Ugly Behavior

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Make-up had caked near her eyes and at the left corner of her mouth. He could see now that she used a little too much lipstick. And something was wrong with her eye shadow: she looked more bruised than seductive. No doubt during the walk here she had perspired, and the make-up had run a bit. Or maybe it had happened during dancing. Some women perspired more, but he hadn’t been aware of her dancing with anyone other than him. It had been as if she’d been waiting. Waiting for someone like him. Her murderer.

  Not that he had ever murdered anyone. He’d never even punched anyone. His previous murders had been strictly academic. He was like one of those fellows who played entire games of chess in his head, and never went near a board and pieces. She might have been his first.

  But the woman didn’t know how to put make-up on anymore. That was it, wasn’t it? She’d come to Jack’s like this, and he hadn’t known because of the dim lighting.

  She smiled up at him. A small bit of congealed egg clung to one powder- and grease-smeared cheek. He picked up a napkin and dipped one corner into his water glass. “Here,” he said. “Here. You’ve got something on you. Let me.” And he reached over, and she sat still as a daughter while he smoothed the place by her mouth, and blended her eye shadow, and gently removed the food clinging to her cheek. “Like a picture,” he said. “Like a pretty picture.”

  She held his hand. “You’re a good man,” she said, knowing absolutely nothing about him, and it hurt him so to hear, and he could feel the anger coming as if from a great distance.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to go the bathroom.” He got up and walked to the back of the restaurant, and the hall that led to the restrooms, and he walked past the restrooms and out the back door, away from his first real victim.

  The morning was hot and dusty and he was still dressed in his best outfit, the black shirt and slacks and the thin silver tie. He walked through the weed and dirt lot behind the diner and wedged himself through a break in the fence.

  He walked down several blocks of bad pavement, poor houses and trashy yards. Ahead of him was a church, and a number of people in nice dresses and suits stood beneath an awning in the graveyard. He came as close to the funeral as he could. No one noticed him. Until a woman’s voice, slightly to his left and behind. “I see I’m not the only one who’s late,” she whispered, and drew closer, stepping beside him so they looked like a couple who had traveled here together to pay their respects.

  “I didn’t know her that well,” she said softly. “But I hear she was just a wonderful woman.”

  He tried to look beyond the perfect make-up job, and could not. “I didn’t know her at all,” he said.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she replied, completely misunderstanding him, not knowing anything that would help her through the next few hours.

  Squeezer

  “You look like you deserve a hug,” Anita said, again, as she had said every time Jefferson ran into her. Only this time they were alone, late at night in the park across the street from the movie theater. There wasn’t the crowd of people around she had always seemed to require. The crowd whose individual members looked so fondly at Anita’s heartfelt expressions of her humanity. “I think you do! I think you do deserve a hug today!”

  When there was a crowd Jefferson could avoid her; he could fade into that large and unmanageable, unhuggable crowd.

  But here there were no witnesses. The last show at the theatre had been an hour ago; Jefferson had hung around in the park because he liked the dark and the relative emptiness of late night. He had not expected to see Anita here—he supposed she was returning from some late night hugging session.

  She looked at him intently and seemed disturbed by what she saw. But then she had never seen Jefferson late at night, with no one else around. She started to pass him, confirming finally for him that these offers of hugs had become merely formal, required greeting for her, and had no conviction behind them at all.

  Tonight Jefferson would have none of that. It was dark and there was no one else around, and he had not touched, much less held, anyone in months. His skin felt dead, a brittle carapace for his nerves. His bones ached as if riddled with holes. He had a need to touch someone else’s life, and if not their life at least their desperation, which for him was much the same thing.

  He stepped forward into her body and offered himself up to her embrace. She hesitated at first, stiffened as if there were something wrong with his skin, as if she had found something repulsive in the feel of him, but then she whispered “Oh, sweetie…” with a heavy exhalation, as if a hope had at last been realized, and wrapped her arms around him, her legs and hips seeming to stretch, as if she would envelope him completely if she could.

  Jefferson held fast to her, at first in a familiar desperation, using her to anchor himself to the remaining tatters of his sense of reality. Then he increased the firmness of this embrace as he felt more and more in control of himself and of his situation. This young woman said she believed in touching, had in fact made hugging a credo, an entire belief system. But he sincerely doubted she understood touching at all. He believed a true touch between human beings to be impossible. But it was that impossibility which made it seem so essential. In fact, his embrace became so strong that the surface area of his arms and hands seemed to increase dramatically, impossibly, so that his grip covered every inch of her flesh, every square inch of her life, so that he could feel her increasingly harsh breathing beneath his touch, her pores opening in panic beneath his touch, releasing the oils and toxins all lives give off as they are winding down, as he squeezed and squeezed in an attempt to touch the life within her, to know that life at the level of his fingertips.

  When at last he felt the spasms beneath his hands, the last swift jerks of her body, he looked down at her steady gaze, her lips sheened with a red froth as they dropped back as if to take his mouth in a final kiss, and he wondered at what he had done.

  Jefferson would think of Anita many times after that. She became more to him than merely a first love, more like his first encounter with the sweet pulse which drove life itself. She was his first bride, and although even then he knew there would be many others, surely there could never be another to surpass the feel or the taste of his sweet Anita.

  She became the standard by which he judged other women, by which he imagined them. And during the months which followed he would imagine many women in his arms.

  Marie was someone he followed for weeks before finally arranging their “accidental” meeting. She cleaned several of the larger houses in the neighborhood, arriving at the corner by bus each morning around nine, and normally departing the same way about two PM. She was short, slight, brunette; some might have called her “ethereal.” It was easy for him to imagine her dissolving completely under the persistent press of his arms.

  She ate lunch every day at the Blue Ribbon Diner. After several days of watching her, Jefferson adopted the same habit, choosing a table to the side, only a few feet away.

  She ate a great deal for such a small person. He wondered where she put it all.

  He dreamed of squeezing the food back out of her, years of it unused and simply waiting for him to empty her with his embrace. All that untapped energy, all that unused life.

  Once or twice she glanced in his direction and smiled. He felt his arm muscles tense, his chest suddenly swelling with an emptiness.

  At last came a day he chose to come late, after the lunch rush was well under way. As always, there was the empty chair at her table.

  “May I?” He smiled widely, and he could feel a strain in his empty belly.

  “Sure… I don’t mind,” she said, as if it mattered. “I see you here all the time.”

  “You always make the food taste better,” he said. He made himself say it without blushing. Anita had given him just that kind of confidence.

  She looked at him with a slightly startled expression, then laughed out loud, presumably at the audacity of his compliment. But she still
smiled at him. She nodded and hid her eyes. Obviously he had pleased her.

  Over the next few weeks Jefferson was careful when and where and how he touched her. He was courting her embrace, in fact, and had to make his moves cautiously, despite his sometimes overwhelming desire to bury her under his hands. She seemed anxious for more as well, and now and then he had to stop her from moving his hand to where he was not yet ready to be.

  “Kiss me,” she whispered late one afternoon, long after her regular bus had left. She had led him to a quiet corner of the park, surrounded by broad shrubbery. “Please… don’t be shy.” Her breath was full and warm against his face. His fingers itched to enter her lips and meet that breath at its source.

  “Not now. Patience…” he whispered back at her. Her back stiffened under his hand. He wanted badly to press into these hardened muscles—how firm she had become through her labors, so wonderfully fit that he could have written testimonials to the physical efficacy of housework for the modern woman’s figure—but he had to pull his hand away instead.

  “Just… forget it!” She stood up and started away.

  He was afraid he had waited too long. He leaped up and ran behind her, grabbing her around the waist and turning her, and holding on with eyes squeezed shut as his lips suddenly opened and he said, in a voice that sounded so much like Anita, whom he had squeezed into the empty spaces inside himself that long ago night, “You look like you need a hug.”

  He was surprised to find that the tighter he squeezed her, the tighter she squeezed back.

  “Hold me,” she whispered with ragged breath. “Hold me tight.”

  And he did. He held her because she wanted him to hold her—that was always the best way. Like everyone else in the world she needed to be held. The flesh of the human body clung all too tightly to its solitary bones. The mixing of flesh, the joining of individual bodies, was illusory, and always promised far more than was delivered. Make love for hours with even remarkable talent and passion and you still finished the evening spent and alone within your own sweat-slicked, shivering hide, your own thoughts hidden and untouchable from the other beside you in your bed. All you could do was hold, and squeeze, and imagine a bonding of skin to skin which could not happen no matter how desperately you squeezed.

  “Too tight, honey. Too tight,” she said between clenched teeth trying to resemble a smile. But Jefferson could see the fear and confusion in her eyes. He moved his hands to her neck and her face and squeezed some more, and was amazed at the relaxation forced into her muscles, the redness and then the pallor that came to her cheeks, and as he squeezed he imagined her moving into the too-rigid outlines of his body, and he could almost hear the endless conversations they might have inside himself.

  Blue shaded her eyes as in his mind his body opened lengthwise, like a huge vertical mouth, and took her in, and swallowed her up, and used her to assuage its loneliness.

  Carol came into his life with a small child, Jenny, who was as beautiful as Carol herself, perhaps more so. At first Jefferson thought that the existence of this child must necessarily preclude his having any sort of relationship with Carol. For children frightened him. They always had. In part, he knew, this was because of the great delicacy of their bodies. It was hard for Jefferson to accept that such delicate bodies could survive. You couldn’t help loving small children, certainly—their physical vulnerability made it inevitable. But that just made them all the more threatening, actually. They looked up at you with eyes filled with trust, and a mock-intelligence which suggested that they knew how you felt, that they were human beings as well, but their freakish vulnerability made that a lie. Their dwarfed, frail bodies were a joke, a hideous satire of the solitary death we each must face.

  And yet for all his understanding, Jefferson was completely seduced by this little girl.

  “Buy me a doll, please, Uncle Jeff?”

  He wanted to ask her what she wanted it for, perhaps for companionship—she looked so much the doll herself, but he knew better than to say something others might think strange. “Your momma’s going to think I spoil you.” He made himself grin.

  “Oh, spoil me, spoil me!” She laughed and gave him a hug.

  “So you want a hug, huh?” he said into her blonde curls smelling of soap.

  She pushed away and looked at him solemnly. Then nodded slowly, her eyes fixed on his.

  He bent over and wrapped himself around her. But formally, with little pressure. It wasn’t a real hug at all, the way he defined the word, but it appeared to satisfy her. She laid her small, all-too-crushable skull on his shoulder.

  “Hugs are nice,” she said softly.

  “Hugs are all that really mean anything,” he said. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  “Well, I’d certainly agree with that,” Carol said from the doorway. Jefferson looked through the yellow nimbus of Jenny’s hair into Carol’s smiling face.

  “Jealous?” he asked, and made himself grin.

  Carol strolled across the room toward them, the lines of her body flowing down and curving around him as she gathered him to her. “Oh, you bet,” she breathed into his ear, and he wanted to pull away, so tightly she pulled on him, and so firmly her little girl still held on to his waist, a desperation with which he was so intimately familiar.

  But he did not pull back, instead squeezing her in return, although not as tightly as he was ultimately capable of squeezing.

  The day was to be spent at a roadside carnival, a place where they could scream and fear for their lives without fully believing in that fear. It was one of Jefferson’s favorite spots. Carol had been hesitant to go but Jenny was eager, typically with more enthusiasm than understanding. “You’ll think you’re going to die,” he whispered to the little girl. “But then you don’t. It’s quite a surprise, really. I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  She nodded and watched his eyes solemnly.

  The roadside carnival had been set up alongside Wildcat Wrecks, the oldest auto salvage yard in the region. This seemed so appropriate to Jefferson it practically took his breath away. The county commissioners had condemned it several times but at the last minute the owners always came up with some measure to avoid the action. Twisted wrecks and crushed cars were stacked into occasional mountains a dozen feet high, waiting for years sometimes until the price of scrap reached levels the owners thought acceptable, the sides of these precipices buttressed with piles of stone and miscellaneous rusted steel debris.

  Jefferson thought of these automobiles as “people cans,” a private little joke he had never shared with anyone. It was a wonder anyone ever survived their trips down the highway. The rides at the carnival pretended to be people cans as well, but he supposed they were in fact much safer.

  On the roller coaster, in mock fear but in a truthfully passionate embrace, he almost squeezed Carol to death. Jenny obviously had no idea what was happening—she thought her mother had passed out from the thrill.

  Jefferson could not believe he had lost control in public that way—perhaps it was having both females together in combination with the pretended danger, perhaps it was the proximity of the junk yard—he spent the last half of the ride arousing Carol, helping her get her breath back, apologizing sincerely (although he didn’t think she was cognizant of what he was saying), until she was at least able to stagger from the ride with his and Jenny’s well-meaning but ineffectual assistance. Several people tittered, obviously thinking she’d had too much beer before the ride. Jefferson relaxed a little—she did, indeed, appear drunk.

  He found a place out of view of the crowd, behind some tents at the back of the carnival, where he let her down into soft grass and stretched her out. He gave Jenny a dollar and sent her off for a coke for her mom.

  Jefferson slapped Carol’s face several times, vaguely excited that he had a good excuse for it, and marveled at the alternating patterns of pallor and redness made when he struck her soft skin.

  Suddenly her hand reached up and grabbed his wrist.
Her head jerked up and she started choking. “You tried to… you tried…” Her eyes popped open from the force of her choking, and Jefferson could see the sudden shock of knowledge in them. It seemed as if she had recognized him for the very first time.

  “You…” she began again, and he threw himself on her, pressing his right shoulder hard into her mouth so that she could not speak and wrapping his arms, his legs around the thrashing, desperate life of her, admiring the energy and will of her, wishing that he had some of that life and will for himself. With alarm, he became aware that he had a growing erection prodding at her lower belly, and anxious to stop this erection he squeezed her head more tightly, he squeezed her neck, needing to consume her before she could consume any part of him.

  At last she sighed and rattled and he clamped his mouth over hers to capture this final bit of her breath. And then he heard the soft crying behind him.

  He jerked around as Jenny screamed and started through the flimsy wire fence that separated the carnival from the salvage yard. Jefferson rose to go after her but Carol’s hand had clutched his left wrist so tightly he could not escape her. He bent over her again and screaming smashed his right fist into her face and arms until at last she released him. He leaped up and ran through the fence, which scratched and clawed him and which he had to kick and smash against until it too would release him. Now he could see Jenny some distance away, running into the valley made between two mountains of ravaged cars, smashed and burned containers for the soft, sickly, all-too-brittle bodies of people.