Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  He lay back in his bed and croaked, “Oh, my God.”

  When she left for L.A. he thought she was gone forever, but she wasn’t. She returned to New York often, and they would sometimes have dinner together. She would describe for him the mysterious artificial world of the movie set, with its harsh aurora borealis of lights and sounds that, by twinkling transmutation, became the magic glass that humans stepped into and mythic beings stepped out of. He liked to picture her on the set, her face covered with the sugar dust of cosmetic powder, her eyes laden with cosmetic jewels, surrounded by and bathed in lights that were like giant technological flowers.

  He kept expecting her—encouraging her, even—to display the deluded self-importance he assumed all successful people harbored, and when she didn’t he felt disbelief, disappointment, and respect. He almost felt as if he were experiencing the excitement of her new life with her. He nursed the fantasy that it was still he for whom she felt the deepest affinity, that he was the one she could turn to at her most confused, when she needed to tell the truth about those Holly-wood phonies. He would always be there for her—when she lost her looks, when her pictures flopped, when the tabloids went after her.

  It was hard to identify the moment when talking to her began to make his life seem like a crushed ball of aluminum in an empty can. But there was a point at which he noticed her expression become vacant and polite when he laid before her even the juiciest gossip about the restaurant. Then there was the subtle change in the way she described her experiences with the director and the other actors; instead of tremulously setting out her stories like new toys she wanted to share, she now displayed them so he could see but not touch them. There would be a sudden smugness in the way she held herself aright and puffed her cigarette, but then she would turn and face him with her candid eyes and he’d shudder inwardly with the memory of her tongue licking his fingers.

  When the film was over and she returned to New York, she became yet more distant. Although Queen of Night was not due to be released for some months, Nicki was already “hot” in Hollywood. She had an agent, who fielded film offers and laid piles of scripts at her feet. She sarcastically denounced the snotty clique of New York-based actors who wouldn’t countenance talented newcomers, and then she went to their parties. She met a famous actor there—“A pig,” she said—who had come on to her rudely and arrogantly. It was at this point that Lesly was startled to realize that if this famous actor had fancied her, others would too, and that not all of them would be pigs. He hurled himself at the vast emptiness of his screenplay with unprecedented ferocity.

  She was visibly pleased when he told her about it. “I’d love to see it when you’re done,” she said. “I’ll bet it’s really good.” But it wasn’t, and he shredded it on the tenth page. After a relaxing three-day drunk, he started another script. He didn’t like that one, either, but when he tore it up he didn’t go on another bender. With the novel sensation that he knew what he was doing, he started another draft. He wasn’t sure this one was good either, but it was fun, and he surprised himself by staying in to work on it during his nights off instead of conducting his usual drinking man’s tour of lower Manhattan.

  Then Nicki did the Rude Thing. He had gotten tickets for them to see a dance company she loved. On the evening they were to go, a few hours before he was to pick her up, she canceled. “A friend,” she said, had phoned at the last minute; she was coming in from L. A. and Nicki had to have dinner with her. He didn’t understand until she stammeringly explained. “She isn’t just a friend. She’s my girlfriend. I got involved with her during the shoot—she’s a camerawoman—and I haven’t seen her for weeks.”

  “You never said anything about her before,” he said stiffly.

  “Well, yeah, I know. It was because—I know it’s silly—but I thought you might be jealous.”

  He snorted violently. “No, not quite. It’s your business, and it’s not like you and I were ever really involved anyway. I just don’t like being stood up at the last minute. What am I supposed to do with your ticket?”

  For several seconds after they said goodbye, he stood with the buzzing receiver in his hand, staring at the dresser that looked as if it had been made to hide dismembered bodies.

  The following week they were in a bar, eating salty peanuts, drinking tequila, and being assaulted by heartlessly fashionable music. “I’m sorry you had to find out about Lana that way,” she said. “I hope you don’t hold it against her; it was my fault, really. But I’m glad I finally told you. I don’t know why I held back. I should’ve known you wouldn’t mind.”

  Grimly, he drank. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that if she was a lesbian, it could hardly be his fault that she’d dumped him, but it didn’t work. Nicki began to describe Lana’s subtle and dashing personal style, her strength, her tenderness, her wit. Nicki really couldn’t be a lesbian, he thought. This was yet another irritating affectation, or else a symptom of her deep distrust of men, which he alone had overcome. Then Nicki started in on Lana’s sexual prowess.

  “Oh, really,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I mean, I’m not one of those idiots who can’t picture what two women could do together. I know there’s a lot of things. I picture lots of slow, languorous. . . you know. But still, there’s a limit to what—I mean, to what any two people can do.”

  “Well, we haven’t reached ours,” said Nicki. “We do everything. Even corny stuff, like she wears a suit and I wear a garter belt and stockings—”

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I need to use the men’s room.”

  He stalked to the John, taunted by visions of the formidable dyke fucking garter-belt-clad Nicki. He tried seeing it as beat-off material, but he was too irked.

  When he got back to the table, her face recoiled slightly.

  “Lesly, are you upset?”

  Of course he wasn’t.

  She began to talk about her anxiety about the reviews Queen would get. He could tell from the artificial quality of her voice that she knew something was wrong. He felt she was trying to charm him out of being upset with a display of modesty and vulnerability, and that made him even madder. He tried to tell himself he had no right to be mad, but it didn’t help. The professional jealousy he had staunchly suppressed in the name of friendship rose and joined forces with romantic jealousy. While his head nodded agreement and tilted at polite angles, Nicki’s conversation raced ahead, trailing a bright streamer of self-involvement. He remembered her on her knees in his bed, moaning into the sheets. He remembered another girl from the past whom he had broken up with, remembered specifically how, long after their affair had ended, he could make her blush merely by looking intensely into her eyes the way he had when he’d fucked her. If he looked at Nicki that way, he thought, she wouldn’t even notice. He looked at the tense, delicate face before him, fixating on one bright, jiggling earring; a black tunnel opened before him, spanning days, maybe weeks, a tunnel filled with shadowy forms of pain and deprivation.

  “And so,” said Nicki, dramatically ending a story he’d heard before, “there’s nothing he won’t do to have me in the part. Plus he’d like to screw me, so I know he’s gonna be totally nice about the script. It’s pretty much up to me at this point.”

  “That’s a little self-aggrandizing, wouldn’t you say?”

  She tipped back her head to release a throatful of smoke and then coolly faced him. “Yeah,” she said. “It also happens to be true.” There was no false vulnerability in her voice.

  “Does he know you’re a lesbian?”

  “He probably thinks I am. A lot of people do.” She jerkily tapped cigarette ash into her empty glass and then looked directly at him. “That only makes men want you more, actually.”

  “Nicki,” he said, “why didn’t you tell me you’re gay?”

  She lowered her eyes and shrugged. “I don’t know. Because I’m not, totally. I do like men sometimes, and I hate the idea that I have to absolutely identify m
yself as one thing or another. It’s true I generally prefer women and that men are usually more casual for me.” She looked up quickly. “But I liked being with you a lot.” She turned her eyes down again. “It didn’t seem necessary to tell you. Until now.”

  For the rest of the wretched evening, he wanted only to go home, to sit in bed and drink. But when he got home he found he was too agitated to do that. He paced the King Farouk Room, thinking of every affected, self-indulgent, obnoxious thing Nicki had ever said. He reflected how his foolish love had blinded him to her offensive personality. He thought of how true it was that the pushiest, most vulgar people always rose to the top. He imagined hitting her. He imagined mashing a grapefruit in her face.

  His eyes fell on his screenplay. He threw it across the room. He stood staring after it for a long moment. Had there been a movie camera trained on his face, it would have recorded an expression of pernicious ingenuity dawning, then slowly spreading from feature to feature. He sat down before his computer and began to type. He typed until three in the morning.

  He was awakened the following day by the clicking answering machine and then by Nicki’s voice leaving a long, scattershot message.

  He got up, made coffee, and returned to his computer.

  A few days later she called again, but he was screening his calls. As he listened to her voice, he gave the machine a loud, farting raspberry. As if she’d heard it, she stopped calling, although there were several hang-up calls during the following week. He wasn’t interested in talking to her. He had developed a much more satisfying relationship with the tiny Nicki cavorting across the pages of his new screenplay.

  The screenplay had started as an exorcism of his demeaning anger and had become, on the same night, a serious idea. Nicki was a perfect heroine: capricious, sexually manipulative, ambitious, charming, ruthless. She tripped girlishly over the hearts of maddened men while prattling quintessential nineties sentiments. She was a waitress moonlighting as a hooker until she clawed her way into the film business by sleeping with the right people. She slept with men who would enhance her profile and then cast them aside. She slept with women, leaked stories of their lingerie-clad romps to the press for titillation value, and then cast them aside. She capitalized on her incestuous relationship with her uncle by discussing it on talk shows until the frantic fellow shot himself. She was eventually forced to be the sex slave of the cruel editor of a scandal magazine, who was holding over her head an embarrassing kiss and tell written by one of her male victims. That was only the start of her disastrous decline, during which she repented but too late.

  Factually the character bore little relationship to the real Nicki, except that he used her favorite jokes, mannerisms, and sayings, and quoted verbatim from private conversations they had had, most notably about Lana and about the pedophile uncle. He would not have thought she was recognizable. But when he finished the first draft and showed it to a friend who worked at the restaurant, the guy called him after reading the first ten pages and said, “Is this Nicki?”

  He titled it Kiss and Tell.

  He stuck it in a drawer and took it out a month later. He was shocked at how good it was. He had never written anything this good in his life. It rattled him to think his first belated triumph had sprung from sheer vindictiveness; he stuck it back in the drawer. He started another screenplay but was distracted by persistent day-dreams of Nicki playing scenes from Kiss and Tell, particularly the one where the heroine is sodomized by the nasty magazine editor.

  He didn’t look at the script again until the first promotional posters for Queen of Night appeared. He saw them when he was returning home from work late one night; they were freshly glued to the rotting side of a cheap men’s-clothing store. Nicki’s face was not on it, but to him it might as well have been. He stood and stared at the poster, while the wind blew plastic bags and candy wrappers about his ankles.

  The next morning he reread Kiss and Tell and felt a certain psychic prickling. He decided to send it to a film agent whom he’d met eight years before. As he put it in the mail, he felt the faint nausea that always accompanied his attempts to accomplish something.

  Queen of Night opened. He didn’t see it, but he religiously read the reviews. They were mixed about the movie but unanimous in their praise for the “incandescent” performance of “sex imp” Nicki Piastrini. He smiled in spite of himself when he read them. He wanted to call and congratulate her. He did call once but hung up when she answered. He spent an evening at a bar, trying to revive his feelings of anger toward her, and realized that he hadn’t thought of her with passion for some time. He felt sad, then began to flirt with the girl behind the bar.

  Early one morning his phone machine clicked on. He’d turned the volume down the night before and he was half asleep, so he was only barely aware of a voice leaving quite a long message. He dimly imagined that it was Nicki; he thought he might return her call when he got up, then he went back to sleep. When he woke and played the tape, he was stunned to hear the confident voice of the film agent. Kiss and Tell, he said, was wonderful. Could Lesly call him back as soon as possible?

  Then he was in the agent’s office. If he’d worn a hat he would’ve wrung it in his hands. The agent looked at him as if he respected him. In fact, he looked as if people he respected came and sat in his office every day. Lesly felt disoriented and sick. The agent sat back in his chair as if everything were okay.

  “I’m not a person who gushes, typically,” said the agent, “but I’ll tell you honestly I haven’t clicked like this with a script for a long time. I could literally see the scenes before my eyes. I could see what the actors looked like. I actually have somebody in mind for the lead. But first things first.”

  The next few weeks were a jumble. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat. He would tell people about the agent and feel his face in conflicted expressions of happiness and fright. He called Nicki three times and hung up on her machine. He called his parents, and the shocked pride in their voices almost made him weep.

  The agent was right. He sold the screenplay within weeks, to a director Lesly had heard of since adolescence. Lesly went into the agent’s office to sign the contract, and the agent talked to him about going to Los Angeles to meet the director. Lesly nodded dumbly.

  “By the way,” said the agent, “remember I mentioned to you that there’s an actress who I think is perfect for the lead? I’m having a colleague of mine show her the script. Have you seen Queen of Night?”

  He flew to Los Angeles the next day. The trip was a series of disconnected still frames out of which popped various animated heads. An escort of palm trees flanked his car trips through each different frame. Bright, winking signs called out to him, doors opened to reveal great expanses of rug and mahogany. Everywhere, people in uniforms wanted to bring him and his friends—smiling men in suits—alcohol, coffee, or snacks. He sat in the sunken tub of his hotel bathroom, drinking Scotch, listening to MTV, and thinking how odd it was to find himself an accessory to all the jokes he’d made about the grossness and vulgarity of Los Angeles. He felt a little hypocritical, but he knew Los Angeles didn’t mind. It knew it was a joke and a face-lift and didn’t try to hide it, and therein, he thought as he swigged, therein lay its charm. In L. A., writing a script called Kiss and Tell about a kiss and tell that was an honest-to-God kiss and tell was only one more kooky face appearing in one more frame, the frame of outraged Nicki reading the script, a great punch line underscored by pop music.

  He flew back to New York with a terrible headache and a vague sense of guilt.

  His answering machine greeted him with an urgently flashing light. He had ten messages! But they were all the irritating kind of hang-up call where the person waits for several seconds and then loudly puts the phone down. He muttered and paced as he listened to them. Well, maybe she hadn’t read it yet. He became so absorbed in hanging his travel-wrinkled shirts on his tatty hangers that he jumped when the phone rang.

  Her voice was so tense w
ith politeness and repressed expression that he didn’t recognize it. “So you’re there,” she said. “I’ll be over in two minutes.”

  “Nicki, I—”

  Click.

  His first impulse was to leave the apartment, but that was too embarrassing. Besides, he wanted to see her face. Not just because of the script but because, he suddenly realized, he’d missed her; he wanted to tell her about L.A. The thing was, she probably didn’t want to hear it. She was probably on her way over to punch him. He reminded himself she was only a girl, but still his hands shook. He decided that when she rang the buzzer he could make up his mind whether to let her in. She rang. He buzzed. He paced the King Farouk Room, trying to compose himself into an expression of implacable rightness. She knocked. He wiped his palms on his pants before he let her in.

  Her cold face was very different from the face he had held in memory. She looked oddly diminished, ordinary, and—for the first time—unsexy. He could not picture her sitting on him backward, exposing her cellulite in her abandon.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She stared at him. She was holding a copy of his script; she dropped it on the floor. “Why,” she said, “did you do this?”

  “Nicki,” he said, “no one will know it’s you.”

  “Only everybody in the restaurant. But that’s not what matters.”

  “It isn’t you, Nicki. It’s an imaginary person. It’s a cartoon character with some of your traits.”

  “A lesbian cartoon character who was molested by her uncle. Couldn’t you think up anything by yourself? God, you’re the cartoon character.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me, but that sounds a little funny coming from a woman who brags about wearing lingerie and getting fucked by a dyke.”

  “I wasn’t bragging, you idiot. I was talking to my friend, or at least I thought I was. You’re a coward and a rip-off. I respected you and—”

  “You never respected me. I was a fixture for your vanity.”