A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
“Gaitskill’s brand of brainy lyricism, of acid shot through with grace, is unlike anyone else’s. And it constitutes some of the most incisive fiction writing around.”
—Meghan O’Rourke, The New York Times Book Review
Dorothy is fat, cranky, and gifted with a vivid and lurid imagination that partly redeems the drabness of her job as a night-shift proofreader. Justine is smart, slender, and tugged by sexual compulsions. One is a journalist and the other—thanks to her past involvement with a preposterous cult leader—is her subject. But their initial interview leads to a friendship that will split open both their lives. As Gaitskill follows Dorothy and Justine’s deepening relationship and its mutual revelations of longing and brutality, she creates a comic, dark, and ultimately moving novel about the grotesque surfaces of modern life—and the raw humanity that lies beneath.
“The book is whole and complete; it needs no resolution, not even the one it offers. It is an entrée into the maw of other people’s lives, to which most people can blind themselves and to which a few novelists sometimes refuse to blind themselves: a weaving of a whole cloth . . . Gaitskill’s fairy tales are part of ordinary life, sometimes giving it grandeur, sometimes taking it back.”
—Greil Marcus, L.A. Weekly
MARY GAITSKILL’s most recent book, Veronica, was nominated for a 2005 National Book Award and was one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2005. She is also the author of two short story collections. Because They Wanted To, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1998, and Bad Behavior. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories (1993), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (1998). Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the film of the same name. She lives in New York.
Cover design and montage by Honi Werner
Cover photograph © age photostock/Superstock
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Praise for Two Girls, Fat and Thin
Chosen as one of the New York Times Book Review’s Notable Books of the Year
“An ingenious and disturbing psychodrama.”
—Interview
“Gaitskill’s unparalleled ability to render the real in all its textures and bring it sharply before all of a reader’s senses is complemented by her uncanny accuracy at recapturing both emotion and thought. . . . Two Girls displays her as a dismayingly strong writer.”
—The Boston Globe
“Thoughtful and eloquent. . . . Her fine and disturbing novel is also a stunning work of the imagination—genuine and luminous.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Lyrical . . . harrowing, finely written . . . fresh . . . startling.”
—The Detroit News
“This is a wonderful and complex novel, at times even brilliant.”
—The Women’s Review of Books
“To read her is to be given many surprise gifts: an unexpected metaphor, an uncannily accurate skewering of humdrum Middle America.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[Gaitskill has] a fresh literary consciousness, a voice at once tender but unsentimental, lyrical and unfettered . . . . She is destined to become a major force.”
—San Jose Mercury News
ALSO BY MARY GAITSKILL
Bad Behavior
Because They Wanted To
SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1991 by Mary Gaitskill
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90023232
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-84312-4 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-43912-880-0 (eBook)
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Excerpt from Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, copyright 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, © 1967 by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
“Reach Out in the Darkness” words and music by Jim Post. Copyright © 1967 Lowery Music Co., Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Love Is All Around” written by Reg Presley. Copyright © 1967 Dick James Music Limited. All rights for the United States and Canada controlled by Songs of PolyGram International, Inc. (3500 West Olive Avenue, Suite 200, Burbank, CA 91505). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Happiness Runs” by Donovan Leitch. Copyright © 1968 Donovan (Music) Ltd. Sole Selling Agent: Peer International Corporation. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
“Straight Up” by Elliot Wolff. Copyright © 1988 Virgin Music, Inc., and Elliot Wolff Music. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
For my parents, with appreciation.
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Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Part Two
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Part Three
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Part One
All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Speak, Memory
I entered the strange world of Justine Shade via a message on the bulletin board in a laundromat filled with bitterness and the hot breath of dryers. “Writer interested in talking to followers of Anna Granite. Please call—.” It was written in rigorous, precise, feminine print on a modest card displayed amidst dozens of cards, garish Xeroxed sheets, newsprint, and ragged tongues of paper. The owners of this laundry establishment seem to have an especially lax policy when it comes to the bulletin board, and upon it any nut can advertise himself, express an inane opinion, or announce a slogan amid a blathering crowd of ads for Gorill-O-Grams, lost cats, plaintive George (wearing a tiny amethyst earring, gray leather boots) searching for “provocative boy in tight silver pan
ts who asked tall black man for fabric softener,” Micro-Cosmic Orbit Meditation Lessons, Yes Sir!: The All-Boy Maid Service, and Spiritual Karate for Women. That day there was even an especially sinister card bearing an invitation to submit to tests that would determine whether or not your suicidal depression could be alleviated by “the latest medication” or hypnotic technique—an invitation evoking images of bulimic girls held prisoner in somebody’s basement, drug-addicted prostitutes confessing to severe men in white coats, electrodes wired to the naked bodies of frightened volunteers, rec rooms erupting with violence, all made doubly queasy by their proximity to wretched George with his laundry. Nestled in this shoddy configuration of suggestion, promise, and nightmare, the writer’s card implied a lone kook gripping a grimy sheaf of papers, philosophical tracts, and paperback books, her jaw clenched, her face unnaturally pale. This is the kind of image that is, no doubt, associated with Anna Granite in the dull minds of those who peruse such bulletin boards carelessly, half-registering the muted snarl of urgency and need—but I knew differently.
I shifted my recalcitrant laundry in my arms and snatched the card from the board, not caring if anyone else wanted to read it or not. I went home, put away my laundry, and sat brooding with coffee and card. It had been years since anyone had expressed professional (or was it professional?) interest in Anna Granite, philosopher and literary genius. I read the card repeatedly, trying to deduce something from its hieroglyphical simplicity. Granite had enemies, even in death. I had made the mistake of talking to them in the past, seduced, as all of us were, by the glamour of flashing lightbulbs, microphones, hysterical questions, and so on. But that had been at least fifteen years ago, and this “writer” seemed too insubstantial to bear the weight of such mania.
Why talk to an insubstantial person? I finished my coffee, ate a Gruyère brioche, and left the apartment to go to work. I am thirty-four years old and I live in Queens. I am a proofreader on the midnight shift at a Wall Street law firm, and the hour of my departure for work is bleak and dark. That night the street featured only a few abstracted pedestrians: a guarded young woman in a raincoat carrying a brown-bagged carton of milk, a pair of subdued boys coming around the corner with their hands thrust into their pockets, a dog-walker clutching a wad of paper towels, and a moody doorman pacing in a vigilant circle. I entered a delicatessen which displayed boxes of detergent, stomach medicines, and bottled spring water in its windows. I purchased a handful of rum-flavored marzipan candies, each wrapped in bright red tinfoil bearing a picture of a mysterious brown-haired Victorian lady in décollétage, then I stepped into the street and hailed a cab. The driver and I exchanged mumbles, his ticking metal box lit up, and I sped to the office where my booth awaited me, nestled amid the flanks of word-processing machines, all faithfully burning their little green lights.
But I couldn’t forget “writer.” As I re-entered my apartment at 9:00 the following morning, I felt the harsh splendor of Granite’s presence arrayed through all my rooms. I had never forgotten her, of course. Her books were all upright on my shelves, and the mighty power of her ideas continued to form the undercurrent that bore along the details of my uneventful and increasingly rancorous life. But Anna Granite had died two years earlier, and I had been disassociated from the remnants of her dwindling movement for longer than that. This was the first time in years that I had felt the almost visceral sensation of the woman’s presence, which was nothing short of a shimmering, diamond-studded aurora borealis. It was as if this star system had become hidden, bound in a thick skein of ordinariness, and that “writer,” with his/her innocuous request, had peeled off a corner of the binding, causing all that I had never really abandoned to come tumbling into my living room.
As I lay in my bed in my plaid flannel nightgown, Granite’s characters crowded round me. Solitaire D’Anconti, oil magnate and lonely woman, paced the room in her black plunge-necked jumpsuit, one arm wrapped around her own slim waist, the other holding the cigarette which issued the snake of smoke that was coiling around her. Bus Taggart, the hood who worshipped her, sat on the windowsill, struck a match against his shoe, and sighed. Skip Jackson, newspaper baron and Solitaire’s lover, leaned against the wall, watching Solitaire with a savage smirk on his face. What were they going to do? Eustace Kwetschmer, editor of a rival newspaper, had started a series of stories exposing Solitaire’s connections with Bus; she had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. Skip was willing to fight back on her behalf, even if it meant destroying his own newspaper empire. Solitaire, who scorned public opinion, was pleading with him to stay out of it. Meanwhile, the world was on the brink of destruction.
I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to look at the card. It seemed foreign, forlorn yet compelling for an index card. I returned to bed with it and snuggled under the blanket; I had been working the graveyard shift for six years, but my body still contracted at various crucial points in my neck, pelvis, and shoulders after staying up all night. I tried to relax my spastic muscles and lay on my stomach to reach for the sleek pink phone beside my bed. I dialed the number offered by “writer.” There was no answer, not even a recorded voice informing me that its author could not “come to the phone right now.” I hung up, relieved; my mental state, induced by such sudden contact with Granite’s fictional universe, was not one that could be shared with the prosaic writer.
I dug back into bed, cozily rubbing the inevitable granules away with my feet. In my mental parade, Granite’s characters were followed by the four-square humans who had surrounded her, and the sensational drama of her life began to merge with the drama of her books. I saw Granite at the podium, her eyes storming as she lashed out at an idiot heckler from the audience who had stood during the question-and-answer period to say, “Doesn’t your insistence on strictly objective truth lead to a kind of authoritarianism that—” “You are an authoritarian of the worst kind!” snarled Granite. “The authority of ignorance, of nothingness, of hallucination!” The article that appeared in Demograph that month read: “With a voice that would tuck a dog’s tail between its legs, Miss Granite scourged the few non-believers who managed to get a word in edgewise,” and the photo that accompanied it showed a homely little woman who could barely make herself seen behind a podium, pointing her thick finger at the world. I saw the journalists, who were allowed to attend the early meetings, clustered in their cheap suits, frowning with the greedy outrage of the self-righteous as they hunched and scribbled Granite’s words on their pads of lined paper. Large, old-fashioned cameras emitted sour blooms of light as stern, unblinking Granite marched by, her purple-lined cape streaming behind her. I felt her outrage as columnists and third-rate thinkers denounced her everywhere. And I felt her glory as I beheld her, bedecked in a necklace of heavy turquoise, on the arm of Beau Bradley, her devastating raven-haired lover. Her short frame lengthened and liquified, her ruddy skin paled, her tight mouth swelled into a vicious pout as I watched her transforming into her creation Asia Maconda, the international beauty and art critic who was swept off her feet by the brilliant sculptor, Frank Golanka, even as she fought to discredit him socially. I heard her rough, sorrowful voice, the Romanian accent that made her sound as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of ground glass and been surprised by how good it was. I saw myself, a near-psychotic child cuddled in the melancholy armchair in my father’s room, dappled by splotches of sunlight through the cheesy curtains veiling the windows.
When I woke late in the afternoon, I called “writer” again. Again, no response. Instead of relief, I felt irritation. Why had this person put his/her number on a bulletin board if he/she didn’t have a machine to take calls? I called twice in the following three days and was rewarded only with ringing. My irritation increased; still I was grateful to the nincompoop who didn’t answer the phone. My life, divided into habitual motions of eating, reading, shopping, carrying loads of laundry back and forth on the same street, taking cabs to work, clutching my bags of snacks, had become laconic and disconnected;
my strongest feeling in this scheme of things was the settled sense in my stomach when I sat before my desk at work. “Writer” had sent a current quivering through my quotidian existence, and now everything was significant. As I rode to work at night, I saw New York from Granite’s perspective for the first time in eight years. The buildings of Wall Street became symbols of conquest, power, and money, the luscious fruit of life lived in the solid truth. The men who drove cabs and manned the rickety wooden candy/newspaper stalls were soldiers in the battle to uphold these standards. Mary, the white-haired word processor who works with me, was transformed from a cranky old woman into a fighter for the cause of concrete ideals; she was an excellent and compulsive worker who skipped lunch breaks, eating instead from a green box of Mystic Mint cookies in her drawer. Opposite her was the enemy, Joan, the complaining young woman who let her stomach hang out, who wrote articles on leftist painters who “challenge even our most basic assumptions about what is moral,” and who would sneak away from her machine whenever she could to call her boyfriend and yell at him.
My almost daily calls to “writer” took on the ritual quality of my calls to Dial-A-Horoscope. It was a useless gesture and I knew it, yet somehow it was satisfying, a duty performed, a pretension of contact. I was taken off guard when she finally answered.
“Hello?” Her voice was flat, nearly metallic, except for the high pitch that made it the voice of a prematurely serious child. She said she was a free-lance journalist and that she wanted to write an article on Granite’s philosophy, Definitism.
“I’ve just recently realized what an impact it has had on this country’s psychology,” she said solemnly. “It’s quite remarkable. I don’t think any other novelist has done anything comparable.”
We talked enough for me to feel reassured that she wasn’t one of Granite’s enemies. I was lulled by the expressionless, melancholy quality of her voice.
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