Bad Behavior: Stories (12 page)

Turning the corner wasn’t simply a selfish desire to avoid unpleasantness; Susan could imagine the pain that Leisha would feel if she was recognized, and it made her cringe. But she would have to get her off the street, buy her a meal, get in touch with her family and so on. She acknowledged and then stifled the idea that her old friend might be too disturbed to remember her, and was appalled to suddenly identify a part of herself that was satisfied, even pleased, at the thought of Leisha the bag lady. This part of her wanted to help Leisha, but only out of duty and the pleasure of condescension; their friendship had ended angrily. Susan dropped her head and covered her face with her hands, raising it to the gawking gaze of a passing teenager.

She stepped into the sidewalk march again, and the bag lady was gone. No, there she was, standing against the wall. Susan walked right up to her and started to speak, then realized that the woman wasn’t Leisha. The stranger looked at her with mild, glassy eyes (hazel, not dark brown) and put out her hand. Relieved but disconcerted, Susan groped through her purse, found five dollars and pressed it into the pinched little hand. The woman put it away without looking at it and said, “Jesus loves you.”

Susan walked back to her friend’s apartment via Eighth Street,
becoming depressed as she was reminded of expeditions with Leisha for shoes. Leisha had been part of an amorphous body of memories provoked by this visit to Manhattan, but now she was the lens through which all the other memories were seen, Susan cursed her impressionability and tried to think of something else.

Susan was thirty-five years old, and Leisha thirty-four. When they were friends, Susan was an aspiring writer and Leisha an actress. Whenever she had a positive image of Leisha—a rarity during these last six years—she saw them together in Leisha’s apartment drinking tea, drinking wine, snorting coke, something, and talking about their careers. Leisha had loved the word “career.” “I think it’s going to happen for you really first,” she’d say. “Like
boom
, your career’s just going to skyrocket—I mean it.”

It hadn’t. Susan had spent most of her New York years typing, proofreading or coat-checking, selling an article maybe twice a year. Little by little she had given up trying to make it as a writer and had taken an entry-level position with a journal that she didn’t think much of. Her editorial career didn’t exactly skyrocket, but it puttered along nicely. In Chicago, where she lived now, she edited a pretentious TV magazine and occasionally wrote film reviews for a local entertainment guide that paid almost nothing but gave her a chance to pontificate about aesthetics. When she thought about the magazine, she despised it and considered herself a failure; when she didn’t think about it, she would catch herself enjoying the work and decide that it was where she belonged.

“And what do you think will happen with
my
career?” Leisha would ask, pulling back her shoulders and revealing her long, alert neck. Susan had answered her cautiously and it had been just as well. Leisha had taken the same acting course repeatedly for three years until the teacher told her she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d had one showcase, a string of auditions and then spent the next few years wringing her hands, seeing therapists and going into debt on her charge cards.

Susan passed the Eighth Street Theater and noted the long-haired boys in black pants hanging around the entrance in a communal slouch. She remembered when she and Leisha would stand
outside the St. Marks Bar and Grill in the summer wearing black Capri pants and white lipstick. She snapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth, making the classic junior-high-schooler’s noise of contempt for her own sentimentality, then remembered that sentiment was what her visit to New York was all about.

She walked up Greenwich Avenue, scanning the Korean fruit stands that she had always liked so much, the tiny hardware stores selling toylike, largely superfluous wares, the cafés with tense outdoor patios and waiters racing to classical music with prim, neurotic steps. It was almost nauseatingly rich compared to clean, terse Chicago. She admired the swaggering young women in their sweaters and leather jackets and the aloof-faced men with arrogant hip-twitching gaits. She imagined Leisha walking with her in a tweed jacket and short black boots, a tiny spike-haired girl with an odd beeline walk and an intent, condensed quality illuminating her angular face.

They had met when they were college students in Ann Arbor. Both had been involved in brief affairs with the same man, who unfortunately turned out to be an uninteresting swine, something that took each of them an unduly long time to realize. Leisha had been the first; he had met Susan only a month after they broke up. She’d become aware of Leisha at a party given by his roommate, Leisha’s then-current lover. Susan had been standing against a wall in the dark, drinking vodka from a plastic cup and watching this theatrical little creature flap drunkenly around a clearly more sober partner on the dance floor, all elbows, jerking hips and senseless knee-bending dips. Her partner suddenly hoisted her up and solemnly circled the room, holding her aloft over his head like a sacrifice as she squeaked, “Give me a break, Eliot, pulease!” Susan disliked her immediately. She thought: I’m a much better dancer, and, putting her drink on the windowsill, went to demonstrate it. (Much later she learned that Leisha hadn’t thought much of her dancing either. “It was like, okay, what does a girl do when she dances? She rotates her hips and sticks out her breasts a lot and
un
dulates.”)

Susan was aware of her intermittently after that—at parties, coffee shops, movies or walking at a distance with her stiff-hipped,
mobile-necked poodle walk. She would hear Leisha’s name mentioned in gossip, usually in a tone of amused tolerance and in the context of some blighted romance, with the word “crazy” figuring prominently. Then Susan became friendly with a girl named Alex, who was, coincidentally, sharing a house with Leisha and another girl. Alex didn’t like Leisha either; she and Susan loved to talk about how trivial and fake she was.

But this talk began to have an unexpected effect. As they disparaged and analyzed Leisha, a strange affection for her began to manifest itself. They started to say things like, “Well, she’s an asshole, but you have to admit she has a good heart.” When Susan saw her on the street, she regarded her as a character in a movie, a mysterious figure who might or might not reveal herself. Her reputed excesses and romantic fiascoes began to appeal to Susan. Her overblown gestures seemed like the gaudy plumage of something too refined and frail to appear unadorned. Besides, morbid, serious Susan, who would brood with a bespectacled roommate for hours over tea and toast when a romance collapsed, could not help but feel a kind of admiration for this person who ran around town chattering about the most embarrassing and painful situations as though she were discussing a musical comedy. It was vulgar, but there was a bravado to it that Susan began to sentimentalize against her will. (In fact, she did discover later that Leisha was very fragile, and that she was usually reacting to a nasty scene that some boy or other had already made public before she ever opened her mouth, that her hysterical tattling was thus a form of self-defense.)

This burgeoning interest in her finally found expression when Leisha got pregnant—for the third time, said Alex. She was in bed with the flu and morning sickness when Alex and Susan went to visit her. She was sitting up in her dishevelled bed in an old blue velveteen robe, surrounded by fashion magazines and sodas, her brown eyes lively and alert. She looked at Susan with discomforting but flattering intensity. Susan sat on the bed. “I heard you were sick. I thought I’d come to see how you were doing.”

They talked about leather gloves, high heels and their favorite writers. It was the first time that Susan had ever really heard Leisha’s
voice—the quick, low-pitched voice affected by a certain type of teenage sex star in the fifties and picked up again by bouffant-haired singers in the seventies, only in Leisha it had an intelligent edge that was not ironic but somehow plain and comforting, as if, honey, she’d been there and back, and she knew how important it was just to sit and have a drink and a good talk—which now seemed like a ridiculous affectation in a twenty-one-year-old college student. Susan realized that almost anything you talked about with this girl would seem important. And it appeared that Leisha was having a similar reaction to her. It was, as Leisha said later, the time they fell in love.

After Leisha had her third abortion, they began spending time together. They met ritualistically for brunch at the Dialtone Café on Sundays so they could discuss whatever had happened the night before, or rant about whatever they’d been obsessed with the previous week.

“The thing that drives me nuts about it is that Elena—well, she’s just a twat. She really is.” Leisha was talking about a party they’d been to, during which a recent ex of hers had disappeared into the bedroom with a South American. “He thinks she’s so exotic because she’s twenty-six and she’s been married and she’s from South America, but I’ve seen her and she’s nothing special. She’s just passive and quiet and looks totally ordinary. He probably thinks she’s got a lot going for her because she’s a law student and I’m not directed yet. But I know I’m as interesting as she is and when I figure out what I want to do … I don’t know.” She picked up her fork, put it down, pulled at the back of her hair and wrapped her arms around her shoulders in the straightjacket position that she assumed when she was upset.

Susan could actually remember her response: “I’m so sick and tired of hearing the words ‘directed’ and ‘career,’ I could scream.”

“But you do want a career, don’t you?”

“No. I want to work at Dunkin’ Donuts when I get out of school. I want to get fat. Or be addicted to heroin. I want to be a disaster.”

“Why? Oh, you’re joking. But I know what you mean. I’m sick
of these closed-minded career people too. It’s just that I’m getting tired of feeling like a stupid … well, a stupid cunt. I want to do something with my talent. I know I’ve got talent.”

Susan ate her toast and stared at her, loving her, almost gloating over her. She loved her tiny fingers, her hot face, her bright nervous energy, her pathetic assertion that she had talent. That she talked like the worst stereotype of the girliest girl imaginable only enhanced her appeal. Susan could not explain this perverse love to herself, but there it was. Perhaps it was so strong because she had almost no other female friends in college; most of her emotional energy had been spent on men—she’d had fewer affairs than Leisha but spent twice the time brooding over them. Maybe the extremities and obviousness of a cartoon girl were all that she could handle in another woman. It was probably for this reason that Leisha chose to be a cartoon girl, she thought sadly.

The curious thing was, Leisha had loved Susan too, at least initially, as another kind of caricature. Susan had been surprised to hear that for months she’d been a source of jealousy and speculation, that Leisha had been deeply puzzled by this solemn, self-contained and (to Leisha) weirdly silent girl. Besides, Susan had quite a reputation in Ann Arbor herself, thanks to their mutual boyfriend. “She’s nothing like she looks,” he’d say to anyone who’d listen. “She’s kinky as hell.” Then he’d generously explain how and in what ways, somehow managing to leave his kinkiness out.

“You remind me of black stiletto heels,” Leisha had said. “I used to picture you all in black, in stretch pants and spike-heeled shoes.”

“Oh, brother,” said Susan. But she was flattered.

The apartment Susan was staying in belonged to an old friend named Bobby, who was in Europe for the month and hadn’t bothered to arrange a sublet for so short a time. It was located in the Village only a few blocks from the apartment she had lived in for most of her time in Manhattan. It was much larger than her old apartment, and brighter.

Her apartment in Chicago was even larger than Bobby’s. It
had high ceilings and large windows; it was fashionably decorated with soft colors and spare-limbed furnishings. It was kept clean by a weekly maid. She had attractive kitchen accessories in matching colors. She remembered Leisha visiting her tiny Manhattan studio and laughing at her, incredulous that after four months Susan’s utensils were still limited to two forks, a knife and a spoon.

She went into Bobby’s bedroom and looked at herself in the long mirror, a plump woman wandering calmly toward middle age, standing with one arm wrapped around her waist and a drink in her hand. She had never thought she would be plump or calm. Ten years ago, even six years ago, she never gained weight, no matter how much she ate. Her sudden plumpness was such a novelty that she enjoyed it rather than fighting it, as did most women her age. “You’ve finally come into your real … look,” her mother said approvingly. “You’re not a skinny kid anymore.” This late maternal acceptance had pleased her to such an extent that she found it somewhat sad; just a few years earlier she would’ve rejected it as the words of a woman glad to see the last of an unreasonable reminder of youth and insouciance in the form of her unusually slender daughter.

Her life in New York had been erratic and unconnected. She had lived hand to mouth most of the time, working a series of menial jobs that made her feel isolated and unseen, yet strangely safe. She ate dinners of rice and beans or boxes of Chinese takeout food on the floor. She stayed up until seven or eight in the morning working on her manuscripts, and then slept all day. She went to Harlem to interview voodoo practitioners. She went to nightclubs and after-hours bars, standing on the periphery of scene after scene with Leisha or some other, less central girlfriend. She took long walks late at night, especially in winter, loving the sound of her own muted footfalls, the slush-clogged city noises, and the sight of the bundled, shuffling drunks staggering home, looking up in surprise to see a young woman walking alone at 4:00
A.M.
The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits
wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked.