The Books: “Bad Behavior” – ‘A Romantic Weekend’ (Mary Gaitskill)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Bad Behavior: Stories – by Mary Gaitskill – a short story collection – I’ll excerpt from the second story today: ‘A Romantic Weekend’. Gaitskill sets up expectations with the title of the story. We think we know what ” a romantic weekend” means. She has other things in mind. The way she writes about sex can be frightening. She writes about women who either do NOT have the “fight or flight” instinct in them – or that instinct is there, only turned on its ear. Where other women would run away, Gaitskill’s characters run toward. It’s tough stuff. But it’s real. It’s the Gaitskill Voice. Beth is the lead in this story – she is going away on a romantic weekend with a man she has fallen in love with. He’s married. I think he and Beth met at a party. Oh, and he is un-named in the story. He’s just “he”. The narration includes both of their thought processes – we’re not just inside Beth’s head. He’s a sadist. And he senses the masochism in Beth. The first time they sleep together, he hurts her. She’s frightened but she takes it. He tells her he won’t give her any more pain than she can handle. There’s something in this comment of his that seems so loving to Beth, so kind, that she falls head over heels for him. Even though on some level he terrifies her. They make a plan to go away for the weekend. The story is a dark pit. You need a strong stomach for some of it. You feel like this guy is a total lunatic. He hates women. But, as always with Gaitskill, she is uninterested in making judgments. She just describes what they do, and what they think – and Gaitskill never blinks! You wait for her to intervene – as a narrator, a writer – but she does not. Hard to explain – but it’s startling stuff. Here’s an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior: Stories – by Mary Gaitskill – ‘A Romantic Weekend’.

They had more drinks on the plane. They were served a hunk of white-frosted raisin pastry in a red paper bag. He wasn’t hungry, but the vulgar cake appealed to him so he stuck it in his baggage.

They had a brief discussion about shoes, from the point of view of expense and aesthetics. They talked about intelligence and art. There were large gaps of silence that were disheartening to both of them. She began talking about old people, and how nice they could be. He had a picture of her kneeling on the floor in black stockings and handcuffs. This picture became blurred, static-ridden, and then obscured by their conversation. He felt a ghastly sense of longing. He called back the picture, which no longer gave him any pleasure. He superimposed it upon a picture of himself standing in a nightclub the week before, holding a drink and talking to a rather combative girl who wanted his number.

“Some old people are beautiful in an unearthly way,” she continued. “I saw this old lady in the drugstore the other day who must’ve been in her nineties. She was so fragile and pretty, she was like a little elf.”

He looked at her and said, “Are you going to start being fun to be around or are you going to be a big drag?”

She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t see how this followed her comment about the old lady. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think you’re very sexual,” he said. “You’re not the way I thought you were when I first met you.”

She was so hurt by this that she had difficulty answering. Finally, she said, “I can be very sexual or unsexual depending on who I’m with an in what situation. It has to be the right kind of thing. I’m sort of a cerebral person. I think I respond to things in a cerebral way, mostly.”

“That’s what I mean.”

She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. The blue puffball thing unfurled itself before her with sickening power. It was the same image of him holding her and gazing into her eyes with bone-dislodging intent, thinly veiling the many shattering events that she anticipated between them. The prospect made her disoriented with pleasure. The only problem was, this image seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. She tried to think back to the time they had spent in her apartment, when he had held her and said, “You’re cute.” What had happened between then and now to so disappoint him?

She hadn’t yet noticed how much he had disappointed her.

He couldn’t tell if he was disappointing her or not. She completely mystified him, especially after her abrupt speech on cerrebralism. It was now impossible to even have a clear picture of what he wanted to do to this unglamorous creature, who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night. Dim, half-formed pictures of his wife, Sharon, Beth and a sixteen-year-old Chinese hooker he’d seen a month before crawled aimlessly over each other. He sat and brooded in a bad-natured and slightly drunken way.

She sat next to him, diminished and fretful, with idiot radio songs about sex in her head.