The Books: “Bad Behavior” – ‘Connection’ – (Mary Gaitskill)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

BadBehaviorGaitskill.jpgBad Behavior: Stories – by Mary Gaitskill – a short story collection – I’ll excerpt from the fifth story today: ‘Connection’. This story is like a deep bruise in the heart of an apple. Like – a bruise that goes all the way through. It’s painful, something I relate to deeply. It’s the kind of loss that you really just need to forget about it in order to navigate the rest of your life. There’s no “getting over” it, or “healing”. Just move ON. Sometimes we lose people along the way of life, and you’ll never stop missing them – so you might as well just keep going, and stop looking back. (Atwood’s Cat’s Eye is similar to this, about that type of loss – ‘Connection’ reminds me a lot of Cat’s Eye)

Susan and Leisha were, once upon a time, dear friends. Perhaps dysfunctional friends – “sob sisters” as Leisha describes it. They were in college – Leisha wanted to be an actress, Susan a writer. The story begins long after the friendship has ended – Susan is visiting New York, and kind of having a walk-down-memory-lane. She sees a bag lady on the street, and is jolted out of complacency – she thinks it might be Leisha. Once we get to know Leisha (through flashbacks) – we realize it wouldn’t be too far out to imagine her homeless. But thinking she sees Leisha starts the memories coming – things she hasn’t thought about in years. An intense friendship … that shattered, without any big fanfare – just a couple of nasty truthful things said. Leisha was always dramatic, and emotional, and (in Susan’s first impression of her) “vulgar” – having emotional scenes with boyfriends in public, crying at parties, etc. Susan was (is) a cool customer. Outwardly demure – but with a whole kinky side – she attracted a wide cornucopia of horrible men, and had adventures she’s pretty much lucky to have survived at all. (Leisha, even with all her mess and complications, was much more conventional – she had BOYFRIENDS – one after the other, but just one guy to one girl – not sado-masochistic anonymous encounters in sex bars at 3 am like Susan was into) But the power of Susan was that nobody would ever guess that she was like that, from her appearance. She deliberately dressed conservatively, as a cover. That was why Leisha’s “out there” truthiness startled and disgusted Susan at first (and later). Leisha was always getting pregnant, having abortions, trying to commit suicide, etc. Her life was a mess. And slowly – over the years – the power started shifting. Leisha was a drain on Susan (the story is from Susan’s point of view). Leisha would call her in the middle of the night, crying … but then when Susan needed her – Leisha wouldn’t return her calls.

I’m making this story sound rather matter-of-fact, and that’s not quite right. It’s HAUNTED. That “female friendship” thing that Margaret Atwood gets so deeply … and what a loss it is, what an irrevocable loss … when such a friendship ends.

Susan is now not so wild as she once was. She’s given up on being a writer. She’s calmed down sexually. She is monogamous.

But there’s been a loss in the transformation. Something was lost in the transfer.

What was it? Leisha?

Was Leisha right about her all along? That she was just a lying phony? That at least Leisha was HONEST about who she was, even with all the mess? Susan, suddenly, overwhelmingly, is haunted by these questions.

But Leisha, the only one who could truly answer these questions, is long gone.

Beautiful story. Really painful. Oh, and lastly: I just love how Gaitskill writes about New York City. She nails it, as far as I’m concerned. It’s hard to write about New York without being a cliche. She sticks to details – and a whole world is erected.


EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior: Stories – by Mary Gaitskill – ‘Connection’.

Her life in New York had been erratic and unconnected. She had lived hand to mouth most of the time, working a series of menial jobs that made her feel isolated and unseen, yet strangely safe. She ate dinners of rice and beans or boxes of Chinese takeout food on the floor. She stayed up until seven or eight in the morning working on her manuscripts, and then slept all day. She went to Harlem to interview voodoo practitioners. She went to nightclubs and after-hours bars, standing on the periphery of scene after scene with Leisha or some other, less central girlfriend. She took long walks late at night, especially in winter, loving the sound of her own muted footfalls, the slush-clogged city n oises, and the sight of the bundled, shuffling drunks staggering home, looking up in surprise to see a young woman walking alone at 4:00 a.m. The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked.

Her relationships with men at that time were disturbing; she had conversation after conversation with Leisha, agonizing over why she always wound up with these terrible people. She remembered them all in an embarrassing blur: the pretty, delicate drug addict, the masochistic Chinese boy, the pretentious Italian journalist, the married professor, the pompous law student, the half-crazy club owner who almost strangled her one night with his belt. The guy she met and screwed in the rest room of some tiny East Village bar, the one who later involved her in an exhausting menage a trois with his Italian girlfriend. Leisha had violently (and primly, Susan thought) disapproved of that one. Strangely enough, after fleeing what she contemptuously labeled “conventional” and “suburban” for anything “unconventional” she could safely lay her hands on, Leisha had performed an indignant and sudden about-face, calling the bohemia she’d adopted “pretentious” and “fake”. When Susan didn’t follow, Leisha had said things like “It’s just horribly painful to even be around you when you’re involved in this adolescent, self-destructive garbage.”

It was too bad Leisha couldn’t see her now, with her steady job, her matching housewares, her kind and gentle boyfriend. It was also annoying to know that Leisha would come to some happy conclusion about her based on the current trappings of her life (“How wonderful it is that Susan has become so stable”) and then compare her favorably with the younger Susan. Susan examined her clearly lined face as she stood before the mirror. There had been changes in her during the last six years, and she thought most of them were good. But she was still, for better or worse, the same woman who had drunkenly screwed a strangeer in the reeking can of a tacky bar and then run out into a cab, smiling as she pressed her phone number into his hand.

She sighed and went into the “living area”, leaning against an exposed brick wall to look out a curtainless window. It seemed as though her friendship with Leisha had never been what she would now call a friendship at all, but a complex system of reassurance and support for self-involved fantasies that they had propped up between them and reflected back and forth. Susan now identified her early fascination with Leisha as a vicarious erotic connection with the ex-lover they had both slept with. She did not fantasize about Leisha and this man together, but she had been oddly gratified to experience secondhand the dynamic between him and this throaty-voiced little bad girl, and to reflect this dynamic back to Leisha, making it more of a drama by becoming another character in the story. Leisha had done the same, clearly enjoying her two-way link with their lover and the mysterious, contrary, perverse woman he had described to her, this tackily glamorous icon of a dirty-magazine woman who was also her reliable friend Susan. During the first year of their friendship they discussed and described him, pro and con, right down to the blond pinkness, the raised, strangely exposed quality of his genitals, and they were both greatly amused to discover that the sight of them talking and giggling together unnerved him.

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2 Responses to The Books: “Bad Behavior” – ‘Connection’ – (Mary Gaitskill)

  1. tracey says:

    Wow. WOW. I don’t know if I could make it through a story about the loss of female friendship — mine is still so fresh to me — but this makes me want to try, you know?

  2. red says:

    I totally hear you. It’s so CLOSE to the bone, these tales – if they’re written right.

    I still haven’t really recovered from reading Cat’s Eye a bazillion years ago – I felt totally NAMED by that story!! The loss of a true friend is sometimes more painful than the loss of a mate.

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