Bad Behavior

Trying to Be

STEPHANIE WASN’T A “professional lady” exactly; tricking was just something she slipped into, once a year or so, when she was feeling particularly revolted by clerical work, or when she couldn’t pay her bills. She even liked a few of her customers, but she had never considered dating one; she kept her secret forays into prostitution neatly boxed and stored away from her real life. She was thus a little dismayed to find herself standing in high heels and underwear in front of the smeared mirror in the “Shadow Room,” handing her phone number to Bernard the lawyer. She felt she was being drawn deeper into something she had no business doing in the first place, but she had no boyfriend, she liked the lawyer and, since he was married, it seemed likely he would leave only a faint impression on her life.

She had been working at her current “house” for three nights when she met him. It wasn’t as posh or expensive as the other two places she’d worked, but it was comfortable and safe. She hadn’t wanted to go back to the first place because of the peculiarity of the manager, who’d read the girls’ auras daily and made them chant over anointed candles in the kitchen to “purify the space”; and she couldn’t go back to the second because it had been closed by the Mafia. She wasn’t well connected or knowledgeable enough to systematically search for the best establishment, so she had settled for this — a run-down townhouse apartment with poor ventilation and sad old smells coiling through the rooms. It was called “Christine’s” after the woman who ran it, a tiny frantic blond tyrant who rather desperately fancied her hideous paisley sitting room to be a salon and forced long minutes of excruciating conversation between women and johns before allowing them to escape up the stairs. “We’re known for our intellectual women,” she told Stephanie during her interview. “Everybody here does something. Alana here is an artist. Suzie is a fashion designer and Beatrice is a nurse,” The three women on the couch regarded Stephanie blankly. Christine gave Stephanie the working name “Perry” and told her to wear something in which she could “meet her mother for lunch and then rendezvous with her boyfriend for cocktails.” This ridiculous pretense, teetering pathetically toward aspiration, appealed to her. She thought: It’s only for a few weeks, and showed up two days later in a tight silver minidress.

She had come downstairs, after being summoned through the intercom to “meet someone,” hurried and disheveled, one stocking badly run, having left her portly, huffing client to finish his ablutions alone. She stood before the new man, feeling slightly knock-kneed in her short black skirt, smiling goofily and thinking, for some reason, of the I Love Lucy show. The canned laughter mumbled as Christine folded her hands and asked, “Well, Bernard, would you like to see Perry?”

The man stood up and said, “Yes, very much.” He was about forty-five, very tall and thin, and wore an absurd bow tie with his conservative suit. He had kind eyes and an intelligent, inquisitive demeanor. She felt that something about her genuinely excited him, and she was flattered.

He followed her to the awful burgundy Shadow Room. He stripped and lay on the bed, his torso resting against a pillow, his slender naked body placidly expectant, his almost alarmingly large penis lying half-hard on his thigh. She took off her high heels and knelt beside him on the bed. He didn’t touch her or even move closer, he just lay there and looked at her as though he were waiting to be amused. The old air conditioner moaned and dripped.

“I like your hair,” he said. “It’s a becoming style.”

She self-consciously ruffled her spiky, black-dyed crew cut. “Oh, it’s fashionable now. Lots of women have this cut.”

“Yes, I know. But it suits you especially well.”

She said thank you and pulled her shirt over her head.

He glanced at her breasts with apparent approval but still made no move to touch her.

She decided with some relief that he was a talker and settled into conversation

She quickly found out that he worked for the city on the redevelopment of the Lower East Side, that he did not love his wife, though he was very fond of her, and that they rarely made love. He stayed with her because he didn’t want to be alone.

“And what about you? What do you do when you’re not at this place?”

She grimaced. “Well, I don’t know if I do anything. I’m trying to become a writer. That’s why I came to New York.” She paused, wondering if that sounded ridiculous to this man who wore suits and patronized prostitutes. “Do you think that’s stupid?”

“No, not at all. Why would I think it’s stupid?”

“Because so many girls in these houses have the desire to do something else, but it’s obvious that in most cases they don’t have any talent or are too scared, and I don’t know, it just seems sort of pathetic to me. I don’t even tell people here what I do. I say I’m a secretary or a dental technical or something.”

“But that’s silly. As it happens, I know there have been some very talented people working here. There was a whole coterie of various artists at one point. One of them was a performance artist who went off to Italy and started working with, oh, some avant-garde choreographer — I know the name but I can’t think of it. Anyway, I hear she’s doing fine.”

“How do you know?”

“I was a regular of hers, and we saw each other on the outside. She had short hair like yours, only hers was orange.” He smiled, as though this disclosed a revealing element that firmly established a relationship between Stephanie and the orange-haired girl. “As a matter of fact, she used this place to collect material for her work. She was extremely bright and very aware of all the contradictions she embodied by being here.” He smiled gently. “She could talk about it endlessly.”

She pulled off her skirt and lay down next to him, supporting herself on one elbow. They talked about fiction in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. She ranted against the trendy writers she despised. They talked about dance performances they’d seen. He described a piece at the Dance Theater Workshop in which the dancers waved large Styrofoam animals at each other and rolled around in paint. She thought it sounded idiotic, but felt tender toward his robustly curious delight in this goofy spectacle.

“I have a Workshop membership and every now and then I get invited to fabulous parties, where all the boys wear long coats and earrings, and all the girls have hair like yours.” He beamed.

She thought: At this rate, I’m not going to have to do anything.

They talked about her past, her coldly perfect father, her sad, passive mother, her sister on lithium, her college major, her first romance. He listened gravely. He began to stroke her arm hairs, and then her arm.

He had a seductive touch; she moved closer to him and he put his arms around her. He caressed her as if he were trying to discover the places she most inhabited — not romantically, but tenderly, with a sense of exploration. She was not aroused, exactly, but it was pleasant; it had been a long time since anyone had touched her like this.

She murmured, “The way you touch reminds me of my mother.”

“How so?”

“Her touch is very seductive. I don’t even like her, but when she starts to touch me, I suddenly become totally vulnerable to her. It’s frightening.”

He liked this a lot. “That’s beautiful,” he said.

The intercom buzzed, announcing that they had ten more minutes. She “took care of him” quickly, and they stood to dress. She stuck her feet back in her high heels, and cheerfully tore the sheets off the bed. He zipped up his pants, handed her an extra twenty and told her it had been a relaxing hour. She said yes, actually, it had been for her too, and then trotted off to stuff the wadded-up sheets in a reeking wicker basket. She walked him downstairs, feeling ungainly and knees-out in her tight skirt. She was aware of him looming and lurking darkly behind her as she came under the speculative, moody gaze of three potential Romeos.

“And here’s Perry,” said Christine brightly.

“Hi,” she said, bobbing her head. She turned to Bernard and rolled her eyes as she walked him to the door, knowing that he would enjoy this open display of contempt.

“See you soon,” he said. He held her against him for a second, and she experienced a disorienting sense of comfort and safety that made walking back into the invading stares of her prospective boyfriends almost voluptuously exposing. She stood before them, and the canned laughter sounded once more.

That night she went to a group show at a small gallery in Soho that included work by her friend Sandra. As usual, she was one of the few non-artists there. Sandra, nervous and carefully chic in a bright blue pillbox hat and a long black velvet skirt, introduced her as “my friend Stephanie, who writes for The Village Voice.” This impressed people, even when Stephanie said, “I just wrote one thing for the Voice and that was a year and a half ago.”

“Yes, but you look like a writer for The Village Voice,” said a painter.

“That sounds like an insult to me.”

“It’s not an insult, but it’s not a compliment either.” He barked out a laugh.

Stephanie attached herself to another conversation about the embarrassing failure of an art gallery that she had never heard of, which, after a rapid shift of participants, became a discussion about somebody’s review in the Times versus somebody’s review in the Voice. Sandra rapidly crossed and recrossed the floor, darting in and out of conversations with apparent pleasure and animation. “Nobody’s here,” she hissed finally, near the hors d’oeuvres, even though there were dozens of people present.

Stephanie wandered from conversation to conversation, having an almost panicky feeling that although there were nice, interesting people in the room, the situation, for all its seeming friendliness and ease, precluded her from connecting with the nice and interesting aspects of them. She tried to figure out why this was and could not, beyond the sense that the conversations around her were opening and closing according to the subtle but definite rules that no one had told her about. Then she saw Dara, Sandra’s other non-artist friend, standing regally alone. Dara was trying to become a fashion designer, and she looked unusually beautiful that night in a strapless satin dress that was dramatically faded in the middle where someone had probably spilled something on it a long time ago. Stephanie had always admired Dara, even though she was not friendly and had once been very rude to Stephanie on the phone. But Dara seemed pleased to see her and hung on to her presence throughout a shockingly dull conversation that stumbled awkwardly through Sandra’s work, Sandra’s husband’s work, a writer Stephanie liked and a movie. Still, Stephanie resolutely held on to her idea of Dara as an interesting person. She said, “You seem like someone who is at home in the world.”

A startled look flared in Dara’s eyes; she glanced at Stephanie with disappointment. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said shortly. “I doubt you know anyone less at home than me.”

They stood silently, Stephanie’s silence a disheartened one. She had thought she was making a penetrating remark that would impress Dara with her perceptiveness; instead she had revealed herself to be a person living in a dreamworld. This was always happening.

The next day at Christine’s, she felt like a person in a dreamworld, specifically a Playboy cartoon dreamworld inhabited by beautiful, moronic prostitutes in short pink negligees lolling about on cushions with white cats while large men in suits smiled at them. It was a strangely pleasant sensation. It had been a slow afternoon, and the women lounged on the couch with their high heels off and their feet up, watching TV and eating heavily salted french fries from damp carry-out containers.

Stephanie was talking to Brett, an alert Chinese girl with waist-length hair. Brett had been in “the business” for ten years, since she was seventeen, and she said she was ready to leave. She told story after story about how customers were always trying to take advantage of her, humiliate her or intrude on her sympathies in some grotesque way. “It was just awful,” she said, concluding a particularly obnoxious story. “It was as if he’d done it almost, having to listen to him say it, you know?” She leaned forward for a handful of french fries, stuck some in her mouth and chewed meditatively. “When I was younger I had more energy to fight them off. No matter what they said or did, I could keep them away from my real self. But it gets harder and harder and I don’t know how much longer I can go on. I want to do something else anyway. I’m bored.”

The other women began to talk about the terrible things men had done or tried to do, and how they’d thwarted them or gotten them back. There was a tenacious sense of defended pride in the room, which Stephanie felt both distant from and very much a part of. She thought of how pathetic this pride would seem to someone like Sandra, who had once disgustedly described a brief stint as a cocktail waitress as making her feel “like a whore.”

The buzzer rang and Bernard the lawyer appeared, hands in his pockets, a sophisticated fellow playing the part, with mild amusement, of the casual businessman about to enjoy himself with a cheap woman. Stephanie smiled at him and sank back into the couch, feeling she was a sophisticated woman playing cheap. Soon they were back in the Shadow Room.

“Do you remember those cartoons in Playboy?” she asked as they lay, not yet touching, on the bed. “The ones about prostitutes with the same faces and bodies lying on pillows, wearing lacy nighties? And the men who were standing with flowers and chocolates in their hands?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It’s funny, because I used to look at those things when I was ten and eleven years old and — well, I didn’t really know what prostitutes were, but it looked like a good thing from what I could see in Playboy. They were beautiful and they didn’t have to do anything but sit on cushions and men loved them. So I told my mother I wanted to be a prostitute when I grew up.”

“That’s fabulous.” He smiled as though this was the most entertaining thing he’d heard all week.

“Naturally she freaked out, and my parents sent me to a psychiatrist.”

“Oh, good Lord.”

“But after a few visits the psychiatrist decided I was normal. I mean, I had good grades and friends and everything, so I didn’t have to go anymore.” She shrugged. “My poor sister wasn’t so lucky. He had her on lithium by the time she was eleven.”

“But the psychiatrist was wrong about you, wasn’t he?”

She laughed, but she thought: He was not wrong. I am actually pretty normal.

“So that’s what you’re doing. You’re playing prostitute.” He stroked her face and hair.

She was startled that he seemed to be thinking in the same terms as she had been downstairs. She pictured him with his orange-haired, chain-smoking performance artist, and she had an almost visual sense of his delight in this educated woman who flew in the face of society, deliberately taking on a role that he probably considered demeaning, and then analyzing it. “Actually, I’m not playing. This is for real. I’m not going to give you your money back.”

“You know what I mean.” He drew her against him and lightly scratched her head.

“But even as a kid I realized there were problems with the customer-hooker romance. Because once, when I was about twelve, I was in my father’s study rubbing his neck — I used to do that all the time for him — and there was this Playboy calendar over his desk and some babe was on it and I said to him, ‘Do you like her?’ and he said, ‘Sure I do,’ and I said, ‘Would you like to meet her?’ and he looked shocked and said, ‘No, she’s just a dumb broad.’ And I was appalled.”

Bernard’s smile almost became a laugh. “Well, but you know he was lying. He would’ve loved to meet her.”

“It’s not funny. I was hurt by what he said. I was hurt for her.”

“No, I know it’s not funny. I’m sorry.” He lay on top of her and kissed her, cupping her head tenderly in his hands. They kissed and touched each other and then broke apart to talk some more. She told him about the conversation with Brett and how it made her feel. She told him about the opening she had been to the night before, leaving out her almost frightened sense of isolation. She asked what his wife was like.

“She’s intelligent, and very independent. She’s better at being alone than I am. And she’s adventurous in her own way. Last year she went to South America by herself, which isn’t something most woman her age would do.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirty-nine.”

“What does she do?”

“Teaches high school, which she likes very much. I enjoy her, even if it isn’t passionate. We actually have separate bedrooms.”

“I couldn’t be married like that,” she said. “There would have to be passion.”

“You’re very idealistic.”

“You’re not?”

“No, I’m not. Anyway, marriage isn’t about passion for me. We’re excellent company for each other. And I don’t want to be alone.”

They were silent for a moment; she gently felt his earlobes.

“Why do you come to places like this?” she asked.

“Why do you think?”

“I really don’t know. How any grown man can accept what happens here as sex is beyond me. You could have affairs if you wanted, I’ll bet. You don’t seem that interested in sex here, anyway. So why do you come?”

“To meet fascinating creatures I’d never meet in the usual course of my life. Like you.” He touched her nose and smiled.

Of course, she realized what he liked about her. He loved the idea of kooky, arty girls who lives “bohemian” lives and broke all the rules. It was the kind of thing he regarded with a certain admiration, but did not want to do himself. He had probably had affairs with eccentric, unpredictable women in college, and then married the most stable, socially desirable woman he could find. This did not make her feel contempt or draw away from him. She liked this vicarious view of herself; it excited and reassured her. She wasn’t a directionless girl adrift in a monstrous city, wandering from one confusing social situation to the next, having stupid affairs. She was a bohemian, experimenting. The idea made rock music start playing in her head. She kissed him with something resembling passion.

“I would like to actually fuck you sometime,” he said. “But I don’t think you enjoy sex here. I don’t want it if you can’t enjoy yourself.”

She smiled and tweaked the light layer of flab at his waist. “But that doesn’t apply to blow jobs, right?”

After he left, the day suddenly became very busy. Most of the men she saw were unpleasant, and she found herself taking refuge in the idea of Bernard the lawyer as she endured their malodorous company.

That night Sandra called her. Stephanie was sitting on her bed eating orange sorbet from a pint box and trying to view her life in a positive way, and she welcomed the interruption.

“Hi,” said Sandra. “You’re not writing, are you?”

“No, in fact, I was avoiding it.”

“Again?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Sandra sighed. “Maybe you’re trying to write at the wrong time of day. Most people have times of day when they’re more productive than others. Have you considered that?”

“No, I haven’t. Anyway, I have a job, you know.”

“That’s right, I forgot. You don’t have as much leeway as I do.” Sandra was supported by her husband, a painter whose father had given him a building. Stephanie had told Sandra that she was working as a maid for an agency that had several apartments on the Upper West Side. In her mind, this was grubbily close to the truth, and it rendered her conveniently unreachable by phone. She felt that Sandra viewed her fictional job with a mixture of secret repugnance and respect, astounded that a person she knew could do such a job without any apparent loss of self-esteem.

Sandra began to talk about the opening. After Stephanie had left, an important East Village art critic had arrived, and Sandra had hoped he would pay attention to her. But he ignored her completely and openly admired the work done by her friend Yolanda.

“I know it’s petty, but by the end of the night, I could hardly speak to her. It’s not just this one incident either; she’s always getting attention — ever since she started putting those little beads in her hair and going out with that guy Serge. And I know what this sounds like, but sometimes I think people respond to her just because she’s black and they want to prove they’re not racist. I mean, I know she’s good, but I work all the time, and she only does one painting every few months. And her stuff is derivative as hell. I mean, I know everybody’s derivative in a way, but you know what I mean. It makes me feel like a piece of shit. Am I being awful?”

“Well … sort of,” said Stephanie, who thought Yolanda’s work was clearly better than Sandra’s. “But I understand how you feel.” She told Sandra how annoyed she was when the name of a writer she didn’t think much of began appearing in bold print in gossip columns everywhere. “When I saw that picture of him in Vanity Fair at the Palladium with China Smith, I almost threw up,” she said.

They talked about how shallow and fake it all was, and once again Stephanie told the story of the twenty-three-year-old clerk who had driven her to despair with stories of his impending publication in Esquire and his subsequent book contract, until she found out that he was certifiably nuts and on lithium, and couldn’t possibly be telling the truth.

Stephanie hung up feeling vaguely humiliated. She thought of her job at Christine’s, almost so she could feel worse, but felt strangely comforted instead. This made no sense to her, but she accepted the comfort. She wished that she could tell Sandra about her real job, but she didn’t dare. Perhaps Sandra wouldn’t be shocked, but she would think it was self-destructive and insulting to women. Well, maybe it was. She never got any writing done while she was hooking. Somehow the idea of coming home after a day at Christine’s and sitting down to write was impossible; her thoughts were clotted by the clamoring, demanding ghosts of the men she’d seen that day. She needed to make herself a nourishing meal and sit still and take care of herself, as her mother used to say. Working at Christine’s was a time for making money and resting her brain, she told herself. Writing would come later.

She pictured herself in the future, so successful that she could talk about being a hooker without anyone minding. “I didn’t do much writing then,” she’d say to her circle of successful friends as they stood around smiling and holding their drinks. “I spent most of my time just trying to re-form my personality.” And they’d all laugh at this adorable admission of her female vulnerability.

The only person she’d ever told was her friend from college, Babette. Babette, who was trying to be an actress, had a whole gaggle of friends from the restaurant where she worked who wore a lot of leather and went en masse to some S&M bar in the West Village on weekends. It didn’t seem as though prostitution would faze Babette, but when Stephanie told her about her first experience three years earlier, she’d said, “Oh, Stephie! How could you do that to yourself? How could you?” Stephanie explained again and again that she didn’t think it was damaging her self-respect, but Babette would not be mollified. Stephanie suspected that Babette’s consternation had little to do with self-respect and a lot to do with Babette’s discomfort at discovering that she was friends with a prostitute instead of a writer. However, Babette was a fragile person who had done too much cocaine, had a breakdown, cut her wrist — shallowly, but still — and now saw a therapist twice a week, so she thought it was best not to speak to her again about subsequent episodes.

She didn’t see Bernard during the next three days, but she saw a variety of people unappealing enough to demolish her soothing daydream of happy prostitutes and fatherly johns. One, although he had made a point of showering and vigorously drying beforehand, dripped sweat off the tip of his nose and onto her face as ardently as he dripped his endearments, and seemed genuinely puzzled, even hurt, when she turned away from his kiss. Another, a huge, morose fellow with a gold Pisces chain on his fleshy chest, lay on his back and talked about how the most wonderful time in his life had been when he played football in high school; he was unable to figure out why everything had been so boring ever since. “I bet I know what you was like then,” he said, rolling over. “You was one of them quiet types that never went out. And look at you now.” There was no malice in his voice; it was a wonderless comment, which made its accuracy all the more depressing. Then there was the concave-chested little person who so offended her with the pre-session suggestion that she “suck his tits” that she involuntarily threw up her hands and said, “No. No. Just no,” and walked out of the room and down the stairs, not caring whether or not Christine fired her, which she didn’t. “I’ll send one of the other girls up,” she said to Stephanie as they huddled in the kitchen. “You’ve worked hard today and I can afford to lose that geek if he walks.”

On the fourth day, when Bernard finally appeared, she fell into his arms. “I’m so glad to see you,” she said, feeling his rather automatic placating response. She told him how terrible the last few days had been.

“This guy was there for half an hour droning about his stupid high school days, and how important he was, and how all the cute girls would go out with him. It was just dreadful.” She noted Bernard’s puzzled expression and laughed. “I guess it doesn’t sound so bad, but it really was. For a while I was in his life, and his life was lousy.”

He looked at her seriously. “You’re right,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here. This is a bad place for you.”

“I know. I’m going to quit next week.”

“If you do, you must give me your phone number. I’d really like to keep in touch with you. It doesn’t have to be any big deal. I just think you’re an interesting girl.”

She didn’t see him before she quit, nor did he call her right away. When a week went by, she decided he’d changed his mind. She felt disappointed, but also relieved, and then stopped thinking about it. She eased back into her life slowly, first looking for another job and then trying to write every day.

Babette entered a period of energy and optimism and began asking her out to nightclubs again. Babette had a lot of friends in the club business, so they could unfailingly sail past the block-long lines of people vainly trying to catch some doorman’s imperious eye. Babette, a tiny angular creature with long, slightly slanted eyes, looked annoyingly perfect in her silk Chinese jacket and black suede boots, her slim hip tilted one way, he little head the other. Stephanie always felt large and unraveled by comparison, as though her hat was wrong or her hem was falling out.

They could spend hours wandering through the dark rooms, holding their drinks and shouting comments at one another. Often they would meet friends of Babette’s who would invite them into the bathroom for cocaine. Sometimes Babette would go off to dance and Stephanie would stand on the periphery of the dance floor, watching the dancers grinning and waving their arms in blind delight or staring severely at the floor as they thrashed their limbs. Lights flashed off and on, and the disc jockey spun one record after another in a pattern of controlled delirium. Stephanie would stroll through the club, watching the non-dancers blankly scrutinizing the dancers or standing in groups that were laughing with mysterious animation. After about fifteen minutes, she would be forced to face the fact that she was bored. Then she would remember what she was like before she came to New York and realize that this was what she had pictured: herself in a glamorous club full of laughing or morosely posing people. In frustration, she would decide that the reason it all seemed so dull was that she was seeing only the outermost layer of a complex society that spoke in ingenious and impenetrable signs to outsiders who, even if they were able to physically enter the club, were unable to enter the conversations that so amused everyone else. This was a discouraging idea, but it was better than thinking that the entire place was a nonsensical bore that people actually longed to belong in.

“Hi,” said a man with a hideous hunk of hair. “I like your hat.”

“Thank you.”

“Would you like to dance?”

“No, thank you.” She looked right at him when she said this, meaning to convey that she didn’t consider him repulsive, but that she was deep in thought and couldn’t dance.

It didn’t work; he stared away with a ruffled air and then said, “Do you want to go to the Palladium?”

“No, thank you.”

He looked at her with theatrical scorn and she noticed that he was actually very handsome. “Are you French?” he asked.

“No. Why do you ask? Do I sound French?”

“I don’t know. You just look like you might be. Are you a dancer?”

“No. Why?”

“I don’t know. You have to be something.” He looked as if he was about to spit.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m an architect. Do you want some coke?”

“No, thank you.”

He looked at her as though she were completely mad and walked away. She quickly moved off the spot of this encounter toward a roomful of people in groups, determined to hear at least part of an interesting conversation. She was stopped by a man who wanted to know if she was Italian. She said no and escaped him. She was continuing toward a courtly group of large, aging transvestites who were the most welcoming and companionable bunch she’d seen all night when a very handsome black man took her elbow and said, “Bonsoir. Are you French?”

“No.”

“Italian?”

“No.”

His faced changed a shade. “What are you?”

“I’m from Illinois.”

He dropped her elbow with unmistakable contempt and turned his back to her. That was the last straw. She walked out of the club and into the street, not even bothering to look for Babette.

She walked ten blocks in her high heels, and was almost home when she decided to stop at a neighborhood lesbian bar. It would be comfortable, she thought, to get drunk in the company of jovial women. And it was, until a pleasant conversation she thought she was having turned into a nasty argument, before she ever saw the turn, about whether or not bisexual women are lying cowards. Then she staggered home.

At twelve o’clock the next day she answered the phone, making her voice as feeble and throaty as possible, the better to parry Babette with a muddled excuse. She didn’t recognize his voice right away, not even when he mentioned Christine’s, and he was beginning to sound insulted when she finally said, “Oh, hi,” her voice wobbling pleasingly (to her) and making her feel like a tousle-haired, mascara-smeared movie babe in a rumpled bed. He was in the neighborhood, and he wanted to meet her for lunch.

“Gosh, I’d like to, but I was out late last night, I’m still in bed and I look awful.”

“Well, I’m disappointed, but maybe some other time.”

“Well, maybe I could … where are you?”

Half an hour later she was sitting with him in an expensive eggs Benedict place, with waiters in black pants mincing about as a piped-in symphony identified this as a haven of Western civilization. “I tried to call you before, but you weren’t at home and then I got incredibly busy. There’s been a lot of fuss over a particular couple of blocks in the Village.”

“I’ve heard,” she said. “Actually, I wish they weren’t doing that to the Village. It’s going to be awfully sterile soon.”

“That may be,” he said easily. “But it would be sterile, not to say precious, if the old neighborhood were artificially maintained.”

“Letting a place alone isn’t the same thing as artificial maintenance. Anyway, this is artificially accelerated development.” She argued with him happily, pointing out that he was contradicting an earlier-expressed belief that the government should manipulate the economy to protect the poor.

“Yes, I suppose you’re right about that,” he said after her short speech. His indifferent capitulation left her forceful argument charging foolishly toward a vanishing target, and she changed the subject, telling him about the previous night. He especially liked the drunken argument with the lesbian, and said “fabulous” three times.

Their eggs came in oblong dishes. The piped-in woodwinds sang stirringly of decency and order.

“What are you doing now that you’ve left Christine’s?” he asked. “Are you working or writing?”

“Neither one, really.” She thought: I’m trying to re-form my personality. “I’m looking for a job, probably some clerical thing. Maybe something part time.”

“Have you considered something in an editorial capacity?”

“I tried that when I first came here and it didn’t work out.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t really interested enough.” She thought of trying to explain herself further, but ate her eggs instead. She remembered herself newly arrived in New York, nervously planning her future. She saw the ensuing events as a series of comic-strip pictures separated by dark borders. This was especially true of her job search — there she was, the round-shouldered applicant before the monotonous, large-handed boss. She remembered her interview with the most respected editor of the most prestigious publishing house in town:

“Oh, yes, I remember Georgia Helman.” The editor had rolled his eyes as he mentioned the woman who had referred Stephanie to him, a woman who had been his associate for two years. “A rather pathetic case. The only reason I hired her was as a favor to a personal friend. She was so messed up with drugs and men, you know. But about you.” He looked at her as if she’d already been in his office several times. “If you really want to be a writer, then don’t move to New York. You’ll just wind up in some dank little dump in the East Village with bars on the windows, and oh, I don’t know.” He grimaced and flapped his hand with distaste.

She reminded him that she had already moved to the city and he said, “Well, in that case, maybe you should try The New Yorker. They generally hire only friends and family, but you have a certain, I don’t know, fresh, insipid look they might like. I’ve gotten quite a few people in there. Would you like to have a drink tomorrow evening?”

She had to admit that a large part of the reason she was even trying to get a job was for the approval of people she’d known in Illinois, many of whom were living in New York and thought of her as a hopeless neurotic who couldn’t do much of anything.

She thought of her last conversation with one of these people, a film production assistant on her lunch break. “Stephanie,” she said, “you’ve simply got to cut your hair. I know it sounds superficial, but really, things like that matter. Editors are very busy people; they can only see you for twenty minutes, so they have to act on impressions, and that includes style. Long hair is college — ideals, finding yourself, and all that. Nobody here has long hair.” She dug smartly into her pile of refried beans.

She thought of Jackson, an ex-lover whom she had especially wanted to impress, and was perversely glad that she never did get a professional position. She remembered what a curious relief it had been to take her first job in a whorehouse, where a real job didn’t matter, where males and females performed the ancient, primal and wonderfully elementary dance of copulation, blandly, predictably and by appointment.

“Is something wrong?” asked Bernard.

“I was just thinking of someone.” She hesitated. “Someone I knew in college. I had a pretty awful relationship with this person and I couldn’t have sex for over a year afterward. The first time I fucked anybody else after him was my first trick in my first house.”

“You’re kidding!”

She laughed. “It’s too corny, isn’t it? Girl has heart broken by callous swine and turns to prostitution.”

“Your life is very dramatic,” he said pleasantly.

“It’s not so dramatic. These things happen. I mean, I’m over it now.”

Bernard walked her back to her building, but to her surprise he didn’t want to come up to the apartment, even though she would have liked him to. In fact, they didn’t fuck until the second time she had dinner with him. It was a calm, affectionate event (“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, referring to his problematic size as he lay on top of her, gripping her firmly about the hips). The evening was marred only when he handed her a hundred dollars on his way out the door.

She stared at him, stricken. “I don’t want that,” she said. “That’s not why I’m seeing you.”

He looked embarrassed. “I know it’s not why you’re seeing me. It’s not why I’m seeing you. But I think you should have it.”

“I don’t want it.”

He sat on the bed. “Stephanie, it’s very simple. I have a lot of money. You do not. You need money. I can give it to you. Please take it.”

“You didn’t give me money when we went out to dinner.”

He groped for an explanation for this and gave up. “Well, the next time we go out to dinner, I’ll give you money.”

“I won’t take it.”

“If you don’t, I’ll just mail it to you.”

Accepting the money became less troublesome than arguing. She stared at the cash sitting on her dresser after he left and thought: So now it is my real life. Then she got up and put it in her wallet.

The next few times she saw him, the cash factor didn’t seem so bad. It even felt perversely glamorous; it made her think of Babette’s friend Natalia, a dark, striking girl who was trying to be an actress. Babette was always telling Stephanie, with a certain awe, how Natalia collected men who bought her clothes and gave her money and drugs. If only Bernard would buy her a dress or something, perhaps it would seem less dubious, but she enjoyed his company, he was sexually pleasant, and she rather relished the novelty of the situation, much as he probably did. She told her friends that she was seeing a married man who “gave her money sometimes.”

“Stephanie, that sounds really good for you,” said Sandra. “Sometimes it’s good to have somebody who will just come over to your house and be nice to you.”

“I like that,” said Bernard as he held her in his arms. “I’m a person who comes over to your house and is nice to you.”

Besides, it had been three weeks since she’d quit Christine’s, and she still hadn’t found a job, so the money was useful to her. Sometimes it was a hundred, sometimes two or even three hundred, depending on nothing but his mood.

Her days began to slide together in a passive slur of afternoon movies, galleries and nightclubs. Babette would ask her if she’d started writing and she’d say that she was taking notes, which was true. She was content to drift, confident that her unconscious was unconsciously gathering information.

She was having coffee in Soho one afternoon when Jackson walked into the café. He had the same mincing, narrow walk, the same rigid pelvis, the same uptilted chin. He looked at her and she at him. She held her breath. He quickly examined her, from foot to eye, and sat down on the other side of the room without answering her nod.

She thought of something Babette had said when Stephanie had told her about her first hooking experience. “Oh, Stephie, don’t you know this is exactly what Jackson said you’d do? How can you fall into that horrible idea he had of you?”

She had stiffly explained to Babette that this had nothing to do with Jackson, and she was sure that it didn’t. But it made her feel bad to think of Jackson’s reaction if he ever heard about it. The last time she’d seen him in New York, she had called him. He said they should meet for lunch, but lunch turned out to be a plastic glass of orange juice in a coffee shop while Jackson waited for his laundry to come out of a machine. He didn’t have much time, he said. He was meeting his fiancée’s parents at five. Their forty minutes of conversation were filled with pauses and downward looks. “People in New York are very busy,” he said. “I divide my time sparingly between my work and my social life. I find myself associating primarily with other young professionals.”

She told Bernard about seeing Jackson that night, as they sat in a loud bar having BLTs and drinks.

“It sounds romantic in a way,” he said. “Silently passing each other in a crowded room.”

“It was awful.”

“What was so terrible about what happened between the two of you?”

She shrugged. “It’s hard to describe. I guess it’s basically that corny thing I talked about. I loved him, I trusted him too much and he turned out to be a dreadful person.” She realized that Bernard was being distracted by a plump blonde with loopy earrings and white go-go boots. She paused until he turned toward her again. “But it was more complicated. He had a lot of power over me. He was bisexual — don’t worry, I test negative — and he was seeing this guy André at the same time that he was seeing me. Sometimes he’d literally get up out of my bed and go be with André. Then he decided André and I should be friends and that we should all go out together.”

“Why did you go along with this? Did you like it?”

“Yeah, that was part of it. I wanted to be open. I wanted to experience everything. And I loved Jackson, or thought I did. Eventually, I wound up in bed with both of them, and that’s when it got ugly. I freaked out, Jackson decided I was boring and dropped me. That’s it.”

Bernard stared at her more intently than he ever had, with a deepening, almost gloating shade of something she couldn’t read in his dark eyes. He clasped her hand under the table and held it tight.

“Even after he left Evanston, I felt as if the whole tone of my time there was set by my thing with him. Everybody there knew about the three of us. Everywhere I went I got these looks. Jackson had a lot of friends who weren’t the most compassionate people in the world and … it was painful.”

“But didn’t such a complex liaison make you all the more mysterious and interesting to people?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t give a shit about being interesting and mysterious. I wanted him to love me.”

For a second, he looked as though she had said something truly strange. Then his face smoothed over with fatherly tenderness. He stroked her cheek. “You really are a classic,” he said. “You don’t look it, but you are.”

Three weeks after she’d started seeing Bernard, a month after she’d left Christine’s, an unexpected thing happened. Someone from a magazine she had interviewed with when she had come to New York three years before called her about a position as an editorial assistant. They had found her résumé and clips from the Evanston college paper in an old file and wanted to know if she was available. It was an architectural journal — not a subject she cared much about, but she remembered the magazine as being well written and beautifully designed. Besides, she was becoming desperate for a job, so she had the interview and was hired two days later.

Babette and Sandra seemed to think that it was the most wonderful thing in the world. (Now Sandra no longer had to stretch Stephanie’s connection with the Voice, and could introduce her as “in editorial.”) Stephanie wasn’t sure that it would in fact be a lot better than working at Christine’s; she no longer cared about being a “young professional” for Jackson’s sake.

Meanwhile, her odd relationship with Bernard was beginning to trouble her. Their conversation, although they spoke of many things, seemed mostly polite and for the benefit of fantasies they had about each other. Sexually, they seemed to be on the same level. She couldn’t tell if this was disappointing to him or not. And the money issue was beginning to disturb her again, now that she was working for the magazine. He’s not someone who comes to my house and is nice to me, she thought as she lay alone in bed. He’s someone who pays me to fuck him. She had an image of herself, sprawled half on and half off a bed at Christine’s, her upside-down head patiently looking back at her from the mirror as some galoot humped her. This vision blended discordantly with the idea of herself at her desk at the magazine and she was unable to separate them.

Despite this ambiguity, she was curiously reluctant to drop the affair. He only saw her once or twice a week, he was not demanding, he liked her favorite authors and was somehow very reassuring. Reassuring of what, she didn’t know, but it was connected to her old feeling that he thought of her as a representative of the exciting avant-garde — although it also seemed that if he had any brains at all, he would’ve realized by now that she was just a bewildered human.

“I think I know why you go to places like Christine’s,” she said.

“I’m all ears.”

“One of the times I was there, I was watching this girl called Marissa, a skinny, not very attractive girl with blank brown eyes. It was almost the end of the night and she was squatting on the floor with her skirt hiked up to her waist, counting her money with a little furry-animal look of concentration, and I thought about how she must look to someone like you, despite her nasty personality — like this cute little beast who can be swept up and fondled and experienced and then put down.”

“That’s fabulous.” He looked deeply entertained. “You have such a wonderful way of expressing things.”

She thought: If he says “fabulous” one more time tonight, I may punch him in the nose.

It was a cool autumn evening. Clawlike leaves smelling of ashes rasped and scuttled across the pavement as they walked to her apartment.

They were silent and she felt uncomfortable about it. They were returning from a dinner that should’ve been nice but wasn’t. Bernard had been distracted and (she felt) bored by her. He had flirted subtly with their waitress, which she’d observed with a detached sense of disappointment, a cold and lifeless form of jealousy. As they mounted the stairs, she felt they were heading toward a destination simply because it was more trouble than it was worth to avoid it.

Once inside the warm apartment, though, she felt better about him, and she sensed a similar change in his mood. They lay snuggled on her bed and told short stories about their lives. He mentioned a girl he’d had a particular passion for in college, a headstrong dancer with long red hair, and told how he had finally seduced her one night after a party. “It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life. At the last moment she panicked and said, ‘No, let me just take you in my mouth.’”

“Why didn’t she want to screw?”

“Because she felt too vulnerable and didn’t want me to enter her.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I fucked her.” Pause. “And that was the beginning of a long and intense relationship.”

“Did you ever consider marrying her?”

What a silly idea, said his face. “No, no. I wasn’t thinking about that then.”

“Did you ever feel a passion like that for your wife?”

“No, I really didn’t. She was by far the most beautiful of all the women I’d been with, but I wasn’t nearly as attracted to her as I had been to the others.” He touched her nose. “You’re really concerned about that, aren’t you?”

They kissed and petted, and her absurd bed creaked. Then they separated and talked again. She told him about the time her sister’s boyfriend had tried to seduce her in the middle of their breakup.

“What happened?” He smiled.

“Nothing. I didn’t want to. I mean, I wasn’t attracted to him and he was obviously doing it out of hostility to my sister.”

“Oh, no. That probably had nothing to do with it.”

“Well, maybe not. I think part of it was that he was intrigued by me as a variation of her.”

“Exactly!” He said this with great emphasis, as though she’d hit upon something important. “I almost seduced my wife’s sister the first time we separated, but we both balked at the last minute, mostly her. We were at the kitchen table, drinking gin.” He smiled. “Of course your sister’s boyfriend wanted you. One wants them all.”

She began to talk about an old lover of hers who reminded her of Bernard, but as she talked she kept imagining Bernard on a clean tiled kitchen floor, humping his blond wife’s blond sister. It reminded her of the stories in The New Yorker about decent professional people having extramarital affairs. The more she contemplated this picture, the more difficult it was to imagine sex with this man … this customer. She had a quick feeling of sympathy for his wife, lying in her single bed, in her separate room, next to the room of a man who wanted them all. She started to feel something like guilt, and to forestall it, she began to kiss him. The bed creaked and he parted her legs.

From that moment on, the same sense of disaffection that she’d felt in the restaurant overtook her. Afterward, they spoke some more, but the conversation didn’t work. They even had a strangely snide argument about whether or not Nabokov was a good writer. In the frequent silences, she felt that he sensed her sudden disapproval of him. She was a little sorry, because she liked him, but at the same time she was relieved when he got up to go. When he said “Take good care of yourself,” she knew that she wouldn’t hear from him again.

It wasn’t until half an hour after he’d left that she realized that for the first time he hadn’t left her any money. This had an entirely unexpected effect on her; she sat on her bed and cried.

She couldn’t have said what she was crying about. Christine’s, Brett, Jackson, her first miserable, lonely year in New York and Bernard the lawyer all seemed to have something to do with it, although she couldn’t tell if she was just pulling anything available into her sadness. She cried until she was sure she was absolutely finished. Then she got up, put on her shoes and went out for a walk.

It was a beautiful Halloweenlike night, and there were exuberant people on the streets. She walked happily, admiring faces and haircuts. She looked at people, dogs, cars and buildings, and everything pleased her. She stopped at a Korean grocery store and looked at the fruit. She was struck by how neat and beautiful it was in its organized, traditional piles. She thought of herself coming here every week and buying fruit, vegetables, bread, cereal and milk, and it seemed like a wonderful idea. She bought herself an apple, and walked home eating it.