David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

‘It sounds taxing,’ Drinion says.

Meredith Rand lights the cigarette she’s been holding. ‘Plus other girls hate you; they don’t even know you or talk to you and they decide they hate you, just because of how the boys all react — like you’re a threat to them, or they assume you’re a stuck-up bitch without even trying to get to know you.’ She has a definite style of averting her head to exhale and then bringing it back. Most people think she’s very direct.

‘I wasn’t a ditz,’ she says. ‘I was good with figures. I won the algebra prize in tenth-grade algebra. But of course nobody cared about me being smart or good at math. Even the men teachers got all googly and nervous or pervy and flirty when I came up after or something to ask about something. Like I was a fox and there was no way anybody could ever even think to see anything more than that.

‘Listen,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not like I think I’m all that pretty. I’m not saying I’m beautiful. Actually I’ve never thought I was all that beautiful. My eyebrows are too heavy, for one thing. I’m not going to go around plucking them, but they’re too heavy. And my neck is, like, twice as long as a normal person’s, when I look in the mirror.’

‘…’

‘Not that it even matters.’

‘No.’

‘No what?’

‘No, I understand it doesn’t really matter,’ Drinion says.

‘Except it does. You don’t get it. The prettiness thing — at least when you’re that age, it’s like a kind of trap. There’s a greedy part of you that really likes the attention. You’re special, you’re desirable. It’s easy to start thinking of the prettiness as you, like it’s all you’ve got, it’s what makes you special. In your designer jeans and little sweaters you can put in the dryer so they’re even tighter. Walking around like that.’ Although it’s not as if what Meredith Rand wears at the Post is effacing or dowdy. They’re professional ensembles, well within code, but many of the Post’s examiners still bite their knuckles when she goes by, especially in cold months, when the extremely dry air produces static cling.

She says: ‘The flip side being how you also start understanding that you’re really just a piece of meat. Is what you are. Really desirable meat, but also that you’ll never get taken seriously and never, like, be the president of a bank or something because no one will ever be able to see past the prettiness, the prettiness is what affects them and what makes them feel anything, and that’s all that matters to them, and it’s hard not to get sucked into that, to start, like, arranging yourself and seeing yourself the same way.’

‘You mean seeing and reacting to people through whether or not they’re attractive?’

‘No, no. ’ You can see that Meredith Rand would have a hard time quitting cigarettes, since she uses the way she smokes and exhales and moves her head to convey a lot of affect. ‘I mean starting to see yourself as a piece of meat, that the only thing you’ve got is your looks and the way you affect boys, guys. You start doing it without even knowing you’re doing it. And it’s scary, because at the same time it also feels like a box; you know there’s more to you inside you because you can feel it, but nobody else will ever know — not even other girls, who either hate you or are scared of you, because you’re a monopsony, or else if they’re also the foxes or the cheerleaders they’re competing with you and feel like they have to do this whole competitive catty thing that guys don’t have any idea of, but trust me, it can be really cruel.’

The fact that one of Drinion’s nostrils is slightly larger than the other sometimes makes it look as though he’s cocking his head a little bit, even when he is not. It’s somewhat parallel to the mouth-breathing thing. Meredith Rand usually interprets expressionlessness as inattention, the way someone’s face blanks out when you’re talking and they’re pretending to listen but not really listening, but this is not the way Drinion’s expressionlessness seems. Also, it’s either her imagination or Drinion is sitting up steadily straighter and taller, because he seems to be slightly taller than when the tête-à-tête started. A collection of different kinds of old-fashioned fedoras and homburgs and various business hats glued or pinned somehow to a varnished rosewood board that had been visible on the opposite wall of Meibeyer’s over Drinion’s head is now partly obscured by the crown of his head and the slight cowlick that sticks up at his round head’s apex. Drinion is actually levitating slightly, which is what happens when he is completely immersed; it’s very slight, and no one can see that his bottom is floating slightly above the seat of the chair. One night someone comes into the office and sees Drinion floating upside down over his desk with his eyes glued to a complex return, Drinion himself unaware of the levitating thing by definition, since it is only when his attention is completely on something else that the levitation happens.

‘Which is part of the feeling of the box,’ Meredith Rand is continuing. ‘There’s the feeling, which in teenagers is really bad anyway, of feeling like nobody can really ever know you or love you for who you are because they can’t really see you and for some reason you won’t let them even though you feel like you want them to. But it’s also at the same time a feeling that you know it’s boring and immature and like a bad type of movie problem, “Boo hoo, no one can love me for who I am,” so you’re also aware that your loneliness is stupid and banal even while you’re feeling it, the loneliness, so you don’t even have any sympathy for yourself. And this is what we talked about, this is what he told me about, that he knew without me telling him: how lonely I was, and how the cutting had something to do with the prettiness and feeling like I had no right to complain but still being really unhappy at the same time believing that not being pretty seemed like it would be the end of the world, I’d just be a piece of meat nobody wanted instead of a piece of meat they did happen to want. Like I was trapped inside it, and I still really had no right to complain about it because look at all the girls who were jealous and thought no one who’s pretty could be lonely or have any problems, and even if I did complain, then all the complaining was banal, he taught me banal, and tête-à-tête, and how this can become part of the whole loneliness — the truth of saying “I’m just meat, people only care about me as beautiful, no one cares what I really am inside, I’m lonely” is totally boring and banal, like something corny in Redbook, not beautiful or unique, or special. Which was the first time I thought of the scars and the cutting as letting the unbeautiful inside truth come out, be on the outside, even if I was also hiding it under long sleeves — although your blood is really actually quite pretty if you really look at it, I mean when it first comes out, although the cut has to be very careful and fine and not too deep so the blood just more appears as a line that kind of slowly wells up, so it’s thirty seconds or more before you have to wipe because it’s starting to run.’

‘Does it hurt?’ Shane Drinion asks.

Meredith Rand exhales sharply and looks right at him. ‘What do you mean does it? I don’t do it anymore. I never have, since I met him. Because he more or less told me all this and told me the truth, that it doesn’t ultimately matter why I do it or what it, like, represents or what it’s about.’ Her gaze is very level and matter-of-fact. ‘All that matters is that I was doing it and to stop doing it. That was it. Unlike the doctors and small groups that were all about your feelings and why, as though if you knew why you did it you’d magically be able to stop. Which he said was the big lie they all bought that made doctors and standard therapy such a waste of time for people like us — they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, it would stop. Which is bullshit,’ Meredith Rand says. ‘You only stop if you stop. Not if you wait for somebody to explain it in some magic way that will presto change-o make you stop.’ She makes a sardonic flourish with her cigarette hand as she says presto change-o.