Because They Wanted To: Stories

by Mary Gaitskill

  “Hey,” he said, “what did you mean when you said you kept trying to fit in and you couldn’t? When you were in Thorold?”

  “Oh, you know.” She seemed impatient. “Acting the part of the pretty, sexy girl.”

  “When in fact you were not a pretty, sexy girl?”

  She started to smile, then caught his expression and gestured dismissively. “It was complicated.”

  It was seductive, the way she drew him in and then shut him out. She picked up her magazine again. Her slight arm movement released a tiny cloud of sweat and deodorant, which evaporated as soon as he inhaled it. He breathed in deeply, hoping to smell her again. Sunlight pressed in with viral intensity and exaggerated the lovely contours of her face, the fine lines, the stray cosmetic flecks, the marvelous profusion of her pores. He thought of the stories he’d read in sex magazines about strangers on airplanes having sex in the bathroom or masturbating each other under blankets.

  The stewardess made a sweep with a gaping white garbage bag and cleared their trays of bottles and cups.

  She put down the magazine. “You’ve probably had the same experience yourself,” she said. Her face was curiously determined, as if it were very important that she make herself understood. “I mean doing stuff for other people’s expectations or just to feel you have a social identity because you’re so convinced who you are isn’t right.”

  “You mean low self-esteem?”

  “Well, yeah, but more than that.” He sensed her inner tension and felt an empathic twitch.

  “It’s just that you get so many projections onto yourself of who and what you’re supposed to be that if you don’t have a strong support system it’s hard to process it.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had that experience. I don’t know how you can’t have it when you’re young. There’s so much crap in the world.” He felt embarrassed, but he kept talking, wanting to tell her something about himself, to return her candor. “I’ve done lots of things I wish I hadn’t done, I’ve made mistakes. But you can’t let it rule your life.”

  She smiled again, with her mouth only. “Once, a few years ago, my father asked me what I believed to be the worst mistakes in my life. This is how he thinks, this is his favorite kind of question. Anyway, it was really hard to say, because I don’t know from this vantage point what would’ve happened if I’d done otherwise in most situations. Finally, I came up with two things: my relationship with this guy named Jerry and the time I turned down an offer to work with this really awful band that became famous. He was totally bewildered. He was expecting me to say “dropping out of college.’”

  “You didn’t make a mistake dropping out of college.” The vehemence in his voice almost made him blush; then nameless urgency swelled forth and quelled embarrassment. “That wasn’t a mistake,” he repeated.

  “Well, yeah, I know.”

  “Excuse me.” The silent business shark to their left rose in majestic self-containment and moved awkwardly past their knees, looking at John with pointed irony as he did so. Fuck you, thought John.

  “And about that relationship,” he went on. “That wasn’t your loss. It was his.” He had meant these words to sound light and playfully gallant, but they had the awful intensity of a maudlin personal confession. He reached out to gently pat her hand, to reassure her that he wasn’t a nut, but instead he grabbed it and held it. “If you want to talk about mistakes—shit, I raped somebody. Somebody I liked.”

  Their gaze met in a conflagration of reaction. She was so close he could smell her sweating, but at the speed of light she was falling away, deep into herself where he couldn’t follow. She was struggling to free her hand.

  “No,” he said, “it wasn’t a real rape. It was what you were talking about—it was complicated.”

  She wrenched her hand free and held it protectively close to her chest. “Don’t touch me again.” She turned tautly forward. He imagined her heart beating in alarm. His body felt so stiff he could barely feel his own heart. Furiously, he wondered if the people around them had heard any of this. Staring ahead of him, he hissed, “Do you think I was dying to hear about your alcoholism? You were the one who started this crazy conversation.”

  He felt her consider this. “It’s not the same thing,” she hissed back.

  “But it wasn’t really a rape.” He struggled to say what it was. He recalled Patty that night at the Winners Circle, her neck arched and exposed, her feelings extended and flailing the air where she expected his feelings to be.

  “You don’t understand,” he finished lamely.

  She was silent. He thought he dimly felt her body relax, emitting some possibility of forgiveness. But he couldn’t tell. He closed his eyes. He thought of Patty’s splayed body, her half-conscious kiss. He thought of his wife, her compact scrappy body, her tough-looking flat nose and chipped nail polish, her smile, her smell, her embrace, which was both soft and fierce. He imagined the hotel room he would sleep in tonight, its stifling grid of rectangles, oblongs, and windows that wouldn’t open. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  The pilot roused him with a command to fasten his seat belt. He sat up and blinked. Nothing had changed. The woman at his side was sitting slightly hunched, with her hands resolutely clasped.

  “God, I’ll be glad when we’re on the ground,” he said.

  She sniffed in reply.

  They descended, ears popping. They landed with a flurry of baggage-grabbing. He stood, bumped his head, and tried to get into the aisle to escape, but it was too crowded. He sat back down. Not being able to leave made him feel that he had to say something else. “Look, don’t be upset. What I said came out wrong.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”

  Neither do I, he thought. But he felt disoriented and depressed amid these shifting, lunging, grabbing people from all over the country, who had been in his life for hours and were now about to disappear, taking their personal items and habits with them.

  “Excuse me.” She butted her way past him and into the aisle. He watched a round, vulnerable piece of her head move between the obstructions of shoulders and arms. She glanced backward, possibly to see if he was going to try to follow her. The sideways movement of her hazel iris prickled him. They burst from the plane and scattered, people picking up speed as they bore down on their destination. He caught up with her as they entered the terminal. “I’m sorry,” he said to the back of her head. She moved farther away, into memory and beyond.

  The Dentist

  In Jill’s neighborhood there was a giant billboard advertisement for a perfume called Obsession. It was mounted over the chain grocery store at which she shopped, and so she glanced at it several times a week. It was a close-up black-and-white photograph of an exquisite girl with the fingers of one hand pressed against her open lips. Her eyes were fixated, wounded, deprived. At the same time, her eyes were flat. Her body was slender, almost starved, giving her delicate beauty the strange, arrested sensuality of unsatisfied want. But her fleshy lips and enormous eyes were sumptuously, even grossly abundant. The photograph loomed over the toiling shoppers like a totem of sexualized pathology, a vision of feeling and unfeeling chafing together. It was a picture made for people who can’t bear to feel and yet still need to feel. It was a picture by people sophisticated enough to fetishize their disability publicly. It was a very good advertisement for a product called Obsession.

  At least this is what Jill thought about it, but Jill was an essayist who wrote primarily for magazines, and she was prone to extravagant mental tangents that were based on very little. She had to be, in order to keep thinking of things to write about. Besides, she was perhaps hypersensitive to the idea of obsession, as she had just become obsessed with someone. He was a mild, pale, middle-aged man who did not return her ardor, and what should’ve been a pinprick disappointment had swollen into a great live wound that throbbed at night and deprived her of sleep, of thought, even of normal physical sensation.

  “Drop it
,” said her friend Pamela. “Don’t even, as they say, think about it. He sounds really fucked up, and not in an interesting way. There wouldn’t be any satisfaction for you. It would be like jerking off forever and not coming.”

  It was. She would lie curled on her bed, making sounds of animal pain, dry even of tears, as thoughts of the loved one so feverishly inflated her desire that she could not fit it into a fantasy which she could then make end in at least rote physical satisfaction.

  The odd thing was that the object of her inflated feelings was her dentist.

  The terrible situation had begun when she had gone to have a wisdom tooth removed. Jill was thirty-seven, and her one remaining wisdom tooth had had ample opportunity to grow where it didn’t belong, for example, around her jawbone. Neither she nor the dentist had realized this at the onset of the operation, and he had, in a professionally somnolent voice, assured her that the ordeal would probably be over in fifteen minutes. An hour later, the as yet mercifully unsexualized dentist was still gripping her jaw with enough force (as it turned out) to bruise her, perspiring and even grunting slightly as he tore her tooth out bit by tiny bit.

  “It became almost comic,” she said later. “He kept heaving back, sort of panting with exertion, and he’d say, in that voice of inhuman dentist calm, ‘Just a little more; we’re going to move it around in there just a little bit more, and then I think we’ve got it.’ It got to the point where I could smell him sweating, and a certain indecorous tone crept up under that professional voice, a sort of hysteria straining at the borders. Finally, when he started to give me the speech one last time, I snapped, ‘I just want the fucking thing out.’ And he snarled back, ‘Okay,’ totally ripping the lid off the calm facade, which is probably pretty hard-core for a dentist.”

  “And that’s when you got excited?” asked Pamela.

  “No. No, I felt united with him in disbelief and disgust at the whole thing, but I was certainly not excited. That didn’t happen until later.”

  A few days after the tooth came out, there were complications. She developed an infection and had to return to the dentist’s office twice. She had an allergic reaction to the pain medication he prescribed for her, and to make up for the unpleasantness, he gave her free medication out of his closet. The gift pills didn’t make her itch, but they made her pulse lunge and her mind twist, so that she was too disoriented to write a commissioned piece for a fashion magazine on the torment of having small lips. With a great effort, she decided not to become discouraged and instead sat down to type a long handwritten draft of a two-part series on whether or not people’s memories of being abused as children are real. She had typed the first line when her word processor collapsed.

  Her word processor was so old and primitive that no local repair company would service it, and it would take weeks for the whimsical midwestern manufacturer to do it, what with shipping and all. No computer she could rent, borrow, or buy could read the old monster’s disks. Besides, she couldn’t afford to buy another machine, and since she had recently moved to San Francisco from Boston, she did not know any writers from whom she could borrow one, and she was not confident about her ability to use a new one anyway. Right about then her jaw started to throb through the pain medication. “I’m tearing my hair out,” she said to Pamela, and it was close to the truth. She couldn’t pay that month’s rent, she was lonely, she had bad dreams, she was worried about losing her looks, and her jaw hurt like hell.

  There is nothing like physical pain for enlarging and enhancing free-floating emotional pain. As she walked to the dentist’s office, Jill began to feel desperate. She was maddened by the noise and motion of the street, she was irritated by the sweet spring air. A burst of purple flowers on a dirty white wall shocked her with their brightness and lulled her with their low whisper of the deep earth, making her feel pulled in two directions and unable to go in either.

  “Well, you’ve got a dry socket,” said the dentist, drawing back from her with a mournful, empathic air. “It’s something that can happen sometimes, and it’s nothing to worry about, although it can be quite painful. We’ll just increase the pain medication and pack the area nice and tight. Then it’s up to you to keep off that sensitive area.” He paused. “I’m sorry you’ve had to walk around with it hurting so much. With that exposed bone, I frankly don’t know how you stood it.”

  “I can’t stand it,” she said. She hesitated, fearing that she was perhaps tastelessly spewing into the dentist’s vast spaces of professional calm. Then she decided that with all that vastness, he could afford it, and she spewed hard. “It’s not just the tooth. It’s everything. I can’t sleep. I can’t talk to anybody. I’m going broke and I can’t write my articles because I’m in a drug haze. I can’t even type an article, because my stupid word processor broke and I can’t afford another one. And now you’re telling me it’s going to keep being like this for days more. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I can loan you my laptop,” he said. “No problem.”

  She paused to adjust to the sudden shift in terrain. “I don’t know how to use a computer.”

  “It’s easy,” he said. “I’ll teach you.”

  She looked into his gray eyes. They were opaque with dutiful kindliness. He wants to be my friend, she thought. Probably he’s not thinking sex; he’s not the type. I’ll just have to be friendly with him, which is a pain, but if I can type that article, the activity will make me less hysterical.

  “I could bring it by tomorrow evening,” he offered. “It’s no trouble at all.” His voice was like a stream of lukewarm water running over her wrist.

  “All right,” she said slowly.

  “And he did it,” she said to Pamela. This was much later, after the grueling drama had erupted. “He did exactly what he said. I felt sort of guarded when he first came in, but I saw right away it wasn’t necessary. He set the thing up, showed me how to work it, and left. He was like a UPS man or an electrician. I think even the cat was impressed with his discretion.”

  “Was he friendly?”

  “More like beneficent. Actually it was this combination of beneficence and self-conscious goofiness. He carried the computer to my desk with this proud little outthrust of his chest in front and this silly little outthrust of his butt in back. Like he was performing a skit he’d done a thousand times before and was still just bemused enough to do again.”

  Pamela uttered a cautious, noncommittal sound. She lived in New York and, as Jill’s oldest friend, had stood by her through many grueling dramas. But Jill hadn’t gotten involved in anything too ridiculous for a few years, and Pamela seemed to find this recidivism depressing.

  “When he left he said I could call him at any time of the day or night. If he was at work, his beeper would go off and he’d call me back.”

  “Well, his behavior is strange,” said Pamela. “Because he certainly gave you every reason to believe he was interested.”

  The dentist’s rigorous and polite reliability impressed Jill, who had not often seen such behavior in men. She had left home at sixteen to live with a commercial artist almost fifteen years older than she was, and although the affair only lasted three years, she left it in a state of unfortunate attunement to the kind of refined, convoluted fellow who likes to make a very fancy mess. She had put herself through school with five years of work in various strip bars and go-go joints, and, at the age of twenty-six, had entered into journalism with the publication of an essay about down-and-out jazz musicians in a trendy men’s magazine. Because of the unusual career segue, she had few professional acquaintances and almost no experience with the sort of mundane camaraderie that makes up the common social staple; thus her baseline emotional life had consisted mainly of going from one loud mess to the next. To her, the dentist’s simple and undemanding generosity looked like a shining piece of integrity, which aroused first her surprise and then her admiration. Admiration didn’t develop into love right away, though, and the first time she
called him, she did so reluctantly. It was, after all, one in the morning, but the computer had disobeyed her at a decisive moment, and he had said anytime.

  He greeted her as if he had been waiting alertly for her call. As he solved her problem, their conversation dipped and bumped along easily. He complained mildly about difficulty he was having with a lab he used. He told her about an old movie he had seen on TV that evening, called Hot Rods to Hell, in which a father (played by Dana Andrews) is terrorized and humiliated by sexy youths but eventually triumphs over the youths. The dentist compared it favorably to newer humiliation/triumph-based movies he’d seen recently. His disembodied voice was gentle and authoritative, and had an under-tone that sounded thwarted, feisty, and playful at once. She pictured him in an apartment made up of utilitarian oblongs, gray shadows, gleaming limbs of furniture, and an entertainment center, all alone with his thwarted feistiness.

  “George?” she asked. “Are you happy?”

  “Pretty much,” he answered. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  She hung up feeling enveloped and upheld by his “Why wouldn’t I be?” His tone seemed to acknowledge all that might threaten happiness—“It’s something that can happen sometimes and it’s nothing to worry about”—and then to shoulder it aside as if the important thing was to get through life somehow, to extract teeth, to follow the schedule, to do what you said you would do. This was a new point of view for Jill, and it affected her profoundly. She finished her article quickly and went to bed feeling an unfamiliar species of warmth and comfort. She woke imagining the dentist holding her from behind, and she prolonged the image, allowing it to become a thought.