Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Well, with something like this — I didn’t know how experienced you were in an interview situation.”

I thought I saw a shade of kindness in the dutiful shield of her expression. I felt a tendril of empathy appear between us. “It’s all right. I know what I’m doing. I trust you.”

“All right.” Her pen was ready.

“So, anyway, by the time I was seventeen, I had a very negative view of life, and a horrific view of sex. Then I read Anna Granite and suddenly a whole different way of looking at life was presented to me. She showed me that human beings can live in strength and honor. And that sex is actually part of that strength and honor, not oppositional to it. And she was the first writer to do that, ever. To show that sex is not only loving but empowering and enlarging. Not only for men but for women. As you can imagine, this was a big revelation to me. And then the rest was just. the sheer beauty of her ideas. That morality is based on the right to choose for yourself, that your life is yours — she held up a vision for me, and her vision helped me through terrible times. I mean, by the time I discovered Granite, I had just about given up.”

She glanced up at me with an expression that was impossible to read.

“I think I’m going to have some tea now.” She scribbled wildly as I poured myself a cup of tea and stirred in the lumps of sugar and cream. I reached for a little boiled dumpling and reclined to eat it before going on.

“I finally escaped my father by going to a rather strange little two-year college that I think has ceased to exist. But that didn’t work out so well because I overloaded myself with a job and fulltime classes, and I dropped out just before I would’ve graduated. It was around this time that I began attending Granite’s lectures.”

“What were they like?”

“They were wonderful, they were exciting. Beau Bradley was like one of her heroes. There were only about fifteen to twenty people in the original group, but that didn’t diminish the sophistication, the intellectual thunder. I felt I was connecting with the life force of humanity. At the first lecture I sat there and wept. I just wept.”

“What was Granite like?”

“My first reaction — I hate to say it but it’s true — my first reaction was disappointment with her physical appearance. Everybody reacted that way. I was expecting — wanting — her to look like one of her heroines and here she was looking like a middle-aged housewife in a Chanel dress. No, no, she didn’t look like that. I don’t want that recorded.”

Justine grudgingly gave her pen a token second of rest.

“She had beautiful lips and eyes, the most intense eyes. They were huge and soulful, and I have never seen a photograph that does them justice. She was a short woman, but she stood tall. She used to come to the meetings wearing this beautiful black cape with purple lining, and the moment she walked in, it was like magic.” Images of Granite, Bradley, and his rosy-skinned wife Magdalen zipped through my mind in vivid succession, as if imprinted on bright, quickly flipped cards. “There was one time I especially remember that she came in wearing a pale blue dress and the most astonishing turquoise necklace you ever saw. This necklace was just so shimmering and so full of light, it was like the sun and stars combined. It was unreal. And another thing about that night”—I paused to adjust my dress, to tuck one leg safely under me—“she had just come back from a vacation in Jamaica, and she had this dark, beautiful tan. And it was impossible not to notice that Beau Bradley had a dark, beautiful tan, too, and that Magdalen did not.”

Justine looked up with what was beginning to be an annoyingly impartial expression. “In some of the things I’ve read, it was implied that they’d had an affair, but I—”

“Oh, they did. It was obvious that Granite and Bradley had gone away that weekend. Poor Magdalen knew about it. That day after the weekend, Granite was just radiant, so triumphant, that it was even more obvious.” I stopped to assess the effect of my words. “I know this sounds like trashy gossip. But I don’t say it disrespectfully. The only reason I bring it up is because of how it fits in to what ultimately happened in the movement.”

Justine looked at me with puzzlement; she unknotted her legs and shifted them demurely to one side. “My next question relates to that,” she said. “How has the character of the movement changed in the last ten years?”

I did not see the relationship this question bore to my information, but I answered it anyway. “It’s disintegrating without a strong center. The last Definitist meeting I went to was eight years ago. It was at the Centurion Hotel, as it had originally been, and Wilson Bean was speaking. It was nothing like the original lectures. It was so depressing. Poor Wilson stood up there, hanging on the lectern and blabbing, with his little twit girlfriend sitting behind him. What was especially significant to me — at the original meetings, there were these beautiful crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and a lush thick carpet on the floor, and elegant, velvet high-backed chairs for the audience. And on every single chair was placed a pad of heavy vellum note paper and a thick silver pen. Can you imagine? Who else would go to such lengths? It was pure enchantment. And at that last meeting, they were using folding chairs and fluorescent lights. It was still the Centurion Hotel, but they’d rented a cheap room. That was it in a nutshell.” I took an egg roll from my platter. “Don’t you want anything?”

She looked quickly away from her notes. “I think I am ready to have a little bite.” She zeroed in on a piece of sweet and sour pork that I suspect she’d been eyeing all along. She daintily dabbed her lips with the tip of her tongue. I finished my egg roll and poured another cup of tea.

“Have you met Wilson or any of the others who were around then?”

“Wilson Bean I’ve only talked to on the phone. One or two, I’ve met.”

“What were they like?”

“Pleasant, polite.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” I tried to see an oddly pretty, coldly vulnerable little woman like Justine through the eyes of a male intellectual; yes, they’d like her all right. “Some of them weren’t pleasant at all. I used to see some of Granite’s followers do things like attack people who were basically silly and harmless and unable to defend themselves in front of Granite, to impress her. There was one fellow who publicly demeaned his girlfriend. There was a lot of sheer flirtation too. Lots of girls fell in love with Definitism because of the erotic power of the books. No one wanted to admit how important the sex was, but let’s face it — the books were very erotic. There were all these intrigues going on, all these little girls wanting to satisfy their sexual cravings, and some of the men took full advantage.”

I took a deep drink of tea. It was too sweet, and I enjoyed it as I enjoyed reconstructing the movement that had transported me from the evil universe of my childhood to the bland and benevolent planet of my Queens apartment, my cabs, my legal documents. “It’s disturbing to me that there were cruel and exploitative people in the movement. And some of them were Granite’s right-hand people, her intellectuals, for God’s sake.”

We regarded each other for a few seconds. She unfolded her legs, sat up straight, and asked, “How do you explain those kinds of people in Anna Granite’s following?”

“I was going to get to that.” I paused, and in that pause tried to gauge the hopefulness of conveying my meaning to this unresponsive creature. I saw Bradley and Granite before me on the lectern, saw Granite’s meaningful look as she caressed Bradley’s hand while handing him the notes for his speech, saw Magdalen’s averted eyes and Bradley’s manly coolness. “You see, Granite and Bradley were two rare creatures. They were of the same species. And that they should be sexually mated as well as professionally, philosophically mated — well, it was like the Definitist formula for matching components. According to Definitism, it was logically impossible for them not to have an affair. And it was equally impossible for Magdalen, as a Definitist, to refuse to accept it, as it was to her partner’s highest good, and so on. But you see, it happened only because Bradley believed that sexual desire must spring from objective admiration. He believed he should desire Granite when he didn’t. And she tried to demand from him that which can’t be demanded. It became really awful to watch. She was a good twenty years older than he, and I think that, with a young man. well, it was just undignified somehow. It finally came to a head during a party at the Centurion. Bradley had foisted Magdalen off on a body builder who’d just joined the meetings”—a painful and acute flash of that melancholy muscle man, his hammy hands absently patting Magdalen’s waist as her trembling body huddled against his bulk—“but instead of dancing with Granite he spent the whole evening courting a beautiful blond actress named Cheryl Bland. And Granite was furious. She finally ordered the music stopped and stalked out, her cape streaming behind her. The next day Bradley’s Definitist Symposium was closed down, and Bradley was a broken man. I remember him that last day, leaving his office with a cardboard box of papers and books. He just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ It was a permanent rift, and none of their ideas, however great, could help them.” I paused, dizzy with the memory, the awful wrenching apart of these magnificent human beings who should’ve been together forever, yet never could. Justine’s face had taken on a matte dreamy quality.