Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“Well. ” She almost said, “Like I’m going up on LSD” and decided that although it was the most accurate description, it wasn’t the wisest and instead said, “I feel like I’m on nitrous oxide, you know, laughing gas? Have you ever had it? It makes your thinking a little distorted. I keep going off on mental tangents, and everything seems to be connected to something huge and complicated.”

“Ah,” said Glenda, “it sounds like an anxiety attack.”

Justine looked at Glenda gratefully. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“No.” Glenda said this as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. “You are perhaps just a little tired and nervous, and I need to take care of you today.” She patted Justine’s shoulder. “Don’t worry.”

“Maybe it is just anxiety.” Justine cautiously felt around the benign explanation, as if it were a chair that might collapse if she sat in it. “I did have kind of a peculiar date last night.”

“Peculiar good or bad?”

“I don’t know.”

She had met Bryan at a Japanese restaurant where they had shared a plate of jewel-like sushi and shiny purple seaweed. She noticed that when he held his tiny cup of sake, he cupped both hands around it for warmth, a gesture she usually saw in women and which she found inexplicably touching. She noticed he didn’t eat very much, that he seemed to have little interest in food. His long, black hair fell across his eyes and she wanted to smooth it back. He saw her looking at him and he looked at her, his face infused with a complicated expression of craftiness, interest, and eager excitement. He looked as if he were being drawn into a game that he wasn’t sure he wanted to play, and that while this seduced him, it also made him look for a way to give the appearance of full participation while he was in fact scrutinizing her from the sidelines as she charged around after the ball by herself. This expression was frightening but it was also flattering to her because it suggested an extreme and personal reaction.

They didn’t refer to their recent heinous intimacy. They talked instead of their childhood experiences, their jobs, her article, and his travels in Southeast Asia. He said he felt greatly attracted to the people who lived in the Patagandrian rain forest.

“They’re small and feline and they please me aesthetically,” he explained. “There’s a sense of delicacy and propriety about everything they do, even the con men. It’s partly because their culture is so old, I guess. They have such a strong sense of who they are, individually and in relation to other people. They don’t have our kind of demented identity problems.”

“Well, if you’re talking about a very traditional culture, it’s not so hard to find a sense of identity within such parameters,” said Justine, happy to disagree so early in the evening. “The more open and diverse a culture is, the less you can rely on the culture to define you, and you have to define yourself. That’s harder.”

“I don’t just mean their culture though. The way they live puts them in direct contact with the most fundamental human needs — food, sleep, shelter. When you talk to those people about supermarkets, they’re astonished that anyone would do something like that, going to buy packaged food instead of hunting for it. It’s not just a stupid macho thing. They understand the importance of ritual and how it has to be played out in a context of practical need. They don’t see how any man with any pride in his masculinity could live such a physically easy life as we do.”

“Did you explain to them that men here have ways of shoving their masculinity down the throats of other people?” she asked drily.

His eyes narrowed and his lower lip dropped a centimeter, like the mouth of a cat using his scent organs to test the wind. His face registered that he had taken in the scent and understood it; a smirk flickered in his eyes. “People in this country,” he continued, his voice bemused and contemptuous, “have it so easy they don’t even know what life is anymore. No one has real problems here, so they have to make them up.”

“What do you mean by real problems?”

“Like hunger and—”

“Bryan,” she said, “look out the window. There’s a guy sleeping on the subway grating. On my way over here I passed two people begging for change. You don’t think they have a problem with hunger?”

“Oh, well yeah, but I’m talking about the vast majority of people here.”

“Anyway,” she said, “there are other problems besides hunger and shelter. Can you really believe that there’s no such thing as psychological pain?”

He shrugged. “Well, really, if you want to know the truth, what I like about Southeast Asia is that you can get a gorgeous twelve-year-old to suck your cock for two bucks.” His voice was like a tickle on the middle of your back where you can’t reach it. “Just kidding,” he said.

She decided to change the subject. “So you like Anna Granite’s stuff.”

“Yeah, I do.” He abandoned his orphanlike method of drinking from the sake cup and upended the little bottle, draining it in a gulp. He signaled the waiter for more with a gesture of satirical politeness.

“Why?”

“Mainly because it’s a lot of fun. She writes about stuff that’s serious and it engages you mentally, but at the same time it’s so exaggerated and goofy that you can see the ridiculousness even while being swept up in it. And I especially like the cartoony renditions of the art world, being an artist myself.”

“You’re an artist?”

“Yeah. I just do that shit at the magazine for money.” He grabbed the sake as it floated towards them on a tray, ignoring the sleek waiter’s indignant look.

She was relieved to find that his conversation, heard in sobriety, suggested that he had actual thoughts, feelings, and sensitivities, that she might be curious about him. It was also obnoxious, but she was willing to let that pass. She imagined them sitting together in restaurant after restaurant, talking about everything that had ever happened to them, telling each other things they had never told anyone.

“I like you,” she said. She was surprised by the sweet tone of her voice.

He smiled, and she saw an expression of tenderness in the center of his eyes. “I like you too.” He reached across the table and took her hand. His tender look was subsumed by a strange, forward gloat. “You’re like a little girl,” he said softly.

“No. I’m really not.”

“I think you are. Not a nice little girl though. You’re like one of those little monsters who tortures other kids on the playground. I can just see you now making some poor fat kid cry.”

She stared at him, shocked, flattered, and slightly frightened. She felt him looking through the layers of her adulthood, peeling away the surface until he found hot little Justine Shade of Action, Illinois, posing on the playground — he was right! — she had never really left. The child Justine pouted flirtatiously as he eyed her.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s go to a bar.”

They went to a dark bar with rotting wooden booths and two big pool tables around which men stalked in various attitudes of predatory langour. Cigarettes drooped from their casual lips, their stomachs protruded majestically. Justine watched their deliberate movements and inhaled the reassuring odor of french fries boiling in grease. Bryan was talking about a pathologically violent boy who had lived next door to him when he was ten years old.

“The girls in the neighborhood were terrified of him, and with good reason. I think he might’ve actually raped a couple of girls. I was with him once when he tricked a girl into climbing down into this hole he’d dug and threatened to bury her unless she stripped and danced naked for us. He even tried to force me to fuck his little sister at knife point.”