Free Bad Behavior: Stories by Mary Gaitskill Page A

all the kittens and puppies that came into his office, clinging to the shirts of their owners, the birds with broken wings in white-spattered boxes!
    The fifth night he came to see her, she wasn’t sitting in the waiting room with the other girls. “Where’s Jane?” he asked the stretch-pants woman nervously.
    “Jane? You must mean Lisette . She’s busy right now,” she answered in her placid, salad-oily voice. “Would you like to see another lady?”
    A very young girl with burgundy hair smiled brightly at him. She was clutching a red patent-leather purse in purple-nailed hands.
    “I’ll wait for Lisette.”
    The stretch-pants woman widened her naked-lashed eyes in approval. “All right, Fred, just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?”
    She brought him a horribly flat, watered-down Scotch in a plastic cup. He held it, smiling and sweating.
    The burgundy-headed girl curled her legs up on the couch and turned back to her Monopoly game with the contemptuous black-haired girl, who lay across the couch like an eel on a market stand. The stretch-pants woman tried to talk to him.
    “Do you work around here, Fred?”
    “No.”
    “What kind of business are you in?”
    “Nothing. I mean, I’m retired.” The patches of shirt under his arms were glued with sweaty hair-lace. Jane was being mauled by a fat oaf who didn’t care that you could feel her innermost life on her skin.
    The stretch-pants woman asked him to step into the kitchen. This house advertised its discretion and made sure men did not meet each other. He saw only the man’s dismal black-suited shape through the slats of the swinging kitchen door as he stood there holding his drink, the ice cubes melting into a depressing fizz. He heard the black shape’s blurred rumble and Jane’s indifferent voice. She sounded much nicer when she said good-bye to him. The pale-eyed hostess opened the swinging door and gave him a flat smile. “Okay, sir, would you like to step out?”
    Jane stood smiling in her checked dress, her hands behind her back, one white-socked ankle crossing the other, her chin tilted up. He remembered how he had seen her first, how she could’ve been any girl, any bland, half-friendly face behind any counter. He felt a funny-bone twinge as he realized how her body, her voice, her every fussy gesture had become part of a Jane network, a world of smells, sounds and touches that found its most acute focus when she had her legs around his back.
     
    The minute she came into the room, he went to her and put his arms around her hips. “Hello, Jane.”
    “Hi.”
    “It was strange not seeing you out there waiting for me.”
    She looked puzzled.
    “I guess I somehow got used to thinking of you as my own little girl. I didn’t like the idea that you were with some other guy. Silly, huh?”
    “Yes.” She broke away and snapped the sheet out over the bed. “Do you say things like that because you think I like to hear them?”
    “Maybe. Some of the girls do, you know.”
    He could feel the sarcasm of her silence.
    He watched her pull her dress off over her head and drop it on the aluminum chair. “I guess it’s only natural that you’ve begun to get jaded.”
    She snorted. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
    “What would you call it?”
    She didn’t answer. She sat on the bed and bent to take off her heels, leaving her socks on. When she looked at him again she said, “Do you really think it’s a good idea for you to come to see me every night? It’s awfully expensive. I know lawyers make a lot of money, but still. Won’t your wife wonder where it’s going?”
    He sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you see how special you are? No other girl I’ve seen like this would ever have thought to say something like that. All they can think of is how to get more money out of me and here you are worrying about how much I’m spending. I’m not trying to flatter you, you are