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 pe
ople. 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.
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.
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