Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill

bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. She stared at the ugly roses with their heads collapsed in a dead wilt and slowly saw what a jerk she’d been. Then she got mad.
    “Do you like people to piss on you?” she asked.
    “Yeah. Last month I met this great girl at Billy’s Topless. She pissed in my face for only twenty bucks.”
    His voice was high-pitched and stupidly aggressive, like some weird kid who would walk up to you on the street and offer to take care of your sexual needs. How, she thought miserably, could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art?
    “There’s a lot of other things I’d like to do too,” he said with odd self-righteousness. “But I don’t think you could handle it.”
    “It’s not a question of handling it.” She said these last two words very sarcastically. “So far everything you’ve said to me has been incredibly banal. You haven’t presented anything in a way that’s even remotely attractive.” She sounded like a prim, prematurely adult child complaining to her teacher about someone putting a worm down her back.
    He felt like an idiot. How had he gotten stuck with this prissy, reedy-voiced thing with a huge forehead who poked and picked over everything that came out of his mouth? He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear. What had he had in mind when he brought this girl here, anyway? Her serious, desperate face, panicked and tear-stained. Her ridiculous air of sacrifice and abandonment as he spread-eagled and bound her. White skin that marked easily. Frightened eyes. An exposed personality that could be yanked from her and held out of reach like … oh, he could see it only in scraps; his imagination fumbled and lost its grip. He looked at her hatefully self-possessed, compact little form. He pushed her roughly. “Oh, I’d do anything with you,” he mimicked. “You would not.”
    She rolled away on her side, her body curled tightly. He felt her trembling. She sniffed.
    “Don’t tell me I’ve broken your heart.”
    She continued crying.
    “This isn’t bothering me at all,” he said. “In fact, I’m rather enjoying it.”
    The trembling stopped. She sniffed once, turned on her back and looked at him with puzzled eyes. She blinked. He suddenly felt tired. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her. He looked around the room until he saw a light wood stick that his grandmother had for some reason left standing in the corner. He pointed at it.
    “Get me that stick. I want to beat you with it.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Get it. I want to humiliate you even more.”
    She shook her head, her eyes wide with alarm. She held the blanket up to her chin.
    “Come on,” he coaxed. “Let me beat you. I’d be much nicer after I beat you.”
    “I don’t think you’re capable of being as nice as you’d have to be to interest me at this point.”
    “All right. I’ll get it myself.” He got the stick and snatched the blanket from her body.
    She sat, her legs curled in a kneeling position. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m scared.”
    “You should be scared,” he said. “I’m going to torture you.” He brandished the stick, which actually felt as though it would break on the second or third blow. They froze in their positions, staring at each other.
    She was the first to drop her eyes. She regarded the torn-off blanket meditatively. “You have really disappointed me,” she said. “This whole thing has been a complete waste of time.”
    He sat on the bed, stick in lap. “You don’t care about my feelings.”
    “I think I want to sleep in the next room.”
    They couldn’t sleep separately any better than they could sleep together. She lay curled up on the couch