Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  “Ercie will run up to him to show him something she’s found, and he’ll say, in baby talk, ‘Oh, look what Ercie has.’ And then he’ll look over her head at me and sneer and say, ‘Really interesting, huh?’ And she looks crestfallen.”

  “Maybe he’s embarrassed to be talking baby talk in front of you. Like you’ll think he’s uncool or something.”

  “That’s no excuse. She’s going to grow up and have all kinds of problems with men, and nobody will understand why. Not even her.”

  “I don’t know, Jacquie. It doesn’t sound that bad to me. Kids are okay as long as you love them, basically.”

  “But what’s called love in most families is inadequate shit.”

  “Loving doesn’t mean being perfect.”

  “I’m not talking about perfect. I’m just talking about respect and kindness for your own kids.”

  He didn’t understand her when she talked this way. Jacquie was a strong girl. She had square shoulders and a muscular butt. She took karate classes. Competence and spirit seemed built right into her. Most of the time he could see her spirit in the animal vibrance of her gold eyes. But sometimes her eyes would reflect a sense of stubborn injury that he could not quite locate. It was an expression that seemed to regard competence and spirit as contrivances that, while they kept her going, had nothing to do with who she really was.

  He felt the look in a different way when they had sex. They would embrace, and he’d feel her engage him from the surface of her skin to the wet muscularity of her hidden organs. But there always came a moment when he stopped feeling her. She held him close, but she was somewhere else. He would look at her face and see it twisted away from him, her eyes closed as if she were looking at the inside of her own head in horror and fascination and need. There would be a moment of tension like a fishing line pulled taut, and then he would feel her slowly return. She would open her eyes and look at him and clasp his hand, her ardent palm open against his, her expression fierce and triumphant.

  He decided to call her, even though it was two o’clock in San Francisco. There were four rings and a laborious click; his recorded voice asked him to leave a message. He hung up. He wondered where she was.

  He sat back in his chair and remembered her naked, kneeling over the low coffee table with her thighs open wide. “If I fucked you in the ass I would own you,” he’d said.

  She turned over quickly. “No, you wouldn’t. What a ridiculous thing to say.”

  An hour later he called again, but she wasn’t home then, either.

  The last time Daniel went to see his mother, he went with his father. In spite of what his father had said in the restaurant about how close he was with Daniel’s mother, there was a sense of overwhelming discomfort between them. It was clear that they were both sad, but they seemed to be sad in separate, restricted ways, as though they were hoarding it. His mother’s mouth was sarcastic, as if she found it ridiculous to be suffering before her ex-husband. His father was gentle, but the gentleness was excruciating. He didn’t say anything to her about his new business. They didn’t refer to the past or to her family. They talked about the accident, about Albert and Rose, and a little about the country club they had once belonged to. When Daniel talked, he felt that he was, in a more advanced and subtle form, serving the same function he had when they relayed messages through him.

  They had been in the room for about half an hour when two interns came in. They said they needed to do a brief examination. One of them asked, “Are you Mr. Belmont?” Daniel’s father said yes. “And you’re the son. Then you can stay if you want. This will only take a few minutes.” Then, with gestures that would have seemed rapacious had they been less efficient, they stripped the sheet from Daniel’s mother, jerking up her gown to expose her lower body. Her pelvic bones stuck out. Her pubic hair was thin and snarled. Gross metal pins attached her at the joints. “Whoops, sorry,” said an intern. He pulled down her gown and absently patted her belly. “All in the family.”

  Jesus Christ, thought Daniel.

  His mother smiled like a bitter doll. “Oh, doctors, hello. You might be interested to know that Mr. Belmont and I have not been married for ten years.”

  His father didn’t say anything.

  The next day he flew back to San Francisco. Jacquie made him a special chicken dinner, and they ate it on the low coffee table. He told her about how difficult it had been to see his mother that first time and how he had almost fainted. He told her about his father and how he had routed the relatives in the hospital waiting room. He told her how his mother had said “bullshit” to the nurse. She listened attentively; he had the impression that she didn’t know what to say. She worked on her sweet potato with inordinate delicacy. Her gold eyes subtly glimmered. He wanted to tell her about the moment he’d had with his father in the car, but it was too far away from him now.

  “Could you tell me again why your grandparents hate your father?” she asked. “I know you’ve told me, but I can’t remember exactly.”

  “Mostly because my father is more adventurous than they are. When my father worked for my grandfather, he had a lot of ideas. He wanted to expand the business into something bigger than this little local thing, and my grandfather just wanted to keep it the way it was. They were arguing about it, and then my grandfather found out that my father was expanding certain lines without telling him. So he fired him.”

  “Really? I thought it was something different. I thought you told me that your father lost the company money, and that’s why he fired him.”

  “I told you that’s what Grandpa said. You weren’t listening to me.”

  She tilted her head toward her plate in a vaguely deferential way. “I always wondered how your father could possibly be angry at them.”

  Daniel pushed the little table away. “Because they tried to emasculate him. What they did would’ve really fucked up another man. But not my father. That waiting room incident is a perfect example of the difference between them. He was the one who took control of the situation, he made things happen, and they just sat there like jerks.”

  She looked at him as though she was coming to a new conclusion about him; it seemed that pity was part of the conclusion. He fought an urge to strike her.

  “I want to ask you something,” he said. “Why didn’t you send my mother a card?”

  She blinked. “Well, from what you said, I thought she’d be too bad off to read it or even know about it. Actually I looked at some cards today, but they were all really ugly. I’ll look at a better store tomorrow.”

  “You think she cares what the card looks like?”

  “If I’m going to send a card, I want it to be a good one.”

  “You don’t understand at all.” He stood. “You’re just thinking about yourself and about the impression you’re going to make. The point isn’t a cute card and a cute comment inside it. You’re right, of course, she’s too bad off to look at it. She can hardly fucking move.”

  “It wasn’t about making an impression.” Jacquie’s voice was going high and stricken. “Sending cards isn’t something I usually ever do. I was going to send one to your mom because what else am I going to do? But it’s a stupid, inadequate way of saying anything to anybody.”

  “That’s not the point. The point of all those stupid cards on her table is one thing. They’re all signed ‘Love.’ That’s it. Every time she sees another card signed ‘Love,’ she knows somebody else is behind her, caring about her. That’s what counts. And last week was the time to send it. Of course it’s inadequate. It’s still better than nothing. Do you know how much pain she’s in? They’ve got her so sedated she can hardly talk, and she’s still in pain. And you don’t send her a card?”

  She hovered between emotions, then went into an afflicted flinch. She covered her face with her hands, and he knew she was crying. This was what he had wanted to see, but now he felt sorry, even though she wasn’t crying much.

  “It’s not that I don’t care about your mother
. I just didn’t want to send a card that didn’t mean anything. I hate cards. I wanted to send her a letter, but I knew she couldn’t read it.” She wiped her face, lifted her head, and faced him. “I was going to send her a book after she gets better. I have it picked out. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking of her.”

  He sat down next to her and put his arm across her shoulders. “I know,” he said. He paused. “You’ve just never been in this kind of situation before, and you don’t know how to respond.” Her quivering slowed, and he felt her listening. “I used to be like that. Something like this is so awful that you don’t know how to react, and part of you is worried about how you’re going to look. But the important thing is just to say that you care, somehow. It doesn’t matter if it’s not exactly right. You just do it.”

  She looked up at him. “But I can’t think that way, Daniel. If I make a gesture, I want it to be real. Especially if the situation is really bad. It seems insulting to act out of convention. It’s like saying ‘Have a nice day.’ It isn’t connected to anything.”

  He dropped his arm from her shoulder and turned away. There was a stretched-out silence with nothing in it.

  He separated into two pieces. Part of him sat square in the middle of pain and held on, knowing that he could endure, knowing that his mother could endure and his father too. But another part of him was extended in darkness, reaching for something without knowing what it was.

  “Daniel?” She embraced him from behind. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her heart moved in loud, hyperextended beats against his back.

  He turned into her embrace and held her head against his chest, locking his legs around her hips. He felt her intensely in the solidity of her little body, felt who she was under her words. She was good inside. She just didn’t know how to show it. She didn’t know how to look outside herself. He wanted to care for her.

  She shifted in his arms and reached up to hold his face in her hands. “You’re so cute,” she said.

  She disengaged herself, got up, and went into the bathroom. He heard the dull ruffle of toilet paper unraveling from its roll, the hiss and squish of a nose blow. She emerged into the room again, moving with familiar authority. But her face, half turned away from him, was strained, diminished, and searching for something that he didn’t know, something that had nothing to do with him, nothing at all.

  The Girl on the Plane

  John Morton came down the aisle of the plane, banging his luggage into people’s knees and sweating angrily under his suit. He had just run through the corridors of the airport, cursing and struggling with his luggage, slipping and flailing in front of the vapid brat at the seat assignment desk. Too winded to speak, he thrust his ticket at the boy and readjusted his luggage in his sticky hands. “You’re a little late for a seat assignment,” said the kid snottily. “I hope you can get on board before it pulls away.”

  He took his boarding pass and said, “Thanks, you little prick.” The boy’s discomfiture was made more obvious by his pretense of hauteur; it both soothed and fed John’s anger.

  At least he was able to stuff his bags into the compartment above the first seat he found. He sat down, grunting territorially, and his body slowly eased into a normal dull pulse and ebb. He looked at his watch; desk attendant to the contrary, the plane was sitting stupidly still, twenty minutes after takeoff time. He had the pleasing fantasy of punching the little bastard’s face.

  He was always just barely making his flight. His wife had read in one of her magazines that habitual lateness meant lack of interest in life or depression or something. Well, who could blame him for lack of interest in the crap he was dealing with?

  He glanced at the guy a seat away from him on the left, an alcoholic-looking old shark in an expensive suit, who sat staring fixedly at a magazine photograph of a grinning blonde in a white jumpsuit. The plane continued to sit there, while stewardesses fiddled with compartments and women rolled up and down the aisles on trips to the bathroom. They were even boarding a passenger; a woman had just entered, flushed and vigorously banging along the aisle with her luggage. She was very pretty, and he watched her, his body still feebly sending off alarm signals in response to its forced run.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m in the middle there.”

  “By all means.” The force of his anger entered his magnanimity and swelled it hugely; he pinched his ankles together to let her by. She put her bag under the seat in front of her, sat down, and rested her booted feet on its pale leather. The old shark by the window glanced appraisingly at her breasts through her open coat. He looked up at her face and made smile movements. The stewardess did her parody of a suffocating person reaching for an air mask, the pilot mumbled, the plane prepared to assert its unnatural presence in nature.

  “They said I’d missed my flight by fifteen minutes,” she said. “But I knew I’d make it. They’re never on time.” Her voice was unexpectedly small, with a rough, gravelly undertone that was seedy and schoolgirlish at once.

  “It’s bullshit,” he said. “Well, what can you do?” She had large hazel eyes.

  She smiled a tight, rueful smile that he associated with women who’d been fucked too many times and which he found sexy. She cuddled more deeply into her seat, produced a People magazine, and intently read it. He liked her profile—which was an interesting combination of soft (forehead, chin) and sharp (nose, cheekbones)—her shoulder-length, pale-brown hair, and her soft Mediterranean skin. He liked the coarse quality in the subtle downturn of her lips, and the heavy way her lids sat on her eyes. She was older than he’d originally thought, probably in her early thirties.

  Who did she remind him of? A girl from a long time ago, an older version of some date or crush or screw. Or love, he thought gamely.

  The pilot said they would be leaving the ground shortly. She was now reading a feature that appeared to be about the wedding of two people who had AIDS. He thought of his wife, at home in Minneapolis, at the stove poking at something, in the living room reading, the fuzzy pink of her favorite sweater. The plane charged and tore a hole in the air.

  He reviewed his mental file of girls he’d known before his wife and paused at the memory of Andrea, the girl who’d made an ass-hole of him. It had been twelve years, and only now could he say that phrase to himself, the only phrase that accurately described the situation. With stale resentment, he regarded her: a pale, long-legged thing with huge gray eyes, a small mouth, long red hair, and the helpless manner of a pampered pet let loose in the wilderness.

  The woman next to him was hurriedly flipping the pages of People, presumably looking for something as engrossing as the AIDS wedding. When she didn’t find it, she closed the magazine and turned to him in a way that invited conversation.

  She said she’d lived in L.A. for eight years and that she liked it, even though it was “gross.”

  “I’ve never been to L.A.,” he said. “I picture it being like L.A. Law. Is it like that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen L.A. Law. I don’t watch TV I don’t own one.”

  He had never known a person who didn’t own a TV, not even an old high school friend who lived in a slum and got food stamps. “You must read the newspapers a lot.”

  “No. I don’t read them much at all.”

  He was incredulous. “How do you connect with the rest of the world? How do you know anything?”

  “I’m part of the world. I know a lot of things.”

  He expelled a snort of laughter. “That’s an awfully small perspective you’ve got there.”

  She shrugged and turned her head, and he was sorry he’d been rude. He glanced at her profile to read her expression and—of course; she reminded him of Patty LaForge, poor Patty.

  He had met Patty at Meadow Community College in Coate, Minnesota. He was in his last semester; she had just entered. They worked in the student union cafeteria, preparing, serving, and snacking on denatured food. She was a slim, curvy person with dark-blond hair, hazel eyes, and remarkable legs and
hips. Her beauty was spoiled by the aggressive resignation that held her features in a fixed position and made all her expressions stiff. Her full mouth had a bitter downturn, and her voice was quick, low, self-deprecating, and sarcastic. She presented her beautiful body statically, as if it were a shield, and the effort of this presentation seemed to be the source of her animation.

  Most of the people he knew at Meadow were kids he’d gone to high school and even junior high with. They still lived at home and still drove their cars around together at night, drank in the small bars of Coate, adventured in Minneapolis, and made love to each other. This late-adolescent camaraderie gave their time at Meadow a fraught emotional quality that was like the shimmering fullness of a bead of water before it falls. They were all about to scatter and become different from one another, and this made them exult in their closeness and alikeness.

  The woman on the plane was flying to Kentucky to visit her parents and stopping over in Cincinnati.

  “Did you grow up in Kentucky?” he asked. He imagined her as a big-eyed child in a cotton shift, playing in some dusty, sunny alley, some rural Kentucky-like place. Funny she had grown up to be this wan little bun with too much makeup in black creases under her eyes.

  “No. I was born there, but I grew up mostly in Minnesota, near Minneapolis.”

  He turned away, registered the little shock of coincidence, and turned back. The situation compounded: she had gone to Redford Community College in Thorold, a suburb much like Coate. She had grown up in Thorold, like Patty. The only reason Patty had gone to Meadow was that Redford didn’t exist yet.

  He felt a surge of commonality. He imagined that she had experienced his adolescence, and this made him experience it for a moment. He had loved walking the small, neat walkways of the campus through the stiffly banked hedges of snow and harsh morning austerity, entering the close, food-smelling student union with the hard winter air popping off his skin. He would see his friends standing in a conspiratorial huddle, warming their hands on cheap cups of coffee; he always remembered the face of a particular girl, Layla, turning to greet him, looking over her frail sloped shoulder, her hair a bunched dark tangle, her round eyes ringed with green pencil, her perfectly ordinary face compelling in its configurations of girlish curiosity, maternal license, sexual knowledge, forgiveness, and femininity. A familiar mystery he had meant to explore some-time and never did, except when he grabbed her butt at a Halloween party and she smiled like a mother of four who worked as a porn model on the side. He loved driving with his friends to the Red Owl to buy alcohol and bagged salty snacks, which they consumed as they drove around Coate playing the tape deck and yelling at each other, the beautiful ordinary landscape unpeeling before them, revealing the essential strangeness of its shadows and night movements. He loved driving with girls to the deserted housing development they called “the Spot,” loved the blurred memories of the girls in the back seat with their naked legs curled up to their chests, their shirts bunched about their necks, their eyes wide with ardor and alcohol, beer and potato chips spilled on the floor of the car, the tape deck singing of love and triumph. He getting out of the car for a triumphant piss, while the girl daintily replaced her pants. In the morning his mother would make him “cowboy eggs,” eggs fried on top of bacon, and he would go through the cold to Meadow, to sit in a fluorescent classroom and dream.