B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

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

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

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

  “Oh God.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “All right.” Her pen was ready.

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

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

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

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

  “What were they like?”

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

  “What was Granite like?”

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

  Justine grudgingly gave her pen a token second of rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What were they like?”

  “Pleasant, polite.”

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

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

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

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

  “Bradley nearly killed himself, but in the end he faced it, admitted his error, and rebuilt his life. He went to Canada and married Cheryl Bland—she was maimed two years later in a hunting accident, a tragic story. But Granite failed to examine what had happened. She hardened in her position that Bradley was a traitor to Definitism, and everybody around her had to harden theirs to suit her. By that time she had backed herself into a corner and surrounded herself with wimps and that’s why she wound up playing Twenty Questions with sycophants instead of leading a movement.”

  I regarded Justine happily. She was scribbling dutifully. I had underestimated her. She seemed unresponsive only because she had been listening so intently, her attention too focused to allow outward expression. There was something wonderfully consistent about her. She was like Katya, the serious, doomed young heroine of Granite’s early Last Woman Alive, Katya who never reveals her emotions, letting the nature of her thoughts and actions stand alone. I remembered that Justine was a molested child, and her methodical reserve became all the more poignant. I reclined and allowed a sensation of personal contact and intimacy to assail me. We could be friends. We could be more than friends; she could be the one to at last tell the truth about Anna Granite to an ignorant world. When she looked up at me, I was convinced of it; her demeanor was that of one who has just come to an understanding.

  “So you still consider yourself a Definitist, even though you reject the idea of matching components?”

  It was a disappointment, but I answered it.

  “I don’t reject it, I—” There was a twinge of hostility in my chest. “Look, you’re really not getting it. The most important thing about Definitism isn’t matching components, it’s that it takes life seriously, which is rare. She said reality was definable—no one was saying that in the sixties. She said you were important in reality, that you could control it. She was the first person to tell me I was important and that I could come out and say so.”

  “Do you feel that fatalism was pushed on you in school or elsewhere?”

  “Yes. One of my first memories is having to deny the concrete truths of my life, of denying the clear pattern of them. In school, everything was disconnected, you were never supposed to discover the way things interlocked.”

  I regarded Justine with dislike and awaited her next prepackaged question.

  “Do you think all of the evil in the world can be attributed to denying an interconnected reality?”

  “Evil comes from denying reality. Period. If my father hadn’t deluded himself, he never would have been able to do what he did. You have to distort reality to rationalize evil acts.”

  I was suddenly very tired. A world had been created between this girl and me, a subtle, turbulent, exhausting world. I had not had such a long conversation with anyone for over two years.

  “I think I will have some tea now,” she said.

  “Go right ahead. Although it’s probably cold.”

  I watched her lean forward to fuss with the tea things. Her movements were careful and graceful. Perhaps I had reacted to her too harshly. She had, after all, just barely been exposed to the complexities of Definitism. There was ink on the tips of her bluntnailed fingers.

  She sat back in the uncomfortable chair and sipped her tea from the turquoise cup. The sun had moved, or been blotted by a cloud, and she was no longer so oppressed by its light. She looked at me frankly, perhaps a little sadly, as she placed her cup on the table and reclaimed her pen and pad. “I hope I’m not taking too much of your time,” she said.

  “Oh no. I don’t work until midnight tonight so I have plenty of time.” I omitted telling her that in my eagerness to speak with her I had stayed up past my bedtime, and that I was thus punchy and skittish.

  “There’s just a few more questions.”

  “All right.”

  “Why do you think Definitism frightens people so?”

  “Because it’s powerful. It glorifies the freedom of the individual, and nowadays that sort of philosophy is labeled fascistic. People think if you make moral judgments, or work hard for a goal and don’t let yourself be deterred, if you accomplish something, that you’re right wing and somehow unfeeling to other people’s plights.” I glanced out my windows into the health club across the street. The exercise class was starting. I could make out the dim shapes of thickset young men in shorts stretching themselves, posing on steely machines, prowling. “People made a lot of assumptions about Granite that simply weren’t true. It’s possible to have great humanity and be a Definitist. I once protected a prostitute from an abusive client—let her stay with me, helped her get back on her feet. And when people who knew I was a Definitist heard that I’d done that, they were shocked that I would protect such a woman, as if being a Definitist and a compassionate person were a contradiction in terms.”

  They were lining up, jostling into position like ponies, pointing their toes against the floor to flex their calves. The instructor st
ood by, slim hip tilted, indolently lifting and dropping a small barbell in one hand. I wasn’t usually awake to see this class. They were restful and pleasing to watch when they did their exercises in formation: dozens of boys bending, stretching, and jumping in harmony, standing splay-legged to lift weights, or on their backs, rapidly curling and uncurling like wounded ants.

  “People only accept the validity of movements that champion the underdog and scorn those that champion people of great accomplishment. You always have to take the dumbest as your lowest common denominator.” The phrase caught in my throat; it had a hard, treacherous shape. I imagined my words tumbling atop each other, snarling together, forming a hostile tangle around my feet that I vainly struggled to escape as a chorus of Granite’s enemies stood and pointed and said, “So! You despise the weak, the helpless . . .” “So people start to think that someone like me, a Definitist, would not feel sympathy for the weak and helpless. Well, they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Pardon my French.” I wrenched myself free of the trap and stood defiant, fists clenched at my sides. Justine stared at my sudden anger. “I had a friend once named Kim who happened to be retarded. We used to belong to a women’s support group, and those women there, those Marxist, feminist bitches, they ignored Kim, they hurt Kim, they would kill Kim if they thought it would further a cause. They would victimize the weak and the helpless. Not me. And not Granite.” Kim’s loose-eyeballed face and pathetic form stood peeping from behind my defiant, fish-clenching figure.

  The exercisers began their jumping jacks.

  “How did Granite react to the press?”

  “She was hurt by them. She could never really defend herself against them, especially after Bradley left. She was a tough lady supreme. But somehow her very toughness made her vulnerable to jerks. If she was wrong but thought she was right she would go to the death to defend it—and she did in the case of Beau Bradley. She was brilliant, she was powerfully sexual, and she spoke with a glamorous accent. When the average person sees a woman with all these qualities plus, he is going to be overwhelmed with how small he is in comparison. She scared the shit out of them. She believed in herself and they didn’t believe in themselves, and they hated her for that. The critics gang-raped her. She tried to fight back but she just wasn’t capable of dealing on their niggling, ugly level.”