The Books: “Because They Wanted to” – ‘Comfort’ (Mary Gaitskill)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction

BecauseTheyWantedTo.jpgBecause They Wanted to: Stories – – by Mary Gaitskill. This excerpt is from the story ‘Comfort’.

A typically bitchy ironic title from Gaitskill – because the characters in the story are comfortless. There is no “comfort” to be found. They all want it – and it seems to Daniel (the main character) that some people (like his brother and his wife) might even have found it … in the little things … but he sure as hell doesn’t have it. Comfort. What a word. Daniel gets a call that his mother is in the hospital. He flies home to be with her. He has a brother, a father. There are family issues. Ambivalence. Lots of things unsaid. But the main slamdunk of this story is the character of Jacquie – Daniel’s girlfriend. What a character. I kind of despise her, although I know she (like all of us) has her reasons. She’s analytical. She’s abstract. Nothing GETS IN THERE with her. There’s something beautiful and sweet about her, too – but in moments of crisis – she tries to say the “smart” thing, THE thing – as opposed to knowing that sometimes, it’s best to just say SOMETHING – even if it’s not the most original thing in the world. When something bad happens to someone you love – it is not necessary to come up with a treatise about the universe and its flaws and things happening for a reason – it is not necessary to be the savior who says the exact right thing that will get the person you love out of their funk. But it IS necessary that you at least say, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry – how are you doing?” Jacquie cannot do that. She’s not malevolent or cruel. It’s just that simple statements like that never occur to her. She doesn’t “get” families. I forget her story – but she doesn’t “get” that Daniel has a family – and that it’s inappropriate for her to casually refer to his father as a “prick”. She doesn’t understand. Isn’t his father just a person like any other person? What did she say wrong?? Anyway, all of this comes to a head because of Daniel’s family emergency.

I’m just going to excerpt from the beginning of the story – where all of this is set up. I’m doing a lot of explaining and describing … better to just read Gaitskill.


EXCERPT FROM Because They Wanted to: Stories – – by Mary Gaitskill – ‘Comfort’.

Daniel sat in his San Francisco apartment on a big, mushy pillow with his black rubber drum pad on his lap. He stretched his legs and pushed the coffee table on which he and Jacquie had just eaten dinner into the middle of the room at a cockeyed angle. Jacquie sat on the bed, coiled in a blanket, holding an Edith Wharton novel in her small, stubby hands. As she read, her gold-brown eyes moved intently back and forth, giving off a spark of private frisson. Half hidden under her lowered lids, the movement of her eyes reminded him of an animal glimpsed as it slips quietly through the underbrush. With loose wristed strokes, Daniel cheerfully swatted his pad. The phone rang.

“Probably somebody we don’t want to talk to,” said Jacquie.

Daniel rolled his eyes. It was his brother, Albert, calling from Iowa.

“Dan,” said Albert. “Something bad happened.”

“What?”

“Mom had a car crash. She’s alive, but she’s really hurt. She’s broken her neck and smashed her pelvis.” He paused, breathing heavily. “And she also broke some ribs.”

Daniel made an involuntary noise. Jacquie’s quick glance was almost sharp. The drumsticks fell to the floor and rolled.

The evening became a terrible melding of misery and sensual tenderness. Jacquie held her head against her breast and stroked him as pain moved through him in slow, even waves. At moments, the pain seemed to blur with the contours of Jacquie’s body, to align itself with her warmth and care, as if by soothing it, she actually made it greater. He stared at their dirty dinner plates, shocked by their brute ordinariness: tiny bones, hunks of torn-up lemon, mashed fish skin.

Late at night, they lay without sleeping on their narrow bed. Jacquie held him from behind, one strong arm firmly around his chest, her dry feet pressed against his. She spoke against his back, her voice muffled, her breath a warm puff against his skin. “Your family gets in a lot of car crashes, don’t they?”

He opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “So do a lot of people. There’s car crashes all over America all the time.”

“Well, there was the one with the whole family in it when you were a little kid, and then the one when your father drove into the fence, and then the one where your mother got hit in the parking lot, and now this. That seems like a lot for one family.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I just noticed it.”

“My mother’s lying in the hospital with half her bones broken, and you just noticed that.”

Jacquie took her arm from him and turned the other way.

There is something wrong with her, he thought. They had been together for two years; this was not the first time he had had this thought.

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