Ugly Behavior

Friday Nights

The first visits had been straightforward enough. He’d started going there to meet women. His wife had been gone almost a year and the women at work seemed too old for him. It had been a long time since he’d thought about how a woman might see him, the kind of messages he sent out. Did he even send out messages? Everyone did, according to the articles in the women’s magazines, which had become his secret vice. After Clara left and he’d been so stupefied by the whole thing he’d thought reading them might help him understand—certainly she’d spent more time reading them than telling him the truth.

“How To Tell Your Man What He’s Doing Wrong.” He wondered if she’d read that one and if so, why she hadn’t followed its recommendations. Maybe she’d decided he wasn’t worth the aggravation.

He didn’t go to Jack’s to meet women anymore. To see them, yes, to smell them. To be in their presence.

“I tell you, the women go crazy there!” Mark had thought going to Jack’s was the best thing Jim could do. If he wanted to meet women, and what man didn’t? “It’s either Jack’s, or a church, or even better a funeral at a church. But Jack’s is where they really let loose, where they really get crazy.” Jim didn’t actually want a crazy woman, but maybe momentary insanity was as good an ice-breaker as any.

Dating had this vaguely disturbing terminology—breaking the ice, sending messages. It seemed strangely science fictional, contact between two alien species. He couldn’t imagine his parents being this way, but he couldn’t remember much communicating taking place there, either. Maybe it had always been this way and he’d just never noticed before. Marriage protected you from the real terrors of relationships.

“I don’t think I’ve danced in years—how about you?”

The fellow—about his age, maybe a little older—made this opening statement and waited for an answer. Some people might have been tempted to make fun of him, but Jim wasn’t one of them. Something had to be said first and perhaps this was as good a thing to say as any. The first thing you said in any relationship had little long-lasting meaning. The first thing you said could even be a lie. The woman’s eyes moved slightly down and up again, almost imperceptibly, a sizing up and a conclusion. She had to determine if this guy was at least in the ballpark and if she didn’t do it now she might be stuck with a major incompatibility for half the evening. Not as cruel as it sounded—she was doing both of them a favor.

At their age the standards were a bit looser, of course. At their age even a man years out of shape might interest an ex-prom queen.

The woman smiled, always an encouraging sign. Good for you, fellow, Jim thought. Good for you.

Mark had stopped coming to Jack’s several years ago, having found a girlfriend and then moving to Seattle where he thought people were friendlier. “It’s the rain and the gloom that brings people closer together.” Mark had theories about all varieties of human behavior. Nothing strange about that, of course. Theories were pretty much all most of us knew about being human. Mark’s problem was that his theories were a bit further off the beam than most, and his need too obvious, too painful to observe.

“Look at them,” Mark had said, gesturing toward the variety of women crowding the dance floor, heads drifting up and down. “It’s just like sex.”

Jim had understood then that Mark knew very little about sex. Not that Jim was an expert. But during the course of his eight-year marriage to Clara they had had three different kinds of sex, all of them authentic in their own way.

Initially there had been the pretense of passion and exhaustion while they attempted to understand the real passion that lay beneath: the bellies sucked in, the dramatic breathing and groaning and sudden cries, the collapse at the end and the various half-true declarations, and the final separate awarenesses that they had not quite found the complete release they’d always dreamed of, but they knew it was there.

Then there had been two years or so of slow comforts, a joining in weariness at the end of the day, and the easing out of tears and the almost-desperate final embraces. These were the times Jim would always recall with fondness, and think of as love.

And then there came that last year of marathon exhaustion, as if both of them were in training for the new life to come, using each other like exercise equipment, a race into oblivion before turning over and falling asleep.

Mark had no idea of any of this. All he had seen out on the dance floor were tides of women. It had been ladies’ choice and the ladies had chosen to move together as one, not so much displaying themselves as keeping themselves alive, for to stand unmoving when you could still hear the music was to harden into something ailing and sad.

“I’m on the road a lot,” the tall sandy-haired man said to the woman he was dancing with.

Jim’s partner was a short, pale woman several years his senior. She never smiled; dancing with strange men was a serious assignment for her, self-assigned or based on recommendations from friends or a therapist.

“That must be very interesting, to be able to travel all the time,” the woman in the red dress replied.

The man laughed a little too hard, on the edge of being offensive. Jim saw the woman frown. Do you think I’m stupid? was in her face but she didn’t voice it.

The man might have told her about his time on the road because it was the only thing he could think of to say or because he wanted to quickly signal his lack of interest in a long-term relationship. The woman’s assessment that this information was somehow interesting was probably a lie, but it gave her an excuse to express a desire to travel which might have also encouraged further conversation about distant places and times. The man might have truly found her to be stupid, or boring, but more than likely he had laughed as an anxiety release. Jim heard more nervous laughter out on the dance floor than in any other setting he could think of.

Some time during this assessment Jim had changed partners, without being fully aware that it was happening. The woman across from him now didn’t look at him, one of the many advantages of a fast song. Fast songs also afforded the opportunity to release sexual tension, an important mechanism for avoiding violence when there were a lot of young single men in the club at one time.

“She did you a favor, leaving you,” Mark had said that first night at the club, a little too loudly. “At least now you can get yourself good and properly laid.” Jim had barely controlled the urge to punch him. He had never punched anyone, and now it seemed appropriate, dealing with a fool. But he didn’t.

Next to him an older man wearing red suspenders gyrated to music Jim suspected he had never heard before. Jim was bad with ages—people his exact same age always looked much older or much younger to him—but he thought the man must be over sixty. He danced with a woman who might have been his daughter, but Jim didn’t think so. Unattached women at Jack’s tended be quite democratic with their dance partners. To be otherwise might send an unwanted message about their motivations for being there. The guy appeared to be using the music as an excuse for exercise, holding off death as best he could. Jim wondered if he had any romantic interest in the younger woman. It was doubtful, but you could never tell for sure.

For ten years Jim had been coming to Jack’s for “oldies” on Friday nights. The mix of ages and singles versus marrieds had stayed pretty constant during that time. But ten years had been long enough for the newer music, played from eleven to midnight each evening, to become part of the oldies musical rotation in subsequent years. At this point the regulars usually started losing interest, most of them eventually dropping out altogether. Jim often wondered what they did on their Fridays instead. He suspected that a particular sort of sad self-consciousness had come into the experience for them as the music aged, preventing them from completely abandoning themselves to the music.

Jim felt himself immune to sadness. He’d long ago concluded it was like checking into a bad hotel room. You just went down to see the manager and requested another. No sense being anxious over a chance encounter—what was life beyond a series of chance encounters?

This evening few smiled out on the dance floor. Either they had their minds on other activities or they were so focused on doing the current activity correctly they forgot how their faces should appear. A smile wasn’t always best, of course, but it was a convenient default.

Explaining some new intention to exercise or diet or tan or purchase or hairdo or make-up style, Clara used to say, “After all, your body is a vessel.” Jim hadn’t always taken the statement seriously: she threw it away too easily. He supposed she didn’t really understand it herself, despite the fact that she’d always been obsessed with her “vessel”: keeping it fit and clean, adorning it to fit the times and her mood, reshaping it as a final, desperate measure when it no longer resembled what it used to be.

Out on the dance floor these vessels bobbed up and down on a tide of rhythmic noise, mouths and minds open, receptive to whatever filling might be available: jobs, partners, a life in the suburbs, a vacation on the beach, a trip out of town, a grope in the back of a shiny black van. Like dancers at some voodoo ceremony, waiting for a random god to possess them. No matter what people said about their lives, none of it was true in any sort of fundamental way. Even your name, he thought, is arbitrary. A physical body dancing in the tide is as close to what you are as anything.

A dark-haired woman with a white streak like a curved knife blade above one ear stood at the edge of the floor watching him. He looked around. Apparently at some point his dance partner had disappeared, and at the moment he had no memory of what she had looked like. He wondered how long he’d been dancing by himself, thinking it should embarrass him, but it did not. He had seen people—mostly drunk, mostly women but not always—dance by themselves before.

He stopped dancing, but not so abruptly as to draw additional attention. He found himself swaying rhythmically as he moved off the floor. He couldn’t help himself. The woman continued to stare at him. He thought at first to avoid her—the bold ones almost invariably became drunk and irritating—but found himself exiting the dance area close to where she stood. Maybe it was the hair. She looked more curious than anything. Jim didn’t think he’d ever seen her here before.

“You seem to have lost your partner.” She smiled, letting him know the comment was friendly.

He smiled back. He seldom went long without a dance partner, but smiling was something he rarely did. The small events of a life were simply not that amusing. “And you don’t appear to have a partner.”

The woman began to dance, moving slowly out to the floor, and after a brief hesitation he joined her. He thought it staged and somewhat silly, but it was almost closing time, and he had been there for hours, so why fight it—she seemed like a nice lady.

Still, he would have just finished this little dance and said his goodnights if she hadn’t stared at him the way she did, eyes wide open like a curious child’s, taking in every detail of his face and expression. If only to distract her he remarked, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you in here before.”

“I buried my husband two weeks ago,” she said, as if that were a logical reply.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry. It’s not something to share in a first meeting.”

“It’s this place. People find themselves saying strange things.” But of course she wasn’t one of those people. She was simply being perfectly honest. Looking at her, he suspected she was barely capable of anything else.

“You must have been coming here for awhile.” Women had said this to him before, of course, but it bridled him a bit because he could tell she expected an honest answer.

“Years,” he said. “But it hasn’t improved my dancing any.”

And she laughed a genuine laugh, which made her seem too vulnerable to be in a place like this, and he began wondering how it would feel to hurt her.

After Jack’s closed they walked outside together. This was not something Jim usually did. Usually he ignored all invitations spoken or implied, said his goodbyes, and returned to his apartment alone. It was a small place, hardly big enough for his own concerns.

But when Helen asked him outside for a walk (“It’s strange, I’m not sleepy at all.”) he had said yes. Of course. And had allowed her to take his arm.

There was really no place to walk outside Jack’s. The building was off an access road by a major north/south interstate, the hot air rank with oil and diesel fumes. Every few minutes a tractor trailer would blow its air horn and rumble past on its way to a nearby depot. Jack’s neighbors were other bars and run-down hotels, a storage business and a lumber yard. Very little grass grew above the curbs, but even here an effort at landscaping had been made with rounded, white-painted stones and the occasional flower bed. Jack wondered what kind of person put out such effort, when it had no chance of being noticed. But at least it gave them a place to walk off the pavement. Property fences ended a few feet from the curbs, so that there was a continuous strip of this poor vegetation and painful landscaping. By including the occasional tree used to obscure side entrances or other semi-private features, an optimistic imagination might envision a parkway in the early morning darkness. He suspected that to be her particular fantasy—she seemed far too at ease for his own comfort.

“It’s probably unseemly for me to go out so soon, but he was ill for such a long time, and I was so afraid I’d turn into one of those women.”

“Those women?”

“Women who stay at home the rest of their lives, or until they can’t stand it anymore and come out of hiding just to make the worst possible choices.”

“Is that important to you, making good choices?”

She stopped and gripped his hand tighter, looking up at him. When had they started holding hands? He had no idea. Like school kids. He wanted to get his hand away from her, but didn’t want to break the curious tone of the evening. “Probably not as important as it should be,” she said.

They walked more than an hour with hands linked at the edge of the curb until awkward footing gave him the opportunity to withdraw his hand. He watched her as she looked up at the lightening sky, at the shadowed trucks passing on the highway, smiling as if she were out on some great adventure, some sort of safari, and such naiveté repelled him. Clearly, she hadn’t the slightest grasp of the true dangers of the world. She was a murder waiting to happen.

“You’re not married, are you?”

He looked at her in surprise. “No, of course not, why would you think…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just had this sudden thought, ‘Maybe he’s married.’ I don’t know why.”

Actually, the fact that she thought to ask the question raised her in his estimation. He briefly considered answering ‘yes,’ curious what her response might be. “No. My wife left me years ago.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry.”

“No, no. Like I said, it’s been years.”

She said nothing for awhile, concentrating on her feet. A shiny, fifties-style diner gleamed from the lot ahead, but after that there was nothing but weeds and ill-kept road for a mile or more. Such stupidity, he thought. Women were killed in places like this. Bodies were dumped. So much unnecessary waste in the world. So much lost potential.

“I was married for years,” she said quietly. “Happily, but it was almost all I ever knew. Each day must be like an adventure for you. You must feel like you could do anything.”

She was giving him every opportunity to impress her with his lies. So this was the way it happened. This was the way nice, lonely women got themselves killed. “Right now,” he said, “I suppose I could do anything. Just to see how it would feel.”

“Oh, I can tell you have a great deal of potential. I could see that from the beginning.”

“Just to feel anything, really. People go to such lengths sometimes. Just to feel something.”

“That’s so true. And all the time it’s right there in front of you.”

“The opportunity is there. No one would know.”

“Absolutely. No one knows how any of us feels.” She grabbed his forearm and looked up into his eyes. “But I believe you can tell a lot about a person, if you just look at them, really look at them.”

He returned her gaze, trying to let something come through that would beam down from his eyes and brand her. Not a warning exactly. Perhaps just a glimpse at what the human heart is truly capable of. But she hadn’t a clue. “I can tell that you’re a very sensitive person,” she said, misinterpreting everything. “Let me buy you breakfast.”

They sat together in the diner for over an hour eating their slow breakfast. Everything was too bright: the chrome trim around the walls and tables, the ghastly intensity of the fluorescents, the early sap of the day rising out of unpromising concrete to fill the air with brilliance. Her face. Older than his, he thought, much older than she’d seemed in the dark. But he was so bad with ages, he reminded himself. It suddenly occurred to him that he might look old. That’s why she had taken such a risk, gone walking out into the darkness with a less-than-perfect stranger. Because he’d looked too old to do her any harm.

Make-up had caked near her eyes and at the left corner of her mouth. He could see now that she used a little too much lipstick. And something was wrong with her eye shadow: she looked more bruised than seductive. No doubt during the walk here she had perspired, and the make-up had run a bit. Or maybe it had happened during dancing. Some women perspired more, but he hadn’t been aware of her dancing with anyone other than him. It had been as if she’d been waiting. Waiting for someone like him. Her murderer.

Not that he had ever murdered anyone. He’d never even punched anyone. His previous murders had been strictly academic. He was like one of those fellows who played entire games of chess in his head, and never went near a board and pieces. She might have been his first.

But the woman didn’t know how to put make-up on anymore. That was it, wasn’t it? She’d come to Jack’s like this, and he hadn’t known because of the dim lighting.

She smiled up at him. A small bit of congealed egg clung to one powder- and grease-smeared cheek. He picked up a napkin and dipped one corner into his water glass. “Here,” he said. “Here. You’ve got something on you. Let me.” And he reached over, and she sat still as a daughter while he smoothed the place by her mouth, and blended her eye shadow, and gently removed the food clinging to her cheek. “Like a picture,” he said. “Like a pretty picture.”

She held his hand. “You’re a good man,” she said, knowing absolutely nothing about him, and it hurt him so to hear, and he could feel the anger coming as if from a great distance.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to go the bathroom.” He got up and walked to the back of the restaurant, and the hall that led to the restrooms, and he walked past the restrooms and out the back door, away from his first real victim.

The morning was hot and dusty and he was still dressed in his best outfit, the black shirt and slacks and the thin silver tie. He walked through the weed and dirt lot behind the diner and wedged himself through a break in the fence.

He walked down several blocks of bad pavement, poor houses and trashy yards. Ahead of him was a church, and a number of people in nice dresses and suits stood beneath an awning in the graveyard. He came as close to the funeral as he could. No one noticed him. Until a woman’s voice, slightly to his left and behind. “I see I’m not the only one who’s late,” she whispered, and drew closer, stepping beside him so they looked like a couple who had traveled here together to pay their respects.

“I didn’t know her that well,” she said softly. “But I hear she was just a wonderful woman.”

He tried to look beyond the perfect make-up job, and could not. “I didn’t know her at all,” he said.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she replied, completely misunderstanding him, not knowing anything that would help her through the next few hours.