Two Girls Fat and Thin (31 page)

I knew this agony had come out of my contact with Knight, yet all I wanted was to be near him. I sat at the meeting absorbing him, pulling his psychic excretions into my body. I told time according to when I might talk to him during a break in the meeting or when he might walk me home.

I don’t remember if I longed to hold him in my arms or to feel him inside me. I do know I wanted to be alone in a room with him. It was to this end that I left (not without a pang of sentiment) the Euella Parks Hotel and rented a room. It was a furnished walkup with a private kitchen and bathroom in the hall. The landlady was a rigid white creature wearing a hairnet and a dress covered with nasty flowers; she tried to be pleasant, but she was too unhappy to make it stick. It didn’t matter; the place had a certain charm, in spite of a greasy stain on the wall. There was sun, blue wallpaper, flower boxes outside the windows, a quilt on the double bed. In addition to the room, I acquired more new clothes, makeup, and a hair cut.

The night I moved into my new home I didn’t get into bed to sleep. I spent the entire night before the mirror trying on clothes and makeup. A young body can withstand a great deal of stress and abuse without showing exhaustion. A few judicious smears of makeup under my eyes erased the circles forming there, pink liquid freshened my cheeks. My weight loss was apparent, and my features had emerged from my face. They fascinated me, although I wasn’t yet sure if I liked them or not. My eyes were large without the surrounding fat, my big lips, instead of adding to the previously exaggerated impression of roundness and slackness, added an interesting dimension to the sharpened planes of my chin and cheeks. The shorter hair drew the movement of my face upward and made my skin appear to open out in radiant petals.

Knight came closer; we crossed the catwalks between us and explored our respective inner girdings. He told me about his childhood. I told him everything about mine, except the one thing. We went to the all night diner where the man had told me I had great tits. It was there, over pieces of wonderfully gooey apple pie, that, during our discussion of ultrareality, a phrase leapt from his mouth and shot into the air between us, urgently flashing. It was “my fiancée in New York.” This flashing sign effectively obscured the
rest of the conversation for several minutes. Knight continued talking, happily manipulating his fork to get maximum corn syrup on it. His words fell one atop the other, forming a senseless pile. I felt myself moving away from him in a square section that became smaller and more distant in evenly spaced pulses, like a photograph inset within a larger photograph. My tiny hands played with sugar packets. Far away, Knight moved his lips in crazy silence. Then I opened my mouth, breathed in and ate the fiancée. Vaguely remembering that Asia Maconda, Katya Leonova, and Solitaire D’Anconti all had more than one lover, I swallowed the fiancée information and held it down. It dissolved in my stomach pretty quickly. I ate my pie and smiled at Knight’s ultrareality. We left the diner, and I invited him up to see my new apartment. It was two o’clock Saturday morning. He hesitated only seconds before he said yes.

I don’t think I can chronicle the combination of words, silences, and movements that led to him and me on my bed with our arms around each other. Rather awkwardly he stroked my hair, felt up and down my spine, and adjusted himself against me. He said, “This may not be fair to you, Dorothy. I know I should’ve mentioned Angela before.” I shook my head, my eyes half closed. There was more talk but it was immaterial before the feelings emanating from him, the strength and gentleness, warmth and control, the mystery of masculine tenderness that enveloped me like the wings of a swan. We lay on my bed, his body supporting itself above me. The ricocheting chatter in my mind became inaudible, the zipping comets of quasi thought slowed to melting putty. Rivulets of liquid gold, swollen with nodules of heat, spanned my limbs. A glimmering flower of blood and fire bloomed between my legs, its petals spanned my thighs. He kissed me. He put his genitals against me. I contracted; all the light in my body went out. I had a sensation of falling and then a sudden jerking halt, as if I were a mountain climber who had slipped and been caught in my harness, swaying above a chasm. Knight moved his lips over my face, he put a hand on my breast. My brief desire was dead. I shuddered and grabbed his shoulder. He misunderstood and touched between my legs. I thought: If I control my body and follow his movements, everything will be all right, I’ll be able to do it. Then
he raised himself and looked into my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”

I moved my hand to my face and felt tears. There was an instant of silence, and then I began to cry in earnest. He moved away from me; I had a glimpse of his stricken expression before I rolled on my stomach and curled into a ball. More words: “I’m sorry baby, I don’t want to hurt you, forgive me,” stuff like that. I gestured irritably. At that moment he seemed almost stupid to me. My heart froze in a desperate palpitation, and I stopped crying.

“It’s all right.” I sat up. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Angela.”

He looked surprised. “What is it then?”

I didn’t know, but I told him anyway. He sat solemnly nodding while I talked about my devotion to Anna Granite and how I didn’t want to be distracted from the important work of her project with an emotional entanglement. I talked about my feelings of friendship for him and how I didn’t want to risk ruining them. I told him I’d never had a lover before, which felt true until the image of my father gestured from a corner. I ignored him, continued talking over him, talking about my feelings of respect for Knight’s relationship with Angela. Knight continued nodding, every now and then interjecting a declaration or protestation of his own. My father stood mute, listening to me talk. Finally I couldn’t talk anymore. Knight talked a little longer while I picked the stuffing from a small hole in the quilt. My body felt wooden. I wished he would go. He stopped talking and sat as though waiting for me to say something. I scanned a list of sentences appropriate for getting him out the door. Then I thought that if he left I would be alone with my father.

“Well,” he said standing up. “Guess it’s time for me to go.”

I cast about for words.

“Dorothy? Are you all right?”

I lunged for a word; it slid away. I began to cry again.

Slowly, I told him. After much more talk, deep under the quilt with our arms around each other, I told him about my father and me. I felt as if there were a hole in my chest and that Knight could look into it as I had once looked into the opened brain of the strange boy sitting in our kitchen. But just as I had felt tenderly protective
towards the boy and his poor exposed brain, I felt Knight’s tenderness penetrating my wound, curling around my ribs, touching against the vulnerable red sponge of my lungs, mournfully stroking my heart hiding in its dark nest of muscle.

It was six o’clock when we turned off the light and lay down. We lay under the quilt with most of our clothes on. My back was against his front, and he curled his body around me, his strangely small hand holding my elbow. I lay for hours feeling his eyelashes rise and lower against my shoulder, more and more slowly as his breath took him into sleep. My breath slowed and deepened with his, and I lay with my eyes shut watching long loops of gray move around my head. I opened my eyes. Shadows crawled and crept. Knight’s penis hardened as he slept, and with a pretty moan, he pressed it against my lower spine before falling back into unconsciousness. I took in the feel of it experimentally. It seemed helplessly outgoing and vulnerable in its blind swollen state, yet fussily and ardently friendly. City sounds and voices came through the window at quickening intervals; the bread truck and its cheerful driver firing jokes into space, the grumbling answer of the restauranteur, the brisk hum of passing cars, the bus doing its noisy duty. Knight’s little hand twitched on my arm. All the bones, ligaments, skin, and nerves that felt these things seemed precious to me, and I wanted to stay awake so I could feel them hanging in the hammock of my exhaustion for as long as possible. Knight’s dick sat on my spine with all the dumb insistence of life, and I felt accompanied on my vigil.

We spent several nights in this way, until a week after the meetings ended and he had to return to New York. I received one letter from him. The web that connected us, its shimmering gossamer spanning even the state border, finally broke and disintegrated. During the next few years I saw him occasionally at various Definitist gatherings—sometimes with his fiancée, who became his wife. She was a tall, big-thighed thing with thrusting breasts and quick eyes, and she looked at me as if she knew what had gone on. It didn’t matter. He would fix his eyes on mine with affectionate pain, he would take my hand, and I would feel as I had when he escorted me down to the waiting cab; distant from him and smaller, but connected by respect and gentleness, even though I had put back all
the weight I lost during the fevered meeting period and gained yet more weight.

It is strange that I didn’t feel abandoned and betrayed, particularly since, on our last night together, we became lovers. It was unexpected. My body awoke from a shallow sleep suffused with heat, and I pressed myself against him. This time I didn’t become frightened, and we continued. His face swam over mine, his breath coiled in my ear. He nestled his body more snugly between my legs. “All right?” he gasped. I arched against him in hopelessly incomplete meeting. My head became a vague blur, my body a thousand cuplike doors opened to receive him. Drool ran in my mouth; I said yes, my voice rising through my body to emerge from my lips a barely audible breath. His fingers gently pulled my stiff nipples, and the outer petals of my vagina crimsoned and curled inward, burned by their own heat. My womb became a supple muscle of fire, expanded and soft, strong as life. I’m going to do it I thought, and in my mind I leapt. Then he penetrated my knot of fiery muscle, and my body went away from me. In my mind were images of my body, arched and abandoned, my neck thrown back, like a surrendering animal, giving to him all the helpless, ferocious, wounded love in my life. Because I wanted so much to give my life to him, even if it were just a moment of it. But my body, still inwardly burning, moved away from me. I could not feel what it experienced and so could not give my experience to him. Hesitant, he pushed farther in, as if he were frightened. My heart hammered in my throat. He pushed deeper. Pleasure rose up through the distance between me and my body and expired. Moaning in sorrow, I held it close as it faded. He kissed my neck; his full, tender, buoyant spirit entered my skin and for an instant I felt my body alive again beneath him.

So it went, the shy beginning and aborted end of pleasure. When it was over I lay confused and relieved in his arms. The next morning he took me in a taxi to a beautiful restaurant with huge feverish bursts of flowers on every table. We ordered champagne with our omelettes. He left the following day.

The next time I saw him, a year and seven months later, I thought with disbelief that this person, so radiant and handsome, had stuck one of his body parts into me, pulled it out, and stuck it
in again, over and over. It was wonderful, but I was glad it was never going to happen again. I preferred the elegance of distance, bridged only by an occasional hand touch, which, as the expression of all emotional language, became more eloquent than the confusing overkill of complete body contact.

Last to go were those moments, scattered throughout the years, when I lay alone in bed, motionless except for the hand wandering between my legs, recalling the feel of his eyelashes against my skin, his breath in my ear, his weight, his genitals. Memory playfully tickled my flesh, but the flesh remained indifferent; my mind would wander to something I’d seen on the street that day, radio jingles would fly by, memory would falter and fail.

Sometimes I tried to excite myself by focusing on the love scenes between Granite’s characters and then putting Knight and me in their places. But the swollen blossoms of passion described in Granite’s novels couldn’t accommodate the scratchy old image of Knight’s body on mine or the strange attendant mix of cold, heat, terror, love, and need.

Gradually I stopped trying.

Longingly I stood and watched
the sweating exercisers, slowly rising and lowering, their hands on their hips, their feet flat and thighs spread. Were they people who had had tragic lives, broken love affairs, murdered children, who had, up until quite recently, spent the bulk of their time lying in darkened rooms, just now able to summon the strength to get into their leotards and jump up and down? Some of them looked slightly pathetic in the dressing room, in spite of their rigorous training. There was the thin girl with sharp raw elbows and eyes so one-dimensional in their wounded uncertainty that people probably victimized her reflexively; in the dressing room, she revealed the thick, layered toenails of a dinosaur. Or the gum-chewing young blonde with her bleached hair tortured up on her head and a set of bright rings through her nose, who presented herself, with her ripped flamboyant clothing, as a jangling icon of aggression and mobility, but who sat like a matron, her heavy breasts drooping in her tatty, loose-fitting bra. Or the frail creature with her shoulders hunched as if she was expecting the blows of a whip, burdened with ugly, static, artificial
breasts, from which the rest of her body seemed to droop. Did their bodies really register terrible pain, or was I, my own body so muffled in inert fat, simply imagining it? What would it be like to hold one of these complexly injured animals in your arms? Would you feel her slowly come to life as you stroked her bony back, would the innocent ugliness of her toenails scrape you as she murmured in delight, would you see her eyes suddenly expand into beauty as they made room for all the treasures of expression she had held trapped in her frightened heart?

The music asked, “Straight up now tell me do you really wanna love me forever/oh oh oh/Or am I caught in a hit and run?” I kept standing there, inexplicably thinking of Justine Shade and what her problems might be.