Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Tell me,” he said. “How did you come to work for Anna Granite? I know she just met you the night I saw you.”

So our conversation began. As soon as they found an opening, the words rolled out in proper form, only more freely than usual. I told him that my life at home had been unbearable, but not why. I expanded more on my life at college, ending with my appearance before Granite.

Then he talked about his life, which included leaving home at the age of sixteen to escape an alcoholic father. This prompted me to ask him questions about his apparently quick rise to success at age thirty-three. I had never had a conversation like this before. Every sentence, from him or me, felt new, wobbly, and vulnerable, waving in the air between us like tiny ant limbs. I felt frightened that I would say something wrong, uncertain as to what was appropriate between relative strangers. I tried to stay with the facts, but even so every new phrase added more footage to a bridge, the length and direction of which I couldn’t predict. But despite my anxiety, his voice, as much as the pills, drew me further and further into conversation, unable to resist brushing against this foreign element of gentle strength.

When we reached my hotel, he said good night, smiled, and left. I mounted the stairs to my room, my words and feelings still extended from me like a limb groping the air for something no longer there. I entered my small suite, removed my shoes, dropped my handbag, and walked through the room in the dark to the bathroom (the toilet rather; there was a communal shower in the hall). I turned on the light, stood before the full-length mirror, and, in that narrow space, slowly stripped off my clothes until I was naked except for my socks. I stood for several moments looking, as if I were an adolescent girl just developing breasts. I didn’t look to see whether I was attractive or not, I just looked.

Then I turned off the light and got in bed.

The next day, during lunch hour, I used some of my new financial abundance (Granite’s already generous wage was increased with all the overtime) to buy two new skirts, two shirts, and a pair of pants. All were two delightful sizes smaller than my conspicuously loose-fitting older clothes. I also bought a paper, which I immediately folded to highlight the rental ads. I sat at my desk reading coded descriptions of “sunny efficiencies” and “furnished 1 bedrm.,” my new clothes bundled in exciting bags under the desk, where I could squeeze them between my knees.

That night the dynamic of the conference was rearranged by Knight’s new proximity to me; all night I felt the friendly tug of his warmth, the silent communication of the invisible antennae tickling the air between us. I felt something open in my body, something like a rare flower that absorbs molecules, pheromones, and oxygen, then secretes them in a glittering membrane of vibrancy, fecundity, and power, a membrane that quivered tautly every time Knight’s image came into my mind.

The meetings that week didn’t run as late as they had previously, and Knight walked me home three times. Each time we sent up new flares which left streams of colored light between us, until there was a cat’s cradle of crisscrossing beams that swayed between us.

On the third walk, I asked him, as we stood outside my hotel, why he had said the previous week that I didn’t seem ordinary to him.

“Something in your face,” he replied. “There’s an unusual combination in your expressions. Sometimes you’re so blank and remote, you’re impossible to read. Other times your eyes are so soft and emotional. But also strong. I think you’re very strong.”

He stood, serious and tense. I had the almost physical sensation that he was going to stroke my face. My skin drew tight.

“Good night,” he said.

Fourteen years later , I sat before a legal document, staring into space, stroking my own face with my hand. I had been thinking obsessively of Knight Ludlow for a week, probably because I had seen his picture on a page of the Times , which had been pulled apart and spread open on a table in the cafeteria. He was still handsome. He had just been named financial advisor to the mayor of New York City. This information, along with the auxiliary information in the article (which did not mention Anna Granite), put me in a melancholy state, and I wandered the abandoned halls for a good half hour before returning to my station, staring with disbelief at the tiny stuffed animals and smiling pictures on the desks of secretaries. Who among my co-workers would believe me, if I should choose to tell them, that this man had once stood with me late at night, talking to me about the expression in my eyes? I went into a ladies’ room on the other side of the building where I was unlikely to be interrupted. I stood before a full-length mirror and looked at my huge body, even lifting up my skirt and rolling down my pantyhose to examine the pocked layer of cellulite on my thighs and butt. I looked at it a long time, wondering that this puckered yellow flesh was actually me.

It is probable that the stirred memory of Knight Ludlow played a role in my finally acting on my repeated resolutions to join a gym. I didn’t feel as embarrassed as I’d expected, wading in wearing my monstrous cotton sweats. At first I restricted myself to the weight area, the largest place in the gym. The weight area was prowled by huge muscular men in stylish leotards adorned with enormous leather belts at their waists, who looked straight ahead as they walked and showed their teeth as they strained to lift. Our endeavors were performed in decorous silence far from the disco-throbbing aerobics room where squadrons of little creatures leapt and kicked. It was a calming, contemplative experience to be part of the rising and lowering, continually slow-moving machinery, and no one laughed at me struggling with my light weight.

The experience — especially the fascinating dressing room, everyone with their interesting underwear, their unpredictable body combinations, their fussy animal-like grooming rituals — was an active bustling island on the slumbering sea of my daily life, and a reason to wake up. I now looked out my window at the boy exercisers across the street with camaraderie and felt my new-forming muscles.

I had been going for two weeks when I gave in to my curiosity and stood at the aerobics room door watching the classes. They weren’t all little creatures. Many were middle-aged and plump, a few were men. There was a certain high-chested majesty in their synchronous movements, their bright outfits were emblematic of sex and fun, the music sang about love and destiny and feverish pleading. The teacher, a beautiful black woman with rosy purple-hued skin, paced among the exercisers crying out, “Up and down, up and down, that’s right, that’s right, you got it!” her voice like crimson roses burning in the air. I watched voyeuristically, knowing I was peeping at people in the middle of a collective dream. I imagined myself among them, part of the regimental dance, the teacher’s rosy heat, the huge mobile hope of happiness and vitality. And as I watched, it suddenly occurred to me I had been merely watching the world all my life. I was angered at the banality of this observation and walked away from the aerobics room to push some metal poundage with all my might.

After Knight described my face to me, the cataclysm occurred. My sense of a flower living inside me was torn to pieces and lost forever; I fell in love. The most striking thing about love was its terrible nature. My guts became black and void with dread while my outermost flesh came alive with darting insect dots of energy that boiled under my skin, as if my blood and organs were trying to get out of my body. My thoughts cracked to pieces that banged against my skull again and again, yielding up image after strange, confusing image. I would see Knight’s face smiling at me from that part of the world where pleasure and companionship were the norm; then I would feel the darkness of my deep body go into a slow rolling motion, like the root of a wave in the pit of the ocean or a silent internal moan; then I would see my own hand plunging a knife into my throat. At night I would get under the blankets and think of him. My insides would soften, my awareness would sink down into my lower body, my pelvis would open and expand, and then a convulsion would come from nowhere, and I would emerge from it shivering. I would touch between my legs; my genitals felt like a foreign object. I would lie this way for hours, unable to move until exhaustion pulled me into a sleep populated with Anna Granite, Bradley, the Philadelphia bus system, Nona Delgado and my father, always my father, holding me in an iron grip, his penis, like rotted meat, pressed against me. I would wake up full of fear and sit with the lights on while my thoughts formed and cracked into pieces. And riding a crazy car around these images and thoughts, screaming and chattering, or just plain staring, were the people I had to talk to on the phone at the office, my fellow travelers on the bus, Wilson Bean and Wilma Humple, store clerks, and criminals staring at me from newspaper pages.