Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  “What’re you doing here?” Her voice came out high and flirtatious, and she blushed. “I mean, in Seattle?”

  “I moved here three years ago. I moved from San Diego.”

  They stood there smiling, their hands still clasped. The wind blew trash about their feet; Patrick shook his ankle to release a piece of pink cellophane, turned his head to watch it run up the street, then turned back to her and grinned. “You’ll never guess what I’m doing now.”

  “I’m a social worker,” she blurted. “How about that?”

  His smile surged again and she felt a pulse of warmth come through his hand into hers, then fade quickly, as if a cat had leapt onto her lap, changed its mind, and leapt off. “That doesn’t surprise me. I mean, it’s great, but—you know what?—it’s also funny, because I’m a psychopharmacologist.”

  “No!”

  “Isn’t that a kick?”

  Margot and Patrick had met when they were undergraduates at the University of Michigan. He was studying to be an actor and she was studying English lit. Margot was generally more interested in girls than in boys, but she, like everyone, had been arrested by Patrick’s attenuated, almost feminine appearance. He had pale-brown hair, full, blurrily defined lips, and wide hazel eyes with blunt, abundant lashes. His skin was live and sensitive as the surface of a breathing young plant. He had a curious, light-footed poise, which in certain acute moments he would discard with a subtle inward movement, as if startled or disgusted or fascinated by something only he could see.

  He said that almost immediately after graduating he’d landed a supporting role in a popular movie Margot had never seen, and that “people” had gotten “excited” about him. But when he moved to Los Angeles, he found Hollywood too horrible to bear. “The vanity,” he said, “the falsity. It’s so base, I can’t even tell you. You lose every-thing, you turn into this creature. I lost the ability to act. I’d go meet these people and do these readings and I’d just choke.” Like a fastidious girl, he tucked a piece of pale hair behind his ear. “Maybe if I’d hung in, I would’ve adjusted and I’d be a star by now. But at a crucial moment my mother died, and I sort of flipped out. She’d always wanted me to go to medical school. So I became a psychopharm.” He shrugged, almost apologetically. “It’s boring, but it’s good because I’m really helping people. It’s really good to be helping people. You know?” There was an unctuous inflection in his voice that to Margot seemed a poor cousin to his former grace.

  They stood and talked for several moments, each moment a triangular wedge that started small, widened, and reached a set limit. He asked if she was “with someone.” She was not; in fact, a woman named Roberta, whom she had been planning to move in with, had recently dumped her for someone else. Patrick, on the other hand, had just left a relationship with a phlebotomist—a “total masochist” whose life was a vector of disaster and misery—for a chiropractor named Rhoda. Now Rhoda wanted to marry him, and even though he loved her, he knew it would never work out.

  “She’s a wonderful kook,” he said, “but she’s a kook. She goes on goddess retreats and Tibetan bell festivals. But I’m actually more open-minded than she is. Her friends are shocked that she’s involved with a psychopharm.” He laughed, Margot thought nervously. “They solemnly come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got a long path ahead of you.’ I mean, please.” He sighed. “She’s at a harmonic convergence retreat now, trying to get ‘centered’ enough to leave me. But I’m afraid I’m just going to pull her back.” He sighed deeply and then blinked as if suddenly aware that they were in public. “Am I telling you more than you need to know?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s good to see you, Patrick.”

  They exchanged numbers and agreed that maybe they should eat dinner together. Margot walked away in a mild disorientation that lasted some blocks. She looked into the coffee shops she passed every day as if she hadn’t realized what they were before. Listlessly dressed young people sat in them, their expressions hovering between public and private. Their coarsely groomed young faces appeared deliberately inchoate, as if in passive resistance to their own identities. A cosmetic redhead stared back at Margot, her gaze a slim, tingling thread of sensory thought. She self-consciously stroked her dyed hair. The sleeve of her loose pink sweater fell to the elbow of her slim forearm. Margot suddenly remembered the street vendor’s little print blouse and reversed her steps back into the wind.

  In Ann Arbor, Margot had answered an ad for a roommate and, as a result, had moved into a house with Patrick, his sister Dolores, and a perpetually consternated math major named Donald. The house was small, but an inept system of hallways gave it a neurotic, spindly sprawl. Margot’s room was a humble cube with three brown cork-board squares affixed to one wall in a slanting shape of dumb symmetrical ascension. One of the house phones sat on a crippled little table outside her door, and since the math major, Donald, shared the first floor with her, it was he that she most often heard, usually having the same dark, fiercely muttered conversation, apparently with the same loathed person whom he invariably hung up on. Whenever Margot remembered the house, she thought of it as dark and a little too cold; she remembered squatting over the heat vent in her room in the morning with big wool house slippers on her feet, working up to getting dressed.

  But the kitchen was large and bright, and it was there that the household gathered for its disorganized breakfasts and late-night snacks. At first it was Dolores whom Margot most noticed. Dolores was twenty-eight, which Margot thought was fascinatingly old and ruined. She was tall, with narrow hips and shoulders but a lot of fat on her rear. She had a pained, sardonic countenance, and her skin was prematurely lined. She had just been released from a mental hospital, where she had been sent after she had pulled most of the hair from her head. She took lithium and wore a head scarf to hide her scalp. She had an air of ridiculous tragedy that reeked of affectation, but Margot admired it anyway. At breakfast she ate an orange, coffee, and toast soaked with expensive European butter, which she would sprinkle with salt. As she leisurely ate, she would glue false fingernails to her fingers and then paint them with red polish. Her gestures were very elaborate and fine.

  Donald, the math major, watched her with bemusement and, Margot thought, perverse, furtive attraction enlivened by a little hot streak of disgust. Patrick did not watch her, but Margot felt his attention sometimes touch his sister, quickly, like a traveling drop of light, as if he were checking to be sure she was still there. He sat at the table in a torpid slouch, but his hazel eyes were live and expectant. He held his limbs, especially his hands, in peculiar twists that made Margot imagine his inner muscles in secret shapes of furious discord, but his posture was light, lax, and happy. She knew that his mother sometimes sent him bottles of Valium or Xanax, because she had once been present when one of his would-be girlfriends intercepted a care package and dumped the contents in the toilet. But she didn’t think his languor was drug induced. It seemed more the product of an unusual distribution of self, as if, by some crafty manipulation of internal circuitry, he’d concentrated himself in certain key psychic posts and abandoned the vast regions he didn’t want to be in. These empty spaces had an almost electrical allure, more highly charged than his distinct presence in the areas he occupied. Men didn’t like him very much, but whenever the phone rang, it was almost always a girl for Patrick.

  Margot’s apartment was cold when she arrived. She turned on the heat and then went through all the rooms, turning on the lights. She put her pink flannel robe over her clothes and made herself a dinner of sliced carrots, a ham sandwich, and a Styrofoam cup of take-out vegetable soup. She put the sandwich and the carrots on a turquoise plate and the soup in a burgundy bowl. She put out a folded napkin and a spoon and vitamin capsules. She poured herself half a glass of red wine. She sat down, and suppressed pain oscillated through her in a slow, hard wave. When she had told Patrick that Roberta had left her, she had seen a faint look of satisfaction move in his eyes—satisfaction not at her los
s but at seeing the Margot who was familiar to him, stalwart in a state of loss. His look almost made her bitter. But at the same time, she felt that something in her voice had invited it.

  She poured lots of salt on her ham sandwich and allowed her little dinner to comfort her. It was one of the things she and Roberta were good at: small, comforting dinners. Roberta had been gone for six months, and it was still difficult for Margot to sit down to eat by herself. Still, she was determined to do it, and her determination felt good to her. It made her feel like a tenacious animal, burrowing a home in hard, dry soil. And that, of course, had been what Patrick had heard in her voice.

  She remembered very well the moment when she and Patrick had become friends. She had been sitting in her room on a rainy afternoon, and he had knocked on the door to ask if she wanted to go to the Brown Jug to have coffee with him. She remembered thinking that coffee with Patrick might be an event and then being irritated at herself for the thought.

  They had to walk some blocks to get to the Brown Jug. The rain had just stopped, and the air was cold, silken, and insinuating. Patrick hadn’t worn a scarf, and to protect his throat he held his coat close around his neck with one hand in a gesture of artificial privation that seemed a calculated counterpoint to the abundance of his lips and eyes. He drew her into conversation with a gentle solicitousness that was both seductive and condescending. The condescension made her unsettled and gruff, but then a little tendril of seduction would creep out and wrap itself about her wrist, and to her embarrassment, she would find herself talking brightly, her words done up in fancy shapes to impress him. He listened to her with a tense receptivity that made her embarrassment strangely thrilling. The conversation was static and vibrant at once, like a suspension bridge humming with hidden electrical energy.

  The rain had surfeited the grass, and each bright blade was alert and full of tender resolve. She commented on the beauty of it. Patrick said that when he was in the third grade, he would walk to school in the winter and imagine that the grass was crying out to him for help from under the snow. Sometimes he would reach down and dig out a blade or two and put them in his warm pocket with an odd, almost erotic burst of feeling at the random, humanitarian rescue. He would imagine what the rescued grass must feel like, huddling in his pocket, gratified, yet bewildered and fearful in the stifling lint-ridden warmth. Once he actually brought one home and laid it to convalesce in a tiny matchbox stuffed with cotton.

  “You must’ve been very disappointed when it died,” said Margot.

  “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t really think it was alive.”

  His tone was light and delighted; it seemed as if it could turn in an infinite number of directions at once, all of them easy. Margot was quite taken with him; he was not what she had expected.

  When they got to the diner, they ordered coffee and sweet, gelatinous pies. The tone of their conversation changed. Seated and eating, Margot no longer felt the solicitousness or the light changeability she had sensed during the walk. Patrick just looked at her and talked about nothing. Her mind wandered, taking in the shabby, genial diner with pleasure. On the walls there were cheap paintings of landscapes and animals that nevertheless looked as if the artists had cared about them. There were plastic flowers on each table. The sugar containers had big lumps of stale sugar in them. Their waitress was a small woman in her thirties with beautiful, fierce eyes. One of her legs was withered, but her carriage was determined and erect. Patrick said, “It’s just that I feel so invisible. I just feel so invisible.”

  Margot blinked and stared at him. His bright-orange shirt was open to his exquisite collarbones. His long, subtle hands looked hypersensitive against his cheap coffee cup. He was outrageously fine and fair. “What do you mean?” she said. “What on earth do you mean?”

  She didn’t remember his answer, or even if he had one.

  She got up at six in the morning so that she would have time to eat a nourishing breakfast and prepare a sack of wholesome lunch food. She made herself a porridge of four kinds of whole grain mixed together in the blender. She thought of a former client, a fragile widower named Thomas, whom she had persuaded to make at least one daily meal for himself. On his second breakfast he had dropped his bowl of oatmeal, and she had been unable to make him try to cook again. As Margot remembered him, she felt an intense rush of loyalty and protectiveness bordering on love.

  She turned on the radio. People were talking about whether or not the nation’s children were being doped up with Ritalin on account of an attention deficit disorder vogue. “It’s a brave new world!” yelled a caller. “And you people . . . you . . .”

  Margot put a lot of butter, honey, and milk in her cereal. She was the only person she knew who still used whole milk, and she was inexplicably proud of that tiny fact. She sat down and dug in. At least she hadn’t spilled her cereal.

  She arrived at the bus stop just in time. The bus was crowded, and she had to stand with people pressed so closely about her that she barely needed to grasp the handrail. She was held and rocked in the warm, undulant mass as the bus chugged up hill and down, stopping and jerking exhaustingly. Through the damp cloth and wool of their sweaters and coats, Margot felt people striving hard inside the bone and muscle of their bodies. They seemed horribly tense and mostly unhappy, but there was courage in their tension, and even hope.

  “Stupid cunts. Stupid cunts are running the world.” The passenger seated before Margot glared up at her like an insulted snake. “It’s cunts in the command seat,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “It really is. And most of them are guys.”

  He wrinkled his brow and retracted. The Asian woman to Margot’s right tried to withdraw from her in distaste but got squashed against her instead as the bus wheezed uphill. Margot’s stop came, and she burst from the bus feeling energized by the little exchange.

  The morning was a chaos of bad news and mix-ups. A client who’d been socked on the nose by another client in a support group was threatening to sue the clinic. There were six messages on her voice mail from a client who said his son’s foster parent was trying to kill the kid. Two of Margot’s clients had been denied further visits by their HMOs because they had “improved,” meaning that they hadn’t attempted to kill themselves recently. Margot waded in, negotiating the snarl of emotional currents that vied and buzzed against each other like agitated snakes. She sorted them, one at a time, handling each furious, vibrating strand with care, allowing some to careen past her.

  She ran out of steam in the middle of a session with a thirty-seven-year-old woman who, although she knew she was pretty for her age, was having suicidal thoughts because she didn’t look like a supermodel. “I know it’s stupid,” she said. “I’m embarrassed even to mention it. But it’s all I can think about.” In spite of her embarrassment, it was all she could talk about too. “I don’t just want to look like that, I want the whole world to be like that.”

  “Like what?” asked Margot.

  “Static. With no feelings except, like, if it’s your birthday you’re happy, if your mom dies you’re sad.” She paused, as if she’d just remembered something. “I mean, I know the models themselves aren’t like that. They probably have the same stupid, ugly problems I do. It’s more the world as they represent it. Without any fucking awful complexity. Without any of this filthy shit.” She indicated her thigh with a backhanded slap.

  After this session, Margot stopped for a snack of orange sections and cheese cubes in the lounge, where she listened to a social worker named Georgia say awful stuff about a colleague she referred to as “the big fat cow pig.” Then she went to the rest room, where two other social workers were talking about a woman who’d been in earlier, trying to have her daughter committed. “I don’t know about the kid,” said one, “but I’d sure like to put Mrs. Bitch away.” Margot washed her hands and pressed a wet paper towel against her forehead and temples. She looked at herself in the mirror, resolutely hooked her hair behind her ears, and for some
reason thought again of Patrick.

  Emerging from her room for late-night toast, she would pass his girl-friends in the hall on their way to the bathroom, or meet them smoking cigarettes in the kitchen. She remembered a beautiful girl named Helen, who had long brown hair and a funny habit of picking up random objects and immediately putting them down as if suddenly stricken with disappointment in this speckled ashtray or that empty fluted cup. Most of the girls seemed unhappy, but their unhappiness seemed integral to them, and in some curious way strengthened Margot’s impression of their integrity. They would look at Patrick as if calmly measuring the distance between him and them, as if they knew that his little area of private space was closed to them, but that was all right because they had their own little area they were planning to go back to once they got what they came for—although of course it often didn’t work out that way. Margot remembered one girl in particular, a girl she had glimpsed on her way past Patrick’s barely opened door. She had been sitting on Patrick’s worn mattress, waiting while he did something at the other end of the room. Her arms were wrapped across her torso, each hand grabbing the opposite small shoulder, and one small, gray-socked foot covered the other in a pathetic gesture of protection, but her downturned angular little face was proud and beautiful and full of tense, ready feeling. One month later the girl called Patrick and cried so loud and hard that Margot heard the sobbing as she squeezed past Patrick sitting on his haunches in the dark, narrow upstairs hallway with the telephone receiver between his cheek and his graceful shoulder, listening with a look of rapt, sensual sorrow.