B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

  The sound of my ragged sobs alarmed me, and I realized that my head was getting badly hurt, that I had better stop this now. I had to distract myself. Like someone running to put out a fire, I jumped up and shut the windows, closing out the hurtful sounds of other people. I put on my shirt and paced the room, hugging my poor body as if to apologize for the mean things I’d subjected it to. It was fat and nobody liked it, but it was mine, and suddenly I wanted to defend it and hide it away somewhere safe. I went to my bookshelves, my pulse returning slowly to a normal condition. I remembered how reading The Bulwark had made me feel in high school. I picked up The Gods Disdained and went to my bed, collecting my potato chips on the way, and sat wound in a blanket with the book.

  The first thing I read was how utterly alone Solitaire D’Anconti was in the world and how much pain it had caused her. I could understand that. It described how she’d lived in isolation in the bosom of her family, how she was incomprehensible to her parents and resented by her siblings. I read on. It described her pain as a thing of beauty and grandeur, her isolation as a sign of her innate superiority, and, in fact, caused by her superiority, comparable to mountain peaks and skyscrapers. “Every loneliness is a pinnacle,” wrote Anna Granite. I had never thought of it this way before. I read of Solitaire’s physical beauty and intellectual brilliance, how she “grimly seized the rapier of hatred thrust upon her by the squalling mob and fought her way out, forcing the hot anger of her pain into the icy steel of her intellect.” So, not every social misfit was ugly and/or fat! They didn’t all lie on the bathroom floor banging their heads! Some of them ran corporations, which is what Solitaire grew up to do.

  The book was about the struggle of a few isolated, superior people to ward off the attacks of the mean-minded majority as they created all the beautiful important things in the world while having incredible sex with each other. It ended with almost all the inferior majority being blown up in chemical disasters, perishing in airplane wrecks or collapsing buildings, all more or less simultaneously, all as an indirect result of their own inferiority.

  My roommate returned that morning to find me pacing our shared unit, playing classical music on the radio, and devouring donuts in a state of exaltation.

  The days during which I read The Gods Disdained were different from the days before. My life was no longer organized around the meaningless nightmare of dinner in the dorm cafeteria, the walk from class to class, or the classes themselves with their inadequate intellectual content on which I’d vainly tried to ground my flying psyche. Instead, it was the struggles and triumphs of Solitaire, Skip, Bus Taggart, and an array of other characters who now served as the support and metaphor of my existence. Sure, I knew they weren’t real people, but they had sprung from the mind of a real person and thus, according to an argument I’d heard in a philosophy class, were possible. These people were possible!

  I finished reading at about four in the morning in a state of such poignant excitation that I went out and walked around Blythetown for hours, sweating, smiling, almost in tears, loving even the sight of brutish boys weaving heavily out of late-closing bars and vomiting in the street. The world, previously an incomprehensible prison, was now an orderly place where I could live with dignity. Even what my father had done to me—as a result of his denial of reality—was not too horrible to look at, could be explained and then rejected. I could determine my own world and reject anything that made it an unhappy place.

  I skipped school the next day, went to a bookstore and bought everything written by Granite. I stayed home and read for days, oblivious to the histrionic comings and goings of my roommate. When I finished the last of the books, I started over again with The Gods Disdained. Between readings I went to classes and walked around the tiny campus, delirious with ideas.

  In this state of intellectual euphoria, I found it almost impossible to pay attention to my school work. My new world view, structured through Granite’s philosophy, could easily be disarranged by the evil little weavings of the inferior thinkers who dominated my studies, or the noxious barrage of other people’s ideas I received when I sat in the cafeteria, or even the complicated probings of my well-meaning counselor. This did not make me think, as it might have, that perhaps my Granite-based structure was unduly frail. I thought the ease with which my new world was imperiled was due to its newness and my own inexperience in fending off challenges to it. I tried to bring it into contact with other people. I introduced Granite into discussions in history and philosophy and was dismissed by my philosophy professor (“I don’t deal with the work of dime-store ideologues”) and blankly stared at by my history teacher, who’d never heard of her. I was able to talk a little with my roommate, Lisa, as she dragged herself around in the morning in her red kimono and socks, chain-smoking and drinking coffee; she actually seemed grateful when I analyzed her miserable romantic experiences in Granite’s terms.

  But gradually I had to cut out anything that threatened my new world. First to go was my counselor, with her puzzled assurances that any time I needed her, she was there. Then I stopped answering the letters from my mother, those crookedly scrawled missives whose words careened up and down and across the pages, oblivious to lines. Such urgent, frantic script about such a poor dull life. Finally I stopped opening them. Several weeks of silence brought the lounge phone to life and snotty co-eds into my territory with news that I “gotta call,” always from my mother, featuring the occasional tense deranged tenor of my father. It made me almost physically sick to squat on the lounge floor with the phone wedged between shoulder and jaw, corporeally in the sphere of giggling students and canned rock music, and psychically in the realm of my childhood with its listing floors and treacherous light. My mother wanted to know if I was all right. My father wanted to know about my grades. They told me they had new neighbors, and a new paperboy who “missed the goddamn porch every time.” I returned to my room in a state of paralysis.

  I stopped going to the phone when they called. Soon I stopped going to my classes. It wasn’t a decision; I simply couldn’t stand going anymore. I couldn’t stand not going either. I would pace the dorm room as my aspirations of graduation and success crowded into one corner of my head, yelling and screaming. I thought it was already too late, I was ruining my life, I’d missed too much material. A phantasmagoric comet of historical facts, philosophical yammerings, and French phrases would fly about the room, impossible for me to grab. And then the phantom of my parents’ house would appear, trembling and weightless in my skull, and I’d think of the way I’d feel if I went out and walked among the people with their slabs of face and darting eyes. In contrast was the world of Anna Granite, clean and logical, sealed off and growing ever remote, Solitaire, Skip and the others, gazing at me regretfully as they floated farther away. To keep them near, I spent more and more time on my bed, reading Anna Granite while the rest of my life pressed in on me.

  Then, within a two-day period, I read two pieces of information. One was that Anna Granite, who never attended college, had left her parents’ home in pre-revolutionary Romania, left the country at age fourteen, and never spoke to them again. Two was that Anna Granite was now living in Philadelphia where she was giving a series of lectures at her Definitist Institute. It was some time that week, as I lay in bed listening to tinny rock music seeping through the wall from the unit next door, that a path seemed to clear before me, a walkway through the writhing information I woke up to each morning. If Anna Granite could do it, why not I?

  I stopped even thinking about going to classes. I changed from part-time to full-time at the restaurant and feverishly double-shifted. I received a letter from the administration which I threw in the drawer with the unopened letters from my mother.

  I threw the letters away when I left for Philadelphia, but not all unread. The last thing I did before fleeing my dorm room (during the dinner hour so my gobbling fellows wouldn’t see me departing with my meager luggage) was to read letter after increasingly frantic letter, the last o
f which said, “We’re worried about you, honey.”

  The bus trip to Philadelphia was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. The vinyl seats, ripped and exploding with dirty foam rubber, the greasy windows, the droopy heads of my companions, the odor of lavatory disinfectant, the merrily sloshing bit of blue at the bottom of the mysterious toilet—the foreignness, the oddity of it thrilled me. I felt I could ride around in the bus forever, going from one dismal, echoing station to the next, eating stale sandwiches and coffee from machines, talking to no one, my identity shrunk to that of fat girl on the bus. Strangely, as I rode through the concrete landscape, dreaming about a life of achievement, beauty, and excellence, I found repose in anonymity and ugliness.

  I thought of my parents, fleetingly. I saw my mother standing in the kitchen, her arms limp, her eyes absent. She was exactly the type of person Anna Granite depicted as a vehicle for evil, and she had been. My father’s image I had no trouble rejecting. He was a bully, a weak nasty little man who had accomplished nothing. He was a denier of reality who had almost destroyed me. I shut a door on him forever as I rode the Greyhound eating potato chips and Junior Mints.

  I ensconced myself in the Euella Parks Young Women’s Hotel, a maternal building with round scrolling flourishes on eave and cornice. According to the schedule I’d received via mail from the Definitist Institute, Granite lectured on Wednesday. It was Sunday. I spent the entire first afternoon and evening pacing the room, sorting and resorting my clothes in their rickety new drawers, arranging my few dresses in the closet, studying the traffic on the street below, rehearsing what I would say to Anna Granite when the moment came, and imagining what she would say to me. My heart swelled with anticipation and fear as scene after scene unreeled before me. I’m not sure why fear; possibly because the intimacy and understanding that I fantasized was such that it would rip my skin off. She would look at me and know everything I’d endured. I wouldn’t have to hold back; I could tell her about it all, I could allow her to penetrate that part of myself I’d held away from everyone, the tiny but vibrant internal Never-Never Land I’d lived in when there was no other place for me. I imagined how moved she would be by my inner world, how angry she would be at how I’d been betrayed. The mere idea of her powerful emotions were enough to make me weep as I circled the room, running my hands up and down the sides of my body. I imagined myself in a psychic swoon, lush flowers of surrender popping out about my head as I was upheld by the mighty current of Granite’s intellectual embrace.

  But what if it didn’t happen that way? I had never seen this woman; how could I imagine she would care for me in a way that no one else ever had? This question made me feel a loneliness so insupportable that I’d hug my original fantasy until it hurt, then let go into the loneliness again.

  At first daylight I rose from my snarled bed clothes (I’d vainly tried to sleep), got dressed and went out. It was a gray dirty morning; squashed milk cartons and eggshells lay in the street. People were walking with their faces against the wind, clothes flapping. I imagined them all in their offices and their apartments, living their fascinating lives (All the little knickknacks! The cartoons taped to refrigerators! The romances, the phone conversations, the families!), occupying their complicated inner worlds as full humans yet appearing in public streets every day to become walking knickknacks in someone else’s landscape.

  I had spent almost my entire life in rooms, both literally and figuratively, and my awakened sense of private versus public hammered me in the head. I was absorbed by every face that passed me; the jowls, the eye wrinkles, the bumpy noses, the flower-petal quality of young female skin, the parasitic crust of mascara, the leakages of lipstick into tiny mouth lines, the delicate eyebrow hairs, the blue frond of vein at the temple—how could I ever have viewed these organisms as slabs! Even more unlike my campus experience, I didn’t feel either isolation or exposure as I walked among the citizens of Philadelphia. I felt as though I occupied a compartment of personal space that they instinctively respected as I respected theirs, out of which I could gaze with total impunity.

  I roamed the city in this fashion all day, breakfasting on french toast, riding the bus, sitting in parks, strolling a museum, a department store, a Laundromat. I returned to the hotel with a bag of burgers, fries, and orange drink and slept almost immediately after consuming them. I woke in darkness, shoved out of sleep by a terrifying dream, unable to identify my surroundings or the menacing ear-piercing buzz which was, I finally realized, the big pink hotel sign outside my window. I had dreamed that my mother was under the ground in a container so small she couldn’t move. In the slow darkness of my dream landscape, she sent me telepathic messages from her prison. She said, “I’m in hell, Dotty.” In the dream this filled me with pain and terror and I tried to find my mother to comfort her. But I could only sense her locked deep underground, away from me forever.

  When I recovered enough to turn on the light, I noticed that the Euella Parks Hotel had cockroaches, many of which were forming a living mosaic on my take-out containers. I spent the rest of the night fitfully pacing, thinking obsessively of Anna Granite until the sun came up and I burst out of my cage and went to have french toast for breakfast again.

  The next day and night followed the same pattern and the evening of the Definitist meeting found me an exhausted nervous wreck, pacing before the hotel rented by the Definitists, eating from a bag of corn curls to calm my agitation. At eighteen minutes before the hour they began to arrive. I stood holding my balled-up corn-curl bag behind my back, studying them as they walked by, my excitement leveling into delight and solemnity. They were just as I’d imagined: tall, serious young men in suits, sometimes accompanied by a serious young woman. Almost all were handsome, all had a dignified demeanor and good posture. Strangely, I didn’t feel embarrassed to be the only fatty in the group, the way I usually did at gatherings of the normally proportioned. Still self-consciousness prevented me from entering the hall until everyone else had and the meeting was about to start.

  When I finally did go in, I wasn’t disappointed. The Centurion Hotel was of the grand old variety, and the hall in which Anna Granite was speaking was long, thick rugged and crystal chandeliered. There were rows of magnificent chairs placed before a low dais and, on the velvet seat of every chair, a sheaf of vellum note paper and an expensive silver pen that caught and refracted the light of the chandeliers. The solemnity of the note paper, the intellectual heaviness of the pens from which sprang the airy nymph of light—these qualities were such a perfect analogy for the balance of rationality and passion in Granite’s work that really, it would’ve been enough for me to stand there in that room of hushed, attractive people for a few hours and then go back to the hotel and collapse.

  But that wasn’t all I’d come for, and through a haze of intense emotion I made my way to the nearest chair and seated myself next to a devastatingly handsome man. He glanced cordially in my direction and executed an unnecessary but polite body movement acknowledging my proximity. Then there was a low communal murmur; I looked up and saw that people had appeared on the stage. A tall, broad, handsome man (who I would later know as Beau Bradley) and a graceful woman walked out like an advance guard and seated themselves on the dais. Then, with a dramatic flourish of curtain, she appeared.

  The emanation of awe from the crowd was tantamount to a chest-thumping, fist-thrusting salute, but truthfully, I was a little disappointed. She was short, thick, and unbeautiful, her hair a tight cap of curls on a square, prematurely lined face. I struggled, my disappointment a dark wave under my need to worship. My fantasy listed feverishly, its crew collapsing on the starboard bow, yelling and frantically manning the pumps. Maybe I thought, maybe she really was beautiful, in an unconventional way. I looked at her eyes—they were truly striking, huge, blue, and electrical, as though the heat of her deepest body as well as the voltage of her cortex was streaming from them. Then the light caught the necklace she wore, the deep blue hunks of precious stone that en
circled her, and in a flash, I saw her haloed by the brilliant wattage of blue, the air about her ululating with an iridescent current of energy. She began to speak. My fantasy mightily puffed out its sails and flew into the stratosphere, crew cheering. I burst into tears.

  Part Three

  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.