Two Girls Fat and Thin (41 page)

Then I read the next paragraph. “Dorothy is a huge woman, who floats with the slow grace of the always fat in airy, gaudy single-cloth garments of indeterminate nature. Her face is intelligent, and her emotional intensity rises from her like a force field. In
conversation, she is incisive, and she displays an acute sensitivity to nuance and an uncanny ability to read a situation emotionally by scanning the minutia of expressions and gestures that frame it. When she talks of the early days of the Definitist meetings, she does so in symbolic, mythological terms . . . when she discusses the split between Bradley and Granite she is like a child talking about her parents’ divorce a month after it happened . . .”

I looked up and sat still for some moments, my bulk stewing in isolation from my lone head. I felt much as I had on first meeting Justine; insulted and yet seduced. She did not have to refer to me as “always fat,” and there was condescension in her description. Yet I also felt in her printed words a respect for me, a desire to understand me, to make her readers understand me, and I couldn’t help being touched by this. She said I was “intelligent,” “authentic,” and “incisive,” yet she compared me to a traumatized child. Worse, she implied that my fealty for Granite was the fealty of a traumatized child. I sat still while the possibility that she was right hovered about me like the evil enchanter closing in on Don Quixote.

I noticed that I was three stations past my stop and rose, cursing. My purse fell off my arm and onto the floor, my keys, lipstick, and change poured out of it. All at once I was engulfed by life’s physically mechanical nature, all the tiny movements and functions you have to perform correctly just to get through the day, all the accoutrements you must carry which can malfunction at any time. Panicked, I fell on the subway floor, groping for my belongings. Legs shifted about me as the animated forest of humans came to life like enchanted trees; hands shot forth, stealing my change, helpfully extending my keys to me, returning my rolled-away lipstick with an impressive hand-to-hand relay involving several school children and a “Yo! Lady!” I was helped, hindered, patted, pulled up, and nodded at, and then the people turned into trees again, frozen on their straps. I passed through them to exit with the ritual Excuse me’s, the doors rattled shut behind me, and I realized I’d left the paper on the train.

My hands made fists, released, and made them again. It was too much, it was unbearable. The darting people about me were like the hurtling debris of an exploded planet, and I could not stand to
look at them. I fled the subway and found I was just above East 14th Street, where, I realized I could easily buy another paper.

I made my purchase at a newsstand and was soothed by the ease with which this was accomplished. As my panic receded, I remembered that I was exhausted and decided to sit down in a coffee shop to finish reading the article.

Soon I was seated with the paper open in my trembling hands, a cup of coffee on its way. I read on, my attention caught on the protruding nails of the deliberate meanness that held the piece together. The coffee came and I drank the bitter stuff. The shop had few customers and I was grateful for that. A dowdy woman read a soiled paperback. A teenager stared into space. A handsome boy mutely reached across a linoleum tabletop to touch the hand of his scowling handsome boy companion. The small dark proprietor strolled behind his counter, absently pulling his ear.

If I had been seduced, I had also been abandoned. I thought of Justine sitting in my apartment fixing me with that stare, spindly fingers working her pen. Even then she had known she would write something that attacked everything I had founded my sane life on, even as she allowed our words and feelings to twine and knot, bringing us together again in an effort to disentangle them. She had talked to me, too, exposed herself—and yet not really, because it was ultimately she who walked away and made this house of cards, this article, this canned result of our exchange which had meant so much to me and so little to her. It was she who stepped back, wrote in her notebook, and pronounced me a “child.” It was she who, after our intimacy, stroked me with the flattering words “authentic,” “incisive,” “intelligent,” caressing me under the table like a flippant ex-lover, using the remains of her power to invoke the memory of our shared closeness, a memory meant to render me helpless. That was the most painful thing; in this article, in which she used me to further demean the memory of Granite, she also invoked, in an encoded still life, the genuine moments we had experienced. Her sensitivity to me had been real, she had illuminated me gently, with respect, and yet she had done it in a context that made a joke out of everything I believed in, and, indirectly, made a fool of me.

Why did my every close contact become a betrayal? Why did everyone who touched me desert me? Why was I never able to do anything about it?

The waiter wandered by, leaving a greasy slip of paper on my table, his head turned away from me as if it was a secret note instead of a bill. I stared at the objects before me: cold coffee in a cup of thick white glass, folded napkin, spoon with a liquid coffee shadow on its face. Symbols of order and humility, comfort and banality. These were the things of my life; I had been sitting at these goddamn coffee tables all my life recovering from what other people had done to me.

The anger that had begun on the subway rose like bubbles from a deceptively still pool of chemical waste. That little bitch had to have realized how lonely I was, what an easy target for information and confidence. She knew how much pain I’d experienced in life; I’d told her. But she’d exploited me anyway for whatever piddling advancement this article represented to her. It wasn’t the first time; there had been other reporters, other articles as wrong-headed and rude. But I had never had coffee and cakes with any of these reporters, they had never discussed their love lives with me, they had never looked at me with those eyes of hers, those eyes that saw me for who I was, and then betrayed me anyway.

A voice of reason coughed nervously and interjected that perhaps I had misinterpreted the message of her eyes. But I had not! She had silently transmitted promises to me, promises of respect and allegiance and, and . . . I felt like there was an animal trapped in my lower body, pacing furiously, wanting to come out and tear the nearest living creature to pieces.

I stood up, wiping my sweating palms on my dress (a single fucking cloth garment of indeterminate nature) and approached the man behind the counter.

“Excuse me,” I sweetly said. “Do you have a current Manhattan phone book I could look at?”

He ran his eyes the length of my body with habitual suspicion and mumbled an affirmative. He found the book in his gleaming cabinets. He handed it to me and leaned on the counter, dreamily gazing out the window. The animal in my abdomen roared and reared as I found the massive “S” listing. I flipped the pages and ran
my damp finger down the columns. I was right. There was only one J. Shade. She lived at 33 Charles which, I surmised, was in the Village.

I hurled a wadded dollar at the man behind the counter and I was on the street again, my arm raised stiffly in the cab-flagging salute. This was Monday, the same day of the week Justine had met me at the coffee shop—as she had remarked at the time, her day off.

You cunt,” he said
. “You fucking worthless cunt.”

She didn’t answer him because he had his belt tight around her throat. Her body convulsed and her sight went. He released his grip, and her vision cleared. Her arms and legs were cold; she tried to move her fingers and wasn’t sure she succeeded. His face came into focus over hers, wavering out of darkness like a dream. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear, the roaring in her head was too loud. She felt him inside her; her vagina was tight and dry. He tightened the belt again, and again she lost her sight. He released her; first his eyes came out of the darkness, then his face. She tried to tell him to stop, but her voice wasn’t working.

He held his hand before her and moved his fingers in a gesture she didn’t understand. Then she realized he was snapping his fingers. He grabbed her jaw with a hard pinch, and moved her head back and forth. Her vision started to go blank again and then cleared abruptly.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Are you okay?”

She put her tongue experimentally out of her mouth and touched her lips. They were so dry they didn’t feel like flesh.

“Here,” he said. He leaned over her body towards the floor and then rolled back onto the bed clutching a bottle of sloshing liquid.
He put it to her lips. Reflexively she tried to take the bottle with her hand and couldn’t; she remembered her hands and feet were tied at the corners of her bed. She opened her mouth and the burning vodka made her sputter and cough. He shoved the bottle against her teeth and kept pouring, letting it run down her chin after she had closed her lips.

“Thought you were gone there for a minute,” he said. He took the bottle from her, put it to his lips, up-ended it, and drained it. He emitted a loud “ahhh” noise.

“I wanna get up,” she said. “Untie me.” She heard the fear in her voice, and it frightened her more.

He leaned back against the wall and looked at her, smiling.

“Goddamn it, Bryan. My stomach hurts and I have to pee.”

He extended his hand and began to stroke her cunt. His eyes looked like the eyes of Mrs. Rabinowitz; the iris bristling with dismembered emotion, the whites riddled with yellow veins.

“You look like a lunatic,” she said.

He slid away from the wall and put his head between her legs. She retreated further into her body. He followed her. She closed her eyes and imagined leaving her body to float away in empty air, turning somersaults in the contactless ease of space, unseen, untouched, unalive. Instead her body stripped itself for him; her full bladder and all her other organs lay exposed, shivering in assonance with the slow movements of his tongue. She felt she was turning gradually inside out. He could’ve strangled her. To her horror, the thought excited her.

“I’m your daddy’s good buddy,” he said, “and your daddy told me I can play with your little pussy any time I want.”

“Don’t,” she said, “please don’t.”

“Any time I want I can take you out to the park and make you take your little panties off.”

“Please, Bryan, don’t, don’t.” Her words were a landslide of pebbles and dirt under someone’s foot.

Her buzzer sounded. He turned and looked at the door. “Expecting anybody?” he asked.

She was unable to answer.

He got up and walked unsteadily to the intercom. He looked at her and smiled. “I’ve always wanted to meet your friends,” he said.

The Village,” I said
to the cabdriver.

“Where in the Village?”

His tone opined that I was an incompetent.

“Thirty-three Charles,” I shot back.

“Charles and what?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t the address enough?”

He muttered something, and his little flag went up.

For a moment I felt myself engaged with his strange, dissatisfied energies, and then he became merely the back of a head, and I returned to my angry plan.

Of course, she might not be home, but she could be, and even if she was not, I would wait for her. I would come back again and again until I found her. I would ring her doorbell, and if she didn’t let me in, I would ring the bell of everyone in the building until someone let me in. At least one thief had gained entry to my building that way.

Once I confronted her, I was less sure of what would happen, except that I would scream at her. I was mad enough to do that, but I so infrequently screamed at anyone that the idea made my heart
leap with fear and excitement. I would back her into a corner! If she reached for the phone to call the police, I would knock it from her hand!

I opened the
Vision
again so I could scan the article and encourage my anger. It worked. The second time around, my feelings were not cushioned by shock or the titillation of seeing an interpretation of myself in print, and I felt even more deeply indignant. What kind of person would go around worming her way into people’s homes and confidences, filtering their words and images through her distorted cynical vision and then using them as weapons against someone they loved? What kind of person could so twist the truth of Granite’s ideas?

“You fucking liar,” I said.

The cab driver’s eyes flickered in the mirror.

“I don’t mean you,” I said. “Have you read this week’s
Urban Vision
?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t read that paper.”

His words were polite, but his voice harbored another quality which I could best describe as a readiness to see me as several different kinds of asshole at once. It was different from an assumption in that an assumption is passive; the quality in his voice was watching and waiting. I ignored it and pressed on, secure in the knowledge that I am not an asshole.

“Well good for you,” I said. “Because it’s a piece of trash. Ordinarily I don’t buy it either, but I did this week because there’s an article in here about Anna Granite, the most important thinker of our time. Do you know who she is?”

He turned his head to curse at a car which had forced its snout between us and the lane we were rightfully headed for. We jerked to a halt as a dark, leaping boy skipped in front of us and continued nimbly through the traffic, a yelling man in baggy red pants stumbling in pursuit. The driver ferociously manned the wheel; we swerved, and I fell to one side in a rattle of paper. I struggled up and briefly took in the awfulness of the moment, the panting vehicles, their primitive engines covered with a thin veneer of colored metal and cheap style, all tiny compartments for embattled humans on seat-belt leashes, vainly trying to assert their presence
with the classical or rap or rock music spilling crazily out their windows to be consumed by the grinding of gears and the clouds of noxious fumes. Construction workers hammered and drilled, bicycle messengers shot into the invisible future of their destination, thousands of faces passed through my line of vision, thousands of expression lines, eye-glints, and hair cuts. An unoccupied strip of street opened before us; the driver gunned his motor, and I was thrown back against the seat.