Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Chapter Thirteen

It would be an exaggeration to say that Justine’s meeting with Dorothy disturbed the years-old insulation of her cloak of loneliness. But something about the encounter had sent an invisible ray under the cloak, a ray that subtly vibrated against everything it touched before it finally faded days later. During the ten years since Justine had left Deere Park, Michigan, she had had many encounters that were stranger, deeper, or more disturbing than this one, but somehow the interview had the haunting impact of a vaguely remembered dream, the kind one thinks may have been significant because images from it pop up during the day while one’s back is turned and then pop back down when one whirls around to confront them.

A week after she interviewed Dorothy, Justine went to Philadelphia for the annual Definitist gathering as Wilson Bean had suggested. She took a train on a gray, damp Saturday morning; it sat in the station for half an hour after she boarded it. She sat with her forehead on the windowpane looking at two fat middle-aged men standing on the platform like two puddings in shirts and baggy pants. They reminded her of Dorothy, and she imagined the teenaged Granite fanatic on a train, going to a meeting such as this for the first time. She smiled with involuntary fondness; it must’ve been unbearably exciting. One of the men scratched his neck, turned, and walked away from the train. The other stood and looked at it in a heartbroken stupor. Justine thought of Dorothy’s father standing like this at a railway station, brooding psychotically over the daughter he had abused and lost. A large boy with a rigid face and distant eyes sat next to her and diverted her attention. The train started to move. She excused her way past the boy’s legs and went to the snack bar to buy two chocolate donuts wrapped in cellophane.

When they arrived in Philadelphia, it was raining densely and hard. Justine snapped open her umbrella with irritation; the boy strode into the downpour with stupid determination. Justine walked for blocks, barely able to read street signs, past meaningless houses and nightmare strips of shopping centers, her legs and feet wet and cold, her fellow passenger plodding a few feet in front of her. The hotel finally appeared in its majestic parking lot; she squished in, feeling vile.

The meeting room was large, thinly carpeted and lit with track lighting. People in suits and dresses stood or strolled, holding plastic glasses of mineral water. She was looking for a snack table when she was accosted by a short plump person with bright eyes and tiny hands.

“Justine Shade, I imagine? I expected you to be pretty, but not to this extent.”

Justine took his soft claw in a daze; even given the vague familiarity of his accent, he had to remind her that they had spoken on the phone, that he had been the one to give her Wilson Bean’s phone number. She was repelled by him, but he was a source of information. Together they wandered through the conference room (which had a table bearing only mineral water, no snacks), Justine trying to form an impression of Anna Granite’s followers, as Dr. Bean had suggested. She was struck first by the absence of attractive people and second by the timid, exhausted look that prevailed. They were totally unlike the “cult members” described in the old magazine articles she had read. The men appeared weak but neurotically tenacious, the women limp and dimly pleasant. This was ironic in view of Granite’s handsome, arrogant characters, the tall robust males and females who despised weakness, who fornicated with such brutish zeal. She felt curiously fond and protective of the crowd.

“No, I’m not a Definitist in the strict sense,” she said to a bespectacled computer expert. “It’s just that certain aspects of it interest me.”

“What interests you? The emphasis on reason, on cold logic?” He said these words as if they were flags waving in the senseless gray landscape of his life.

“It’s more the emphasis on the individual versus the herd,” she said. “The concept of the beauty of loneliness.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Of course, one leads to the other, you know,” said Bernard as they strolled away. “To stand apart from the collective is the only choice a rational human can make.”

“People stand apart for irrational reasons, too. Sometimes it just happens.”

“That’s not possible.”

Justine said she thought she’d go to have lunch somewhere.

“I shall accompany you,” said Bernard.

They went to a Chinese restaurant with broken ocher and black tiles, smeared walls, and crabbed, tiny waitresses. A group of exhausted, sweaty waiters in dingy white kitchen uniforms sprawled around a back table smoking and muttering to each other. They looked at Justine and Bernard with incurious distaste.

They ordered mushroom fried rice with green peas and lurid red spare ribs. They shared from the plates, eating the meat with their fingers. Bernard discussed his endeavors and accomplishments. He was majoring in linguistics at NYU, where he hoped to found a student Definitist group. He was minoring in economics. He was teaching himself Japanese in his spare time. He was studying art history. He was translating The Hunchback of Notre Dame into Hebrew. He was putting himself through school by working in computer programming.

“I am taking as my model Jesus Delorean Dilorenzo Michaelangelo in The Gods Disdained. Maximum achievement, the highest you are capable of. None of this ‘well, maybe I can’t.’”

He chewed his rice and peas exuberantly. A kitchen boy tossed a lank strand of hair off his forehead and sneered.

“Although it looks as though I am going to be let go from my job. But, so what?” He shrugged. “Frank Golanka was fired twice in The Bulwark, right? For much the same reason. My co-workers do not like me. Very few people like me. Also like Frank Golanka I have no friends.”

“Aren’t other Definitists your friends?”

“Not really.” He looked at her, part of his face bright-eyed and smug, the other part desolate and frozen. “Every now and then a few people come into my life who seem to be friends. But they eventually disappear.”

She was touched. The expression on his face suddenly appeared to have been molded by hostile, alien hands, as if he were an unfortunate putty dwarf created to play the patsy in a sadomasochistic cartoon, the jargon he mouthed about the sanctity of the individual part of the mean joke.

“You must be lonely,” she said.

Surprise softened his face and made it vulnerable; he wasn’t used to hearing concern expressed on his behalf. She wanted to stroke his oily cheek.

“Yes, it is lonely. It is always lonely to stand apart from the crowd. One wishes to meet another with whom one has matching components.”

Justine tried to see this as an entertaining experience, but she felt disoriented and sad; she did not even consider the horror with which the Justine of Action, Illinois, would have viewed this situation. Beyond the dirty window pane was gray sky, mist. They and this dingy room, with its sticks of furniture and inhabitants, could be afloat in an envelope of mist, unconnected with anything on earth, as in a serious play about ideas, where tense characters assemble on a bare stage and talk about life or society, with no life or society anywhere in sight. If this were one of those plays, what lines would the kitchen boys have? What would they think of the conflict between the individual and the herd, the choice between rationality and irrationality? She thought of photographs she’d seen of thousands of Chinese in identical gray shirts, thrusting red books into the air. Would their lines give the subject a special Chinese perspective? Or would they remain silent, their presence meant merely to represent society watching as the individuals hashed it out?

“What about yourself?” asked Bernard. “Do you find yourself often alone?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

“How could you tell?”

“By your arrogance. You are very arrogant. I mean that as a compliment.”

Again she thought of Dorothy. She wondered if a large proportion of Definitists were victims of disturbed families.

“What about your family?” she asked. “Do you have a decent relationship with them?”

“Not a very Definitist question. I don’t have any relationship with them. They are beaten, weak people. My father was cautious and full of false humility. Of my mother there is even less to say. She peeled potatoes. She wore no makeup. She was religious.”

Justine imagined little Bernard in the appalling bosom of his family. The father was a wretch, the mother a shadow. There was a bowl of lumpy potatoes for dinner, shoes left in the middle of the floor, used Kleenex crumpled on the couch, a black-and-white television on the blink. Bernard rarely went outside; he had no friends. Shunned on the school playground, he squatted alone, collecting pebbles and pieces of colored glass. Without naming her, Justine thought of Emotional and felt a pang.

Despite his physical ugliness, surely Bernard wasn’t an unpleasant child. There was a gentle, sensitive place in his meaty soul, a place from which he viewed the world as he sat alone on the playground, appreciating its hues of sadness and moments of joy. From this spot he arranged his perception into fantasies of beauty and strength, glory and striving, fantasies he nursed deep within himself. His mother’s bleak pain, his father’s emptiness, the contempt of his schoolmates, all menaced and tortured his inner self until it developed a callused, horned armor. Through this armor his deformed sensitivity strained to find the thundering abstracts of beauty and heroism that consoled it and discovered Anna Granite.

Justine walked silently beside Bernard on their way to the lecture hall, listening to him discuss the fine points of Definitism. She had rancorous thoughts about the kind of world that could turn a child into a pontificating maniac.

They arrived at the hall late. Dr. Bean was already giving his speech to a crowd of about two hundred people. They sat too far back for Justine to get a good look at him; she could only see a grotesquely tall figure clutching the podium with both hands. He wore glasses and his long hair played with suppressed hysteria about his shoulders. He spoke as though describing something that had been done to him recently at the hands of a mob.

“What we’re seeing is a systematic attempt to de-rationalize and de-Americanize the educational system of this country. This is something that started in the forties and has gradually wormed its way into respectability. One of the first signs of this change was the mass acceptance of a book by a supposed scientist, Hilma Feeney, who went to live in the primitive island culture of Patagandria, came back, and wrote a book about how wonderful this primitive culture was — implying, quite clearly, that it is better to be a naked, bead-making Patagandrian living in a hut without so much as an outhouse than an American with houses, cars, skyscrapers, shopping centers, and art. That this work was hailed not only by anthropologists but by the public, was one of the first danger signs — recognized as such by Anna Granite herself, who attacked it as the perfidious evil it was when it first appeared. But it didn’t stop there.”

“I think I’m going to go to the train station,” whispered Justine. “I want to get back early.” She got up and turned to say good-bye. To her dismay, Bernard stood and said, “I’ll accompany you.” To her disgust, he put his hand on her shoulder. In this way, they walked out into the rain.

Chapter Fourteen

The night after I did the interview with Justine Shade, I transformed it into a wonderful story which I told to proofreaders Debby and Sandra. We discussed Ms. Shade during our break over a metal tray of crumbling company-supplied cookies and Stryofoam cups of coffee.

“Do you really think she’s who she says she is?” asked Sandra. “I mean, what kind of reporter would dress like that?”

“And reporters use tape recorders, not note pads,” added Debby, picking some chapped extranea from her pink-coated lips. “Did she have any kind of I.D.?”

“No.”

“God, Dorothy, I can’t believe you let this stranger into your house. Anybody could say they were writing free-lance for the Vision.”

“But why would anybody want to? She was obviously writing an article for somebody.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because she knew Granite’s material so well. She asked a lot of well-thought-out questions.”

“That’s even scarier if you ask me,” said Sandra, jabbing at some tiny cookie crumbs with her moistened fingertip. “She’s probably a crackpot gathering information for some sick purpose of her own.” She licked her harvesting finger.

“No,” I said. “I’m the crackpot. She’s the normal person coming to expose me. She tried to make me out as some kind of masochist.”

They exchanged glances. “How did she do that?”

“She just said a lot of things implying that Granite’s novels are based on masochistic sex, which is totally unfair. Then she tried to appease me by talking about her sex life, about how some guy did stuff to her she couldn’t control or something.”

The girls gasped in unison and simultaneously picked up cookies which they pried apart, Sandra getting white Oreo goo in the point of a false fingernail. I felt sort of guilty betraying Justine in this way, but I also felt that she deserved it.

“She talked to you about her sex life? And you believe she was a reporter? Dorothy, come on!”

“She even told me about the time she was sexually molested as a child.”

“Oh my God, Dorothy. Sicko. Sicko.”

“God,” said Debby. “What if she wanted to meet you for a personal reason? What if she somehow found out who you are and became obsessed with you? What if she’s a lesbian!”

I refrained from suggesting that Debby, who was continually obsessed with virtual strangers, might be projecting. “How could she have found out who I was? I randomly answered an ad on a bulletin board, remember?”

“I don’t know, maybe she’s a lesbian obsessed by Anna Granite who fixated on you because you reminded her of somebody.”

“Yeah,” said Sandra. “You never know with these nut cases. You saw Fatal Attraction, right?”

“You really think she might be a lesbian?”

“Could be. Sounds like there was something pretty intense going on there.”

I hadn’t considered this at all. “She didn’t look like a lesbian.”

“Well, whether she is or not, if she calls again, I hope you hang up.”

“Really,” said Debby. She tipped her head back and ferociously expelled her cigarette smoke.

Four A.M. found me in the toilet still wondering about the conversation, undoubtedly the liveliest I’d ever had with my foolish coworkers. Debby’s theory that Justine was a dyke seemed ridiculous. and yet. What did that “Girlworld” on her T-shirt mean? Had it simply been my exhaustion that had given our interview its feverish dimension? I had told reporters about my father before (information which, strangely enough, I found easy to dispense to strangers but never revealed to those I saw everyday), but I had never received such a confidence in return, nor had I ever become so emotional with one of these people before. Justine had said stupid, irritating things, but so had all of them. Was it possible that I had been disturbed because I had been receiving sex signals from Justine? She had referred to her “awful” ex-lover as “he,” but perhaps he had been her last heterosexual affair before discovering her true sexuality, which would explain her odd coldness in describing what should have been rapture.

Two proofreaders came in and loudly banged around in the stalls, peeing and yakking about the supervisor’s ridiculous infatuation with an eighteen-year-old temp, and what a fool he was making of himself. I sat quietly until they’d finished at the sinks and then emerged to examine myself in the mirror. As usual, my heart sank. I was fat and pasty, with dark bags under my eyes and visible roots. Even if Justine was a lesbian, she couldn’t possibly be sending out sex signals to me.

On my way back home to Queens via company car service, I considered my limited experience with lesbians. I’d noticed that things like fat and skin tone didn’t seem to matter so much to them as they did to men. There were a handful of lesbians in the Dance of the Spirit and Healing Circle group I went to when I was even more desperate than usual for human contact. They weren’t fat or dumpy, but they didn’t seem like they’d reject you if you were. I found myself dreamily imagining Justine at a Dance of the Spirit meeting as I lolled groggily in the leathern gloom of the car, my eyes on the aqua-colored bottle of liquid air-sweetener the driver had attached to the center of his dashboard. The convoluted landscape of downtown Manhattan slid by in the emergent light.

Perhaps my attendance at a Dance of the Spirit group would strike some as a contradiction of my belief in Anna Granite, who was an atheist and would probably have scorned auras, healing crystals, and chakra meditation if she’d had the chance to. But one of the central beliefs of Definitism is in the right of the individual to seek out whatever serves and pleases him, as long as others are not trampled upon. Anyway, I enjoyed the meetings, and I thought Justine might too, although I’m not sure why I thought of her when I received my invitation to that month’s Dance of the Spirit, two weeks after our interview. But I did think of her, and my memory of her tense body made me feel she might be in need of the kind of gentleness I sought at these fests. Besides, I wanted to know how the article was coming.

I had better luck finding her on the other end of her ringing telephone this time. She sounded disoriented, especially when she realized who it was.

“I haven’t even started the article yet,” she said. “God knows when I will, there’s still so many people to interview.”

Her voice was expressionless save that it was sinisterly rimmed with the glowing wattage of raw nerves. It disturbed me; there was something desperate in it. Perhaps she was anxious about the article and my call had precipitated feelings of guilt.

“Oh well, take as much time as you need,” I chattered. “These things require a good deal of thought and meticulousness and care. Don’t let anyone rush you.”

Silence, underscored by the dull electrical pulse of the phone.

“Anyway, that’s not the real reason I called. There’s an event I wanted to invite you to that I thought might be of interest.”

“Yeah?” Her voice swelled with personality.

I described Dance of the Spirit as best I could, emphasizing the healings and niceness. “It’s almost all women,” I added at the end.

Another silence.

“Hello?” A little irritable, I admit.

“This is a Definitist meeting?” she asked.

“Oh no, no.” I gaily laughed. “Not at all. It’s something I felt that perhaps, on an intuitive level, you might enjoy.”

Another long throb of silence. “Well thanks but I don’t think so. To tell you the truth I’m surprised you’d go to something like that. It doesn’t sound very Definitist in spirit.”

“Well, maybe if you went you’d get a broader picture of Definitism,” I snapped. “But maybe you don’t want that.”

I felt her behind her silence, squirming. “Why don’t you give me the address,” she compromised. “Maybe I’ll drop in if I have the time.”

I placed the squares of information at her disposal and got off the phone. Debby and Sandra were right; she was obviously some kind of nut. I was sorry she’d been molested as a child, but ultimately one has to take responsibility for one’s self, including one’s phone manners.

Dance of the Spirit opened as usual; the Reverend Jane Terwilliger, a tall bright-eyed woman with long, sensitive fingers, stood beaming in the center of her loft before massive vases of roses and lilies, around which were heaped hunks of clear quartz, giant pink and purple crystals. She was further ringed by a half circle of white and blue candles and, beyond that, a circle of primary-colored folding chairs in which members of the group sat, their eyes happily shut, their open hands resting palms-up on their spread knees. Tonal music bloomed in stately bulbs of sound, and the healers moved among the seated celebrants, gesturing earnestly with their hands, pushing auras this way and that.

I have to confess that a large part of my reason for being there was the beauty of the ritual, the solemnity and delicacy of it all. Justine had been right; Anna Granite would not have approved.

The Reverend Jane saw me and floated towards me. “Dorothy, so nice to see you, it’s been a while.” She rested her long arm across my shoulders, and her body warmth sank into my outer flesh and vanished. I uttered my greeting, and she stepped slightly away from me, her hand still resting on my shoulder. She looked at me, and her expression seemed to spiral inward as her eyes released darts of light that covered my forehead and cheeks with bright barbs.

“There seems to have been a change in you,” she said. “Quite recently. Yes.” Slowly her eyes eased back into their normal function and she smiled, emitting nothing but kindness and interest. “You’re probably not aware of it yet but you will be. A nice opening is taking place.” She nodded happily, and I was embarrassed by the little lilypad pulse that answered her from somewhere in my chest, eager for her words and voice simply because they were kind.

I saw Jodie and Marie, a couple that faithfully attended the meetings. I felt for Jodie a strange affinity born of our mutual awkwardness and our politeness in the face of it. We had nothing to say to each other, yet we felt a bond based on the unspoken sense of an elusive similarity between us and the fear that if we actually got to know one another the result would be disappointment. The similarity was not physical; she was a tall, sharp-featured strawberry blonde with an almost expressionless face and stiff Kabuki grace. Her girlfriend Marie, a young, sarcastic, alcoholic Southerner with gorgeous green eyes and bad skin, scared me, but I approached them anyway as they lounged by the snack table.

Marie regarded me resentfully as Jodie and I made our usual pointlessly locked-in eye contact and clumsy small talk. I wanted to talk to them about Justine and the interview but could find no way to do so as they knew almost nothing about me. Instead I made oblique references to a certain “strange person” who had appeared in my life and who was “playing games” with me, a person I could see was trouble, yet felt drawn to. In between sentences I directed hard, confusing thoughts at Jodie, and she seemed to sense the scrambled text beneath my banal phrases, for I could feel a reaction pressing against her austerity like a curious animal. Even Marie seemed sympathetic. “Get rid of her,” she said. “Don’t cut her any slack.”

Reverend Jane clapped her hands and called out, “Okay! Let’s begin!”

We sat in our circle of chairs, and Jane began her talk. She’d been thinking about the limitations we place on ourselves. She told of a story she once read in a National Geographic which reported that when tigers accustomed to captivity were taken to nature preserves, they refused to leave the perimeters of their cages, even after the cages were removed. My eyes scanned the attentive faces. Who were these people? Mostly attractive, healthy-looking women in their thirties who wore bright-colored clothing. One of them, a Puerto Rican woman with a sternly beautiful face and huge starved eyes, had recently lost her mother to cancer and her brother to AIDS. She sat in her chair as if she were a cactus drinking in the tiny rivulet of nourishment at the center of Jane’s voice; it was very little, but she was drawing on it with all her deep plantlike might. I felt for her.

“. and I just kept seeing that strong beautiful tiger in the midst of that lush greenery, with those wonderful tropical flowers and the fresh air all around him, yet unable to step out and live it. And I said to myself, that’s been me. That’s been a lot of people I know.”

I wondered if it had ever been me. It didn’t seem like it. I looked around the circle. People were nodding their heads. Then it was time to link hands, close our eyes, and focus inward, visualizing pure golden light bathing our heart chakras. Usually when we did this I found that while there was nothing much in my heart chakra, my head was a-boil with nasty little memories. The teenagers on the subway who called me “porky,” the cab driver who’d called me a cunt, bitchy Ms. Feigenbaum, the lawyer with illegible handwriting, all chattering hatefully to the accompaniment of the Top 40 trash I was subjected to from my work-mate’s desk radio. I sighed, linked hands, and encouraged my thoughts to skip with idiotic lightness over my recent plans for joining a gym and losing weight. Salads, I thought. Water. Threads of tonal music penetrated my skull. I must’ve been tired for I experienced a sudden cerebral dip, the startling change of level one feels when stepping into sleep, not one layer at a time, but down several layers with one elongated step. I yawned. I thought of my mother. This was not unusual; I thought of both my parents on occasion, usually with intense anger. But at this moment I felt acutely my mother as she was in Ohio, still young, still pretty, and in my child’s eyes so much more than pretty that “pretty” would demean features that to me were the fine articulation of her deep internal life, which made meaningless the social concept “pretty.” I remembered her rubbing my shoulders as I lay in bed ready for sleep, remembered her gentleness, her innocent undefended nature entering my body through her fingers. I remembered my body responding to her. All at once I felt my heart chakra, which was filled, not with light, but with pain.

I must have transmitted this to the women who held my hands, for I felt gentle squeezes on each side. This only made it worse. My mother was swallowed up in black.

“Okay, now we’re just going to go around the circle and give everybody the chance to say a few words — maybe to ask for support or to give thanks or whatever you want. If you feel like keeping quiet, just squeeze the hand of the person next to you. Ready?”

I sat shivering and cold as a woman began expressing gratitude for all the wonderful changes in her life during the last year. The image of Justine Shade flitted across my mind, and I wondered why. Was my life so empty? I thought of Anna Granite the first time I had seen her on the dais in Philadelphia.

I was so overwhelmed by my emotional response to Granite, that I could only comprehend her speech in fragments. She talked about how tragic it was when the individual was sacrificed for the majority, how the needs of the weak became an excuse for undermining the strong. I wept for the entire time, deep in the turbulent waters of my feelings, terrified by and agog at the fanged and finned beasts that swam by; I heard the speech only when I rose to the surface for air. What I heard corresponded with what I was seeing in my underwater maelstrom. I had been stronger than my parents. I had been damn strong to survive a childhood that was completely lacking in emotional or mental sustenance and in fact would’ve killed most people. And it was my strength that had made my father hate me. It wasn’t because I was worthless, not because I was ugly or fat. It was because I was worth something and he knew it and he wanted to destroy me for it. I wept with rage, yet with decorum. The handsome man next to me furtively looked, but not with anything but kindness.

When the speech was over, my tears were done. I sat quietly in the back row resting as I watched the audience crowd around Granite to ask her questions and to shake her hand, or merely to look upon her at close range. My emotions gently ebbed as the audience began to filter out of the building, their faces upturned and glowing. I wasn’t even surprised when the man who had been sitting next to me appeared in the aisle beside my seat and, putting his hand on my shoulder, said “Goodbye now”—even though no handsome man had ever touched or spoken to me in that way.

I waited until there were only a few people standing around Granite and she was reaching to collect her things as she answered their final questions. Then I rose and approached her. I saw her glance flicker at me and then back to the boy who was telling her of his plans to become an architect. I stood next to him, heavy with determination. I could feel her becoming aware of me, taking me in, trying to interpret the surge of resolve emanating from this silent fat girl. I could see the coarseness of her skin and hair, the deep lines on her forehead, her mouth creases, and the swollen pockets of brown and purple under her eyes. It didn’t matter anymore that she was not beautiful. She turned to me. Her aquamarine eyes were shielded, questioning, very tired.

“I. I. I. ” To my horror I was unable to speak. She frowned at me, she gestured with impatience. “I just had to tell you. ” My feelings swelled up through my lungs and into my throat. I made a choked noise. My moment had come, I was before my savior, and I was falling away from her as if down a dark pit. Her face seemed to come apart, cracking like that of a witch in a mirror. Alarm bolted from her eyes. My hand thrashed out reflexively, as though to break my fall and then the miraculous thing; she stood and gripped my shoulders with both hands, and I felt her body heat enter my system with the blind muscularity of an eel whipping through deep water.

She said, “I can see you’ve had a lot of pain in your life.”

“Yes I have.” People were looking, but I didn’t care.

“There were times I didn’t know how I would survive. Even recently. I just wanted to die.”

Her eyes radiated the gentlest strength I had ever experienced, her tough, hot, callusy hands supported me with the full intensity of her life. “Yes,” she said. “I can see that.”

“But I did survive, and the reason I survived was you. I had to tell you that. I had to thank you.”

She looked at me and, as in my fantasy, she saw me, saw my pain — which no one had ever acknowledged or even allowed me to acknowledge. However, unlike my fantasy, to be seen and acknowledged by her wasn’t to be penetrated and ripped apart by an obscene burst of energy. I did not feel her gaze boring through my pores to envelop my swooning spirit; I felt her at the perimeters of myself, attentive, very close, but respectful, waiting for me to reveal myself. So I didn’t swoon. I stood and met her gaze and felt my self, habitually held in so deep and tight, come out to meet her with the quavering steps of someone whose feet have been asleep for a long, long time.

“Sit down,” she said. “I am very tired, but I feel we must talk.”

We sat down to talk as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Everyone else was gone, but I could hear people milling around behind the curtain, occasionally putting their heads out to see what was happening between Anna Granite and the unknown fat girl. She still held my hand.

“Tell me,” she said. “Just tell me.”

I did. What I had been unable to say to anyone, barely even to myself, came out in normal sentences. I didn’t even feel embarrassment, let alone shame. As I talked she sat erect, her whole body in a state of alertness, taking in, I felt, not only my words, but my voice, my eyes, my movements, the invisible mist of my secret bodily qualities, that which makes you sense a person before you’ve seen them. When I told her that my father had molested me, her eyes became suffused with such an extremity of feeling that they became walls of fierce unfeeling, inanimate as fire or radiation. I told of how I’d read The Bulwark, how I’d gone to college hoping to find meaning in my life and had instead been battered by everyone and everything around me, how once again her work had been the only thing for me to hold on to, how I’d come to the decision to leave college, cut myself away from my parents forever, change my name and become a student of Definitism.

When I was finished she stared at me in silence for a long moment, her hand still on mine. She said, “And how will you support yourself?”

“I can type fast,” I said. “I’m a good speller. I could be a secretary.”

There was another moment in which her eyes absorbed me slowly, and then she said, “Would you like to work for me?”

“Be your secretary?”

“Not mine directly. But for my protégé, Beau Bradley. It is part time, I’m afraid, but we are paying almost double the standard hourly wage. And for that we expect double the competence.”

She was talking to me as if we were both characters in her novels! I wanted to answer her like one, but I couldn’t quite. “Are you sure?” I said. “I’d love to try but I’ve never been a secretary before and—”

“If it doesn’t work out we’ll know soon enough. But I think it will. I see incredible strength in you. I also see intelligence, which is proven by the fact that you were drawn to my work. If you could live your life up to this point in the face of such terrible opposition, I think you will do amazing things now that you have removed that opposition. I want you to know that. And I want you to report for work tomorrow.”

The last words between us occurred as I was on my way to the door. She said, “Oh, wait, you haven’t told me — what is your name? I mean your real name, not the one your parents gave you.”

And I said, “Dorothy. Dorothy Never.” And she smiled and repeated it.

And now we’re going to open our eyes,” said Reverend Jane.

I opened my eyes to the sight of happy strangers unclasping their hands and looking around. I caught Jodie’s curious glance and looked away.

“Why don’t we end the service with a little song,” continued Jane. “I always enjoy that, don’t you?” We reached for our songbooks.

I remembered Anna Granite and me alone in the hotel hall like two lovers clasping hands in a closing restaurant. I remembered leaving her that night and walking through the streets feeling my secret slowly releasing itself from my body. I felt my inner tissue open and lie breathing and restful. I felt yellow flowers blooming on my internal organs.

But now Anna Granite is dead, and sometimes I think my memories of her don’t mean as much to me as I’d like to think they do. I remember my sense of release and freedom that night, but only cerebrally. Well, Granite would say that is the most important way, I guess.

We held our songbooks before us and sang: “Happiness runs in a circular motion/Thought is like a little boat upon the sea/Everybody is a part of everything anyway/You can have everything if you let yourself be.”

Chapter Fifteen

Justine Shade rolled down the cheap black socks of a large male patient. She dotted glue on his thick ankles and applied the clamps.

“Just rest your arms at your sides,” she said gently. She moved to glue and clamp his wrists.

What an idiotic thing to spend your days doing, she thought. She looked at the heavy man on the table, exposed in his underwear. He looked calm and potentially very purposeful, despite his passive body. She wondered if he was a Definitist.

“Mr. Johnson, have you ever read The Gods Disdained by Anna Granite?”

“No, I haven’t. Although I think I’ve heard of her. Why?”

“I don’t know. You remind me a little bit of a character, Skip Jackson. Maybe because your name is Skip, too.”

“What’s Skip Jackson like?”

“Well, he’s an industrialist supercapitalist. He’s brilliant and rich. He’s one of the only successful supercapitalists left in the world because the liberals and weaklings have pretty much taken over and are trying to destroy the strong, productive people.” He looked interested. “Most of the other supercapitalists have hidden out in a capitalist paradise with the head capitalist and are just waiting for the world to collapse without them. Which it does.”

“What happens to Skip Jackson?”

“He gets to the paradise with the others and then comes back in the end to take over the world.” She worked the knobs of the machine. “Plus there’s some romance and some sex.”

“That sounds interesting. That sounds like something I might like to read. I haven’t read for years now.”

“I told Skip Johnson he reminded me of Skip Jackson in The Gods Disdained,” she said to Glenda that afternoon.

“Ah, what a compliment.”

“Now he’s probably going to read it and think I have a crush on him.”

Glenda laughed throatily. “You know, he really isn’t anything like the character. Do you know he is forty-five years old and he lives with his mother?”

“Oh my.”

“That’s right. His mother is Regina Johnson who comes in about every six months. She is really the mover and shaker of the family. She still manages a floor of Bloomingdale’s and she is sixty-seven years old.”

“That’s wonderful.”

Justine filed patients’ cards and brooded. According to Definitist thought, for every imperfect entity, be it human or material, there exists a perfect counterpart; a lovely princess for every pimply shop girl. This perfection was not an annulment of the shop girl, but an ideal for her to aspire to, and the clerk who whistled at her in the street could see and love the princess in her, just as she could see the glamorous playboy in him. That is why, said Anna Granite, advertising is deeply moral; its smiling billboards are openings into the perfect beauty that we can all strive for and attain, to one degree or another, depending on our individual components.

Maybe, thought Justine bleakly, there is a perfect Justine Shade somewhere. A tall, full-lipped beauty who wears silk and leather. She lives in a beautiful, austere apartment and condescends to write a half-dozen or so brilliant pieces of journalism a year. They all sound the same, and they are never ambiguous. She has lilac-point Siamese cats and a few strong, handsome, powerful lovers who never stand her up or make her feel awful, instead of a series of eccentrics, instead of a tiny apartment filled with gewgaws and balls of dirt, instead of a job putting clamps on old people and arranging cards in alphabetical order.

This can’t go on, she thought. Somehow, I have to get out and Live.

On the other hand, Anna Granite’s heroines rarely got out and Lived. They didn’t want to either, as it would require that they mix with the herd. They just worked hard at their careers, thought, and were beautiful in grand, square-jawed isolation, at least until the hero appeared who had also, until this point, been sitting alone in his room when he wasn’t working hard. Perhaps there was something starkly beautiful about her simple job and her functional apartment, her daily subway ride, her small bags of groceries and neat dinners, her staring vigils over the clanking typewriter. It was possible, except there was nothing stark or beautiful about the gewgaws or the dirtballs. Maybe she would begin sweeping more regularly and throw some things out.

“How is the article coming?” asked Glenda.

“I’m making progress. I’m interviewing people this afternoon, these guys who run a Definitist school.”

“That should be interesting,” said Glenda, absently examining a postcard from a forgotten patient.

“And I’m trying to arrange an interview with Austin Heller next week.”

“Really?” Glenda looked at her with tentative reappraisal. “That would be a feather in your cap, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know. He probably won’t understand why anybody would be interested in Anna Granite now. He might not have anything to say.”

“But still, just to mention his name in your article.”

Justine crouched on the slim ledge of Glenda’s validation, her enjoyment of the perch only partially marred by its smallness and flimsiness.

The offices of Rationalist Reaffirmation High were located in a small oblong apartment building in Brooklyn. The third floor stairwell had “You Die” written in Spanish on its wall.

Jack Peach, president of Reaffirmation High, was a plump fellow with a proud fleshy chest and a normal smile. He shook her hand and guided her through the functional apartment, which was defined by boxes of files, a desk layered with organized paper, and a glowering answering machine. She sat in a small chair with a vinyl seat and arranged her notebook. “My partner will be joining us in a few minutes,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind the mess.”

She said no and studied the room, its stacks of cardboard files, its blankets rolled on the saggy twin beds, the little bundle of folded socks on the dresser. She imagined two men waking up every morning in this room, walking around in their underwear, drinking coffee, preparing to go and spread Definitism into the world.

“Our office is a little unorthodox,” said Jack Peach, seating himself on a folding chair. “Especially for me. Just two years ago, I had an office that was almost as big as this apartment. I had a lovely view of Manhattan and New Jersey.”

“What were you doing then?”

“I was a corporate lawyer at Moose Grimm.” He grinned proudly. “Quite a change of life-style, wouldn’t you say?”

The door opened and a slight man with glasses on the end of his nose entered carrying a box of pizza and a brown grocery bag.

“But it’s worth it for the school,” said Jack. “The school’s the most important thing in my life right now. This is my partner, Dave Fry.”

The slender man tugged shyly at the bottom of his suit jacket, nodded, and said, “Hello.”

“Would you like some pizza?” asked Jack courteously.

She said no; there was food arranging and jacket removing. Jack gave her a can of diet root beer, and he and Dave sat down to their dinner with an air of gracious ease. Dave picked up his little can of carbonation and fervently began. “I. ” but Jack cut him off.

“I first conceived of making Definitism the dominant philosophy in our time when I was at Princeton studying economics, and I noticed how two conflicting attitudes towards making money and building commerce were gnawing at the minds of the students. On one hand they were being given the best education that money could buy, the best training to go into business that anyone could have — and on the other, they were being subtly told that what they were doing was somehow base, greedy, even immoral. I saw a dangerous and horribly cruel cultural schizophrenia that needed to be cured with reason. And that’s why I started the school.”

“Education should make sense,” burst out Dave. “It should be about thinking, writing, and speaking within the parameters of logic.”

“We had certain problems with the state at first,” confided Jack. “We did break a few bureaucratic-type rules. But how could they say ‘no’ to a high school staffed by teachers who all have such advanced degrees?” He beamed sweetly.

“Can I say something?” asked Dave Fry.

“Sure,” said Jack. “I just. ”

“The bottom line of leftist thought is that individuals cannot know reality or truth, that there is no objective truth. If there is no objective truth, then everything is excused. If we cannot know reality, then to act and build is futile. If an individual is just a collection of neurons and genes, or a receptacle for whatever environmental data that’s input, then he isn’t responsible for himself. In a world like this, everything’s on the same level, whether it’s a Bach sonata or a papier mâché pig made by a retarded kid. Everybody’s on the same level; you’re supposed to care as much or more about thousands of Vietnamese strangers as you would about your own family. In a world like this, what can you value or turn to but the approval and love of other people—any other people?”

He emphasized these last three words as though they were steel jaws closing on the horrified face of a victim who has realized too late the trap he’s been sitting in. Justine pictured the people on the subway holding shopping bags and reading the Post. Jack nodded and beamed.

Justine rode home on the subway in a good mood which was only slightly disturbed by the four ragged, crack-eyed beggars who walked through the cars mutely shaking paper cups of change. Hers was among the arms that furtively thrust coins into the cups while the corresponding eyes scanned cardboard ads for the AIDS Hotline and Dynamic Business School, as though it would embarrass the rest of the body to know that the hands had assisted a desperate person, however minimally.

She ate her take-out salad on the floor and was preparing to read an autobiography of one of the sixties’ most active rock ’n’ roll groupies when she received a phone call from the fat lady interviewee inviting her to what sounded like some sort of group therapy. As in the interview, the woman seemed to get angry at her for no reason; as in the interview, Justine found herself inexplicably intimidated by her. She made a stammering attempt to mollify Dorothy and then got off the phone. Unable to return to the groupie book, she thought of the woman she’d met, the poor bloated creature with her flowered dress and corona of false red, her invented name wafting above her, attached by the thinnest of threads. She tried to imagine this person as a child, to imagine her life. She had a sensation of cold and dark, a dark house, remote, terrifying parents whose faces were somehow blocked from her psychic view, like killers in masks. Dorothy had eaten breakfast with these people, shared the bathroom with them, probably exchanged Christmas presents. It was incredible to Justine.

The hell of it was, the fat woman was obviously very tough in some way. She had that craziness locked into formation, doing drills, getting her up and out and moving through life, with a roof over her head and money in her pocket, instead of roaming the Hades of beggars and bag people, many of whom had had, Justine suspected, normal homes and lives at some point. Where had this strength come from? Surely not her mother; no sane mother could have allowed her husband to sexually assault her child. Perhaps there had been moments of tenderness before puberty, outbursts of love strong enough to support a budding human. Perhaps somewhere deep under the suffocating mud of her parents’ psychology there had been hidden pockets of sanity and self-respect that Dorothy had unconsciously sought out with the unerring impulse of a plant root, distant pockets from which she drew enough nurture to survive.

The phone rang and Justine regarded it warily for some rings before she answered. It was her mother.

If her mother’s voice had changed during the past twenty years, it wasn’t detectable to Justine. It still had that quality of groundless cheer that had inspired, then galled, then depressed Justine as a child. Justine liked and even respected her mother (albeit reflexively), but the sound of her voice always made Justine recoil into some emotionless state in which her own voice became flat as processed air. No matter how she vowed to be kind and warm, no matter how she reminded herself of the profundity of the mother-daughter connection, her mother’s habitual greeting—“Hello, hello!”—delivered with that relentless optimism, never failed to transform her into a robot.

“So, dear, tell me what you are doing. I need some excitement in my life. What is a young woman in New York City doing for fun?”

Justine gritted her teeth as she related the only event that could possibly come under the heading “Fun.”

“I’m not going out much now,” she finished. “I’m busy working on this piece for Urban Vision.” Actually, it was fun describing Jack and Dave, and her mother was thrilled to hear of her possible interview with Austin Heller.

Her mother began talking about the wonderful new friend she’d met in her yoga class, the stylish and adventurous Martina, a recently divorced thirty-eight-year-old with whom she was trading books and going to a “really nice little” bar in Deere Parke. It wrung Justine’s heart to think of her mother sitting in a pick-up bar with all her makeup on.

“Now we’re reading a really interesting book about Peggy Guggenheim and her circle. I just love it, but after I put it down, I find myself feeling such envy for all these people and their wonderful lives. Ah, well. Maybe I was just born into the wrong decade.”

After she got off the phone, Justine felt the need to go sit in a bar with all her makeup on. She tried to avoid it by grimly walking block after block, handing change to beggars and being called a dyke by a ghostly lurking boy. She was on her way home, having successfully fought the urge to drink, when she was chased into a bar by a man in an Armani suit who wildly waved a broken bottle and yelled “I love you! I love you! I want to eat your shit and drink your piss!”

It was a dark bar with heavy air, tended and frequented mainly by old men whose personalities seemed to have drained from their upper bodies and become lodged in their buttocks and thighs, which, as a result of having to carry that extra weight, needed to rest on as many bar stools as possible. These men turned and faced the bottle-waving screamer and the collective impact of that stultified buttock-impacted energy was enough to make him lower his bottle and slink out the door. Well, thought Justine, that’s a relief. Still, you never know; he might wait for me outside. I’d better sit in here for a while. She approached the beautiful oak bar and gazed at herself in the mirror behind it. The heavy, cloudy glass seemed like the deep water she’d sometimes seen herself sinking into in dreams. Alistair, a kindly bartender with a collapsing face, gave her a free scotch to help her get over the coprophiliac assault, and she sat absorbing the hideous modern rock music—“Ohhh! Livin’ on a prayer!”—that these old guys apparently had a secret need to bludgeon themselves with.

She’d had two drinks when she noticed that there was a sharp elfin face in the mirror with her. It was such a contrast to the other faces there that she stared at it, uncertain if it were male or female. It smiled at her with an elegant facial twist, and she had the uneasy sensation of someone sliding a finger under one of her tendons and prying it away from her muscle, quite casually speculating on how far it could be pulled before it snapped.

He crossed the room and sat beside her at the bar. “Hi,” he said. He expelled smoke from his full lips and sat with his slim, small body inclined towards her as if he’d known her a long time.

Justine felt an odd sensation of excitement, as she gradually eased her tendon back into place, odd because it involved feelings of contempt towards this stuck-up stranger which were somehow playful. She looked into his drunken eyes and found them simultaneously vague and penetrating; she felt that a conversation with him would involve a continual grope for something which would turn out to be, on contact, completely illusory. And there was something else about him, something diffuse and yet heavy and potent infusing his whole presence. He blew a throatful of smoke in her face. “A little young for this crowd, aren’t you?” he remarked.

She deftly snatched the cigarette from his lips, dropped it on the floor, and stepped on it. “I only come here when I’m desperate,” she answered. “What about you?”

He hadn’t quite recovered from having his cigarette snatched so he was slow in answering. “Actually I was going to go to the Hellfire Club down the street, but it turns out tonight is queer night. Want to buy me some more cigarettes?”

“Not if you’re going to blow smoke in my face.”

“I was just trying to get your attention. Like boys on the playground. When they pull up your skirt and knock you down it means they like you, didn’t your mama ever tell you that?”

His voice had the delicacy of a slim snake moving through wet grass. She tried to understand her reaction to him. It was no use; she was dealing with feelings ranging from disinterest and irritation to sickening arousal. He reached out and touched the tip of her nose. “You’re really cute,” he said. “With those big glasses you look like an autistic kid in a Diane Arbus picture.”

“And you’re really rude. Why don’t you go bother somebody else?”

“I’m not rude, you’re just drunk.”

She stood up, grabbed for her coat, fumbled, and dropped it. He put his hand on her elbow. “Please don’t go. I am rude, but it’s only because I’m too drunk to flirt. I’ve been watching you since you came in. I think you’re adorable.”

She hesitated, confused. She wondered if he were the person who’d chased her into the bar, if he’d just gone home to change his clothes.

“But if you want to go, I won’t stop you. Here, I’ll even help you.” He picked up her coat and draped it across her shoulders. He got her scarf and was winding it around her neck with a sloppy flourish when she said, “Cut it out. If you want to apologize, buy me a drink instead.”

“Great idea! I need one too.” He summoned Alistair, who smiled paternally at her as if delighted to be watching an actual pick-up, probably a rare occurrence in this place.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “What a weird day.” She remembered her interview with Jack and Dave that afternoon and the phone conversation with what’s-her-name and felt like a wild boar crashing through a life of figurines.

“So what happened? You said you only came here when you were desperate. What’re you desperate about?”

His voice was soft and gentle in a TV lover-boy style, but his pale eyes glittered with the adrenal malice of a sex criminal who likes to crack jokes while reaming his sobbing victims. She turned away from him. Next to her, one old guy grasped the arm of another and said, “Take care, Jim. Don’t let it get you down.” The sight of human comfort injured her. The jukebox bawled about sex. She turned again to the smirking vandal at her side. “I’m desperate because I–I’m not actually desperate at all generally, it’s just that some mental case was chasing me with a broken bottle so I ducked in here.”

“Oh.” He seemed disappointed. “You look like you’re pretty desperate generally. That’s a compliment. I like desperate women.”

She tried to read his face, which increasingly struck her as hard and immobile under its thin layer of easy expression. She finally noticed that he was very handsome. “Why do you like desperate women? Because they’re easy to push around?”

He smiled. “I like the way you think. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a part-time secretary and also a writer.” She was ashamed of herself for trying to impress this creep, but “writer” had just slipped out.

“Oh yeah? A writer, huh?” He smiled and lifted his drink to his mouth as though to suppress a horse laugh. His slim throat palpitated; she had an urge to touch the exposed vein. He put down his glass, his eyes coolly releasing a jet of sarcasm into her face. “And what do you write about?”

One part of her stepped forward like a first grader in a starched dress with her hands clasped behind her back and, with eager animation, she began to describe the Anna Granite article while another part of her skulked in the background, angrily eyeing the first grader, and yet another part of her tried to puzzle out why she was talking to this prick, let alone exhausting her short supply of charm on him. She was lonely, desperately so; she could feel the loneliness scraping along her insides every time she witnessed the slightest display of human warmth between strangers. But Justine had a hard little spiny pride that stiffly forbade her to talk with people solely out of loneliness, and she wasn’t drunk enough to ignore it. What else could it be? She looked again at the boy’s face as he listened — actually quite intently, it seemed his snotty composure was somewhat shaken by the Anna Granite article — and tried to feel what it was. Although she didn’t remember this, it was as though she and the stranger were doing what she and her mother had done over the phone many times many years ago, as though beneath the nasty and tedious conversation, he was emanating some urgent, insistent signal and was being received by a hitherto slumbering segment of her and answered with a good deal of ferocity. Of course it was sex, but it was something else as well, something that was becoming swollen and unwieldy, like a helium balloon rapidly inflating under her behind. The skulking part of her grimaced to hear her outermost aspect use the word “interesting” again and again with almost the exact degree of irritating elocution her mother habitually used. She struggled to analyze this attraction before she was overwhelmed by it. There was also the contempt; why didn’t the contempt kill her interest in him rather than titillating it with a spastic corkscrew jab that first made her shudder, then provoked a sensual, playful hostility that made her want to cuff him like a cat would swat a kitten.

“That sounds cool,” he was saying. “I read her stuff when I was in high school. I loved it.”

“Yeah?” Her separated selves came banging together in shared curiosity. “Why did you love it?”

“I don’t remember.” He actually seemed to be trying to talk to her, and this show of respect and humanity after his ugliness made him seem complex. “There was good sex in it, but that wasn’t all. I don’t know.”

The moment of genuine conversation seemed to leave him subdued. He sat facing the bar with his body in a curl, staring at his drink as though he’d just realized he had to be at work tomorrow morning. The jukebox was silent.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked.

“I’m an art director for Grab magazine.” Without his animating mask of sarcasm, his face was tired and pinched. “It’s dumb but I like it. The people are nice.”

To her dismay she was afraid he was about to get up and leave. “My name’s Justine,” she said with sudden extroversion. “What’s yours?”

“Bryan.” He turned towards her again, his face regaining its life. “Have you ever been to the Hellfire Club?”

“I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s an S&M club.” He watched her. “You know, master, slave, people being tied up and beaten, women getting fucked by dozens of guys. I’ll bet you’d like it.”

This was a jarring speech, but instead of pushing her away from him she felt it pull her towards him. A bolt of sensation zipped through her genitals and nailed her to her seat, and she felt much as she had when she was a prepubescent cruising the mall with a pack of boys at her heels; dislocated, aroused, and disturbed to be having such a personal reaction in a public place. Oh Christ, she thought. Not this again. Her heart beat arrhythmically against the bones of her rib cage. She looked for Alistair and saw him far, far away, at the other end of the bar, his big once-strong body in an absent-minded slump as he wiped some glasses.

“You would like it, wouldn’t you? I’d suggest we go except now it’s just queers giving each other AIDS.”

“I didn’t think it was legal anymore, for straights or gays to screw in public.”

“Murder isn’t legal either, but people do it.”

This frightened her. She suddenly remembered where she had heard the name of this club before; it was the last place a beautiful model had been seen before being ritually murdered. “I wouldn’t want to go anyway.” She frantically tried to make eye contact with Alistair, who smiled and waved.

“Hey, wait a minute, don’t be scared. Shit, you’re really scared!” He stood and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him; his small white face was neither sarcastic nor limp, but taut with an expression she couldn’t identify. “Don’t be scared, I’m not dangerous, I’m just a nut. Okay, I’m a little bit perverted, I admit it. But I wouldn’t really hurt you. I just like to shock people.”

“Yeah, you and Richard Speck.” She shook off his hand and pulled on her coat, digging in the pockets for dollars that flapped around elusively. Alistair moved towards them, slapping his trusty rag on the bar with a professional flourish.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

She got her coat and scarf under control while he reflexively navigated the world of commerce and hearty gestures. “Everybody who finds me attractive is a fucking maniac of some kind,” she thought. “Every time I meet somebody cute he wants me to pee on him or some goddamn thing.” She had the comforting thought that any minute now she would be at home, sobbing on her bed, alone but unmolested. She fought her way through the air, holding back her tears. She had just made her escape out the door when he appeared at her side.

“I hope you were kidding with that Richard Speck crack.”

“I just wanna go home.”

He grabbed her shoulders with both hands. If his grab had felt like the beginning of an attack she would’ve run; had it felt like a full attack she would have turned and hit him. But it was just powerful enough to hold her yet tender enough to paralyze her. “Don’t run away,” he said. “Please don’t be afraid of me.”

She turned to him and saw his face, drained and exhausted, his eyes wide with alarm. He pulled her to him and she collapsed against his small chest, exhausted. She felt his quick heart leaping urgently. He emanated warmth. His dick hardened against her abdomen. He stroked her hair. She began to cry. “Honey,” he said. “Darling.”

Chapter Sixteen

My first days of work for Beau Bradley were so fraught with reverence and vigilance that I existed in a strange state that was both hyperaware and muddled. I arrived that first morning in such a sleepless fever that the physical perfection of tall, smiling Bradley didn’t awe or excite me — I, who usually saw beautiful males as species from a hostile planet. He seemed like nothing less than de rigueur for this storybook I’d stepped into. I was trying with all my flabby concentration to absorb the details, to be a good employee. I’m not sure why I wasn’t too disoriented to function at all, except that my entire life had been made up of incredible situations in contrast to which this one seemed unusual only in that it was positive. The very bizarre and extreme nature of finding myself employed by my idol the day after meeting her was what made it, in a sense, natural to me. The experience was so charged, so heady that I lived those days in my head, my breath high and quivering on the pinnacle of my deserted body. Anything more mundane would’ve sunk me back into my chest and pelvis, right onto my legs where I would’ve felt my old creaking soul slowly doing the hoops and ladders of my life.

But Beau Bradley was anything but mundane. He had black hair, silky, almost feminine white skin, the cleft-chinned square jaw of a movie star, and blue eyes that matched Granite’s. Even more unusual, his kindness equaled his beauty. When I entered the office — medium-sized, clean, sparely furnished with modern furniture and stark steel sculpture, located in an oblong building that also housed the Philadelphia Mah-Jongg Society — he smiled at me as if it were utterly natural for me to enter his sphere. His hand enveloped mine with warmth and pressure that was respectful and protective as a father is supposed to be. “Anna has told me so much about you,” he said.

I nodded, realizing that he probably knew my secret. I didn’t find this probability shaming or even inappropriate. “Then you know I haven’t had experience,” I said.

“From what I’ve heard, that doesn’t matter. Anna can tell from speaking with someone for five minutes what they’re made of, and she says I should jump at the chance to hire you.”

The phone rang and Bradley, with an “Excuse me,” disappeared into his private office, leaving the door open. I stood in the outer office, in front of what was probably to be my desk, holding my purse against my body, feeling my heart beat against it. I absorbed the cream-colored walls, the skeletal bookcases and their books, the bindings of which seemed to vibrate with color and significance. I stared at a spiney, determined-looking little sculpture of a man hoisting the world on his shoulders and thought, “That’s me.” I knew it was a silly thought, but I excused it on the grounds that it was emblematic and that it was a prefiguring of the new direction my life would now take.

Bradley spent about fifteen minutes explaining my duties to me. They seemed, in spite of Granite’s description of their arduous nature, to be pretty easy. Answering the phone, typing letters, photocopying, dictation, an occasional run to the post office or deli — all in a quiet office that appeared to receive a phone call every two or three hours. The apparent simplicity bewildered and then panicked me — what if it seemed simple because I was not grasping the entire picture but only seeing the most obvious elements in a complex mosaic! I spent the rest of the morning sweating in my woolly skirt, spot-checking the filing system, cleaning the coffee filter, roaring through a letter, pouncing on the phone whenever I could. Noon arrived and Bradley went out saying, “Take a breather, have some lunch!” I ate my cheese sandwich, potato chips, and candy bar at my desk and allowed myself an hour of feeling superior. If this was hard work then other jobs must be softer than anything I’d ever experienced in my life — and no wonder Granite had such contempt for the common people! I ate my sandwich with one hand and straightened the Rolodex with the other, marveling at my own efficiency.

By the time Bradley had returned from lunch, however, I was again full of self-doubt, which was later exacerbated by a typing mistake which Bradley jovially brought to my attention.

The next two days — half days both — followed the same pattern, except that they were enlivened by the appearance of Definitists from other parts of the country who had long conferences with Bradley. There were three of them, two men — one rotund with a receding hairline, the other weirdly tall, his sensitive brow a-twitch with the weight of heavy glasses — and a big woman with small eyes and a bun of brown hair who breathed in strange broken sighs.

On the fourth day Bradley asked me to join him for lunch. We closed the office and went to a plain, clean luncheonette with speckled table tops. I dimly remember a jukebox playing dramatic love music as we sat across from one another, smiling over our menus. He asked me how I was enjoying the work. I said very much. We ordered our sandwiches. For the first time I felt self-conscious about being fat before him and refrained from ordering the milkshake and double fries I would’ve liked. We ate without speaking for several moments, but rather than feeling isolated from him, I felt bonded by our mutual silent intensity. Besides, this way I didn’t have to worry about saying something stupid.

Mid-sandwich he spoke. “I asked you to lunch for a reason.”

I nodded and my heart sank.

“We — Anna and I — need you just now to do more than your usual duties. You’ve noticed the three people I’ve been meeting with. They are three of the top Definitist intellectuals in the country, and two of them — Doctor Wilson Bean, the English professor, and Wilma Humple, the banker — will be meeting with Anna and me along with Knight Ludlow, a financier from New York, to do intensive conference work for about two weeks. We would like to have our discussion transcribed, and Anna and I would like you to be the one to do it.”

Mentally I reeled while physically I nodded. I put down my sandwich.

“It will be arduous work and will involve long hours — very long hours. Anna can stay up all night discussing ideas; the others will probably sleep in shifts, but you will be expected to stay up as long as there is discussion. Think you can handle it?”

I nodded and said, “Yes.” My adrenaline rose, and suddenly, I wanted to order a piece of lemon meringue pie.

“Good.” Bradley smiled. “We both know it’s a lot to ask of a beginning secretary, but we felt you would welcome the opportunity to learn more about Definitism. It is the chance of a lifetime in that respect.”

“I’m. I’m honored that you asked me,” I replied in all sincerity.

“Wonderful.” Bradley smiled again. “Let’s finish these sandwiches and get back to work.” He said it as though we were about to return to the office and do hours of heavy construction.

I bit my sandwich, mentally scorning the lemon pie as a frivolity that would be stripped off the streamlined life of an intellectual.

The conferences began a week or so later. Bradley and I stayed an uncharacteristically full day at the office then ordered sandwiches which we ate with our feet on his desk, then we took a cab to Granite’s apartment. I felt extreme anxiety on the way up in the elevator. This was not after all, a fantasy or a TV show, even if it felt like it. I was going to be among the most intelligent people in the world, and I was terrified of disappointing them, even if only in a secretarial capacity.

Out of the elevator we marched, entering the apartment with determined purpose. Granite opened the door, her eyes afire and her forehead locked. Mercifully, we were the first to arrive. Unsmiling, she gestured for us to sit on a stiff square-pillowed gray couch before a small, proud coffee table devoid of anything but a pitcher of water, some glasses, and three ashtrays. I would’ve sorely loved to see a decorative jar of French creams or even the cheapest peppermints, but I realized that such an item in Granite’s home would’ve disappointed me. Granite left the room briefly, and I noticed that she was again wearing her billowing purple-lined cape. Did she wear it around the apartment when no one else was there? How marvelous! When she returned with a sheaf of papers, she sat in a chair opposite us, gazing slightly over our heads as though she were furious about something. Bradley sat against the back of the couch, very relaxed. I found it odd that on this occasion, the first time I had seen Granite since our original meeting, she hadn’t yet spoken to me. But I sat obediently and waited, unable to decide if a slouch or an upright position was most appropriate.

“So, Anna,” said Bradley. “What is the topic for tonight?”

“The conflict between the individual and society, focusing on whether or not the will of the individual genius can ever be compatible with that of society.”

Having spoken, she sharply adjusted her line of vision to include us and seemed to see me for the first time. Tenderness suffused her eyes as thoroughly as had determination a moment before. “So little one,” she said, “how are you?”

Little one! When had I ever been called that? “Very well, ma’am,” I answered absurdly.

She smiled at me and then her expression shifted, her eyes again assumed their martial energy, and she began talking to Bradley. I was relieved; her maternal words somehow strained the moment we had had in the hotel.

The others arrived, and the only thing worth noting about their perfunctory arrival, greeting, and seating arrangements was that the wonderful man who had smiled at me at the lecture was among them. Knight Ludlow, financier, nodded at me with incomplete recognition and turned away — then turned back and smiled with full acknowledgment of our last contact.

He turned from me again to talk to Granite, and the room fractured, my ears were filled with the buzz of my own internal circuitry, and I was afraid that the building was going to collapse, catch fire, or be struck with lightning.

Fortunately I went emotionally blank — I say fortunately because the meeting was beginning and my mind is more acute when my feelings are gone.

“Let me introduce to you our new secretary, Dorothy Never.” The standing Granite indicated me with a sweep of her arm. “She will be taking notes as the meeting progresses.” She then gazed at me, exuding support and confidence. “You understand, Dorothy, I don’t want you to take it down word for word; it would be too much. Just the important ideas, yes?” I nodded, heart in throat. I had never taken dictation before.

Granite stood and paced the room as she talked, her cape framing her, a cigarette sprouting from an elegant arm. She spoke at length while the others listened, and I plunged blindly into that state of refined consciousness necessary for taking dictation or any other highly concentrated task. So many words so quickly! All of them seemed to be important! Granite’s phrases were so complicated, by the time I had determined that something was important, and went back to retrieve it, I found that other important words had bounded far ahead of me and I was thus in a continual breathless chase. I trembled, my hand sweated and ached, I wanted to cry, I can’t do it! I can’t! But fast after this feeling came another, a deep dark surge of “Oh yes you can” that seemed to come from my lower body, my stomach, ovaries, and bowels. It was a proud, stubborn, angry feeling that made me picture a harsh thin-lipped mouth setting itself in determination. My will, usually wandering my body in various pieces, suddenly coalesced, and I waded among the words like a Viking in a foreign swamp, sword aloft, striking hither and yon, mercilessly, instinctively, without analyzing whether or not they were important. I felt my pupils dilate. The others began to talk.

“But, theoretically, society is made up of many individuals,” said the woman banker. “Theoretically one could pose the problem that it is the violation of many individuals when one imposes his will—”

“Bosh! Illogic!”

“Hitler, Anna, Hitler. Fascism is the antithesis of individuality, yet Hitler was an individual who imposed his will—”

“You have answered the question yourself, Wilma. Hitler was a weak collectivist as is clear from his doctrine of the Volk, the blood, the irrational belief in the innate superiority of a nationality. This belief in and of itself is anti-individual.”

“It is something you will have to deal with, Anna.” Him! His voice! “As well as the misconception that thieves and thugs are truly acting selfishly.”

After the first hours had passed, my frayed perception forked into two — one navigating the landscape of words, phrases, and ideas, the other absorbing the sounds, inflections, and tonal habits of the voices. This secondary perception transmuted words and phrases into sounds that took on shapes of gentleness, aggression, hardness, softness, pride, and happiness, shapes that moved through the room, changing and reacting to one another, swelling and shrinking, nosing against the furniture, filling the apartment with their mobile, invisible, contradicting vibrancy, then fading away. With a half-conscious puzzlement I absorbed these sounds; Wilma Humple and Wilson Bean did not sound like I would’ve expected, and their voices often seemed to contradict their words.

“We don’t have to placate anyone,” said Dr. Bean. Yet his voice had the dry raspy sound of defeat and passivity; it moved sluggishly, with a great aggrieved effort.

“Of course,” said Wilma Humple, “there is the issue of judgment — the indoctrination of ‘judge not lest ye be judged,’ the willful paralyzation of the intellect!” She projected the words stridently, but there was an effort in her projection that was like a child yanking its mother’s hem and whining, afraid it won’t be heard.

Of the three strangers, only Knight’s voice was full and buoyant; it reminded me of the easeful support a body of water, miles deep and full of ferocity, can give a human relaxed enough to trust it.

I sat among these diverse energies feeling them clashing against and complementing each other while my mind resolutely held its beam of light on the business at hand. It was beginning to be difficult to go on when Granite called for a break. There was a moment of silence during which Granite lit another cigarette, and then Wilma H. and Wilson B. rose and paced to the windows. Granite asked if anyone was hungry. I was, but when everyone said they weren’t, I was too embarrassed to say so. Granite sat near Knight on the couch, and they talked. I was surprised to see a girlish quality come into her face as they spoke; she even slid her feet out of her shoes and flirtily tucked her legs up against her body in my mother’s habitual way.

“How’re you doing, champ?” Bradley spoke kindly, leaning towards me with an elbow on his knee.

I cringed a little at “champ.” “Okay I think.”

“Are you able to keep up with the discussion?”

“Pretty much.” It amazed me that he was adopting such a comradely attitude and that I took to it so naturally.

“Ah! Dorothy!” Granite got to her feet and into her shoes and joined us on the couch, very close to me. Once again I noticed the dull grainy texture of her skin, the multitude of tiny lines; then I made myself widen my focus to take in the fullness of her face. “You are doing well?” Her eyes were gentle but serious.

“I think so. Would you like to look?”

“Yes, I would.” She took my notebook from my hand! I was reminded of the gravity of my position as I watched her eyes rapidly traverse my pages. Her jaw twitched passionately. Bradley and Knight began to chat.

“Pretty good for your first time,” said Granite turning to me. “But you are wasting time with asides and extra words. Then you have to waste time crossing out, see?” She pointed to a nasty knot of ink. “Listen as if you were a reporter and wanted to find the main points of this discussion.” She emphasized the last six words with a measured up-and-down movement of her hand, fingers bunched together, hooklike. “Also don’t worry about the handwriting. I don’t need to read it, you are the one who will type it out. Understand?”

“Yes but I. I don’t know if I’m capable of deciding which are the important points.”

“Dorothy!” Her eyes blazed! “That is a weak statement and unworthy of you!” Her severity pinned me through the eyeballs, and we sat staring at each other, she discharging bolt after bolt of sharp indignation. I felt my pores dilate helplessly to receive her until the tissue beneath my facial skin seemed composed of her indignation. Then abruptly she softened. “I know I can trust your judgment. Can you trust mine?”

“Of course!”

“Good.” She spoke this word with wonderful finality. “Carry on.” These last two words she said with a certain childishness, almost as if she’d heard them recently on TV and had been waiting for a chance to say them, but I didn’t mind. The meeting resumed and so did I, my pen flying with renewed vigor. Hours passed. The ashtrays were gradually loaded with pale gray refuse. Wilma’s face became soft and ivory with sleepiness, the men took off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves, and still Granite paced and talked. I thought of malteds and potato chips, jelly beans and roast beef sandwiches dripping gravy. I pressed on.

It was one thirty when the meeting ended and I was released into a yellow cab dispatched especially for me. Bradley actually stepped out of his conversation with the still-pacing Granite and offered to go down in the elevator and wait for it with me under the awning of the apartment.

“No, Bradley, it’s all right, finish your discussion.” Knight was suddenly behind me, manning the buttons of his coat. “I’ll take the young lady down, I’m ready to go.”

It seemed as though Wilma jerked her head in surprise, but that only added to the pleasure of the whirring fluorescent descent, during which I could not once raise my eyes. I looked at the buttons on my cheap red corduroy jacket and at Knight’s shoes, his wonderful sharp-toed gray suede shoes.

He said, “I remember you from the lecture.”

I said, “Yes.”

“I was very moved by your response.”

I gestured with a hand. “I couldn’t help it,” I murmured at my buttons.

“Yes I know. That’s what made it so moving.”

I looked up in surprise. The door burst open. We proceeded through the lobby out into the damp night where the taxi awaited. He opened the door of the car for me, and I got in, looking at him for the first time. According to his face he did this sort of thing all the time. “See you tomorrow, Dorothy.”

“Goodnight,” I gasped. I was sealed into the cab in a state of shock, staring at the smiling jiggling hula girl on the dashboard and glad to be sitting down. I thought of my former high school companions sitting around their lunch table in their pink and chartreuse skirts, the occasional triangle of pantie, their “Luv” pendants, their stupid dates and proms. Which of them would ever have what I had now?

I rode home obsessively noting the tatty little buildings of Philadelphia, the romance of neon, fluorescence and electricity, even the traffic lights swaying heavily on their wires, the hydrants, the jumbled angles, the splayed newspapers flapping against public benches. I wanted to remember every detail of this night and reconstruct it in miniature, a tiny world into which I could repair at any time.

Beau and I went to the meeting the next night and the next. They followed the same pattern; Granite would prowl the room in her cape, expounding, while the others constructed rhetorical arguments for her to refute or expand upon. I picked out the main points rather timidly the second night and then, emboldened by Granite’s approval, more cavalierly the third. Now comfortable with what I was doing, I had, to my delight, more time to observe and digest what was going on.

My first observation was the tension between Bradley and Granite. I noticed first that he was the only one of the group from whom she would accept contradiction. Further, when he spoke, her composure fell from her in delicate shudders, leaving her gentle, soft-mouthed, eyes bright and wide. And when she spoke to him, he seemed subtly to expand, to emanate heat, to release some muscles and tense others, as if her voice simultaneously stroked and tickled the length of his body.

Second was that Wilma and Wilson did not radiate any of the energy the others had. Wilson in particular seemed to sit in a patch of personal cold, his thin limbs held stiffly, his comments merely affirmations or repetitions of what Granite had said. To my surprise, Granite didn’t seem to mind or even to notice; she treated his contributions as seriously as she did Knight’s. Even more puzzling, when Wilma sallied forth, Granite barely acknowledged her or sometimes even scolded her unfairly, it seemed to me. Wilma’s pointy brittle face would remain impassive, perhaps tighten a little more, but she never argued.

The philosophy itself was wonderful. Most of it was an elucidation of the points I had already understood from The Bulwark and The Gods Disdained, but on the third night, a topic was introduced that I hadn’t yet encountered: the ultra-real, the apparently patternless structure of the universe that seems random and chaotic (causing some people to despair and turn to religion or nihilistic philosophy) but was in fact a super-rational pattern too intricate to be discerned and comprehended by us right away.

The meetings lasted until one or two o’clock in the morning, and I returned to my bed so stimulated it was hard for me to sleep right away. I was thus sleeping only about four hours a night and skipping my dinner (I considered the sandwich Bradley ordered from work a snack). The happy result was that, for the first time in my life, I was losing weight. The waist-bands of my skirts were sliding towards my hips, and my only pair of pants fit loosely. My appearance hadn’t noticeably changed, but I nonetheless rejoiced.

On the fifth night, however, my stamina began to give out. One o’clock then two o’clock came and went, and still Granite discussed. At two thirty Wilson Bean went home. At three Bradley retired into Granite’s bedroom for a nap. Fifteen minutes later Knight rested in an easy chair to close his eyes. For the next interminable half-hour, it was only Granite, me and the haggard Wilma. The air was heavy with swarming yellow granules, all light was an assault. To my dismay, I saw my dictation stumble, get up, stumble, and proceed along on its knees. Every sentence was a marathon with a lung-bursting explosion at the end. Wilma curled up on the couch and went under. Granite turned to me.

“And how are you feeling, Dorothy?” Her eyes were encircled with bruise-like purple but they retained their intensity. I felt her hot noisy heart pumping in her chest and my own dull organ making its reply. “Are you tired?”

“Yes, Anna, I am.” My blood roared in my head; I had involuntarily used her first name.

“Yes, I can see.” She leaned forward and turned away, and I thought she was displeased. Then she turned back. “I would like to offer you something to help you stay awake. But only if you want it, you understand?”

“What is it?”

“It” was two small capsules (half midnight blue, half aquamarine) that made me feel as wide awake as I had ever felt in my life. Together Granite and I outlasted everyone, smiling and waving goodbye as one by one, Wilma, Knight, and Bradley expressed their regrets. Indeed, at the very end it was I who fiercely paced the floor taking notes in motion while Granite lay on the couch soliloquizing, cigarette held aloft.

It was seven thirty when she finally gave me my cab fare. “You have pleased me, Dorothy,” she said, and I sailed out into the celebratory sun full of get up and go. It was a Saturday, but instead of going home to sleep I went to a large diner with a sparkling, kidney-shaped counter and ordered french toast. I ate slowly as my usually receptive stomach was still taut with excitement. (I didn’t make the connection between the pills and appetite loss.)

I looked with great interest at the other people at the diner, thinking about the oddness of fate. Who would think from looking at me as I sat mopping up syrup that I had just, of my own initiative, become part of the greatest intellectual vanguard in the country? I looked at the man just across from me. He was only in his late twenties, I guessed, but grizzled and jowly with tough skin and dully thoughtful eyes. He had a crouched, guarded way of sitting that was wary, weary, and sluggish, yet, because of an alertness in his neck and head, he looked capable of sudden quite vigorous action. I wished I could talk philosophy with him. He looked at me.

“You’re a cute little girl,” he said.

I stared.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I answered. “I don’t. I’ve never had a boyfriend.”

“Really?” He picked up a triangle of dark toast and bit off half of it, chewing with loose, loopy movements. “That’s a shame. I’d offer to be your boyfriend myself but I’m too old and you’re not interested.” He looked sadly off into space. “You’ve got great tits though,” he added morosely.

I knew most people would think this was a rude thing to say, but considering that no one had ever described any portion of my body as “great,” it was hard to view it that way, especially given the wistful tone in which it was said. I started to say “Thank you” but then considered how Solitaire D’Anconti would react to such a remark and flushed with embarrassment to think I’d almost been flattered by it. I glowered in the mirror behind the counter, making my features as cold and imperious as possible while surreptitiously checking to see if there was anything there that could reasonably be described as “cute.” Drained face, wild burning eyes, pale fat too-wide mouth.

“You don’t have to say anything,” continued the man, pulling apart his toast with a certain magnanimous air.

I fled to the comparative serenity of the Euella Parks Hotel.

I slept most of the morning and all afternoon but still found myself a little groggy when it was time to return to Granite’s apartment at six (she ran the meetings through the weekends). I had barely enough time to heat a can of soup on my hot plate and eat it, along with a few pieces of bread, before rushing out. That night and on many of the nights that followed — whenever the conferences went past one’clock — Granite would secretly share with me one or two of her heavenly midnight and aqua capsules. My dictation became ever more quick and sure, my demeanor so optimistic that at times I feared I was losing my mind. I was sometimes so full of energy when I left Granite’s apartment that I walked to my hotel instead of taking the taxi. Knight continued to escort me to the taxi on the nights when we left at the same time and my pill-induced enthusiasm elbowed my shyness to one side. Sometimes when the cab pulled away I would look out the back window and see him turning in the other direction, presumably to walk to his apartment, or perhaps to take a bus. I viewed him romantically, but not with the expectation that anything sexual could happen between us; that didn’t occur to me. It was enough for me to be the recipient of his gallant attention, his smiles, his almost tangible warmth and goodwill. Then something happened to awaken another need which, although it initially awoke with only the feeblest twitch, continued to twitch with larger and larger movements until I saw that it was only the smallest foreclaw of a beast that, once fully aroused, would scream unabated day and night — then sleep again forever.

One evening I arrived at Granite’s apartment so exhausted that I didn’t think I could successfully pick out main points. For the first time I asked her for a pill and she gave it to me. Thus, even though it was only twelve thirty when the meeting broke up, I left with my brain chattering enthusiastically to itself and my body full of energy. When Knight performed his usual courtly gesture, I stopped outside on the pavement and told him I thought I’d walk home.

“By yourself?” he wondered.

“Yeah. Maybe I’ll give the cabbie some money so he won’t be upset.” I did so, shut the door in his muttering face, and returned to my Knight.

“How far away do you live?”

“It takes about half an hour to walk it.” We both watched as the cabbie tooled off into the night.

“Do you think it’s safe for you to—”

“Mr. Ludlow,” I said. “I’m, I, I’m grateful for your concern but I’m really not afraid. I’ve done it before, even later. I know I must seem very ordinary to you but—”

“No you don’t,” he murmured.

I hesitated. My stimulated heart ground away, my stimulated brain spewed words. “Well, I’m not. After what I’ve experienced, I doubt that anything on the late-night streets of Philadelphia could throw me for a loop.” Knight looked at me as if I’d said something curious and very cute. My confidence suddenly felt like a heavy, high structure creaking on a flimsy base. I stared at the sidewalk.

“Well, maybe you’d let me walk you home. I’m feeling pretty stirred up and energetic myself. Besides, I’m a terrible insomniac.”

I agreed out of passivity more than anything else; it discomfited me, this familiarity and friendliness. I would have preferred that he remain at a distance, gallant but within prescribed boundaries. I didn’t understand why he wanted to step over those boundaries for me. I’d seen movies in which important handsome financiers became smitten by little secretaries — but those little secretaries looked like Judy Garland and Doris Day, not like me. As we walked, however, my feelings began to change. He didn’t rush into conversation; he didn’t talk at all. He simply walked along, hands behind his back, emitting grace combined with that full and buoyant quality I’d heard in his voice — and now, unlike in the meetings, it was suffused with warmth. I enjoyed his presence in spite of myself. My hopped-up mind spewed words which, since I was too shy to talk, tunneled through my brain and doubled back out until my head was riddled with unspoken words. My thoughts roiled around in such a convoluted way that I wondered how I ever spoke at all. I wished Knight would talk to me.

“Tell me,” he said. “How did you come to work for Anna Granite? I know she just met you the night I saw you.”

So our conversation began. As soon as they found an opening, the words rolled out in proper form, only more freely than usual. I told him that my life at home had been unbearable, but not why. I expanded more on my life at college, ending with my appearance before Granite.

Then he talked about his life, which included leaving home at the age of sixteen to escape an alcoholic father. This prompted me to ask him questions about his apparently quick rise to success at age thirty-three. I had never had a conversation like this before. Every sentence, from him or me, felt new, wobbly, and vulnerable, waving in the air between us like tiny ant limbs. I felt frightened that I would say something wrong, uncertain as to what was appropriate between relative strangers. I tried to stay with the facts, but even so every new phrase added more footage to a bridge, the length and direction of which I couldn’t predict. But despite my anxiety, his voice, as much as the pills, drew me further and further into conversation, unable to resist brushing against this foreign element of gentle strength.

When we reached my hotel, he said good night, smiled, and left. I mounted the stairs to my room, my words and feelings still extended from me like a limb groping the air for something no longer there. I entered my small suite, removed my shoes, dropped my handbag, and walked through the room in the dark to the bathroom (the toilet rather; there was a communal shower in the hall). I turned on the light, stood before the full-length mirror, and, in that narrow space, slowly stripped off my clothes until I was naked except for my socks. I stood for several moments looking, as if I were an adolescent girl just developing breasts. I didn’t look to see whether I was attractive or not, I just looked.

Then I turned off the light and got in bed.

The next day, during lunch hour, I used some of my new financial abundance (Granite’s already generous wage was increased with all the overtime) to buy two new skirts, two shirts, and a pair of pants. All were two delightful sizes smaller than my conspicuously loose-fitting older clothes. I also bought a paper, which I immediately folded to highlight the rental ads. I sat at my desk reading coded descriptions of “sunny efficiencies” and “furnished 1 bedrm.,” my new clothes bundled in exciting bags under the desk, where I could squeeze them between my knees.

That night the dynamic of the conference was rearranged by Knight’s new proximity to me; all night I felt the friendly tug of his warmth, the silent communication of the invisible antennae tickling the air between us. I felt something open in my body, something like a rare flower that absorbs molecules, pheromones, and oxygen, then secretes them in a glittering membrane of vibrancy, fecundity, and power, a membrane that quivered tautly every time Knight’s image came into my mind.

The meetings that week didn’t run as late as they had previously, and Knight walked me home three times. Each time we sent up new flares which left streams of colored light between us, until there was a cat’s cradle of crisscrossing beams that swayed between us.

On the third walk, I asked him, as we stood outside my hotel, why he had said the previous week that I didn’t seem ordinary to him.

“Something in your face,” he replied. “There’s an unusual combination in your expressions. Sometimes you’re so blank and remote, you’re impossible to read. Other times your eyes are so soft and emotional. But also strong. I think you’re very strong.”

He stood, serious and tense. I had the almost physical sensation that he was going to stroke my face. My skin drew tight.

“Good night,” he said.

Fourteen years later, I sat before a legal document, staring into space, stroking my own face with my hand. I had been thinking obsessively of Knight Ludlow for a week, probably because I had seen his picture on a page of the Times, which had been pulled apart and spread open on a table in the cafeteria. He was still handsome. He had just been named financial advisor to the mayor of New York City. This information, along with the auxiliary information in the article (which did not mention Anna Granite), put me in a melancholy state, and I wandered the abandoned halls for a good half hour before returning to my station, staring with disbelief at the tiny stuffed animals and smiling pictures on the desks of secretaries. Who among my co-workers would believe me, if I should choose to tell them, that this man had once stood with me late at night, talking to me about the expression in my eyes? I went into a ladies’ room on the other side of the building where I was unlikely to be interrupted. I stood before a full-length mirror and looked at my huge body, even lifting up my skirt and rolling down my pantyhose to examine the pocked layer of cellulite on my thighs and butt. I looked at it a long time, wondering that this puckered yellow flesh was actually me.

It is probable that the stirred memory of Knight Ludlow played a role in my finally acting on my repeated resolutions to join a gym. I didn’t feel as embarrassed as I’d expected, wading in wearing my monstrous cotton sweats. At first I restricted myself to the weight area, the largest place in the gym. The weight area was prowled by huge muscular men in stylish leotards adorned with enormous leather belts at their waists, who looked straight ahead as they walked and showed their teeth as they strained to lift. Our endeavors were performed in decorous silence far from the disco-throbbing aerobics room where squadrons of little creatures leapt and kicked. It was a calming, contemplative experience to be part of the rising and lowering, continually slow-moving machinery, and no one laughed at me struggling with my light weight.

The experience — especially the fascinating dressing room, everyone with their interesting underwear, their unpredictable body combinations, their fussy animal-like grooming rituals — was an active bustling island on the slumbering sea of my daily life, and a reason to wake up. I now looked out my window at the boy exercisers across the street with camaraderie and felt my new-forming muscles.

I had been going for two weeks when I gave in to my curiosity and stood at the aerobics room door watching the classes. They weren’t all little creatures. Many were middle-aged and plump, a few were men. There was a certain high-chested majesty in their synchronous movements, their bright outfits were emblematic of sex and fun, the music sang about love and destiny and feverish pleading. The teacher, a beautiful black woman with rosy purple-hued skin, paced among the exercisers crying out, “Up and down, up and down, that’s right, that’s right, you got it!” her voice like crimson roses burning in the air. I watched voyeuristically, knowing I was peeping at people in the middle of a collective dream. I imagined myself among them, part of the regimental dance, the teacher’s rosy heat, the huge mobile hope of happiness and vitality. And as I watched, it suddenly occurred to me I had been merely watching the world all my life. I was angered at the banality of this observation and walked away from the aerobics room to push some metal poundage with all my might.

After Knight described my face to me, the cataclysm occurred. My sense of a flower living inside me was torn to pieces and lost forever; I fell in love. The most striking thing about love was its terrible nature. My guts became black and void with dread while my outermost flesh came alive with darting insect dots of energy that boiled under my skin, as if my blood and organs were trying to get out of my body. My thoughts cracked to pieces that banged against my skull again and again, yielding up image after strange, confusing image. I would see Knight’s face smiling at me from that part of the world where pleasure and companionship were the norm; then I would feel the darkness of my deep body go into a slow rolling motion, like the root of a wave in the pit of the ocean or a silent internal moan; then I would see my own hand plunging a knife into my throat. At night I would get under the blankets and think of him. My insides would soften, my awareness would sink down into my lower body, my pelvis would open and expand, and then a convulsion would come from nowhere, and I would emerge from it shivering. I would touch between my legs; my genitals felt like a foreign object. I would lie this way for hours, unable to move until exhaustion pulled me into a sleep populated with Anna Granite, Bradley, the Philadelphia bus system, Nona Delgado and my father, always my father, holding me in an iron grip, his penis, like rotted meat, pressed against me. I would wake up full of fear and sit with the lights on while my thoughts formed and cracked into pieces. And riding a crazy car around these images and thoughts, screaming and chattering, or just plain staring, were the people I had to talk to on the phone at the office, my fellow travelers on the bus, Wilson Bean and Wilma Humple, store clerks, and criminals staring at me from newspaper pages.

I knew this agony had come out of my contact with Knight, yet all I wanted was to be near him. I sat at the meeting absorbing him, pulling his psychic excretions into my body. I told time according to when I might talk to him during a break in the meeting or when he might walk me home.

I don’t remember if I longed to hold him in my arms or to feel him inside me. I do know I wanted to be alone in a room with him. It was to this end that I left (not without a pang of sentiment) the Euella Parks Hotel and rented a room. It was a furnished walkup with a private kitchen and bathroom in the hall. The landlady was a rigid white creature wearing a hairnet and a dress covered with nasty flowers; she tried to be pleasant, but she was too unhappy to make it stick. It didn’t matter; the place had a certain charm, in spite of a greasy stain on the wall. There was sun, blue wallpaper, flower boxes outside the windows, a quilt on the double bed. In addition to the room, I acquired more new clothes, makeup, and a hair cut.

The night I moved into my new home I didn’t get into bed to sleep. I spent the entire night before the mirror trying on clothes and makeup. A young body can withstand a great deal of stress and abuse without showing exhaustion. A few judicious smears of makeup under my eyes erased the circles forming there, pink liquid freshened my cheeks. My weight loss was apparent, and my features had emerged from my face. They fascinated me, although I wasn’t yet sure if I liked them or not. My eyes were large without the surrounding fat, my big lips, instead of adding to the previously exaggerated impression of roundness and slackness, added an interesting dimension to the sharpened planes of my chin and cheeks. The shorter hair drew the movement of my face upward and made my skin appear to open out in radiant petals.

Knight came closer; we crossed the catwalks between us and explored our respective inner girdings. He told me about his childhood. I told him everything about mine, except the one thing. We went to the all night diner where the man had told me I had great tits. It was there, over pieces of wonderfully gooey apple pie, that, during our discussion of ultrareality, a phrase leapt from his mouth and shot into the air between us, urgently flashing. It was “my fiancée in New York.” This flashing sign effectively obscured the rest of the conversation for several minutes. Knight continued talking, happily manipulating his fork to get maximum corn syrup on it. His words fell one atop the other, forming a senseless pile. I felt myself moving away from him in a square section that became smaller and more distant in evenly spaced pulses, like a photograph inset within a larger photograph. My tiny hands played with sugar packets. Far away, Knight moved his lips in crazy silence. Then I opened my mouth, breathed in and ate the fiancée. Vaguely remembering that Asia Maconda, Katya Leonova, and Solitaire D’Anconti all had more than one lover, I swallowed the fiancée information and held it down. It dissolved in my stomach pretty quickly. I ate my pie and smiled at Knight’s ultrareality. We left the diner, and I invited him up to see my new apartment. It was two o’clock Saturday morning. He hesitated only seconds before he said yes.

I don’t think I can chronicle the combination of words, silences, and movements that led to him and me on my bed with our arms around each other. Rather awkwardly he stroked my hair, felt up and down my spine, and adjusted himself against me. He said, “This may not be fair to you, Dorothy. I know I should’ve mentioned Angela before.” I shook my head, my eyes half closed. There was more talk but it was immaterial before the feelings emanating from him, the strength and gentleness, warmth and control, the mystery of masculine tenderness that enveloped me like the wings of a swan. We lay on my bed, his body supporting itself above me. The ricocheting chatter in my mind became inaudible, the zipping comets of quasi thought slowed to melting putty. Rivulets of liquid gold, swollen with nodules of heat, spanned my limbs. A glimmering flower of blood and fire bloomed between my legs, its petals spanned my thighs. He kissed me. He put his genitals against me. I contracted; all the light in my body went out. I had a sensation of falling and then a sudden jerking halt, as if I were a mountain climber who had slipped and been caught in my harness, swaying above a chasm. Knight moved his lips over my face, he put a hand on my breast. My brief desire was dead. I shuddered and grabbed his shoulder. He misunderstood and touched between my legs. I thought: If I control my body and follow his movements, everything will be all right, I’ll be able to do it. Then he raised himself and looked into my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”

I moved my hand to my face and felt tears. There was an instant of silence, and then I began to cry in earnest. He moved away from me; I had a glimpse of his stricken expression before I rolled on my stomach and curled into a ball. More words: “I’m sorry baby, I don’t want to hurt you, forgive me,” stuff like that. I gestured irritably. At that moment he seemed almost stupid to me. My heart froze in a desperate palpitation, and I stopped crying.

“It’s all right.” I sat up. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Angela.”

He looked surprised. “What is it then?”

I didn’t know, but I told him anyway. He sat solemnly nodding while I talked about my devotion to Anna Granite and how I didn’t want to be distracted from the important work of her project with an emotional entanglement. I talked about my feelings of friendship for him and how I didn’t want to risk ruining them. I told him I’d never had a lover before, which felt true until the image of my father gestured from a corner. I ignored him, continued talking over him, talking about my feelings of respect for Knight’s relationship with Angela. Knight continued nodding, every now and then interjecting a declaration or protestation of his own. My father stood mute, listening to me talk. Finally I couldn’t talk anymore. Knight talked a little longer while I picked the stuffing from a small hole in the quilt. My body felt wooden. I wished he would go. He stopped talking and sat as though waiting for me to say something. I scanned a list of sentences appropriate for getting him out the door. Then I thought that if he left I would be alone with my father.

“Well,” he said standing up. “Guess it’s time for me to go.”

I cast about for words.

“Dorothy? Are you all right?”

I lunged for a word; it slid away. I began to cry again.

Slowly, I told him. After much more talk, deep under the quilt with our arms around each other, I told him about my father and me. I felt as if there were a hole in my chest and that Knight could look into it as I had once looked into the opened brain of the strange boy sitting in our kitchen. But just as I had felt tenderly protective towards the boy and his poor exposed brain, I felt Knight’s tenderness penetrating my wound, curling around my ribs, touching against the vulnerable red sponge of my lungs, mournfully stroking my heart hiding in its dark nest of muscle.

It was six o’clock when we turned off the light and lay down. We lay under the quilt with most of our clothes on. My back was against his front, and he curled his body around me, his strangely small hand holding my elbow. I lay for hours feeling his eyelashes rise and lower against my shoulder, more and more slowly as his breath took him into sleep. My breath slowed and deepened with his, and I lay with my eyes shut watching long loops of gray move around my head. I opened my eyes. Shadows crawled and crept. Knight’s penis hardened as he slept, and with a pretty moan, he pressed it against my lower spine before falling back into unconsciousness. I took in the feel of it experimentally. It seemed helplessly outgoing and vulnerable in its blind swollen state, yet fussily and ardently friendly. City sounds and voices came through the window at quickening intervals; the bread truck and its cheerful driver firing jokes into space, the grumbling answer of the restauranteur, the brisk hum of passing cars, the bus doing its noisy duty. Knight’s little hand twitched on my arm. All the bones, ligaments, skin, and nerves that felt these things seemed precious to me, and I wanted to stay awake so I could feel them hanging in the hammock of my exhaustion for as long as possible. Knight’s dick sat on my spine with all the dumb insistence of life, and I felt accompanied on my vigil.

We spent several nights in this way, until a week after the meetings ended and he had to return to New York. I received one letter from him. The web that connected us, its shimmering gossamer spanning even the state border, finally broke and disintegrated. During the next few years I saw him occasionally at various Definitist gatherings — sometimes with his fiancée, who became his wife. She was a tall, big-thighed thing with thrusting breasts and quick eyes, and she looked at me as if she knew what had gone on. It didn’t matter. He would fix his eyes on mine with affectionate pain, he would take my hand, and I would feel as I had when he escorted me down to the waiting cab; distant from him and smaller, but connected by respect and gentleness, even though I had put back all the weight I lost during the fevered meeting period and gained yet more weight.

It is strange that I didn’t feel abandoned and betrayed, particularly since, on our last night together, we became lovers. It was unexpected. My body awoke from a shallow sleep suffused with heat, and I pressed myself against him. This time I didn’t become frightened, and we continued. His face swam over mine, his breath coiled in my ear. He nestled his body more snugly between my legs. “All right?” he gasped. I arched against him in hopelessly incomplete meeting. My head became a vague blur, my body a thousand cuplike doors opened to receive him. Drool ran in my mouth; I said yes, my voice rising through my body to emerge from my lips a barely audible breath. His fingers gently pulled my stiff nipples, and the outer petals of my vagina crimsoned and curled inward, burned by their own heat. My womb became a supple muscle of fire, expanded and soft, strong as life. I’m going to do it I thought, and in my mind I leapt. Then he penetrated my knot of fiery muscle, and my body went away from me. In my mind were images of my body, arched and abandoned, my neck thrown back, like a surrendering animal, giving to him all the helpless, ferocious, wounded love in my life. Because I wanted so much to give my life to him, even if it were just a moment of it. But my body, still inwardly burning, moved away from me. I could not feel what it experienced and so could not give my experience to him. Hesitant, he pushed farther in, as if he were frightened. My heart hammered in my throat. He pushed deeper. Pleasure rose up through the distance between me and my body and expired. Moaning in sorrow, I held it close as it faded. He kissed my neck; his full, tender, buoyant spirit entered my skin and for an instant I felt my body alive again beneath him.

So it went, the shy beginning and aborted end of pleasure. When it was over I lay confused and relieved in his arms. The next morning he took me in a taxi to a beautiful restaurant with huge feverish bursts of flowers on every table. We ordered champagne with our omelettes. He left the following day.

The next time I saw him, a year and seven months later, I thought with disbelief that this person, so radiant and handsome, had stuck one of his body parts into me, pulled it out, and stuck it in again, over and over. It was wonderful, but I was glad it was never going to happen again. I preferred the elegance of distance, bridged only by an occasional hand touch, which, as the expression of all emotional language, became more eloquent than the confusing overkill of complete body contact.

Last to go were those moments, scattered throughout the years, when I lay alone in bed, motionless except for the hand wandering between my legs, recalling the feel of his eyelashes against my skin, his breath in my ear, his weight, his genitals. Memory playfully tickled my flesh, but the flesh remained indifferent; my mind would wander to something I’d seen on the street that day, radio jingles would fly by, memory would falter and fail.

Sometimes I tried to excite myself by focusing on the love scenes between Granite’s characters and then putting Knight and me in their places. But the swollen blossoms of passion described in Granite’s novels couldn’t accommodate the scratchy old image of Knight’s body on mine or the strange attendant mix of cold, heat, terror, love, and need.

Gradually I stopped trying.

Longingly I stood and watched the sweating exercisers, slowly rising and lowering, their hands on their hips, their feet flat and thighs spread. Were they people who had had tragic lives, broken love affairs, murdered children, who had, up until quite recently, spent the bulk of their time lying in darkened rooms, just now able to summon the strength to get into their leotards and jump up and down? Some of them looked slightly pathetic in the dressing room, in spite of their rigorous training. There was the thin girl with sharp raw elbows and eyes so one-dimensional in their wounded uncertainty that people probably victimized her reflexively; in the dressing room, she revealed the thick, layered toenails of a dinosaur. Or the gum-chewing young blonde with her bleached hair tortured up on her head and a set of bright rings through her nose, who presented herself, with her ripped flamboyant clothing, as a jangling icon of aggression and mobility, but who sat like a matron, her heavy breasts drooping in her tatty, loose-fitting bra. Or the frail creature with her shoulders hunched as if she was expecting the blows of a whip, burdened with ugly, static, artificial breasts, from which the rest of her body seemed to droop. Did their bodies really register terrible pain, or was I, my own body so muffled in inert fat, simply imagining it? What would it be like to hold one of these complexly injured animals in your arms? Would you feel her slowly come to life as you stroked her bony back, would the innocent ugliness of her toenails scrape you as she murmured in delight, would you see her eyes suddenly expand into beauty as they made room for all the treasures of expression she had held trapped in her frightened heart?

The music asked, “Straight up now tell me do you really wanna love me forever/oh oh oh/Or am I caught in a hit and run?” I kept standing there, inexplicably thinking of Justine Shade and what her problems might be.

Chapter Seventeen

Justine had just awakened in the hellish but reassuringly familiar suburb of Hangover. Her eyeballs hurt, her vision was static, the mucus in the passages of her head had turned to mud. Insects with many slow-moving legs patrolled her skin. The inside of her mouth and her upper digestive tract felt as if she’d spent the last six hours valiantly vomiting to counter an unsuccessful poisoning attempt. Other than that, she had no idea where she was, and worse, what time it might be. She pictured herself fumbling with the EKG machine, explaining to old Mrs. Hoffenbacher that she was a little hung over; she wondered if the comic element of the situation might mitigate her clumsiness, her possible odor. At the sound of a flushing toilet she lifted her concrete head, squinting into the planes of light and shade that filled the room. A human entered wearing nothing but rumpled socks. He sat on the bed she was prostrate on and said, “I don’t know about you, but I have to be at work in forty minutes.” Considering the personal nature of the memories that now unfolded in her skull, memories in which this naked person had a lot of prominence, she felt his words were pretty cold. “Don’t I even get a kiss?” she rasped.

He pinched his wrinkly face together. “No. But I’ll get you coffee if you want. I’m going down to the take-out.”

He slowly picked his clothing off the floor and pieced together his own personal puzzle of how to put it on. She fell into a reverie of the recent events between them. She didn’t think she’d ever committed such pornographic acts before.

He was moving heavily out the door, a bleary and oppressed look on his face. She sat for a moment, her energies divided between trying to figure out if she were upset or not and attempting to support her monstrous head. A hostile clock said “8:30,” and she was struck with fear and shame about failing Glenda and the helpless Mrs. Hoffenbacher.

She was fully dressed by the time he had returned with two cups of hot coffee and a bag of sugars, stirrers, and petroleum milk substitutes. She was waiting for him with uncomfortable questions. He smiled, a bright spark showing deep in the murk of his tired eyes. “Good morning,” he said. “It’s a nice day out.” He sat next to her on the edge of the bed, leaned and kissed her mouth from the side. “I had fun last night,” he said. “You did too.”

With a conspiratorial air they prepared their coffees, resting the full cups precariously on the rumpled bed while, with mouselike movements, they opened the packets of sugar and petroleum byproducts. Her questions dissolved in the warmth of the moment; she loved the familiarity imparted by having coffee together in the morning. They made small talk and jokes. He hailed a cab for her and kissed her as she got into it. She took it to her apartment, asked the cabby to wait, and remembered, as she ran up the hall stairs to change her clothes, that he couldn’t call her, as he’d said he would, because he didn’t have her number. She rode to work feeling rejected and exploited.

Glenda was arranging the medical implements on the counter when Justine burst into the fluorescence of the examining room, heroically pulling on her white coat. “Sleep late?” she asked. “It’s all right, I have everything under control. But could you make us some coffee?” She looked at her watch. “The doctor is late. Are you feeling well, Justine? Your eyes are very dark.”

During the next fifteen minutes of routine, Glenda’s presence, the familiar smells and sights, the reassuring sound of Adventures in Good Music—still borne along by the same mournful voice Justine had loathed as a teen! — calmed the disturbed pulse of her body and stilled her feelings of abandonment and fear. Well, she thought, he was sort of a weirdo anyway, and, as she remembered their conversation at the bar, an unpleasant one. If she was going to be upset, it should be because she’d gone home with an abusive mental case, not because he wasn’t going to call her. She tried to concentrate on how lucky she was not to have to see him again and instead found herself, as she often did, mentally listing all the people she’d screwed since she’d been in Manhattan, and categorizing them in terms of the emotional quality of the experience, good, bad, or neutral. The numbers changed depending on her mood (today, almost everybody had a minus by his name; Eric had three minuses) but even at her most cheerful, there was an abundance of neutrals and bads and, out of twenty-six, only two or three grudging pluses.

No happy person would do this she thought.

Glenda moodily popped her Dexatrim with her coffee and looked at her watch. Two old ladies had come into the waiting area and were sitting with their hands on their purses. One of them, Mrs. Oliphant, walked with a cane. She was fat, and Justine imagined a life made up of the panting, sweating struggle to get from one corner of one city block to the next, your pantyhose gaping between your legs, your ankles leaden in your terrible shoes. For fleeting seconds she saw herself moving around the office like that, only caneless, her bloated legs unable to propel her frantic torso, her elongated noodle arms gesturing impotently. She recalled herself the night before, on her knees with her face pressed into the mattress, Bryan hungrily crouched over her from behind, popping his small penis in and out of her. It was the same numb image of a thousand pornographic pictures, almost consoling in its banality. Show this picture to someone, they know what you mean. His small teeth flashed in his head as he lay on his back and smiled at her. She was telling him a story about an old boyfriend of hers. Ron, a handsome musician with the big-eyed face of a teen fanzine idol, was drinking in a bar in Ypsilanti, Michigan, when he was approached by a middle-aged woman and her visibly anxious sixteen-year-old daughter. After some bewildering small talk the woman asked him to come to their home and deflower her daughter. She explained that the daughter liked him and that she, the mother, thought that he seemed okay too and wanted to supervise the event to be sure it was safe. The daughter was a frail creature wearing unfashionable glasses. Ron, who as Justine explained, was one of the nicest men she had ever been involved with, knew it was sick but he, as he phrased it, “went along with it anyway” because he felt aroused. “That girl didn’t know what was happening to her,” he said. “She was totally helpless. And I wolfed on her.” As she quoted him she pictured him thrusting crazily at the girl on a stiffly made bed in an oblong room with square windows. The mother was waiting outside in the kitchen, sitting with her legs tightly crossed, perhaps drinking a cup of coffee.

“Did he screw the mother too?” asked Bryan interestedly.

“No. I don’t think so. He left right afterwards.” She imagined Ron fleeing the house as the girl sobbed on her bed, and the mother yelled at her to stop being such a baby. “In a way it was a horrible thing to do,” she said. “It was horrible. But I don’t blame him. It would be such an extreme, how could you not do it?”

“Yeah.”

Miss Stilt, the other old lady in the room, was looking at her quizzically. Justine smiled at her. Miss Stilt was one of her first old ladies. Justine remembered her because of the way she’d stood before the small mirror in the examining room, striking at her mouth with her lipstick as she griped, “I don’t know why I bother. I look like hell anyway.”

“Honestly, it must be an emergency, I am going to find out,” said Glenda, picking up the phone to call the hospital.

Justine thought Dr. Winkgard was probably having an affair, possibly more than one. She thought he loved and respected Glenda but that he believed it was his prerogative to screw other people in much the same way he believed it was his prerogative to keep patients sitting in his waiting room for hours. She remembered her father striding around the house talking about his scrawny broken patients, inert in their beds, totally dependent upon him, this human embodiment of vigor and health, talking as if the world were polarized into those who were weak, ill, and unhappy and those who were not. Justine would imagine him striding among the patients, dispensing wellness and energy; somehow that image became an image of her father roaring through the world in a celebratory rampage of grabbing and eating and expressing himself at the top of his lungs, saying things like, “She’s only unhappy because she wants to be.”

Dr. Winkgard crashed in through the front door, his eyes radiating fierce outgoing beams, his dark hair ridged against his forehead with the wetness of his morning swim.

Glenda smiled and put down the phone. Justine took Mrs. Oliphant into the examining room and waited outside for her to take off her clothes before she went in to glue and clamp her. She stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, and stood in the hum of the odor-removing fan, looking at herself in the mirror. She scanned her twenty-eight-year-old face for lines and, finding none, concentrated on how huge the pores around her nose had become in the last two years and how ugly it was.

She swam through the day just below the surface of mental alertness, bumping her head on the floating detritus of impressions and thoughts. She woke a little when she went outside to buy the muffins that Glenda and the doctor ate for lunch. Justine bought herself a bag of cookies and walked around the block, eating them out of the bag, absorbing the cacophonous energies of the people around her. A man in rags with one eye gone grabbed at her sleeve as if it were the bow of a lifeboat he was trying to pull himself into. “I’m hungry, mama,” he said, “please give me a dime, a nickel, anything, please.” She gave him a quarter and the rest of the cookies, and he fell back into the sea.

The most interesting moment of the day came in a conversation with the generally taciturn Mrs. Thomas. During the cardiogram, Mrs. Thomas said, “Dr. Winkgard is the best doctor I ever had. Because he’s not only a good doctor, he’s a good man. When I was on the operating table and that other doctor was saying they had to amputate my breast, I could hear Dr. Winkgard fighting for me. He said, ‘Don’t you take away that lady’s breast.’ And they didn’t. They did have to take a piece out of it”—she indicated the spot with her hand—“but they didn’t take the whole thing. And he was right. That was two years ago, and I’ve been okay since.”

Justine wholeheartedly agreed that Dr. Winkgard had done the right thing and left the room with a new respect for her employer. She was bewildered though that while he had been indifferent to Mrs. Rabinowitz who was beaten by her husband, he had respected Mrs. Thomas’s body and protected her breast. Well, Ron had made her a birthday cake and stayed up all night massaging her head; he had also assisted a demented woman in the rape of her daughter. And she, Justine, had said she didn’t blame him for doing it.

She returned home that evening with a severe headache. Her apartment seemed silent and void. She sat on the foam cushion before her low coffee table and ate a take-out salad from a plastic container. The air between her and the phone was thick and hostile. The bathroom seemed to be at the end of a treacherous tunnel even though it was only a yard or so from where she sat. Her stomach felt too tight even for chewed-up mouthfuls of salad, and she ate uncomfortably, forcing herself because it was good for her. She stared at the clothing she’d thrown on the floor that morning and decided that what had happened the night before hadn’t meant anything, that the blade lodged in her chest had always been there, that this incident had just reminded her of it. She adjusted her posture to accommodate the blade and went out for a walk.

The evening was cool and vague. Justine watched everyone who walked past her, and irksome tiny facts about them entered her orbit and clustered about her head. A young couple approached her, the man with his square pink head raised as if he were looking over a horizon, his hands thrust angrily in his pockets, his slightly turned-out feet hitting the ground with dismal solidity, his cheap jacket open to his cheap shirt. The woman on his arm crouched into him slightly, her artificially curled hair bounced around her prematurely lined face, her red mouth said, “Because it’s dishonest to me and to everybody and even to yourself.” Justine looked headlong into the open maw of their lives; they passed, and the pit closed up again. She looked into the windows of a restaurant and saw in the various wordless postures — a man with his body close in to the table at which he sat, his elbows supporting the intimate lunge of his torso; a woman holding herself in a reserved straight-backed position; a boy displaying himself with an aloof, cross-legged twist to one side as his grinning, socializing head held forth — varying gradations of human relationship that were so strange and unreadable to her, they made her feel like a lost dog. No one accosted or terrorized her.

The next day was a short day at the office; Justine left work at one o’clock. She went to Penn Station and boarded a commuter train to Princeton, New Jersey, to visit Rationalist Reaffirmation High. She had never taken a commuter train to the suburbs before, and the visit seemed like a special outing to her. She brought a bag of cashews, a bag of marzipan, and an apple and was looking forward to eating the treats.

She was startled by the appearance of the train; she expected anything associated with the suburbs to have a gloss of orderliness, cleanliness, and characterlessness, yet the train was a metaphor for decrepitude. Balled up potato chip bags, bottle caps, crumpled cigarette packages, and cans rolled on the floor or collected in corners under a gray gauze of dust. Foam poked out of the vinyl seat coverings. The cracked and taped-over windows had strange rattling collections of tiny paper wads, food crumbs, and unidentifiable granules in their loose-fitting casements. A businessman seated across from her put his briefcase down, pressed the recline button on his chair, leaned trustingly back, and fell into the lap of the man seated behind him.

Justine was more careful with her recline button, but there was nothing to worry about as it didn’t work. How, she wondered, could suburban people tolerate such a level of disrepair? She was disconcerted to find herself thinking that perhaps, since she’d been in New York, the entire country had deteriorated as seriously as Manhattan had, that everywhere people were wading ankle-deep in rolling, rotting trash, that everywhere homeless people pissed in the streets and railed at the well-to-do who slunk shame-faced along the walls. This of course was exactly what Anna Granite had said would happen, due to weak-willed liberals and governmental meddling. For a moment she looked at the possibility of total collapse as if she were a Definitist and found the idea to be somehow dramatically and ethically satisfying.

Then the train entered the fecund green landscape of Princeton, and she was stunned by the order and prosperity, the brightly painted homes, tended gardens, and lush lawns. Flawless sidewalks ran and touched noses, big round mail boxes stood like jolly street corner burghers. Justine had grown up thinking that such neighborhoods were normal places where most people lived, yet this neighborhood seemed foreign and mythic.

Max Nolte, a teacher at Rationalist Reaffirmation High, met her at the platform. He was a tall person with a big bottom and a little head and mild yet intent eyes. His open jean jacket exposed a full chest which, in its fleshy softness, suggested a sensitivity that was almost painfully swollen and tender and yet unrelievedly proud and out-thrusted, like the triumphant guitar chord of the crassest rock song.

He drove with one hand, gesturing with the other as he talked about the school and the English classes which he taught. “You go to most English classes today in the schools — have you? Well you should. Because you’d be shocked at what they teach. Joyce, Kafka — horrible stuff about people’s lives being destroyed by a baby crying. Or going to a carnival and getting lost and not being able to find what you wanna buy and getting depressed. Or a guy turning into a cockroach — it’s unbelievable. It’s all about defeat and helplessness. No wonder the kids hate it.”

Justine started to argue for the intrinsic value of beauty in writing, but as he continued, she found herself seduced by his blunt sensibility, so full of feeling yet so dumb, by his cheerful way of going after literature like a dog would a bone, snuffling, turning, chewing, genuinely enjoying it, provided it conformed to his belief. She thought he was a very nice person.

“What I teach is stuff like Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane, Jack London, Hemingway, Conrad, and, of course, Anna Granite. Literature with clear plots, clear cause-and-effect connections, plenty of action and heroes. That’s the most important thing. Especially for kids at this age. Heroes who live by clear values.”

Justine remembered the man who had picked her up in the bar, his pale face, the eerie angle of his bones, his glittering eyes, the deliberate way he drew the smoking reed of cigarette to his lips. She remembered herself between his spread legs, sucking his cock, glimpsing his happy rat-toothed smirk with each upward bob of her pumping head. This memory, with its ugly eroticism, was not in the least arousing; however she recognized something compelling in it, a compulsion akin to that of a starving lab animal which will keep pressing the button that once supplied it with food, even though the button now jolts its poor small body with increasing doses of electric shock.

“I have them read Joyce and Kafka and other junk, but I give them a solid Definitist perspective.”

“But is a Definitist perspective only looking at whether or not a story concerns happy themes and strong characters?”

“Strong characters, yes. Happy themes, no. Shakespeare is great even though he deals with disaster and betrayal and the worst aspects of human nature because his characters are strong and you can feel something for them when they fall. They at least try for the heroic. When a man tries the heroic and fails, it’s a great tragedy. Telling about a man going through a boring day, sitting on a toilet, watching a girl expose herself — what is that?” Max held out his hand and let it drop. “It’s nothing. It’s antilife.”

“But mundane things and even miserable things are a part of life.”

“They’re not a part of life I aspire to.”

The Rationalist classes were held in the rented classrooms of a local community college. The fourteen young Definitists sat on their tailbones, their spines outlined under their shirts. Justine sat in the back of the room, legs crossed and note pad open. Max paced before them, his enthusiasm protruding from him like an invisible spear.

“So what kind of guy is Jake? He’s a nice guy, a smart guy. The kind of guy who’d sit for hours in a parlor in Boston and talk about social problems and try to come up with solutions. He’s an intellectual, in other words. A liberal in fact. But he’s not a phony!” Max’s voice went up in register and became both conciliatory and probing, as though he were verbally peeling away the slightly ridiculous outer layer of Jake’s character and revealing his deeper, truer nature, while at the same time pleading with the listener to take a peep at this more genuine Jake and not merely laugh at his outer manifestation. “He’s really after the truth in life, he wants to experience it instead of just talking about it. That’s why he’s signed up for this voyage, he doesn’t have to go, he’s not like the rest of these guys.”

Justine looked at the boys and again imagined Bryan, only this time as a young boy, sitting in this classroom listening to Max. What would he be thinking? How would it affect the daydreams he would doubtless be having, sitting on his tailbone in the heavy sun? She remembered Ricky Holland and his gang on a heartless expanse of playground standing in a circle around a trapped fourth-grader who had been forced to lift her skirt. She remembered Emotional and felt a pang of sensitivity and remorse which was so painful it was immediately stamped out by a ferocious burst of internal rock music which, if it had a face, would’ve been sticking out its tongue.

“So,” concluded Max, “that’s what you have to do when you read a book. I know it may seem hard at first, but if you practice it, say, when you go to the movies, you’ll get the hang of it. Movie after movie, break it down — plot, character, theme, resolution, message. Pretty soon you’ll be doing it automatically, and then you’ll be able to defend yourself from the crap they’ll throw at you in college.”

Justine returned to Manhattan depressed and nauseous from the treats she had consumed on the train. As soon as she entered her apartment, the phone rang. He said “Hi” as though she was supposed to know who he was, and annoyingly she did.

“How did you know my number?”

“I got it from you last night, don’t you remember? Well maybe you were drunk.”

Chapter Eighteen

I was at the gym doing lat pull-downs when I thought of my mother: she and I baking cookies, hula dancing in the living room, making crayon heavens, or together in my bedroom, her tender presence taking me into the night. As I felt these images, weakness spread through my shoulders and the weights became heavier. I thought instead of my mother’s voice as I’d heard it from my bedroom in Painesville, telling my father how terrible I had been that day, punctuating and goading his bursts of anger. The strength came back to my arms, and again I pulled down, pushing my breath out between my teeth with a hiss. I remembered her at the dining table, her eyes covered with impenetrable film, her forkful of salad frozen in space. My father told me I was sitting on my fat ass while he worked and slaved with bastards. I pumped at twice my usual rate. A hirsute Hispanic fellow in a leopard-skin leotard glanced, alarmed. “Take it easy,” he said. “Don’t overwork.” I checked my body for stress in mid-pump and felt none; my blood beat like a marching band. My father gesticulated and showed his teeth. My mother’s eyes remained unseeing. Then, like the hand of a phantom, a palpable feeling of love and longing extended itself to me. It touched my cheek. Superimposed over my indifferent mother, another mother leaned towards me with tears in her eyes, wanting to protect me, to console me. A chemical release bathed my muscles. I pressed my weight for the last time and let it go. Pain shot up my back and sides. I slumped on the bench, trying to rotate my shoulders.

“Ma’am,” said the Hispanic fellow, “I know you’re big and strong, but are you trying to kill yourself or what? They ain’t gonna pay your hospital bill, you know, remember that paper you signed? Hey, are you okay?”

“Yes,” I said, “thank you.” He helped me off the machine and advised me to take a steam bath and stretch out. It was only with the faintest twinge of pride that I registered the incredulous remark made by the muscle boy who’d stepped up behind me and seen how much I’d pressed.

I walked into the dressing room, pain and adrenaline vying for bodily dominance. I pulled off my wet clothes with effort, not even trying to hide the grotesque display of cellulite crushed by spandex. The girl next to me was a homely little thing anyway.

I had never used the steam room before, mainly because I had been too embarrassed to sit there unsheathed. Now discomfort overruled embarrassment, and besides I was in no mood to care.

I entered the steam room clutching defiance to my body as well as one of the gym’s skimpy regulation towels. I quickly dropped both; there was no one in the room, and even if there had been, I was partially obscured from critical eyes by billows of hot steam. I stood for a moment absorbing the experience and decided it was pleasant. I eased myself onto the wooden bench, leaned back and had the novel sensation that the world was a safe, gentle place.

I had last seen my mother in a coffee shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, where I had lived briefly. Her face had aged shockingly since I’d seen her last; there were dark circles under her eyes. Our conversation had ended with her collapsing onto the table, her head hidden in her folded arms as she wept, the fingers of one hand blindly groping my arm across the table in pitiful supplication. I had sat silent and immobile. She had asked me to come home and see my father who was very ill, and I had refused.

That was not the first contact I’d had with her since I had left home. There had been letters and phone conversations, some of which were with my father. I had seen my mother twice before that last meeting. The first time was in Philadelphia. She had put aside a portion of her weekly allowance over a period of weeks to hire a private detective to find me.

The encounter occurred one afternoon as I returned home from work early, compensating as I sometimes did for a long night of conference transcription. She was sitting on the steps with a newspaper folded on her lap. The crossword puzzle, on which she was writing with a stubby pencil, sat on her knee. When she saw me she stopped, her pencil suspended. If I hadn’t been stunned I would’ve run; I was paralyzed by the certainty that my father was nearby. My mother rose, came forward, and embraced me. “Dotty,” she said. “Dotty, darling, thank God you’re safe.”

It wasn’t until we were in my room sitting on my bed that she told me that my father wasn’t there, that he didn’t even know what she was doing. I was shocked at this information; my mother had never done anything without my father’s permission. I listened as she went on, tracing an invisible pattern on my bedspread with her finger. She wanted me to come home, she said. Maybe college had been a bad idea, but I should come home. She knew there had been problems at home. She drew her pattern with meticulous care, examining every aspect of it. But still. Home was the place for a young girl. She looked up, smiled wretchedly, and touched my cheek.

“No,” I said. “And you can’t make me.”

Her expression shrank from me. There was silence, and then she came slowly forward again. She repeated what she had said, adding that they would be willing to “get help” for me. She said my father was “half crazy” with worry. I kept saying no, my conviction that she could not force me growing with each repetition of the word. I was of legal age, and Anna Granite was on my side. If my father wanted so badly to see me, he could have hired a detective; he probably didn’t because he was terrified of opening the Pandora’s Box of family counseling.

In the end she gave up. She said she wouldn’t tell my father where I was on the condition that I write to her regularly and tell her how I was doing. I agreed. We had a short conversation about my job and my life. I told her that I was a secretary for an art dealer and that I had made two new friends — this last out of a desire to reassure her that I was happy, for even then I couldn’t be indifferent to the pain I saw her in. She said well, I’m just starving to death and I’d love a grilled cheese sandwich, how about you?

We had a snack at a diner. Our meal was accompanied alternately by bright conversation and my mother’s tears. She chewed and wiped at her eyes, then at her mouth, clearing her throat with ladylike sounds.

Once past the initial resentment, I wrote my regular letters with enthusiasm, inventing bright anecdotes I knew would please her. I think I liked writing the letters because they prevented the development of homesickness and remorse, which might have led me to return home. I liked recounting my pretend successes, knowing my real accomplishments were all the greater. I had fantasies of returning home unexpectedly, after a triumph in banking or industry, dispensing munificence and superiority. They would plead with me to stay with them, just for a few days, but I would have to rush off to a conference or something. I imagined my father looking at me with awe, shamed to realize his judgment of me had been so wrong.

The letters from my mother, also full of anecdotes, were small notations of my old life, memories of chili dinners, the evening news, the sound of electric fans and of marching music, the close, dark rooms of the Painesville house, threads worked into the now vaster tapestry of my complex new life — present but safely contained and circumscribed.

This contact alternately fell off or intensified over the years and was, often at Christmas or Thanksgiving, supplemented by phone conversations. During one of those conversations my father came on the line and without warning began talking to me as if he’d seen me the previous week. It was only minutes before the strength of his voice, resonant with the conviction that what he was doing was perfectly normal, drew me into a conversation. I heard my voice change as I talked to him, become small, soft, constricted — the voice of my childhood. His voice was fat with generosity when he said, “Come home for Christmas next year, okay?” and I said okay even though we both knew I wouldn’t. I hung up feeling disgust and pain and covetousness — covetousness because part of me held onto the pain like it was a precious pet, the favorite stuffed animal I had clutched as a child.

One day I called when my father was alone. He began talking about the neighbors who hated him and the bastards he worked with, how much he’d like to smash their skulls with hammers. There was marching music in the background. I said nothing.

“And then,” he continued, “there’s my selfish bitch daughter. Who wasted my money flunking out of college and then deserted us. Who calls us every few months on her royal whim. My daughter—”

“Yes,” I said, “your daughter who you raped.”

“Raped.” My father spoke furiously. “If you think you were raped, you don’t know what rape is. I’m the one who’s been raped, sister. Raped all my goddamn life by the army, the school system, the bosses, the neighbors—”

I hung up.

For a long time I stopped reading my mother’s letters, and I never wrote to her. When I moved I left no forwarding address, and for a time there was no contact at all. Then came the inevitable reconnection, Christmas cards, a birthday present, a shopping trip with my mother, events like a trail of pebbles leading to that final conversation in Hoboken.

I picked at my misshapen bran muffin while she described my father’s illness and how her days were spent caring for him. From the moment she told me he was seriously ill and might soon die, I felt my own assumption that I would go home to see him plant itself in my solar plexus. I didn’t say anything about it though; I merely listened and asked occasional questions. I could hear in her voice that she shared my assumption that I would come home.

The conversation went on, and I tried to imagine a scene of forgiveness and reconnection. But the stick figures of myself and my father stood mute in the dark rooms of my internal house. I tried to imagine him looking at me with tears in his eyes, speechless with sorrow as he clasped my hand to beg forgiveness. But I could only imagine him with his eyes glassy and glazed, muttering about bastards with his dying breath. “You prick,” I said to him. “You ruined me.” He didn’t hear me.

I looked at my mother. The sentence I had just imagined saying to my father stood between us in full view, but she didn’t see it. She began talking about travel arrangements.

“Mother,” I said. “I don’t want to go.”

She didn’t look surprised. Her body went into its habitual posture of readiness to receive pain, and then I saw her gather herself to argue with me. She began with the “difficulties” between my father and me. We talked round the fact of what happened; I felt angrier and angrier. I backed away from my feelings, using the conversation to parry and evade them. Unknowing, my mother cornered me, stripping away my defenses as fast as I could secure them. My feelings pressed against my control like the fists and feet of a baby trying to punch free of the womb.

We paused for a moment. There was a light sweat on my forehead. A thin layer of composure constrained my anger. If she had remained silent only a little longer, the layer might have thickened enough to protect us both, but she said, at that fragile moment: “Can’t you be big enough to forgive him, Dotty? Can’t you stop thinking of your problems just this one time?”

Her face recoiled from my expression, she put her hand to her throat as though in self-protection, and then my words garrotted her. “No, mother,” I said, “no I can’t forget about my problems. Because my problems are that my father did everything but fuck me, again and again. You know, incest? You watch television, don’t you?”

Her face confirmed my worst fear; she was not surprised by what I’d said, but wounded to the death that I’d said it. Ashy noise rose and died in her throat, and she collapsed on the table like the weak old woman she was.

Some weeks later, she sent me a card announcing the funeral. I disregarded it. Once or twice I worried if I had made the right decision in not going to see him. Then the worry went into oblivion. My mother and I had not communicated since. I did not even know if she was alive.

I left the steam room, my body relaxed and heavy. I didn’t bother to clutch my towel over my nakedness; I exposed even my horrible pubic hair. No one gawked. Only another fat lady glanced at me with mild curiosity. A skull with wavy blond hair was tattooed on one of her huge arms. The girl next to me carefully dried her breasts, gently patting the tiny rings that pierced both nipples. No wonder nobody looked at my cellulite, I thought, defiantly assuming poses that I knew would best reveal it. People are used to weirdness, inured to ugliness. It’s beauty we stare at, disbelieving and furious.

I lumbered into the street thinking perhaps I should try to find my mother. She was probably still living in Painesville, unless she was one of those old people who moved to Florida. It was also possible she had died and, since I’d changed my name, no one had been able to locate me.

As soon as I entered my apartment I ripped open a bag of potato chips and a bag of candy, turned on the TV, and sat before it, eating from both bags. The news was on. Two white teenagers who had beaten a black teenager to death with a baseball bat had been fined $100 for misconduct and black people were demanding a retrial. The families and neighbors of the white teenagers were outraged by this, saying that they were being unfairly judged because they were white. A bleached blonde with a huge wad of gum in her mouth spoke to a newsman’s microphone. “Cuz I known these guys all my life,” she said in defense of the white boys. “They’re the nicest, most unprejudice people in the whirl.” I hit the remote control button. On the next channel a talk show featured schoolchildren who said they’d been sexually abused by their allegedly Satan-worshipping teacher; they were confronting the accused teacher. The parents of the children stood behind their seated offspring, gripping the backs of their chairs, their faces held in strangely combined expressions of anger, disgust, prurience, and awareness that they were on TV

“And so Miss Peatrosinski,” said the host, stalking the tense young teacher with his mike, “what do you have to say to that?”

The teacher blinked rapidly and nervously rubbed the corner of one deeply shadowed eye. She said, “This is nothing but a witchhunt based on gossip and faulty—”

A child of twelve or so leapt to his feet and shouted, “I wanna say something. How do you think we little kids could make up stuff as dirty as that? How would we know about Satanism and all that other stuff?”

The audience roared in approval, the children cheered and shook their fists in the air.

I imagined my mother in a room watching television, alone with memories of a rapist husband and a daughter who hated her. I remembered my father as I used to find him sometimes when I returned from school, alone in the darkened house, feeling the hairs in his nose with his thumb, his eyes looking as if he didn’t know where he was. His face would come to life as he saw me, a familiar reference point moving through the room. I remembered the way he would lie in the dark in his room before dinner, listening to the soft music emerging through the static on the radio. Sometimes I’d be in the hall and he’d appear, his oiled hair traveling in conflicting directions on his head, his face set like a carving, his eyes totally bewildered. On one such occasion he said to me, “I had a dream. A dream I was back in Michigan at the Bowlarama. Mama and Aunt Cat were alive and happy, and there were flowers everywhere.” He put his finger to his nose, turned up a nostril and tenderly stroked the hairs.

My poor father. My poor, poor father. Pity spread through my body, paralyzing me. My father had lived and died in terrible pain. My mother might be lost forever. Anna Granite had not saved me.

The phone rang. I stared in the direction of the ringing. It was my mother. It was one of those instances you read about in Reader’s Digest; she had been psychically penetrated by the strength of my thoughts and was now trying to reach me. I stood up. Except how would she know my number? I sat down. There were lots of ways! I leapt up and headed for the phone, which immediately stopped ringing. “Shit!” I slammed my fist on the wall and the ringing began again. I dove at the phone with tears in my eyes, barely able to control my voice as I answered hello.

“Hi,” said the thin little voice. “It’s Justine Shade. Remember me?”

Chapter Nineteen

Justine looked at the Medicaid billing forms before her, fearful that she had filled them out incorrectly but unable to tell how. When she looked at the numbered instructions, boxes to fill in and various codes, she could not see them as specific abstractions with easily understood meanings which began and ended when you put the obvious information in the box. The grid of green ink that made up the form seemed rather the opening of a hellish labyrinth at the end of which sat checks in envelopes made out to Dr. Winkgard. She steeled herself and filled in a code of numbers; immediately the numerals sent out invisible threads attaching them to a machine of paper that ground along on a cloud of thoughts, the now totally abstract thoughts of whoever had come up with this method of defense against a cruel and exorbitant medical system.

Her mind had been moving in this psychotic direction all morning, and it was beginning to alarm her. Even worse, it seemed as though other people could see the distressed twistings and turnings in her head. Patients would approach the desk to request an appointment or to pay their bill; she would look at them and she would suddenly see their facial expressions and body movements as though through the tiny end of a telescope, leading to an infinity of personality, and then beyond personality to a place out of which the personality grew in a thick tough stalk, a place unreadable by even her grossly heightened perceptual mechanism. She would look at the appointment book, and see there a list of names symbolizing people, people who were each as complex as the one standing before her and yet reducible to a list of squiggles in an appointment book anyone could buy in any stationery store. Shaken, she would fill out an appointment card and hand it to the patient and see on her face a vague expression of discomfort and puzzlement, as if she’d registered Justine’s weird consternation. When one of them asked her a question and sensed her groping confusedly for an answer, he looked past her to Glenda and said, “Perhaps you could tell me, Mrs. Winkgard?” And Glenda’s voice sailed forth, cheerfully acknowledging the chaos that so stupefied Justine, then sweeping it into a corner with the brisk broom of her voice, neatening and simplifying, answering the question.

Probably it was obvious to everyone, on a deep level, that Glenda was a conduit for the forces of order, rationality, and strength, and that she, Justine, was a mere appendage, useful only insofar as she was a conduit for Glenda. Further, it seemed that this had been true all her life and would probably always be true, no matter how many articles she wrote or how old she got. And it was only ten thirty! How was she going to get through the day?

She turned to Glenda, who was sitting beside her doing some paperwork, her furrowing dewlaps giving her the appearance of a masticating little animal. Surely Glenda would realize that something was wrong with her soon; she thought she’d better comment on her condition so that she wouldn’t appear too far gone to have noticed it herself.

“Glenda,” she said as casually as possible, “do I seem to be acting weird today?”

“No. Are you feeling well?”

“I don’t feel sick. I just feel strange.”

Glenda put aside her paper and looked at her alertly. “Strange how?”

“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.”

“Why were you friends with him?”

“I had to be. I lived right next to him, and he would’ve killed me otherwise. He almost killed me anyway. He beat the shit out of me a couple of times, and once he pushed me out the third-story window and I had to go to the hospital—”

“Didn’t your parents get upset about this?” Justine vaguely remembered giggling outside the principal’s office with Debby as they listened to the distraught Mrs. Wolcott complain about the D girls pulling down Johnny Wolcott’s pants and spanking his butt.

He shrugged. “There wasn’t much they could do. My mother said I’d have to learn to take care of myself. Besides, he was fun sometimes.”

“I raped someone once, when I was a kid,” said Justine dreamily.

“Yeah?”

She hesitated; since the vanished Dr. Venus, she had never told anyone about Rose. She wasn’t sure why she’d started to tell Bryan; she suddenly wanted to reveal herself to this person who’d recognized the cruel child of Action, Illinois, and stated that he liked her. Nonetheless, as she told the story, which was still painful and sad to her, she disguised the truth of it by relating it with a smile on her face, as if she wanted only to excite him.

He received the story with greed in his eyes and his body in a posture of assessment. “You really were a mean kid,” he finally said.

“It wasn’t just meanness,” she said, confused. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t even know if it was really sexual.” She felt exposed, extended towards him, and a little sick at having displayed her private life for a relative stranger’s titillation — and yet she felt titillated herself.

“It sounds like a military maneuver,” he said. “You entered the city, you pillaged, plundered, mauled everything of value, and withdrew.”

“Nooo.” She ducked her head and giggled. What he said bore no relation to what she felt, but she was seduced by the idea of herself prancing through his imagination as a tiny porn queen while the truth of what had happened lay safely hidden in a pocket of misunderstanding. At the same time, she felt a compulsion to make him understand her, and she was disconcerted to realize that the more he refused to do so, the more desperate the compulsion would become. “Really,” she said, smiling. “It wasn’t like that.” And she told the story again.

Glenda handed her a warm Styrofoam cup of tea with oil glimmering on its surface. Justine sipped and was comforted as associations with safety and ordinariness were triggered by the sweet taste.

“Glenda,” she said, “have you ever had a real anxiety attack?”

Glenda looked at her and nodded; the expression that rose on her face spoke of a deeply disturbing experience, muted with time, and now about to take the tame form of an anecdote. “It happened when I was living in Miami shortly after my divorce from my first husband. I was staying in this sleazy rooming house with cockroaches and I was drinking pretty heavily. One day I made the mistake of calling my ex-husband while I was drinking. He had a woman living with him by then, and I heard one of my daughters call her ‘Mama.’ It was like a knife in my heart; when I got off the phone I almost lost my mind. I ran to the medicine cabinet and took tranquilizers, and when that didn’t help I followed them with sleeping pills. And Justine, when I lay down in my bed I could actually see demons, one black and one red, coming to turn my bed over. It went on for hours, with me fighting to keep them from doing it. And you know, I’m still not convinced that they weren’t there.”

“Have you ever read Hegel?” asked Bryan.

“I guess, I don’t remember.” She was feeling drunk; she felt herself slouched on the table in an attitude of belligerent indolence. “Why?”

“I was just thinking of an essay he wrote. I can’t remember the name of it. But it has to do with human freedom and its natural limits.”

She came out of her slouch to watch as this new vista of his mental processes displayed itself. She felt confused by the ease with which he alternately skimmed and dove into conversation, one moment leading her down into the tunnels and caverns of his psyche to show her the strange stones and stalactites studding the walls and then, without warning, springing up to run away over the barren surface, laughing like a hyena.

“His basic idea is that people crave freedom but that, because of the realities of their lives, they are inherently unfree. And that the only way people can have a sense of freedom is by taking the freedom of others — enslaving others.”

“That doesn’t sound so original to me,” she grumped.

“So that every human interaction, whether on a national or individual level, is a war over who will be enslaved and who will rule.”

Justine pictured a bleak landscape occupied by two people, one of whom was groveling in the dirt while the other stood exulting in the vast black emptiness of his freedom. “That sounds hopelessly neurotic to me,” she said.

“Well then you must be pretty neurotic to do what you did to that girl in the bathroom. A toothbrush, God.” He smiled as he swigged his beer.

“Fuck you,” she said, and withdrew haughtily into her booth.

“Don’t you think it’s true?”

“I told you a personal thing about myself that’s actually sort of upsetting to me, and you act like it’s some fucking joke.”

He inhaled cigarette smoke and aggressively released it towards her. “It’s so cute when you have these little moments of self-respect and integrity.”

“You’re lucky there’s a table between us,” she said. “If there wasn’t, I’d smack your little face.”

He smiled like an animal showing its teeth.

Something old stirred in her.

“Have another drink,” he said.

She walked into Dr. Winkgard’s office to put his mail on his desk and heard him haranguing a patient.

“Mr. Nelson, I have told you repeatedly, we have run every possible test, and there is nothing wrong with you. We cannot assume that you are sick because of ‘feelings’ and the premonitions of your aunt, who is, I’m sure, a wonderful lady.”

She lingered in the examining room next to his office to hear the rest of this speech.

“However, one thing is for sure and I’ll tell you what it is: If you continue to believe that you are sick, you will become sick. The mind, Mr. Nelson. The mind!”

She had heard this all her life, that if you believe things, they will come true. Bryan had said in a drunken moment the previous night that he could change reality by his perception of it, or something to that effect. Well it didn’t work for her; she had believed in things as hard as she could, she had decorated her beliefs with bells, ribbons, and streamers, she had made winged boats for them to go flying out into the world, and although they had looked wonderful sailing into space, they had crashed in a heap.

Dr. Winkgard obviously didn’t have this problem. She could hear the rippling muscularity of his belief system flexing through his words, taking up all the space in his office, possibly forcing Mr. Nelson to cower under the desk. This was, she supposed, what was meant by having a strong personality. It galled her to think that Dr. Winkgard had a stronger personality than she. Then she thought of Bryan’s nutty Hegelian ideas and was further galled to think that he would see them embodied in the fact that she worked for Dr. Winkgard.

“So,” concluded Dr. Winkgard, “stop worrying yourself into illness, Mr. Nelson. Go and be happy and stop thinking about the demons that populate the dreams of your aunt.”

More demons, thought Justine as she left the examining room. Demons are the theme this morning. The thought frightened her.

She was very drunk by the time they returned to his apartment, and she barely remembered the at first playful exchange of shoves, slaps, and verbal abuse, the escalating bolts of aggression that flew between them.

“I’d like to tie your ankles up by your head, with your legs pushed straight back until I could see up your asshole.” His voice jerked as he fucked her. “I’d like to stick a lit candle all the way up your snatch and lick your pussy until it starts to singe.”

“An homage to Hegel?” she asked.

She felt the teeth of his ferocity cut open her body, and she felt her poisonous response spill into his mouth like blood. She lifted her pelvis off the bed and fucked him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “Turn me over,” she whispered, “and stick your cock up my ass.”

“No. I’m going to fuck your pussy until I feel you start to come and then I’m going to cram it up your ass. Then I’ll stick it down your throat.”

“You stupid prick.” But she said it like a caress, slowing her pelvic movement, slowly gripping and releasing his cock with the rhythmic stroke she would use to pet an animal.

“You might hate me but your cunt’s begging for it, isn’t it?”

She sank beneath the dark current that bore them along, rose and sank again. She saw herself frozen in disbelief at what she was doing and then herself as a child, alone in the apartment after school, running through the rooms, smashing windows and destroying furniture like she had never been able to do, jumping up and down with delight to see big Justine doing the nasty with this dirty boy. The strange thing was that this excitement didn’t affect her cunt. She felt it there, but only dimly, as if there was a thin but firm barrier between her genitals and the rest of her body. Stranger still, it didn’t matter.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, rolled him onto his back and sat on him. The smell of her cunt floated up to her; she felt like she’d dipped her hand in her own guts. She whispered to him, “I want you to play with my cunt until I’m almost ready to come and then I want you to whip me.”

He poked his head up. “You want to be whipped?”

“Yes.”

“Then get up. I’ll whip you right now.”

Fright leapt in her stomach, and she jammed it down. He got a small whip from a drawer across the room. She had never seen a whip before and she was frightened again. Even the rampaging child paused, wondering. Then he grabbed a long candle from its holder and continued towards her.

“No,” she said sharply, raising a hand. “No fire.”

He stopped. “Okay,” he said almost tenderly. “Nothing you don’t want.” And he turned and hurled the candle against a wall, smashing it.

He pressed her face down on the edge of the bed and bound her hands behind her back. Her knees were bent up to her chest and splayed apart so that her vagina and asshole were pulled open. She thought of her exposed crotch, feeling that these hairy wet holes were her, just as her eyes and nose were her, and yet, seen isolated and up close, they were prehistoric, stupidly impersonal, beastly and irreducible — yet still gentle, merciful and sweet.

She felt him embrace her spread buttocks; he must’ve been kneeling. She felt him kiss her hips and behind over and over again. “Baby,” he murmured. “Baby girl.” He dipped his tongue into one hole and then the other. The barrier protecting her genitals fell away; her inner flesh opened to receive pleasure. He slowly fucked her with his tongue, and her mouth released a genuine sigh. Her body opened more deeply until she felt herself split and revealed all the way into the pit of her guts, a place of heat and light that shone with tenderness for the lover who had come at last.

He gently withdrew from her, licked her once more, and backed away. She was aware of him behind her, and although she didn’t make this association, she felt as she had when she was alone with her father in his car and he had made her say what Dr. Norris had done; pinned, helpless, exposed. Only now she felt her opened being contacted and stroked instead of coldly regarded. She thought: I love you.

He struck her with the whip. The pain cut her drunkenness and shocked her so badly she couldn’t scream. He struck her again, harder, and she did scream. Her panicked body jerked against its restraints and tried to close in defense; from her depths there burst a terrified creature, all elongated hands and wild distended mouth, its body twisting crazily as it flew into her throat, silently crying, No, no, don’t let him hurt me. But it was too late.

She let her attention wander to the welts pressed against the vinyl seat of her office chair as she sat, still struggling with Medicaid forms. “I hope you didn’t leave permanent marks,” she’d said as she lay in his arms.

“Not this time,” he assured her. “We’ll talk about that later.” He turned away from her, his back hard as a door shut in someone’s weeping face.

Sleep alternately took her under and released her, tossing her into his room with its staring furniture and scattered bundles of dirty socks, and then drawing her back into her loud and messy dreams.

She blinked and looked up from her Medicaid forms, suddenly recalling: the unhinged Granite enthusiast, Dorothy, had appeared in a dream. Probably, she thought, it was the discussion of Granite’s work the night before. A strange dream; they were walking in a garden of blighted flowers and trees that were twisted into aberrant forms, both rotted and beautiful. The gravel path beneath them shimmered with a light that seemed radioactive and frightening to Justine. It shifted as they walked, crawling like the colored sand of a kaleidoscope; Justine was afraid it would open and swallow them. The fat woman seemed to sense her fear and took her hand firmly, giving her to understand that even if the gravel did open under their feet, she would still bear them aloft.

“You shouldn’t be involved with this man,” said the fat woman. “He is dangerous.”

“I know,” answered Justine. “But it’s something I have to do.”

“No it isn’t.”

They looked at one another, and Justine noticed the clarity and beauty of the other woman’s eyes.

“Are you feeling better now?” asked Glenda. “Your face looks very relaxed.”

“Yeah, yeah, I am. Can I make a phone call?”

“Of course.”

The fat lady’s phone rang for a long time with no answer. Justine remembered that she worked on a graveyard shift and wondered if she were still asleep. It was four o’clock already; probably she had dialed the wrong number. She hung up, called again, and was answered immediately.

“Hi, it’s Justine Shade. Remember me?”

“Yes.”

Dorothy’s hollow voice made Justine pause; nothing happened in the pause so she continued.

“Well, I’m close to finishing my article, and I just have a few things I’d like to, er, tie up. I remembered you said you’d be happy to meet again if I needed any more information, and I thought I’d invite you to have coffee.” Dorothy was silent. “So we could talk,” added Justine.

“Um, yes, that would be — I’d like that.”

As she said the last phrase, Justine heard in her voice that familiar disconcerting momentum and was reassured. She hung up strangely gratified, feeling she’d accomplished something useful, related after all to her career.

“Glenda,” she said, pushing her chair back. “How about if I go out and get us some cookies?”

Chapter Twenty

The place Justine Shade had chosen for our meeting was one of those fashionable cafés where people with expensive haircuts drink cappuccino and eat plates of fruit and cheese. I had walked by cafés of this sort on my infrequent trips to the Village; when I peered into their windows, I would feel my curiosity press forward with its little pink nose atwitch and then my contempt would stiffly pull itself proud and erect, shutting its ears to curiosity’s pleas to maybe go in and have some expensive pastry. When curiosity had the loudest voice, it seemed to me that the people in these cafés were not only attractive but fascinating, that they were probably talking about the issues that Anna Granite’s characters talked about at cocktail parties, each one representing a different philosophical view. Then contempt spoke, and I saw trivial self-satisfied swine obsessed with fashion and artificial emotion, probably on drugs, people like the awful characters in those short glib books by trendy young writers. Sometimes I would have the wistful thought that it might be fun and certainly novel to be, for just a little while, self-satisfied and obsessed with fashion. Then I would reflect that, fun or not, I couldn’t do it because of who I was.

Now though, I had to go into Gran Caffé Degli Artisti, and in I went. Narrowing my focus so that I would respond only to the visual apprehension of one thin blond girl with glasses (I didn’t want to stand there gaping at the various types that would doubtless abound), I marched through the place. She wasn’t there. I stood a moment, consternated (what if she’d forgotten?) and then sat at one of the cunning little tables across from the door where she’d be sure to see me. I spent some moments arranging myself and then looked up to reconnoiter. I was pleased by the sight of statuettes in niches, candelabras covered with the lavish wax of hundreds of expired candles, and carved, high-backed inquisitor-style chairs. There actually weren’t many people of any description there, probably because it was four thirty, an hour when most people are either at work or getting ready to go to work. A table away from me sat a young woman with long dark hair and soft eyebrows. The multitude of finely wrought silver bracelets on her forearm stirred and gleamed as she lifted and set down her cup. She was reading, with great concentration, a book, the title of which I couldn’t see. Her blouse was plain and gray, but the jacket thrown over her chair was a beautiful little thing of purple, silver, and mauve, and actually had tiny triangular mirrors woven into it. Was this a signal that she was a fashionable person, or was this jacket a personal emblem, a defiance of the tyranny of fashion, possibly even made by the girl herself? I had no idea.

I looked towards the window. Two plainly dressed women in their thirties talked in low voices, their arms stretched towards each other on the table. Next to them was a table of boys with long hair tied back off their faces, a jumble of cups, dishes, and glasses before them on the table. Their profiles, alternately stiff, gentle or fluid were finely chiseled in the sharp relief of the sunlight, like boys who had just moments before been statues sculpted in honor of youth.

This wasn’t what I’d expected, but it was pleasant. I looked at the intriguing glass case of pastries and puddings to my right. I wondered if it would be unseemly to order two. “Hi.” Justine’s flat chirp announced her presence, and she sat down before me, smiling shyly.

I returned her greeting and immediately felt that she had changed since the last time I’d seen her. I couldn’t tell if this change was real or imagined. The waitress, a solemn girl with freckles, brought our menus, and I became too engrossed in mine to examine her further. I would’ve liked to go and scrutinize the cakes in the glass case and select several by hand, but I was embarrassed to do so. The waitress, however, was wonderfully solicitous in describing the imaginatively named confections on the menu, looking at me as she did so with an expression that suggested not only an intimate understanding and acceptance of my cravings, but also that she was happy to be instrumental in satisfying them. What a wonderful place, I thought, closing the menu. My contentment was interrupted when I glanced up and encountered Justine’s face. She too had ordered and closed her menu and, her face turned slightly sideways, was now staring into space, chewing on a piece of lip and covering half her face with her hand. She didn’t notice my look for several seconds, and when she finally turned towards me, I identified part of what was different about her. Her air of self-containment, her annoying detachment, and her sharp, out-thrusting concentration, which she had trained on me like a radar gun during our last meeting, was gone. I could still feel her little mind buzzing away, but its rays were diffuse, wandering, seemingly too weak to penetrate anything. In addition, I felt her groping not only towards me, but groping generally and desperately, like a hungry infant futilely trying to work its will by flailing the air with its tiny hands. One obvious difference; she was now using a tape recorder instead of pen and paper.

“So,” she said, readying the little machine, “I wanted to talk about a couple of things. Do you remember the last time we met how we got into a sort of argument about how many women perceive Granite’s attitude towards sexuality as atavistic and masochistic?”

Her obsession with masochism and perversion was really trying; of course it was her business if she kept it to herself, but for her to invite me out to talk about it was really a bit much, especially since she knew me to be the victim of a sadistic father. She must have noticed my expression because she hastened to make her voice conciliatory.

“You were saying how this isn’t what Granite meant at all. Well, during my research and interviews I’ve noticed — and not just in regard to the erotic aspect of Granite’s work — that her followers often seem to derive meaning from her work that would surprise her critics and even Granite herself. It’s almost as if her work exists here”—she gestured with her hands as if placing a small package on the table—“and that her followers exist here”—another package—“and that here, between them, is something altogether separate, a mixture of Granite’s work and the perception of it. And I was wondering if she was aware of this when you knew her and if so what she thought of it.”

Her bland delivery of this brainless assertion made it all the more exasperating. How could someone who had spent the last month studying Granite and her followers not realize that this way of thinking was the very thing she — and we — most despised? But as my anger came forward, ready to smite her, I sensed, in addition to her diffuse desperation, a scary fragility in her, a psychic quivering which vibrated in her smile and even more noticeably in her trembling hand. I had the distinct feeling that I was in the presence of someone about to have a nervous breakdown, and I lost my interest in rebuking her. I didn’t lose my interest in defending Granite, but I did so gently.

“Such a concept would never have entered Granite’s head. Of course, there were always flakey people around her who misunderstood her work, but if she saw that they were trying their best to grasp it and simply didn’t have the mental equipment to do so, she was very kind to them. The others, those who deliberately misinterpreted—”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean what happens when people look at a thing and see in it something other than what its creator intended and aren’t aware of the difference. That happens all the time, especially to writers. I just think it’s particularly interesting in the context of what Granite said about objective truth.”

Of course I knew what she meant. But why would she focus on something so trivial when the irrefutable grandness of Granite blazed like the sun, illuminating and upholding the existence of so many people who might have spent their lives metaphorically slumped before their televisions, too despondent to move? (I pushed aside the troublesome thought that Granite herself had espoused contempt for people who fastened their thoughts onto the belief systems of others and would never have done so herself.) It was frustrating to be in the presence of someone so interested in Granite and yet to pass her, ships in the night, but ships that scraped and grated against each other on the way by. I was exasperated to have this strange, nervous, delicate being flitting about me, first jangling the alarm bells of my most personal issues, seeming to offer intimacy and then denying it, stirring up old grief and then skipping off, and now sitting before me like a foreign solar system gone awry, broadcasting signals from her distant station too weak and confusing for me to read and then saying things which could only lead away from serious discussion and which, furthermore, I sensed didn’t engage her full attention or express her real concerns.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Why are you doing this article anyway?”

When Justine walked into the café and saw Dorothy sitting there, she was reminded, with unexpected vividness, of the power of the woman’s presence. In the precious café she seemed even more huge than she had in her apartment, even more insistently strange, the emblems of her derangement circling her in an invisible but palpable personal mandala. For a moment she felt embarrassed to be sitting next to a fat lady wearing hideous chartreuse sweat pants, big red hair and the plastic jewelry of a drag queen with an ironic sense of humor. Horrified, she considered the possibility of an acquaintance coming in and seeing her with this person, or even the waitress, who would surely notice how odd they looked together. Then the stubborn kid who had defied society once before spoke up; “I don’t care what you douche-bags do. I’m not gonna hate Emotional anymore,” and she sat down, smiling.

She immediately noticed a difference in Dorothy and was taken aback by it, although she wasn’t sure what the difference was. She surreptitiously glanced across the table as they surveyed their menus; she was touched and amused to see the suppressed excitement in Dorothy’s face. Dorothy seemed solid, stronger than she had at that last encounter, during which, as Justine remembered it, the fat woman, for all her weight, had seemed groundless and insubstantial, floating, sometimes flapping as she was buffeted by the abnormal ferocity of her own emotions. She felt the ferocity was still there, but centered this time, shimmering like precious metals in some invisible cache. Her vague fear of the woman appeared behind her like a shadow and tapped her on the shoulder. She ignored it and drew forward, unconsciously intrigued by her strength and where it could be coming from. Perversely, she started with a question she knew would provoke Dorothy. Sure enough, although Dorothy answered the question politely, Justine could feel in her voice and see in her eyes that hornet swarm of anger that had thickened the air during the first interview. But instead of releasing the swarm, Dorothy abruptly asked her that question.

She didn’t know what to say, and was glad when their snacks were placed before them and they could become involved in the neutral movements of stirring and arranging. “Just a minute,” she said to Dorothy and then saw that it was quite unnecessary; Dorothy was looking with delighted absorption at the huge piece of chocolate cake that had been set before her and was already reaching for her fork. Justine saw her face become immobile and sealed off, as if all reception of signals from outside had become temporarily suspended so that all units could be devoted to the eating of cake. She felt a flash of repulsion at this sight of greed on automatic pilot, and then that was superseded by an odd feeling of tenderness based on her certainty that behind this mask of blind compulsion was a little girl in a state of solemn ecstasy over an extra-special treat — and then she was saddened by the equally strong certainty that food was the only kind of treat this little girl ever got.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very good,” replied Dorothy. “Really tasty.”

They ate in silence for a moment as Justine reflected on something a girlfriend had said once, that men bond when they drink and women bond when they eat dessert together.

“So,” she said, “I’m doing the piece because I’m fascinated that people would be so influenced by the work of a fiction writer and would base their lives on the acts of fictional characters. Also I think that in spite of Granite’s scorn for collective culture, she in fact embodied — in her work — major contradictions and dilemmas in the way Americans view money and the way individuals interact with groups. And she did so in a very pop culture medium with these archetypal pop characters. That’s remarkable to me.”

As Justine spoke, Dorothy slowly lowered a fork of cake and fixed her with her large eyes. Justine prepared herself for a burst of indignation and instead felt a chink open in Dorothy’s impenetrability; a soft little beam of light came forth.

She was smarter than I’d thought. I momentarily lost interest in my cake. Interestingly, once I’d softened in my attitude towards her, due to sympathy for her emotional disturbance, I felt a dispassionate interest in her point of view, which I suddenly saw as an abstract extravaganza of mental reaction, beams of thought darting and ricocheting from one point in Granite’s world to the next, growing in heat and light with each connection. “You’re right,” I said. “It is interesting, and you’ve hit it on the head when you say she embodied the central moral dilemmas in the country. But why are you paying attention to dumb stuff like people thinking her work meant this or that when the important thing was what it did in fact mean?”

“For two reasons. One is that I think Granite was often attacked unfairly by well-meaning liberals who looked at the work from a shallow perspective—”

Ah ha! She was an ally, a defender after all! An explosion of sweetness went off in my mouth as I chewed, coinciding spectacularly with a burst of mental pleasure.

“—and also because when people adopt a political position or philosophy, they rarely take it into their personality whole hog, whether they think they do or not. It is filtered through a life-long construct of individual perception, emotional needs, and unconscious assumptions about life. That doesn’t make the philosophy any less strong or valid. In fact it is a testimony to its vitality and viability that it is capable of subtle transmutation and expansion into various forms without losing its essential characteristics.”

This reeked of subjectivism, and I of course saw it as rot. Yet. it was interesting rot. I couldn’t help but be curious even as I rejected it. “But you are making a mistake,” I said. “You are taking sheer confusion for vitality and viability. Yeah, there are plenty of people who misunderstood Granite in many ways but still grasped enough of Definitism for it to be of immeasurable value in their lives. You should focus on the value, not the confusion.”

Her back straightened, and I saw her go into that prim boxed-in mode that I remembered. “But I think sheer confusion is vitality and viability. The interplay between the imaginary and the real, the private emotional world and the discourse of ideas. that stuff. When a person takes Anna Granite’s ideas and — well, like you did. When you first read Granite’s work, you were living in an unbearable situation in which you were forced to hide everything precious in you because there was no place safe for you.”

My stomach shut against the cake, and I put my fork down, pressing my spine against the back of my chair.

“So when you read Granite’s work not only did she awaken your sense of beauty and pleasure in life, not only did she illustrate for you a positive use of strength and power, but she provided a springboard for you to create an internal world richer and stronger than the external world which wasn’t giving you any support at all. But she was only the departure point.”

I stared at her, mortified and speechless. Her impending mental collapse had apparently shattered her judgment, made her reckless, aggressive, oblivious to any concept of the natural boundaries between people, careening into my territory with her wheels spinning. Yet she was right, at least about me. I tried to stir myself into being offended by her reference to Granite as a “departure point,” but I was too confused to do so. I felt invaded and imposed upon, skewed, as I had been so long ago by the kind gaze of Nona Delgado in the hallway. This girl was talking to me as I had fantasized Anna Granite would talk to me before I met her, breaking down doors I couldn’t bring myself to open and storming in. That wasn’t all; when she had talked she was like a tiny magician in a cape and top hat drawing back a velvet curtain and pointing with her wand to the unsuspected tableaux of my life, a place where Anna Granite entered a human woman and was changed into a mythical winged thing with myriad powers — transformed by me and in fact part of me. As I say: rot, but seductive, flattering rot.

“Tell me,” I said, applying fork to cake once more, “what do you think of Granite’s ultrareality work?”

Justine had expressed herself carefully at first and then more boldly as it gradually dawned on her that as long as she appealed to Dorothy’s taste for drama, maximum impact, and seriousness, she could say almost anything to her. She wanted to appeal to her intelligence and make her realize that she herself was intelligent too — although she didn’t know why she wanted to do either of these things. She had watched Dorothy’s face as she talked and saw a lot of activity transpiring behind its surface, but she couldn’t read its nature. She was a little shamed by the way she was slanting her words to make it sound as if she took Granite more seriously than she did; ordinarily she felt that this was the prerogative of the journalist, but in this case it seemed unfair. These feelings were further complicated by a skulking wish that she did believe in Definitism in the way Dorothy and Max Nolte did, and her misleading words were in part a playacting meant to momentarily deceive herself as well as her subjects.

“The ultrareality theory,” began Dorothy, enthusiastically mashing her cake crumbs into the tines of her fork, “was the most daring and controversial aspect of Granite’s work. It came about in answer to the challenge made to an objective world view by a certain kind of person. For example, how can you pin reality down like that, how can you restrict what is real? How can all the conflict between people be boiled down to self versus collectivism?”

In between rhetorical questions, she put her fork into her mouth, suctioned off the compressed cake and began methodically to gather more. With each question, her voice seemed to get louder, as if each phrase carried her closer to the center of her imaginary Definitist world in which she, Dorothy Never, was a participant in a complex drama with global import. Justine glanced nervously at the lone dark-haired girl sitting near them, again embarrassed to be heard and seen having a conversation with this crank in Sears clothing.

“Then there’s always the random chaos argument; if logic and reason are the strongest, noblest factors in human life, why is the world such a disaster of chaos and illogic?”

“Well so many people are illogical, for one thing,” said Justine helpfully.

“Yes!” Dorothy’s eyes bulged with excitement, and Justine was again ashamed of creating this artificial bond of assonance.

Dorothy put down her fork; she had by this time annihilated the cake crumbs. “Now the kinds of objections and points of view that I just listed are — were, I mean — totally alien from Granite’s way of thinking. Her thought processes were so clear, so courageous that she simply went straight for the most fundamental elements of human life and psychology and wasn’t stopped by the complexity that stymies most of us. Of course there is tremendous complexity in human interaction and many different things going on, some of them apparently contradictory. But they are all — all! — linked to those fundamental life issues and the choice we must make between life and antilife. Every human act, every thought, every feeling has in it a direction one way or the other — weakness, collectivism, mediocrity, death, or strength, beauty, selfishness, life. The connections may not be apparent at first, but they are there. You, for example. Your choice to work as a free-lance writer instead of being on staff — that is a choice that speaks of your strength, your need to be apart from the herd. It is a choice for life.” Dorothy took a breath to avoid apoplexy and went on. “Even inanimate objects are statements for or against life. These chairs we’re sitting in — which I think are wonderful by the way, as is this whole place; I’m glad you picked it — have certain qualities of refinement, sensibility, statements in their contours and curves about the way life should be lived, which connect them to the abstracts of honor and graciousness without which life wouldn’t be worthwhile. The desserts we just ate — they embody the qualities of lightness, gentleness, sweetness, and comfort — moral qualities because when you decide whether or not to have these things in your life, you make a moral choice. Moral choice is not ambiguous; it is as concrete as these chairs we sit in. There is no chaos, except that which we create ourselves.”

Dorothy’s face radiated certainty and pride, as if she were standing on a mountain peak with the sun streaming down on her, as in one of those car commercials that, by some weird twist of sensibility, place a Cadillac on a mountain peak in the Sierras where fawning cameras circle around it as if it had just found a cure for cancer.

Hopeless, thought Justine, as are most attempts to quantify and contain. Still, she had to admit, there was something consoling, seductive even, about this vision of chairs and pieces of cake suspended, along with everything else, in a glistening web of order that connected them to all the morality in the universe. For all Anna Granite’s trumpeting about arrogance and elitism and how great it was, her ideas were ingenuously humble and populist. In her vision, there was nothing absurd about a culture that broadcasts images of a car standing triumphant on a mountain peak as if it were a genius who had cured cancer — the car was, after all, connected to the same abstractions of greatness as the scientist and, in a way, represented the scientist! And, after all, you couldn’t very well duplicate the scientist and sell him to people, could you?

“I’m glad you brought that up,” said Justine, taking the tape out, turning it over and popping it back in, “because you clarified some things for me. But I have to change the subject since I have to go soon.”

“By all means,” said Dorothy. “I think I’d like to see the menu again.”

“I was reading the paper the other day and I came across this guy who’s been given a pretty high position in the city financial administration who was quoted as saying Anna Granite was one of his early influences. Did you ever meet Knight Ludlow?”

When she asked that question, I had the crazy thought that she knew, that she’d interviewed him and he’d told her, and now she just wanted to watch my face. But then she said, “I’ve tried to interview him but I can’t get through by phone or mail. It’s not essential, but since he’s so highly placed, it would be good to mention him. So I wondered if you knew anything of interest about him. Off the record, if you like.”

Either she had calmed herself, called her blind groping energies to huddle around her and thus presented a more stable appearance, or I had adjusted to her neurotic presence. Because suddenly her white, pretty face moved me almost to tears; the childish sweetness of her demeanor was like silver thread guided by the bright needle of her voice. I wanted to be close with her. I had wanted to be close with her from the moment I met her. “This is off the record,” I said, a lump in my throat.

She turned off the tape recorder.

“I had an affair with Knight Ludlow.” I had an image of myself sitting there in front of her sobbing but I was dry-eyed. A cup of cocoa loomed in the back of my mind. I signaled the waitress. “It was the only affair I’ve ever had in my life.”

She stared at me, her serene expression scattered by surprise. When her face began to re-form itself, I was surprised that its new expression seemed to be pity.

“I’m not ashamed of it, quite the reverse. It can’t be made public because at the time he was engaged to be married, and he did get married shortly afterward. He could be with her still, so I have to maintain discretion.”

Justine said she understood.

“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.

Chapter Twenty-One

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.

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.

Chapter Twenty-Two

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.”

She lay panting on the floor as he stood at the counter pouring beer down his throat. Silence imploded in her ears. She turned her head to stare at her shoe lying on its side.

That night at dinner he had told her stories of his travels in Southeast Asia.

He had walked through the Patagandrian rain forest with kind, dark guides who showed him where to find edible plants and roots to drink from, and who told him stories based on their dreams. The paths in the forest were so hard that his shoes were destroyed in a week, they were so rugged that he could not walk on them without falling again and again. If you cut your foot in the forest, he said, you could get an infection and die in days. His guides had feet that were tougher than shoes and they taught him how to walk in the forest, they taught him how to read direction on the bark of trees and the hairs of moss.

He traveled weeks without seeing the sky, when the sun was an article of faith through the emerald roof of the forest. He saw pale-hued flowers that bloomed at night, giant spiders bejewelled with bright hoary pustules, salamanders with tiny palpitant throats, sudden storms of butterflies and plant roots that tore through the earth with erotic violence. He saw a man covered with animal tattoos carrying an old-fashioned washing machine through the jungle on his back. He saw villages where people danced to Prince and Beach Boys tapes, and predicted the future with the entrails of pigs. He hunted boar with parties of men and half-wild dogs. He murdered animals for the pleasure of watching them die. He was mistaken for an evil spirit and almost butchered by a frightened woman with a machete. He talked her out of it, and gave her his Swatch watch, assuring her it would protect her from any cruel spirit.

After two years he returned to Manhattan and was totally disoriented. He felt as if the cab bearing him home from the airport was taking him into hell. It was early December and, trapped in the stultification of the holiday traffic uptown, he viewed legions of shoppers marching the streets at what seemed an insane and martial speed, their expressions of frozen emotion covered with willful oblivion. Mechanical elves and dummy children in the windows of Bloomingdale’s beat their cymbals and screamed with joy around the tree. Human beggars extended their hands into the neurotic throng, like thirst-parched men sticking their cupped hands out into the rain which, thoughtless and unfeeling though it is, will provide them with enough drops to survive.

She listened, impressed by his bravery and ingenuity and uneasy with the combination of condescension and fondness with which he described the forest people. She saw him again as she had seen him on their first meeting, a mobile little sphinx with shifting surfaces encouraging her to admire its mystery and then contemptuously shedding that mystery like an old skin, laughing at her as she puzzled over the empty skin. It occurred to her that perhaps he felt so comfortable in Southeast Asia because it wasn’t possible to pull this act there; people wouldn’t understand it. He was probably forced by language and cultural barriers to interact on a fundamental human level; this being an experience he’d never had before in his life, it was probably a great novelty as well as a great relief.

He leaned naked against the counter drinking beer so he’d have some piss when the moment came. His body had a tense, frenetic, rigid quality, it was completely stripped of its animal nature. And out of his face, emerging as if his cells had subtly changed shape, came the stiff visage of something old, mechanical, and unfeeling. She felt that this thing was part of him, and that if it had taken a different turn in its development, it could’ve been a natural element of his self, but that it had instead gotten stuck in a crawl space somewhere, neglected and denied contact until it had grown into this creature that appeared to come over him like a transfiguration.

“Play with yourself,” he said. “Stick your fingers in your cunt.”

She did what he said; she was wet, swollen, tender, and numb. She masturbated expertly and felt nothing. She was aware of her humiliation, but it was so far away and had so little to do with her that she couldn’t feel that either. Still, she clung to it fiercely, as if it were her only chance to feel.

He pissed on her genitals, occasionally traveling up her body. It felt warm, almost caressing, and for a second she had an unbearable sensation of closeness with him. Then she worried about the mess on the floor, which had smelled bad enough to begin with.

“Tell me you love me,” he said.

“I love you.”

He pissed in her face.

After dinner they had gone to a bar with red vinyl booths and drank martinis as they sat close together, stroking each other’s thighs. She had told him about her experience in the garage with Rick Houlihan.

“That sounds a little gruesome,” he said.

“Well, yeah.” She stared confused at the play of light and shadow on a painfully perfect martini glass. “What do you mean?”

“I mean was it really that bad?”

“Yeah, it was. He was your average jerk I guess.” She picked her olive out of her glass and chewed it, savoring its bitterness.

He stared at her until she felt self-conscious as she hunted for bits of unchewed olive with her tongue. “Most of the men I’ve ever been with are like that. They’re really awful.”

His face went into a strange combination; his mouth was as playfully cruel as a child torturing an animal while his eyes were gentle and inviting. “You are so hard and closed,” he said. “Don’t you know anything about tenderness and caring? Between men and women?”

She stared, incredulous to think that he was on speaking terms with tenderness and caring. “Are you trying to tell me that you do?”

“Yeah, I do.” His eyes beckoned her into an Easter egg world where males and females held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes while music played in the background. She regarded it suspiciously. “I’ve had relationships that were close and loving. From what you’ve told me, you haven’t. Why is that?”

His falsely tender eyes mocked her and hurt her; still part of her trembled forward, starving to experience the place of love and closeness he had displayed, even if it was a deliberate illusion created to highlight her privation.

He smiled, and the cruelty of his mouth shadowed his eyes and made their tenderness piercing. “I’m going to teach you about love and closeness,” he said.

They fucked touching as little as possible; he raised straight up on his arms, she with her legs wide apart and her arms flung open to grip the sheets in an anti-embrace. She closed her eyes and turned her head away from him, hurtling alone through her imagination, the furniture of her internal self smashing on impact.

“I’d like to see you on your hands and knees,” he whispered, “surrounded by guys who’d piss on your cunt and jerk off in your face. I’d like to blindfold you in the Hellfire Club and tie you up with your legs spread so anybody could fuck you or beat you.”

She imagined the warm piss of strangers between her legs and come running down her face. Split apart and boundary-less, she was sucked into the eye of the storm. She reached between her legs for some tiny memory of pleasure. She floated for a second of peace before she came as if she were being cut to pieces, her cunt and her heart utterly apart.

He continued to flail above her, his eyes closed, oblivious, alone in his private cyclone.

Chapter Twenty-Three

I don’t have a husband anymore and my kids don’t give a damn about me,” said the elderly black lady. She regarded Justine with what appeared to be irritation as Justine moved about her, preparing her for an EKG.

“What about friends? Can’t they help you out?”

“Yeah, but I’m not the kind of person who likes to always be going to other people with my problems. They’ve got plenty of their own you know.” Mrs. Dubois regarded her censoriously.

The problem under discussion was Mrs. Dubois’s partial blindness due to severe cataracts in both eyes. She had begun to find it difficult to shop and to read bills; she had almost fallen down a flight of stairs, a potential disaster for someone her age. She was reluctant, however, to have the cataracts removed; Justice thought it was because she was afraid of having her eyes operated on. “I’m sure your friends wouldn’t mind helping you,” said Justine, “they’d be pretty mean if they did.”

Mrs. Dubois answered her with a look that said, “If you think that’s ‘mean,’ you don’t know what mean is, you young fool.”

Well, thought Justine, it’s not any of my business. Still, she had always liked Mrs. Dubois, a stiff-backed, ill-tempered, good-mannered, ferociously proper little woman who always pulled on her threadbare kid gloves with a wonderful arrogant smartness before she left the office. She hated to think of her alone at home in a small dark apartment, hungry and afraid to go out because she couldn’t see. She wondered if her pride prevented her from getting help from her neighbors and children, or if they really were indifferent to her. She applied the clamps to the delicate sepia ankles and thought of herself, alone in her apartment at night, trying to soothe herself to sleep with a fantasy of Bryan holding her in his arms and cupping her head against his chest, which he never did and probably never would do. Her concern for Mrs. Dubois united with her desperation and self-pity and became magnified abnormally. She thought of Mrs. Dubois as a young woman, a romantic and finicky young woman who liked matching jewelry combinations and wanted everything to be just so. She imagined her traveling through the barbed wire and land mines of a racist society which refused to respect or even acknowledge the delicacy of any black woman and insisted on seeing only the coarseness and dullness that it had decreed to be the character of African-Americans, regardless of how it had to distort its vision in the process. Since the neat garden of Angeline Dubois’s nature was denied the sun and warmth of acknowledgment, she was forced to turn inward to keep her internal garden alive, to draw nurture from an underground well so deep she couldn’t allow her attention to waver from the thread of concentration on which she lowered the bucket, lest the thread break and she be bereft forever. Thus she drew herself in, stiffening the rules, regulations, and visiting hours of the garden, tightening its borders, becoming fanatical over the patterns in which it was allowed to grow until her natural delicacy had assumed the martial uniform of primness, the bitter primness with which she pulled on her battered, once-elegant gloves.

Justine desolately considered the level of insult this woman had had to bear simply in maintaining her true self in a world that denied its existence, and the vicarious pain fell like a piece of granite against her own pain. “Maybe you should get the operation, Mrs. Dubois,” she said.

The filmy, half-blinded eyes filled with expressions that rose and were succeeded by different shades of feeling; she saw Justine’s kindness which she despised and rejected, she saw also that the kindness was connected to something else, felt curious as to what this other thing might be, then rejected it as well, then felt curious again. Justine could see she felt invaded and oppressed by her concern, and strove to hold it away from her. Then the eyes softened, perhaps because she saw that Justine was essentially harmless and well-meaning, perhaps because she was too old to expend the energy required to reject her; she accepted Justine’s kindness and then let it fall away from her with the uselessness of a broken ornament. “Well maybe I will,” she said.

Mrs. Dubois says her children don’t give a damn about her,” said Justine to Glenda.

“Ah! That is nonsense. She is probably just depressed.”

“How do you know?”

“Because her daughter has come to pick her up here before and she seems to be a fine young person. She wouldn’t come pick her up if she didn’t care about her.”

Justine didn’t see that that was necessarily true but she didn’t want to argue. Glenda oscillated the radio dial to escape the news for more classical music and was interrupted by a phone call. The dial was caught for a moment on a pop song undercut with the processed mutter of the news broadcast. The song told about love and then the news voice gained ascendancy long enough to mention the latest in a series of incidents in which gangs of young girls surrounded lone women and jabbed them in the butt with needles. So far, the jabbing girls had been black and the jabbed women had been white, and the media was solemnly speculating that the attacks might be racial; one commentator said she thought that perhaps they were making a statement about the spread of AIDS in the black community via hypodermics. The love song swelled forth again, smothering the news with one and only true love. Justine was stung by the sweet, calculated young voice, its high pitch like a tiny knife cutting a valentine heart out of the coarse flesh of love.

Mrs. Dubois emerged from the office, her little hat askew on her head. For the first time Justine saw her composure become undone in embarrassment as she reacted to the sight of Justine’s face, which was crying spare, almost dry tears as she filled out Mrs. Dubois’s appointment card, talking as if nothing unusual was taking place even as the tears ran over her lips.

Justine was glad when they let her leave work early because that way she would have more time to work on her Anna Granite piece. But it had probably made a bad impression to cry at work, even though she had done it discreetly, even though Mrs. Dubois had been nice about it.

She bought a bag of cookies in lieu of dinner and ate them as she sat on the floor with her legs extended before her, thinking about the article. She justified going without dinner by telling herself that preparing and eating it would take away too much of her writing time. The eating of meals had somehow become burdensome to her; she was losing weight and becoming anxious about her health, yet she couldn’t make herself eat nutritionally sound food. Well, she’d worry about it later. She wadded up the empty cookie bag and left it on the floor. She put her notebook on her lap, picked up her pen, and began: “The national swing to the right, in progress for the last five years, has developed the skewed, triple exclamation point character of a bad novel.”

The phone rang, and she picked it up. “Hi,” he said. “Feel like getting your ass whipped?”

“I’m busy,” she snapped and hung up.

The phone rang again, four times before she answered it.

“God, what’re you so testy about?” he asked. “At least you could say hello.”

“It didn’t seem necessary.”

“You know my nutty sense of humor.”

“Okay, hello. I’m working on my article and I can’t see you tonight if that’s what you were asking about.”

“I understand. You’re writing really important stuff and you can’t be interrupted.”

“Fuck off.” She hung up again.

The phone rang again. Again she picked it up.

“Is this behavior modification or what?”

“You’re acting like an asshole.”

“So what else is new? Justine, I don’t want to make you mad. I know you have to do your work. It’ll probably be great. I just wanted to see you. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“I’ve been thinking about you too,” she lied.

“That’s nice.”

“I’d love to see you, it’s just I can’t now. If I get this done tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

They hung up civilly. She continued writing. “This cultural utopia of greed, expressed in gentrification and the slashing of social programs, has had its spokesperson and prophet for the last fifty years, a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing. Anna Granite, who coined the term ‘the Truth of Selfishness,’ has been advocating the yuppie raison d’être since the early forties; it is only now that her ideas are being lived out, in mass culture and in government.”

The phone rang again.

“How about if I just come over and whip you and then leave so you can keep working?”

She hung up, cursed, unplugged the phone, and kept writing.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Justine had said that she would call me when the article was going to appear in the Vision, and I believed her. I knew that it often took months for magazines to print articles, so I wasn’t suspicious or impatient when two months passed without my hearing from her. I kept it in the back of my mind like a present to be opened when the time was right. I imagined reading it and then meeting with Justine to discuss it. I would praise her overall insight and then criticize the finer points of her analysis, instructing her in how she might present her arguments better in the future. I imagined her following my finger with her eyes as it traced the place she had gone slightly awry in her article, I imagined her humbly nodding.

But she didn’t call me.

I was leaving work after a grueling twelve-hour shift. It was 10:00 A.M., and I was exhausted. Tiny particles of paranormal light swam before my eyes; the day workers, with their bright, tense faces, their jaunty manic walks, swinging purses and dangling belts were an onslaught. I made my way out of the building, bubbles of disorientation popping about my head.

Ordinarily I rode a company car home from work, but at this hour it was faster to take the subway, so I went to the nearest noise-boiling pit. The train was delayed, or so I deduced from the mangled voice that roared from the speakers above us. The mob on the platform grew in number, everyone bearing down hard on the track of daily habit, staring into the maw of the impending day, pacing in insect circles, pitching their thoughts and feelings into the future or the past, anywhere but the subway.

I spotted a concession stand and thought of little mints and chewy candies. I made my way towards the booth to participate in the mechanical ballet of giving and receiving choreographed by the muttering man behind the counter. As I waited my turn I scanned the magazines and papers, the horrific headlines and happy faces that help give form to our inchoate and vulnerable mass psyche. I looked rather fondly at the Vision—yet another headline about the political import of some rock band — and absently turned the front page to stare at the table of contents. “Anna Granite,” it said, “Yuppie Grandmother — by Justine Shade.”

The snottiness of it was like a bracing blow to the face — but I recovered. Probably Justine had nothing to do with the headline, and not everyone used the word “yuppie” pejoratively. I muffed my part in the newsstand ballet by turning to walk away with the paper without paying, and the newsman screamed at me, scowling at my cheerful attempts at explanation. I paid for it and opened it — there it was again! That classic photograph of Granite’s imperial face, so long absent from public pages! My pleasure rose and combined with my exhaustion, and for a moment my brain came undone from its dense gray coils and merrily bobbed in the colorful miasma of irrationality. I started to read, and the subway came bawling into view. I folded the paper under my arm and fought savagely for a seat so I could comfortably read, shamelessly using my size and weight to get my way. People glared, but I didn’t care. I was smiling insanely as I opened the paper. I was puzzled, even in my magnanimous state, by her first sentence and its metaphor of the bad novel. I was still game though and read on; I became even more puzzled. “Yuppies, power breakfasts, the leering, double-crossing bed-hoppers of ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ stalking their victims in glitzy gowns, a national obsession with exercise and physical perfection, a riot of matching spider-limbed furniture, surreal TV Prayathons. ” What did this have to do with Anna Granite? She went on in this irrelevant way until I began to think I was reading the wrong article. Then: “It sounds like a bad novel and it is.” My distended happiness hemorrhaged in inky black spurts as I was lashed in the face with that serpentine phrase “a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing.”

“That bitch,” I said, “that goddamn bitch.”

The nyloned thighs to my right shifted away from me.

I read on, my concentration now razor sharp. She went on to describe Granite’s influence and its present day manifestations: the taped lectures, the yearly Philadelphian gatherings, the Definitist courses offered at various small colleges, an expensive three-day workshop held in Honolulu, the Rationalist Reaffirmation School, and the fact that Knight Ludlow, “highly placed city financial analyst” had been her “personal protégé.”

“Her novels,” continued Justine “are like phantom comic-book worlds shadowing, in exaggerated Kabuki-like form, the psychological life and anxieties of our society.”

“Shit!” I muttered. “A comic book! A comic book!” I turned to the young black woman on my right with some vague idea of showing her I wasn’t another subway madwoman. “Have you read this?” I asked.

She glanced at me, more with her face than her eyes, tightly shook her head “no” and returned her attention to her paperback.

“Well if you do, you ought to know it’s crap, one hundred percent. I know the writer and I know the person it’s about. I was interviewed by this. writer and it’s a vindictive piece of falsification.” She ignored me. Well to hell with you, I thought. I looked at the people across from me. They were staring resolutely in every direction but mine. I cracked the paper assertively and continued reading.

Justine went on for several paragraphs in that breezy pop Vision-speak, invoking television shows, movies, and media jokes about the inner conflicts of American psychology — the “pop icon” of the lone hero versus the “pathological” desire to be part of the crowd, the assumption that the strong individual is somehow inherently in opposition to society. “This confusion extends most painfully into the conflicting American attitude towards money,” pontificated the bitch. “Does an individual with money have a responsibility to society and does the government have a moral right or obligation to oversee this responsibility? This question is overlaid with an almost pornographic fascination with money and people who have it. ”

I had to concede it was interesting; if it hadn’t been in the service of trashing Granite, I might’ve enjoyed it. Why, I thought in anguish, did intelligent people always try to undermine Granite, even now? “Anna Granite’s novels not only shadow the back-and-forth, one-or-the-other nature of this struggle, they purport to resolve it.” This was followed by an unfair caricature of Granite’s theories concluding with “she reduced the complex dilemma of the individual in society down to either/or moralistic terms couched in the dramatic devices and gestural glitz of a soap opera.”

“Cunt,” I said.

“Excuse me,” said a female wearing purple contact lenses. “Would you mind watching your language?”

“Mind your own business,” I snarled.

She reared back and clicked her tongue.

“The irony is that, like the wicked liberals in her books, Granite’s rational answers are based on illusions. She stood for rationality, yet her novels shamelessly (and what’s worse, unknowingly) use emotional manipulation, melodrama, jargon, and sexual fantasy to make her points. While claiming to exalt the individual, she plugged into a mass psyche, using archetypal characters devoid of real individuality, with the same vulgar emotional power as the Wicked Witch. Granite’s work is a phenomenon worth looking at as a fun-house mirror for a society that is one part sober puritan and one part capitalist sex fiend. It’s an odd thing to watch a culture start to look like the plot of a bad novel.”

“Goddamn it!” I yelled.

There was a rustling sound around me as the commuters strained their bodies to put a token of space between themselves and the crazy person. I the crazy person! When obviously demented people got paid to write stuff like this! I felt and stopped the approach of tears. From that point I only scanned the piece for particularly telling and offensive passages, of which there were many.

“She succeeded because she was, however clumsily, onto something much bigger than a first glance at her silly novels would reveal. Her writing was like the broad slashes and gaudy colors of the cheapest comic strip — but it was a comic strip about life and death and everybody knew it.”

I inhaled deeply and looked up to be sure I hadn’t missed my stop. The doors were rattling open, people were moving in and out, wiping their noses, securing their purses, locking their blank stares into place. I was okay. I looked back down and saw “She was repeatedly molested by her father during what sounds like a horrific childhood, and she says Granite’s books were what enabled her to see that life could be other than hideous.”

My anger suspended itself as I experienced the strange sensation of seeing my life rendered publicly. It was on one hand a demeaning experience, like seeing myself as a paper cut-out doll, marched by a huge hand through the toy landscape of somebody else’s opinions and purposes, unable to register my distaste because my words had been cut into dolly balloons and frozen before my mouth. But it was at the same time aggrandizing. It was only a small part of me, but so enlarged, so magnified, on a national scale, that it was like having a gross image of myself inflated into a giant parade balloon, floating above the crowd, my stubby arms helplessly extended, my face crudely painted in some fiendish expression designed for maximum impact. I watched myself, fascinated, entertained, waving and cheering at the balloon with the rest of the crowd.

I had to admit Justine had quoted me more or less fairly. Of course, my words were taken out of context and distorted as is always the case with such articles, but the quotes were fairly accurate, and I didn’t sound like a fool or a maniac, unlike most of the other people she’d skewered on paper. She couldn’t resist putting in snide parentheticals in which she suggested that my opinions were not well-founded, but there was still room for the intelligent reader to make a decision. Gingerly I moved from reaction to myself as public item and into my life again, unscathed, safe, still me.

Then I read the next paragraph. “Dorothy is a huge woman, who floats with the slow grace of the always fat in airy, gaudy single-cloth garments of indeterminate nature. Her face is intelligent, and her emotional intensity rises from her like a force field. In conversation, she is incisive, and she displays an acute sensitivity to nuance and an uncanny ability to read a situation emotionally by scanning the minutia of expressions and gestures that frame it. When she talks of the early days of the Definitist meetings, she does so in symbolic, mythological terms. when she discusses the split between Bradley and Granite she is like a child talking about her parents’ divorce a month after it happened. ”

I looked up and sat still for some moments, my bulk stewing in isolation from my lone head. I felt much as I had on first meeting Justine; insulted and yet seduced. She did not have to refer to me as “always fat,” and there was condescension in her description. Yet I also felt in her printed words a respect for me, a desire to understand me, to make her readers understand me, and I couldn’t help being touched by this. She said I was “intelligent,” “authentic,” and “incisive,” yet she compared me to a traumatized child. Worse, she implied that my fealty for Granite was the fealty of a traumatized child. I sat still while the possibility that she was right hovered about me like the evil enchanter closing in on Don Quixote.

I noticed that I was three stations past my stop and rose, cursing. My purse fell off my arm and onto the floor, my keys, lipstick, and change poured out of it. All at once I was engulfed by life’s physically mechanical nature, all the tiny movements and functions you have to perform correctly just to get through the day, all the accoutrements you must carry which can malfunction at any time. Panicked, I fell on the subway floor, groping for my belongings. Legs shifted about me as the animated forest of humans came to life like enchanted trees; hands shot forth, stealing my change, helpfully extending my keys to me, returning my rolled-away lipstick with an impressive hand-to-hand relay involving several school children and a “Yo! Lady!” I was helped, hindered, patted, pulled up, and nodded at, and then the people turned into trees again, frozen on their straps. I passed through them to exit with the ritual Excuse me’s, the doors rattled shut behind me, and I realized I’d left the paper on the train.

My hands made fists, released, and made them again. It was too much, it was unbearable. The darting people about me were like the hurtling debris of an exploded planet, and I could not stand to look at them. I fled the subway and found I was just above East 14th Street, where, I realized I could easily buy another paper.

I made my purchase at a newsstand and was soothed by the ease with which this was accomplished. As my panic receded, I remembered that I was exhausted and decided to sit down in a coffee shop to finish reading the article.

Soon I was seated with the paper open in my trembling hands, a cup of coffee on its way. I read on, my attention caught on the protruding nails of the deliberate meanness that held the piece together. The coffee came and I drank the bitter stuff. The shop had few customers and I was grateful for that. A dowdy woman read a soiled paperback. A teenager stared into space. A handsome boy mutely reached across a linoleum tabletop to touch the hand of his scowling handsome boy companion. The small dark proprietor strolled behind his counter, absently pulling his ear.

If I had been seduced, I had also been abandoned. I thought of Justine sitting in my apartment fixing me with that stare, spindly fingers working her pen. Even then she had known she would write something that attacked everything I had founded my sane life on, even as she allowed our words and feelings to twine and knot, bringing us together again in an effort to disentangle them. She had talked to me, too, exposed herself — and yet not really, because it was ultimately she who walked away and made this house of cards, this article, this canned result of our exchange which had meant so much to me and so little to her. It was she who stepped back, wrote in her notebook, and pronounced me a “child.” It was she who, after our intimacy, stroked me with the flattering words “authentic,” “incisive,” “intelligent,” caressing me under the table like a flippant ex-lover, using the remains of her power to invoke the memory of our shared closeness, a memory meant to render me helpless. That was the most painful thing; in this article, in which she used me to further demean the memory of Granite, she also invoked, in an encoded still life, the genuine moments we had experienced. Her sensitivity to me had been real, she had illuminated me gently, with respect, and yet she had done it in a context that made a joke out of everything I believed in, and, indirectly, made a fool of me.

Why did my every close contact become a betrayal? Why did everyone who touched me desert me? Why was I never able to do anything about it?

The waiter wandered by, leaving a greasy slip of paper on my table, his head turned away from me as if it was a secret note instead of a bill. I stared at the objects before me: cold coffee in a cup of thick white glass, folded napkin, spoon with a liquid coffee shadow on its face. Symbols of order and humility, comfort and banality. These were the things of my life; I had been sitting at these goddamn coffee tables all my life recovering from what other people had done to me.

The anger that had begun on the subway rose like bubbles from a deceptively still pool of chemical waste. That little bitch had to have realized how lonely I was, what an easy target for information and confidence. She knew how much pain I’d experienced in life; I’d told her. But she’d exploited me anyway for whatever piddling advancement this article represented to her. It wasn’t the first time; there had been other reporters, other articles as wrong-headed and rude. But I had never had coffee and cakes with any of these reporters, they had never discussed their love lives with me, they had never looked at me with those eyes of hers, those eyes that saw me for who I was, and then betrayed me anyway.

A voice of reason coughed nervously and interjected that perhaps I had misinterpreted the message of her eyes. But I had not! She had silently transmitted promises to me, promises of respect and allegiance and, and. I felt like there was an animal trapped in my lower body, pacing furiously, wanting to come out and tear the nearest living creature to pieces.

I stood up, wiping my sweating palms on my dress (a single fucking cloth garment of indeterminate nature) and approached the man behind the counter.

“Excuse me,” I sweetly said. “Do you have a current Manhattan phone book I could look at?”

He ran his eyes the length of my body with habitual suspicion and mumbled an affirmative. He found the book in his gleaming cabinets. He handed it to me and leaned on the counter, dreamily gazing out the window. The animal in my abdomen roared and reared as I found the massive “S” listing. I flipped the pages and ran my damp finger down the columns. I was right. There was only one J. Shade. She lived at 33 Charles which, I surmised, was in the Village.

I hurled a wadded dollar at the man behind the counter and I was on the street again, my arm raised stiffly in the cab-flagging salute. This was Monday, the same day of the week Justine had met me at the coffee shop — as she had remarked at the time, her day off.

Chapter Twenty-Five

You cunt,” he said. “You fucking worthless cunt.”

She didn’t answer him because he had his belt tight around her throat. Her body convulsed and her sight went. He released his grip, and her vision cleared. Her arms and legs were cold; she tried to move her fingers and wasn’t sure she succeeded. His face came into focus over hers, wavering out of darkness like a dream. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear, the roaring in her head was too loud. She felt him inside her; her vagina was tight and dry. He tightened the belt again, and again she lost her sight. He released her; first his eyes came out of the darkness, then his face. She tried to tell him to stop, but her voice wasn’t working.

He held his hand before her and moved his fingers in a gesture she didn’t understand. Then she realized he was snapping his fingers. He grabbed her jaw with a hard pinch, and moved her head back and forth. Her vision started to go blank again and then cleared abruptly.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Are you okay?”

She put her tongue experimentally out of her mouth and touched her lips. They were so dry they didn’t feel like flesh.

“Here,” he said. He leaned over her body towards the floor and then rolled back onto the bed clutching a bottle of sloshing liquid. He put it to her lips. Reflexively she tried to take the bottle with her hand and couldn’t; she remembered her hands and feet were tied at the corners of her bed. She opened her mouth and the burning vodka made her sputter and cough. He shoved the bottle against her teeth and kept pouring, letting it run down her chin after she had closed her lips.

“Thought you were gone there for a minute,” he said. He took the bottle from her, put it to his lips, up-ended it, and drained it. He emitted a loud “ahhh” noise.

“I wanna get up,” she said. “Untie me.” She heard the fear in her voice, and it frightened her more.

He leaned back against the wall and looked at her, smiling.

“Goddamn it, Bryan. My stomach hurts and I have to pee.”

He extended his hand and began to stroke her cunt. His eyes looked like the eyes of Mrs. Rabinowitz; the iris bristling with dismembered emotion, the whites riddled with yellow veins.

“You look like a lunatic,” she said.

He slid away from the wall and put his head between her legs. She retreated further into her body. He followed her. She closed her eyes and imagined leaving her body to float away in empty air, turning somersaults in the contactless ease of space, unseen, untouched, unalive. Instead her body stripped itself for him; her full bladder and all her other organs lay exposed, shivering in assonance with the slow movements of his tongue. She felt she was turning gradually inside out. He could’ve strangled her. To her horror, the thought excited her.

“I’m your daddy’s good buddy,” he said, “and your daddy told me I can play with your little pussy any time I want.”

“Don’t,” she said, “please don’t.”

“Any time I want I can take you out to the park and make you take your little panties off.”

“Please, Bryan, don’t, don’t.” Her words were a landslide of pebbles and dirt under someone’s foot.

Her buzzer sounded. He turned and looked at the door. “Expecting anybody?” he asked.

She was unable to answer.

He got up and walked unsteadily to the intercom. He looked at her and smiled. “I’ve always wanted to meet your friends,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Village,” I said to the cabdriver.

“Where in the Village?”

His tone opined that I was an incompetent.

“Thirty-three Charles,” I shot back.

“Charles and what?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t the address enough?”

He muttered something, and his little flag went up.

For a moment I felt myself engaged with his strange, dissatisfied energies, and then he became merely the back of a head, and I returned to my angry plan.

Of course, she might not be home, but she could be, and even if she was not, I would wait for her. I would come back again and again until I found her. I would ring her doorbell, and if she didn’t let me in, I would ring the bell of everyone in the building until someone let me in. At least one thief had gained entry to my building that way.

Once I confronted her, I was less sure of what would happen, except that I would scream at her. I was mad enough to do that, but I so infrequently screamed at anyone that the idea made my heart leap with fear and excitement. I would back her into a corner! If she reached for the phone to call the police, I would knock it from her hand!

I opened the Vision again so I could scan the article and encourage my anger. It worked. The second time around, my feelings were not cushioned by shock or the titillation of seeing an interpretation of myself in print, and I felt even more deeply indignant. What kind of person would go around worming her way into people’s homes and confidences, filtering their words and images through her distorted cynical vision and then using them as weapons against someone they loved? What kind of person could so twist the truth of Granite’s ideas?

“You fucking liar,” I said.

The cab driver’s eyes flickered in the mirror.

“I don’t mean you,” I said. “Have you read this week’s Urban Vision?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t read that paper.”

His words were polite, but his voice harbored another quality which I could best describe as a readiness to see me as several different kinds of asshole at once. It was different from an assumption in that an assumption is passive; the quality in his voice was watching and waiting. I ignored it and pressed on, secure in the knowledge that I am not an asshole.

“Well good for you,” I said. “Because it’s a piece of trash. Ordinarily I don’t buy it either, but I did this week because there’s an article in here about Anna Granite, the most important thinker of our time. Do you know who she is?”

He turned his head to curse at a car which had forced its snout between us and the lane we were rightfully headed for. We jerked to a halt as a dark, leaping boy skipped in front of us and continued nimbly through the traffic, a yelling man in baggy red pants stumbling in pursuit. The driver ferociously manned the wheel; we swerved, and I fell to one side in a rattle of paper. I struggled up and briefly took in the awfulness of the moment, the panting vehicles, their primitive engines covered with a thin veneer of colored metal and cheap style, all tiny compartments for embattled humans on seat-belt leashes, vainly trying to assert their presence with the classical or rap or rock music spilling crazily out their windows to be consumed by the grinding of gears and the clouds of noxious fumes. Construction workers hammered and drilled, bicycle messengers shot into the invisible future of their destination, thousands of faces passed through my line of vision, thousands of expression lines, eye-glints, and hair cuts. An unoccupied strip of street opened before us; the driver gunned his motor, and I was thrown back against the seat.

“Do you know who Anna Granite is?” I persisted.

“No. Maybe I heard of her but I don’t really know.”

“Well she’s a philosopher who stands for everything that makes life possible. She believes in total freedom for the individual as opposed to living for the state. She believes in the primacy of rationality over emotion, although she respects the truth of emotion.” I faltered and groped for the words to express succinctly what Granite had been, her hot leonine face in a haze of turquoise light refracting off the crystal chandeliers, the feel of her hand on mine, my life saved, so many lives saved. He was black; I would mention her stand against racism, except I didn’t want to patronize.

“She’s a Scientologist, right?”

“No, not at all.”

“A Moonie?”

“No! She, she was a Definitist, an inventor of a whole movement dedicated to the power and sanctity of the individual—”

“White individuals, I can assume.”

“No! Not at all! She was absolutely against the kind of collective tribal mentality from which racism springs!”

He snorted. “So what does Urban Vision have to say about it?”

A tornado of explanations, political points of view, sociopolitical lines of thought roared through my head. There was no time to explain it all and anyway, none of it addressed the real issue. “Urban Vision ran this article by this bitch who lied to me about everything she believed, who got me to talk to her about the most personal things in my life, and then, then used it in the service of, of evil, of everything that’s destroying this society. This person betrayed me, she—”

He sharply swerved and pulled over to the curb. I paused and looked. We were in the Village, but this was not Charles Street.

“Get out of my car,” he said.

The chattering voices in my head stopped, confused. “Why? Is something wrong?”

“No, lady, nothing’s wrong. I’ve just been driving around all day listening to the crazy piss-ant problems of white people, and I can’t stand it anymore. Get out.”

Explanations lunged forward, all talking at once, knocking each other down and climbing over each other. “This is not a crazy piss-ant problem!” To my shame, I heard a whine streaking down the center of my voice. “I’m talking about something that affects both of us, I’m—”

“Whatever it is, I can guarantee it doesn’t affect us in the same way. You owe me three-forty.” Smartly, he struck the stop button on his meter.

Shocked, I sat back and reached for my purse. Distress signals flew from my body in bright flares that perished in the dead air between the driver and me. He was a wall, impervious to the stewing explanations, hurt feelings, and angry impulses that hurled themselves at him, tugging at his clothes. I tried to awaken the anger that had so recently reigned in me, but what I felt was the hurt passivity that knew such walls very well. My coins and dollars fell from my fingers and I had to grope for them on the floor of the cab. He muttered contemptuously.

The problem was, when I looked at myself as he probably saw me, I couldn’t blame him. A fat white woman with dyed hair who he imagined came from a pampered suburban life and had had everything given to her, but was ranting and screaming anyway. I felt a tingling sensation in the back of my throat, like you get before you vomit. I sat up, the skin on my face hot with sensations. I made myself talk as I thrust the money over the ripped and taped up seat.

“I know what it looks like,” I said. “I know what you think. And I don’t blame you.”

Tears panted in my hoarse voice. His eyes darted in the mirror, eyes of anger, puzzlement, and strangely, an element of fear.

“But if you knew me.” I stopped to muffle the tears. “If you knew the truth about me, you would be sorry you are doing this. I’m not your enemy.”

His eyes changed, his jaw softened, and in a terrible moment I saw that he was sorry, if not because of my words, then because he was gentleman enough to be distressed by the tears in my voice. It was a terrible moment because neither of us knew what to do about it. He looked away in embarrassment. I dropped the money on the seat and got out of the car.

I stood trembling on the pavement, trying not to cry. I heard his voice behind me. “Charles is just a couple more blocks to your left,” he said. I turned in time to see him roll up his window and drive away.

I began walking to my left. The full weight of my exhaustion pressed the backs of my eyeballs. Why had he been so angry? I passed fruit stands, beggars, wastebaskets jammed with trash. The only reason I could think of was the recent acquittal of the white kids who’d beat a black kid to death, an event which had made a lot of people mad. He was right, I thought miserably. If I were he, I’d be in no mood to listen to white people’s problems either, however universal they might be. The thought was like a punch in the gut, and I was no longer sure I had the stamina to carry out my mission. My single focus had been cleft in two, and now only half my mind was lunging towards my revenge on Justine, while the other half was riding to Brooklyn with the cab driver to find the white brawlers and beat them senseless or kill them. I sweated in triumph as I imagined the terrified expression on the face of a young thug as I picked him up and pinned him against the wall, fixing him with my righteous stare before I — but although I was big and at that point very strong, it was unlikely I could pick up a strapping eighteen-year-old boy. How would we know where they were anyway? We could find out, but if a white fat lady and a black guy drove into Brooklyn inquiring about these local heroes, we’d probably be set upon by the entire community before we even got out of the car. Besides, the cab driver was long gone.

I couldn’t do anything about that atrocity, but, I told myself, I could do something about Justine Shade; my wavering resolve was strong again as I bore down upon Charles Street.

I was at first glad to discover that 33 Charles was only a few houses down the block, but as I entered the small building, I found myself wishing it had been farther away so that I would have more time to prepare myself for the encounter. I stood before the buzzers wiping my sweating hands on my dress in blank anxiety until I remembered my strategy: first push her buzzer to find out if she was home. Easy enough I thought. I almost cried out in alarm when the device buzzed back. I was not expecting that; surely she wouldn’t be stupid enough to admit anyone who buzzed her from the street. To make sure I pressed the button again. Again I was startled by an even more immediate response. I stared at the door. What if she was expecting a friend and thought that I was that friend? That would mean the friend could arrive in the middle of my scene and cause awkwardness. Then I realized that such an occurrence would cause all the more embarrassment for Justine, would mar her social plan. The door buzzed a third time, unprovoked. I shoved it open and began to climb the stairs, my determination advancing and receding. According to the mailbox she was on the fifth floor, and I tried to take advantage of the long walk to rehearse the outraged speech I’d planned. I panted as I climbed, and the panting fed my sense of extremity and imminent crisis. “And then,” I whispered between my teeth, “then you have the nerve to patronize a thinker who—”

Like a jack-in-the-box, her door popped open before I’d reached the landing, a pale, mocking face peeked round its corner. Leering, goading, apparently expecting me! I lunged, I gained the apartment, I knocked the face to the floor! “You bitch!” I yelled.

Victorious, I shut the door behind me. Then I blinked. Embarrassment prickled my face. Before me lay sprawled a naked ratty-looking young man slowly propping himself up on his elbows, a psychotic smile infecting his face. His eyes traveled up and down my body with such aggressive lewdness that I felt like stepping backwards. He spoke to the corner of the room.

“Hey,” he asked it, “who’s the tub o’ lard?”

I followed his gaze, and the air began to ripple like water. Justine Shade lay naked on her bed, her hands and feet tied to its corners, her head raised, her wild mascara-smeared eyes staring at me with utter incomprehension. She dropped her head, muttered incoherently, then raised her head again. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked.

“Don’t tell me,” said the man. “It’s one of your diesel dyke girlfriends.”

“Eat shit,” said Justine.

I saw marks on her thighs and breasts, and dried blood on her lips. My voice came mechanically out of my throat. “I came because of that. thing you published in Urban Vision, that’s what I’m doing here.” I used the words as if they could insulate me from the scene before me. I realized I should turn and walk out of whatever this was, but I was transfixed by Justine’s raised face. Her skin was so red it could have been scalded, her forehead was almost contorted with tension while her lower face was weirdly lax, her eyes were like terrified animals bolting in every direction and finding no release. She looked both inhuman and shockingly human. But when she spoke, her voice and words were clipped, flat, almost rebuking.

“Dorothy,” she said, “this is really not the time to discuss it. Why don’t you call me later?”

The man rose from the floor into a squatting position. “Why don’t you eat her pussy?” he suggested conversationally. “I’ll watch.”

Justine spoke again, her voice even more absurdly proper. “Actually,” she said, “now that you’re here, could you untie me? I have to go to the bathroom and this idiot”—she indicated the man with a head gesture—“has gone completely off the deep end.”

Her voice held a tea party in the garden while a child was murdered in the house. I could not hear her in her voice or see her in her face and for a moment my contempt for her was almost hatred.

The man stood up. “Are you mad at her?” he said. “Maybe you’d like to whip her?” He took a whip from a small table and held it out to me. He was close enough for me to smell the liquor evaporating from his skin, to feel the aggression crackling around him with the electrical force of a bomb. I could feel it pressing around my head and body, wanting to get into me. He stepped closer. I stepped towards the door. “Get away from me,” I said. “Just get the hell away from me.” My hand was on the doorknob.

“Dorothy,” said Justine. “Please.”

The brittle control of her voice cracked and I heard her. I looked and saw the strange, serious woman who had come to ask me about Anna Granite. She was desolate and ashamed. My heart opened with a quick, painful movement. I moved swiftly towards her.

The man stepped in front of me and put his hands on me. I pushed him away. He stepped in front of me again. I pushed him. He leaned into my face and started talking to me. His voice coiled round me like a snake. My body stiffened with fear. He put his hands on my breasts and hurt me. And I hit him. His hands flew off my body as he reeled backward, clutching his bleeding mouth; he wavered and fell, banging a skinny hip on a little table. His ferocity fell in pieces around him, and he crouched, looking at me with a slippery grin. He started to say something, but I didn’t give him a chance. I kicked him first, squarely in the chin, and then he got up and then I hit him again. It was a terrifying sensation, my fists beating his face, my foot slamming his belly and the knuckles of his hands as he clutched his naked little prick. He hit back, but he was weak and drunk and I could barely feel it. I got his hair in my fist and propelled him to the door, kicking his tailbone to encourage his scuttling cooperation. With my free hand I opened the door, kicked him into the hall, slammed the door, and locked it. My hands were trembling. He had torn my dress and bloodied my lip. My legs were trembling. My whole body was trembling. I felt as if my blood would burst from me. I felt my face with both hands, trying to make myself come back again. I was interrupted by a noise from the bed. I looked up. Justine was wriggling against her bonds. “Hurry!” she said. “I’m going to throw up!”

Quickly, I went to her and began to untie her. “Are you all right?” I asked idiotically.

“Just a minute,” she gasped.

I freed her and she immediately bounded towards the bathroom, the flesh of her scarred backside jiggling urgently. Outside, the man began to pound on the door with furious vigor.

I sat gingerly on the edge of the grossly rumpled bed and listened to the pounding. The door jumped and shuddered on its hinges, but it held. The man began to yell and curse, displaying a good deal more focus and force than he had a moment ago. I yelled at him to go away. Then I remembered that his clothes were in the room and he couldn’t go away. I didn’t know what to do. If I opened the door, he could come in full of murderous sobriety and rage; he could attack me and choke me to death. He was, after all, a man and, for all his puny size, possessed of testosterone and the other mysterious chemical and hormonal forces that goad that sex to kill, rape, and commit crimes of horrific sadism; I had simply gotten the drop on him. I felt afraid, more so than when he had been in the room. I thought of calling the police, but it was possible that if they appeared he would charge me with assault — and he had a witness, the unpredictable, perverted Justine Shade who was at the moment emitting unpleasant bodily noises from behind the bathroom door, of no help to me at all.

Then the pounding stopped and I heard another voice, also male, also angry. It said something about “butt-naked” and “jerkoff.” Justine’s friend seemed to make some kind of response. I leapt off the bed, hastily found the male clothing strewn around the room, and ran to the door. I opened it. His back was to me; he stood, with no shame apparent in his posture, facing a much larger, fully clothed fellow who was half-emerged from the apartment across the hall, an aggravated look on his face. Both men looked at me, the naked one whipping his head around to do so. I threw the clothes. He dove. I slammed the door and locked it. I listened. The shower was running in the bathroom.

“Look,” said Justine’s neighbor through the door. “I don’t give a shit about your problems. I’m trying to sleep. Stop screaming or I’ll throw you down the goddamn stairs. Get it?”

Justine’s boyfriend seemed to contemplate this silently. I heard the door across the hall close. I heard rustling and floor creaking; probably he was getting dressed. I relaxed slightly.

The bathroom door popped open, and Justine minced out, a towel precariously wrapped about her nakedness. Her short hair was sleekly wet against her head. At first glance she seemed much refreshed. She looked at me, blinking rapidly, rubbed her face, and stood in the middle of the room with her arms around herself, staring at the door.

“Justine,” he said from the hallway. “Justine.”

His voice surprised me. It was mournful and gentle, full of remorse. It was vulnerable as a child alone in the dark. I looked at Justine. I could see in her face that the voice affected her, but she made no move to open the door.

“Justine,” he said. “Honey.”

She shook her head and approached the door, her buttocks peeking out of her towel. “Bryan,” she answered, “you have to go away.”

“Will you call me later?”

“No. Go away.”

He made no response, nor did we hear him walk away. Justine listened attentively for a moment, then shrugged. She went to the bed and sat on it, looked at me, and then looked away. “Shit,” she muttered. She covered her face with her hands and hunched forward.

I didn’t know what to say.

“So,” she said into her hands. “I guess you didn’t like the article.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think you would.” She came out of her hunch and faced me. “But I couldn’t help it. I had to say my opinion.”

“You certainly didn’t say your opinion when you were talking to me.”

“Well as a reporter I don’t have to. And I did say enough that—”

There was a quiet knock at the door.

Her little face coiled furiously, she shot off the bed and attacked the door with vicious, flat-footed kicks. “Dumb fucking scumbag!” she screamed. “Get away!” She stood combative, panting, I thought rather ridiculous as she faced down the door, clutching her towel. After a few seconds of silence, she daintily adjusted the towel and returned to the bed. She looked at me. “But I don’t think I can talk about it now. I’m exhausted. I’ve been up all night.” Somewhat incongruously, she blushed.

“Me too,” I said.

In the ensuing silence we heard footsteps retreating down the stairs. “Thank God,” said Justine. “I thought he’d never leave.” She stood up and walked past me to the kitchenette against the wall. “Would you like some camomile tea?”

I said yes and looked for a place to sit. There were no chairs or couch in the tiny studio, only the bed. I moved to sit on it, and she stopped me. “Wait,” she said, “let me change those sheets.” She dropped the towel and momentarily revealed her wounded body.

“Why,” I said, “why did you let him do that to you?”

She didn’t answer me. She took a robe from the closet and put it on. She began to strip the sheets from the bed. I waited, but she just said, “I’m glad you came.” Her voice trembled, and she seemed to be trying to hide her face from me. She turned and stuffed the sheets in a laundry bag then drew a folded new sheet from the closet. She cracked it open and let it float over the bed. Then she crawled over the mattress tucking it under, looking like an animal in its burrow. “There,” she said. “Have a seat.”

We sat against large pillows and drank tea from china cups with flowers on them. We were silent at first, looking at each other, then looking away. I noticed that our hands were still shaking. I said again, “Why did you let him do that to you?”

“I didn’t let him do anything,” she snapped. She looked at me almost insolently. “I told him what to do.” Her jaw twitched violently. “Except towards the end.”

“Why?”

She looked away and slightly down and shrugged one small shoulder, the gesture of an adolescent in the principal’s office. “I don’t know.” With tight lips, she sipped her tea. I noted the outline of her naked eyelashes and the fine curve of her cheek. She looked back at me. “Does it disgust you?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I think so.”

“Well, you’re probably right. Although it’s not as awful as it looks when you just sort of burst in on it like that. I mean when you’re doing it, it’s, you know. Except this got a little. ” She put her teacup on the table near the bed and lay back against the pillow, curling her legs up and tucking her feet securely under the robe. She didn’t finish her sentence.

“You don’t disgust me,” I said uncertainly. I looked at her cheaply beautiful old vanity with its chipped wood, its carved mirror under a gray veil of dust. On it were musty old perfume bottles with sticky remnants on the bottom, scattered rings and brooches, a piece of ribbon, and different colored candles in holders of all shapes and sizes, all lightly layered with dust. Pasted to the mirror was a black-and-white photograph of a very young child in a bathing suit, posing with a seductiveness that was unsettling in a preschooler. “I always thought you were interesting,” I said. “I thought about you a lot.”

“Really? What did you think?”

“Just that I would like to talk to you. Of course,” I continued, rather bitterly, “that’s probably because I don’t have any friends. When you came to interview me, it was the longest talk I’d had with anyone for years. So naturally I fixated.” I drank my tea.

“I don’t have any friends either.” She spoke sorrowfully.

“Really?” It was hard for me to believe. I thought all pretty people had friends.

“Well, I know a few people. I go out sometimes. But I don’t have real friends.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard for me to be close to people.” She sat up again and allowed her hair to shield her profile.

We sat silently for some time. As my body systems slowly regained their usual stately plod, the adrenaline drained from my flesh, and I imagined going home to sleep.

Then I realized she was crying. Tears dropped from her chin onto her folded hands, and she trembled small and hard. She sat erect and contained, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her robe and gulping discreetly. I didn’t comfort her because her body did not invite it. But I sat with my heart opened to her, feeling her heart mournfully opening to me, sending me the messages that can be received only by another heart, that which the intellect can never apprehend.

Still crying, she said, “I’m sorry about the article. I really am.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Frankly I haven’t had so much excitement in years.”

I felt her smile inwardly; her trembling stopped.

“I thought of you too sometimes,” she said, tears still in her throat.

“What? What did you think?”

She sniffed and wiped at her nose. “They weren’t really thoughts. Just images, feelings. I could tell you were very strong, and I wondered how you got to be that way.”

“I already told you how.” I spoke rather stiffly.

She smiled. “Anna Granite?”

“Yes. Anna Granite.” My irritation with her flickered and died.

“I don’t think that’s it,” she said.

I didn’t answer. A cloud swallowed what little sun had come in through her barred window. She settled more deeply into the pillow and stretched her naked legs out from beneath the robe, tautly splaying then relaxing her toes. I felt the last of her tears leave her. She closed her eyes. I sat there watching her hand rise and fall on her stomach, the sound of her breath stroking my face. The hum of her refrigerator crawled up my backbone. I closed my eyes. A cocoon of dreams spun about me.

“Dorothy.” Justine’s voice woke me. Dimly I regarded her. “I’m going to lie down and try to sleep. I know the bed is small but if you want, you can sleep here.”

We lay down side by side, politely observing the conventions of strangers sharing a bed. I could feel her small body bristling with contained fidgets as she lay stiffly on her side, not invading my side of the bed. I too clung rigorously to etiquette, lying with my back to her, curled to take up as little room as possible.

The politeness of course kept us awake; although I had barely been able to keep my eyes open a moment ago, now I found myself trying to soothe my tense body to sleep by parading before it the gray images of ordinariness. Legal documents. Breakfast. Justine scratched herself and sighed. A long moment rolled by. She shifted her legs. I thought: If only I could lie on my back. Exhaustion eased down upon us, dimming mental clarity but not extinguishing it. Asia Maconda’s face swam across my mental field.

“I can’t sleep,” said Justine.

Her voice was so worn that I turned to her with an impulse to comfort. At the same time she turned towards me. Her thin arms went around my body, her face pressed against my shoulder. I held her side and cupped her head, careful not to touch her injured back. Her body against me was like a phrase of music. My muscles were calmed, white flowers bloomed on my heart. Asia Maconda’s face still stared at me from inside my head. I stared back, wondering that this completely imaginary face had meant so much to me for so long. I watched it dissolve into pieces as I went to sleep with my arms around Justine Shade.