Bad Behavior

A Romantic Weekend

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. Perhaps her body tilted too far forward as she walked, perhaps her jacket made her torso look bulky in contrast to her calves and ankles, which were probably skinny. She felt like an object unraveling in every direction. In anticipation of their meeting, she had not been able to sleep the night before; she had therefore eaten some amphetamines and these had heightened her feeling of disintegration.

When she arrived at the corner he wasn’t there. She stood against a building, trying to arrange her body in the least repulsive configuration possible. Her discomfort mounted. She crossed the street and stood on the other corner. It seemed as though everyone who walked by was eating. A large, distracted businessman went by holding a half-eaten hot dog. Two girls passed, sharing cashews from a white bag. The eating added to her sense that the world was disorderly and unbeautiful. She became acutely aware of the garbage on the street. The wind stirred it; a candy wrapper waved forlornly from its trapped position in the mesh of a jammed public wastebasket. This was all wrong, all horrible. Her meeting with him should be perfect and scrap-free. She couldn’t bear the thought of flapping trash. Why wasn’t he there to meet her? Minutes passed. Her shoulders drew together.

She stepped into a flower store. The store was clean and white, except for a few smudges on the linoleum floor. Homosexuals with low voices stood behind the counter. Arranged stalks bearing absurd blossoms protruded from sedate round vases and bristled in the aisles. She had a paroxysm of fantasy. He held her, helpless and swooning, in his arms. They were supported by a soft ball of puffy blue stuff. Thornless roses surrounded their heads. His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one. This was all right with her. “I have never met anyone I felt this way about,” he said. “I love you.” He made her do things she’d never done before, and then they went for a walk and looked at the new tulips that were bound to have grown up somewhere. None of this felt stupid or corny, but she knew that it was. Miserably, she tried to gain a sense of proportion. She stared at the flowers. They were an agony of bright, organized beauty. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to give him flowers. She wanted to be with him in a room full of flowers. She visualized herself standing in front of him, bearing a handful of blameless flowers trapped in the ugly pastel paper the florist would staple around them. The vision was brutally embarrassing, too much so to stay in her mind for more than seconds.

She stepped out of the flower store. He was not there. Her anxiety approached despair. They were supposed to spend the weekend together.

He stood in a cheap pizza stand across the street, eating a greasy slice and watching her as she stood on the corner. Her anxiety was visible to him. It was at once disconcerting and weirdly attractive. Her appearance otherwise was not pleasing. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why this was. Perhaps it was the suggestion of meekness in her dress, of a desire to be inconspicuous, or worse, of plain thoughtlessness about how clothes looked on her.

He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.”

He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. “I had a relationship like that when I was in college,” she said. “Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.”

The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spire-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall?

“I’m afraid of you,” she murmured.

“Why?”

“Because I just am.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.”

She curled against him and squeezed her feet together like a stretching cat. Her socks were thick and ugly, and her feet were large for her size. Details like this could repel him, but he felt tenderly toward the long, grubby, squeezed-together feet. He said, “I want a slave.”

She said, “I don’t know. We’ll see.”

He asked her to spend the weekend with him three days later.

It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but now he felt an irritating combination of guilt and anxiety. He thought of his wife, making breakfast with her delicate, methodical movements, or in the bathroom, painstakingly applying kohl under her huge eyes, flicking away the excess with pretty, birdlike finger gestures, her thin elbows raised, her eyes blank with concentration. He thought of Beth, naked and bound, blind-folded and spread-eagled on the floor of her cluttered apartment. Her cartoon characters grinned as he beat her with a whip. Welts rose on her breasts, thighs, stomach and arms. She screamed and twisted, wrenching her neck from side to side. She was going to be scarred for life. He had another picture of her sitting across from him at a restaurant, very erect, one arm on the table, her face serious and intent. Her large glasses drew her face down, made it look somber and elegant. She was smoking a cigarette with slow, mournful intakes of breath. These images lay on top of one another, forming a hideously confusing grid. How was he going to sort them out? He managed to separate the picture of his wife and the original picture of blindfolded Beth and hold them apart. He imagined himself traveling happily between the two. Perhaps, as time went on, he could bring Beth home and have his wife beat her too. She would do the dishes and serve them dinner. The grid closed up again and his stomach went into a moil. The thing was complicated and potentially exhausting. He looked at the anxious girl on the corner. She had said that she wanted to be hurt, but he suspected that she didn’t understand what that meant.

He should probably just stay in the pizza place and watch her until she went away. It might be entertaining to see how long she waited. He felt a certain pity for her. He also felt, from his glassed-in vantage point, as though he were torturing an insect. He gloated as he ate his pizza.

At the height of her anxiety she saw him through the glass wall of the pizza stand. She immediately noticed his gloating countenance. She recognized the coldly scornful element in his watching and waiting as opposed to greeting her. She suffered, but only for an instant; she was then smitten by love. She smiled and crossed the street with a senseless confidence in the power of her smile.

“I was about to come over,” he said. “I had to eat first. I was starving.” He folded the last of his pizza in half and stuck it in his mouth.

She noticed a piece of bright orange pizza stuck between his teeth, and it endeared him to her.

They left the pizza stand. He walked with wide steps, and his heavy black overcoat swung rakishly, she thought, above his boots. He was a slight, slender boy with a pale, narrow face and blond hair that wisped across one brow. In the big coat he looked like the young pet of a budding secret police force. She thought he was beautiful.

He hailed a cab and directed the driver to the airport. He looked at her sitting beside him. “This is going to be a disaster,” he said. “I’ll probably wind up leaving you there and coming back alone.”

“I hope not,” she said. “I don’t have any money. If you left me there, I wouldn’t be able to get back by myself.”

“That’s too bad. Because I might.” He watched her face for a reaction. It showed discomfort and excitement and something that he could only qualify as foolishness, as if she had just dropped a tray full of glasses in public. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “But I like the idea that I could.”

“So do I.” She was terribly distressed. She wanted to throw her arms around him.

He thought: There is something wrong. Her passivity was pleasing, as was her silence and her willingness to place herself in his hands. But he sensed another element present in her that he could not define and did not like. Her tightly folded hands were nervous and repulsive. Her public posture was brittle, not pliant. There was a rigidity that if cracked would yield nothing. He was disconcerted to realize that he didn’t know if he could crack it anyway. He began to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps the weekend would be a disaster.

They arrived at the airport an hour early. They went to a bar and drank. The bar was an open-ended cube with a red neon sign that said “Cocktails.” There was no sense of shelter in it. The furniture was spindly and exposed, and there were no doors to protect you from the sight of dazed, unattractive passengers wandering through the airport with their luggage. She ordered a Bloody Mary.

“I can’t believe you ordered that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I want a bloody Beth.” He gave her a look that made her think of a neurotic dog with its tongue hanging out, waiting to bite someone.

“Oh,” she said.

He offered her a cigarette.

“I don’t smoke,” she said. “I told you twice.”

“Well, you should start.”

They sat quietly and drank for several minutes.

“Do you like to look at people?” she asked.

She was clearly struggling to talk to him. He saw that her face had become very tense. He could’ve increased her discomfort, but for the moment he had lost the energy to do so. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

They spent some moments regarding the people around them. They were short on material. There were only a few customers in the bar; most of them were men in suits who sat there seemingly enmeshed in a web of habit and accumulated rancor that they called their personalities, so utterly unaware of their entanglement that they clearly considered themselves men of the world, even though they had long ago stopped noticing it. Then a couple walked through the door, carrying luggage. The woman’s bright skirt flashed with each step. The man walked ahead of her. He walked too fast for her to keep up. She looked harried. Her eyes were wide and dark and clotted with makeup; there was a mole on her chin. He paused, as though considering whether he would stop for a drink. He decided not to and strode again. Her earrings jiggled as she followed. They left a faint trail of sex and disappointment behind them.

Beth watched the woman’s hips move under her skirt. “There was something unpleasant about them,” she said.

“Yes, there was.”

It cheered her to find this point of contact. “I’m sorry I’m not more talkative,” she said.

“That’s all right.” His narrow eyes became feral once again. “Women should be quiet.” It suddenly struck her that it would seem completely natural if he lunged forward and bit her face.

“I agree,” she said sharply. “There aren’t many men around worth talking to.”

He was nonplussed by her peevish tone. Perhaps, he thought, he’d imagined it.

He hadn’t.

They had more drinks on the plane. They were served a hunk of white-frosted raisin pastry in a red paper bag. He wasn’t hungry, but the vulgar cake appealed to him so he stuck it in his baggage.

They had a brief discussion about shoes, from the point of view of expense and aesthetics. They talked about intelligence and art. There were large gaps of silence that were disheartening to both of them. She began talking about old people, and how nice they could be. He had a picture of her kneeling on the floor in black stockings and handcuffs. This picture became blurred, static-ridden, and then obscured by their conversation. He felt a ghastly sense of longing. He called back the picture, which no longer gave him any pleasure. He superimposed it upon a picture of himself standing in a nightclub the week before, holding a drink and talking to a rather combative girl who wanted his number.

“Some old people are beautiful in an unearthly way,” she continued. “I saw this old lady in the drugstore the other day who must’ve been in her nineties. She was so fragile and pretty, she was like a little elf.”

He looked at her and said, “Are you going to start being fun to be around or are you going to be a big drag?”

She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t see how this followed her comment about the old lady. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think you’re very sexual,” he said. “You’re not the way I thought you were when I first met you.”

She was so hurt by this that she had difficulty answering. Finally, she said, “I can be very sexual or very unsexual depending on who I’m with and in what situation. It has to be the right kind of thing. I’m sort of a cerebral person. I think I respond to things in a cerebral way, mostly.”

“That’s what I mean.”

She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. The blue puffball thing unfurled itself before her with sickening power. It was the same image of him holding her and gazing into her eyes with bone-dislodging intent, thinly veiling the many shattering events that she anticipated between them. The prospect made her disoriented with pleasure. The only problem was, this image seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. She tried to think back to the time they had spent in her apartment, when he had held her and said, “You’re cute.” What had happened between then and now to so disappoint him?

She hadn’t yet noticed how much he had disappointed her.

He couldn’t tell if he was disappointing her or not. She completely mystified him, especially after her abrupt speech on cerebralism. It was now impossible to even have a clear picture of what he wanted to do to this unglamorous creature, who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night. Dim, half-formed pictures of his wife, Sharon, Beth and a sixteen-year-old Chinese hooker he’d seen a month before crawled aimlessly over each other. He sat and brooded in a bad-natured and slightly drunken way.

She sat next to him, diminished and fretful, with idiot radio songs about sex in her head.

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.

“You’re hurting my feelings,” she said, “but I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.”

He was briefly touched. “Accidental pain,” he said musingly. He took her head in both hands and pushed it between his legs. She opened her mouth compliantly. He had hurt her after all, he reflected. She was confused and exhausted, and at this instant, anyway, she was doing what he wanted her to do. Still, it wasn’t enough. He released her and she moved upward to lie on top of him, resting her head on his shoulder. She spoke dreamily. “I would do anything with you.”

“You would not. You would be disgusted.”

“Disgusted by what?”

“You would be disgusted if I even told you.”

She rolled away from him. “It’s probably nothing.”

“Have you ever been pissed on?”

He gloated as he felt her body tighten.

“No.”

“Well, that’s what I want to do to you.”

“On your grandmother’s rug?”

“I want you to drink it. If any got on the rug, you’d clean it up.”

“Oh.”

“I knew you’d be shocked.”

“I’m not. I just never wanted to do it.”

“So? That isn’t any good to me.”

In fact, she was shocked. Then she was humiliated, and not in the way she had planned. Her seductive puffball cloud deflated with a flaccid hiss, leaving two drunken, bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. She stared at the ugly roses with their heads collapsed in a dead wilt and slowly saw what a jerk she’d been. Then she got mad.

“Do you like people to piss on you?” she asked.

“Yeah. Last month I met this great girl at Billy’s Topless. She pissed in my face for only twenty bucks.”

His voice was high-pitched and stupidly aggressive, like some weird kid who would walk up to you on the street and offer to take care of your sexual needs. How, she thought miserably, could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art?

“There’s a lot of other things I’d like to do too,” he said with odd self-righteousness. “But I don’t think you could handle it.”

“It’s not a question of handling it.” She said these last two words very sarcastically. “So far everything you’ve said to me has been incredibly banal. You haven’t presented anything in a way that’s even remotely attractive.” She sounded like a prim, prematurely adult child complaining to her teacher about someone putting a worm down her back.

He felt like an idiot. How had he gotten stuck with this prissy, reedy-voiced thing with a huge forehead who poked and picked over everything that came out of his mouth? He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear. What had he had in mind when he brought this girl here, anyway? Her serious, desperate face, panicked and tear-stained. Her ridiculous air of sacrifice and abandonment as he spread-eagled and bound her. White skin that marked easily. Frightened eyes. An exposed personality that could be yanked from her and held out of reach like … oh, he could see it only in scraps; his imagination fumbled and lost its grip. He looked at her hatefully self-possessed, compact little form. He pushed her roughly. “Oh, I’d do anything with you,” he mimicked. “You would not.”

She rolled away on her side, her body curled tightly. He felt her trembling. She sniffed.

“Don’t tell me I’ve broken your heart.”

She continued crying.

“This isn’t bothering me at all,” he said. “In fact, I’m rather enjoying it.”

The trembling stopped. She sniffed once, turned on her back and looked at him with puzzled eyes. She blinked. He suddenly felt tired. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her. He looked around the room until he saw a light wood stick that his grandmother had for some reason left standing in the corner. He pointed at it.

“Get me that stick. I want to beat you with it.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Get it. I want to humiliate you even more.”

She shook her head, her eyes wide with alarm. She held the blanket up to her chin.

“Come on,” he coaxed. “Let me beat you. I’d be much nicer after I beat you.”

“I don’t think you’re capable of being as nice as you’d have to be to interest me at this point.”

“All right. I’ll get it myself.” He got the stick and snatched the blanket from her body.

She sat, her legs curled in a kneeling position. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m scared.”

“You should be scared,” he said. “I’m going to torture you.” He brandished the stick, which actually felt as though it would break on the second or third blow. They froze in their positions, staring at each other.

She was the first to drop her eyes. She regarded the torn-off blanket meditatively. “You have really disappointed me,” she said. “This whole thing has been a complete waste of time.”

He sat on the bed, stick in lap. “You don’t care about my feelings.”

“I think I want to sleep in the next room.”

They couldn’t sleep separately any better than they could sleep together. She lay curled up on the couch pondering what seemed to be the ugly nature of her life. He lay wound in a blanket, blinking in the dark, as a dislocated, manic and unpleasing revue of his sexual experiences stumbled through his memory in a queasy scramble.

In the morning they agreed that they would return to Manhattan immediately. Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.

They packed quickly and silently.

“It’s going to be a long drive back,” he said. “Try not to make me feel like too much of a prick, okay?”

“I don’t care what you feel like.”

He would have liked to dump her at the side of the road somewhere, but he wasn’t indifferent enough to societal rules to do that. Besides, he felt vaguely sorry that he had made her cry, and while this made him view her grudgingly, he felt obliged not to worsen the situation. Ideally she would disappear, taking her stupid canvas bag with her. In reality, she sat beside him in the car with more solidity and presence than she had displayed since they met on the corner in Manhattan. She seemed fully prepared to sit in silence for the entire six-hour drive. He turned on the radio.

“Would you mind turning that down a little?”

“Anything for you.”

She rolled her eyes.

Without much hope, he employed a tactic he used to pacify his wife when they argued. He would give her a choice and let her make it. “Would you like something to eat?” he asked. “You must be starving.”

She was. They spent almost an hour driving up and down the available streets trying to find a restaurant she wanted to be in. She finally chose a small, clean egg-and-toast place. Her humor visibly improved as they sat before their breakfast. “I like eggs,” she said. “They are so comforting.”

He began to talk to her out of sheer curiosity. They talked about music, college, people they knew in common and drugs they used to take as teenagers. She said that when she had taken LSD, she had often lost her sense of identity so completely that she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. This pathetic statement brought back her attractiveness in a terrific rush. She noted the quick dark gleam in his eyes.

“You should’ve let me beat you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hurt you too much.”

“That’s not the point. The moment was wrong. It wouldn’t have meant anything.”

“It would’ve meant something to me.” He paused. “But you probably would’ve spoiled it. You would’ve started screaming right away and made me stop.”

The construction workers at the next table stared at them quizzically. She smiled pleasantly at them and returned her gaze to him. “You don’t know that.”

He was so relieved at the ease between them that he put his arm around her as they left the restaurant. She stretched up and kissed his neck.

“We just had the wrong idea about each other,” she said. “It’s nobody’s fault that we’re incompatible.”

“Well, soon we’ll be in Manhattan, and it’ll be all over. You’ll never have to see me again.” He hoped she would dispute this, but she didn’t.

They continued to talk in the car, about the nature of time, their parents and the injustice of racism.

She was too exhausted to extract much from the pedestrian conversation, but the sound of his voice, the position of his body and his sudden receptivity were intoxicating. Time took on a grainy, dreamy aspect that made impossible conversations and unlikely gestures feasible, like a space capsule that enables its inhabitants to happily walk up the wall. The peculiar little car became a warm, humming cocoon, like a miniature house she had, as a little girl, assembled out of odds and ends for invented characters. She felt as if she were a very young child, when every notion that appeared in her head was new and naked of association and thus needed to be expressed carefully so it didn’t become malformed. She wanted to set every one of them before him in a row, as she had once presented crayon drawings to her father in a neat many-colored sequence. Then he would shift his posture slightly or make a gesture that suddenly made him seem so helpless and frail that she longed to protect him and cosset him away, like a delicate pet in a matchbox filled with cotton. She rested her head on his shoulder and lovingly regarded the legs that bent at the knee and tapered to the booted feet resting on the brakes or the accelerator. This was as good as her original fantasy, possibly even better.

“Can I abuse you some more now?” he asked sweetly. “In the car?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Gag you? That’s all, I’d just like to gag you.”

“But I want to talk to you.”

He sighed. “You’re really not a masochist, you know.”

She shrugged. “Maybe not. It always seemed like I was.”

“You might have fantasies, but I don’t think you have any concept of a real slave mentality. You have too much ego to be part of another person.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never had the chance to try it. I’ve never met anyone I wanted to do that with.”

“If you were a slave, you wouldn’t make the choice.”

“All right, I’m not a slave. With me it’s more a matter of love.” She was just barely aware that she was pitching her voice higher and softer than it was naturally, so that she sounded like a cartoon girl. “It’s like the highest form of love.”

He thought this was really cute. Sure it was nauseating, but it was feminine in a radio-song kind of way.

“You don’t seem interested in love. It’s not about that for you.”

“That’s not true. That’s not true at all. Why do you think I was so rough back there? Deep down, I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you, that I’ll need to be with you and fuck you … forever.” He was enjoying himself now. He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.

On one hand, she was beside herself with bliss. On the other, she was scrutinizing him carefully from behind an opaque facade as he entered her pasteboard scene of flora and fauna. Could he function as a character in this landscape? She imagined sitting across from him in a Japanese restaurant, talking about anything. He would look intently into her eyes….

He saw her apartment and then his. He saw them existing a nice distance apart, each of them blocked off by cleanly cut boundaries. Her apartment bloomed with scenes that spiraled toward him in colorful circular motions and then froze suddenly and clearly in place. She was crawling blindfolded across the floor. She was bound and naked in an S&M bar. She was sitting next to him in a taxi, her skirt pulled up, his fingers in her vagina.

… and then they would go back to her apartment. He would beat her and fuck her mouth.

Then he would go home to his wife, and she would make dinner for him. It was so well balanced, the mere contemplation of it gave him pleasure.

The next day he would send her flowers.

He let go of the wheel with one hand and patted her head. She gripped his shirt frantically.

He thought: This could work out fine.