Several of the short stories in Mary Gaitskill’s second collection, originally published in 1997, deal with desires that may be incapable of fulfilment, and anyway will never be fulfilled. The title story is altogether more horrifying.

Till recently, I’d read hardly anything by Mary Gaitskill. In the early 90s, a Vintage paperback copy of her novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), occupied a prominent place on my bookshelves, but I never managed to get more than a few pages into it. I watched the film Secretary (2002), “based on” her short story of the same name from her first collection, Bad Behavior (1988), and to my surprise found it unsatisfying, in spite of the lead roles being played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. I read somewhere that the original story was very different from the film and thought I must read it but I didn’t find a copy of Bad Behavior till just a couple of months ago, though Penguin added it to Penguin Modern Classics in 2018.

In 2019, I read the 15,000-word novella/long story, “This Is Pleasure” in The New Yorker, and that must have reminded me that I had meant to pay more attention to her writing. I’ve now read all the stories in Bad Behavior but only three of them more than once, so I’m going to concentrate on her second collection, Because They Wanted To (1997). It too has appeared in Penguin Modern Classics in recent years.

The title story is horrifying, and made me doubt whether I wanted to persist with the book. 16-year-old Elise, from Marin County, has run away and crossed the border into Canada. In Vancouver, she subsists primarily by begging on the street. We’re told that “She hadn’t bathed for a while and she smelled bad, but didn’t know it” (p. 16). Desperate for a job, she agrees to babysit for Robin, also an undocumented migrant from California, who has three children, one of them a baby, Penny. Robin, too, needs to find work and she can’t afford to pay Elise until she gets paid herself.

Robin tells her that she expects to be back around 3 in the afternoon, or maybe 6 if she’s offered a job and asked to start immediately. But the hours go past with no sign of Robin’s return. The older children get impatient and ask Elise when their mother will be back. She doesn’t know. The reader doesn’t find out what has happened to Robin, or why she’s late. After 11 pm Elise leaves, having asked the people in the apartment downstairs to keep an eye out for the children.

Elise has two brothers, Rick, who is a year older than she is, and Robbie, who’d younger. Rick is clearly their mother’s favourite:

Their mother would yell when Rick was mean, but she loved him too much to really punish him. She loved his boyish arrogance and his radiance … But she loved Robbie too, and she was frightened by the way Rick treated him. (p. 28)

Rick, it seems, is repelled by his own feelings of tenderness towards his young brother. Sometimes he can’t resist giving in to them but eventually he always reacts against them.

Then Rick hung Robbie upside down in a neighbour’s barn and made him swing back and forth until Robbie’s head hit the wall and his forehead cracked open. When their mother saw, she screamed and put her hand over her mouth; then she turned and hit Rick in the face. She bundled Robbie up and carried him to the house, his forehead bleeding onto her pink blouse, one leg hanging limp off to the side. (p. 29)

After this, Rick and Elise go to live with their father, while Robbie stays with their mother. Before she ran away, Elise would visit her mother every summer. She reflects that “Robbie had turned into a strange, fat kid who read philosophy books that were beyond his age range, but she liked him too” (p. 42). Is Robbie’s strangeness a consequence of his head injury, or might he have been like that anyway? The reader has no way to judge.

In any case, the story is clearly not set in a world where children are safe or protected. Is it credible, therefore, that Robin may simply have abandoned her children to starve or fend for themselves? Unlikely, but not entirely out of the question, would be my guess.

“Because They Wanted To” is the second story in the collection. The first, “Tiny, Smiling Daddy”, is one of the shortest in the book. The tale it relates is familiar — a father reacts badly to his daughter’s coming out as a lesbian — but is told in an oblique and disorienting manner. It’s only in the antepenultimate paragraph (the last four paragraphs are all short), that we discover that the protagonist rejected his daughter before she (as he sees it) betrayed him.

Several of the stories centre on desires that remain unfulfilled (often because the cost of fulfilling them would be dangerously high) and in most cases can never be acknowledged. In “Orchid”, Margot and Patrick run into each other in Seattle, where they are both now living. Sixteen years earlier, they had attended the University of Michigan and had shared a house with two others, Patrick’s older sister Dolores and a nerdish maths student, Donald. Margot, an astute observer of human behaviour, thought that Donald watched Dolores with “perverse, furtive attraction enlivened by a little hot streak of disgust” (p. 54). Dolores had been hospitalized with depression and, at one point in the story, tried to kill herself using her brother’s Valium.

When they shared the house in Ann Arbor, Patrick was beautiful, very appealing to women, and destined to become an actor. Now, he tells Margot that he’s a psychopharmacologist, but he’s bored with that and looking into producing a CD-Rom “about depression, in which psychiatrists would appear on a tiny screen to explain to viewers what depression is and how to get treatment” (p. 63). Margot, who is now a social worker, asks about Dolores, but Patrick isn’t in touch with her any more and describes her as “a total alcoholic” (p. 62).

The story’s title comes from Dolores’s account of her brother’s relationship with their mother. She told Margot:

“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.” (p. 64)

Patrick hasn’t kept his looks. When they run into each other in Seattle, she is puzzled at first when he addresses her by name:

She wondered how this oddball knew who she was, but then he extended his hand to her with the debonair fatuity of a very handsome man, and she recognized him. Patrick had been quite a beautiful boy. (p. 51)

Margot was, and remains, primarily attracted to women, but there was always something drawing her to Patrick. After a row, in which she berated him for his treatment of his many lovers, a bemused Donald had asked “Isn’t she, like, supposed to be a lesbian?” (p. 70).

And Patrick has lost more than just his good looks.

How had her light, heartless, lovely bête noire become this silly man? (p. 74)

He’s still capable of hurting or irritatating her but the hurt quickly fades, the irritation “immediately cooled and went sticky” (p. 74).

“The Blanket” is the collection’s other very short story, shorter than “Tiny, Smiling Daddy”. It features a new relationship between a 36-year-old woman, Valerie, and Michael, who is 24. Neither of them feels able to articulate what they want, so they resort to role-playing:

She would be a slutty teenager who’s secretly hoping for love, and he would be the smug prick who exploits her. He would be the coarse little gym teacher, trying to persuade the svelte English teacher to let him go down on her at a cocktail party. She would be the rude girl with no panties flaunting herself before an anxious student in the library. Feverishly, they’d nose around in each situational nuance before giving in to dumb physicality. (p. 81)

The reliance on disguise and roleplay very nearly brings their developing relationship crashing to an early end when Valerie, in all seriousness, tells Michael that she was raped, and he reacts by smiling.

“That smile was left over on my face because I’d just told you other nice stuff. I wasn’t smiling about being raped.” (p. 87)

But then he takes her on a long drive at night to a deserted spot and she is suddenly terrified, realizing that she doesn’t know him at all well. He says he wouldn’t have done anything she didn’t want.

“You already did something I didn’t want.” She shoved open the car door and stepped out onto the pavement, then spun back on the first step. “What do you think? You spoiled, stupid, ignorant little shit! I tell you I don’t want to fuck, I tell you about being raped, and you set up a rape fantasy? What’s wrong with you!”

“I was just doing what we do all the time.”

“It’s not the same!” (p. 90)

Their “fantasies” may be a way of avoiding speaking about what they really want or think, but that doesn’t mean that the fantasies are separate from reality, or a refuge from it.

Jill, the protagonist of “The Dentist” becomes obsessed with the unprepossessing man who has removed her wisdom tooth. Like several other women in these stories, Jill is in her late 30s. She writes essays for magazines. She is not well off: her aged word processor breaks down and she can’t afford to replace it. The dentist, George, is not the kind of man she would ordinarily expect to be attracted to. He tells her he is “shy” (p. 137), but he seems to be terrified — presumably of relationships and intimacy.

He tells her he wrote a thesis on lesbianism among strippers, and when she is curious as to what kind of show the stripper did, it turns out that he didn’t actually see their act.

He told her that he had only interviewed the strippers and had not watched them perform.

“Why not?” she asked. “I mean, weren’t you curious?”

No, he wasn’t. (p. 135)

Jill’s friends agree that George is behaving as if he were interested in her but, though they go on a number of dates, nothing tangible develops between them. Eventually, Jill tells her therapist that “it was clear that her attraction had devolved into a masochistic compulsion and that the dentist himself appeared to be in the grip of some ghastly, half-conscious sadism” (p. 153). The therapist respons reasonably that the fact that he had physically hurt Jill (while extracting her wisdom tooth) didn’t necessarily make him a sadist.

It’s easy to believe that George isn’t a sadist, though Jill may be right to think that his (oddly not voyeuristic) interest in lesbian strippers is something that needs explaining. She tells a woman she meets at a party, the publisher of “a stylish sex magazine” (p. 157):

“… I’m convinced he’s a secret pervert and that he just doesn’t know it yet.”

Cindy smiled appreciatively. “You think if you could just get him into a sling, he’s be fine?”

“No, I don’t think he’d ever actually get into a sling, whether he wanted to or not. I think he’d just keep getting into slinglike positions in inappropriate situations.” Jill had of course just described herself, but Cindy didn’t know that, so she laughed. (p. 158)

But if George is an unlikely sadist, Jill is on more solid ground when she describes her own compulsion as masochistic. The mismatch between a sadist’s desires and those of a masochist is one of Gaitskill’s recurring themes. A story from her first collection, “A Romantic Weekend”, features the unsatisfactory relationship between a sadistic man and his new lover who, he insists, is not a masochist as she had claimed. She is indeed a masochist, but not the kind of masochist he would like. Quite possibly, the kind of masochist he would like doesn’t exist.

This theme turns up again in the final story in Because They Wanted To, “The Wrong Thing”. The story is divided into four parts with their own subtitles, and its protagonist is Susan, another 39-year-old woman. She published a book of poetry ten years earlier and now teaches poetry at Berkeley. The quote I’ve used as a title for this post is something Susan says to the woman behind the counter in the deli next door.

In the course of the story Susan meets and becomes involved (to a greater or lesser extent) with three people, two men and one woman. The woman is Erin (32):

She said that she sometimes described herself as a “butch bottom” but lately she was questioning how accurate that was. (p. 201)

In contrast with the couple in “The Blanket”, Susan and Erin attempt to avoid roleplay and to have sex “as themselves”. There are times when that almost seems to work.

Other times I felt disgruntled and ashamed of myself. On those occasions I was aware that I was offering her only a superficial tidbit of myself, a tidbit tricked out to look substantial. It was dishonest, but our tacit agreement to be dishonest together at least allowed a tiny moment of exchange that I wasn’t sure was possible otherwise. (p. 212)

After their brief relationship has ended, Susan tells Erin that she is upset by the latter’s submissiveness, because it feels as if Erin believes that she deserves to be hurt and humiliated. Erin assures her that “that stuff is what gets me off. It’s not about self-hate or anything icky. It just gets me off” (p. 243). Erin has placed a personal ad.

“… I’m not looking for sex; I feel too vulnerable for that. I just want somebody to hurt me and humiliate me.” She took an enthusiastic drink. “It’s harder to find than you would think …” (p. 234)

She finds “a dominatrix from Germany” who is into cutting, and who cuts an elaborate snake design into Erin’s buttocks. The cuts are shallow “so it’ll fade in a few months” (p. 236). In the meantime, of course, it is painful.

Susan tells Erin about an experience she had as a teen, when she “had tried having sex for money” (p. 210):

“He didn’t want me to take my panty hose off, he just wanted me to bend over and pull them down to about midthigh, which short of embarrassed me. But I did it, and then I bent over and waited, and he didn’t do anything.” (p. 210)

This situation is almost identical with that in “Secretary” (from Bad Behavior). In the earlier story, after her employer has ejaculated on her buttocks, Debby wants to go to the bathroom to clean herself up and masturbate, but is impeded by the presence of the office paralegal. (She never goes back to the office after that day.)

For this character, as for others in Gaitskill’s stories, humiliation and degradation may be a turn-on, but crucially they are no less humiliating and degrading for that. Much the same is true of pain, which may do permanent damage. This is one of the reasons why the gratification of desires may — often does — come at a cost that is either too high or not capable of being paid, however eager the individual is to pay it.

Most of the characters in this collection are dissatisfied, and without hope of ever being otherwise. This is often reflected in their surroundings, which tend towards the gloomy and uninspiring. The struggling screenwriter in “Kiss and Tell”, who might finally be about to break through after he’s written a vicious revenge fantasy about his ex-girlfriend, lives and works in “the dark glamour of the ‘King Farouk Room’” (p. 162):

It was a gloomy rectangle on the ground floor of a reeking Greenwich Village tenement with smeared linoleum walls. The ceiling sagged as if it were about to cry; plaster from the crumbling walls gathered in little heaps on the uneven floor. His dresser looked like a hiding place for dismembered corpses, his throw rugs emphasized the sad state of the splintering floor, his matress was beset by a mean snarl of blankets. (p. 162)

Patrick from “Orchid” occupies a space that is nowhere near as squalid, though not much more inspiring:

His apartment was an expensive oblong with a vast, sad view of the city. (p. 75)

Is it any wonder he’s not feeling satisfied with his life?

Edition: Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To, Penguin Modern Classics, 2020 originally published 1997; all ellipses added.