Two Girls Fat and Thin (24 page)

I roamed the city in this fashion all day, breakfasting on french toast, riding the bus, sitting in parks, strolling a museum, a department store, a Laundromat. I returned to the hotel with a bag of burgers, fries, and orange drink and slept almost immediately after consuming them. I woke in darkness, shoved out of sleep by a terrifying dream, unable to identify my surroundings or the menacing ear-piercing buzz which was, I finally realized, the big pink hotel sign outside my window. I had dreamed that my mother was under the ground in a container so small she couldn’t move. In the slow darkness of my dream landscape, she sent me telepathic messages from her prison. She said, “I’m in hell, Dotty.” In the dream this filled me with pain and terror and I tried to find my mother to comfort her. But I could only sense her locked deep underground, away from me forever.

When I recovered enough to turn on the light, I noticed that the Euella Parks Hotel had cockroaches, many of which were forming a living mosaic on my take-out containers. I spent the rest of the night fitfully pacing, thinking obsessively of Anna Granite until the sun came up and I burst out of my cage and went to have french toast for breakfast again.

The next day and night followed the same pattern and the evening of the Definitist meeting found me an exhausted nervous wreck, pacing before the hotel rented by the Definitists, eating from a bag of corn curls to calm my agitation. At eighteen minutes
before the hour they began to arrive. I stood holding my balled-up corn-curl bag behind my back, studying them as they walked by, my excitement leveling into delight and solemnity. They were just as I’d imagined: tall, serious young men in suits, sometimes accompanied by a serious young woman. Almost all were handsome, all had a dignified demeanor and good posture. Strangely, I didn’t feel embarrassed to be the only fatty in the group, the way I usually did at gatherings of the normally proportioned. Still self-consciousness prevented me from entering the hall until everyone else had and the meeting was about to start.

When I finally did go in, I wasn’t disappointed. The Centurion Hotel was of the grand old variety, and the hall in which Anna Granite was speaking was long, thick rugged and crystal chandeliered. There were rows of magnificent chairs placed before a low dais and, on the velvet seat of every chair, a sheaf of vellum note paper and an expensive silver pen that caught and refracted the light of the chandeliers. The solemnity of the note paper, the intellectual heaviness of the pens from which sprang the airy nymph of light—these qualities were such a perfect analogy for the balance of rationality and passion in Granite’s work that really, it would’ve been enough for me to stand there in that room of hushed, attractive people for a few hours and then go back to the hotel and collapse.

But that wasn’t all I’d come for, and through a haze of intense emotion I made my way to the nearest chair and seated myself next to a devastatingly handsome man. He glanced cordially in my direction and executed an unnecessary but polite body movement acknowledging my proximity. Then there was a low communal murmur; I looked up and saw that people had appeared on the stage. A tall, broad, handsome man (who I would later know as Beau Bradley) and a graceful woman walked out like an advance guard and seated themselves on the dais. Then, with a dramatic flourish of curtain, she appeared.

The emanation of awe from the crowd was tantamount to a chest-thumping, fist-thrusting salute, but truthfully, I was a little disappointed. She was short, thick, and unbeautiful, her hair a tight cap of curls on a square, prematurely lined face. I struggled, my disappointment a dark wave under my need to worship. My fantasy listed feverishly, its crew collapsing on the starboard bow,
yelling and frantically manning the pumps. Maybe I thought, maybe she really was beautiful, in an unconventional way. I looked at her eyes—they were truly striking, huge, blue, and electrical, as though the heat of her deepest body as well as the voltage of her cortex was streaming from them. Then the light caught the necklace she wore, the deep blue hunks of precious stone that encircled her, and in a flash, I saw her haloed by the brilliant wattage of blue, the air about her ululating with an iridescent current of energy. She began to speak. My fantasy mightily puffed out its sails and flew into the stratosphere, crew cheering. I burst into tears.

It would be an exaggeration
to say that Justine’s meeting with Dorothy disturbed the years-old insulation of her cloak of loneliness. But something about the encounter had sent an invisible ray under the cloak, a ray that subtly vibrated against everything it touched before it finally faded days later. During the ten years since Justine had left Deere Park, Michigan, she had had many encounters that were stranger, deeper, or more disturbing than this one, but somehow the interview had the haunting impact of a vaguely remembered dream, the kind one thinks may have been significant because images from it pop up during the day while one’s back is turned and then pop back down when one whirls around to confront them.

A week after she interviewed Dorothy, Justine went to Philadelphia for the annual Definitist gathering as Wilson Bean had suggested. She took a train on a gray, damp Saturday morning; it sat in the station for half an hour after she boarded it. She sat with her forehead on the windowpane looking at two fat middle-aged men standing on the platform like two puddings in shirts and baggy pants. They reminded her of Dorothy, and she imagined the teenaged Granite fanatic on a train, going to a meeting such as this for the first time. She smiled with involuntary fondness; it must’ve
been unbearably exciting. One of the men scratched his neck, turned, and walked away from the train. The other stood and looked at it in a heartbroken stupor. Justine thought of Dorothy’s father standing like this at a railway station, brooding psychotically over the daughter he had abused and lost. A large boy with a rigid face and distant eyes sat next to her and diverted her attention. The train started to move. She excused her way past the boy’s legs and went to the snack bar to buy two chocolate donuts wrapped in cellophane.

When they arrived in Philadelphia, it was raining densely and hard. Justine snapped open her umbrella with irritation; the boy strode into the downpour with stupid determination. Justine walked for blocks, barely able to read street signs, past meaningless houses and nightmare strips of shopping centers, her legs and feet wet and cold, her fellow passenger plodding a few feet in front of her. The hotel finally appeared in its majestic parking lot; she squished in, feeling vile.

The meeting room was large, thinly carpeted and lit with track lighting. People in suits and dresses stood or strolled, holding plastic glasses of mineral water. She was looking for a snack table when she was accosted by a short plump person with bright eyes and tiny hands.

“Justine Shade, I imagine? I expected you to be pretty, but not to this extent.”

Justine took his soft claw in a daze; even given the vague familiarity of his accent, he had to remind her that they had spoken on the phone, that he had been the one to give her Wilson Bean’s phone number. She was repelled by him, but he was a source of information. Together they wandered through the conference room (which had a table bearing only mineral water, no snacks), Justine trying to form an impression of Anna Granite’s followers, as Dr. Bean had suggested. She was struck first by the absence of attractive people and second by the timid, exhausted look that prevailed. They were totally unlike the “cult members” described in the old magazine articles she had read. The men appeared weak but neurotically tenacious, the women limp and dimly pleasant. This was ironic in view of Granite’s handsome, arrogant characters, the tall robust males and females who despised weakness,
who fornicated with such brutish zeal. She felt curiously fond and protective of the crowd.

“No, I’m not a Definitist in the strict sense,” she said to a bespectacled computer expert. “It’s just that certain aspects of it interest me.”

“What interests you? The emphasis on reason, on cold logic?” He said these words as if they were flags waving in the senseless gray landscape of his life.

“It’s more the emphasis on the individual versus the herd,” she said. “The concept of the beauty of loneliness.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Of course, one leads to the other, you know,” said Bernard as they strolled away. “To stand apart from the collective is the only choice a rational human can make.”

“People stand apart for irrational reasons, too. Sometimes it just happens.”

“That’s not possible.”

Justine said she thought she’d go to have lunch somewhere.

“I shall accompany you,” said Bernard.

They went to a Chinese restaurant with broken ocher and black tiles, smeared walls, and crabbed, tiny waitresses. A group of exhausted, sweaty waiters in dingy white kitchen uniforms sprawled around a back table smoking and muttering to each other. They looked at Justine and Bernard with incurious distaste.

They ordered mushroom fried rice with green peas and lurid red spare ribs. They shared from the plates, eating the meat with their fingers. Bernard discussed his endeavors and accomplishments. He was majoring in linguistics at NYU, where he hoped to found a student Definitist group. He was minoring in economics. He was teaching himself Japanese in his spare time. He was studying art history. He was translating
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
into Hebrew. He was putting himself through school by working in computer programming.

“I am taking as my model Jesus Delorean Dilorenzo Michaelangelo in
The Gods Disdained
. Maximum achievement, the highest you are capable of. None of this ‘well, maybe I can’t.’”

He chewed his rice and peas exuberantly. A kitchen boy tossed a lank strand of hair off his forehead and sneered.

“Although it looks as though I am going to be let go from my job. But, so what?” He shrugged. “Frank Golanka was fired twice in
The Bulwark
, right? For much the same reason. My co-workers do not like me. Very few people like me. Also like Frank Golanka I have no friends.”

“Aren’t other Definitists your friends?”

“Not really.” He looked at her, part of his face bright-eyed and smug, the other part desolate and frozen. “Every now and then a few people come into my life who seem to be friends. But they eventually disappear.”

She was touched. The expression on his face suddenly appeared to have been molded by hostile, alien hands, as if he were an unfortunate putty dwarf created to play the patsy in a sadomasochistic cartoon, the jargon he mouthed about the sanctity of the individual part of the mean joke.

“You must be lonely,” she said.

Surprise softened his face and made it vulnerable; he wasn’t used to hearing concern expressed on his behalf. She wanted to stroke his oily cheek.

“Yes, it is lonely. It is always lonely to stand apart from the crowd. One wishes to meet another with whom one has matching components.”

Justine tried to see this as an entertaining experience, but she felt disoriented and sad; she did not even consider the horror with which the Justine of Action, Illinois, would have viewed this situation. Beyond the dirty window pane was gray sky, mist. They and this dingy room, with its sticks of furniture and inhabitants, could be afloat in an envelope of mist, unconnected with anything on earth, as in a serious play about ideas, where tense characters assemble on a bare stage and talk about life or society, with no life or society anywhere in sight. If this were one of those plays, what lines would the kitchen boys have? What would they think of the conflict between the individual and the herd, the choice between rationality and irrationality? She thought of photographs she’d seen of thousands of Chinese in identical gray shirts, thrusting red books into the air. Would their lines give the subject a special Chinese perspective? Or would they remain silent, their presence meant merely to represent society watching as the individuals hashed it out?

“What about yourself?” asked Bernard. “Do you find yourself often alone?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

“How could you tell?”

“By your arrogance. You are very arrogant. I mean that as a compliment.”

Again she thought of Dorothy. She wondered if a large proportion of Definitists were victims of disturbed families.

“What about your family?” she asked. “Do you have a decent relationship with them?”

“Not a very Definitist question. I don’t have any relationship with them. They are beaten, weak people. My father was cautious and full of false humility. Of my mother there is even less to say. She peeled potatoes. She wore no makeup. She was religious.”

Justine imagined little Bernard in the appalling bosom of his family. The father was a wretch, the mother a shadow. There was a bowl of lumpy potatoes for dinner, shoes left in the middle of the floor, used Kleenex crumpled on the couch, a black-and-white television on the blink. Bernard rarely went outside; he had no friends. Shunned on the school playground, he squatted alone, collecting pebbles and pieces of colored glass. Without naming her, Justine thought of Emotional and felt a pang.

Despite his physical ugliness, surely Bernard wasn’t an unpleasant child. There was a gentle, sensitive place in his meaty soul, a place from which he viewed the world as he sat alone on the playground, appreciating its hues of sadness and moments of joy. From this spot he arranged his perception into fantasies of beauty and strength, glory and striving, fantasies he nursed deep within himself. His mother’s bleak pain, his father’s emptiness, the contempt of his schoolmates, all menaced and tortured his inner self until it developed a callused, horned armor. Through this armor his deformed sensitivity strained to find the thundering abstracts of beauty and heroism that consoled it and discovered Anna Granite.

Justine walked silently beside Bernard on their way to the lecture hall, listening to him discuss the fine points of Definitism. She had rancorous thoughts about the kind of world that could turn a child into a pontificating maniac.