“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 excitem
ent 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?”
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