Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Not if you’re going to blow smoke in my face.”

“I was just trying to get your attention. Like boys on the playground. When they pull up your skirt and knock you down it means they like you, didn’t your mama ever tell you that?”

His voice had the delicacy of a slim snake moving through wet grass. She tried to understand her reaction to him. It was no use; she was dealing with feelings ranging from disinterest and irritation to sickening arousal. He reached out and touched the tip of her nose. “You’re really cute,” he said. “With those big glasses you look like an autistic kid in a Diane Arbus picture.”

“And you’re really rude. Why don’t you go bother somebody else?”

“I’m not rude, you’re just drunk.”

She stood up, grabbed for her coat, fumbled, and dropped it. He put his hand on her elbow. “Please don’t go. I am rude, but it’s only because I’m too drunk to flirt. I’ve been watching you since you came in. I think you’re adorable.”

She hesitated, confused. She wondered if he were the person who’d chased her into the bar, if he’d just gone home to change his clothes.

“But if you want to go, I won’t stop you. Here, I’ll even help you.” He picked up her coat and draped it across her shoulders. He got her scarf and was winding it around her neck with a sloppy flourish when she said, “Cut it out. If you want to apologize, buy me a drink instead.”

“Great idea! I need one too.” He summoned Alistair, who smiled paternally at her as if delighted to be watching an actual pick-up, probably a rare occurrence in this place.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “What a weird day.” She remembered her interview with Jack and Dave that afternoon and the phone conversation with what’s-her-name and felt like a wild boar crashing through a life of figurines.

“So what happened? You said you only came here when you were desperate. What’re you desperate about?”

His voice was soft and gentle in a TV lover-boy style, but his pale eyes glittered with the adrenal malice of a sex criminal who likes to crack jokes while reaming his sobbing victims. She turned away from him. Next to her, one old guy grasped the arm of another and said, “Take care, Jim. Don’t let it get you down.” The sight of human comfort injured her. The jukebox bawled about sex. She turned again to the smirking vandal at her side. “I’m desperate because I–I’m not actually desperate at all generally, it’s just that some mental case was chasing me with a broken bottle so I ducked in here.”

“Oh.” He seemed disappointed. “You look like you’re pretty desperate generally. That’s a compliment. I like desperate women.”

She tried to read his face, which increasingly struck her as hard and immobile under its thin layer of easy expression. She finally noticed that he was very handsome. “Why do you like desperate women? Because they’re easy to push around?”

He smiled. “I like the way you think. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a part-time secretary and also a writer.” She was ashamed of herself for trying to impress this creep, but “writer” had just slipped out.

“Oh yeah? A writer, huh?” He smiled and lifted his drink to his mouth as though to suppress a horse laugh. His slim throat palpitated; she had an urge to touch the exposed vein. He put down his glass, his eyes coolly releasing a jet of sarcasm into her face. “And what do you write about?”

One part of her stepped forward like a first grader in a starched dress with her hands clasped behind her back and, with eager animation, she began to describe the Anna Granite article while another part of her skulked in the background, angrily eyeing the first grader, and yet another part of her tried to puzzle out why she was talking to this prick, let alone exhausting her short supply of charm on him. She was lonely, desperately so; she could feel the loneliness scraping along her insides every time she witnessed the slightest display of human warmth between strangers. But Justine had a hard little spiny pride that stiffly forbade her to talk with people solely out of loneliness, and she wasn’t drunk enough to ignore it. What else could it be? She looked again at the boy’s face as he listened — actually quite intently, it seemed his snotty composure was somewhat shaken by the Anna Granite article — and tried to feel what it was. Although she didn’t remember this, it was as though she and the stranger were doing what she and her mother had done over the phone many times many years ago, as though beneath the nasty and tedious conversation, he was emanating some urgent, insistent signal and was being received by a hitherto slumbering segment of her and answered with a good deal of ferocity. Of course it was sex, but it was something else as well, something that was becoming swollen and unwieldy, like a helium balloon rapidly inflating under her behind. The skulking part of her grimaced to hear her outermost aspect use the word “interesting” again and again with almost the exact degree of irritating elocution her mother habitually used. She struggled to analyze this attraction before she was overwhelmed by it. There was also the contempt; why didn’t the contempt kill her interest in him rather than titillating it with a spastic corkscrew jab that first made her shudder, then provoked a sensual, playful hostility that made her want to cuff him like a cat would swat a kitten.

“That sounds cool,” he was saying. “I read her stuff when I was in high school. I loved it.”

“Yeah?” Her separated selves came banging together in shared curiosity. “Why did you love it?”

“I don’t remember.” He actually seemed to be trying to talk to her, and this show of respect and humanity after his ugliness made him seem complex. “There was good sex in it, but that wasn’t all. I don’t know.”

The moment of genuine conversation seemed to leave him subdued. He sat facing the bar with his body in a curl, staring at his drink as though he’d just realized he had to be at work tomorrow morning. The jukebox was silent.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked.

“I’m an art director for Grab magazine.” Without his animating mask of sarcasm, his face was tired and pinched. “It’s dumb but I like it. The people are nice.”

To her dismay she was afraid he was about to get up and leave. “My name’s Justine,” she said with sudden extroversion. “What’s yours?”

“Bryan.” He turned towards her again, his face regaining its life. “Have you ever been to the Hellfire Club?”

“I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s an S&M club.” He watched her. “You know, master, slave, people being tied up and beaten, women getting fucked by dozens of guys. I’ll bet you’d like it.”

This was a jarring speech, but instead of pushing her away from him she felt it pull her towards him. A bolt of sensation zipped through her genitals and nailed her to her seat, and she felt much as she had when she was a prepubescent cruising the mall with a pack of boys at her heels; dislocated, aroused, and disturbed to be having such a personal reaction in a public place. Oh Christ, she thought. Not this again. Her heart beat arrhythmically against the bones of her rib cage. She looked for Alistair and saw him far, far away, at the other end of the bar, his big once-strong body in an absent-minded slump as he wiped some glasses.

“You would like it, wouldn’t you? I’d suggest we go except now it’s just queers giving each other AIDS.”

“I didn’t think it was legal anymore, for straights or gays to screw in public.”

“Murder isn’t legal either, but people do it.”

This frightened her. She suddenly remembered where she had heard the name of this club before; it was the last place a beautiful model had been seen before being ritually murdered. “I wouldn’t want to go anyway.” She frantically tried to make eye contact with Alistair, who smiled and waved.