Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

“It started as an affair of the intellect. He told me about his fiancée before it went beyond that, so I knew what I was doing. Of course, when he told me, I was taken aback and upset. Here I was after all, this naïve little girl from the midwest who knew nothing about affairs, who’d never gone on dates, whose only experience with the opposite sex was. you know. But it was the work of Anna Granite that helped me get past all that.” I smiled at Justine, giving her a chance to apprehend that she was hearing about a wonderful experience and for her face to change accordingly. It didn’t. “For, according to Granite, there is nothing wrong with an affair with a married man, for anyone involved. It would be wrong for the wife to expect the husband to deny himself something that would give him pleasure — it would be very unloving of her. It would also be wrong of me to deny myself the pleasure of an affair with him — wrong also to expect him to leave the wife he loved. I’m not talking about that hippie free-love merde either. I’m talking about passion between responsible adults.” The shadows on the wall of the Euella Parks Hotel! The traffic noise outside! Knight happily mopping corn syrup from his plate! The dark-haired girl stared at me as she got up to leave. I stared back, and she dropped her gaze.

“Who came on to whom first?” asked Justine.

“What?”

“Who made the advance? Sexually.”

It was uncanny, her intuition for the most irritating question possible. “What difference does that make? We were both passionately attracted to each other, it was obvious. Either one of us could’ve made the first move.”

“Did he know about what had happened to you with your father? Before you had sex I mean.”

“Yes and he was wonderful about it. He never made me feel like there was anything sullied or—”

“Big of him.”

“—ruined about me. He made me feel protected and loved. He made me feel like a beautiful woman. The way he ended it was so poignant and elegant. He took me to a champagne brunch at the best hotel in town. Can you imagine? This little eighteen-year-old who’s never done anything in her life sitting with her lover having champagne for breakfast with a beautiful bouquet of flowers on the table.” Again I saw the flowers, saw their bruised petals fallen on the table, soft and full of repose in their delicate death.

“So it didn’t hurt you to have this affair with a married man?”

Justine’s face had a look of irretrievable sorrow. I resisted its pull. “No, not at all. It was the most wonderful experience of my life.”

Suddenly, I was afraid she was going to ask, Well, if it was so great why didn’t you ever do it again? and I found myself without an answer. Instead she said, “I’m always upset by affairs with married men. I’m upset by affairs period.”

And her upright posture changed into a soft slump, all the weight of her torso on one slim, exquisitely tapered forearm, the blond hairs of which slowly stood erect. I had an impulse to reach across the table and stroke this down.

“I don’t know why that would be,” I said inanely. “You’re such a pretty woman.”

“I don’t think I know how to have relationships.” She rushed her tone to let me know this was the end of the conversation, pulled the tape recorder into her bag, and looked at me with a hurried sidelong glance, part rueful smile, that was like the light in the crack of a door which is closing shut.

For weeks this conversation seeped across the borders of my days. I found myself bursting into extensions of it as I paced my room, preparing for work. “Once you understand the Definitist principles of mutual self-interest, you realize that an affair with a married man is no problem,” I argued.

As time went on, my excited soliloquies faded, and I found myself brooding over the fact that it was I, not she, who had asked the question, “Well, if it was so great, why didn’t you do it again?” Sometimes I answered, “Because I’m fat,” and I saw her face before me, skeptical, as if waiting for me to tell the truth.

I sat in my armchair with bags of potato chips and cookies, flitting from channel to channel with my remote control, pausing long enough to get irritated at the various yakking faces, the muddled blurs of action. I kept coming back to the channel that devoted itself exclusively to videos of bands playing their trashy music amid the debris of images that changed with the rapid fluidity of dreams without the context of a dreamer. I usually passed over this station, but today I found its random faces and movements facilitated my brooding.

The camera was on the chiseled face of a boy whose features were almost distorted with beauty, whose voluptuous lips were an accident of monstrous fecundity in the icy desolation of his cheeks, forehead, and cold empty eyes, who looked as if the hard planes of his face were the direct result of the hard world in his skull.

The camera panned back to show a group of boys much like him, with fetishistic long hair and arrogant childish features. The camera played over their fingers, their lithe arms, the feverish tattoos on their slim biceps (bulging eyes, dripping fangs). The singer’s voice plunged into a pit of chemical fire and leapt out screaming. The video told the story of a boy named Ricky who has crossed over into the dreamy world of limitless cruelty with the blithe ease of childhood. He was fighting with his dad in a suburban rec room, the dad a numb fleshy brute whose mind is a blueprint of whatever social rules prevail at the moment. I watched with interest. Dad pushed the kid through a plate glass door. The kid’s friend, a pretty, gentle-faced boy, went to help him up and was shoved aside. Both boys walked away from gaping Dad with gestures of contempt. The band threw their hair around, and the singer drew a leash around the throat of his ferocious voice. The next scene was the two boys smashing the meager furnishings of a deserted building, drinking alcohol with head-tipped abandon, and setting the building on fire while the invisible band members screamed and played loud. The boys, silhouetted by flames, leapt into the air to ritually slap their hands together. The band threw their hair again, and I noticed the harshness of their faces was now softened, the singer’s especially; his long throat was exposed, his beautiful lips seductively parted. The child vandal pulled up his shirt to reveal a big handgun thrust deep down the front of his pants and then withdrew the gun. He pointed it at his partner, who patted it away with the look of a girl being teased by a boy she likes. The band squirmed against their screeching instruments. The boys pushed and playfully shoved, the gentler one throwing his whiskey bottle into the air for Ricky to shoot. Ricky pointed the gun at him again, and this time the boy opened his jacket to show his chest and dared him to shoot. Ricky shot his pretty friend, and the boy fell in a slow motion slur of open lips and wide disbelieving eyes.

The singer’s last screech distended his voice further still. The guitar chords trailed away.

I was remembering the way I had felt with Knight. When he held me in his arms, it felt as though he held my beating inner organs in his hands. This feeling frightened me so much that I could not sustain it while he was inside me. But when sex was over and we lay in each other’s arms, the reverberation of it throbbed in my chest like an open wound that only his presence could heal.

I remembered sitting in the hotel restaurant the morning after, the day he left forever, staring at the mass of flowers, all of different demeanor — exploding, rampant, brandishing their bright petals in the air, or frail and delicate, shyly whispering from the vase. There were splotches of light on the vase and on the table. The morning sun was in Knight’s face, revealing all his pores and tiny hairs, the slight oiliness of his nose, the rolling motion of his swallowing throat. I had never seen him as quite such a corporeal creature before. He smiled at me and talked about the projects he had waiting for him in New York. I remembered that in The Bulwark , after Frank Golanka takes Asia Maconda in the art gallery, he walks out sneering and doesn’t think about her, even though it was the best sex he had ever had, until a few days later when she crosses his mind during a flight to Los Angeles and he’s amazed to be thinking of her at all. In the book, this doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her: they eventually get married. But Knight was already getting married to someone else. I looked around the room, taking in the beauty of the shimmering glass chandeliers, the velvet curtains, the composed men and women eating their lunch, trying greedily to feel every iota of the romance and wonderfulness of the experience. I wanted to fondle and squeeze the experience, to possess it, to jam it down into every cell in my body, my love affair, my glamorous love affair, my glass chandeliers and flowers, stuffed into the locked steel box of memory where no one could get it. But I couldn’t. I had no context, no reference point, for anything that was happening to me now and could only stare, stunned and frozen, barely able to feel it at all, almost glad that Knight was about to go away.