Two Girls Fat and Thin (39 page)

I got my answer when Bradley arrived. As he entered, Granite marched up to him and struck his face so hard he staggered to one side and then to the other as she backhanded him.

“You have betrayed the principle of matching components!” she screamed. “Unless you can give me a rational reason for this treachery, you are my enemy for life—for life!”

Poor Bradley, obviously unprepared for this, fumbled for an intellectual argument to support his decision. Even I could hear the truth in his voice; he simply wasn’t attracted to her. So she declared her enmity again, slapped him around some more, and then let him crawl away. I only saw him once more after that, fleeing the Philadelphia office with his box of papers.

Wilson Bean took Bradley’s place, and I became his secretary.

After the end of her affair with Bradley, Granite changed. I thought the change was permanent, but it was apparent only for about a month. Her face temporarily lost its hot ferocity, its leonine, regal calm. The circles beneath her eyes became darker, the deep lines running from her nostrils to her chin evinced pain and deprivation, and sometimes her mouth would look like the crabbed, down-pulled mouth of a bitter old woman poking furiously around in a bargain bin for something she doesn’t really want anyway.

It wasn’t very attractive, but there was something noble and moving about her during this time. I was often with her in the week or so before the advent of Bean, taking dictation from her—notes for an (alas doomed) sequel to
Gods Disdained
. And it was during this time that I came to feel most close to her, although we talked very little. Her pain was something precious, and I felt I was somehow its caretaker, alone in the rare pain museum, protecting the encased specimens, tiptoeing about with the requisite solemnity, watchful and fussy that everything be just right. I made her coffee, turned down her bed, listened to her dreams.

She felt my protection and vigilance, I’m sure of it. I could see it
in her eyes when she looked at me years later, an expression that spoke of her superiority but also of her gratitude for that slim psychic strand between us, along which my protection had once traveled towards her.

On TV more cute boys threw their hair and screamed about love.

Justine pressed her face
into the floor, rubbing her cheek against the porous smelly wood, trying to scrape through her drunkenness. Darkness moved around her; she could barely feel the welts rising on her back. Her knees hurt, she thought. He beat her as she squirmed on the floor, caught in the steel trap that had closed on her when she was five years old. The upper strata of her thoughts and feelings had ruptured, and the creature long trapped beneath was out and gnawing her with its teeth.

She felt him drop down on his knees to fuck her and she turned away from him, rolling on her back. “I don’t want your cock,” she said. “I want you to make yourself soft and piss on my cunt.”

She lay panting on the floor as he stood at the counter pouring beer down his throat. Silence imploded in her ears. She turned her head to stare at her shoe lying on its side.

That night at dinner
he had told her stories of his travels in Southeast Asia.

He had walked through the Patagandrian rain forest with kind, dark guides who showed him where to find edible plants and roots to drink from, and who told him stories based on their dreams. The
paths in the forest were so hard that his shoes were destroyed in a week, they were so rugged that he could not walk on them without falling again and again. If you cut your foot in the forest, he said, you could get an infection and die in days. His guides had feet that were tougher than shoes and they taught him how to walk in the forest, they taught him how to read direction on the bark of trees and the hairs of moss.

He traveled weeks without seeing the sky, when the sun was an article of faith through the emerald roof of the forest. He saw pale-hued flowers that bloomed at night, giant spiders bejewelled with bright hoary pustules, salamanders with tiny palpitant throats, sudden storms of butterflies and plant roots that tore through the earth with erotic violence. He saw a man covered with animal tattoos carrying an old-fashioned washing machine through the jungle on his back. He saw villages where people danced to Prince and Beach Boys tapes, and predicted the future with the entrails of pigs. He hunted boar with parties of men and half-wild dogs. He murdered animals for the pleasure of watching them die. He was mistaken for an evil spirit and almost butchered by a frightened woman with a machete. He talked her out of it, and gave her his Swatch watch, assuring her it would protect her from any cruel spirit.

After two years he returned to Manhattan and was totally disoriented. He felt as if the cab bearing him home from the airport was taking him into hell. It was early December and, trapped in the stultification of the holiday traffic uptown, he viewed legions of shoppers marching the streets at what seemed an insane and martial speed, their expressions of frozen emotion covered with willful oblivion. Mechanical elves and dummy children in the windows of Bloomingdale’s beat their cymbals and screamed with joy around the tree. Human beggars extended their hands into the neurotic throng, like thirst-parched men sticking their cupped hands out into the rain which, thoughtless and unfeeling though it is, will provide them with enough drops to survive.

She listened, impressed by his bravery and ingenuity and uneasy with the combination of condescension and fondness with which he described the forest people. She saw him again as she had seen him on their first meeting, a mobile little sphinx with shifting surfaces
encouraging her to admire its mystery and then contemptuously shedding that mystery like an old skin, laughing at her as she puzzled over the empty skin. It occurred to her that perhaps he felt so comfortable in Southeast Asia because it wasn’t possible to pull this act there; people wouldn’t understand it. He was probably forced by language and cultural barriers to interact on a fundamental human level; this being an experience he’d never had before in his life, it was probably a great novelty as well as a great relief.

He leaned naked against the counter
drinking beer so he’d have some piss when the moment came. His body had a tense, frenetic, rigid quality, it was completely stripped of its animal nature. And out of his face, emerging as if his cells had subtly changed shape, came the stiff visage of something old, mechanical, and unfeeling. She felt that this thing was part of him, and that if it had taken a different turn in its development, it could’ve been a natural element of his self, but that it had instead gotten stuck in a crawl space somewhere, neglected and denied contact until it had grown into this creature that appeared to come over him like a transfiguration.

“Play with yourself,” he said. “Stick your fingers in your cunt.”

She did what he said; she was wet, swollen, tender, and numb. She masturbated expertly and felt nothing. She was aware of her humiliation, but it was so far away and had so little to do with her that she couldn’t feel that either. Still, she clung to it fiercely, as if it were her only chance to feel.

He pissed on her genitals, occasionally traveling up her body. It felt warm, almost caressing, and for a second she had an unbearable sensation of closeness with him. Then she worried about the mess on the floor, which had smelled bad enough to begin with.

“Tell me you love me,” he said.

“I love you.”

He pissed in her face.

After dinner they had gone
to a bar with red vinyl booths and drank martinis as they sat close together, stroking each other’s thighs. She had told him about her experience in the garage with Rick Houlihan.

“That sounds a little gruesome,” he said.

“Well, yeah.” She stared confused at the play of light and shadow on a painfully perfect martini glass. “What do you mean?”

“I mean was it really that bad?”

“Yeah, it was. He was your average jerk I guess.” She picked her olive out of her glass and chewed it, savoring its bitterness.

He stared at her until she felt self-conscious as she hunted for bits of unchewed olive with her tongue. “Most of the men I’ve ever been with are like that. They’re really awful.”

His face went into a strange combination; his mouth was as playfully cruel as a child torturing an animal while his eyes were gentle and inviting. “You are so hard and closed,” he said. “Don’t you know anything about tenderness and caring? Between men and women?”

She stared, incredulous to think that he was on speaking terms with tenderness and caring. “Are you trying to tell me that you do?”

“Yeah, I do.” His eyes beckoned her into an Easter egg world where males and females held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes while music played in the background. She regarded it suspiciously. “I’ve had relationships that were close and loving. From what you’ve told me, you haven’t. Why is that?”

His falsely tender eyes mocked her and hurt her; still part of her trembled forward, starving to experience the place of love and closeness he had displayed, even if it was a deliberate illusion created to highlight her privation.

He smiled, and the cruelty of his mouth shadowed his eyes and made their tenderness piercing. “I’m going to teach you about love and closeness,” he said.

They fucked touching as little
as possible; he raised straight up on his arms, she with her legs wide apart and her arms flung open to grip the sheets in an anti-embrace. She closed her eyes and turned her head away from him, hurtling alone through her imagination, the furniture of her internal self smashing on impact.

“I’d like to see you on your hands and knees,” he whispered, “surrounded by guys who’d piss on your cunt and jerk off in your face. I’d like to blindfold you in the Hellfire Club and tie you up with your legs spread so anybody could fuck you or beat you.”

She imagined the warm piss of strangers between her legs and come running down her face. Split apart and boundary-less, she was sucked into the eye of the storm. She reached between her legs for some tiny memory of pleasure. She floated for a second of peace before she came as if she were being cut to pieces, her cunt and her heart utterly apart.

He continued to flail above her, his eyes closed, oblivious, alone in his private cyclone.

I don’t have a husband anymore
and my kids don’t give a damn about me,” said the elderly black lady. She regarded Justine with what appeared to be irritation as Justine moved about her, preparing her for an EKG.

“What about friends? Can’t they help you out?”

“Yeah, but I’m not the kind of person who likes to always be going to other people with my problems. They’ve got plenty of their own you know.” Mrs. Dubois regarded her censoriously.

The problem under discussion was Mrs. Dubois’s partial blindness due to severe cataracts in both eyes. She had begun to find it difficult to shop and to read bills; she had almost fallen down a flight of stairs, a potential disaster for someone her age. She was reluctant, however, to have the cataracts removed; Justice thought it was because she was afraid of having her eyes operated on. “I’m sure your friends wouldn’t mind helping you,” said Justine, “they’d be pretty mean if they did.”

Mrs. Dubois answered her with a look that said, “If you think that’s ‘mean,’ you don’t know what mean is, you young fool.”

Well, thought Justine, it’s not any of my business. Still, she had always liked Mrs. Dubois, a stiff-backed, ill-tempered, good-mannered,
ferociously proper little woman who always pulled on her threadbare kid gloves with a wonderful arrogant smartness before she left the office. She hated to think of her alone at home in a small dark apartment, hungry and afraid to go out because she couldn’t see. She wondered if her pride prevented her from getting help from her neighbors and children, or if they really were indifferent to her. She applied the clamps to the delicate sepia ankles and thought of herself, alone in her apartment at night, trying to soothe herself to sleep with a fantasy of Bryan holding her in his arms and cupping her head against his chest, which he never did and probably never would do. Her concern for Mrs. Dubois united with her desperation and self-pity and became magnified abnormally. She thought of Mrs. Dubois as a young woman, a romantic and finicky young woman who liked matching jewelry combinations and wanted everything to be just so. She imagined her traveling through the barbed wire and land mines of a racist society which refused to respect or even acknowledge the delicacy of any black woman and insisted on seeing only the coarseness and dullness that it had decreed to be the character of African-Americans, regardless of how it had to distort its vision in the process. Since the neat garden of Angeline Dubois’s nature was denied the sun and warmth of acknowledgment, she was forced to turn inward to keep her internal garden alive, to draw nurture from an underground well so deep she couldn’t allow her attention to waver from the thread of concentration on which she lowered the bucket, lest the thread break and she be bereft forever. Thus she drew herself in, stiffening the rules, regulations, and visiting hours of the garden, tightening its borders, becoming fanatical over the patterns in which it was allowed to grow until her natural delicacy had assumed the martial uniform of primness, the bitter primness with which she pulled on her battered, once-elegant gloves.

Justine desolately considered the level of insult this woman had had to bear simply in maintaining her true self in a world that denied its existence, and the vicarious pain fell like a piece of granite against her own pain. “Maybe you should get the operation, Mrs. Dubois,” she said.

The filmy, half-blinded eyes filled with expressions that rose and
were succeeded by different shades of feeling; she saw Justine’s kindness which she despised and rejected, she saw also that the kindness was connected to something else, felt curious as to what this other thing might be, then rejected it as well, then felt curious again. Justine could see she felt invaded and oppressed by her concern, and strove to hold it away from her. Then the eyes softened, perhaps because she saw that Justine was essentially harmless and well-meaning, perhaps because she was too old to expend the energy required to reject her; she accepted Justine’s kindness and then let it fall away from her with the uselessness of a broken ornament. “Well maybe I will,” she said.