Ugly Behavior by Steve Rasnic Tem Read Free Book Online

he
said, delivering his line.
    “Why, thank you.” She cozied back into one of his hair oil-spotted
pillows. “I don’t get too many compliments anymore.”
    Her pleasure saddened him. For the first time he noticed how faded
her simple cotton dress appeared. The spots, the worn places. “Everyone needs a
compliment now and then.” His eyes went back to the monitor. One by one his
images were slipping off the sides of the screen, leaving video noise in their
wake.
    “Well, ain’t that the truth. Even if you
know you’re ugly, and you know the other person is lying through his teeth just
to get into your panties, well, you still like to hear that sweet stuff.”
    He could feel his face flush, tried to will it another color,
perhaps just a hint of Caribbean tan. “I don’t even think I believe in ugly
anymore,” he said. “It’s all just one image set up against another. Some looks
get marketed better, that’s all. Sometimes you can change your marketing, and
sometimes you can’t. That’s the scary part, I think. You feel so damn helpless
about it all. All these damn images of beauty and success and happiness that’ll
fit inside a frame and stay there while you look at it, admire it, covet it.
And if you aren’t careful, it all becomes this minefield that nobody ever gets
out of alive. That image is a killer—it’s got all our need and fear
balled up in one place—it’s a terrible thing and yet even the smartest of
us think that’s all we are.”
    Her head was bobbing, but it was because she was looking around at
the clutter of his living room. He wasn’t sure at what point he must have lost
her; he hadn’t been paying that close attention. But lost her he had.
    Suddenly he felt acutely embarrassed for the way he lived. The
place was like some skid-row trash heap and he was just the fly that landed
there. He looked down at his stained T-shirt and shorts. He hadn’t even been
aware what he’d been wearing when she came to his door. He could’ve taken a
bathroom break and washed and changed his clothes before coming back out but it
seemed too late for that now. She could see how he lived and what he’d become.
    “That’s a real nice sports jacket,” she said, oblivious to his
musings. “Did it cost a lot? I bet it did and I bet you make good money doing
this typing thing.”
    He tried to follow her line of sight, saw the sports jacket
sprawled across an end-table where he’d thrown it after the last disastrous job
interview. He could have done the job, of course—he never applied for any
job he couldn’t do—but the thing was trying to convince an employer that
someone who looked like he did could do the job. And acted like him. He wanted
a job outside these walls, thinking it might save him from this continued
craziness of solitary existence—a solitude that just had to kill him one
day, he was sure—but he’d been like this so long it was difficult for
anyone he met to picture him any other way. When he got back from that last
interview he’d taken this long look at himself in the mirror and realized he
hadn’t a clue how he appeared to other people. He’d gone into that interview
with dirt under his nails and white stuff at the corners of his mouth, and he
hadn’t even seen those things even though he’d made a studied self-examination
before entering their building.
    So they weren’t about to give him a second look. They could not
imagine anyone who looked like him working for them.
    “It is a nice coat,” he said. “I don’t get many chances to wear
it.”
    “Well, you should wear it more often,” she replied. “Hey, maybe
you could take me to the movies sometime. You could put that nice-looking
jacket on and take me to the movies.”
    “I bet Tommy wouldn’t be too happy with that.” K.T. felt as if he
had said something quite bold, but she didn’t appear to react.
    “Hey, you got a TV? Maybe there’s a movie on now. You got your
jacket and I got…” She held up