wanted to make love to her.

“You’re the cruelest person I’ve ever known.” Her voice almost broke into panting. She yanked herself out of the chair and walked away, kicking the bag of jelly beans as she passed, spraying them across the floor. He waited until she was out of the room and then went to scoop up a handful of the red, orange and green ones. He ate them as he looked out the picture window and down into the street. There were two junkies in ugly jackets hunched beside the jagged hole in a wire fence. I am a slime-bag, he thought.

He went to his room to think about Daisy.

The next morning he went to Daisy’s desk and sat near her on a box of books bearing an unflattering chalk drawing of the shipping department supervisor. She held her Styrofoam cup of tea with both hands and drank from it, looking over its rim with dark-shadowed eyes.

“She said I was the cruelest person she’d ever known.”

“Oh, you’re not so bad. She just doesn’t get out of the house much. She doesn’t know what’s out there.”

“You don’t know me.”

She put down her cup. “I talked to David last night. He cried too. He just lay there and stared at me with those big eyes. It was awful.”

She picked up a piece of cardboard and began sweeping the mouse droppings on her desk into a neat pile. “So now they both know.”

“And we can go to the opera tonight. I have tickets to Die Walküre. You can medicate and we can stay out all night.”

“I don’t want to medicate.” She pulled the sticky, coffee-stained wastebasket out from under her desk and showered the mouse turds into it with a deft swish of cardboard.

Daisy had never been to an opera. “Will there be people in breastplates and headdresses with horns?” she asked. “Will there be a papier-mâché dragon and things flying through the air?” She looked hard at the curtained stage.

“Probably not,” he said. “I think this production is coming from a German Impressionist influence, which means they’ll eschew costumes and scenery as much as possible. They’re coming from an emphasis on symbolism and minimal design. It was a reaction against the earlier period when—”

“I want to see a dragon flying through the air.” She took a pink mint from the box of opera mints he’d bought, popped it into her mouth and audibly sucked it. She shifted it to her cheek and asked, “Why do you like the opera?”

“I don’t know, I like the music sometimes, I like to see how they put productions together. I like to watch the people.”

“So do I.”

“Sometimes I have this fantasy that the opera house is suddenly taken over by psychos or terrorists or something, and that I save everybody.”

She stopped sucking her mint and turned to look at him. “How?”

“I jump from the balcony railing and scale down the curtain until I’m parallel with the cord. Then I jump for the cord, swing through the air—”

“That’s impossible.”

“Well, yes, I know. It’s a fantasy.”

“Why would you have a fantasy like that?” She looked disturbed.

“I don’t know. It’s not important.”

She continued to stare at him, almost stricken. “I think it’s because you feel estranged from people. You want something extreme to happen so you can show that you love them, and that you deserve love from them.”

He pulled her head against his shoulder and kissed it. He said, “Sometimes I just want to tear you apart.”

She put her box of mints in her lap and grabbed him tightly around the waist.

It was after midnight when they left the opera. They went to a neon-lit deli manned by aging waiters wearing red jackets, several of whom had violent tics in their jaws. Daisy persuaded him to order a salad and a milk shake; she was worried that he didn’t eat enough. He sipped his shake uncomfortably and watched her eat cream cheese and salmon. She talked about her unhappy relationship with her father, pausing to bend her head so she could nip up the fallen croissant flakes with her tongue. Waiters ran around the table, some of them bearing three food-loaded plates in each hairy hand.

He tried to make her take some pills and stay out with him longer, but she said she felt too guilty about David. There was also some art work she wanted to do. She sighed and looked at the ground. She pulled away from him four times before he let her go. He watched her walk away and thought, “Now it’s too late to buy jelly beans.”

When he opened the door to his apartment, Diane hit him in the face. He was so startled, he stood there and let her hit him three more times before he grabbed her wrist.

“You filthy bastard!” she screamed. “You went to the opera with her! We always go to the opera together and you went with that cunt!”

“I hardly thought you wanted to go.”

“Well, I did. I waited for you to come home from work.” Her voice hobbled tearfully. “I never thought you would go with that cunt.”

“She’s not a cunt.”

She swung her free hand, catching his ear. She yanked at the lobe, tearing out his tiny blue earring. It pinged on the floor, sparkled and rolled away. “Shit!” he screamed. He dropped to his knees and felt the floor with his palms. “Don’t you have any self-control?”

“I don’t give a shit about self-control. Get the fuck out.”

“Will you just wait until I find my earring?”

“I don’t care about your fucking earring. Get out before I kill you.”

“God, you’re so irrational.”

He listened for sobbing from outside the slammed door. There was none. His ear was bleeding and his face burned, but he was oddly exhilarated. He was sorry Diane was so upset, but there was something stirring about a violent tantrum. It was the sort of thing he liked to tell stories about.

The street was buzzing with junkies and kids with big radios. They stood in a jumbled line against buildings and crawled out of holes in the walls and fences. They mumbled at him as he walked past. “I got the blues, I got the reds, I got the greens and blacks, the ones from last week.”

He walked three blocks to Eliot’s apartment; he didn’t expect Eliot to answer the door, but he buzzed anyway. He was startled when Eliot’s suspicious voice darted from the cluster of tiny holes that served as an intercom.

“It’s the F.B.I.,” said Joey.

There was a grudging silence before the buzzer squawked. When Joey reached the apartment door, Eliot poked his head out, one finger to his lips. His wispy brown hair stuck out in a ratty halo; his round, thin-lashed eyes were hysterically wide and moist. “Whatever you do, don’t mention drugs,” he whispered. “If you have to refer to them at all, say ‘gum’ or something. Only don’t be conspicuous.”

“All right,” said Joey.

“They’ve got the place wired,” explained Eliot. “We tore the apartment apart and we still can’t find the bug. Are you sure you weren’t followed?”

Joey nodded. Eliot stretched his neck and stared into the empty hall, blinking his damp eyes hard. Satisfied, he let Joey in.

Rita was lying on the couch in front of a partially dismantled TV screen with a soundless picture on it. Her large feet hung over the edge of the couch, her hands were limp at the ends of her thin, prominently veined wrists. Her head drooped sideways on her slender, listless neck, almost falling off the couch. When she saw Joey she lifted her head, and her dark eyes lighted.

He flapped his hand at her and sat on a hard-backed chair. “Diane threw me out of the house,” he said.

“Yeah?” said Eliot. He got on his knees and began looking through the records scattered on the floor.

“It doesn’t matter. I wanted to move anyway. I’m in love. It’s all over between Diane and me.”

“You should’ve made that decision five years ago,” said Rita.

Eliot whirled around, waving a record. “You’ve got to hear this. It’s the most incredible thing.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, that record came out ten years ago,” said Rita. “Just because you’ve only heard it for the first time.”

Eliot tore the record from its jacket, tossed the jacket across the room and knelt before the turntable. He lifted the needle and examined it, blowing delicately.

Rita threw her long legs up and sat with her small bony knees together, her feet toeing in. “Who are you in love with?”

“You know, she’s still showing those stupid home movies of you in the bathtub,” said Eliot. “She watches them and masturbates. It’s hilarious. She shows them to everybody.”

“Who is it?” asked Rita.

“This girl at the store named Daisy.”

“Oh. I guess it figures.” She leaned forward to the cluttered table for a match. Her dark hair fell across her face with the graceful motion of a folding wing. She leaned back, exposing her face again. The lines under her eyes were deep and black with smeared makeup. “Got any pills, Joe?”

Eliot jumped up. “Don’t say that!” he screamed.

“Oh, you asshole,” said Rita. “Got any … socks?”

“Sure.” Joey poured a colorful tumble into her palm.

“What are you trying to do to me?” said Eliot through his teeth. “Are you working for them or what?”

Joey looked around; they really had torn up the apartment. Dead plants were turned over in their broken pots, slashed pillows spilled yellow foam out onto the floor, cardboard boxes lay with their lids yanked open, their contents exposed and strewn. The filing cabinet was tipped over, its open drawers freeing a white dance of paper. At least the broken bottles had been swept safely into piles.

Eliot’s rare book collection was preserved in a prim stack beside the couch. Joey could see the three Bartolovs he’d sold him. Eliot had been awed when he’d discovered that Joey’s pill connection was Alexander Bartolov, the famous poet.

“Oh, come on Rita, just a little blow job,” said Eliot. “I won’t come or anything.”

“Forget it,” said Rita. She lay back into the couch, her spidery white hand over her eyes. Her long limp legs recalled the flying grasshopper on Daisy’s valentine.

“She’s still hot for you, you know,” said Eliot. “I still have to hear about the times you tied her up and spanked her.”

“Can’t we change the subject?” said Joey.

“Okay,” said Eliot cheerfully. “I’m going to the bathroom anyway. I’m nauseous.”

“Don’t relax,” said Rita. “He’ll be back in a minute.”

“It’s all right with me,” said Joey. He took a magazine off the table. It was open to a picture of a masked woman dressed in a red rubber suit that a man was inflating with a pump. On the next page, a naked girl was tied with belts in a kneeling position on a bathroom floor. An ornery-looking young fellow approached her from behind with a rubber hose; she looked over her shoulder, her lips parted in a look of coy fear. He was surprised at how pretty she was. Her cheekbones and shoulders were like Daisy’s.

Daisy and Joey emerged from the movie theater holding hands. “We have no place to go,” said Daisy. “It’s been a month since we’ve been alone in a room. And David won’t leave.” They walked, still holding hands.

“I feel so terrible about David,” she said. “He’s such a lovely, innocent person. He’s the purest person I know.”

“There are no pure people.”

“You haven’t seen David. He has such naked eyes. When you touch him, it’s like there’s nothing between you and him.” She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not like that. When I touch you, I don’t feel you at all.”

“There’s nothing to feel.”

“Don’t say that about yourself.” She dropped his hand and rubbed his back with her mittened hand. “Anyway, it’s good you’re not like David. Even as you are, I worry about you being too nice to me.”

He put his hand around her neck. “I don’t know what makes you think I have any intention of being nice to you.”

She turned and kissed him. He took a handful of her hair in his fist and pulled her head tautly back while he kissed her.

They sat on the cold stone steps of an apartment building. They unbuttoned their jackets and huddled together, his hands on either side of her softly sweatered body.

“You’re so strange,” she said. “It’s hard to talk to you.”

“How so?”

“You’re always talking at me. You don’t listen to what I say.”

“I seem strange because I’m special.”

“I think it’s because you take so many pills.”

“You should start taking them. Did you know the government gives them to soldiers who are about to go into combat? They sharpen the reflexes, senses, everything.”

“I’m not going into combat.”

There was a sound from above. They turned and saw a handsome, well-dressed middle-aged couple at the head of the steps. Joey saw a flicker of admiration in Daisy’s face as she looked at the tall blond lady in her evening dress. The couple began to descend. Daisy and Joey stood and squeezed into a stony corner to let them pass. The man’s shoulder scratched against Joey. The man coughed, quite unnecessarily.

“Excuse me,” said the woman. “We only live here.”

“You have plenty of room,” said Daisy sharply.

“You have no business being here,” said the man. The couple stood on the sidewalk and frowned, their shoulders indignant.

“Why do you care?” said Daisy. “We aren’t in your way.” Her voice quivered oddly.

“Ssssh,” said Joey. “Let them live their lives.”

“You are very rude,” said the woman. “If you’re here when we get back, we’re going to call the police.” She swept away, sweeping her husband with her. They were probably in a hurry.

Joey watched the woman’s dress fluttering along the pavement. “That was strange,” he said. “I’ve sat on lots of steps before and that’s never happened.”

Daisy didn’t answer.

“I guess it’s different in the East Village.”

Daisy sniffed wetly.

He reached into his pocket and got out his bag of jelly beans. He offered some to Daisy, but she ignored him. Her head was down, and slow, quiet tears ran singly down her nose. He put his arms around her. “Hey, come on,” he said. He felt no response from her. She didn’t move or look at him.

He dropped his arm and looked away, confused. He ate his jelly beans and looked at the pool of lamplight in the black street.