Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

I remembered lying in bed the night after he did go away. I had lain down looking forward to curling up in a lone ball, with a sense of goodwill for Knight, now miles away in the arms of his brilliant and beautiful fiancée. But then I thought of him as he had been with me the night before, and suddenly it happened all over again, my body swelled open to receive him, only this time it didn’t shut and this time he wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to do. My heart continued to thud, saliva collected in my mouth. I lay in this open position all night, my body receiving only emptiness and silence.

It did not occur to me to call him or to try to see him again. I would picture him with his fiancée, who I imagined as tall, blond, lithe, and thin, and tears of admiration would come to my eyes as I felt the great love between these intellectual titans. I would imagine them in profile, facing the wind together, her blond hair blown back, his eyes coolly lidded, her chin lifted haughtily, his jaw set in determination, and I would think, this is how it should be. And I thought, as I lay in my bed at night, how lucky I was to have been a part of these mighty lives.

When I finally saw them together some time later, I was disappointed to see she was dark haired, with heavy thighs and a fleshy jaw line. It was disorienting to see him after so much time; my dismembered love twitched into life at the sight of him and began to stumble about like Frankenstein’s poor monster, who doesn’t know why he’s alive.

I imagined Knight as he must be today, in his late forties by now, sitting at a desk somewhere, wielding power. I wondered if he ever thought of me. I wondered if he had had other affairs during the last decade. I enjoyed thinking that he had; I liked creating a world of illicit meetings, smoldering glances, feelings too strong to be denied, the powerful businesswomen moaning beneath him, caught in the vise of their doomed love. Gee, I’d been part of it. Except now I wasn’t. I had never had illicit meetings, writhed beneath anyone, threatened a marriage. I never even got a chance to writhe beneath Knight; I lay there stiff and terrified. I hadn’t been a powerful businesswoman either. How did I fit into this picture? How would he remember me, if he remembered me? What had it been like for Knight Ludlow, superior person, to hold the firm, fat young body of an abused child in his arms, to feel her racked with conflicting impulses, finally coming to a shuddering halt against him, her hot little face in his chest? Had it been pleasant? Had it been a lot of fun?

On the television screen before me a forty-plus woman pranced in garter belt and stockings, displaying the tattoos on her buttocks before an entire battleship crew as she belted out a song.

Why had he done that anyway? Why had he stroked and reassured my frightened body until it felt its need for love and opened up, only to find he had gone? Why did the affair which I had always cherished as the most beautiful thing in my emotional life suddenly seem like a rape?

It was as if I had divided into two people: one hungrily embracing the dangerous world of emotional contact and power play, enjoying the game of move, counter move, the unpredictable changes of feelings, the other a terrified child unable to bear the carnivorous spirit of this world, weeping with fear at the sight of adults savagely copulating on their beds, on desks, in elevators.

I was ashamed of this child and tried to stifle her. She was, after all, the weak, the unable one who must not be allowed to restrain the strong in their thirst for life. Anna Granite was never cruel, never callous, as people believed her to be. She simply loved life, was capable of living it at fifty times the intensity of most people, and could not bear to see the bright beast of desire tripped up in its lunge towards pleasure by some sniveling kid who, if it had its way, would live its life in a closet under a blanket.

But when her affair with Beau Bradley had ended, a kid came roaring out of her closet, kicking, screaming, and throwing things.

“That bastard!” she raged, “that dirty, treacherous little bastard! How dare he! How dare he!”

She had just read the letter in which he informed her that his love for her, while still strong, had become platonic; he wanted to be friends.

“Tell him to get up here on the double before I drag him up by his ear!”

“Up here” was her hotel suite where I happened to be taking dictation; a group of us were attending a conference in Boston. Bradley was out of his room at the moment and thus couldn’t be summoned, and Granite was left alone with me and her fury, stalking the room muttering, actually stumbling once over her cape and flinging an ashtray. I sat silent and still, impressed by the magnificence of her rage and yet puzzled by it. Why, I wondered, was she not happy, in her love for Bradley, to let him decide for his most positive value?

I got my answer when Bradley arrived. As he entered, Granite marched up to him and struck his face so hard he staggered to one side and then to the other as she backhanded him.

“You have betrayed the principle of matching components!” she screamed. “Unless you can give me a rational reason for this treachery, you are my enemy for life — for life!”

Poor Bradley, obviously unprepared for this, fumbled for an intellectual argument to support his decision. Even I could hear the truth in his voice; he simply wasn’t attracted to her. So she declared her enmity again, slapped him around some more, and then let him crawl away. I only saw him once more after that, fleeing the Philadelphia office with his box of papers.

Wilson Bean took Bradley’s place, and I became his secretary.

After the end of her affair with Bradley, Granite changed. I thought the change was permanent, but it was apparent only for about a month. Her face temporarily lost its hot ferocity, its leonine, regal calm. The circles beneath her eyes became darker, the deep lines running from her nostrils to her chin evinced pain and deprivation, and sometimes her mouth would look like the crabbed, down-pulled mouth of a bitter old woman poking furiously around in a bargain bin for something she doesn’t really want anyway.

It wasn’t very attractive, but there was something noble and moving about her during this time. I was often with her in the week or so before the advent of Bean, taking dictation from her — notes for an (alas doomed) sequel to Gods Disdained . And it was during this time that I came to feel most close to her, although we talked very little. Her pain was something precious, and I felt I was somehow its caretaker, alone in the rare pain museum, protecting the encased specimens, tiptoeing about with the requisite solemnity, watchful and fussy that everything be just right. I made her coffee, turned down her bed, listened to her dreams.

She felt my protection and vigilance, I’m sure of it. I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me years later, an expression that spoke of her superiority but also of her gratitude for that slim psychic strand between us, along which my protection had once traveled towards her.

On TV more cute boys threw their hair and screamed about love.

Justine pressed her face into the floor, rubbing her cheek against the porous smelly wood, trying to scrape through her drunkenness. Darkness moved around her; she could barely feel the welts rising on her back. Her knees hurt, she thought. He beat her as she squirmed on the floor, caught in the steel trap that had closed on her when she was five years old. The upper strata of her thoughts and feelings had ruptured, and the creature long trapped beneath was out and gnawing her with its teeth.

She felt him drop down on his knees to fuck her and she turned away from him, rolling on her back. “I don’t want your cock,” she said. “I want you to make yourself soft and piss on my cunt.”