Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Bradley nearly killed himself, but in the end he faced it, admitted his error, and rebuilt his life. He went to Canada and married Cheryl Bland — she was maimed two years later in a hunting accident, a tragic story. But Granite failed to examine what had happened. She hardened in her position that Bradley was a traitor to Definitism, and everybody around her had to harden theirs to suit her. By that time she had backed herself into a corner and surrounded herself with wimps and that’s why she wound up playing Twenty Questions with sycophants instead of leading a movement.”

I regarded Justine happily. She was scribbling dutifully. I had underestimated her. She seemed unresponsive only because she had been listening so intently, her attention too focused to allow outward expression. There was something wonderfully consistent about her. She was like Katya, the serious, doomed young heroine of Granite’s early Last Woman Alive , Katya who never reveals her emotions, letting the nature of her thoughts and actions stand alone. I remembered that Justine was a molested child, and her methodical reserve became all the more poignant. I reclined and allowed a sensation of personal contact and intimacy to assail me. We could be friends. We could be more than friends; she could be the one to at last tell the truth about Anna Granite to an ignorant world. When she looked up at me, I was convinced of it; her demeanor was that of one who has just come to an understanding.

“So you still consider yourself a Definitist, even though you reject the idea of matching components?”

It was a disappointment, but I answered it.

“I don’t reject it, I—” There was a twinge of hostility in my chest. “Look, you’re really not getting it. The most important thing about Definitism isn’t matching components, it’s that it takes life seriously, which is rare. She said reality was definable — no one was saying that in the sixties. She said you were important in reality, that you could control it. She was the first person to tell me I was important and that I could come out and say so.”

“Do you feel that fatalism was pushed on you in school or elsewhere?”

“Yes. One of my first memories is having to deny the concrete truths of my life, of denying the clear pattern of them. In school, everything was disconnected, you were never supposed to discover the way things interlocked.”

I regarded Justine with dislike and awaited her next prepackaged question.

“Do you think all of the evil in the world can be attributed to denying an interconnected reality?”

“Evil comes from denying reality. Period. If my father hadn’t deluded himself, he never would have been able to do what he did. You have to distort reality to rationalize evil acts.”

I was suddenly very tired. A world had been created between this girl and me, a subtle, turbulent, exhausting world. I had not had such a long conversation with anyone for over two years.

“I think I will have some tea now,” she said.

“Go right ahead. Although it’s probably cold.”

I watched her lean forward to fuss with the tea things. Her movements were careful and graceful. Perhaps I had reacted to her too harshly. She had, after all, just barely been exposed to the complexities of Definitism. There was ink on the tips of her bluntnailed fingers.

She sat back in the uncomfortable chair and sipped her tea from the turquoise cup. The sun had moved, or been blotted by a cloud, and she was no longer so oppressed by its light. She looked at me frankly, perhaps a little sadly, as she placed her cup on the table and reclaimed her pen and pad. “I hope I’m not taking too much of your time,” she said.

“Oh no. I don’t work until midnight tonight so I have plenty of time.” I omitted telling her that in my eagerness to speak with her I had stayed up past my bedtime, and that I was thus punchy and skittish.

“There’s just a few more questions.”

“All right.”

“Why do you think Definitism frightens people so?”

“Because it’s powerful. It glorifies the freedom of the individual, and nowadays that sort of philosophy is labeled fascistic. People think if you make moral judgments, or work hard for a goal and don’t let yourself be deterred, if you accomplish something, that you’re right wing and somehow unfeeling to other people’s plights.” I glanced out my windows into the health club across the street. The exercise class was starting. I could make out the dim shapes of thickset young men in shorts stretching themselves, posing on steely machines, prowling. “People made a lot of assumptions about Granite that simply weren’t true. It’s possible to have great humanity and be a Definitist. I once protected a prostitute from an abusive client — let her stay with me, helped her get back on her feet. And when people who knew I was a Definitist heard that I’d done that, they were shocked that I would protect such a woman, as if being a Definitist and a compassionate person were a contradiction in terms.”

They were lining up, jostling into position like ponies, pointing their toes against the floor to flex their calves. The instructor stood by, slim hip tilted, indolently lifting and dropping a small barbell in one hand. I wasn’t usually awake to see this class. They were restful and pleasing to watch when they did their exercises in formation: dozens of boys bending, stretching, and jumping in harmony, standing splay-legged to lift weights, or on their backs, rapidly curling and uncurling like wounded ants.

“People only accept the validity of movements that champion the underdog and scorn those that champion people of great accomplishment. You always have to take the dumbest as your lowest common denominator.” The phrase caught in my throat; it had a hard, treacherous shape. I imagined my words tumbling atop each other, snarling together, forming a hostile tangle around my feet that I vainly struggled to escape as a chorus of Granite’s enemies stood and pointed and said, “So! You despise the weak, the helpless. ” “So people start to think that someone like me, a Definitist, would not feel sympathy for the weak and helpless. Well, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Pardon my French.” I wrenched myself free of the trap and stood defiant, fists clenched at my sides. Justine stared at my sudden anger. “I had a friend once named Kim who happened to be retarded. We used to belong to a women’s support group, and those women there, those Marxist, feminist bitches, they ignored Kim, they hurt Kim, they would kill Kim if they thought it would further a cause. They would victimize the weak and the helpless. Not me. And not Granite.” Kim’s loose-eyeballed face and pathetic form stood peeping from behind my defiant, fish-clenching figure.

The exercisers began their jumping jacks.

“How did Granite react to the press?”

“She was hurt by them. She could never really defend herself against them, especially after Bradley left. She was a tough lady supreme. But somehow her very toughness made her vulnerable to jerks. If she was wrong but thought she was right she would go to the death to defend it — and she did in the case of Beau Bradley. She was brilliant, she was powerfully sexual, and she spoke with a glamorous accent. When the average person sees a woman with all these qualities plus, he is going to be overwhelmed with how small he is in comparison. She scared the shit out of them. She believed in herself and they didn’t believe in themselves, and they hated her for that. The critics gang-raped her. She tried to fight back but she just wasn’t capable of dealing on their niggling, ugly level.”

The boys across the street blurred before the vision of an elderly Granite on the dull gray box of my TV set. She was the guest on a talk show, sitting in a plush swivel chair. “Do you know what I have to say to those who don’t agree with me? Fine, don’t agree. But don’t come on my show and ruin it for everybody else.” The audience laughed.