Ugly Behavior (14 page)

Then there had been two years or so of slow comforts, a joining in
weariness at the end of the day, and the easing out of tears and the
almost-desperate final embraces. These were the times Jim would always recall
with fondness, and think of as love.

And then there came that last year of marathon exhaustion, as if
both of them were in training for the new life to come, using each other like
exercise equipment, a race into oblivion before turning over and falling
asleep.

Mark had no idea of any of this. All he had seen out on the dance
floor were tides of women. It had been ladies’ choice and the ladies had chosen
to move together as one, not so much displaying themselves as keeping
themselves alive, for to stand unmoving when you could still hear the music was
to harden into something ailing and sad.

“I’m on the road a lot,” the tall sandy-haired man said to the
woman he was dancing with.

Jim’s partner was a short, pale woman several years his senior.
She never smiled; dancing with strange men was a serious assignment for her,
self-assigned or based on recommendations from friends or a therapist.

“That must be very interesting, to be able to travel all the time,”
the woman in the red dress replied.

The man laughed a little too hard, on the edge of being offensive.
Jim saw the woman frown. Do you think I’m stupid? was in her face but she
didn’t voice it.

The man might have told her about his time on the road because it
was the only thing he could think of to say or because he wanted to quickly
signal his lack of interest in a long-term relationship. The woman’s assessment
that this information was somehow interesting was probably a lie, but it gave
her an excuse to express a desire to travel which might have also encouraged
further conversation about distant places and times. The man might have truly
found her to be stupid, or boring, but more than likely he had laughed as an
anxiety release. Jim heard more nervous laughter out on the dance floor than in
any other setting he could think of.

Some time during this assessment Jim had changed partners, without
being fully aware that it was happening. The woman across from him now didn’t
look at him, one of the many advantages of a fast song. Fast songs also
afforded the opportunity to release sexual tension, an important mechanism for
avoiding violence when there were a lot of young single men in the club at one
time.

“She did you a favor, leaving you,” Mark had said that first night
at the club, a little too loudly. “At least now you can get yourself good and
properly laid.” Jim had barely controlled the urge to punch him. He had never
punched anyone, and now it seemed appropriate, dealing with a fool. But he
didn’t.

Next to him an older man wearing red suspenders gyrated to music
Jim suspected he had never heard before. Jim was bad with ages—people his
exact same age always looked much older or much younger to him—but he
thought the man must be over sixty. He danced with a woman who might have been
his daughter, but Jim didn’t think so. Unattached women at Jack’s tended be
quite democratic with their dance partners. To be otherwise might send an
unwanted message about their motivations for being there. The guy appeared to
be using the music as an excuse for exercise, holding off death as best he
could. Jim wondered if he had any romantic interest in the younger woman. It
was doubtful, but you could never tell for sure.

For ten years Jim had been coming to Jack’s for “oldies” on Friday
nights. The mix of ages and singles versus marrieds had stayed pretty constant
during that time. But ten years had been long enough for the newer music,
played from eleven to midnight each evening, to become part of the oldies
musical rotation in subsequent years. At this point the regulars usually
started losing interest, most of them eventually dropping out altogether. Jim
often wondered what they did on their Fridays instead. He suspected that a
particular sort of sad self-consciousness had come into the experience for them
as the music aged, preventing them from completely abandoning themselves to the
music.

Jim felt himself immune to sadness. He’d long ago concluded it was
like checking into a bad hotel room. You just went down to see the manager and
requested another. No sense being anxious over a chance encounter—what
was life beyond a series of chance encounters?

This evening few smiled out on the dance floor. Either they had
their minds on other activities or they were so focused on doing the current
activity correctly they forgot how their faces should appear. A smile wasn’t
always best, of course, but it was a convenient default.

Explaining some new intention to exercise or diet or tan or
purchase or hairdo or make-up style, Clara used to say, “After all, your body
is a vessel.” Jim hadn’t always taken the statement seriously: she threw it
away too easily. He supposed she didn’t really understand it herself, despite
the fact that she’d always been obsessed with her “vessel”: keeping it fit and
clean, adorning it to fit the times and her mood, reshaping it as a final,
desperate measure when it no longer resembled what it used to be.

Out on the dance floor these vessels bobbed up and down on a tide
of rhythmic noise, mouths and minds open, receptive to whatever filling might
be available: jobs, partners, a life in the suburbs, a vacation on the beach, a
trip out of town, a grope in the back of a shiny black van. Like dancers at
some voodoo ceremony, waiting for a random god to possess them. No matter what
people said about their lives, none of it was true in any sort of fundamental
way. Even your name, he thought, is arbitrary. A physical body dancing in the
tide is as close to what you are as anything.

A dark-haired woman with a white streak like a curved knife blade
above one ear stood at the edge of the floor watching him. He looked around.
Apparently at some point his dance partner had disappeared, and at the moment
he had no memory of what she had looked like. He wondered how long he’d been
dancing by himself, thinking it should embarrass him, but it did not. He had
seen people—mostly drunk, mostly women but not always—dance by
themselves before.

He stopped dancing, but not so abruptly as to draw additional
attention. He found himself swaying rhythmically as he moved off the floor. He
couldn’t help himself. The woman continued to stare at him. He thought at first
to avoid her—the bold ones almost invariably became drunk and
irritating—but found himself exiting the dance area close to where she
stood. Maybe it was the hair. She looked more curious than anything. Jim didn’t
think he’d ever seen her here before.

“You seem to have lost your partner.” She smiled, letting him know
the comment was friendly.

He smiled back. He seldom went long without a dance partner, but
smiling was something he rarely did. The small events of a life were simply not
that amusing. “And you don’t appear to have a partner.”

The woman began to dance, moving slowly out to the floor, and
after a brief hesitation he joined her. He thought it staged and somewhat
silly, but it was almost closing time, and he had been there for hours, so why
fight it—she seemed like a nice lady.

Still, he would have just finished this little dance and said his
goodnights if she hadn’t stared at him the way she did, eyes wide open like a
curious child’s, taking in every detail of his face and expression. If only to
distract her he remarked, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you in here before.”

“I buried my husband two weeks ago,” she said, as if that were a
logical reply.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry. It’s not something to share in a first
meeting.”

“It’s this place. People find themselves saying strange things.”
But of course she wasn’t one of those people. She was simply being perfectly honest.
Looking at her, he suspected she was barely capable of anything else.

“You must have been coming here for awhile.” Women had said this
to him before, of course, but it bridled him a bit because he could tell she
expected an honest answer.

“Years,” he said. “But it hasn’t improved my dancing any.”

And she laughed a genuine laugh, which made her seem too
vulnerable to be in a place like this, and he began wondering how it would feel
to hurt her.

After Jack’s closed they walked outside together. This was not
something Jim usually did. Usually he ignored all invitations spoken or
implied, said his goodbyes, and returned to his apartment alone. It was a small
place, hardly big enough for his own concerns.

But when Helen asked him outside for a walk (“It’s strange, I’m
not sleepy at all.”) he had said yes. Of course. And had allowed her to take
his arm.

There was really no place to walk outside Jack’s. The building was
off an access road by a major north/south interstate, the hot air rank with oil
and diesel fumes. Every few minutes a tractor trailer would blow its air horn
and rumble past on its way to a nearby depot. Jack’s neighbors were other bars
and run-down hotels, a storage business and a lumber yard. Very little grass
grew above the curbs, but even here an effort at landscaping had been made with
rounded, white-painted stones and the occasional flower bed. Jack wondered what
kind of person put out such effort, when it had no chance of being noticed. But
at least it gave them a place to walk off the pavement. Property fences ended a
few feet from the curbs, so that there was a continuous strip of this poor
vegetation and painful landscaping. By including the occasional tree used to
obscure side entrances or other semi-private features, an optimistic imagination
might envision a parkway in the early morning darkness. He suspected that to be
her particular fantasy—she seemed far too at ease for his own comfort.

“It’s probably unseemly for me to go out so soon, but he was ill
for such a long time, and I was so afraid I’d turn into one of those women.”

“Those women?”

“Women who stay at home the rest of their lives, or until they
can’t stand it anymore and come out of hiding just to make the worst possible
choices.”

“Is that important to you, making good choices?”

She stopped and gripped his hand tighter, looking up at him. When
had they started holding hands? He had no idea. Like school kids. He wanted to
get his hand away from her, but didn’t want to break the curious tone of the
evening. “Probably not as important as it should be,” she said.

They walked more than an hour with hands linked at the edge of the
curb until awkward footing gave him the opportunity to withdraw his hand. He
watched her as she looked up at the lightening sky, at the shadowed trucks passing
on the highway, smiling as if she were out on some great adventure, some sort
of safari, and such naiveté repelled him. Clearly, she hadn’t the slightest
grasp of the true dangers of the world. She was a murder waiting to happen.

“You’re not married, are you?”

He looked at her in surprise. “No, of course not, why would you
think…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just had this sudden
thought, ‘Maybe he’s married.’ I don’t know why.”

Actually, the fact that she thought to ask the question raised her
in his estimation. He briefly considered answering ‘yes,’ curious what her
response might be. “No. My wife left me years ago.”

“Oh! I’m so sorry.”

“No, no. Like I said, it’s been years.”

She said nothing for awhile, concentrating on her feet. A shiny,
fifties-style diner gleamed from the lot ahead, but after that there was
nothing but weeds and ill-kept road for a mile or more. Such stupidity, he
thought. Women were killed in places like this. Bodies were dumped. So much
unnecessary waste in the world. So much lost potential.

“I was married for years,” she said quietly. “Happily, but it was
almost all I ever knew. Each day must be like an adventure for you. You must
feel like you could do anything.”

She was giving him every opportunity to impress her with his lies.
So this was the way it happened. This was the way nice, lonely women got
themselves killed. “Right now,” he said, “I suppose I could do anything. Just
to see how it would feel.”

“Oh, I can tell you have a great deal of potential. I could see
that from the beginning.”

“Just to feel anything, really. People go to such lengths
sometimes. Just to feel something.”

“That’s so true. And all the time it’s right
there in front of you.”

“The opportunity is there. No one would know.”

“Absolutely. No one knows how any of us feels.” She grabbed his
forearm and looked up into his eyes. “But I believe you can tell a lot about a
person, if you just look at them, really look at them.”

He returned her gaze, trying to let something come through that
would beam down from his eyes and brand her. Not a warning exactly. Perhaps
just a glimpse at what the human heart is truly capable of. But she hadn’t a
clue. “I can tell that you’re a very sensitive person,” she said,
misinterpreting everything. “Let me buy you breakfast.”

They sat together in the diner for over an hour eating their slow
breakfast. Everything was too bright: the chrome trim around the walls and
tables, the ghastly intensity of the fluorescents, the early sap of the day
rising out of unpromising concrete to fill the air with brilliance. Her face.
Older than his, he thought, much older than she’d seemed in the dark. But he
was so bad with ages, he reminded himself. It suddenly occurred to him that he
might look old. That’s why she had taken such a risk, gone walking out into the
darkness with a less-than-perfect stranger. Because he’d looked too old to do
her any harm.