Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

We spent several nights in this way, until a week after the meetings ended and he had to return to New York. I received one letter from him. The web that connected us, its shimmering gossamer spanning even the state border, finally broke and disintegrated. During the next few years I saw him occasionally at various Definitist gatherings — sometimes with his fiancée, who became his wife. She was a tall, big-thighed thing with thrusting breasts and quick eyes, and she looked at me as if she knew what had gone on. It didn’t matter. He would fix his eyes on mine with affectionate pain, he would take my hand, and I would feel as I had when he escorted me down to the waiting cab; distant from him and smaller, but connected by respect and gentleness, even though I had put back all the weight I lost during the fevered meeting period and gained yet more weight.

It is strange that I didn’t feel abandoned and betrayed, particularly since, on our last night together, we became lovers. It was unexpected. My body awoke from a shallow sleep suffused with heat, and I pressed myself against him. This time I didn’t become frightened, and we continued. His face swam over mine, his breath coiled in my ear. He nestled his body more snugly between my legs. “All right?” he gasped. I arched against him in hopelessly incomplete meeting. My head became a vague blur, my body a thousand cuplike doors opened to receive him. Drool ran in my mouth; I said yes, my voice rising through my body to emerge from my lips a barely audible breath. His fingers gently pulled my stiff nipples, and the outer petals of my vagina crimsoned and curled inward, burned by their own heat. My womb became a supple muscle of fire, expanded and soft, strong as life. I’m going to do it I thought, and in my mind I leapt. Then he penetrated my knot of fiery muscle, and my body went away from me. In my mind were images of my body, arched and abandoned, my neck thrown back, like a surrendering animal, giving to him all the helpless, ferocious, wounded love in my life. Because I wanted so much to give my life to him, even if it were just a moment of it. But my body, still inwardly burning, moved away from me. I could not feel what it experienced and so could not give my experience to him. Hesitant, he pushed farther in, as if he were frightened. My heart hammered in my throat. He pushed deeper. Pleasure rose up through the distance between me and my body and expired. Moaning in sorrow, I held it close as it faded. He kissed my neck; his full, tender, buoyant spirit entered my skin and for an instant I felt my body alive again beneath him.

So it went, the shy beginning and aborted end of pleasure. When it was over I lay confused and relieved in his arms. The next morning he took me in a taxi to a beautiful restaurant with huge feverish bursts of flowers on every table. We ordered champagne with our omelettes. He left the following day.

The next time I saw him, a year and seven months later, I thought with disbelief that this person, so radiant and handsome, had stuck one of his body parts into me, pulled it out, and stuck it in again, over and over. It was wonderful, but I was glad it was never going to happen again. I preferred the elegance of distance, bridged only by an occasional hand touch, which, as the expression of all emotional language, became more eloquent than the confusing overkill of complete body contact.

Last to go were those moments, scattered throughout the years, when I lay alone in bed, motionless except for the hand wandering between my legs, recalling the feel of his eyelashes against my skin, his breath in my ear, his weight, his genitals. Memory playfully tickled my flesh, but the flesh remained indifferent; my mind would wander to something I’d seen on the street that day, radio jingles would fly by, memory would falter and fail.

Sometimes I tried to excite myself by focusing on the love scenes between Granite’s characters and then putting Knight and me in their places. But the swollen blossoms of passion described in Granite’s novels couldn’t accommodate the scratchy old image of Knight’s body on mine or the strange attendant mix of cold, heat, terror, love, and need.

Gradually I stopped trying.

Longingly I stood and watched the sweating exercisers, slowly rising and lowering, their hands on their hips, their feet flat and thighs spread. Were they people who had had tragic lives, broken love affairs, murdered children, who had, up until quite recently, spent the bulk of their time lying in darkened rooms, just now able to summon the strength to get into their leotards and jump up and down? Some of them looked slightly pathetic in the dressing room, in spite of their rigorous training. There was the thin girl with sharp raw elbows and eyes so one-dimensional in their wounded uncertainty that people probably victimized her reflexively; in the dressing room, she revealed the thick, layered toenails of a dinosaur. Or the gum-chewing young blonde with her bleached hair tortured up on her head and a set of bright rings through her nose, who presented herself, with her ripped flamboyant clothing, as a jangling icon of aggression and mobility, but who sat like a matron, her heavy breasts drooping in her tatty, loose-fitting bra. Or the frail creature with her shoulders hunched as if she was expecting the blows of a whip, burdened with ugly, static, artificial breasts, from which the rest of her body seemed to droop. Did their bodies really register terrible pain, or was I, my own body so muffled in inert fat, simply imagining it? What would it be like to hold one of these complexly injured animals in your arms? Would you feel her slowly come to life as you stroked her bony back, would the innocent ugliness of her toenails scrape you as she murmured in delight, would you see her eyes suddenly expand into beauty as they made room for all the treasures of expression she had held trapped in her frightened heart?

The music asked, “Straight up now tell me do you really wanna love me forever/oh oh oh/Or am I caught in a hit and run?” I kept standing there, inexplicably thinking of Justine Shade and what her problems might be.

Justine had just awakened in the hellish but reassuringly familiar suburb of Hangover. Her eyeballs hurt, her vision was static, the mucus in the passages of her head had turned to mud. Insects with many slow-moving legs patrolled her skin. The inside of her mouth and her upper digestive tract felt as if she’d spent the last six hours valiantly vomiting to counter an unsuccessful poisoning attempt. Other than that, she had no idea where she was, and worse, what time it might be. She pictured herself fumbling with the EKG machine, explaining to old Mrs. Hoffenbacher that she was a little hung over; she wondered if the comic element of the situation might mitigate her clumsiness, her possible odor. At the sound of a flushing toilet she lifted her concrete head, squinting into the planes of light and shade that filled the room. A human entered wearing nothing but rumpled socks. He sat on the bed she was prostrate on and said, “I don’t know about you, but I have to be at work in forty minutes.” Considering the personal nature of the memories that now unfolded in her skull, memories in which this naked person had a lot of prominence, she felt his words were pretty cold. “Don’t I even get a kiss?” she rasped.

He pinched his wrinkly face together. “No. But I’ll get you coffee if you want. I’m going down to the take-out.”

He slowly picked his clothing off the floor and pieced together his own personal puzzle of how to put it on. She fell into a reverie of the recent events between them. She didn’t think she’d ever committed such pornographic acts before.

He was moving heavily out the door, a bleary and oppressed look on his face. She sat for a moment, her energies divided between trying to figure out if she were upset or not and attempting to support her monstrous head. A hostile clock said “8:30,” and she was struck with fear and shame about failing Glenda and the helpless Mrs. Hoffenbacher.