Because They Wanted To: Stories (11 page)

She and Dolores had analyzed the incident at length, sitting on Dolores’s big bed in a flood of sunlight, eating from a box of dime-store chocolates. “Patrick has always had these things with women,” said Dolores moodily. “And being a guy, he can’t help but take advantage of them. Like, that girl put herself in a situation where he might tell her to go home, you know? What do you expect if you call up strangers in the middle of the night?”

Margot supposed it was true. “But still, something seems gross
about it. Like, maybe he could’ve told her that he might ask her to leave.”

“Oh, come on, how could he have done that? That would really have been gross.” Dolores took an open package of cigarettes and a silver lighter from her bedside table; she manipulated the small objects with the grand, suppressed languor of a person moving underwater. “In his own way, Patrick is an old-fashioned gentleman,” she said. “He likes things to have a certain decorum, a certain . . . gracious style. He’s a romantic.”

Dolores’s hands were crossed at the wrist, a fresh cigarette inserted between two slightly puffy fingers. Margot wondered if the medication she took made her hands puffy. “But it doesn’t seem gentlemanly to let a stranger come over,” Margot persisted. “I mean, he was allowing a situation that would probably not be very gracious, whether she stayed or left. Don’t you think?”

“But the thing is, she probably really wanted to come over. She probably had extremity in her voice, and any extremity is potentially very romantic.” She brought the cigarette to her lips and Margot noticed that her hand trembled. “People often want something from Patrick, and he has a hard time saying no. It’s our family and this awful boundary crap. Our mom was all over Patrick, physically and every other way. She let him get away with anything because he was beautiful, but then there were all these other ways she had him by the balls. She was obsessed with him. The sick old bitch. She called him ‘my orchid.’” Dolores imitated her mother with fine, slippery malice. “My orchid.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Dolores’s bed was covered with an old quilt made of meticulously color-coordinated shapes sewn together with the pretty humor of a child. A strip of pink cloth decorated with abstract roses was sewn next to a triangle of blue and white stripes next to a lavender oblong with green and yellow polka dots on it. At the head of the bed were Dolores’s pillows, in faded yellow slipcovers. She had lace curtains on her windows. Her room did not look like the room of someone who had recently torn the hair from her head.

“People get fixated on Patrick,” said Dolores. “When he was in high school he actually had a female fan club. It was embarrassing. He
encourages stuff like that because it flatters him, but in another way, he knows it’s not about him at all. I think he’s pretty lonely, actually.”

“Yeah,” said Margot. “I can see that.” Thoughtfully, she ate a caramel; it was slightly, sensuously stale, and she chewed it with contented vigor.

Work the next day was like running a relay race through a rabbit warren while pranksters blew horns, banged cymbals, and set off sirens. The morning began with the arrival of a mother and son who had come in on an emergency basis because the son, a sixteen-year-old who attended a school for the gifted, had pierced his nose and inserted a ring through it. His father had committed suicide when the kid was ten, and his mother was convinced that the nose piercing was an indication of “suicidal ideation.” It took an hour to convince her otherwise, which made Margot an hour late for her appointment with a family that had just been successfully “reunited.” The daughter in this family
was
having suicidal ideation, and Margot scarcely blamed her. Her father beat her up and her mother, a hot-wired piece of bone and muscle with a face-lift, complained constantly that the kid wasn’t happy.

“I mean, I know he shouldn’t hit her, but just look at her!” She gesticulated at her drooping child, a pale fifteen-year-old with dyed black hair and black lipstick. “I don’t mind the black thing and the tattoos; we did stuff like that too. But we were happy! We did things! The people we knew were cream of the crop, the best and the brightest! She just lumps around with losers and doesn’t care about anything.”

“I think Lalena cares about her poetry,” said Margot.

“Yeah—it’s all about suicide!”

“But I see a lot of intensity in her poems,” said Margot. “Even if they are about suicide, they feel intensely alive and fierce. They aren’t fierce the way you are. But she’s a different person.”

The mother started and blinked. The girl glanced at Margot. Margot met her eye and held her. With an abrupt emotional cramp, she remembered Patrick sitting in the diner, holding her with his eyes.

All her morning sessions ran late, and Margot had only ten minutes for lunch. She ate her dried apricots and pecans out of a Baggie in the ladies’ lounge, where she paced before the smeared mirror, furtively
abusing her clients. “You wonder why she’s writing suicide poems?” she muttered. “Take a look in the mirror, you deranged cow.”

She looked at herself and remembered something Roberta had said. “You’re a stereotype of a social worker!” she’d yelled. “You go in there like you’re healing the world, and you’re just as screwed up as they are! You’re really trying to heal yourself, and it’s not working, Margot!”

Near the end of the semester, she’d met an astonishing girl, a freshman named Chiquita. She was a giggly little thing, who painted her fingernails with a different color on each short, chewed nail and who, at the end of orgasm, would reach greedily between her legs with both hands, sighing and twisting her head as Margot’s tongue played over her fingers. Margot would return home with light, bright eyes, and sometimes Patrick would see her and his eyes would light in response. She would talk about her date, and he would listen with an avid regard that felt almost like love. His voice lost the teasing, seductive quality that had so flummoxed her, and he would look at her as if she were an especially honorable enemy soldier meeting with him in an established neutral zone, a place where, unencumbered by the need for strategy, he could see her as a person and have a moment of expansive feeling that was indirectly erotic.

“When you talk about her, you get this look on your face that’s just exquisite,” he said. “It’s so brittle and tentative. It’s like you think you might be almost happy, but you’re afraid to trust it.”

“Patrick,” she said, “the girl’s got nipples you could hang shit on; of course I’m scared.”

They were walking to the Brown Jug. The spring day was an exclamation point of radiant abundance. Vulgar little flowers burst from the ground like bright hiccups. Crabgrass was everywhere. Patrick wore a tan beret at a sideways angle that made his beauty a silly exaggeration.

“What about you?” she said. “Don’t you ever feel that way about girls?”

“Oh, all the time. I’m always afraid to trust love and happiness. And that feeling of not quite trusting but at the same time trying to trust is the best.”

The words had sounded ludicrous in his affected voice, and Margot slapped him on the butt. But now, as she stood in the ladies’ lounge at work, it occurred to her that the first part of it, at least, had been true.

In mere months, Chiquita had dumped her for a particularly tedious law student. Stupid with grief, she had gone upstairs to Patrick’s room. He sat up and opened his arms without a word. She stayed outside his blankets, safe in her ugly flannel gown, but he held her close and stroked her hair. His tenderness was like a secret thing he had always craved to show her. It was open, raw, almost female, but there was a boy’s spirit in it, sparkling, resilient, almost cutting in its resolve. She imagined Patrick the baby, falling down with a little “oof” and getting up again. She looked up at him; his eyes were clear and deep, as if he were looking at her all the way from the bottom and, even more, inviting her to look in.

The bus home was crowded, but she was able to sit, quietly enjoying the animal comfort of proximity to strangers that she didn’t have to talk to. As the bus roared forward, its machinery gave off a freakish, surging whine that, for a piercing moment, Margot heard as a smothered soprano chorus singing desperately through a distorted medium from very far away.

On the evening of her dinner with Patrick, she found that she was looking forward to seeing him; she was disappointed when he canceled. He was worn out, he said, from overwork and romantic problems. He’d broken up with Rhoda and begun seeing Tricia, the masochistic phlebotomist, again. It was all so exhausting he didn’t even want to talk about it. “So,” he concluded, “how was your week?”

“Well,” said Margot, “I don’t have girlfriend problems, but one of my clients just tried to castrate himself. Do you think that counts?”

“No!”

“I guess technically he was just indulging in a little erotic cutting. But he damn near took the whole head off. The emergency room report says that after they stitched him up, he woke and immediately started whackin’ the ham.”

“So debased. Just so sad and debased.”

“He’s just one of the people you’re, um, helping. The guy’s got Haldol coming out his ears.”

“Margot, are you pissed at me for canceling on you? First you talk about castration, and then—”

“Patrick, not everything is about you. Anyway, you know what I did when I heard the whacking-off part? I punched the air and said, ‘Yes!’ Because for that guy, it was like a triumphant cry. It was beating off in the face of adversity, goddammit.”

Patrick giggled.

“No, really,” said Margot. “You know how sometimes you see something that looks really gross or stupid? Like a big fat guy walking down the street wearing a shirt that says ‘I Like It Doggy Style’? Or a forty-five-year-old woman in a bouffant wig and purple eye shadow and it actually looks pretty good? It’s that person’s way of saying, ‘Here I am.’ Or you go into a really bad immigrant neighborhood at Christmas—these people just got here, everything’s against them, they don’t totally know what’s going on. But you’ll always see a few houses covered in lights and crèches and reindeer—they’re giving it everything they have. It’s a triumphant cry. And beating off after he damn near lost it—in that guy’s cosmology, it was a triumphant cry.”

The long silence flickered with invisible movement. “Margot,” said Patrick, “I love you.” The movement shimmered in his voice.

The next morning Margot woke at six o’clock, riven by the half memory of Patrick on a damp gray day, holding his rough old coat about his bare neck, his full lips parted, dry granules of skin at one corner of his mouth. She couldn’t remember his eyes.

She rolled to one side of her bed and tried to comfort herself by putting her palm and face against the warm place where she had been lying. Her memory surged voluptuously: he’d held her against his chest and she’d cried about Chiquita. She rested in and was upheld by his strength and his glandular boy’s resolve. She put her palm against his chest. He covered it with his hand. “I’ve thought about us,” he said.

She opened her eyes. The artificial quality of his voice was pleasing in the way a song on a grocery store sound system can be pleasing. But it was not what she wanted.

“Basically, I could take it or leave it,” he said.

She sat up and stared at him. She got off the bed. “Then you can leave it,” she’d said.

Now she rolled onto her back and pulled the blankets up to her chin. She remembered Roberta getting up to go to work one morning, pulling away from Margot’s embrace as she rolled naked from the bed. She’d yawned as she walked across the floor, swinging her slim hips. “Then you can leave it,” Margot said aloud.

After that night, Margot had tried to act normal with Patrick, but it didn’t work. He was stilted and polite. When she asked him out for coffee, he couldn’t come. Breakfast conversations that should’ve been casual took sharp turns; innocuous comments seemed to have complicated, unseen meanings. Dolores and Donald looked on with sidelong glances. It seemed to her that Patrick had made her feel rejected for absolutely no reason when she couldn’t afford to feel that way. This idea made her indignant, and her indignation mounted with each odd conversational moment, finally rearing up to its full height one morning while Patrick was telling the house-hold about his disastrous encounter with two sisters, both of whom had briefly been lovers of his. There had been screaming, tears, awful accusations.

“The absurd thing is, I like both of them a lot,” said Patrick. “But I didn’t really want to have sex with either one. All this could’ve been avoided if—”

“Patrick,” said Margot, “if you didn’t want to have sex with them, then why did you?”

He tipped his chair back and looked at her with insouciant tension. “Because they wanted to, mostly.”

“That is not an answer.”

Patrick shrugged and eased his chair back onto its four legs.

As Margot left the room, she’d heard Donald say, “Isn’t she, like, supposed to be a lesbian?”

They made plans for another dinner date, but Patrick canceled it because he had to fly to Los Angeles to tie up business related to his CD-ROM. The whole project was driving him crazy, he said. The
psychiatrists were hell to work with; they were all deluded egomaniacs. And things were not going well with Tricia, who was being stalked by a biker with whom she’d had a one-night stand. His first urge of course was to protect her, but he was also disgusted with her for allowing such a situation to come about. “I mean, for so long, she was really living straight, you know? And I respected her for it. And now—”

“Patrick,” said Margot abruptly, “how’s Dolores? Did you get her number for me?”

“Oh, damn,” he said. “I forgot about that. I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to think about her, it’s so sad. But I’ll get it.”

When Margot got off the phone she felt that she didn’t want to talk to Patrick again, let alone see him. “What an asshole,” she said to her darkened hallway. Hours later, preparing for bed, she spat diluted toothpaste into the sink, looked at herself in the mirror, and said it again. Her hair was held back in a ratty terry-cloth band, and her features were stark, inturned, and convictionless.