“I don’t know why that would be,” I said inanely. “You’re such a pretty woman.”
“I don’t think I know how to have relationships.” She rushed her tone to let me know this was the end of the conversation, pulled the tape recorder into her bag, and looked at me with a hurried sidelong glance, part rueful smile, that was like the light in the crack of a door which is closing shut.
For weeks this conversation seeped across the borders of my days. I found myself bursting into extensions of it as I paced my room, preparing for work. “Once you understand the Definitist principles of mutual self-interest, you realize that an affair with a married man is no problem,” I argued.
As time went on, my excited soliloquies faded, and I found myself brooding over the fact that it was I, not she, who had asked the question, “Well, if it was so great, why didn’t you do it again?” Sometimes I answered, “Because I’m fat,” and I saw her face before me, skeptical, as if waiting for me to tell the truth.
I sat in my armchair with bags of potato chips and cookies, flitting from channel to channel with my remote control, pausing long enough to get irritated at the various yakking faces, the muddled blurs of action. I kept coming back to the channel that devoted itself exclusively to videos of bands playing their trashy music amid the debris of images that changed with the rapid fluidity of dreams without the context of a dreamer. I usually passed over this station, but today I found its random faces and movements facilitated my brooding.
The camera was on the chiseled face of a boy whose features were almost distorted with beauty, whose voluptuous lips were an accident of monstrous fecundity in the icy desolation of his cheeks, forehead, and cold empty eyes, who looked as if the hard planes of his face were the direct result of the hard world in his skull.
The camera panned back to show a group of boys much like him, with fetishistic long hair and arrogant childish features. The camera played over their fingers, their lithe arms, the feverish tattoos on their slim biceps (bulging eyes, dripping fangs). The singer’s voice plunged into a pit of chemical fire and leapt out screaming. The video told the story of a boy named Ricky who has crossed over into the dreamy world of limitless cruelty with the blithe ease of childhood. He was fighting with his dad in a suburban rec room, the dad a numb fleshy brute whose mind is a blueprint of whatever social rules prevail at the moment. I watched with interest. Dad pushed the kid through a plate glass door. The kid’s friend, a pretty, gentle-faced boy, went to help him up and was shoved aside. Both boys walked away from gaping Dad with gestures of contempt. The band threw their hair around, and the singer drew a leash around the throat of his ferocious voice. The next scene was the two boys smashing the meager furnishings of a deserted building, drinking alcohol with head-tipped abandon, and setting the building on fire while the invisible band members screamed and played loud. The boys, silhouetted by flames, leapt into the air to ritually slap their hands together. The band threw their hair again, and I noticed the harshness of their faces was now softened, the singer’s especially; his long throat was exposed, his beautiful lips seductively parted. The child vandal pulled up his shirt to reveal a big handgun thrust deep down the front of his pants and then withdrew the gun. He pointed it at his partner, who patted it away with the look of a girl being teased by a boy she likes. The band squirmed against their screeching instruments. The boys pushed and playfully shoved, the gentler one throwing his whiskey bottle into the air for Ricky to shoot. Ricky pointed the gun at him again, and this time the boy opened his jacket to show his chest and dared him to shoot. Ricky shot his pretty friend, and the boy fell in a slow motion slur of open lips and wide disbelieving eyes.
The singer’s last screech distended his voice further still. The guitar chords trailed away.
I was remembering the way I had felt with Knight. When he held me in his arms, it felt as though he held my beating inner organs in his hands. This feeling frightened me so much that I could not sustain it while he was inside me. But when sex was over and we lay in each other’s arms, the reverberation of it throbbed in my chest like an open wound that only his presence could heal.
I remembered sitting in the hotel restaurant the morning after, the day he left forever, staring at the mass of flowers, all of different demeanor—exploding, rampant, brandishing their bright petals in the air, or frail and delicate, shyly whispering from the vase. There were splotches of light on the vase and on the table. The morning sun was in Knight’s face, revealing all his pores and tiny hairs, the slight oiliness of his nose, the rolling motion of his swallowing throat. I had never seen him as quite such a corporeal creature before. He smiled at me and talked about the projects he had waiting for him in New York. I remembered that in The Bulwark, after Frank Golanka takes Asia Maconda in the art gallery, he walks out sneering and doesn’t think about her, even though it was the best sex he had ever had, until a few days later when she crosses his mind during a flight to Los Angeles and he’s amazed to be thinking of her at all. In the book, this doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her: they eventually get married. But Knight was already getting married to someone else. I looked around the room, taking in the beauty of the shimmering glass chandeliers, the velvet curtains, the composed men and women eating their lunch, trying greedily to feel every iota of the romance and wonderfulness of the experience. I wanted to fondle and squeeze the experience, to possess it, to jam it down into every cell in my body, my love affair, my glamorous love affair, my glass chandeliers and flowers, stuffed into the locked steel box of memory where no one could get it. But I couldn’t. I had no context, no reference point, for anything that was happening to me now and could only stare, stunned and frozen, barely able to feel it at all, almost glad that Knight was about to go away.
I remembered lying in bed the night after he did go away. I had lain down looking forward to curling up in a lone ball, with a sense of goodwill for Knight, now miles away in the arms of his brilliant and beautiful fiancée. But then I thought of him as he had been with me the night before, and suddenly it happened all over again, my body swelled open to receive him, only this time it didn’t shut and this time he wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to do. My heart continued to thud, saliva collected in my mouth. I lay in this open position all night, my body receiving only emptiness and silence.
It did not occur to me to call him or to try to see him again. I would picture him with his fiancée, who I imagined as tall, blond, lithe, and thin, and tears of admiration would come to my eyes as I felt the great love between these intellectual titans. I would imagine them in profile, facing the wind together, her blond hair blown back, his eyes coolly lidded, her chin lifted haughtily, his jaw set in determination, and I would think, this is how it should be. And I thought, as I lay in my bed at night, how lucky I was to have been a part of these mighty lives.
When I finally saw them together some time later, I was disappointed to see she was dark haired, with heavy thighs and a fleshy jaw line. It was disorienting to see him after so much time; my dismembered love twitched into life at the sight of him and began to stumble about like Frankenstein’s poor monster, who doesn’t know why he’s alive.
I imagined Knight as he must be today, in his late forties by now, sitting at a desk somewhere, wielding power. I wondered if he ever thought of me. I wondered if he had had other affairs during the last decade. I enjoyed thinking that he had; I liked creating a world of illicit meetings, smoldering glances, feelings too strong to be denied, the powerful businesswomen moaning beneath him, caught in the vise of their doomed love. Gee, I’d been part of it. Except now I wasn’t. I had never had illicit meetings, writhed beneath anyone, threatened a marriage. I never even got a chance to writhe beneath Knight; I lay there stiff and terrified. I hadn’t been a powerful businesswoman either. How did I fit into this picture? How would he remember me, if he remembered me? What had it been like for Knight Ludlow, superior person, to hold the firm, fat young body of an abused child in his arms, to feel her racked with c
onflicting impulses, finally coming to a shuddering halt against him, her hot little face in his chest? Had it been pleasant? Had it been a lot of fun?
On the television screen before me a forty-plus woman pranced in garter belt and stockings, displaying the tattoos on her buttocks before an entire battleship crew as she belted out a song.
Why had he done that anyway? Why had he stroked and reassured my frightened body until it felt its need for love and opened up, only to find he had gone? Why did the affair which I had always cherished as the most beautiful thing in my emotional life suddenly seem like a rape?
It was as if I had divided into two people: one hungrily embracing the dangerous world of emotional contact and power play, enjoying the game of move, counter move, the unpredictable changes of feelings, the other a terrified child unable to bear the carnivorous spirit of this world, weeping with fear at the sight of adults savagely copulating on their beds, on desks, in elevators.
I was ashamed of this child and tried to stifle her. She was, after all, the weak, the unable one who must not be allowed to restrain the strong in their thirst for life. Anna Granite was never cruel, never callous, as people believed her to be. She simply loved life, was capable of living it at fifty times the intensity of most people, and could not bear to see the bright beast of desire tripped up in its lunge towards pleasure by some sniveling kid who, if it had its way, would live its life in a closet under a blanket.
But when her affair with Beau Bradley had ended, a kid came roaring out of her closet, kicking, screaming, and throwing things.
“That bastard!” she raged, “that dirty, treacherous little bastard! How dare he! How dare he!”
She had just read the letter in which he informed her that his love for her, while still strong, had become platonic; he wanted to be friends.
“Tell him to get up here on the double before I drag him up by his ear!”
“Up here” was her hotel suite where I happened to be taking dictation; a group of us were attending a conference in Boston. Bradley was out of his room at the moment and thus couldn’t be summoned, and Granite was left alone with me and her fury, stalking the room muttering, actually stumbling once over her cape and flinging an ashtray. I sat silent and still, impressed by the magnificence of her rage and yet puzzled by it. Why, I wondered, was she not happy, in her love for Bradley, to let him decide for his most positive value?
I got my answer when Bradley arrived. As he entered, Granite marched up to him and struck his face so hard he staggered to one side and then to the other as she backhanded him.
“You have betrayed the principle of matching components!” she screamed. “Unless you can give me a rational reason for this treachery, you are my enemy for life—for life!”
Poor Bradley, obviously unprepared for this, fumbled for an intellectual argument to support his decision. Even I could hear the truth in his voice; he simply wasn’t attracted to her. So she declared her enmity again, slapped him around some more, and then let him crawl away. I only saw him once more after that, fleeing the Philadelphia office with his box of papers.
Wilson Bean took Bradley’s place, and I became his secretary.
After the end of her affair with Bradley, Granite changed. I thought the change was permanent, but it was apparent only for about a month. Her face temporarily lost its hot ferocity, its leonine, regal calm. The circles beneath her eyes became darker, the deep lines running from her nostrils to her chin evinced pain and deprivation, and sometimes her mouth would look like the crabbed, down-pulled mouth of a bitter old woman poking furiously around in a bargain bin for something she doesn’t really want anyway.
It wasn’t very attractive, but there was something noble and moving about her during this time. I was often with her in the week or so before the advent of Bean, taking dictation from her—notes for an (alas doomed) sequel to Gods Disdained. And it was during this time that I came to feel most close to her, although we talked very little. Her pain was something precious, and I felt I was somehow its caretaker, alone in the rare pain museum, protecting the encased specimens, tiptoeing about with the requisite solemnity, watchful and fussy that everything be just right. I made her coffee, turned down her bed, listened to her dreams.
She felt my protection and vigilance, I’m sure of it. I could see it in her eyes when she looked at me years later, an expression that spoke of her superiority but also of her gratitude for that slim psychic strand between us, along which my protection had once traveled towards her.
On TV more cute boys threw their hair and screamed about love.
Justine pressed her face into the floor, rubbing her cheek against the porous smelly wood, trying to scrape through her drunkenness. Darkness moved around her; she could barely feel the welts rising on her back. Her knees hurt, she thought. He beat her as she squirmed on the floor, caught in the steel trap that had closed on her when she was five years old. The upper strata of her thoughts and feelings had ruptured, and the creature long trapped beneath was out and gnawing her with its teeth.
She felt him drop down on his knees to fuck her and she turned away from him, rolling on her back. “I don’t want your cock,” she said. “I want you to make yourself soft and piss on my cunt.”
She lay panting on the floor as he stood at the counter pouring beer down his throat. Silence imploded in her ears. She turned her head to stare at her shoe lying on its side.
That night at dinner he had told her stories of his travels in Southeast Asia.
He had walked through the Patagandrian rain forest with kind, dark guides who showed him where to find edible plants and roots to drink from, and who told him stories based on their dreams. The paths in the forest were so hard that his shoes were destroyed in a week, they were so rugged that he could not walk on them without falling again and again. If you cut your foot in the forest, he said, you could get an infection and die in days. His guides had feet that were tougher than shoes and they taught him how to walk in the forest, they taught him how to read direction on the bark of trees and the hairs of moss.
He traveled weeks without seeing the sky, when the sun was an article of faith through the emerald roof of the forest. He saw pale-hued flowers that bloomed at night, giant spiders bejewelled with bright hoary pustules, salamanders with tiny palpitant throats, sudden storms of butterflies and plant roots that tore through the earth with erotic violence. He saw a man covered with animal tattoos carrying an old-fashioned washing machine through the jungle on his back. He saw villages where people danced to Prince and Beach Boys tapes, and predicted the future with the entrails of pigs. He hunted boar with parties of men and half-wild dogs. He murdered animals for the pleasure of watching them die. He was mistaken for an evil spirit and almost butchered by a frightened woman with a machete. He talked her out of it, and gave her his Swatch watch, assuring her it would protect her from any cruel spirit.
After two years he returned to Manhattan and was totally disoriented. He felt as if the cab bearing him home from the airport was taking him into hell. It was early December and, trapped in the stultification of the holiday traffic uptown, he viewed legions of shoppers marching the streets at what seemed an insane and martial speed, their expressions of frozen emotion covered with willful oblivion. Mechanical elves and dummy children in the windows of Bloomingdale’s beat their cymbals and screamed with joy around the tree. Human beggars extended their hands into the neurotic throng, like thirst-parched men sticking their cupped hands out into the rain which, thoughtless and unfeeling though it is, will provide them with enough drops to survive.
She listened, impressed by his bravery and ingenuity and uneasy with the combination of condescension and fondness with which he described the forest people. She saw him again as she had seen him on their first meeting, a mobile little sphinx with shifting surfaces encouraging her to admire its mystery and then contemptuously shedding that mystery like an old skin, laughing at her as she puzzled over the empty skin. It occurred to her that perhaps he f
elt so comfortable in Southeast Asia because it wasn’t possible to pull this act there; people wouldn’t understand it. He was probably forced by language and cultural barriers to interact on a fundamental human level; this being an experience he’d never had before in his life, it was probably a great novelty as well as a great relief.
He leaned naked against the counter drinking beer so he’d have some piss when the moment came. His body had a tense, frenetic, rigid quality, it was completely stripped of its animal nature. And out of his face, emerging as if his cells had subtly changed shape, came the stiff visage of something old, mechanical, and unfeeling. She felt that this thing was part of him, and that if it had taken a different turn in its development, it could’ve been a natural element of his self, but that it had instead gotten stuck in a crawl space somewhere, neglected and denied contact until it had grown into this creature that appeared to come over him like a transfiguration.
“Play with yourself,” he said. “Stick your fingers in your cunt.”
She did what he said; she was wet, swollen, tender, and numb. She masturbated expertly and felt nothing. She was aware of her humiliation, but it was so far away and had so little to do with her that she couldn’t feel that either. Still, she clung to it fiercely, as if it were her only chance to feel.
He pissed on her genitals, occasionally traveling up her body. It felt warm, almost caressing, and for a second she had an unbearable sensation of closeness with him. Then she worried about the mess on the floor, which had smelled bad enough to begin with.
“Tell me you love me,” he said.
“I love you.”
He pissed in her face.
After dinner they had gone to a bar with red vinyl booths and drank martinis as they sat close together, stroking each other’s thighs. She had told him about her experience in the garage with Rick Houlihan.
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