Don't Cry

by Mary Gaitskill

  I entered the appointed spot, a dive with a slanted, vertiginous floor. It took a moment to figure out who she was, but I believe she saw my nakedness at once. So did the man sitting with her, a middle-aged academic with a red shelflike brow. “Your stories are interesting for their subject matter,” he peevishly remarked to me. “But they aren't formally aggressive enough for me.” He went on to describe his formal needs while Dani listened with droll courtesy, then turned to me with an amused grin. She put her cold finger on my sternum and ran it lightly down to my navel, then turned back with mock solemnity as her companion put down his drained glass and held forth again. He left minutes later, banging a table cockeyed as his curled arm and flipper hand worried the torn sleeve of his jacket.

  “I'm sorry about that,” she said. “I just ran into him. He's lonely and he talks too much when he's drunk.”

  She was twenty-five. I was thirty-three. She was already editor in chief of a venerable avant-garde press, a veritable circus of caged monsters and their stylish keepers. She spoke with a combination of real confidence and its flimsy counterfeit. Monsterless, I barely knew how to speak at all, and what I could say was timid and unctuous. It didn't matter. She wore a heavy silver necklace over her white T-shirt, under which her small breasts gave off dark, glandular warmth. Behind the bar, a mountain of green, blue, and gold bottles glimmered before a murky mirror lake. On the television above the bar, a rock star in an elaborate video drew a door in the air with a piece of chalk, smiled, and stepped through it. Jukebox music rose up, making a forest of sound, through which young girls traveled on their way to the bathroom. Above us, the fog traveled, too, laughing and quick. The bathroom door creaked loud and long; slim thighs went past, along with a swinging little wrist loaded with shining jewelry. We were hungry for this, all of this, and for each of us, “this” took form in the other. We ate each other with our eyes and, completely apart from our inconsequential words, our voices said, How delicious. We impulsively kissed, and separated quickly, laughing like people who had accidentally brushed against each other on the sidewalk. Then with a nervous toss of her head, she glided in close again. Soft heat came off her face, and then there was the dark, sucking heat of her mouth. She said, “I'd take you to dinner, but my girlfriend is expecting me.”

  She drove me to the bus stop in front of a doughnut place and stood waiting with me. She lived with her girlfriend, she said, but they had an understanding. Gum wrappers and plastic bags stirred in the cold, light-echoing wake of night traffic. Behind the glass of the doughnut place, a dark woman with rhythmic arms labored over golden dough. On the street, a hunched man with a sour face strutted back and forth, displaying the masking-tape words on the back of his jacket—cops are tops—i'm a bottom—plus an arrow pointing at his butt. Really, I said, an understanding? Yes, said Dani, though it had been difficult to maintain. How had they arrived at it? I asked. How had they talked about it? They had not talked about it, she said. She thought it was more powerful for not being talked about. Bottom scowled as we kissed again. Golden doughnuts continued to fry. The bus arrived; I crossed its black rubber threshold, sat in the back, and almost immediately went to sleep.

  Asleep on the bus, I dreamed that while watching a magic show I was plucked, blank and tingling, from the audience and led by a white-gloved assistant up onto the stage, where I was suddenly drenched with color and identity: I was the girl to be sawed in half. My heart pounded. I woke on the winding avenue thickly built with hotels, their signs now rapt and glowing in the velvet dark.

  Naturally, it was nonsense about the understanding. That was just a door Dani had drawn in the air with her finger. But when we tried it, it opened, and so in we went.

  We met almost every week for five months. Our time alone was as light and pleasantly shocking as her casual touch to my sternum, but with its meaning now thoroughly unfolded. We attended film screenings, dinner parties, the dull receptions that follow literary panels—and somehow we would always find an unused room, an inviting stair, a hallway that would magically rearrange its molecules to become a sweet little seraglio and modestly revert as soon as we left it, smoothing our clothes and hair. We would have dinner somewhere, and then she would drive me back home to Marin. We drove without talking, the tape deck playing and the landscape making dark curved shapes all about us, shapes that would part to reveal the stars, then the ocean, then clusters of fleeing light. I remember a tape she played a lot, a song that went “Let your love come through / Love come through to you.” It was a lush and longing song, and after it, the silence between songs seemed dense and deep. It was during this silence that Dani asked, “What are you thinking?” And so we began to talk.

  We talked much like we made love—false and sincere, bold and fearful, vulnerable and shielded. I knew that her mother had had several face-lifts, a tummy tuck, and liposuction. I knew that after an especially grueling set of operations, she had declared triumphantly to her daughter, “You have inherited an excellent set of healing genes!” She knew that my father had screamed to my mother, “I'm done with you, you phony! I'm going to find me a black lady with big flat feet and a hole up her butt!” I knew that one Thanksgiving her mother had burst into tears, run into the kitchen, and stuffed the turkey into the garbage, shouting, “And I wish I could do this to every one of you!” When Dani tried to comfort her, she turned away, shouting, “No! No!” Dani told this story not with self-pity but with laughter and love in her voice. When I showed her a picture of my parents taken at an ancient local studio known for its funereal tinting and suffocating airbrush technique, she said, entirely without irony, “They look great! They look so real!”

  “She means we look like hell,” said my father when I told him what my “friend” had said.

  “She meant you don't look like you've had a face-lift,” I replied.

  “I would if I could afford it.”

  I repeated that to Dani, with laughter and love in my voice. We love our parents, our stories said to each other. We are people who can love. At thirty-three, I used my parents to explain me—to make me something more real than the outline of a woman drawn in the polluted air of a bar by the most casual of fingers. The thought makes me sad and a little ashamed, and yet our confidences were not entirely false. Standing on the street fifteen years later, we still felt the silken warmth of our stories breathing between us, a live tissue of affectionate trust that appears to give us shelter each time we meet.

  The light changed, but instead of crossing the street toward my destination, I went the other way with Dani, as if she had led me, even though she hadn't. I asked about her latest girlfriend, a poet as fashionable as Dani's orange hip-hugging jeans. “Yasmin is in L.A. for the month,” she said, and paused while we recognized an actress striding toward us on starved stick legs, a little black poodle with a beautiful red tongue peering haplessly from the tensile cave of her bosom. “She's teaching a poetry workshop,” added Dani. “And how is David?”

  A grainy smell of gas rose off a torpid snake of traffic and snakily wound through the scent of damp bark and leaves. A taxi driver with his arm out the window beat out a song on his section of snake. Already it had formed, our invisible shelter, its walls hung with living pictures.

  “So,” said Dani lightly, “are we going somewhere?”

  And of course we are: down the hall and to the right, past the picture of Dani in her office, talking on the telephone to her father; he is in San Francisco and wants to see Tosca with her. Dani is wearing black-and-white-checked stretch pants and bright red lipstick, and her glossy hair is flush against her wide cheekbones. “Okay, Daddy,” she says, and her voice is softer and more seductive than it ever was with me.

  We walk down the street in San Francisco, holding hands; a creamy-skinned young girl with a rosy smile rides up on a lavender bike and says, “Dani!” She and Dani talk, the girl's long bare leg bracing tense and beautiful against the curb. Dani promises to call soon; the girl rides away in a wake of lavender and ro
sy eagerness. I ask, “Who's that?” and Dani smiles. “Oh,” she replies, drawing it out, “just some girl.”

  In my bedroom, we lounge on a summer afternoon. The air is thick with heat and earthen smells: cat piss, armpit, rug mold, fruit, cunt; in the world around us, fibrous green and fungal life unfurls to offer its inmost odor to the sun. We are naked, and my blue comforter is rolled back like a parted wave; the cat walks in and out with her tail up. I am showing Dani a picture of my father holding me in one arm and bending his head to kiss my infant foot. My mother is a blur of breast in the background, and my breast, just scored by Dani's teeth and tongue, echoes hers. Dani had called and asked me to meet her and Id said no because I had a cold. An hour later, she showed up with a plastic bag of oranges and echinacea tea, and I was surprised and touched to realize she thought I might be lying.

  I should not have been surprised: Dani's confidence lay almost entirely in her social identity a smart, well-secured area, beyond which lay hidden a verdant private world longing for and afraid of form—hidden even from her. When she broke up with her girlfriend (a pretty blonde with pink, allergic eyes whom I was fated to run into at parties for the next dozen years), Dani said this woman, with whom she'd lived for two years, had never known her. “I feel like people accept the first thing I show them,” she said, “and that's all I ever am to them.” A month later, she broke up with me.

  I said, “Do you have time to get a drink?”

  “With your bag?”

  “Why not?” I said. “It's easily checked.”

  “Umm.”

  A freckled girl walked by in a red raincoat, smiling to herself, and there was that same papered-over circus poster on another wall, this time showing a ghostly tiger leaping from a shouting model's open mouth.

  “I dreamed about you last week,” I said.

  “Yes?” Her sidelong glance was piercing in the eye, but watchful in the heart; her dark hair was rough-textured, and layered in a ragged way, which gave a casual carnality to her lips and jaw.

  “I dreamed we were in Las Vegas again, and you were wearing high heels and a dress.”

  “Really!” She laughed, a hot, dry little sound, and—how ridiculous—on yet another wall a circus elephant dourly paraded across an advertisement for a rock concert against cancer, apparently holding another elephant by the tail. “So,” she said, “where do you want to go?”

  Back to that first dive with its passing girls, its flavor of fog and forest of music; or the sweet sad cave next to a vacant lot strung with darkish-colored bulbs; or that odorous cavern glittering with earrings and rhinestone studs and sweat on the tossing hair of some dancer under a dirt-swarming light; that velvety cubbyhole like an emerald jewelry box with a false back, a secret compartment that, when we found it, revealed a place where we belonged together.

  “Café Loup?” I said. “It's quiet.”

  Six months or so after the first time we broke up, we met again at the book fair in Las Vegas. I was there because my new book was coming soon; Dani was there as an editor. During the day, the book fair was a bland caravan parked inside a pallid amphitheater tented with beige, a series of stalls and tables draped with colorless cloth and laden methodically with books. At night, it was a giant Ferris wheel whirring ecstatically and predictably, each club, restaurant, and gaming room its own tossing car, blurred with lights and screaming faces while the sober carnie worked the machine. In this tossing blur, I kept glimpsing Dani; walking down a hallway to an obligatory event, I glanced into a passing room and saw her crossing it with the feral stride particular to her—her hips never swaying, but projecting intently, rather coldly forward. I thought I saw her slender back and butt impatiently squeeze between a pair of outsized hams and heads in order to get to the bar, but more hams and heads crowded in and buried her before I could be sure. I was at a party for an author, who has since become an actress, when I saw Dani politely listening to someone I couldn't see, eyes flashing through the politeness as if in response to the flattered speaker—a fool who would not recognize the instinctive flashing of an eel in deep water. It was a few minutes later that she came up behind me while I was scooping a fingerful of icing off the author's cake. Later that night, in front of a display of white tigers trapped behind the glass wall of a hotel lobby, I leaned against her and whispered, “Let's pretend we don't know each other.” She embraced me from behind and roughly rubbed her head on mine. A brilliantly colored bird flew behind the glass; one tiger snarled at another, which had come too close to it.

  In my room, we ordered a bottle of scotch. An hour or so later, in a torrent of furious drunkenness, we used each other on the floor. I remember pungently but only dimly the terse movement of her lean arm and its maniacal shadow, my splayed leg, the gentle edifice of her chin, her underlip, the soft visual snarl as she turned her face sharply to the side. Amazement briefly lit my drunkenness as she gathered me in her arms and carried me to the bed. “I love you,” I said, and sleep came batlike down upon us.

  The next day, we ordered breakfast from a huge menu in a fake leather book and I apologized for that intimacy—we were not, after all, supposed to know each other. “Oh, that's all right,” she said. “People who don't know you are always saying that.” For the rest of the book fair, we were together every night, holding hands and kissing at strip shows, casinos, and a women's boxing match. Then we went back to San Francisco, and broke up again.

  During that breakup conversation, I reminded her of what she'd said about no one really knowing her. “Don't you see why that is?” I said. “You've gone out of your way to create a perfect, seductive surface, and people want to believe in perfection. If they think they see it, they don't want to look further.”

  “Do you want to?”

  If I said yes, I meant it, in a way But in another way, I didn't. If social identity was her great strength, it was my great weakness. And so of course I loved to see myself reflected in her shiny surface. I loved to appear in public as that reflection—even if the reflection was that of a stupidly smiling woman in a sequined costume, waiting to be sawed in half.

  Café Loup is an elegant establishment with a low ceiling, dim lighting, and a melancholy feeling of aquarium depth that subtly blurs the diners seated at the white-draped tables in the back—the elderly gentleman with his gallant fallen face and his pressed shirt, his companion's lowered white head and dark linen dress, her pale arm quivering slightly as she saws the leg off a small bird. I checked my bag at the door and we chose a table, even though the polished bar was almost empty Dani ordered a martini with no olive; I had red wine. The waiter, a middle-aged man with a heavy face, silently approved of the elegant manner with which Dani placed her order. Silently, with upturned eyes, she accepted his approval. Then she turned to me and said, “So, how long has it been?”

  Months passed; I moved from Marin County to San Francisco. I saw Dani for dinner every now and then, or went with her to the movies. We were only friends, but still her face froze when, over pomegranate cocktails with lime, I told her I couldn't meet her later because I had to meet my boyfriend. Seeing her expression, I became so flustered that I nearly began to stammer. She turned her head and became absorbed in the view—chartreuse shrubbery below, blue and hazy sky above, a watercolor with a purple blur spreading luridly across its middle.

  After that, our invisible shelter became less substantial, more like a pavilion or a series of tents gently billowing and hollowing in the night air. When I saw her at a poetry reading/performance that I attended with my boyfriend, it was almost not there at all. While he wandered through the room with an affable air, I sought out Dani, half-afraid to find her. When I did, she saw my fear, and rushing to press her advantage, she tried and failed to curl her lip contemptuously. Perhaps to steady her quavering mouth, she took my extended hand. “Hello,” she said softly Hello, said the heat of her hand. It was around then that she took up with another writer, a preposterous person who once took offense at something I said or didn't say
, and, to my relief, refused to speak to me ever after.

  And suddenly there were long distances between one tent and the next, and I found myself walking under the stars, alone on dark wet grass.

  Dani sipped her martini and nibbled at a dish of nuts. She talked about Yasmin, with whom she had lived for the last three years— longer than anyone else. Her posture was erect and alert, her small shoulders perfectly squared. But her hair was rough by then, not glossy. She was swollen under the eyes, and there were deep creases on either side of her mouth and between her brows; her lips were bare and dry. Her once-insouciant slenderness had become gaunt and somehow stripped, like a car or motorcycle might be stripped to reveal the crude elegance of its engine.