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

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

BadBehaviorGaitskill.jpgBad Behavior: Stories – by Mary Gaitskill – a short story collection – Today’s excerpt is from the story ‘Other Factors’.

This story depresses the hell out of me. I mean, if you’ve been following these Gaitskill excerpts then you know that she is not exactly a cheery writer – but this one, in particular, got under my skin. It’s another story where the focus is a damaged female friendship … and the neverending loss that that brings. Like Christine Lavin’s song “the kind of love you never recover from”. Who knows why certain things fall apart. Sometimes it cannot be analyzed. We move on from the loss. We try to forget. We make other friends. But something haunts us at the back of our consciousness. There is something MISSING. And you just have to learn to live with it. That’s what ‘Other Factors’ is about. There is such longing in this story! It’s killer.

Constance, a writer, runs into an old friend in the Village. A couple years back, he declared his love to her – she turned him down – and within a week he was engaged to someone else. It’s an odd anxious memory for Constance – and it’s all tied up with this time in her life when she was dear friends with a difficult yet mesmerizing woman named Alice. That friendship shattered (the details of why escapes me) – and running into Franklin brings it all back. Constance is now living with a woman who is her girlfriend. She never really identified as strictly gay … but she fell in love with Deana, and they live in domestic snuggle-land, with cats and Chinese takeout, etc. Constance, an anxious vulnerable person, feels like she has settled down. And that has seemed like a GOOD thing … until the run-in with the old friend. It stirs up shit. Constance starts to look around her apartment, look at Deana … and wonder what Alice would think and say about all of it. Franklin tells her he’s going to some party later that week and Alice will be there- and she should really come! “I know Alice would love to see you!” The wound is so deep – Constance doesn’t know if she can handle it. The friendship with Alice had been, like many female friendships, intertwined, intimate, messed up, dysfunctional – and all-engrossing. To see her and have a polite, “Hi, how have you been” conversation is unthinkable to Constance.


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

She woke up in the middle of the night, slumberously thinking of Franklin. “I love you,” he said. “I love you in a way I’ve never loved anyone.” “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “He’s just crazed,” said his friends. “Frank’s hyper, that’s all.” What would happen if she went to his party? Would he fall all over her and rave about how glad he was to see her, then disappear for the rest of the night? Would it hurt her feelings? She imagined Alice standing near a table of ravaged snacks, holding a plastic cup of alcohol, a little hat neatly sitting on her blow-dried head. It wasn’t true that Alice had no unhappiness. She had a schizophrenic mother who lived in a state mental hospital (Alice’s family wasn’t wealthy) and who sometimes didn’t know her. Alice felt that she wasn’t accepted as an artist by her circle, and sometimes would get so upset about it that she’d scream and throw things. “I feel like a piece of shit,” she once said to Connie.

Connie turned and put her stomach and breasts against Deana’s warm back. She thought about the first woman she’d had a crush on, a beautiful stripper with black hair and bitter blue eyes. She had gone to see her strip and was irretrievably moved by the resigned but arrogant turn of her strong chin, the way she casually offered and rigidly withheld her body, as well as her tacky black lingerie.

“You don’t love women. You’re just trying to live out some kind of porno fantasy invented by men with the corniest props you can find,” a gay woman had told her.

She turned again and placed her back in a matching curve against Deana’s. When she was a child, her mother had said, “When boys get angry with each other, they just fight it out and it’s all over. But girls are dirty. They pretend to be your friend and go behind your back.” She remembered herself as the new girl in elementary school trying to belong with the bony-legged clusters of little girls snapping their gum and talking about things that she never discovered the significance of. She saw herself sitting alone in a high school cafeteria eating French fries and a Cap’n Crunch bar.

She opened her eyes and could barely see the big-eared outline of the tiny ceramic Siamese cat that her aunt had given her when she was twelve. At the time she had thought that itand its brood of ceramic kittens were the height of taste and elegance, and even though its face had been broken in half and Krazy-glued back together, it still seemed faintly regal and glamorous. It had been one of the items that Alice had in mind when she looked at Connie’s dresser and said, “One of these days you’re going to wake up and look at all this stuff and say, ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with me,’ and throw it out.”

But it does have something to do with me, thought Connie.

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