Mary Gaitskill - Two Girls, Fat and Thin

I viewed the exercisers sadly. Justine followed my gaze. They were bending in unison in solemn, balletic toe-touches. We could faintly hear the sonorous thump of the disco music that bore them along.

“Do you see a contradiction in the sexual behavior of her characters — the pattern of dominance and submission that she says is, in other spheres, irrational? Do you find that the behavior of her female characters is a denial of themselves in reality — for example, when Skip beats up Solitaire and she likes it?”

The stupid and self-righteous nature of this question cast a grim shadow on my hopes for the quality of Justine’s article. The sight of the joyful exercisers soured, as did the awful green of the instructor’s sweatsuit. “Solitaire likes it, not because she’s hit, but because it’s Skip. It’s totally different from the kind of neurotic masochism you’re implying.”

“Well, then, there’s the rape thing with Asia Maconda and Frank Golanka.”

“Look, I’m a sex abuse victim and so are you, and you ought to be able to understand. Asia is presented as having a problem, for one thing. She’s neurotic and she needs this kind of crushing force to act upon her because she needs to be broken in a way, but it’s got nothing to do with masochism. Asia is exalted when Frank Golanka takes possession of her. She is not demeaned. A masochist is somebody like my mother who was demeaned by her subservience to a cruel, dishonest, contemptible man. When the women in Granite’s books submit, they do it out of strength, out of choice, as a gift. That’s the difference between masochism and love, and if you don’t see that, then you’re crazy.”

Justine’s jaw muscles flinched spasmodically as she scribbled; her fingers were tight on her pen. She was skewed by a renewed blast of sunlight. Minute cinders of light darted and vanished in the air between us, the hallucinated discharge of my wrath. My head felt separated from my body; I floated, stretched out, calm and naked in a soothing space above our ugly disconnected conversation. Below, my intestines contracted into a malign snake. A large gas bubble solemnly floated up from my abdomen. The exercisers jogged gaily in place, hands flopping at their sides.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

In the placid enclosure of aqua tiling, my intestines warred, suffered, and subsided. The fierce cylindrical lights on either side of the mirror above the basin revealed a surprising face; instead of the angry, adamant woman I had expected to meet, there was the porous, puffy, pink-splotched face of an exhausted person on the verge of tears. Only my bright eyes, shining bravely and a little too enthusiastically above dark and heavy skin revealed my fighting spirit. But who was I fighting? The collegiate mouse in my living room? I finished my ablutions in the aqua basin, opened the window a crack, and sat on the edge of the tub for a moment.

I returned to the living room to find Justine contemplatively eating an egg roll.

“I think you’re misunderstanding me,” she said. “I’m not asking these questions because I think those things about Granite’s work. It’s just that these accusations have been made against her, and if I’m going to write an article, I have to address them.”

“But do you understand what I’m saying? I wouldn’t consider it demeaning to worship at the feet of a hero.”

“I know what you mean. I even know what you mean when you say that Asia needed to have something taken from her by force for it to mean anything. I’ve had an experience like that myself.”

All my eagerness to like Justine frolicked in the air between us. “Really?”

“It wasn’t that I was raped or anything. Just that about three years ago I had a relationship with someone who sort of. in bed, opened me up in a way that I had no control over.”

“Oh! Really?”

“And it was the most moving thing because I was never able to open up to anyone else before that. And no one else had been able to really penetrate me. I didn’t have any choice either, the way he did it. He just made it happen.”

“Oh!” I was intoxicated with the ravishment of Justine. I envisioned her, her nervous jaw relaxed, her neck arched, throat exposed, the brittle crust of her public persona broken and stripped off. What would you find under that crust? “Did he say anything about what happened?”

“No. We didn’t talk about it.”

“How wonderful of him not to say it!”

“I’m not sure he noticed, actually.”

“Oh, surely he noticed! Are you still together?”

“No.” She inclined her head downward, closed her notebook. “He was sort of awful, generally.”

She put her red-shoed feet together and began to organize her papers. From the kitchen, the refrigerator whirred and droned. A gauzy float of dust twinkled in the fading sun. What did she mean, sort of awful?

“I just brought it up so you’d know that I understand you.” She closed her notebook and put her pen in her small fat burgundy handbag. “I’m done interviewing you. Unless you have anything more you’d like to say.”

“No, I think we’ve covered it.” My body posed in a sore slump on the edge of the couch. Justine stood, glancing around as though she’d dropped something. “But if you’d like to stay and visit a while and help me finish these snacks, we could talk some more about some of the things we’ve started. Just in a personal way.”

Her eyes widened and lightly filmed over, as though she had withdrawn behind a veil of polite embarrassment. “Thank you but I really can’t. I’ve got a lot to do today and I’ve already spent more time than I’d planned. But thank you. It’s been very interesting.”

“Perhaps you’d like to come back tomorrow? Or the next day? We could have lunch.”

“I don’t know, I. maybe. I’m busy but I could. I could call you.”

He hand was on the doorknob. She was fleeing.

Every loneliness is a pinnacle. I opened the door for her. From the safety of the hall she promised to send me a copy of the published article, and then she was gone. I returned to the couch and sat on it. The rims of my eyeballs had dried out. My tail bone had become a focal point of exhaustion. But I knew I couldn’t sleep. I sat for several seconds feeling the apartment recover from the presence of a stranger. While she had sat before me, a foreign vibration had quivered through the air, handling and examining everything it brushed against, subtly changing the attitude and appearance of my knickknacks and furniture, giving everything the stiff, careful quality of the scrutinized. Slowly, the room settled into ease as the last tremors of that inquisitive quiver subsided. The cool beige carpet crawled happily along the floor. The refrigerator whirred. I turned on the television. It was Firing Squad with Austin Heller. His guests were Donovan Milundira, the exiled Czech author and somebody else, a dense old fellow with massive eyebrows and a hand lifted to dangle before his mouth. I sat on the floor to watch it, my back against the soft white plush of the couch, my legs stretched before me.

“So I am not exaggerating to say you despise Chernovsky?” asked Heller. He popped his eyes and rapidly flicked the tip of his tongue against both corners of his open mouth — a weird and unattractive habit he had developed recently.

I raised my baggy flowered dress and crept along the floor to the window. I stood upright on my knees and rested my arms on the ledge. The exercise class had ended. A few lone boys still lolled about, stretching and chatting. One leaned pensively on the window ledge, a fluff of blond hair across his sulky brow, his squared chin resting on his fist. Beyond him, in the fluorescent shadows of the gym, I dimly saw two boys standing to talk, their inclined hips almost touching. The taller one rested his thick forearm on the shoulders of the lighter boy, who looked shyly down. I dropped my eyes to the street below. Everywhere there were people with their arms around each other.