Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

He emphasized these last three words as though they were steel jaws closing on the horrified face of a victim who has realized too late the trap he’s been sitting in. Justine pictured the people on the subway holding shopping bags and reading the Post . Jack nodded and beamed.

Justine rode home on the subway in a good mood which was only slightly disturbed by the four ragged, crack-eyed beggars who walked through the cars mutely shaking paper cups of change. Hers was among the arms that furtively thrust coins into the cups while the corresponding eyes scanned cardboard ads for the AIDS Hotline and Dynamic Business School, as though it would embarrass the rest of the body to know that the hands had assisted a desperate person, however minimally.

She ate her take-out salad on the floor and was preparing to read an autobiography of one of the sixties’ most active rock ’n’ roll groupies when she received a phone call from the fat lady interviewee inviting her to what sounded like some sort of group therapy. As in the interview, the woman seemed to get angry at her for no reason; as in the interview, Justine found herself inexplicably intimidated by her. She made a stammering attempt to mollify Dorothy and then got off the phone. Unable to return to the groupie book, she thought of the woman she’d met, the poor bloated creature with her flowered dress and corona of false red, her invented name wafting above her, attached by the thinnest of threads. She tried to imagine this person as a child, to imagine her life. She had a sensation of cold and dark, a dark house, remote, terrifying parents whose faces were somehow blocked from her psychic view, like killers in masks. Dorothy had eaten breakfast with these people, shared the bathroom with them, probably exchanged Christmas presents. It was incredible to Justine.

The hell of it was, the fat woman was obviously very tough in some way. She had that craziness locked into formation, doing drills, getting her up and out and moving through life, with a roof over her head and money in her pocket, instead of roaming the Hades of beggars and bag people, many of whom had had, Justine suspected, normal homes and lives at some point. Where had this strength come from? Surely not her mother; no sane mother could have allowed her husband to sexually assault her child. Perhaps there had been moments of tenderness before puberty, outbursts of love strong enough to support a budding human. Perhaps somewhere deep under the suffocating mud of her parents’ psychology there had been hidden pockets of sanity and self-respect that Dorothy had unconsciously sought out with the unerring impulse of a plant root, distant pockets from which she drew enough nurture to survive.

The phone rang and Justine regarded it warily for some rings before she answered. It was her mother.

If her mother’s voice had changed during the past twenty years, it wasn’t detectable to Justine. It still had that quality of groundless cheer that had inspired, then galled, then depressed Justine as a child. Justine liked and even respected her mother (albeit reflexively), but the sound of her voice always made Justine recoil into some emotionless state in which her own voice became flat as processed air. No matter how she vowed to be kind and warm, no matter how she reminded herself of the profundity of the mother-daughter connection, her mother’s habitual greeting—“Hello, hello!”—delivered with that relentless optimism, never failed to transform her into a robot.

“So, dear, tell me what you are doing. I need some excitement in my life. What is a young woman in New York City doing for fun?”

Justine gritted her teeth as she related the only event that could possibly come under the heading “Fun.”

“I’m not going out much now,” she finished. “I’m busy working on this piece for Urban Vision .” Actually, it was fun describing Jack and Dave, and her mother was thrilled to hear of her possible interview with Austin Heller.

Her mother began talking about the wonderful new friend she’d met in her yoga class, the stylish and adventurous Martina, a recently divorced thirty-eight-year-old with whom she was trading books and going to a “really nice little” bar in Deere Parke. It wrung Justine’s heart to think of her mother sitting in a pick-up bar with all her makeup on.

“Now we’re reading a really interesting book about Peggy Guggenheim and her circle. I just love it, but after I put it down, I find myself feeling such envy for all these people and their wonderful lives. Ah, well. Maybe I was just born into the wrong decade.”

After she got off the phone, Justine felt the need to go sit in a bar with all her makeup on. She tried to avoid it by grimly walking block after block, handing change to beggars and being called a dyke by a ghostly lurking boy. She was on her way home, having successfully fought the urge to drink, when she was chased into a bar by a man in an Armani suit who wildly waved a broken bottle and yelled “I love you! I love you! I want to eat your shit and drink your piss!”

It was a dark bar with heavy air, tended and frequented mainly by old men whose personalities seemed to have drained from their upper bodies and become lodged in their buttocks and thighs, which, as a result of having to carry that extra weight, needed to rest on as many bar stools as possible. These men turned and faced the bottle-waving screamer and the collective impact of that stultified buttock-impacted energy was enough to make him lower his bottle and slink out the door. Well, thought Justine, that’s a relief. Still, you never know; he might wait for me outside. I’d better sit in here for a while. She approached the beautiful oak bar and gazed at herself in the mirror behind it. The heavy, cloudy glass seemed like the deep water she’d sometimes seen herself sinking into in dreams. Alistair, a kindly bartender with a collapsing face, gave her a free scotch to help her get over the coprophiliac assault, and she sat absorbing the hideous modern rock music—“Ohhh! Livin’ on a prayer!”—that these old guys apparently had a secret need to bludgeon themselves with.

She’d had two drinks when she noticed that there was a sharp elfin face in the mirror with her. It was such a contrast to the other faces there that she stared at it, uncertain if it were male or female. It smiled at her with an elegant facial twist, and she had the uneasy sensation of someone sliding a finger under one of her tendons and prying it away from her muscle, quite casually speculating on how far it could be pulled before it snapped.

He crossed the room and sat beside her at the bar. “Hi,” he said. He expelled smoke from his full lips and sat with his slim, small body inclined towards her as if he’d known her a long time.

Justine felt an odd sensation of excitement, as she gradually eased her tendon back into place, odd because it involved feelings of contempt towards this stuck-up stranger which were somehow playful. She looked into his drunken eyes and found them simultaneously vague and penetrating; she felt that a conversation with him would involve a continual grope for something which would turn out to be, on contact, completely illusory. And there was something else about him, something diffuse and yet heavy and potent infusing his whole presence. He blew a throatful of smoke in her face. “A little young for this crowd, aren’t you?” he remarked.

She deftly snatched the cigarette from his lips, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. “I only come here when I’m desperate,” she answered. “What about you?”

He hadn’t quite recovered from having his cigarette snatched so he was slow in answering. “Actually I was going to go to the Hellfire Club down the street, but it turns out tonight is queer night. Want to buy me some more cigarettes?”