Two Girls Fat and Thin (18 page)

The scene becomes static, frozen in flat subreality, a torn grainy photograph of my own stunned face. He is on top of me for several moments, breathing. He swings himself into a sitting position on the edge of my bed and sits there, both hands flat on the mattress. He seems to have forgotten about the glop he’s left on my body. My held breath is an obstruction in my throat. My feet feel cold and far away. I watch him from my side-turned head. He clears his throat and sits in a hunched, unassuming position, as though puzzled by something. He turns, bends forward and kisses the back of my head. “Good night,” he says. “Sleep tight.” Then he leaves the room, closing the door carefully behind him.

I became conscious again as I sat in study hall the next day before a pile of books. My French book, a faded green thing with a broken
spine, lay open before me, ignored. I was listening to the group of small, slender girls in bright dresses and paisley tights. Sally Rose was talking about how she let Chris Hannewald “finger” her, and Emma Contrell was saying she’d go all the way with Todd Welsh any time. I felt stupefied to think that I’d done the things they coyly talked about. Yet it was nothing like what they were talking about. An invisible square of definition formed around the circle of girls; another square formed around me. I imagined myself sealed in an enclosure of darkness that could be seen into but not out of, only in my imagination I was a tall, beautiful woman with waist-length raven hair. I was a space traveler sent on a dangerous mission and captured on a hostile planet. I was condemned to eternity in the impenetrable enclosure that would drift through space until I floated out of my solar system and into a black dimension. Space travelers would tell stories about the legend of the beautiful lady trapped in the impenetrable column. Those who had actually seen me could barely refrain from weeping at the sight of my beautiful face, frozen and transfigured by pain.

“No really,” said little Emma. “I’d suck his thing, prob’ly.”

I read
1984,
by George Orwell
. I read it voluptuously, loving the pitiless description of a panicked fat man weeping as he vainly tried to escape machine-gun fire, of a terrified woman trying to protect a doomed child with her body, of the toothless old whore that Winston had mistaken for a pretty child-harlot. It wasn’t the brutality I loved, it was the bravado in Orwell’s monotonous treatment of horror, and the pathetic human efforts to stand against it, or even to believe in the existence of something else. The outburst of humanity between Winston and Julia was a feeble blow against the malign forces of Big Brother, beautiful only in the moment it dared to come into being before crumpling and dying like a leaf. The unbeautiful monotony of Orwell’s prose was like Winston’s affair with Julia: a slight, spare poem pitching itself against the horror it evoked, and dying in the attempt.

I read planted on the couch in the living room, oblivious to the televised news, or crouched at the dining room table after dinner, eating a teacupful of sherbet, or in my bed under the blankets, a bag of corn curls at my side.

“Do you understand what it is you’re reading?” asked my father. “Can you give me a plot summary?”

“It’s about a totalitarian government—a communist government—that’s taken over the world, and that controls everyone’s minds. And there’s two people—who represent individual freedom—who are fighting it.”

“That’s pretty good. You have better comprehension than a lot of adults.” He looked out the window, frowning, pressing the tips of his fingers together. “It’s a very important book,
1984
. It’s a warning about what could happen if we don’t keep the destructive bastards out.”

As soon as I finished it, I began reading it again, from the beginning.

A song began playing
on my transistor radio called “Love Is All Around,” by the Troggs. “It’s written on the wind,” sang the Troggs, “It’s everywhere we go. So if you really love me, come on and let it show.” A slur of violins and guitars undulated around the words. It spoke to me of hopeless passion fluttering on a wind that would bear it to its death. I bought the 45 with its pale blue label and played it over and over again on my little plastic record player. “Why do you play that record so much, honey?” asked my mother. We stood by the kitchen sink, me peeling carrots while my mother scrubbed potatoes. “Don’t you get tired of it?”

“It reminds me of Winston and Julia,” I said. “In
1984
.”

“But why? Love wasn’t all around them.”

I couldn’t explain it.

I could hear my father in the dining room, shifting in his chair.

I sat behind an invisible shield
while a classmate, possibly classmates, threw spitballs at me during intervals of lapsed teacher attention. Dozens of tiny white balls lay about my chair, like the seedlings for a field of white poppies. I thought of Hate Week. “You gave your promise to me and I gave mine to you,” sang the Troggs. Of course, Winston had broken his promise to Julia, and she had broken hers to him. But I believed that under the destroyed integrity, the broken bones and humiliated character, the ghost of love flitted amid the ruins, moving from broken pillar to broken pillar, hiding behind a
pile of rubble. On some deep, unfathomable level, where the pressure would burst human lungs and flatten three-dimensional bodies, where life took the form of eyeless, headless creatures with wobbling tentacles and undulating hammerlike tails, their love survived, faithful, luminous and totally useless.

My ear stung. Someone had shot a rubber band at me.

My mother wanted me to make
lists of the things that made me happy and the things that made me unhappy. On the happy list I put “reading in bed,” “talking to Donna,” “lime sherbet,” “watching horror movies,” and “George Orwell.” On the unhappy list I put “walking to school from the car,” “gym class,” “study hall,” “dinnertime,” “going to bed,” “getting up in the morning.” My mother took the list and tacked it up on the inside of a cabinet door, along with newspaper recipes, a grocery list, and a reminder to call Dr. Adams.

You are an argument
for abortion,” said my father. “If I had known you were going to happen, I never would’ve had a child.”

I sat on the couch with my face in a knot. My mother sat in the red armchair, her mouth determined and straight, her eyes as distant as though she had, by intense concentration, sent her mind to bathe in an ocean of neural bliss which was reflected, crystal ball-like, in the tranquil, unseeing gray of her eyes. “Don’t sit there looking at me with that face. You attacked me, and when you attack me, I react. And when I react, I go right for the jugular.”

He appeared in my bedroom again and again. The air filled with angry shapes that rolled around the room, tipping the furniture, tilting the floor, suffocating me as he held me against his chest. My nose filled with sweat and baby powder, his hands possessed my breasts. Our bodies became white, ectoplasmic forms that stretched and contracted; my arms and legs flew from my pinned body to the corners of the ceiling, then back into their sockets, then back to the ceiling. My head was a white round thing with black holes for eyes and a mouth that stretched until my whole face was a scream. The image snapped back into my head, which was still a hard little skull and a face with open, staring eyes and a closed, silent mouth irredeemably connected to an inert fleshy body with
hands that gripped the sheets of my bed in the dark room, quiet and still except for the squeaking of the bed and my father’s breathing.

I sat in study hall
. The room was full of voices moving through the air like colored balloons. Urine trickled down the legs of my chair and made a puddle on the floor. No one seemed to notice. I delicately lifted one red and black shoe, shook it, and removed it from the puddle. It was a strange sensation to be doing such a private thing in public, even if I hadn’t done it on purpose. I tried to tighten my collapsing bladder, but warm pee continued to trickle between my legs, into my pantyhose, and down my chair as the giggly words from the next table floated by.

My mother began taking me to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Eldridge Mars. I liked him. He was a tall, thin man with dandruff and madly optimistic eyes burning behind a pair of dust-covered glasses that sat, with affable kookiness, in the middle of his nose. When I went to visit him, my mother waited for me in the lobby along with other mothers and two plastic toys with grinning faces on wheels. The front wheels turned at radical angles from the yellow and chartreuse bodies, as though grinning horse and grinning dog had violently swerved to avoid a collision. Dr. Mars took me down a hall to a candy machine and bought me a chocolate bar. Then we went to his office and he asked me questions. Did I have any friends? Did I like school? What did I want to be when I grew up? Then he produced a dog-eared manila folder of pictures and asked me to imagine what was happening in each picture as he showed it to me. He showed me a cheap reproduction of an early Flemish family portrait: the exhausted mother and father in the dull gray background, the young daughter in a high-necked dress in the foreground. “The daughter has just been raped,” I explained. “And she’s wondering how to tell her parents.”

I began
reading
The Bulwark
during the winter of my seventeenth year. It was not exactly true that it became “the most important influence in my life” from the tenth page on as I would later tell Justine Shade, but I was deeply moved by the description of Asia Maconda and Frank Golanka, the proud outcasts moving through
a crowd of resentful mediocrities, surrounded by the cold glow of their genius and grace. I was profoundly satisfied by the terse, brutal prose, blunt as a bludgeon. Granite drew ugliness and beauty with the same unveiling hand; there was no attempt at bravado, yet the elegant gesture with which she plucked off the obscuring extranea was exquisite. When I read the words of Anna Granite, I visualized a man with a splendid chest standing stripped to the waist in a moonlit snow-covered field. He stood erect, arms loose at his sides, fists lightly balled, waiting in the dark for something he alone understood.

“When I look at this stone, Miss Maconda, I see not only an object made up of mineral and material parts, but properties of color, curves and density that exist in their own point in space. This rock exists, Miss Maconda, because it exists. Not because I want it to exist, or because I imagine it exists, or because anyone else imagines it exists but because it does. And just as this rock and its properties exist, so do it and its properties exist on an abstract level. They are projected into being, Miss Maconda, by this mundane physical shape. It is those abstract properties that I represent in my work. As accurately and truthfully as I can.”

Asia listened, her perfect head tilted coolly to one side, her long jade eyes half-closed in their usual mocking expression. Her fragile form stood at such an angle that she appeared to be supported by air. Only her dilated pupils betrayed the surge of emotion she felt at his words. She looked at the canvas before her—at the arrogant strength of the line, the elegant hauteur of the spare details, the distinct bold use of color. There was not one element in it that shrunk from the fullest statement of what it was. It was a gauntlet flung in the face of everything cheap, trivial and false. The thought of it in a gallery full of conceptual, cubist and surreal trash made her want to die.

It was the same brave evocation of beauty that I had loved in Orwell—except that this was strong, contemptuous beauty, a beauty indifferent to anything but itself and its own growth. In
Orwell’s world, beauty was unreachable, and the attempt to grasp it was fatal; the frail shadow you could hold in your hand was quite possibly not worth the attempt, however admirable that attempt might be. In Granite’s world, it thrived, proud and undeniable. It could be had by the strong and at least admired by the weak. As I read, the actions and words of Granite’s characters settled like a mantle over the people around me. Jana Morgan, Emma Contrell and the D’Arcy twins became spritelike partial elements of Asia Maconda: Jana the languid beauty Asia, sitting with her waist twisted so that her breasts were accented, not because she cared about making people desire her, but because she knew that Beauty is part of what makes life livable. Emma, the abandoned, passionate Asia, so deeply sensitive to the viciousness and dishonesty in the world that she would disfigure her own integrity and insult her body with subhuman lovers rather than let her natural purity exist side by side with corruption. The D’Arcy twins, one jumping into the air in a jackknife to slam a volleyball with two fists while the other bounded across the floor to help it over the net, were the vicious snakelike Asia who teases men and humiliates women.

And I myself was another aspect of Asia, as I sat silently at the dinner table while my father crouched above his plate, reviling me. I felt, in addition to the inevitable dislocated shame, a strange kind of pride; I was almost grateful to my father for hating me. I was accepting the discharge of an aggression that was an essential part of the life force.

The greater pain she was subjected to—every mediocre piece of trash she was asked to review, every fatuous ass she saw praised as a great artist, every empty conversation at every party, every night alone—only created a thicker wall between her and the rest of the world, a wall that protected her from being poisoned by its mediocrity. It was behind this wall that she really lived, in a small world of dazzling white. In this world, she was never cruel or cold, but gentle and wondering as a child in a garden. She was alone and lonely, and it was this cherished loneliness that gave her inner world its inviolate whiteness.

If I could see aspects of Asia all about me, even in myself, I could
see Frank Golanka nowhere in my world. This did not make him less real than Asia Maconda—on the contrary. The absence of his reflection in my daily life rendered him exalted, immune to my vulgar fantasies, more inviolate than Asia behind her wall. His absence cast a silent spell over my world, he was all life’s potential suspended in a state of constant possibility, the prince who could awaken me with a kiss. At any moment he could appear, but if he didn’t I could spend the rest of my life caressing the possibility. Like Katya in
The Last Woman Alive
, I nurtured myself with dreams of what could be. On those nights when my father came to me, these dreams were the mainstay on which my listing comprehension attached itself, the immobile constant that stood watch while I struggled to maintain silence and stillness.