Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Chapter One

I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers. “Writer interested in talking to followers of Anna Granite. Please call—.” It was written in rigorous, precise, feminine print on a modest card displayed amidst dozens of cards, garish Xeroxed sheets, newsprint, and ragged tongues of paper. The owners of this laundry establishment seem to have an especially lax policy when it comes to the bulletin board, and upon it any nut can advertise himself, express an inane opinion, or announce a slogan amid a blathering crowd of ads for Gorill-O-Grams, lost cats, plaintive George (wearing a tiny amethyst earring, gray leather boots) searching for “provocative boy in tight silver pants who asked tall black man for fabric softener,” Micro-Cosmic Orbit Meditation Lessons, Yes Sir!: The All-Boy Maid Service, and Spiritual Karate for Women. That day there was even an especially sinister card bearing an invitation to submit to tests that would determine whether or not your suicidal depression could be alleviated by “the latest medication” or hypnotic technique — an invitation evoking images of bulimic girls held prisoner in somebody’s basement, drug-addicted prostitutes confessing to severe men in white coats, electrodes wired to the naked bodies of frightened volunteers, rec rooms erupting with violence, all made doubly queasy by their proximity to wretched George with his laundry. Nestled in this shoddy configuration of suggestion, promise, and nightmare, the writer’s card implied a lone kook gripping a grimy sheaf of papers, philosophical tracts, and paperback books, her jaw clenched, her face unnaturally pale. This is the kind of image that is, no doubt, associated with Anna Granite in the dull minds of those who peruse such bulletin boards carelessly, half-registering the muted snarl of urgency and need — but I knew differently.

I shifted my recalcitrant laundry in my arms and snatched the card from the board, not caring if anyone else wanted to read it or not. I went home, put away my laundry, and sat brooding with coffee and card. It had been years since anyone had expressed professional (or was it professional?) interest in Anna Granite, philosopher and literary genius. I read the card repeatedly, trying to deduce something from its hieroglyphical simplicity. Granite had enemies, even in death. I had made the mistake of talking to them in the past, seduced, as all of us were, by the glamour of flashing lightbulbs, microphones, hysterical questions, and so on. But that had been at least fifteen years ago, and this “writer” seemed too insubstantial to bear the weight of such mania.

Why talk to an insubstantial person? I finished my coffee, ate a Gruyère brioche, and left the apartment to go to work. I am thirty-four years old and I live in Queens. I am a proofreader on the midnight shift at a Wall Street law firm, and the hour of my departure for work is bleak and dark. That night the street featured only a few abstracted pedestrians: a guarded young woman in a raincoat carrying a brown-bagged carton of milk, a pair of subdued boys coming around the corner with their hands thrust into their pockets, a dog-walker clutching a wad of paper towels, and a moody doorman pacing in a vigilant circle. I entered a delicatessen which displayed boxes of detergent, stomach medicines, and bottled spring water in its windows. I purchased a handful of rum-flavored marzipan candies, each wrapped in bright red tinfoil bearing a picture of a mysterious brown-haired Victorian lady in décollétage, then I stepped into the street and hailed a cab. The driver and I exchanged mumbles, his ticking metal box lit up, and I sped to the office where my booth awaited me, nestled amid the flanks of word-processing machines, all faithfully burning their little green lights.

But I couldn’t forget “writer.” As I re-entered my apartment at 9:00 the following morning, I felt the harsh splendor of Granite’s presence arrayed through all my rooms. I had never forgotten her, of course. Her books were all upright on my shelves, and the mighty power of her ideas continued to form the undercurrent that bore along the details of my uneventful and increasingly rancorous life. But Anna Granite had died two years earlier, and I had been disassociated from the remnants of her dwindling movement for longer than that. This was the first time in years that I had felt the almost visceral sensation of the woman’s presence, which was nothing short of a shimmering, diamond-studded aurora borealis. It was as if this star system had become hidden, bound in a thick skein of ordinariness, and that “writer,” with his/her innocuous request, had peeled off a corner of the binding, causing all that I had never really abandoned to come tumbling into my living room.

As I lay in my bed in my plaid flannel nightgown, Granite’s characters crowded round me. Solitaire D’Anconti, oil magnate and lonely woman, paced the room in her black plunge-necked jumpsuit, one arm wrapped around her own slim waist, the other holding the cigarette which issued the snake of smoke that was coiling around her. Bus Taggart, the hood who worshipped her, sat on the windowsill, struck a match against his shoe, and sighed. Skip Jackson, newspaper baron and Solitaire’s lover, leaned against the wall, watching Solitaire with a savage smirk on his face. What were they going to do? Eustace Kwetschmer, editor of a rival newspaper, had started a series of stories exposing Solitaire’s connections with Bus; she had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. Skip was willing to fight back on her behalf, even if it meant destroying his own newspaper empire. Solitaire, who scorned public opinion, was pleading with him to stay out of it. Meanwhile, the world was on the brink of destruction.

I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to look at the card. It seemed foreign, forlorn yet compelling for an index card. I returned to bed with it and snuggled under the blanket; I had been working the graveyard shift for six years, but my body still contracted at various crucial points in my neck, pelvis, and shoulders after staying up all night. I tried to relax my spastic muscles and lay on my stomach to reach for the sleek pink phone beside my bed. I dialed the number offered by “writer.” There was no answer, not even a recorded voice informing me that its author could not “come to the phone right now.” I hung up, relieved; my mental state, induced by such sudden contact with Granite’s fictional universe, was not one that could be shared with the prosaic writer.

I dug back into bed, cozily rubbing the inevitable granules away with my feet. In my mental parade, Granite’s characters were followed by the four-square humans who had surrounded her, and the sensational drama of her life began to merge with the drama of her books. I saw Granite at the podium, her eyes storming as she lashed out at an idiot heckler from the audience who had stood during the question-and-answer period to say, “Doesn’t your insistence on strictly objective truth lead to a kind of authoritarianism that—” “You are an authoritarian of the worst kind!” snarled Granite. “The authority of ignorance, of nothingness, of hallucination!” The article that appeared in Demograph that month read: “With a voice that would tuck a dog’s tail between its legs, Miss Granite scourged the few non-believers who managed to get a word in edgewise,” and the photo that accompanied it showed a homely little woman who could barely make herself seen behind a podium, pointing her thick finger at the world. I saw the journalists, who were allowed to attend the early meetings, clustered in their cheap suits, frowning with the greedy outrage of the self-righteous as they hunched and scribbled Granite’s words on their pads of lined paper. Large, old-fashioned cameras emitted sour blooms of light as stern, unblinking Granite marched by, her purple-lined cape streaming behind her. I felt her outrage as columnists and third-rate thinkers denounced her everywhere. And I felt her glory as I beheld her, bedecked in a necklace of heavy turquoise, on the arm of Beau Bradley, her devastating raven-haired lover. Her short frame lengthened and liquified, her ruddy skin paled, her tight mouth swelled into a vicious pout as I watched her transforming into her creation Asia Maconda, the international beauty and art critic who was swept off her feet by the brilliant sculptor, Frank Golanka, even as she fought to discredit him socially. I heard her rough, sorrowful voice, the Romanian accent that made her sound as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of ground glass and been surprised by how good it was. I saw myself, a near-psychotic child cuddled in the melancholy armchair in my father’s room, dappled by splotches of sunlight through the cheesy curtains veiling the windows.

When I woke late in the afternoon, I called “writer” again. Again, no response. Instead of relief, I felt irritation. Why had this person put his/her number on a bulletin board if he/she didn’t have a machine to take calls? I called twice in the following three days and was rewarded only with ringing. My irritation increased; still I was grateful to the nincompoop who didn’t answer the phone. My life, divided into habitual motions of eating, reading, shopping, carrying loads of laundry back and forth on the same street, taking cabs to work, clutching my bags of snacks, had become laconic and disconnected; my strongest feeling in this scheme of things was the settled sense in my stomach when I sat before my desk at work. “Writer” had sent a current quivering through my quotidian existence, and now everything was significant. As I rode to work at night, I saw New York from Granite’s perspective for the first time in eight years. The buildings of Wall Street became symbols of conquest, power, and money, the luscious fruit of life lived in the solid truth. The men who drove cabs and manned the rickety wooden candy/newspaper stalls were soldiers in the battle to uphold these standards. Mary, the white-haired word processor who works with me, was transformed from a cranky old woman into a fighter for the cause of concrete ideals; she was an excellent and compulsive worker who skipped lunch breaks, eating instead from a green box of Mystic Mint cookies in her drawer. Opposite her was the enemy, Joan, the complaining young woman who let her stomach hang out, who wrote articles on leftist painters who “challenge even our most basic assumptions about what is moral,” and who would sneak away from her machine whenever she could to call her boyfriend and yell at him.

My almost daily calls to “writer” took on the ritual quality of my calls to Dial-A-Horoscope. It was a useless gesture and I knew it, yet somehow it was satisfying, a duty performed, a pretension of contact. I was taken off guard when she finally answered.

“Hello?” Her voice was flat, nearly metallic, except for the high pitch that made it the voice of a prematurely serious child. She said she was a free-lance journalist and that she wanted to write an article on Granite’s philosophy, Definitism.

“I’ve just recently realized what an impact it has had on this country’s psychology,” she said solemnly. “It’s quite remarkable. I don’t think any other novelist has done anything comparable.”

We talked enough for me to feel reassured that she wasn’t one of Granite’s enemies. I was lulled by the expressionless, melancholy quality of her voice.

“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” I said. I paused. “Let me preface this. During the beginning stages of the movement, there were a lot of people attracted to it who were a bit crazy. They would come to the meetings and say things about banding together and going off to an island to build a Definitist society — crazy. Granite was very kind to them of course, but she wasn’t interested in those people. And I don’t think their nutty ideas were any reflection of Definitism. I just think that any major movement will attract its share of fanatics.”

“Oh, I agree.”

“And I wondered if those were the kind of people you’ve been seeing, so far.”

The voice retained its flat thoughtfulness. “Well, I haven’t done an interview yet. On the phone a few have sounded a little unhinged, but most of them seemed pretty ordinary, as far as I could tell. But I’m the last person to make judgments of other people’s sanity.”

“Yes, there is always that,” I agreed. “There have been times, in the past, when I was a little bit. crazy myself. But those days are over. In any case, it wasn’t the craziness in me that was responding to Anna Granite. It was the sanity.”

“Well, seriously, I expect most Definitists to be quite sane,” she said.

I was pleased after we hung up, and ready to start the project of the interview. I wrote “Justine Shade—10:00 A.M. — interview” inside one of the red-numbered squares on my calendar.

That was how it began, although to an objective party, it might look as though I were the strange world into which Justine unwittingly pitched herself. In any case, her effect on my mind and heart was immediate: the sad, voluptuous memories of Anna Granite would become, in the three or four days that would pass before the interview, memories of my childhood, as well as other things I don’t like to think about. I spent hours before my legal documents, in my bed, and in the dream state of my cab rides, speculating on what kind of person Ms. Shade might be. I hadn’t had a conversation about Anna Granite in at least eight years; in fact I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a genuine conversation at all. I invented possible scenarios daily, growing more and more excited by the impending intellectual adventure.

My wildest invention, however, didn’t prepare me for what actually happened, which was mind-boggling even in the context of my circuitous and exhausting life. I had thought of Anna Granite as the summit of my life, the definitive, devastating climax — and yet perhaps she had only been the foreshadowing catalyst for the connection that occurred between me and Justine, the bridge without which our lives would have continued to run their spiritually parallel courses. But that is probably just the way it looks now.

Chapter Two

Justine Shade was a neurotic, antisocial twenty-eight-year-old. She had few friends, and as she saw them infrequently, her main source of entertainment was an erratic series of boyfriends who wandered through her small apartment, often making snide comments about her decor. She was serious about her career as a journalist, but she sold very few articles. This was because she got ideas at the rate of about one a year, and once she had one, she went through a lengthy process of mentally sniffing, poking, and pinching it before she decided what to do with it.

To support herself, she worked part time as an assistant secretary for a doctor of internal medicine. The job was lulling and comfortingly dull. Dr. Winkgard was an energetic, square, bad-tempered, good-hearted man, and his wife Glenda was a beautiful forty-year-old whose bright, erotic spirit, in combination with the stubborn way she held her mouth, made Justine think of a pungent, freshly cut lemon. The living room-like office was furnished with proud armchairs, a fiercely thin-cushioned sofa, a drawing of a geometric cat, and a radio that perpetually leaked a thin stream of classical music. The black-and-white striped walls and the purple carpet haughtily complemented each other. This office was the last place Justine would have expected to get an idea. But the fateful article on Anna Granite, which would, in an entirely unforeseen fashion, alter the course of her life, was born as she sat behind her desk, peacefully sorting papers.

She spent much of the day behind this desk with Glenda, welcoming the patients as they teetered in on their canes, hats listing on their heads. She wrote down their names, addresses, and birth dates on large index cards and guided them down the treacherously rumple-rugged hall to the electrocardiogram room, where she got them to take off their clothes and lie on the table so she could wire them to the machine. The EKG was a uniquely intimate process. The old, often odorous and clammy body lay spread out before her, affable and trusting, willing to let her squeeze blobs of white conducting glue on its ankles and wrists. Women lay docile as she lifted their limp breasts for the little red suction cups, even if there were lumpy brown sores beneath them. She saw eczema and swollen ankles and fragile chests bearing terrible scars. A lady with one eye blinded by milky fluid showed her the dainty bag of protective talismans she kept safety-pinned to her dirty bra.

One day she asked a fat, sweating woman how she was, and the lady burst into tears. “My husband, he is beating me,” she said. “I am bruised, see?”

Justine was alarmed to see brown and purple splotches on her chest and stomach. Her alarm flustered her, and she didn’t know what to say. “Why don’t you hit him back?” she asked idiotically. “You’re pretty big.”

“Oh, he would kill me, he would crush me! He was in the army, he is strong, he knows how to kill!”

“Can’t you leave?”

“Where would I go? I have no children. I have no one. He is going to kill me!” The weeping little eyes were finely shot with yellow veins.

Justine handed her a box of Kleenex. She took the EKG printout into Dr. Winkgard’s office. “I think something terrible is happening,” she said. “Mrs. Rabinowitz says her husband is beating her.”

“Mrs. Rabinowitz is crazy,” he said. “It’s a very tragic case. She has a brain disease.”

“But I saw bruises.”

“Well, he does beat her sometimes, but she exaggerates. Sometimes she thinks the pills I give her are poison and she won’t take them. It is a tragedy.”

He went into the cardiogram room, and Justine heard him ask in his vibrant red ball of a voice, “How are we today, Mrs. Rabinowitz?” She took the manila folders of patients already seen and went back to the reception area. Mrs. Winkgard was picking the wilting blossoms from orchids in a vase, her head tilted slightly in appraisal.

“Glenda, Mrs. Rabinowitz just told me something terrible. She says her husband beats her. I told the doctor and he—”

“Yes, yes,” said Glenda. “I know the situation. It is very sad. Both Jonathan and I have spoken to Mr. Rabinowitz. It seems to help for a while, but then he reverts. We’ve spoken to her as well. The problem is, she is as disturbed as he is.”

“But it seems that something—”

The buzzer rang, and Glenda put a finger to her lips. It was Mrs. Wolfen, Mrs. Rabinowitz’s sister. Her entrance, a dour presentation of ragged gray overcoat, folded hands, and disapproving jowls, effectively ended the conversation.

Sometimes a young person with a delicate heart would come to the office. If that person was a young woman, Dr. Winkgard would poke his smiling head out of his office to watch her advance towards him, his grin-wrinkled face set in the gloating, indulgent expression of a client just introduced to a teenaged prostitute. If it was a young man, the doctor would grin a more robust, less liquid grin and swing his hand through the air until it violently connected with the patient in a handshake of health and camaraderie that would have floored an oldster.

“It is good for him to look at a young body for a change,” said Glenda.

It was from one of these diversionary young bodies that Justine got her idea.

He was a small nervous boy with a large round forehead, a saucy jawline, palpitations, and shortness of breath. Justine took him into the EKG room and closed the door. He took off his shirt and lay down; the little room became their private planet, with Dr. and Mrs. Winkgard hovering in the distance like friendly stars.

“What do you do?” asked Justine.

“I’m a writer,” he said, “although I’ve never been published.” He lifted his pretty head and looked at the painless clamps on his wrists and ankles.

“It’ll only take a minute,” she said.

He dropped his head back on the institutional pillow. “The thing is, I find it so hard to concentrate. I haven’t written anything for a while.”

“I write too,” she said.

“Oh, then you understand.”

The machine began to whirr; the thin needles jerkily sketched their abstract of the boy’s heart.

“What do you think of Anna Granite?” he asked.

“I’ve never read her.”

“Really? Oh, you’ve got to read her. She’s the most unique writer. Of course, I don’t believe in what she says politically, but still she’s so powerful. Especially now, when people are so into whining and abdicating responsibility, it’s good to read somebody advocating strength and power, and doing things. She had a lot of influence on me. I even thought of joining a Definitist organization.”

“A what?”

“You know, the groups they used to have in the sixties where they got together and studied Granite’s work. They’re still around.”

“You’re kidding.” She cut the printout on the tiny teeth of the machine and stuck it on the mounting paper. “I mean I knew she was popular, but—”

Dr. Winkgard entered with a broad flap of the door, shoulders squared in his white coat. “Come, Justine, what is taking so long?”

She returned to the stack of papers at her desk and brooded excitedly. It is hard to say why the Anna Granite story had impressed her, but almost immediately on hearing it she formed the tiny damp mushroom of an idea. Justine was morbidly attracted to obsessions, particularly the useless, embarrassing obsessions of the thwarted. She could not help but be drawn to the spectacle of flesh-and-blood humans forming their lives in conjunction with the shadows invented by a mediocre novelist.

“Glenda, have you ever read anything by Anna Granite?”

“Ah yes.” Mrs. Winkgard nodded, her stubborn mouth set in admiration. “Very good writing, very dramatic. The clarity, the way she states her case. I read The Bulwark at a time when I was undergoing a crisis, and it gave me such moral support to read about those strong characters doing great things.”

When Justine left work she bought a bag of cookies and rode home on the subway eating them with queenly elation, impervious to the crumpled bags and bad smells, the empty soda cans rattling about her feet. When she entered her apartment, she stripped off her pantyhose and called an editor she knew at Urban Vision.

The next day, she placed brief ads in Manhattan Thing, a monthly, and the weekly Urban Vision. To be sure she reached the serious nut population, she made up several index cards bearing a neutral statement which she placed on bulletin boards in right-wing bookstores, cafés, and an NYU building. She serendipitously stuck one on the wall of a laundromat in Queens where she had gone to argue with an ex-boyfriend before loaning him some money. Then she bought all of Granite’s books, and started reading The Last Woman Alive, the story of a young woman caught in the grip of a socialist revolution in an imaginary society.

On Thursdays she went to the library with her notebook under her arm and did research. Granite had cut a colorful path through the media, starting with a few mild reviews of her early short-story collection, building in the seventies into lengthy, incredulous, outraged reviews as well as full-blown features about the “Stern Young Cult of Anna Granite,” eventually culminating in sarcastic editorial denunciations by Austin Heller, Shepard Shale, and Michael Brindle, the foremost magazine intellectuals of the left and right wings. The last little noise was a long obituary in Opinion by Heller, in which he told the story of their tentative friendship and eventual violent feud, after which Granite refused to be in the same room with him. He gloatingly referred to a time Granite “bawled” at a party after being insulted by a professor.

Justine left the library feeling as though she had been reading one of Granite’s novels — the proud declarations, the dedicated followers, the triumphant public appearances, the controversy, the feuds, the denunciations, the main character storming from the room with her cape streaming from her shoulders after a violent confrontation with archenemy Austin Heller.

She began getting answers to her ads. The voices sounded like young, cramp-shouldered people taking their lunch breaks in cafeterias lit by humming fluorescent lights. She pictured women with sad hair in flower-print dresses and men with fleshy chests and hands. They all described what Granite had done for them, how she had made them value their lives, how she had inspired them to strive for the best they were capable of, whether as secretaries or as engineers. She made appointments to interview some of them, including one fellow who claimed to be a “Definitist intellectual.”

Meanwhile, Katya, the heroine of The Last Woman Alive, had refused to join the Collectivist party, and had subsequently been thrown out of the academy, where she had been studying higher mathematics. She had been forced into an affair with the philosophically wrong Captain Dagmarov in order to save the life of her lover, Rex.

A week after the dissemination of the cards, she received a call from someone with a high-pitched voice that reminded her of a thin stalk with a rash of fleshy bumps. His name was Bernard, and, in addition to giving her the address of a study group that he attended in Brooklyn, he supplied her with the phone number of Dr. Wilson Bean, Granite’s “intellectual protégé.”

Bean’s voice sounded as if it were being dragged along the bottom of an old tin tub. He didn’t want to be interviewed; he spent minutes castigating the press, which he said had “crucified” him in the past, yet he continued talking. She pursued him down the center of his defense with the laser of her cold, clear voice, and she could feel herself contacting him. Grudgingly, with a lot of rasping around the bottom of the old tub, he agreed to talk to her again after she’d read The Bulwark and The Gods Disdained. He also advised her to attend the annual Definitist conference in Philadelphia, which would take place in a few weeks.

She hung up elated; the phone rang immediately. It was another Granite fan, a woman with a voice that, although riddled with peculiarity and tension, stroked Justine along the inside of her skull in a way that both repelled and attracted her. She said her name was Dorothy Never and she sounded like a nut. She’d been calling for days, she said, and she was so glad to have finally gotten through. Justine, trying to infuse her voice with seriousness and authority, was genuinely excited to hear that she had been a member of the original Definitist movement and had personally known Anna Granite, Beau Bradley, and Wilson Bean. She seemed not only willing but pathetically eager to be interviewed. They arranged a time, and Justine hung up full of amazement at the desire some people have for attention and publicity.

In the meantime, Katya had perished on an ice floe in an effort to escape to America, Captain Dagmarov had killed himself on realizing that he was philosophically in error, and Rex, having been broken by the collectivist society around him, was writing pornography for a living.

Chapter Three

Justine Shade’s voice sounded different in person than it had on the phone. Floating from the receiver, it had been eerie but purposeful, moving in a line towards a specific destination. In my living room, her words formed troublesome shapes of all kinds that, instead of projecting into the room, she swallowed with some difficulty. She sat in the least comfortable chair, blinking frequently under the squalid intensity of city sunlight pressing through my curtainless windows. She glanced surreptitiously at the horrified woman on the gold cover of Night Duty, the paperback on my coffee table. She picked at the dainty fried snacks I had placed between her seat and mine as I traveled from kitchen to living room arranging our tea things.

“I’ve been looking forward to this,” I said. “I was dying to meet someone interested in Granite now, when it’s no longer fashionable. Someone who isn’t a zealot of some kind.”

“Well you realize I’m not a Definitist,” she said. She placed her narrow hands on the top knee of her crossed legs and tilted her small head away from her body, giving herself a neurotically asymmetrical but graceful appearance. She was a pretty woman, once you got used to her. Her skin was very white and clear, her small, finely shaped skull was set off by pale blond short-cropped hair. Her prominent cheekbones, strong chin, and high forehead complemented a face marred only by thin, tight lips and huge black glasses that sat crookedly on her small nose. I was a little disappointed by her. I had imagined a mature and handsome woman wearing a tailored gray suit and black stiletto heels carrying a small tape recorder. Justine dressed like a college kid: tight jeans, pointy red shoes, and a T-shirt with an indecipherable picture and the words “Girl World” on it. She held an already scrawled-in notebook on her knotted-up lap. She’d said that she’d written mainly for Urban Vision, and it was entirely believable to me that a Vision writer would look like this.

“But you seem to take Definitism seriously,” I said.

“Oh, I do. Very seriously.” Her wide gray eyes focused on me intently.

“Well, that means you respect it, and that’s enough recommendation for me.” I sat on the generous expanse of white-cushioned couch and spread my floor-length, bright-flowered dress around me. “Shall we start?”

“Okay.” She smiled as this quasi word came from her mouth like a bubble that floated into the room and disappeared. “When did you first encounter Definitism?”

“As a teenager, when I read The Bulwark. I would say from about the tenth page on, it became the most important influence in my life — certainly the only positive influence.” I paused. “Would you like tea?”

“Not now.” She glanced with suppressed interest at my tea set. “Later I will.”

“Let me explain what I meant by what I just said. I was a sexually abused child. I was forced to have an incestuous affair with my father, starting at age fourteen.”

Her blank face registered nothing, but I could sense the telescope of her attention frantically adjust its gauge to examine my statement. “Have I upset you by telling you that?”

“No. No. I mean, yes. I mean it upsets me that it happened to you, but it doesn’t shock me. I know it’s very common. In fact, I was molested as a child.” Slight pause, slight body recession. “When I was five years old, by a friend of my father’s.”

“Oh God.”

“It didn’t happen that often though. Maybe three or four times.” Her face retained its serene surface. “I know that’s not as awful as with your father because—”

“Stop. Don’t deny your own experience. It’s just not the kind of thing you can quantify. Any therapist will tell you that.” I felt my face relaxing towards her in what I hoped was a pleasant way.

“I know, it’s just that I can’t imagine it happening over a prolonged period of time with your father.” Her eyes flickered from me to the notebook; she paused, cheap ballpoint in mid-flight. Her attention zoomed at me like a bat. She tilted forward, her face shaded with melancholy puzzlement. What an odd little creature she was. “What I’m wondering about though, is. you know I’m writing an article for publication. Are you sure you want to be talking about this?”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ve done it before. I’ve been interviewed often in connection with Granite. A long time ago, but I’m quite used to dealing with it. I bring it up because it’s important in connection with how Granite affected my life. And it’s important to me to speak openly about it. But thank you. No one else in your position has ever thought to ask.”

“Well, with something like this — I didn’t know how experienced you were in an interview situation.”

I thought I saw a shade of kindness in the dutiful shield of her expression. I felt a tendril of empathy appear between us. “It’s all right. I know what I’m doing. I trust you.”

“All right.” Her pen was ready.

“So, anyway, by the time I was seventeen, I had a very negative view of life, and a horrific view of sex. Then I read Anna Granite and suddenly a whole different way of looking at life was presented to me. She showed me that human beings can live in strength and honor. And that sex is actually part of that strength and honor, not oppositional to it. And she was the first writer to do that, ever. To show that sex is not only loving but empowering and enlarging. Not only for men but for women. As you can imagine, this was a big revelation to me. And then the rest was just. the sheer beauty of her ideas. That morality is based on the right to choose for yourself, that your life is yours — she held up a vision for me, and her vision helped me through terrible times. I mean, by the time I discovered Granite, I had just about given up.”

She glanced up at me with an expression that was impossible to read.

“I think I’m going to have some tea now.” She scribbled wildly as I poured myself a cup of tea and stirred in the lumps of sugar and cream. I reached for a little boiled dumpling and reclined to eat it before going on.

“I finally escaped my father by going to a rather strange little two-year college that I think has ceased to exist. But that didn’t work out so well because I overloaded myself with a job and fulltime classes, and I dropped out just before I would’ve graduated. It was around this time that I began attending Granite’s lectures.”

“What were they like?”

“They were wonderful, they were exciting. Beau Bradley was like one of her heroes. There were only about fifteen to twenty people in the original group, but that didn’t diminish the sophistication, the intellectual thunder. I felt I was connecting with the life force of humanity. At the first lecture I sat there and wept. I just wept.”

“What was Granite like?”

“My first reaction — I hate to say it but it’s true — my first reaction was disappointment with her physical appearance. Everybody reacted that way. I was expecting — wanting — her to look like one of her heroines and here she was looking like a middle-aged housewife in a Chanel dress. No, no, she didn’t look like that. I don’t want that recorded.”

Justine grudgingly gave her pen a token second of rest.

“She had beautiful lips and eyes, the most intense eyes. They were huge and soulful, and I have never seen a photograph that does them justice. She was a short woman, but she stood tall. She used to come to the meetings wearing this beautiful black cape with purple lining, and the moment she walked in, it was like magic.” Images of Granite, Bradley, and his rosy-skinned wife Magdalen zipped through my mind in vivid succession, as if imprinted on bright, quickly flipped cards. “There was one time I especially remember that she came in wearing a pale blue dress and the most astonishing turquoise necklace you ever saw. This necklace was just so shimmering and so full of light, it was like the sun and stars combined. It was unreal. And another thing about that night”—I paused to adjust my dress, to tuck one leg safely under me—“she had just come back from a vacation in Jamaica, and she had this dark, beautiful tan. And it was impossible not to notice that Beau Bradley had a dark, beautiful tan, too, and that Magdalen did not.”

Justine looked up with what was beginning to be an annoyingly impartial expression. “In some of the things I’ve read, it was implied that they’d had an affair, but I—”

“Oh, they did. It was obvious that Granite and Bradley had gone away that weekend. Poor Magdalen knew about it. That day after the weekend, Granite was just radiant, so triumphant, that it was even more obvious.” I stopped to assess the effect of my words. “I know this sounds like trashy gossip. But I don’t say it disrespectfully. The only reason I bring it up is because of how it fits in to what ultimately happened in the movement.”

Justine looked at me with puzzlement; she unknotted her legs and shifted them demurely to one side. “My next question relates to that,” she said. “How has the character of the movement changed in the last ten years?”

I did not see the relationship this question bore to my information, but I answered it anyway. “It’s disintegrating without a strong center. The last Definitist meeting I went to was eight years ago. It was at the Centurion Hotel, as it had originally been, and Wilson Bean was speaking. It was nothing like the original lectures. It was so depressing. Poor Wilson stood up there, hanging on the lectern and blabbing, with his little twit girlfriend sitting behind him. What was especially significant to me — at the original meetings, there were these beautiful crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and a lush thick carpet on the floor, and elegant, velvet high-backed chairs for the audience. And on every single chair was placed a pad of heavy vellum note paper and a thick silver pen. Can you imagine? Who else would go to such lengths? It was pure enchantment. And at that last meeting, they were using folding chairs and fluorescent lights. It was still the Centurion Hotel, but they’d rented a cheap room. That was it in a nutshell.” I took an egg roll from my platter. “Don’t you want anything?”

She looked quickly away from her notes. “I think I am ready to have a little bite.” She zeroed in on a piece of sweet and sour pork that I suspect she’d been eyeing all along. She daintily dabbed her lips with the tip of her tongue. I finished my egg roll and poured another cup of tea.

“Have you met Wilson or any of the others who were around then?”

“Wilson Bean I’ve only talked to on the phone. One or two, I’ve met.”

“What were they like?”

“Pleasant, polite.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” I tried to see an oddly pretty, coldly vulnerable little woman like Justine through the eyes of a male intellectual; yes, they’d like her all right. “Some of them weren’t pleasant at all. I used to see some of Granite’s followers do things like attack people who were basically silly and harmless and unable to defend themselves in front of Granite, to impress her. There was one fellow who publicly demeaned his girlfriend. There was a lot of sheer flirtation too. Lots of girls fell in love with Definitism because of the erotic power of the books. No one wanted to admit how important the sex was, but let’s face it — the books were very erotic. There were all these intrigues going on, all these little girls wanting to satisfy their sexual cravings, and some of the men took full advantage.”

I took a deep drink of tea. It was too sweet, and I enjoyed it as I enjoyed reconstructing the movement that had transported me from the evil universe of my childhood to the bland and benevolent planet of my Queens apartment, my cabs, my legal documents. “It’s disturbing to me that there were cruel and exploitative people in the movement. And some of them were Granite’s right-hand people, her intellectuals, for God’s sake.”

We regarded each other for a few seconds. She unfolded her legs, sat up straight, and asked, “How do you explain those kinds of people in Anna Granite’s following?”

“I was going to get to that.” I paused, and in that pause tried to gauge the hopefulness of conveying my meaning to this unresponsive creature. I saw Bradley and Granite before me on the lectern, saw Granite’s meaningful look as she caressed Bradley’s hand while handing him the notes for his speech, saw Magdalen’s averted eyes and Bradley’s manly coolness. “You see, Granite and Bradley were two rare creatures. They were of the same species. And that they should be sexually mated as well as professionally, philosophically mated — well, it was like the Definitist formula for matching components. According to Definitism, it was logically impossible for them not to have an affair. And it was equally impossible for Magdalen, as a Definitist, to refuse to accept it, as it was to her partner’s highest good, and so on. But you see, it happened only because Bradley believed that sexual desire must spring from objective admiration. He believed he should desire Granite when he didn’t. And she tried to demand from him that which can’t be demanded. It became really awful to watch. She was a good twenty years older than he, and I think that, with a young man. well, it was just undignified somehow. It finally came to a head during a party at the Centurion. Bradley had foisted Magdalen off on a body builder who’d just joined the meetings”—a painful and acute flash of that melancholy muscle man, his hammy hands absently patting Magdalen’s waist as her trembling body huddled against his bulk—“but instead of dancing with Granite he spent the whole evening courting a beautiful blond actress named Cheryl Bland. And Granite was furious. She finally ordered the music stopped and stalked out, her cape streaming behind her. The next day Bradley’s Definitist Symposium was closed down, and Bradley was a broken man. I remember him that last day, leaving his office with a cardboard box of papers and books. He just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.’ It was a permanent rift, and none of their ideas, however great, could help them.” I paused, dizzy with the memory, the awful wrenching apart of these magnificent human beings who should’ve been together forever, yet never could. Justine’s face had taken on a matte dreamy quality.

“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.

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.

I picked up the bottle of Magic Bubble that I kept on the window sill, and removed the slim wand from the mysteriously blue, ether-smelling liquid. I dipped the wand again and leaned out the window with it; the iridescent chemicals that stretched invisibly across the wand’s small hoop caught the sun and glimmered before I blew. A dozen bubbles floated free. They dallied wondrously in midair, as though unsure what to do with their new life, and then meandered on the wind, all the way to the corner below, into crowds of people waiting for the light with their briefcases and bags. The pedestrians looked up, confused, looked all around for the source of the bubbles, watching in fascination as the shiny circles drifted into the street to be murdered by traffic. I raised my wand and blew another doomed, shimmering flock.

I envisioned pale Justine in the arms of her powerful lover, her small head thrown back in surrender. I felt a pinch of pain. The pouting boy across the street had left the window. Only vague shadows were visible in the fluorescent depths of the gym. Every loneliness is a pinnacle.

I turned away from the windows and faced the room. I had wanted to tell Justine about my childhood.