Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

I knew this agony had come out of my contact with Knight, yet all I wanted was to be near him. I sat at the meeting absorbing him, pulling his psychic excretions into my body. I told time according to when I might talk to him during a break in the meeting or when he might walk me home.

I don’t remember if I longed to hold him in my arms or to feel him inside me. I do know I wanted to be alone in a room with him. It was to this end that I left (not without a pang of sentiment) the Euella Parks Hotel and rented a room. It was a furnished walkup with a private kitchen and bathroom in the hall. The landlady was a rigid white creature wearing a hairnet and a dress covered with nasty flowers; she tried to be pleasant, but she was too unhappy to make it stick. It didn’t matter; the place had a certain charm, in spite of a greasy stain on the wall. There was sun, blue wallpaper, flower boxes outside the windows, a quilt on the double bed. In addition to the room, I acquired more new clothes, makeup, and a hair cut.

The night I moved into my new home I didn’t get into bed to sleep. I spent the entire night before the mirror trying on clothes and makeup. A young body can withstand a great deal of stress and abuse without showing exhaustion. A few judicious smears of makeup under my eyes erased the circles forming there, pink liquid freshened my cheeks. My weight loss was apparent, and my features had emerged from my face. They fascinated me, although I wasn’t yet sure if I liked them or not. My eyes were large without the surrounding fat, my big lips, instead of adding to the previously exaggerated impression of roundness and slackness, added an interesting dimension to the sharpened planes of my chin and cheeks. The shorter hair drew the movement of my face upward and made my skin appear to open out in radiant petals.

Knight came closer; we crossed the catwalks between us and explored our respective inner girdings. He told me about his childhood. I told him everything about mine, except the one thing. We went to the all night diner where the man had told me I had great tits. It was there, over pieces of wonderfully gooey apple pie, that, during our discussion of ultrareality, a phrase leapt from his mouth and shot into the air between us, urgently flashing. It was “my fiancée in New York.” This flashing sign effectively obscured the rest of the conversation for several minutes. Knight continued talking, happily manipulating his fork to get maximum corn syrup on it. His words fell one atop the other, forming a senseless pile. I felt myself moving away from him in a square section that became smaller and more distant in evenly spaced pulses, like a photograph inset within a larger photograph. My tiny hands played with sugar packets. Far away, Knight moved his lips in crazy silence. Then I opened my mouth, breathed in and ate the fiancée. Vaguely remembering that Asia Maconda, Katya Leonova, and Solitaire D’Anconti all had more than one lover, I swallowed the fiancée information and held it down. It dissolved in my stomach pretty quickly. I ate my pie and smiled at Knight’s ultrareality. We left the diner, and I invited him up to see my new apartment. It was two o’clock Saturday morning. He hesitated only seconds before he said yes.

I don’t think I can chronicle the combination of words, silences, and movements that led to him and me on my bed with our arms around each other. Rather awkwardly he stroked my hair, felt up and down my spine, and adjusted himself against me. He said, “This may not be fair to you, Dorothy. I know I should’ve mentioned Angela before.” I shook my head, my eyes half closed. There was more talk but it was immaterial before the feelings emanating from him, the strength and gentleness, warmth and control, the mystery of masculine tenderness that enveloped me like the wings of a swan. We lay on my bed, his body supporting itself above me. The ricocheting chatter in my mind became inaudible, the zipping comets of quasi thought slowed to melting putty. Rivulets of liquid gold, swollen with nodules of heat, spanned my limbs. A glimmering flower of blood and fire bloomed between my legs, its petals spanned my thighs. He kissed me. He put his genitals against me. I contracted; all the light in my body went out. I had a sensation of falling and then a sudden jerking halt, as if I were a mountain climber who had slipped and been caught in my harness, swaying above a chasm. Knight moved his lips over my face, he put a hand on my breast. My brief desire was dead. I shuddered and grabbed his shoulder. He misunderstood and touched between my legs. I thought: If I control my body and follow his movements, everything will be all right, I’ll be able to do it. Then he raised himself and looked into my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”

I moved my hand to my face and felt tears. There was an instant of silence, and then I began to cry in earnest. He moved away from me; I had a glimpse of his stricken expression before I rolled on my stomach and curled into a ball. More words: “I’m sorry baby, I don’t want to hurt you, forgive me,” stuff like that. I gestured irritably. At that moment he seemed almost stupid to me. My heart froze in a desperate palpitation, and I stopped crying.

“It’s all right.” I sat up. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Angela.”

He looked surprised. “What is it then?”

I didn’t know, but I told him anyway. He sat solemnly nodding while I talked about my devotion to Anna Granite and how I didn’t want to be distracted from the important work of her project with an emotional entanglement. I talked about my feelings of friendship for him and how I didn’t want to risk ruining them. I told him I’d never had a lover before, which felt true until the image of my father gestured from a corner. I ignored him, continued talking over him, talking about my feelings of respect for Knight’s relationship with Angela. Knight continued nodding, every now and then interjecting a declaration or protestation of his own. My father stood mute, listening to me talk. Finally I couldn’t talk anymore. Knight talked a little longer while I picked the stuffing from a small hole in the quilt. My body felt wooden. I wished he would go. He stopped talking and sat as though waiting for me to say something. I scanned a list of sentences appropriate for getting him out the door. Then I thought that if he left I would be alone with my father.

“Well,” he said standing up. “Guess it’s time for me to go.”

I cast about for words.

“Dorothy? Are you all right?”

I lunged for a word; it slid away. I began to cry again.

Slowly, I told him. After much more talk, deep under the quilt with our arms around each other, I told him about my father and me. I felt as if there were a hole in my chest and that Knight could look into it as I had once looked into the opened brain of the strange boy sitting in our kitchen. But just as I had felt tenderly protective towards the boy and his poor exposed brain, I felt Knight’s tenderness penetrating my wound, curling around my ribs, touching against the vulnerable red sponge of my lungs, mournfully stroking my heart hiding in its dark nest of muscle.

It was six o’clock when we turned off the light and lay down. We lay under the quilt with most of our clothes on. My back was against his front, and he curled his body around me, his strangely small hand holding my elbow. I lay for hours feeling his eyelashes rise and lower against my shoulder, more and more slowly as his breath took him into sleep. My breath slowed and deepened with his, and I lay with my eyes shut watching long loops of gray move around my head. I opened my eyes. Shadows crawled and crept. Knight’s penis hardened as he slept, and with a pretty moan, he pressed it against my lower spine before falling back into unconsciousness. I took in the feel of it experimentally. It seemed helplessly outgoing and vulnerable in its blind swollen state, yet fussily and ardently friendly. City sounds and voices came through the window at quickening intervals; the bread truck and its cheerful driver firing jokes into space, the grumbling answer of the restauranteur, the brisk hum of passing cars, the bus doing its noisy duty. Knight’s little hand twitched on my arm. All the bones, ligaments, skin, and nerves that felt these things seemed precious to me, and I wanted to stay awake so I could feel them hanging in the hammock of my exhaustion for as long as possible. Knight’s dick sat on my spine with all the dumb insistence of life, and I felt accompanied on my vigil.