Next book on my adult fiction shelves:
Bad Behavior: Stories
– by Mary Gaitskill – a short story collection – I’ll excerpt from the fifth story today: ‘Trying To Be’.
Another one of Gaitskill’s stories that take place in the underworld of sex workers. What always struck me about her tone in these stories is how casual she is about it … almost dead and matter-of-fact … it’s chilling. It doesn’t feel like an effect, as in: Let Me Show You This and SHOCK YOU! It’s not self-conscious. It is a tone that is appropriate to the subject matter. Calm, factual … but perhaps the calmness is there to mask the shrieking misery beneath. But who knows? When people are so damaged … it’s hard to know what is what. Is the facade the real thing? Or is there more? Gaitskill never has an easy answer for those questions – and, to be honest, those questions don’t seem to interest her all that much.
Stephanie is a writer. She lives in New York City. She’s an intellectual (you can tell from the friends she has – her college friends, all academic feminist sex-positive types) – and she’s also a prostitute. She doesn’t work off the street – she works out of a house – it’s called Christine’s. She kind of just fell into it. She doesn’t mind it. She’s able to keep herself distant from her clients, and she’s doing it for the money. But at the start of the story – for some reason – she finds herself giving her number to a guy she just serviced – Bernard the Lawyer. She’s not sure why. She liked him. She’d seen him a couple of times and there was something different about him. He seemed to treat her and the other sex workers as an anthropological oddity … he was interested in it from a psychological standpoint … To some degree, he romanticized them. Stephanie knows there is nothing romantic about being a prostitute – but she lets him have his fantasy. Meanwhile, she has pretty much kept her job a secret from her friends – she’s tried to tell one or two of them – and they are all horrified. Horrified. Even though, for the most part, these women are the types who think women should be able to do what they want to do with their own bodies. Stephanie has now gone beyond the pale though. They think she is degrading herself. They wonder if she is writing anymore, how her book is coming along. Stephanie herself wonders that about herself. She can’t seem to harness her creative energies anymore. Days pass in a blur. She sleeps til 3 pm. She is not writing. There’s some sort of swan-dive into oblivion happening here … and she can’t seem to stop it.
Make no mistake, this story is freakin’ depressing.
But Gaitskill makes it so without telegraphing her intent that this is depressing. She just methodically tells us what Stephanie does, and thinks. And you want to run screaming into the night.
Here’s an excerpt. Stephanie goes out with her old friend Babette. Babette is trying to be an actress, and is really into the whole S&M scene in New York – so Stephanie had thought Babette might be supportive of the fact that she was hooking for money. She thought Babette might even be interested in it, and want to hear all the stories. Instead, Babette bursts into tears and says something like, “How could you?? How could you degrade yourself like that?” Meanwhile, Babette goes to clubs in the middle of the night and gets tied up to a hitching post and gets whipped. Degradation? Who knows what that even IS anymore. Everyone has their limits. The line over which they will not go.
There’s humor in this excerpt, too. Dark humor … but very human. It feels right, it feels like what those clubs are really like.
EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior: Stories – by Mary Gaitskill – ‘Trying To Be’.
Babette entered a period of energy and optimism and began asking her out to nightclubs again. Babette had a lot of friends in the club business, so they could unfailingly sail past the block-long lines of people vainly trying to catch some doorman’s imperious eye. Babette, a tiny angular creature with long, slightly slanted eyes, looked annoyingly perfect in her silk Chinese jacket and black suede boots, her slim hip tilted one way, her little head the other. Stephanie always felt large and unraveled by comparison, as though her hat was wrong or her hem was falling out.
They could spend hours wandering through the dark rooms, holding their drinks and shouting comments at one another. Often they would meet friends of Babette’s who would invite them into the bathroom for cocaine. Sometimes Babette would go off to dance and Stephanie would stand on the periphery of the dance floor, watching the dancers grinning and waving their arms in blind delight or staring severely at the floor as they thrashed their limbs. Lights flashed off and on, and the disc jockey spun one record after another in a pattern of controlled delirium. Stephanie would stroll through the club, watching the non-dancers blankly scrutinizing the dancers or standing in groups that were laughing with mysterious animation. After about fifteen minutes, she would be forced to face the fact that she was bored. Then she would remember what she was like before she came to New York and realize that this was what she had pictured: herself in a glamorous club full of laughing or morosely posing people. In frustration, she would decide that the reason it all seemed so dull was that she was seeing only the outermost layer of a complex society that spoke in ingenious an dimpenetrable signs to outsiders who, even if they were able to physically enter the club, were unable to enter the conversations that so amused everyone else. This was a discouraging idea, but it was better than thinking that the entire place was a nonsensical bore that people actually longed to belong in.
“Hi,” said a man with a hideous hunk of hair. ‘I like your hat.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like to dance?”
“No, thank you.” She looked right at him when she said this, meaning to convey that she didn’t consider him repulsive, but that she was deep in thought and couldn’t dance.
It didn’t work; he stared away with a ruffled air and then said, “Do you want to go to the Palladium?”
“No, thank you.”
He looked at her with theatrical scorn and she noticed that he was actually very handsome. “Are you French?” he asked.
“No. Why do you ask? Do I sound French?”
“I don’t know. You just look like you might be. Are you a dancer?”
“No. Why?”
“I don’t know. You have to be something.” He looked as if he was about to spit.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m an architect. Do you want some coke?”
“No, thank you.”
He looked at her as though she were completely mad and walked away. She quickly moved off the spot of this encounter toward a roomful of people in groups, determined to hear at least part of an interesting conversation. She was stopped by a man who wanted to know if she was Italian. She said no and escaped him. She was continuing toward a courtly group of large, aging transvestites who were the most welcoming and companionable bunch she’d seen all night when a very handsome black man took her elbow and said, “Bonsoir. Are you French?”
“No.”
“Italian?”
“No.”
His face changed a shade. “What are you?”
“I’m from Illinois.”
He dropped her elbow with unmistakable contempt and turned his back to her. That was the last straw. She walked out of the club and into the street, not even bothering to look for Babette.
She walked ten blocks in her high heels, and was almost home when she decided to stop at a neighborhood lesbian bar. It would be comfortable, she thought, to get drunk in the company of jovial women. And it was, until a pleasant conversation she thought she was having turned into a nasty argument, before she ever saw the turn, about whether or not bisexual women are lying cowards. Then she staggered home.
It’s so great how she frames the repetition of the “Are you French?” line–which could, in lesser hands, come across as a sitcom-ish sort of thing. Instead, because of the ambiguous way M.G. leads us into the dialogue (the description of the bar is both existentially stultifying and threatening–“a pattern of controlled delirium,” “limbs thrashing”), the characters’ speech, humorous on the surface, takes on deeper, less stable meaning, partly through repetition (say the same thing enough times–“ARE YOU FRENCH?”–and it risks coming across as downright incomprehensible) and also through the violence of the continuing descriptions (“He looked as if he was about to spit”) as they plays against equally dubious utterances (“I don’t know. You have to be something.”) The net effect is to make you both want to stay and flee the bar at the same time–very much in the way the character does (only to find that there is no exit: getting into an unexpected fight at the dyke bar on the way home! hilairious! horrifying!) Thanks for excerpting this great and, yes, (what else is new?), exhiliratingly depressing passage from the Dark (blond) Lady. Yay!
Great great comment … You know how certain writers want us to be impressed by the bad-ass underworld lives they have lived? And so their prose has a self-consciousness to it? It’s immature writing – I mean, we all do it … we all want attention … but the difference between that kind of writing and Gaitskill’s is … It’s not even in the same class.
There is a total lack of self-consciousness in her descriptions – in a way that whole section reads like “and then THIS happened and then THIS happened …” but she (the writer) is not hoping that we (the reader) are impressed or shocked (I know I keep coming back to that). She is just telling it like it is. Anyone who has been to a club like that knows she NAILS it.
And yes – so funny – ‘are you French?”
It adds a level of existential angst to Stephanie – because nobody in her REAL life can believe she is doing what she is doing (having sex for money) – and even to strangers she appears odd and foreign. How disorienting and, ultimately, depressing.
And yes, I love the image of her getting into a random fight about bisexuality in what she had hoped was a regular relaxing lesbian bar!!!