Ugly Behavior (15 page)

Make-up had caked near her eyes and at the left corner of her
mouth. He could see now that she used a little too much lipstick. And something
was wrong with her eye shadow: she looked more bruised than seductive. No doubt
during the walk here she had perspired, and the make-up had run a bit. Or maybe
it had happened during dancing. Some women perspired more, but he hadn’t been
aware of her dancing with anyone other than him. It had been as if she’d been
waiting. Waiting for someone like him. Her murderer.

Not that he had ever murdered anyone. He’d never even punched
anyone. His previous murders had been strictly academic. He was like one of those
fellows who played entire games of chess in his head, and never went near a
board and pieces. She might have been his first.

But the woman didn’t know how to put make-up on anymore. That was
it, wasn’t it? She’d come to Jack’s like this, and he hadn’t known because of
the dim lighting.

She smiled up at him. A small bit of congealed egg clung to one
powder- and grease-smeared cheek. He picked up a napkin and dipped one corner
into his water glass. “Here,” he said. “
Here.
You’ve
got something on you. Let me.” And he reached over, and she sat still as a
daughter while he smoothed the place by her mouth, and blended her eye shadow,
and gently removed the food clinging to her cheek. “Like a picture,” he said.
“Like a pretty picture.”

She held his hand. “You’re a good man,” she said, knowing
absolutely nothing about him, and it hurt him so to hear, and he could feel the
anger coming as if from a great distance.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I have to go the bathroom.” He got up and
walked to the back of the restaurant, and the hall that led to the restrooms,
and he walked past the restrooms and out the back door, away from his first
real victim.

The morning was hot and dusty and he was still dressed in his best
outfit, the black shirt and slacks and the thin silver tie. He walked through
the weed and dirt lot behind the diner and wedged himself through a break in
the fence.

He walked down several blocks of bad pavement, poor houses and
trashy yards. Ahead of him was a church, and a number of people in nice dresses
and suits stood beneath an awning in the graveyard. He came as close to the
funeral as he could. No one noticed him. Until a woman’s voice, slightly to his
left and behind. “I see I’m not the only one who’s late,” she whispered, and
drew closer, stepping beside him so they looked like a couple who had traveled
here together to pay their respects.

“I didn’t know her that well,” she said softly. “But I hear she
was just a wonderful woman.”

He tried to look beyond the perfect make-up job, and could not. “I
didn’t know her at all,” he said.

“I know exactly what you mean,” she replied, completely
misunderstanding him, not knowing anything that would help her through the next
few hours.

“You look like you deserve a hug,” Anita said, again, as she had
said every time Jefferson ran into her. Only this time they were alone, late at
night in the park across the street from the movie theater. There wasn’t the
crowd of people around she had always seemed to require. The crowd whose
individual members looked so fondly at Anita’s heartfelt expressions of her
humanity. “I think you do! I think you do deserve a hug today!”

When there was a crowd Jefferson could avoid her; he could fade
into that large and unmanageable,
unhuggable
crowd.

But here there were no witnesses. The last show at the theatre had
been an hour ago; Jefferson had hung around in the park because he liked the
dark and the relative emptiness of late night. He had not expected to see Anita
here—he supposed she was returning from some late night hugging session.

She looked at him intently and seemed disturbed by what she saw.
But then she had never seen Jefferson late at night, with no one else around.
She started to pass him, confirming finally for him that these offers of hugs
had become merely formal, required greeting for her, and had no conviction
behind them at all.

Tonight Jefferson would have none of that. It was dark and there
was no one else around, and he had not touched, much less held, anyone in
months. His skin felt dead, a brittle carapace for his nerves. His bones ached
as if riddled with holes. He had a need to touch someone else’s life, and if
not their life at least their desperation, which for him was much the same
thing.

He stepped forward into her body and offered himself up to her embrace.
She hesitated at first, stiffened as if there were something wrong with his
skin, as if she had found something repulsive in the feel of him, but then she
whispered “Oh, sweetie…” with a heavy exhalation, as if a hope had at last been
realized, and wrapped her arms around him, her legs and hips seeming to
stretch, as if she would envelope him completely if she could.

Jefferson held fast to her, at first in a familiar desperation,
using her to anchor himself to the remaining tatters of his sense of reality.
Then he increased the firmness of this embrace as he felt more and more in
control of himself and of his situation. This young woman said she believed in
touching, had in fact made hugging a credo, an entire belief system. But he
sincerely doubted she understood touching at all. He believed a true touch
between human beings to be impossible. But it was that impossibility which made
it seem so essential. In fact, his embrace became so strong that the surface
area of his arms and hands seemed to increase dramatically, impossibly, so that
his grip covered every inch of her flesh, every square inch of her life, so
that he could feel her increasingly harsh breathing beneath his touch, her
pores opening in panic beneath his touch, releasing the oils and toxins all
lives give off as they are winding down, as he squeezed and squeezed in an
attempt to touch the life within her, to know that life at the level of his
fingertips.

When at last he felt the spasms beneath his
hands, the last swift jerks of her body, he looked down at her steady gaze, her
lips sheened with a red froth as they dropped back as if to take his mouth in a
final kiss, and he wondered at what he had done.

Jefferson would think of Anita many times after that. She became
more to him than merely a first love, more like his first encounter with the
sweet pulse which drove life itself. She was his first bride, and although even
then he knew there would be many others, surely there could never be another to
surpass the feel or the taste of his sweet Anita.

She became the standard by which he judged other women, by which
he imagined them. And during the months which followed he would imagine many
women in his arms.

Marie was someone he followed for weeks before finally arranging
their “accidental” meeting. She cleaned several of the larger houses in the
neighborhood, arriving at the corner by bus each morning around nine, and
normally departing the same way about two PM. She was short, slight, brunette;
some might have called her “ethereal.” It was easy for him to imagine her
dissolving completely under the persistent press of his arms.

She ate lunch every day at the Blue Ribbon Diner. After several
days of watching her, Jefferson adopted the same habit, choosing a table to the
side, only a few feet away.

She ate a great deal for such a small person. He wondered where
she put it all.

He dreamed of squeezing the food back out of her, years of it
unused and simply waiting for him to empty her with his embrace. All that
untapped energy, all that unused life.

Once or twice she glanced in his direction and smiled. He felt his
arm muscles tense, his chest suddenly swelling with an emptiness.

At last came a day he chose to come late, after the lunch rush was
well under way. As always, there was the empty chair at her table.

“May I?” He smiled widely, and he could feel a strain in his empty
belly.

“Sure… I don’t mind,” she said, as if it mattered. “I see you here
all the time.”

“You always make the food taste better,” he said. He made himself
say it without blushing. Anita had given him just that kind of confidence.

She looked at him with a slightly startled expression, then
laughed out loud, presumably at the audacity of his compliment. But she still
smiled at him. She nodded and hid her eyes. Obviously he had pleased her.

Over the next few weeks Jefferson was careful when and where and
how he touched her. He was courting her embrace, in fact, and had to make his
moves cautiously, despite his sometimes overwhelming desire to bury her under
his hands. She seemed anxious for more as well, and now and then he had to stop
her from moving his hand to where he was not yet ready to be.

“Kiss me,” she whispered late one afternoon, long after her
regular bus had left. She had led him to a quiet corner of the park, surrounded
by broad shrubbery. “Please… don’t be shy.” Her breath was full and warm
against his face. His fingers itched to enter her lips and meet that breath at
its source.

“Not now. Patience…” he whispered back at her. Her back stiffened
under his hand. He wanted badly to press into these hardened muscles—how
firm she had become through her labors, so wonderfully fit that he could have
written testimonials to the physical efficacy of housework for the modern
woman’s figure—but he had to pull his hand away instead.

“Just… forget it!” She stood up and started away.

He was afraid he had waited too long. He leaped up and ran behind
her, grabbing her around the waist and turning her, and holding on with eyes
squeezed shut as his lips suddenly opened and he said, in a voice that sounded
so much like Anita, whom he had squeezed into the empty spaces inside himself
that long ago night, “You look like you need a hug.”

He was surprised to find that the tighter he squeezed her, the
tighter she squeezed back.

“Hold me,” she whispered with ragged breath. “Hold me tight.”

And he did. He held her because she wanted him to hold
her—that was always the best way. Like everyone else in the world she
needed to be held. The flesh of the human body clung all too tightly to its solitary
bones. The mixing of flesh, the joining of individual bodies, was illusory, and
always promised far more than was delivered. Make love for hours with even
remarkable talent and passion and you still finished the evening spent and
alone within your own sweat-slicked, shivering hide, your own thoughts hidden
and untouchable from the other beside you in your bed. All you could do was
hold, and squeeze, and imagine a bonding of skin to skin which could not happen
no matter how desperately you squeezed.

“Too tight, honey. Too tight,” she said between clenched teeth
trying to resemble a smile. But Jefferson could see the fear and confusion in
her eyes. He moved his hands to her neck and her face and squeezed some more,
and was amazed at the relaxation forced into her muscles, the redness and then
the pallor that came to her cheeks, and as he squeezed he imagined her moving
into the too-rigid outlines of his body, and he could almost hear the endless
conversations they might have inside himself.
   

Blue shaded her eyes as in his mind his body opened lengthwise,
like a huge vertical mouth, and took her in, and swallowed her up, and used her
to assuage its loneliness.

Carol came into his life with a small child, Jenny, who was as
beautiful as Carol herself, perhaps more so. At first Jefferson thought that
the existence of this child must necessarily preclude his having any sort of
relationship with Carol. For children frightened him. They always had. In part,
he knew, this was because of the great delicacy of their bodies. It was hard
for Jefferson to accept that such delicate bodies could survive. You couldn’t
help loving small children, certainly—their physical vulnerability made
it inevitable. But that just made them all the more threatening, actually. They
looked up at you with eyes filled with trust, and a mock-intelligence which
suggested that they knew how you felt, that they were human beings as well, but
their freakish vulnerability made that a lie. Their dwarfed, frail bodies were
a joke, a hideous satire of the solitary death we each must face.

And yet for all his understanding, Jefferson was completely
seduced by this little girl.

“Buy me a doll, please, Uncle Jeff?”

He wanted to ask her what she wanted it for, perhaps for
companionship—she looked so much the doll herself, but he knew better
than to say something others might think strange. “Your momma’s going to think
I spoil you.” He made himself grin.

“Oh, spoil me, spoil me!” She laughed and gave him a hug.

“So you want a hug, huh?” he said into her blonde curls smelling
of soap.

She pushed away and looked at him solemnly. Then nodded slowly,
her eyes fixed on his.

He bent over and wrapped himself around her. But formally, with
little pressure. It wasn’t a real hug at all, the way he defined the word, but
it appeared to satisfy her. She laid her small, all-too-crushable skull on his
shoulder.

“Hugs are nice,” she said softly.

“Hugs are all that really mean anything,” he said. “Don’t ever
forget that.”