Two Girls Fat and Thin (3 page)

One day she asked a fat, sweating woman how she was, and the lady burst into tears. “My husband, he is beating me,” she said. “I am bruised, see?”

Justine was alarmed to see brown and purple splotches on her chest and stomach. Her alarm flustered her, and she didn’t know what to say. “Why don’t you hit him back?” she asked idiotically. “You’re pretty big.”

“Oh, he would kill me, he would crush me! He was in the army, he is strong, he knows how to kill!”

“Can’t you leave?”

“Where would I go? I have no children. I have no one. He is going to kill me!” The weeping little eyes were finely shot with yellow veins.

Justine handed her a box of Kleenex. She took the EKG printout into Dr. Winkgard’s office. “I think something terrible is happening,” she said. “Mrs. Rabinowitz says her husband is beating her.”

“Mrs. Rabinowitz is crazy,” he said. “It’s a very tragic case. She has a brain disease.”

“But I saw bruises.”

“Well, he does beat her sometimes, but she exaggerates. Sometimes
she thinks the pills I give her are poison and she won’t take them. It is a tragedy.”

He went into the cardiogram room, and Justine heard him ask in his vibrant red ball of a voice, “How are we today, Mrs. Rabinowitz?” She took the manila folders of patients already seen and went back to the reception area. Mrs. Winkgard was picking the wilting blossoms from orchids in a vase, her head tilted slightly in appraisal.

“Glenda, Mrs. Rabinowitz just told me something terrible. She says her husband beats her. I told the doctor and he—”

“Yes, yes,” said Glenda. “I know the situation. It is very sad. Both Jonathan and I have spoken to Mr. Rabinowitz. It seems to help for a while, but then he reverts. We’ve spoken to her as well. The problem is, she is as disturbed as he is.”

“But it seems that something—”

The buzzer rang, and Glenda put a finger to her lips. It was Mrs. Wolfen, Mrs. Rabinowitz’s sister. Her entrance, a dour presentation of ragged gray overcoat, folded hands, and disapproving jowls, effectively ended the conversation.

Sometimes a young person with a delicate heart would come to the office. If that person was a young woman, Dr. Winkgard would poke his smiling head out of his office to watch her advance towards him, his grin-wrinkled face set in the gloating, indulgent expression of a client just introduced to a teenaged prostitute. If it was a young man, the doctor would grin a more robust, less liquid grin and swing his hand through the air until it violently connected with the patient in a handshake of health and camaraderie that would have floored an oldster.

“It is good for him to look at a young body for a change,” said Glenda.

It was from one of these diversionary young bodies that Justine got her idea.

He was a small nervous boy with a large round forehead, a saucy jawline, palpitations, and shortness of breath. Justine took him into the EKG room and closed the door. He took off his shirt and lay down; the little room became their private planet, with Dr. and Mrs. Winkgard hovering in the distance like friendly stars.

“What do you do?” asked Justine.

“I’m a writer,” he said, “although I’ve never been published.” He lifted his pretty head and looked at the painless clamps on his wrists and ankles.

“It’ll only take a minute,” she said.

He dropped his head back on the institutional pillow. “The thing is, I find it so hard to concentrate. I haven’t written anything for a while.”

“I write too,” she said.

“Oh, then you understand.”

The machine began to whirr; the thin needles jerkily sketched their abstract of the boy’s heart.

“What do you think of Anna Granite?” he asked.

“I’ve never read her.”

“Really? Oh, you’ve got to read her. She’s the most unique writer. Of course, I don’t believe in what she says politically, but still she’s so powerful. Especially now, when people are so into whining and abdicating responsibility, it’s good to read somebody advocating strength and power, and doing things. She had a lot of influence on me. I even thought of joining a Definitist organization.”

“A what?”

“You know, the groups they used to have in the sixties where they got together and studied Granite’s work. They’re still around.”

“You’re kidding.” She cut the printout on the tiny teeth of the machine and stuck it on the mounting paper. “I mean I knew she was popular, but—”

Dr. Winkgard entered with a broad flap of the door, shoulders squared in his white coat. “Come, Justine, what is taking so long?”

She returned to the stack of papers at her desk and brooded excitedly. It is hard to say why the Anna Granite story had impressed her, but almost immediately on hearing it she formed the tiny damp mushroom of an idea. Justine was morbidly attracted to obsessions, particularly the useless, embarrassing obsessions of the thwarted. She could not help but be drawn to the spectacle of flesh-and-blood humans forming their lives in conjunction with the shadows invented by a mediocre novelist.

“Glenda, have you ever read anything by Anna Granite?”

“Ah yes.” Mrs. Winkgard nodded, her stubborn mouth set in admiration. “Very good writing, very dramatic. The clarity, the way
she states her case. I read
The Bulwark
at a time when I was undergoing a crisis, and it gave me such moral support to read about those strong characters doing great things.”

When Justine left work she bought a bag of cookies and rode home on the subway eating them with queenly elation, impervious to the crumpled bags and bad smells, the empty soda cans rattling about her feet. When she entered her apartment, she stripped off her pantyhose and called an editor she knew at
Urban Vision.

The next day, she placed brief ads in
Manhattan Thing,
a monthly, and the weekly
Urban Vision.
To be sure she reached the serious nut population, she made up several index cards bearing a neutral statement which she placed on bulletin boards in right-wing bookstores, cafés, and an NYU building. She serendipitously stuck one on the wall of a laundromat in Queens where she had gone to argue with an ex-boyfriend before loaning him some money. Then she bought all of Granite’s books, and started reading
The Last Woman Alive,
the story of a young woman caught in the grip of a socialist revolution in an imaginary society.

On Thursdays she went to the library with her notebook under her arm and did research. Granite had cut a colorful path through the media, starting with a few mild reviews of her early short-story collection, building in the seventies into lengthy, incredulous, outraged reviews as well as full-blown features about the “Stern Young Cult of Anna Granite,” eventually culminating in sarcastic editorial denunciations by Austin Heller, Shepard Shale, and Michael Brindle, the foremost magazine intellectuals of the left and right wings. The last little noise was a long obituary in
Opinion
by Heller, in which he told the story of their tentative friendship and eventual violent feud, after which Granite refused to be in the same room with him. He gloatingly referred to a time Granite “bawled” at a party after being insulted by a professor.

Justine left the library feeling as though she had been reading one of Granite’s novels—the proud declarations, the dedicated followers, the triumphant public appearances, the controversy, the feuds, the denunciations, the main character storming from the room with her cape streaming from her shoulders after a violent confrontation with archenemy Austin Heller.

She began getting answers to her ads. The
voices sounded like young, cramp-shouldered people taking their lunch breaks in cafeterias lit by humming fluorescent lights. She pictured women with sad hair in flower-print dresses and men with fleshy chests and hands. They all described what Granite had done for them, how she had made them value their lives, how she had inspired them to strive for the best they were capable of, whether as secretaries or as engineers. She made appointments to interview some of them, including one fellow who claimed to be a “Definitist intellectual.”

Meanwhile, Katya, the heroine of
The Last Woman Alive
, had refused to join the Collectivist party, and had subsequently been thrown out of the academy, where she had been studying higher mathematics. She had been forced into an affair with the philosophically wrong Captain Dagmarov in order to save the life of her lover, Rex.

A week after the dissemination of the cards, she received a call from someone with a high-pitched voice that reminded her of a thin stalk with a rash of fleshy bumps. His name was Bernard, and, in addition to giving her the address of a study group that he attended in Brooklyn, he supplied her with the phone number of Dr. Wilson Bean, Granite’s “intellectual protégé.”

Bean’s voice sounded as if it were being dragged along the bottom of an old tin tub. He didn’t want to be interviewed; he spent minutes castigating the press, which he said had “crucified” him in the past, yet he continued talking. She pursued him down the center of his defense with the laser of her cold, clear voice, and she could feel herself contacting him. Grudgingly, with a lot of rasping around the bottom of the old tub, he agreed to talk to her again after she’d read
The Bulwark
and
The Gods Disdained
. He also advised her to attend the annual Definitist conference in Philadelphia, which would take place in a few weeks.

She hung up elated; the phone rang immediately. It was another Granite fan, a woman with a voice that, although riddled with peculiarity and tension, stroked Justine along the inside of her skull in a way that both repelled and attracted her. She said her name was Dorothy Never and she sounded like a nut. She’d been calling for days, she said, and she was so glad to have finally gotten through. Justine, trying to infuse her voice with seriousness and authority, was genuinely excited to hear that she had been a member of the
original Definitist movement and had personally known Anna Granite, Beau Bradley, and Wilson Bean. She seemed not only willing but pathetically eager to be interviewed. They arranged a time, and Justine hung up full of amazement at the desire some people have for attention and publicity.

In the meantime, Katya had perished on an ice floe in an effort to escape to America, Captain Dagmarov had killed himself on realizing that he was philosophically in error, and Rex, having been broken by the collectivist society around him, was writing pornography for a living.

Justine Shade’s voice
sounded different in person than it had on the phone. Floating from the receiver, it had been eerie but purposeful, moving in a line towards a specific destination. In my living room, her words formed troublesome shapes of all kinds that, instead of projecting into the room, she swallowed with some difficulty. She sat in the least comfortable chair, blinking frequently under the squalid intensity of city sunlight pressing through my curtainless windows. She glanced surreptitiously at the horrified woman on the gold cover of
Night Duty
, the paperback on my coffee table. She picked at the dainty fried snacks I had placed between her seat and mine as I traveled from kitchen to living room arranging our tea things.

“I’ve been looking forward to this,” I said. “I was dying to meet someone interested in Granite now, when it’s no longer fashionable. Someone who isn’t a zealot of some kind.”

“Well you realize I’m not a Definitist,” she said. She placed her narrow hands on the top knee of her crossed legs and tilted her small head away from her body, giving herself a neurotically asymmetrical but graceful appearance. She was a pretty woman, once you got used to her. Her skin was very white and clear, her small,
finely shaped skull was set off by pale blond short-cropped hair. Her prominent cheekbones, strong chin, and high forehead complemented a face marred only by thin, tight lips and huge black glasses that sat crookedly on her small nose. I was a little disappointed by her. I had imagined a mature and handsome woman wearing a tailored gray suit and black stiletto heels carrying a small tape recorder. Justine dressed like a college kid: tight jeans, pointy red shoes, and a T-shirt with an indecipherable picture and the words “Girl World” on it. She held an already scrawled-in notebook on her knotted-up lap. She’d said that she’d written mainly for
Urban Vision
, and it was entirely believable to me that a
Vision
writer would look like this.

“But you seem to take Definitism seriously,” I said.

“Oh, I do. Very seriously.” Her wide gray eyes focused on me intently.

“Well, that means you respect it, and that’s enough recommendation for me.” I sat on the generous expanse of white-cushioned couch and spread my floor-length, bright-flowered dress around me. “Shall we start?”

“Okay.” She smiled as this quasi word came from her mouth like a bubble that floated into the room and disappeared. “When did you first encounter Definitism?”

“As a teenager, when I read
The Bulwark
. I would say from about the tenth page on, it became the most important influence in my life—certainly the only positive influence.” I paused. “Would you like tea?”

“Not now.” She glanced with suppressed interest at my tea set. “Later I will.”

“Let me explain what I meant by what I just said. I was a sexually abused child. I was forced to have an incestuous affair with my father, starting at age fourteen.”

Her blank face registered nothing, but I could sense the telescope of her attention frantically adjust its gauge to examine my statement. “Have I upset you by telling you that?”

“No. No. I mean, yes. I mean it upsets me that it happened to you, but it doesn’t shock me. I know it’s very common. In fact, I was molested as a child.” Slight pause, slight body recession. “When I was five years old, by a friend of my father’s.”

“Oh God.”

“It didn’t happen that often though. Maybe three or four times.” Her face retained its serene surface. “I know that’s not as awful as with your father because—”

“Stop. Don’t deny your own experience. It’s just not the kind of thing you can quantify. Any therapist will tell you that.” I felt my face relaxing towards her in what I hoped was a pleasant way.