Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Hey, wait a minute, don’t be scared. Shit, you’re really scared!” He stood and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him; his small white face was neither sarcastic nor limp, but taut with an expression she couldn’t identify. “Don’t be scared, I’m not dangerous, I’m just a nut. Okay, I’m a little bit perverted, I admit it. But I wouldn’t really hurt you. I just like to shock people.”

“Yeah, you and Richard Speck.” She shook off his hand and pulled on her coat, digging in the pockets for dollars that flapped around elusively. Alistair moved towards them, slapping his trusty rag on the bar with a professional flourish.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

She got her coat and scarf under control while he reflexively navigated the world of commerce and hearty gestures. “Everybody who finds me attractive is a fucking maniac of some kind,” she thought. “Every time I meet somebody cute he wants me to pee on him or some goddamn thing.” She had the comforting thought that any minute now she would be at home, sobbing on her bed, alone but unmolested. She fought her way through the air, holding back her tears. She had just made her escape out the door when he appeared at her side.

“I hope you were kidding with that Richard Speck crack.”

“I just wanna go home.”

He grabbed her shoulders with both hands. If his grab had felt like the beginning of an attack she would’ve run; had it felt like a full attack she would have turned and hit him. But it was just powerful enough to hold her yet tender enough to paralyze her. “Don’t run away,” he said. “Please don’t be afraid of me.”

She turned to him and saw his face, drained and exhausted, his eyes wide with alarm. He pulled her to him and she collapsed against his small chest, exhausted. She felt his quick heart leaping urgently. He emanated warmth. His dick hardened against her abdomen. He stroked her hair. She began to cry. “Honey,” he said. “Darling.”

My first days of work for Beau Bradley were so fraught with reverence and vigilance that I existed in a strange state that was both hyperaware and muddled. I arrived that first morning in such a sleepless fever that the physical perfection of tall, smiling Bradley didn’t awe or excite me — I, who usually saw beautiful males as species from a hostile planet. He seemed like nothing less than de rigueur for this storybook I’d stepped into. I was trying with all my flabby concentration to absorb the details, to be a good employee. I’m not sure why I wasn’t too disoriented to function at all, except that my entire life had been made up of incredible situations in contrast to which this one seemed unusual only in that it was positive. The very bizarre and extreme nature of finding myself employed by my idol the day after meeting her was what made it, in a sense, natural to me. The experience was so charged, so heady that I lived those days in my head, my breath high and quivering on the pinnacle of my deserted body. Anything more mundane would’ve sunk me back into my chest and pelvis, right onto my legs where I would’ve felt my old creaking soul slowly doing the hoops and ladders of my life.

But Beau Bradley was anything but mundane. He had black hair, silky, almost feminine white skin, the cleft-chinned square jaw of a movie star, and blue eyes that matched Granite’s. Even more unusual, his kindness equaled his beauty. When I entered the office — medium-sized, clean, sparely furnished with modern furniture and stark steel sculpture, located in an oblong building that also housed the Philadelphia Mah-Jongg Society — he smiled at me as if it were utterly natural for me to enter his sphere. His hand enveloped mine with warmth and pressure that was respectful and protective as a father is supposed to be. “Anna has told me so much about you,” he said.

I nodded, realizing that he probably knew my secret. I didn’t find this probability shaming or even inappropriate. “Then you know I haven’t had experience,” I said.

“From what I’ve heard, that doesn’t matter. Anna can tell from speaking with someone for five minutes what they’re made of, and she says I should jump at the chance to hire you.”

The phone rang and Bradley, with an “Excuse me,” disappeared into his private office, leaving the door open. I stood in the outer office, in front of what was probably to be my desk, holding my purse against my body, feeling my heart beat against it. I absorbed the cream-colored walls, the skeletal bookcases and their books, the bindings of which seemed to vibrate with color and significance. I stared at a spiney, determined-looking little sculpture of a man hoisting the world on his shoulders and thought, “That’s me.” I knew it was a silly thought, but I excused it on the grounds that it was emblematic and that it was a prefiguring of the new direction my life would now take.

Bradley spent about fifteen minutes explaining my duties to me. They seemed, in spite of Granite’s description of their arduous nature, to be pretty easy. Answering the phone, typing letters, photocopying, dictation, an occasional run to the post office or deli — all in a quiet office that appeared to receive a phone call every two or three hours. The apparent simplicity bewildered and then panicked me — what if it seemed simple because I was not grasping the entire picture but only seeing the most obvious elements in a complex mosaic! I spent the rest of the morning sweating in my woolly skirt, spot-checking the filing system, cleaning the coffee filter, roaring through a letter, pouncing on the phone whenever I could. Noon arrived and Bradley went out saying, “Take a breather, have some lunch!” I ate my cheese sandwich, potato chips, and candy bar at my desk and allowed myself an hour of feeling superior. If this was hard work then other jobs must be softer than anything I’d ever experienced in my life — and no wonder Granite had such contempt for the common people! I ate my sandwich with one hand and straightened the Rolodex with the other, marveling at my own efficiency.

By the time Bradley had returned from lunch, however, I was again full of self-doubt, which was later exacerbated by a typing mistake which Bradley jovially brought to my attention.

The next two days — half days both — followed the same pattern, except that they were enlivened by the appearance of Definitists from other parts of the country who had long conferences with Bradley. There were three of them, two men — one rotund with a receding hairline, the other weirdly tall, his sensitive brow a-twitch with the weight of heavy glasses — and a big woman with small eyes and a bun of brown hair who breathed in strange broken sighs.

On the fourth day Bradley asked me to join him for lunch. We closed the office and went to a plain, clean luncheonette with speckled table tops. I dimly remember a jukebox playing dramatic love music as we sat across from one another, smiling over our menus. He asked me how I was enjoying the work. I said very much. We ordered our sandwiches. For the first time I felt self-conscious about being fat before him and refrained from ordering the milkshake and double fries I would’ve liked. We ate without speaking for several moments, but rather than feeling isolated from him, I felt bonded by our mutual silent intensity. Besides, this way I didn’t have to worry about saying something stupid.

Mid-sandwich he spoke. “I asked you to lunch for a reason.”

I nodded and my heart sank.

“We — Anna and I — need you just now to do more than your usual duties. You’ve noticed the three people I’ve been meeting with. They are three of the top Definitist intellectuals in the country, and two of them — Doctor Wilson Bean, the English professor, and Wilma Humple, the banker — will be meeting with Anna and me along with Knight Ludlow, a financier from New York, to do intensive conference work for about two weeks. We would like to have our discussion transcribed, and Anna and I would like you to be the one to do it.”