The Rules of Attraction

by Bret Easton Ellis

  Scott worked at an advertising agency and Ann opened restaurants with her father’s money. They had adopted a Vietnamese child, a boy of thirteen, the year after they married and named him Scott, Jr., and promptly sent him off to Exeter where Scott had gone to school. I would wander dumbly around their loft while they were both at work, drinking Evian water, watching Sean sleep, touching things in Scott, Jr.’s room, realizing how fast the time was going by, that the term was nearly over. Maybe I had reacted too quickly to Sean’s proposal, I would think to myself, while in Ann’s luxurious, sunken tub. But I’d push the thought out of my mind and tell myself I was doing the right thing. I didn’t tell Ann I was pregnant or that I was going to marry Sean for I was sure she would call up my mother and have this confirmed, and I badly wanted my mother to be surprised. I watched television. They had a cat named Cappuccino.

  The four of us went to a restaurant on Columbus the second night we were in New York: Talk centered around John Irving’s new book, restaurant critics, the soundtrack from Amadeus and a new Thai restaurant that opened uptown. I watched Scott and Ann very closely that night.

  “It’s called California Cuisine,” Ann told Sean, leaning next to him.

  “Why don’t we take them to Indochine tomorrow?” Scott suggested. He was wearing an oversized Ralph Lauren sweater and expensive, baggy corduroys. He was wearing a Swatch.

  “That’s a good idea. I like it,” Ann said, placing her menu face down. She knew already what she wanted. She was dressed almost exactly like Scott.

  A waiter came over and took our drink orders.

  “Scotch. Straight,” Sean said.

  I ordered a champagne on the rocks.

  “Oh,” Ann said, deliberating. “I’ll just have a Diet Coke.”

  Scott looked up, concerned. “You’re not drinking tonight?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ann said, relenting. “I’ll be daring and have a rum and Diet Coke.”

  The waiter left. Ann asked us if we had seen the recent Alex Katz exhibit. We said we hadn’t. She asked about Victor.

  Scott asked, “Who’s Victor?”

  Ann told him, “Her boyfriend, right?” She looked at me.

  “Well,” I said, could not bring myself to say “ex.” “I’ve talked to him a couple of times. He’s in Europe.”

  Sean downed his drink as soon as it came and waved to the waiter for another one.

  I kept trying to talk to Ann but felt utterly lost. While she was telling me about the advantages of low-sodium rice cakes and new age music, something flashed in me and pierced. Sean and I in four years. I looked across the table at Sean. He and Scott were talking about Scott’s new compact disc player.

  “You’ve got to listen to it,” he told Sean. “The sound,” he paused, closed his eyes in ecstasy, “… is fantastic.”

  Sean wasn’t looking at me but knew I was looking at him. “Yeah?” he nodded.

  “Yeah,” Scott went on. “Bought the new Phil Collins today.”

  “You should hear how great ‘Sussudio’ sounds on it,” Ann agreed. The two of them had been big Genesis fans at Camden, and had forced me to listen to “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” one night when the three of us were on coke my Freshman term. But what can you do?

  Sean sat there impassive, his face falling slightly. And though it was at that moment I realized I did not love him and never had, and that I was acting on some bizarre impulse, I was still hoping he was thinking the same thing I was: I don’t want to end up like this.

  Later that night I dreamed of our new married world. The world Sean and I would live in. Mid-dream Sean was replaced by Victor, but we were still smart and young and drove BMW’s and the fact that Sean had been replaced didn’t alter the dream’s significance to me. Not only did we vote in this dream but we voted for the same person our parents voted for. We drank Evian water and ate kiwi fruit and chomped on bran muffins; I turned into Ann. Sean who had become Victor was now Scott. It was unpleasant but not unbearable and in some indefinable way I felt safe.

  The next morning over a breakfast of bran muffins and kiwi and Evian water and wheatgrass juice, Ann mentioned something about buying a BMW and I had to hold back a scream. It was clear that this had not been my best term; it was clear that I was losing it.

  At night Sean would lay beside me and I’d be thinking about the baby, something Sean would never mention. He would complain bitterly about how pathetic Ann and Scott were and I would get strange, unexplained urges to call my mother or my sister at R.I.S.D.; to call and explain to them what was going on. But this, like my questioning of my relationship with Sean, vanished.

  The last night we were in the loft he turned to me and said, “I can remember the first time we…” He stopped and I knew he wanted to say fucked, went to bed, did it, fucked on the floor, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it without extreme embarrassment, so he said quietly, “… met.”

  I looked at him sharply, “So do I.”

  He was sweaty and his hair was sticking to his forehead. I was smoking one of his cigarettes, our faces blue because of the television set. The sheet was pulled down, just enough so that I could see the hair below his waist. I was wearing a T-shirt.

  “That night at the party,” he said.

  His face got sad, or did it? Then the expression left. When he touched me, my whisper was deadly and clear and all I said was, “I’m sorry.”

  And he asked me, “Why didn’t you tell me you were in love with this guy?”

  “Who?” I asked. “You mean Victor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I was afraid,” I said, and maybe at one point somewhere I was.

  “Of what?” he asked.

  I sighed and didn’t want to be there and without looking at him spoke. “I was afraid that you’d leave me.”

  “You want him to like me?” he asked, confused. “Is that what you said?”

  I didn’t bother to correct him, or repeat myself, so I said, “Yeah. He likes you.”

  “He doesn’t even know me,” he said.

  “But he knows of you,” I lied.

  “Great,” he mumbled.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking of Victor, thinking how can one know yet still hope? I closed my eyes, tried to sleep.

  “How do you know it’s not … his?” he finally asked, nervous, suspicious.

  “Because it’s not,” I told him.

  This was probably our last real conversation. He turned the TV off. The room went dark. I lay there holding my stomach, then running my fingers up, then down, over my belly.

  “They have the Sex Pistols on C.D.,” he said. The statement hung there, accusing me of something.

  I fell asleep. We left the next morning.

  PAUL Just another night. December and in Commons watching TV before it’s light out on Saturday morning, still slightly drunk and shrooming with Gerald. There had been nothing to do last night. The movie was The Barefoot Doctors of Rural China or something and the party seemed hopelessly lame.

  Victor Johnson was there and even though I found it disgusting that Rupert Guest and him had given Tim’s Secret Santa a vial of semen and a douchebag and were getting a kick out of seeing Gerri Robinson crying in the bathroom after she opened it, I still couldn’t help flirt with Victor and we shared a joint and he kept asking me where Jaime Fields was. I had heard from Raymond that Victor had been institutionalized, which meant I had a better than fifty-fifty chance of getting him into bed. When he offered me a bottled beer, I thanked him and asked, “So what’s going on with you?”

  He said, “Fantastic.”

  I asked him, “Where have you been?”

  “Europe,” he said.

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “Cool,” he said and then with less enthusiasm, “Actually it was just okay.”

  “Do you like being back?” I asked.

  “I like America.” He winked. “But only from a distance.”

  Oh please. Gerald had been watching the
scene from a corner of the room and before he could come over and ruin it, I traded an REM ticket for a bag of mushrooms.

  Now the familiar words—Hanna Barbera—flash on every so often and remind me of a time I used to want to wake up early on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons. The party’s still happening at McCullough, and Gerald’s talking about old boyfriends, GQ models, members of some unnamed crew team, lying shamelessly. I kiss him to shut him up. Then turn my attention back to the TV screen. An especially loud New Order song comes from the open windows at McCullough, “Your Silent Face.” Sean liked this song, so did Mitchell in fact. Gerald says, “Jesus, I really hate this song.” I kiss him once more. It turns out to be the last song of the party. It fades out, nothing replaces it.

  Watching TV nothing makes sense. An Acutrim commercial is followed by a Snickers commercial followed by a Kinks video followed by In The News. My mom likes the new Kinks video. That depresses me even more than Gerald does.

  “You bummed?” he asks.

  I look at him. “He likes him. He likes her. I think she likes someone else, probably me. That’s all. No logic.”

  “Hmmmmm,” Gerald says, checking his pockets. He brings out the napkin he had the mushroom in. There’s nothing left, just mushroom crumbs.

  “No one ever likes the right person,” I say.

  “That’s not true,” he says. “I like you.”

  That’s not exactly what I meant or wanted to hear, but I ask him earnestly, “Do you?”

  There’s a pause. “Sure. Why not?” he says.

  There’s nothing worse than being drunk and disproven.

  LAUREN The next week (or maybe it was a couple of days) seemed like a blur. Motel rooms, driving all night, getting stoned as his friend’s MG raced through the snowy roads. Everything seemed speeded up, time moved faster. There was no conversation, we didn’t speak to each other those days on the road. We had reached a point where there was simply nothing to talk about. We had passed even the most elementary stages of conversation. There were not even polite “How are you’s” in the morning; simple questions like “Can we stop at that gas station?” were discarded. Nothing was said. Neither of us spoke.

  Though there were moments that week, even as we sat silently in that car zooming around, when I actually believed something was on his mind. He would slow the car down if we passed anything that even remotely resembled a chapel, or a church, and stare at it, the motor still running. Then he’d speed off again and wouldn’t stop until he found a suitable motel somewhere. And it was in these motel rooms where we started doing the cocaine he was carrying, and because of the cocaine the days, short already, seemed even shorter, and he’d drive faster, more recklessly, trying to get to some unknown destination. We would stay up all night in motels, the TV on, inhaling the cocaine, and if we needed something to eat later to keep us going, to fill our stomachs so we could do more coke without getting cramps, he’d leave the motel room and come back with cigarettes, cheeseburgers, and candy which he had bought with someone’s American Express card since he carried no cash.

  The cocaine, oddly enough, made neither one of us talkative. We would do a few lines and instead of babbling away insincerely, we’d watch the television set and smoke, never confronting each other, just sitting there, or in the MG, or in coffee shops, almost embarrassed. He got thinner, more gaunt, as the amount of cocaine he was carrying dwindled down. More motels, more gas stations, another diner somewhere.

  I would only eat candy bars and drink Diet Coke. The radio was always on whether there were stations nearby or not. News would come on but there really wasn’t anything to hear. Earthquakes, the weather, politics, mass death. It was all boring. I carried with me a photograph of Victor, and I would take it out and sit in the car, Sean next to me sniffing constantly, his sunglasses kept on, covering glassy eyes, and I’d touch the photograph. It was black and white and Victor was shirtless, smoking a cigarette, half-leering into the lens of the camera, trying to look like an old-young faded movie star, his eyes half-lids, closed in sexy parody. I liked Victor even more because of this photograph and the mystery it contained. But then I didn’t, couldn’t like him because he stayed with Jaime, and that was unforgivable. The only tape in the car was old Pink Floyd and Sean would only listen to “Us and Them” and nothing else, rewinding it over and over, and the draggy rhythm would put me to sleep, which was probably what Sean wanted, yet then he would turn it up whenever the chorus would blast out “Haven’t you heard, it’s a…” and startled I would sit upright, my heart pounding and reach over and turn the volume down once his fingers left the control dial. The song would fade out, then he’d rewind it again. I said nothing.

  Sean would light cigarettes, toss the match out the window, take a drag, put the cigarette out.

  SEAN All of the trees were dead. There were dead skunks and dogs and even an occasional deer by the sides of the roads, their blood staining the snow. There were mountains full of dead trees. Orange signs announced road-work. The radio was only static, the tape player often broken, though when it wasn’t Roxy Music loud and garbled would play. The road seemed endless. Motels. Buying food in malls. Lauren constantly throwing up. She wouldn’t speak to me. I would just concentrate on the road or on people in other cars. When we could pick up a station there would only be Creedence Clearwater songs playing which made me sad but I didn’t know why. In motel rooms her eyes were dumb and accusing; her body wasted and pathetic. She’d reach out—a plaintive touch and I’d tell her to get away from me. At a gas station in some place called Bethel, across the border and into Maine, I almost left her while she went to the bathroom to throw up. I put close to 2,000 miles on the car that week. I thought of Roxanne a lot for some reason. I thought of where I could go, but couldn’t think of anyplace. There was just another motel or gas station. She would sit beside me, listless. She would break glasses in the motel bathrooms. She stopped wearing shoes. I drank a lot. I’d wake up the next morning, if I went to sleep at all, hungover and I’d look at her pitiful body in the bed next to mine and again think about leaving her. Without waking her up, stealing all her stuff, her make-up, which she had stopped wearing anyway, her clothes, everything, and split. She never took her sunglasses off, not even if it was night and snowing hard. The snow was slushy and would fall heavily. It would get dark at four in the afternoon, the snow drifting over the rise and fall of the countryside….

  We came back to that gas station in Bethel—somehow we had made a full circle—and while she went to the restroom and was coming back, trudging through the snow, approaching the car, after throwing up, something clicked. The snow on the windshield started to melt. I reached over and turned on the radio but couldn’t find anything. The Roxy Music tape was ruined. I eventually found another station that was playing faraway sounding Grateful Dead. I lit a cigarette even though the guy was still filling up the car. She opened the door and sat down. I offered her one. She shook her head, no. I paid the guy and drove out of the station. It was early morning and snowing hard. Back on the highway, without looking over at her, I said, “I’ll pay for it,” then cleared my throat.

  LAUREN He drops me off, waiting at the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street…. It had been twelve weeks. I keep thinking it must have been that night with Paul. It had to have been that night with Paul. Forms to fill. They will not accept my American Express, only MasterCharge. Want to know my age, religion. An abortion in New Hampshire: my life reduced. I’m calm but it doesn’t last. Tense when I read the words: Hereby Authorize Terminate Pregnancy. Graffiti on the tables in the waiting room: Feminine chaos, End of the term—things only other girls from the college had written. Was Sara here? They give me Valium. Someone explains the operation to me. Laying on my back wondering vaguely if it’s a boy or a girl. “Okay, Laurie,” the doctor says. An examination of Laurie’s uterus. The table rises. I moan. Lift the hips please. Something antiseptic. I can’t help it and gasp. The nurse looks at me. She seems nice. Humming noise. My stomach sta
rts heaving. Sucking noises. It’s over. I sweat. I go to the recovery room. It doesn’t matter. I pass by other girls, some crying, most of them not. Come out onto the street after Sean picks me up, forty-five minutes, an hour later. Two girls from the high school pass by. I’m thinking, I was once that young.

  In the car driving back to campus, Sean asks, “Truce?”

  And I tell him, “No way.”

  SEAN At the party I couldn’t find the waitress I had picked up earlier at Dunkin’ Donuts and who I had invited to the party, but I went crazy anyway, getting drunk and celebrating the end of term by fucking Judy again in her room—just grabbed her arm and we went—and then I made out with the hippie girl on the way back to Windham. Back at the party for a beer, I started feeling really good and still horny, so I made it with Susan and finally around two went home with that Swedish girl. After that I came back to find the party still going and so I sat around with everybody who was waiting for someone to bring more beer, most of the Freshmen pissed off because they wanted Lite beer. I was really drunk and I knew the beer wasn’t going to arrive for a long time and The Pub had closed hours ago and I should have gone home, gone somewhere, maybe back to Susan’s room, or maybe to visit Lauren, but I didn’t want to. I was already worlds away from that shit. And suddenly looking around the living room of Windham, Roxy Music blasting, a fire roaring, a half-decorated Christmas tree covered with bras and panties tilted to one side in the corner, I hated these people, yet I wanted to stay here with them. Even with the guy who was a shitty guitarist talking to the loudmouth alcoholic; even with the dyke from Welling; even with the waitress from Dunkin’ Donuts who had showed up and was hanging on to Tim’s arm; even Getch, who was loaded, sitting in the corner, crying, fondling a pony-keg. These were people I would never have spoken to out of this room, but here, at the party, I loathed them more than I thought possible. The music was loud and it was snowing lightly outside, dark in the room except for the fireplace and the lights on the Christmas tree in the corner flickering off and on. This was the moment that counted. This was when it all came together. This was where I wanted to be. Even the ex who was going to fuck Tony. Even her. All that mattered was that we were here….