Bad Behavior

Other Factors

CONSTANCE WAS DISCONCERTED by her meeting with Franklin in the East Village, partly because two years before he’d spent exactly one week ardently trying to seduce her, and then had abruptly dropped her to get married to a hitherto undisclosed fiancée. But there were other factors. “Constance!” he yelled. “God, it’s great to see you! You’re looking good! In fact, you’re looking beautiful!”

The last time she had seen him had been at his wedding party; he’d been lip-synching to Grand Master Flash and doing an arm-flapping dance that threatened to tear the armpits out of his rented tux. Since then his nose seemed to have grown larger and lumpier, his face broader and his eyes more prone to wander frantically over the head of whomever he was talking to. But he still had his kind demeanor and his air that whatever he was talking about and whoever he was talking to were both equally and desperately important. She remembered something he had said to her sometime before: “Don’t worry, Connie. In fifteen years, I’ll be doing my retrospective at the Whitney and you’ll be publishing regularly in The New Yorker.” He paused. “But by then we’ll be ugly.”

She smiled at him on the crowded street and they yelled cheerfully back and forth. He was busy, very busy, writing art criticism for three publications, teaching part-time and painting. She was doing free-lance journalism, and was currently huddled in a cranny of stability as a part-time editor for a slick literary quarterly. They linked arms and went for coffee.

“God,” he said, hunching over his tiny brown cup of espresso, “it’s good to see a new face. For weeks I’ve seen nobody but friends of Emily’s who’ve come in from Dallas — these really incredible women who’re all painters, all in their forties, incredibly intelligent and — would you believe it? — all single. They’re great, but I feel like I have to constantly be telling them how attractive and talented they are — and they are attractive! They’re incredibly attractive! — because they’re in their forties, and they’re not married, and they’re not successful.”

“What makes you think you always have to tell them how great they are?”

“You just do. It’s obvious.” He lifted the little brown cup in his big hands and delicately inserted the tip of his tongue, put it down and played with his napkin.

“You wouldn’t have to tell me that if I was forty.”

He didn’t respond to this, but stared fixedly into a corner for several seconds and then said, “So, whose heart are you laying waste to now?”

“You mean who’s trashing me these days? I’m not so extreme anymore, Franklin.”

Franklin smiled in the sly, flatly pleased way he contrived when she simultaneously ridiculed and accepted his flattery.

“Actually, I have a girlfriend.” She picked up her croissant as if she were going to bat her eyelashes from behind it. “We’ve been together for a year and a half. We live together.”

“Connie, that’s great. That’s really super. Is this a new predilection?”

“No, it’s always been there. This is just more serious than usual.”

“You know, if she were a boy, I think I’d be jealous. Where’d you meet her?”

They burrowed into a conversation that skimmed over the present, then tunneled back through the five years since they’d met in a proofreading booth, where exhausted, languid Connie would sleep on the floor beneath her desk, using Franklin’s balled-up sweater as a pillow. They had nested in that booth every weekend for months, surrounded by literary supplements, plastic take-out containers, boxes of cookies and notebooks in which they furiously scribbled between jobs. It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it — or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away.

Connie stopped a moment as Franklin talked and put her head up to survey the outside world; the dark café was crowded with young people in big jackets and neat, mincing shoes. A grotesquely beautiful girl in pink leather seemed to be staring at them. Did they look like pathetic aging hipsters? Was her hair wrong? Was their conversation too loud? Franklin was talking very loudly about a nasty exchange he’d had with another critic at some club. She winced, then took shelter in his apparently inexhaustible confidence and burrowed again. Then other factors raised their heads.

“You know, I had dinner with Alice and Roger last week,” he said, tearing a bite out of his little sponge cake.

Constance halted in her burrowing. “I thought you didn’t see them anymore.”

“What? Why?”

“What about that big fight you had with Roger?”

“What big fight?”

“The one about the article you did on him in Art in America.”

“Oh, that. It was just a spat. I see him all the time. You wouldn’t believe their new loft. It’s perfect.”

This person, thought Connie, does not have one deep feeling about anything. She felt like a crabbed, bitter woman in a brittle curl over her coffee.

“You should give Alice a call — she’d love to hear from you.”

“Alice was the one who stopped calling me, in case you don’t remember.”

“Connie, Alice loves you. She really does.”

“Horseshit, Franklin. She stabbed me in the back.”

“God, you girls are unbelievable. Girls are unbelievable.”

They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad.

But it had been. She cringed as they walked to the cash register, convinced that everyone was watching them and rolling their eyes.

“I’m giving a party the day after tomorrow,” said Franklin as they walked out. “It’s Emily’s birthday. You’ve got to come. And bring your amour.”

“Roger and Alice will be there.”

“Oh, come on!”

“All right, I’ll probably come. Give me your address.”

He found a scrap of paper — the folded edge of a torn envelope — and scrawled his address in purple pen while the March wind raised his hair in an elegant, multidirectional headdress. A boy walked by in black leather, his bleached hair shaved into one strip down the center of his skull, painstakingly waxed and sculpted into the shape of a dragon’s back. She felt a pang of affection and reassurance, knowing that kids were still doing the same things they’d been doing for years, tinged with a touch of incredulousness that they hadn’t yet been able to think up anything else.

“Here.” Franklin looked at her as he pressed the paper into her hand. “And Connie, I want you to know”—his eyes got that vague yet sincere and noble look they took on when he was about to talk about art or something—“I’ve thought about you a lot in the last year or so. I’ve really wanted to see you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Really.” His eyes looked so intensely vague, yet so sincere and so noble, she had the sense that the brown orbs could detach from their centers and wander all over his eyeball, slowly, with a certain majesty, each movement expressing the depth of his sincerity.

“You could’ve called me.”

“Yeah, I could have. But I was too ashamed.” He dropped his eyes and actually did look sincere for a minute.

She cupped his face with her hand and kissed his cheek. “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

They squeezed each other’s hands, communicated some sexual comradery and goodwill, and then walked away.

Well, she thought, it was good to see Franklin, but she certainly wasn’t going to his party. It would be too depressing. It was strange to realize that the depressing part wouldn’t be her memory of his dizzy seduction attempt — she was never romantically interested in him anyway — but the presence of her ex-friend Alice, the mere mention of whose name had plunged her into a slight rancor. She eyed with disaffection and contempt the neatly hatted and booted, dyed and moisturized strangers marching toward her.

Alice and Roger had been the first New Yorkers she had met in Manhattan. They had met accidentally, when Constance had sublet their loft with two other girls. She had been very impressed by them. They were so handsome — Roger, blond and tall, his potentially annoying symmetry broken by the stubborn cowlick on the back of his head, and Alice, tiny and sleekly dark, her short hair like the shiny, pleated wings of a beetle, her clothes fully color-coordinated and accessorized — very poised, and apparently secure. Alice had asked her a lot of questions about her plans, and seemed to be scrutinizing her answers for signs of acceptability, while Roger smiled and nodded affably. At first Constance resented it, but soon, to her embarrassment, she found that she was flattered by Alice’s eventual approval. Alice had been especially kind when Constance was thrown out of her first apartment after two days of tenancy with a psychotic roommate, rushing to her assistance with advice and a huge garbage bag of Salvation Army — bound clothes. “Don’t leave New York because of this,” she said. “Everybody gets mangled a little during the first few months.”

She huffed up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, dropped the keys, swore unattractively and opened the door to find that the heat was too high, the cats were running around with mysterious desperation, and Deana wasn’t home. The cats moiled loudly around her legs as she wrestled with can and opener; they squabbled for position as she put the blobs of cold meat-and-cornmeal byproducts before them. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You guys aren’t that hungry. Pigs.”

She went into the living area, turned on the radio to her favorite noncommercial station and was assaulted by horribly optimistic fiddle music. She thought: This must be the folk music slot. She snapped her tongue, turned it off and paced around the room. Their downstairs neighbor was whistling in a pealing, urgent way that usually drove her crazy but now seemed homey and reassuring simply because of its familiarity. She began to mentally list all the mean things that Alice had ever said or done to her. For example, the time Constance was overcome by a severe toothache, which turned out to be an exposed nerve, and had to walk out of a movie that she was watching with Alice. Alice had insisted on leaving with her, then complained all the way home about missing the movie. “Well, it was great riding the subway with you,” she snapped as Constance staggered toward her building clutching her jaw.

But Alice wasn’t just a straight-out bitch. It wasn’t that simple.

Her neighbor rattled his castanets with ominous urgency. Constance slumped on the miserable old mattress that she and Deana had covered with fabric and large pillows and used as a couch. The mattress depressed her because it was like something that hippies would have in their apartment and because it was the same silly mattress that, in another life, had squeaked and rattled under the various activities of the two thousand and one dates. Yet, somehow she’d become attached to it, even though it was so mushy that when she sat on it it felt as if her internal organs were collapsing into one another. She collapsed across it now, supporting herself on one elbow planted deeply in the mattress, and surveyed the dustballs collecting under the desk and chair. No matter how often she and Deana swept, these animate-looking things slunk from corner to corner and left their residue on the cats’ whiskers. The late afternoon light filtered in, eerie and faded through the gauzy float of dust, and cast an odd perspective on the room, at least from where she lay, making it look elongated and stark. The splintery floor looked craggy and forsaken with its dead dustball vegetation.

The cats, suddenly alert, ran to the door. There were footsteps, a key in the lock: Deana entered, encumbered by the cats.

“Boy, the guy downstairs is going bananas today,” she said. She tossed her hair off her forehead with the usual nervous gesture. “Didn’t you feed these guys?”

“Yeah, they just got their faces out of the dish two minutes ago.” Connie rolled up and out of the mattress as gracefully as possible and put her arms around Deana’s waist and her head on her shoulder.

“What’s this?” Deana tenderly felt the lumps of Connie’s spine, lingering in the spaces between the bones.

“Nothing. I was just spacing out and the room was beginning to look like a set for Giant Ants from Pluto or something.”

“What?”

“I was in a weird mood.”

“I guess so.” Deana rubbed her briskly, let go and turned toward the refrigerator. “I’m starving. I have to have some carrots or something.”

“What do you want for dinner?” Connie put one foot on the other knee and stood like an aborigine in a textbook photograph.

“I was thinking that we could order Chinese food from Empire. I’m too cranky to cook. And you’re too weird to cook, apparently.” She got the bag of carrots out of the refrigerator’s vegetable bin and began scattering the sink with bright orange peels.

“Why are you cranky?”

“The same garbage. If I’d known I was going to work for a clone of my mother, I never would’ve taken the job.” Deana rinsed her three shaved carrots meticulously, then went into the bathroom to tear off a large piece of toilet paper, folded it on the counter and put the carrots on it to drain. (One of her idiosyncrasies, which still caused Connie a pang of tender amusement, was her aversion to eating wet vegetables or fruit; she routinely dried pieces of cut fruit before putting them in her cereal.) “So what’s your problem?”

Connie shrugged and sank into the mattress again. “I ran into somebody … not somebody I dislike really, just somebody I associate with anxiety.”

“Who?”

“Somebody I haven’t seen in years. Do you remember me mentioning Franklin Weston?”

Deana snapped off the end of a carrot. “Was he the guy you used to proofread with, who became some sort of quasi-famous art critic or something?”

“Yeah.” Rat Fink, the male cat, came into grabbing range, and Constance scooped him into her lap like a large plush bunny, his eyes agog, paws helpless and limp in the air. “He’s connected with some people I used to know before I met you. One person who — who hurt me, who rejected me in fact. Did I ever tell you about Alice?”

“A bit,” said Deana, quietly crunching.

“Well, she came up in conversation and it depressed me. That’s all.” Rat Fink squeaked and flailed in her arms, wildly swatted his helpless tail, then jumped from her lap and hit the female cat on the nose. “The last time Alice and I talked was three years ago. It was when I was doing horribly, everything was going wrong, my writing was a disaster, I couldn’t breathe, and I got so depressed that I couldn’t eat. I was afraid to say anything about it to anyone and finally I decided to trust Alice enough to talk to her. Franklin kept saying ‘Connie, Alice loves you,’ in that stupid way he has, and I thought, Well, we’ve been friends for two years, so I told her. And she said, ‘Connie, nobody wants to be around somebody who’s unhappy.’ She told me I should see a therapist, and never called me again. She didn’t return my calls either.”

“Why didn’t you call her and yell at her?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have the spirit, I guess. I felt pretty ravaged.”

“It sounds like she was afraid of being unhappy herself,” said Deana.

“Except that she didn’t have anything to be unhappy about. She had — still has — a rich husband, a beautiful apartment, a prefabricated social life—”

“Oh, come on. Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it. She sounds like one of those.”

“All those clothes, those trips to Europe — sheer terror, I’m sure.”

“Well, in any case, it doesn’t sound like she was much of a friend. I’d say you were well rid of her.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Connie pulled herself out of the mattress, readjusted her weight and sank in at another angle. “It’s just … the whole conversation was a vivid reminder of what it was like for me back then. Because of the thing with Franklin too. I don’t remember if I ever told you about him, but just before the thing with Alice happened, he made this monstrous come-on to me, saying how much he loved me, going on and on about how beautiful and special I was, literally trying to drag me onto his mattress — it was bewildering, and I didn’t quite trust it, and as it turned out, I was right. After a week of this he suddenly disappeared, and the next time I spoke to him, like two weeks later, he told me he was getting married to somebody named Emily, which he did.”

“Another fine human being.”

“But the thing about Franklin was that he had been a friend of mine up to that point. He virtually got me published in New York magazine. That’s why it felt so awful. It was as if he and Alice had simultaneously decided—”

Deana left her carrots and, putting her fingers on Connie’s lips, pitched the two of them into the center of the mattress. “God, you must be really depressed. I haven’t heard you talk like this for ages.” She stroked Connie’s hair and smoothed her eyebrows. The mattress rasped and squeaked as they curled against each other like kittens in a shoe box.

“Franklin invited me to a party where Alice will be. I don’t know what to do.”

“Are you still thinking about that?”

They had just finished their take-out Chinese meal. Small white containers ranged over the table with fork handles protruding erectly from their centers; little balls of hardening rice trailed from container to plate; the cats circled beneath them with stiff, ardent steps. Deana was still lazily eating her spareribs and drinking her Vita-C.

“Connie, if this woman is such a bad memory, why don’t you just forget it? Why dwell on her? She isn’t in your life anymore.”

Connie looked at the bright, cold flower of broccoli splayed prettily on the edge of her plate. “The thing is, Alice and I had a good time together. We’d go out to the movies, and then go for coffee and talk about the movie for hours, analyzing every character and gesture and the use of music and so on. I can remember when she ordered an anchovy sandwich and one of those sweet almond drinks and said, ‘Whenever I’m with you I feel like eating stuff that’s really fun and really bad for me.’”

“Hmpf,” said Deana.

“And then there was the time that she and Roger paid for my airfare so I could visit them at their summer cottage in Pennsylvania.”

“So why don’t you go to Weston’s party and see her?”

“Because there were other times when I felt she wasn’t my friend at all. I remember her telling me about some big party she had that she didn’t invite me to. She was complaining because she had wanted to have an equal number of highly successful males and females and she couldn’t find enough successful females. It suddenly occurred to her that it was sort of rude to be talking about this in front of me when she hadn’t even asked me to come, so she said, ‘I didn’t think of you because you’re not in the field and you would’ve been bored anyway. I know you can hold your own on your own terms, but you couldn’t deal with these people on their level.’ Can you imagine?”

“Connie, were you in love with this woman?”

“What?”

“Did you have a thing for Alice?”

“No. Not at all. Why do you ask?”

“Because of the way you talk about it.”

Connie paused and admired the graceful interaction of three long cold sesame noodles lying on her plate. “Well, it wasn’t love, at least not romantic love. I’m just particularly sensitive to being betrayed by women. It’s always been easy for me to be vulnerable around men because you’re allowed to be. And I can make myself vulnerable to women sexually, but it’s really hard to do with a woman friend. I did it with Alice and she rejected me.”

Deana meditatively sucked a sparerib bone and limpidly blinked her large eyes.

Connie curled one leg up on the chair and sat on her ankle. “Once we went to see a movie about a dumb, trusting girl who gets involved with a whiny, sleazy psycho guy who tortures and kills her in the end.”

“Great movie.”

“Well, we wanted to see it because the actress had silicone implants and we wanted to see what they looked like. Anyway, Alice was so upset by this movie. She kept saying, ‘That girl was so stupid, she deserved to die. You couldn’t have any sympathy for her, she was so weak.’”

“That’s not such an unusual reaction, you know.” Deana plucked another slender red rib from its white box and began to delicately strip it of meat with her teeth.

“Okay, maybe not, but she got so obsessed about it, it was as if she was terrified at the mere idea that somebody could be a victim.”

“Well, it is frightening.”

Deana’s voice was assuming the annoyed, panicky tone it got when she was having something ugly thrust upon her.

Connie turned and looked out the narrow window that opened onto an air shaft, a blackened brick wall and a wretched little window smothered in filthy cardboard and the scabrous rag of a dead curtain. The usual fat, dirty pigeons with bleary, beady eyes gathered on the opposite window ledge like unregenerate pimps. When they had first moved here, Constance worked very hard at seeing this view as something other than horribly depressing. “Just look at it,” she’d tell herself. “Don’t make a judgment.”

“You have a way, you know, of shoving your vulnerability right into people’s faces. Or something that you call vulnerability, anyway. You sometimes do it immediately upon meeting them. You force people to deal with it.” Deana was speaking excitedly but precisely, her words like clean-cut vanilla-colored chips.

“Deana.”

“No, listen to me. Don’t be angry with me for saying this; you don’t do it as much as you did. But you used to do it a lot, and it’s kind of strange to be confronted so aggressively with somebody else’s frailty. Some people will want to protect you, as I did, but some people will want to hurt you. Others will be merely afraid of you, for the obvious reason that it reminds them of their own frailty, which sounds a lot like your friend Alice.”

Connie drew up her legs and sat with her arms around both knees and looked out the window again. It was true that in the summer the air shaft had an oddly poetic aspect. On days when the apartment air was heavy and stifling as a swamp, noises and smells came floating up it on clouds of heat, lyrical blends of voice and radio scraps, drifting arguments and amorous sighs, the fried shadow of someone’s dinner, a faded microcosm that lilted into their apartment and related them to everyone else in the building. Of course, whether or not this relationship was a pleasant sensation depended largely on one’s frame of mind, as well as on other factors; last summer the apartment below them had been sublet to a boy who would drunkenly imitate their voices when they made love.

“Have I upset you?” asked Deana.

“No, no.” Connie looked up. “I understand what you’re saying, but that wasn’t the case with Alice. I never acted vulnerable around her. And actually I don’t really agree with you. I may have done that to you because I responded to you sexually, but in general, I don’t.”

Deana shrugged. “Well, I only know what I’ve seen. I’m just trying to come up with an answer for you because you seem so distressed.” She stood and collected the dishes. Her fingers and hands, Constance thought, had an exposed, strangely cold and receptive quality, like the nose of a puppy. As she was watching her clear the table and take the dishes to the kitchen, she could see the many aspects of her lover come forward and shyly recede with each movement; her rigid, stubborn arms, her strong shoulders positioned in a soft, demure curve, her stern chin, her luminous forehead, her odd way of stiffly holding back and gently, curiously moving forward — all spoke of her radial gradations of tenderness, sorrow and radiant, fanlike intelligence.

She woke up in the middle of the night, slumberously thinking of Franklin. “I love you,” he said. “I love you in a way I’ve never loved anyone.” “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “He’s just crazed,” said his friends. “Frank’s hyper, that’s all.” What would happen if she went to his party? Would he fall all over her and rave about how glad he was to see her, then disappear for the rest of the night? Would it hurt her feelings? She imagined Alice standing near a table of ravaged snacks, holding a plastic cup of alcohol, a little hat neatly sitting on her blow-dried head. It wasn’t true that Alice had no unhappiness. She had a schizophrenic mother who lived in a state mental hospital (Alice’s family wasn’t wealthy) and who sometimes didn’t know her. Alice felt that she wasn’t accepted as an artist by her circle, and sometimes would get so upset about it that she’d scream and throw things. “I feel like a piece of shit,” she once said to Connie.

Connie turned and put her stomach and breasts against Deana’s warm back. She thought about the first woman she’d had a crush on, a beautiful stripper with black hair and bitter blue eyes. She had gone to see her strip and was irretrievably moved by the resigned but arrogant turn of her strong chin, the way she casually offered and rigidly withheld her body, as well as her tacky black lingerie.

“You don’t love women. You’re just trying to live out some kind of porno fantasy invented by men with the corniest props you can find,” a gay woman had told her.

She turned again and placed her back in a matching curve against Deana’s. When she was a child, her mother had said, “When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it’s all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.” She remembered herself as the new girl in elementary school trying to belong with the bony-legged clusters of little girls snapping their gum and talking about things that she never discovered the significance of. She saw herself sitting alone in a high school cafeteria eating french fries and a Cap’n Crunch bar.

She opened her eyes and could barely see the big-eared outline of the tiny ceramic Siamese cat that her aunt had given her when she was twelve. At the time she had thought that it and its brood of ceramic kittens were the height of taste and elegance, and even though its face had been broken in half and Krazy-glued back together, it still seemed faintly regal and glamorous. It had been one of the items that Alice had in mind when she looked at Connie’s dresser and said, “One of these days you’re going to wake up and look at all this stuff and say, ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with me,’ and throw it out.”

But it does have something to do with me, thought Connie.

The next day she had to leave the office because of a sudden and painful toothache. She thought it might’ve been psychosomatically induced by the memory of the exposed-nerve episode with Alice in the theater, but the dentist assured her that it was not.

“Nope, nope, nope. This is the real thing, all right. You’ve just got a lulu of a mouth, is all. Just one thing after another. But this isn’t a root canal. Just a deep, nasty filling.” He jabbed her tooth with an instrument and she gasped with pain. “I’m surprised that it hasn’t hurt you before. It’s practically into your navel.” He jabbed her again; she groaned and tried to close her mouth. “Don’t worry, though, we caught it in time.” He swiveled robustly in his chair and began to manipulate his precise, needle-nosed implements. Dr. Fangelli had very large forearms heavily strewn with hair; his hands seemed weirdly placed on his wrists, and his unevenly spaced fingers suggested undue activity in impossibly varied directions. He wasn’t a big man, but when he walked his arms and shoulders rolled like a tank tread, and he seemed to suddenly require a lot of space.

“Okay, now, we’re going to inject you with a little—” His face zoomed at her, and she had the disturbing thought that its happy, porous proximity could unhinge her jaw with the projected, exuberant desire that she open wide.

“What about the nitrous?” she asked.

He backed off. “Oh, I forgot, you like that. I keep telling you it kills your brain cells, but if you want it—” He swiveled violently away. “Carla! Carla, get me some nitrous in here, will you?”

Carla, a dark, small-nosed girl with mascara-crusted eyelashes, entered pushing the familiar gray machine, and a cool rubber, none-too-clean mask was placed over Connie’s nose. “There we go,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Crank her up, Carla. We’ll let you get nice and relaxed. Carla, get the cream two-six base.”

Connie closed her eyes. A balloon of warm air slowly expanded in her head. She thought of the commercials for Wonder Bread that she’d seen as a kid, in which a lucky little boy was borne by friendly butterflies to Wonder Bread Land, a place full of flowers and clouds and loaves of bread.

“So, Connie, are you married yet?” asked Dr. Fangelli.

“No.”

“No? I’m surprised. How old are you?”

She lay in the chair like a starfish and imagined the sound of his voice, the clink of the instruments and the squeak of chairs penetrating her body with thin rays of light, piercing through her bones and traveling gaily up and down her skeleton. She imagined the very life force of the universe, in all its horrific complexity, penetrating her every pore, charging her body with millions of tiny beams. She sighed and inhaled deeply; she loved nitrous oxide.

“Okay, we’ve really got you flying now. Feel pretty good, doncha, Connie?”

Connie tried to surmount the saliva in her mouth and managed to make an affirmative noise. She could tell from the little oil slick on Dr. Fangelli’s voice that he enjoyed seeing his patients helpless and openmouthed in his chair, that it made him feel powerful, and in fact, at this moment he was sort of powerful. Well, that was all right. The universe needed spaces for power to move into. It liked those spaces and valued them.

“Just a little pinch … there we go.” He grabbed her lip and wriggled it. “You feel great, don’t you? I bet we could take all your teeth out today and that would be fine with you. But of course, we’re not going to do that.” He patted Connie’s shoulder. “It’s just a small job that won’t take a minute.”

The problem was, if you’re lying there like a starfish letting the universe seep through your pores, all kinds of stuff can get in. How do you keep out the bad things? “Don’t be such a Christian,” said Franklin. “Things aren’t good or bad; they just are.” Well, that was a whole other line of thought. She pictured it as a wriggly, purple organism entering her space, and brusquely pushed it away. She tried to imagine a selective gray force field coming down at the various points on her body where the bad things were trying to enter. She became confused. Franklin wasn’t altogether wrong. Buddhists and other people agreed with him. Anyway, even if you didn’t agree with him, how could you tell for sure which things were bad? The tiny rubber hose sucking the spit from her mouth felt bad to her, as did the sound of the drill. But they weren’t inherently bad, they were just dry and shrill. How did dryness and shrillness translate in terms of the universe? Surely these elements were affecting her nitrous oxide experience, but how?

Dr. Fangelli put some good, solid pressure on her tooth. “Carla, could you pass me the other drill?”

Then there were the basic things. She thought of Deana’s soft, slightly fleshy embrace, the pale skin, the severe mouth, the tilt-eyed, heavy-framed glasses that made the composed, dignified face almost ludicrous. This was also one of the basic things: to lie in the dark under a blanket in an embrace with a tender lover, to have the sensations and their emotional entourage that came under the heading “sex.” This was something that she contemplated with a feeling almost like relief, similar to how an exhausted person would view a vast, infinitely trustworthy pillow. You know what this is, everybody does. Like everybody knows what “job” and “success” mean. People who struggle for success are doing a primal thing. She had read something once about lab rats fighting for dominance, even under conditions where cooperation was needed for survival. She thought of herself at her desk reviewing manuscripts. She saw herself on the phone, talking to the editor of a piece that she’d recently completed. She felt detached as she viewed these images, which seemed more abstract than snapshots in a slide projector. They were like reminders scrawled on the square white days of a calendar. Like the imperative “call Fangelli for appt.,” they were merely the most visible emblems, the crudest symbols for something too complex to describe in the given space. The image of herself at her desk, typing, became a scrawled notation for “job,” but job was only another notation for something she barely sensed as a dark area of elements crossing and recrossing one another in an unreadable grid.

She made an effort to get out of the “work” area and saw herself lunching with her friend Helen, in the area marked “social life.” Helen was talking about her boyfriend Patrick, who had strangled her a little bit the night before. “What I don’t want to hear is how I don’t deserve this,” said Helen. “Last year when George hit me I remember telling some girl who kept saying, ‘Helen, you deserve better than this,’ which is just such a stupid thing to say, I mean, what does it mean?” Connie tried to remember if she had been the person to say this to Helen; it sounded like something she might say. Maybe it was a stupid thing to say, but it seemed as though something should be said. Helen still had faint blue bruises in her neck. “I said to him afterwards, like, were you trying to hurt me or something just now?”

This image — Helen frozen in her gestures with utensils and cigarette — receded into another dark corner of her fluid mental field, so that other scenes could crowd the picture. There was Connie, sometimes with Deana, sometimes alone, at a nightclub where a man was saying to her, “With that hat on, you look like you’ve got a piece of the world in your pocketbook,” or at bars and parties, surrounded by well-dressed strangers who wielded their personalities like weapons and shields when they approached her, drinks in hand.

In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide — induced, she might’ve cried.

She opened her eyes and looked at the stiff black hairs on Dr. Fangelli’s chin, and then at his placid, daydreaming gray eyes. Past them was the shiny, drab-colored machinery that was so forbidding to her but probably so familiar and homey to him. She shifted her gaze and met Carla’s kind, squirrel-bright brown eyes. Was Carla’s job in this office a set of symbols for her too, or was it an entity complete in itself, an efficient series of movements and interactions that emerged wholly and naturally from her needs and abilities like a bouquet of trick flowers, opening when you least expect it?

“Doing all right, aren’t you?” asked Carla.

Connie made a faint affirmative half moan.

Carla made a small sensual laugh in her throat. “She’s really enjoying herself now,” she said.

“And we’re allllmost done,” said Dr. Fangelli. “Just a little …” He did some dull, painful thing that caused a nasty taste in her mouth.

She returned to her office in a mildly muddled state that was both combative and uncertain. She stopped in the ladies’ room to look at herself in the mirror and saw with an unhappy loss of confidence that one side of her face had fallen into a jowly state of despair and that her eyes looked terribly tired and sad. She put on more makeup and entered the office. Luckily, there were only three people there, two assistants and an associate whom she liked.

On her desk was a copy of a story being considered for publication. She read it twice and took it into the associate editor’s office.

“Steve,” she said, “do you like this?”

“What’s wrong with your mouth?”

“Ignore it. I look spastic, but I’m not, I just went to the dentist. Do you like this?”

“Yeah, I do. It’s—”

“No, I mean really. Tell me the truth. Do you like this?”

Steve looked provoked, then cornered, then he marshaled himself. “Yes, Connie, I like it. It’s terse, it’s quirky, it tricks you into thinking you’re safe, and then you find yourself on the edge of a cliff.”

“Yeah, so does everything else we publish here.”

“Connie, what do you want me to say? I know you feel frustrated about what we’re publishing, but this is what Fulford likes. I don’t have a problem with it.”

“But I thought you liked the thing I showed you a few weeks ago.”

“I did like it! I liked it a lot! But Fulford didn’t.”

“He never likes anything I like. I don’t know why he hired me.”

“You don’t like many things. If you did blurbs for novels they’d read ‘Mediocre! raves Constance Weymouth.’”

“You like everything.”

“I’m ready to like things. That’s true.” He leaned back in his chair and tipped his head backward as if he were on a talk show hosted by an obnoxious crank. Then he banged his chair forward again and smiled.

They talked a little more; Steve said the quality of a text depended largely on the frame of reference you imposed on it. Connie disagreed. They made a few jokes and Connie went back to her cubicle. She sat quietly as her jaw woke up, and watched the coarsely sweatered back of an assistant move from side to side at her desk. Another assistant, a young, pretty woman who believed in what she was doing, distracted her by walking from one spot in the office to another, and Connie reflected that in a better state of mind she would be comforted by the slow, predictable sight of people engaged in meaningful activity. Now it induced ragged reverberations of her nitrous oxide experience, and she had an exhausting flashback of her haggard self carrying large chunks of her life, compressed into brightly colored packages that were marked “Constance the writer,” “Constance the social being,” “Constance as part of a couple”—all layering plain Constance alone in her apartment, waiting for Deana in the dark, under a blanket, arms wrapped around herself. She saw each marked package as a weight she carried back and forth, setting one down in a random spot so she could pick up another and stagger off in a new direction.

She put her head down on her desk.

On her way home from work she decided that she would go to Franklin’s party.

“Why?” asked Deana. “After all this talk?”

“Because I feel like I need to end a cycle or something. Maybe I can get drunk and sock Alice.”

“You’re not serious, I hope.”

“No. But I might stare her down.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t go with you if it’s tomorrow. I have to have dinner with my mother at nine and after that I won’t be fit for human society.”

The party had apparently reached its peak an hour or two before she came. People looked as though they were bunched according to who grabbed whose arm on their way to the bathroom, and were leaning against walls, the women nodding their heads a lot. Some of them turned toward her and smiled with vague goodwill as she walked to the center of the room. She thought she recognized the lone couple dancing in a corner, eyes lowered in benign concentration as they shifted their weight from hip to hip and jogged their hands around their waists. She did recognize the man with hysterically bright blue eyes who was aggressively pacing around with a handful of greasy peanuts, and looked the other way.

“Connie, yo!” Franklin appeared with his hair in his eyes and his pores flowering magnanimously. “You came!” They groped for each other’s hands and darted at each other’s cheeks with a lot of “mm!” sounds.

“Where’s your girlfriend?”

“Oh, she had a family obligation.” They stood close, Connie quickly scanning the back of the room while Franklin’s eyes wandered over her head. “Yo, Dave, I’ve gotta talk to you before you leave! Connie, the hooch is over there, there’s some cake and stuff in the kitchen. And don’t disappear! There’s somebody I want to introduce you to.” He squeezed her shoulder and moved away, and she penetrated more deeply into the crowd, heading for the discordant light-reflective arrangement of bottles and tumbling towers of paper cups. As she approached the table and reached for the slim neck of a vodka bottle, a woman turned around and she stood facing Alice. The neat proportions of surprise, warmth and compassion in the resulting declaration—“Connie!”—suggested that Alice had been prepared for this. She made a tentative half move with her upper body that looked like the first stage of a hug; Connie half moved in response and then stopped, so Alice stopped and they paused to look at each other, slowly recovering their distance. Connie wondered if Alice was inspecting her crow’s-feet. “So, how’ve you been?” she asked. “How’s your painting?”

“Good! I mean, I’m much more productive than I was when I knew you. I don’t spend half as much time tearing my hair out.”

“Do you still have the feelings of resentment you had about Roger’s success?” Alice’s eyes slid sideways toward her with a short burst of expression that was like the gliding movement of a bird; this was a reference to their old discussions about Roger’s commercial success and Alice’s bitter jealousy.

“Yes, I do, but I’ve dealt with it. I’m not such a bitch about it. My own productivity has made it easier.” They stood linked by a delicate membrane of remembered intimacy. “I hear your writing is going well.”

“Yeah, it is.” Connie listed the year’s accomplishments, becoming for an annoying moment the girl from out of town who was trying to impress imperious Alice. The conversation was not what she had planned; they were talking like acquaintances at a party, perhaps because they were. “The magazine was fun at first,” she finished. “But I’m not so happy there now. I don’t have the influence that I thought I would. And it pays nothing.”

“Still, it’s a good spot, right? To make connections?”

“Yeah.”

They stood looking in slightly different directions as the connective tissue began to dissolve in an anomaly of music and party chatter. Connie glanced sideways at Alice’s face; there were tiny lines and a faint dryness that made her skin look frail, but the bone structure and demeanor still had the imposing, impenetrable look of a fashion model staring down a lifetime of cameras.

“How’s your mother?” asked Connie.

Again there was the gliding appearance of open expression. “She died a few years ago. Just a little while after I talked to you last.” Another threadlike connection stretched between them, but Connie wasn’t sure what it was.

“That must’ve really been hard. I’m sorry.”

Alice turned toward her, and Connie saw another face start to surface under the composed party expression, the careful eye makeup and poise. She wasn’t sure how to define it, but it looked like the face of a young girl who had spent a lot of time studying models in fashion magazines.

“Yes, it was hard. You remember how things were. In a way I was relieved. But it was awful.”

Somebody turned up the music and it marched between them.

“How’re things with your parents?”

“Better.” Connie nodded. “They’re back together and the separation seems to have cleared the air. They actually seem to love each other again.”

“Yeah? That’s great.” Alice turned toward the table, grabbed a large potato chip and used it to shovel up a mouthful of green paste. Connie found a paper cup without anything sticky on the inside and poured vodka into it. She groped for a bright sticky carton of orange juice and a brief storm of conversation bore them apart; Connie became embroiled with a very young man who wanted to talk about the magazine she worked for, while Alice was impaled by the aquamarine stare of the peanut-eater Connie had avoided. They were relieved to come together again a few minutes later in an opposite corner of the room.

“So Franklin tells me that you’re living with a woman now.”

“Yeah.”

Alice’s eyes brightened with a flare of enlightenment; she had never been able to understand Connie’s manic affairs or the way she had flatly turned down the men Alice would introduce her to, and now here was the simple explanation: Connie was gay. “Is that good?”

“Yes, it is. I really love her.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“How’re things between you and Roger?”

Alice looked away and shrugged. “Okay, I guess. We’re not that close these days. He’s seeing somebody else, actually. He’s off somewhere with her tonight, I think.”

“Oh!”

“It’s not a crisis. I think that it’s probably good for both of us. I’d be interested in an affair myself, but there’s nobody around at the moment. Roger has a lot of access to single girls. He’s gotten to be a pretty big deal, you know.”

There was another shift in the surface of Alice’s face and Connie saw a sudden resemblance to the person she’d seen in the mirror yesterday, right after her dental appointment — one half of the face was alertly contemplating the world with expectation and confidence, while the other had fallen under the weight of it. The eyes expressed the fatigue and rancor of a small, hardworking person carrying her life around on her back like a set of symbols and circumstances that she could stand apart from and arrange.

“Do you think that you’ll stay married?”

“Oh, yes. I mean, my marriage with Roger is like … a project I’d never drop. And I want to have children soon.”

Connie looked at the sadness in her jaw and the tired eyes, and she wanted to put her arms around Alice, to hold her and comfort her. Then either the face or her perception changed, and she was once again looking at a handsome, self-assured, wealthy woman with polite, curious, impenetrable eyes. “You know that we moved, don’t you? We bought a wonderful co-op in Soho. We’ll be having a party sometime soon. I should invite you.”

“Oh, Alice!” A man in a paisley jacket with a smile like a bludgeon swooped toward them and took Alice’s elbow. “I must introduce you to Alex here…. Hi,” he said to Connie. “Are you a painter too?”

Connie said no, and Alice waved a tiny good-bye with her fingers and went to meet Alex. Connie walked into the next room with her drink and got a hunk of chocolate cake and stood eating it out of one hand, dropping crumbs on the floor. A man asked her if she was a writer and she got involved in drunken conversations with three different people, in which almost nothing was said. The last was interrupted when Franklin appeared, his eyelids thick and purple, and took her by the arm. “Here’s a woman you’ve just got to meet. She’s incredibly intelligent and she’s a writer for The New Yorker. Cathy! Cathy! This is Constance Weymouth, an incredible writer, one of the most brilliant writers I know. You’ve got a lot to talk about.”

An attractive gray-haired woman with large blue eyes stood facing her uncertainly but gamely. Connie shook her hand and they traded magazine gossip until it became apparent that while a great friendship could possibly be forged between them, the present situation precluded it.

Two more couples shifted and undulated in the corner, and Connie watched them with a mournful and diffuse concentration. Their flat-footed steps were neither graceful nor dynamic, but their goodwill infused their clumsy gestures — the hand outstretched to squeeze a partner’s hand, the sudden eye contact — with a gentle, faded romance that made Connie want to go home and be with Deana.

She found Franklin in the middle of two conversations about sculpture and Libya and said good-bye to him quickly. As she was putting on her coat, Alice turned toward her and smiled, holding a finger up in the paisley man’s face. “Are you leaving?” She came hurriedly across the floor. “Do you want to wait a little while? I’m going soon.”

Connie felt an eagerness light in her eyes and then fade. She hesitated.

“Well, if you’re in a rush, go ahead. But here, let me give you my card.” Alice had her business card ready in her hand. “It’s our new phone number. Why don’t you call?”

They said it was good seeing each other, made more stunted hugging gestures and settled for hand squeezes.

Connie walked three blocks before hailing a cab. “You think you know what you’re doing, but you don’t,” a huddled drunk informed her. She gave him a dollar bill and walked on, silently agreeing. Why hadn’t she waited for Alice? “Alice loves you, Connie,” Franklin had said. A couple across the street were embracing against a crumbling brick wall; the man’s hand was under the woman’s short leather skirt. Because she’d been ending a cycle and they weren’t friends anymore, Constance thought. She stopped before a garbage-choked wastebasket and pulled Alice’s card from her pocket. She started to throw it away and then changed her mind. You never know. One day she might come upon this card and decide it would be good to talk to somebody she hadn’t spoken to in years. She pocketed the little piece of cardboard and hailed a cab that was roaring down the street like a desperate animal.