Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Page A

pondering what seemed to be the ugly nature of her life. He lay wound in a blanket, blinking in the dark, as a dislocated, manic and unpleasing revue of his sexual experiences stumbled through his memory in a queasy scramble.
    In the morning they agreed that they would return to Manhattan immediately. Despite their mutual ill humor, they fornicated again, mostly because they could more easily ignore each other while doing so.
    They packed quickly and silently.
    “It’s going to be a long drive back,” he said. “Try not to make me feel like too much of a prick, okay?”
    “I don’t care what you feel like.”
    He would have liked to dump her at the side of the road somewhere, but he wasn’t indifferent enough to societal rules to do that. Besides, he felt vaguely sorry that he had made her cry, and while this made him view her grudgingly, he felt obliged not to worsen the situation. Ideally she would disappear, taking her stupid canvas bag with her. In reality, she sat beside him in the car with more solidity and presence than she had displayed since they met on the corner in Manhattan. She seemed fully prepared to sit in silence for the entire six-hour drive. He turned on the radio.
    “Would you mind turning that down a little?”
    “Anything for you.”
    She rolled her eyes.
    Without much hope, he employed a tactic he used to pacify his wife when they argued. He would give her a choice and let her make it. “Would you like something to eat?” he asked. “You must be starving.”
    She was. They spent almost an hour driving up and down the available streets trying to find a restaurant she wanted to be in. She finally chose a small, clean egg-and-toast place. Her humor visibly improved as they sat before their breakfast. “I like eggs,” she said. “They are so comforting.”
    He began to talk to her out of sheer curiosity. They talked about music, college, people they knew in common and drugs they used to take as teenagers. She said that when she had taken LSD, she had often lost her sense of identity so completely that she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. This pathetic statement brought back her attractiveness in a terrific rush. She noted the quick dark gleam in his eyes.
    “You should’ve let me beat you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have hurt you too much.”
    “That’s not the point. The moment was wrong. It wouldn’t have meant anything.”
    “It would’ve meant something to me.” He paused. “But you probably would’ve spoiled it. You would’ve started screaming right away and made me stop.”
    The construction workers at the next table stared at them quizzically. She smiled pleasantly at them and returned her gaze to him. “You don’t know that.”
    He was so relieved at the ease between them that he put his arm around her as they left the restaurant. She stretched up and kissed his neck.
    “We just had the wrong idea about each other,” she said. “It’s nobody’s fault that we’re incompatible.”
    “Well, soon we’ll be in Manhattan, and it’ll be all over. You’ll never have to see me again.” He hoped she would dispute this, but she didn’t.
    They continued to talk in the car, about the nature of time, their parents and the injustice of racism.
    She was too exhausted to extract much from the pedestrian conversation, but the sound of his voice, the position of his body and his sudden receptivity were intoxicating. Time took on a grainy, dreamy aspect that made impossible conversations and unlikely gestures feasible, like a space capsule that enables its inhabitants to happily walk up the wall. The peculiar little car became a warm, humming cocoon, like a miniature house she had, as a little girl, assembled out of odds and ends for invented characters. She felt as if she were a very young child, when every notion that appearedin her head was new and naked of association and thus needed to be expressed carefully so it didn’t become malformed. She wanted to set every