Bad Behavior

An Affair, Edited

WHEN HE SAW her on the way to work in the morning, he ignored her, even though he hadn’t seen her for four years. They had met at the University of Michigan. It had been such a brief, disturbing affair that he didn’t even think of her as an old girlfriend. His memory of her was like a filmy scrap of dream discovered on the floor during the drowsy journey from bed to toilet, or a girl in an advertisement that catches in the cluttered net of memory and persists, waiting to commit sex acts with you later that night. Her slight body and pale movements intensified his impression. He had his Walkman on when they passed each other, and his blotted hearing made it easier for him to ignore her. She approached, her face tilted toward him, quizzical and apprehensive. She passed him and vanished, replaced by a girl in a suit and two staring, striding men with briefcases. She did not seem to notice that he ignored her; in fact she might have ignored him too. Their affair had ended badly.

He descended into the dank grayness of the subway, relishing slightly her surprise appearance. He had never gone to work this way before. It was probably the route she always took.

He wondered what kind of job she had; she had been wearing blue jeans stuffed into short, scuffed black boots and a tweed coat with a purple scarf folded around her neck. He wondered if it had embarrassed her to encounter him in a suit, obviously the holder of the better job. In college they had often discussed how one should deal with the world in order to become successful. He saw her ghost lying on its side on his rumpled sheets, resting on one elbow, her then-long hair lying randomly on her shoulders, telling him what she thought about success. He smiled a little. The subway banged harshly into view, and he pressed forward with the sleepy, odorous mass he joined each morning.

He emerged in a cleaner area of Manhattan and entered the spinning glass doors of a gray building that was as grainy and oblong as a cartoon drawing of an office building in The New Yorker. He worked for an independent film distribution company that dealt mainly in foreign films. It was a prestigious place to work, and he was proud of himself for getting the job right after graduation. When he first started there, it had thrilled him to know that he could attend screenings of important films, take his friends to see them free, and meet famous people every now and then.

The office was small and contained mixed knotty-legged furniture and the square orange desks of secretaries and assistants. There was a bulletin board tacked with magazine headings and photographs slabbed together. “Hi, Joel,” said the receptionist. She was echoed by two other assistants as he walked by. He stopped to chat with Cecilia, a colleague with whom he had had an affair during his first two years at the company. Now that it was over, they were friends and often had lunch. She talked to him about her date the night before.

“I’m intrigued,” she said. “He’s done work for”—she named two fashionable directors—“and next summer, he’s going to France to work with Eric Rohmer. He’s very good-looking. And funny and intelligent. Everything.”

“Sounds perfect. Where did Mr. Wonderful take you?”

“The Gloucester House. That seafood place around Fiftieth?”

“And then what?”

She returned his playful leer and told him.

He didn’t feel belittled by Cecilia’s wealthier, more prestigious boyfriends, partly, he supposed, because he felt that he had somehow joined their ranks sheerly by virtue of his affair with her. He did feel slightly humiliated by Cecilia’s speedy rise in the company, however, which had left him behind in the same job he’d been doing for three years. “My inner time clock isn’t the same as everyone else’s.” It occurred to him that he’d said that a long time ago to the phantom girl he’d seen on the street.

He sat at his desk, looked through yesterday’s mail and then, bracing himself, he got on the phone. He spent a great deal of time calling student film groups and guilds across the country, trying to interest them in Ariel films. He had always been very good at it, but now he had to fend off the idea that it might be depressing. One of the women he currently went out to dinner with also did most of her work on the phone. She had once said to him, in her nervously irritated way, that doing most of her business by phone had begun to seem strange to her. “Think about it,” she said, gripping her noodle-bearing fork in tight, elegant fingers. “All day long you’re in that room by yourself, talking to disembodied voices. Hundreds of ’em during the year. You’re immersed in floating utterances. You don’t know these people, you don’t even know what they look like. There’s no handshake, nothing. Just a pattern of sounds coming out of a plastic thing with holes.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he said. “For comic effect.”

“Barely. I never should’ve taken this job. I’ve always hated talking on the phone.”

Why was he always attracted to these small, dramatic women?

He got on the phone and began selling Ariel’s latest release — an American film he disliked and didn’t want to distribute. The plot was ridiculous; he was surprised when it was met with such a friendly critical response. It concerned a young Chinese woman working in a Japanese geisha bar in San Francisco, who is trying to find a relative she has never seen, an uncle who disappeared shortly after a murder that took place during a meeting of an obscure, crackpot Chinese political group. The woman never finds her uncle, although someone keeps leaving photos of him in her path, along with impossible excerpts from the I Ching. It was idiotic, but popular with college students. “It’s not a political film per se, although there is a political element present. It’s more about communal identity and illusion,” he said to buyers.

After lunch there was a meeting about several new films under consideration. One of them was based on a novella by a famous South American writer about a child forced into prostitution by her grandmother. Listening to the discussion of the film reminded him again of the girl he had passed on the street that morning. The subject of child prostitution almost always did, even after all this time. This was because she had told him, almost on meeting him, that she had left home at the age of fifteen and had, when she was sixteen, become a hooker for two months. She was a twenty-two-year-old college junior when they met, but the information had formed a fascinating gauze that floated over her for the entire time that he knew her.

He went to a screening of the South American film after work. It was a beautifully photographed political allegory, the kind he nearly always liked. But the frame that stayed with him had nothing to do with politics. The dark child, raped by her brutal first customer, turns her head to avoid his kiss, and a flat, brilliant fish swimming in imaginary water is superimposed, with rippling subtlety, over her face, a memory, perhaps, of the pretty fish tank in her grandmother’s demolished mansion.

When he got home he called one of the women he dated. “Nothing special,” he said. “Just checking up on you. Seeing how you are.”

She was pleased by his call, and told him she’d been depressed all week because of an agent’s reaction to her writing. He lost interest in the conversation sooner than he’d expected. He told her he had to go, but that he’d call her soon. Then he called the woman who hated telephones. She was depressed too. Her father had been calling to talk to her about how awful his life was, sometimes before she made it out of the apartment in the morning. That was a little more entertaining, but he cut that short too.

He made himself a quick dinner of packaged vegetable-flavored Indian noodles with butter. Then he opened a can of sardines and took them into his bedroom to eat in front of the TV. The best thing that he found to watch was a talk show featuring a beautiful teenaged movie star who had recently performed an erotic nude scene in a box office hit. He liked to watch her. Her precise, careful manner would have seemed stiff in a grown woman, but was charming in a child sex star. Half-formed illusions about meeting and seducing her absorbed him as he ate his noodles.

He went to bed early. When he woke up, he realized that he’d been dreaming. A fourteen-year-old girl had been given to him to take care of by some vague authority. She was a lovely tall child with wide solemn eyes and long dark hair. She hated clothes and walked around the apartment naked. He was not just excited by this, he was exhilarated and moved by her innocence. He remembered an image of her bicycling down the block in unconcerned leggy nakedness, her hair catching the sunlight. The dream then took an unfortunate turn. She was chased by a host of anxious neighbors, all trying to drape her with garments. They caught her and wrested her from his care with accusations of indecency and child molestation.

The dream left him with a sense of irrational discouragement and a mosquito-bite feeling of loss. He moped as he brushed his teeth. He wished his roommate would come back from Italy. He had never been to Europe or anywhere else, and was sick of people going.

He walked the unusual route again. Again he saw her, in almost exactly the same place. This time she looked directly at him and even showed a slight smile on her face. She nodded shyly at him. Not meeting her look, he half nodded and she was gone. Her severely bobbed hair was pretty, but not as pretty as her long hair had been.

He had lunch with Cecilia that afternoon. They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like they’d met with utter disappointment and became attached to it. Cecilia was reassuring. She was not small or theatrical. Her shoulder-length hair was blond, her plump body calm. She had a long way of saying her words, a relaxed but vaguely predatory way of turning her head. She came from a wealthy family, and he supposed that was where she got her assurance. Her background was part of what made her attractive to him. He wasn’t after her money (although he wouldn’t mind, certainly, if one day she spoke to her parents about financing a film project of his own); there was simply something foreign and delightful about this rich girl who had been safely surrounded by money all her life. The perfume of wealth graced her casually, like grass stains on the skin of a lazy child sleeping in a garden. He pictured her as an adolescent, lounging on her huge unmade, canopied and silk-sheeted bed. She was in her underwear, she was reading Tolstoy, occasionally scratching herself and eating from a box of chocolates, although he knew that Cecilia didn’t like candy and never had.

“It’s so interesting,” she said. “Now that I’m closer to success, I’ve become much less interested in it. I’ve always known that I would be successful, that I just had to work for it. But it was always out of reach, so I obsessed about it all the time. It was a goal. Now it’s more like a natural outcome, another element of my life to be experienced. It’s not even important anymore. There are so many other things in life. It’s silly to be so narrow.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” he said. “Things are always less important once you’re assured of having them.”

“It’s not that it isn’t important, it’s just that I’m not focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else. But I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when it happens. If anything, it’s more real to me now, not like something I’m going to acquire.”

He chewed without answering, and she flicked the corners of her mouth with her tongue.

“I think I’m going to Italy in a few months,” she said. “I’m really excited about it. I want to meet an Italian film producer and have an affair with him.”

“My roommate is in Italy,” he said.

“You told me.”

In a few months he would say, “My friend Cecilia is in Italy.” He looked at her serene face, her resting throat, her slightly upturned chin. He had slept with her for almost two years. She had sucked him off with that mouth. He thought: My friend, Cecilia. My friend.

When he returned to his office he got on the WATS line and called Wilson. Wilson had been a close friend while they were in Ann Arbor. Now he was stuck teaching undergraduates in a geology department in Washington, D.C. Joel called him about twice a month to gossip about other people they’d gone to school with. He knew Wilson kept in touch with the woman he’d seen again this morning.

“Do you know what Sara’s doing? Do you know where she’s working?”

There was a breath of silence before Wilson answered. “She’s all right. I think she’s still working in a bar in the East Village.”

“Has she gotten anywhere with her painting?”

“I don’t think so. Not since the little show she was in at that club. Why?”

“I’ve seen her twice on the street this week. We haven’t had a chance to talk. I just wondered what she was up to.”

Wilson had disapproved of Joel’s relationship with Sara, even though he’d been morbidly fascinated by it. Even though it had raised Joel in his esteem.

Joel got off the phone and gazed at the morose buildings standing in a clump outside his window.

Interrupted, static-ridden commercials for memories of Sara flitted mutely through his mind, chopped up and poorly edited — Sara before he knew her, a small slender person walking down State Street with her books, wearing jeans and fawn-colored boots. She had a very stiff walk despite her round hips, a tight sad mouth and wide abstracted eyes. She was always alone whenever he saw her, and always appeared vaguely surprised by everything around her. He saw her propped up in his bed, reading a book about South Africa. He saw her sitting across a table, a sauce-red shrimp in her fingers, chatting about her experience as a hooker, oblivious to stares from the next table. She appeared seated in the dark of the film auditorium, her hand at her jaw, her booted legs tossed over the next few chairs, her tongue snapping sarcastically.

“It’s so dishonest, it’s so middle-class. Who does he think he’s shocking? It’s such a reaction to convention. It’s babyish.”

“You don’t understand the concept of subversion,” he said.

“I know more about subversion than anybody else in this stupid town,” she said.

The clips sped up and blurred into glimpses. Her melancholic paleness in the dark, the sheets rumpled to reveal her gray-tinged mattress. The stark lumpiness of her spine and shoulder blades as she reached across him to snatch a “snot rag” from its box. The dry toughness of her heels. The nervous stickiness of her fingers. “Hurt me,” she said. “Hurt me.”

He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy. His focus wobbled, he slipped out again. In Ann Arbor he had pierced his ear, he had worn a beret sometimes. He had written articles in the student paper on labor unions. He had brought Andy Warhol to Cinema I. He saw himself drunk on the curb outside the Del Rio, talking with Wilson and vomiting. They were talking about politics and sex, Wilson mainly talking politics, since he rarely fucked anybody. Joel had just met Sara. “She’s great. She’s every man’s dream. I can’t tell you how, because she made me promise not to.” He turned and barfed.

Everything was so important in Ann Arbor, so fraught with the tension held tight in the bud of fantasy before it bursts into gaily striped attempt. “I have this fantasy of becoming an anarchist on the Left Bank,” he said to Sara. “Throwing bombs and creating a disturbance.”

“I want to become a good painter,” she said. “Or a great painter.”

“Listen,” he said, raising himself above her on his elbow. “I want you to be strong. You’ve come so far in spite of everything. I want you to be successful.”

“I am strong,” she said. Her eyes were serene. “I’m stronger than anyone else I know.”

He cleared his eyes and looked once more at the querulous buildings sweating in the afternoon heat. Of course, she hadn’t been strong at all. He remembered the tremulous whine coming out of the phone during their last conversation. “I’m scared,” she’d wept. “I feel like I don’t exist, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything. I want to kill myself.”

“Look, I grew up in a normal, happy family,” he’d said. “I’m well adjusted. I can’t identify with this self-esteem crisis, or whatever it is you’ve got. Anyway, we’ve only known each other for a few months and I’m not obligated to listen to your problems. You should call a psychiatrist, and anyway I have to take a bath right now.”

He couldn’t stand weak women.

He went to a nightclub in the evening with his friend Jerry and two of Jerry’s hulking lawyer friends. They went to a club that made them and a lump of other people line up outside the door for inspection by a haughty doorman who might or might not admit them, depending on whether or not he liked their appearance. Joel and Jerry, with the lawyers, had to wait an inordinate length of time while a series of habitual clubbers insouciantly gained entrance. It could’ve been humiliating, but instead it was an intriguing form of entertainment, a piece of behavior to be observed. One of the lawyers kept saying, “I don’t want to go in there anyway. This is a drag. Let’s go somewhere else.”

“No, it’s really good in here,” said Jerry. “You’ll see.”

They eventually gained admission and roamed the three floors of the club, greedily looking around. Joel drank one paper cup of watered-down alcohol after another and stared at the moiling sweat-dampened crowd with an attitude of wistful contempt. They were coiffed like Dr. Seuss characters and dressed like children in their parents’ clothes. At one time he had wanted to be like them. Now he thought they were stupid, although he still liked to look at them. He saw a girl standing alone at a bar, dressed like a twelve-year-old’s idea of a hooker. Tight black bodice, short flared ballerina skirt. She was small, she stood with her ankles together. He edged along the wall, pretending to study the material hung up as art. He remembered the blow-up doll he had once hung up in his Ann Arbor apartment as a party decoration. It wore Sara’s clothes and bore, with Scotch tape, a sign that read “Hurt Me Beat Me Fuck Me.” Wilson had said, “Joel, come on. This is too much. It’s not funny.” Joel continued toward the girl at the bar, fighting the anxious crimp in his shoulders.

The terse conversation with her didn’t result in her phone number on a piece of paper in his pocket. He found the lawyers again and stalked around with them, making jokes. They couldn’t find Jerry, so the three of them got into a cab and left together, a trio of masculine shoulders filling the paned-in back seat with gruff laughter and blurted comments.

He entered his dark, narrow-halled apartment in a grainy mental state. He stopped briefly before the toilet on his way to bed. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them in the middle of the floor. He lay on his back and put one hand on his cock. He imagined dozens of intriguing images, perusing the possible nuance of each circumstance. There was Cecilia. There was the girl at the bar. There was Sara. “Get my belt,” he had said to her. She hesitated. “Don’t you think you deserve it?” He masturbated watching spread-legged Sara arch her neck and rub her injured-looking vagina. He finished. He mopped his abdomen with a “snot rag.” A memory separated from the fantasy and lingered.

“I love you,” said Sara.

“It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.”

“No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips, and her tenderness pierced him.

The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned-off TV.