B00768D9Y8 EBOK

by Gaitskill, Mary

  “That sounds a little gruesome,” he said.

  “Well, yeah.” She stared confused at the play of light and shadow on a painfully perfect martini glass. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean was it really that bad?”

  “Yeah, it was. He was your average jerk I guess.” She picked her olive out of her glass and chewed it, savoring its bitterness.

  He stared at her until she felt self-conscious as she hunted for bits of unchewed olive with her tongue. “Most of the men I’ve ever been with are like that. They’re really awful.”

  His face went into a strange combination; his mouth was as playfully cruel as a child torturing an animal while his eyes were gentle and inviting. “You are so hard and closed,” he said. “Don’t you know anything about tenderness and caring? Between men and women?”

  She stared, incredulous to think that he was on speaking terms with tenderness and caring. “Are you trying to tell me that you do?”

  “Yeah, I do.” His eyes beckoned her into an Easter egg world where males and females held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes while music played in the background. She regarded it suspiciously. “I’ve had relationships that were close and loving. From what you’ve told me, you haven’t. Why is that?”

  His falsely tender eyes mocked her and hurt her; still part of her trembled forward, starving to experience the place of love and closeness he had displayed, even if it was a deliberate illusion created to highlight her privation.

  He smiled, and the cruelty of his mouth shadowed his eyes and made their tenderness piercing. “I’m going to teach you about love and closeness,” he said.

  They fucked touching as little as possible; he raised straight up on his arms, she with her legs wide apart and her arms flung open to grip the sheets in an anti-embrace. She closed her eyes and turned her head away from him, hurtling alone through her imagination, the furniture of her internal self smashing on impact.

  “I’d like to see you on your hands and knees,” he whispered, “surrounded by guys who’d piss on your cunt and jerk off in your face. I’d like to blindfold you in the Hellfire Club and tie you up with your legs spread so anybody could fuck you or beat you.”

  She imagined the warm piss of strangers between her legs and come running down her face. Split apart and boundary-less, she was sucked into the eye of the storm. She reached between her legs for some tiny memory of pleasure. She floated for a second of peace before she came as if she were being cut to pieces, her cunt and her heart utterly apart.

  He continued to flail above her, his eyes closed, oblivious, alone in his private cyclone.

  I don’t have a husband anymore and my kids don’t give a damn about me,” said the elderly black lady. She regarded Justine with what appeared to be irritation as Justine moved about her, preparing her for an EKG.

  “What about friends? Can’t they help you out?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not the kind of person who likes to always be going to other people with my problems. They’ve got plenty of their own you know.” Mrs. Dubois regarded her censoriously.

  The problem under discussion was Mrs. Dubois’s partial blindness due to severe cataracts in both eyes. She had begun to find it difficult to shop and to read bills; she had almost fallen down a flight of stairs, a potential disaster for someone her age. She was reluctant, however, to have the cataracts removed; Justice thought it was because she was afraid of having her eyes operated on. “I’m sure your friends wouldn’t mind helping you,” said Justine, “they’d be pretty mean if they did.”

  Mrs. Dubois answered her with a look that said, “If you think that’s ‘mean,’ you don’t know what mean is, you young fool.”

  Well, thought Justine, it’s not any of my business. Still, she had always liked Mrs. Dubois, a stiff-backed, ill-tempered, good-mannered, ferociously proper little woman who always pulled on her threadbare kid gloves with a wonderful arrogant smartness before she left the office. She hated to think of her alone at home in a small dark apartment, hungry and afraid to go out because she couldn’t see. She wondered if her pride prevented her from getting help from her neighbors and children, or if they really were indifferent to her. She applied the clamps to the delicate sepia ankles and thought of herself, alone in her apartment at night, trying to soothe herself to sleep with a fantasy of Bryan holding her in his arms and cupping her head against his chest, which he never did and probably never would do. Her concern for Mrs. Dubois united with her desperation and self-pity and became magnified abnormally. She thought of Mrs. Dubois as a young woman, a romantic and finicky young woman who liked matching jewelry combinations and wanted everything to be just so. She imagined her traveling through the barbed wire and land mines of a racist society which refused to respect or even acknowledge the delicacy of any black woman and insisted on seeing only the coarseness and dullness that it had decreed to be the character of African-Americans, regardless of how it had to distort its vision in the process. Since the neat garden of Angeline Dubois’s nature was denied the sun and warmth of acknowledgment, she was forced to turn inward to keep her internal garden alive, to draw nurture from an underground well so deep she couldn’t allow her attention to waver from the thread of concentration on which she lowered the bucket, lest the thread break and she be bereft forever. Thus she drew herself in, stiffening the rules, regulations, and visiting hours of the garden, tightening its borders, becoming fanatical over the patterns in which it was allowed to grow until her natural delicacy had assumed the martial uniform of primness, the bitter primness with which she pulled on her battered, once-elegant gloves.

  Justine desolately considered the level of insult this woman had had to bear simply in maintaining her true self in a world that denied its existence, and the vicarious pain fell like a piece of granite against her own pain. “Maybe you should get the operation, Mrs. Dubois,” she said.

  The filmy, half-blinded eyes filled with expressions that rose and were succeeded by different shades of feeling; she saw Justine’s kindness which she despised and rejected, she saw also that the kindness was connected to something else, felt curious as to what this other thing might be, then rejected it as well, then felt curious again. Justine could see she felt invaded and oppressed by her concern, and strove to hold it away from her. Then the eyes softened, perhaps because she saw that Justine was essentially harmless and well-meaning, perhaps because she was too old to expend the energy required to reject her; she accepted Justine’s kindness and then let it fall away from her with the uselessness of a broken ornament. “Well maybe I will,” she said.

  Mrs. Dubois says her children don’t give a damn about her,” said Justine to Glenda.

  “Ah! That is nonsense. She is probably just depressed.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because her daughter has come to pick her up here before and she seems to be a fine young person. She wouldn’t come pick her up if she didn’t care about her.”

  Justine didn’t see that that was necessarily true but she didn’t want to argue. Glenda oscillated the radio dial to escape the news for more classical music and was interrupted by a phone call. The dial was caught for a moment on a pop song undercut with the processed mutter of the news broadcast. The song told about love and then the news voice gained ascendancy long enough to mention the latest in a series of incidents in which gangs of young girls surrounded lone women and jabbed them in the butt with needles. So far, the jabbing girls had been black and the jabbed women had been white, and the media was solemnly speculating that the attacks might be racial; one commentator said she thought that perhaps they were making a statement about the spread of AIDS in the black community via hypodermics. The love song swelled forth again, smothering the news with one and only true love. Justine was stung by the sweet, calculated young voice, its high pitch like a tiny knife cutting a valentine heart out of the coarse flesh of love.

  Mrs. Dubois emerged from the office, her little hat askew on her head. For the first time Ju
stine saw her composure become undone in embarrassment as she reacted to the sight of Justine’s face, which was crying spare, almost dry tears as she filled out Mrs. Dubois’s appointment card, talking as if nothing unusual was taking place even as the tears ran over her lips.

  Justine was glad when they let her leave work early because that way she would have more time to work on her Anna Granite piece. But it had probably made a bad impression to cry at work, even though she had done it discreetly, even though Mrs. Dubois had been nice about it.

  She bought a bag of cookies in lieu of dinner and ate them as she sat on the floor with her legs extended before her, thinking about the article. She justified going without dinner by telling herself that preparing and eating it would take away too much of her writing time. The eating of meals had somehow become burdensome to her; she was losing weight and becoming anxious about her health, yet she couldn’t make herself eat nutritionally sound food. Well, she’d worry about it later. She wadded up the empty cookie bag and left it on the floor. She put her notebook on her lap, picked up her pen, and began: “The national swing to the right, in progress for the last five years, has developed the skewed, triple exclamation point character of a bad novel.”

  The phone rang, and she picked it up. “Hi,” he said. “Feel like getting your ass whipped?”

  “I’m busy,” she snapped and hung up.

  The phone rang again, four times before she answered it.

  “God, what’re you so testy about?” he asked. “At least you could say hello.”

  “It didn’t seem necessary.”

  “You know my nutty sense of humor.”

  “Okay, hello. I’m working on my article and I can’t see you tonight if that’s what you were asking about.”

  “I understand. You’re writing really important stuff and you can’t be interrupted.”

  “Fuck off.” She hung up again.

  The phone rang again. Again she picked it up.

  “Is this behavior modification or what?”

  “You’re acting like an asshole.”

  “So what else is new? Justine, I don’t want to make you mad. I know you have to do your work. It’ll probably be great. I just wanted to see you. I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you too,” she lied.

  “That’s nice.”

  “I’d love to see you, it’s just I can’t now. If I get this done tonight, maybe tomorrow.”

  They hung up civilly. She continued writing. “This cultural utopia of greed, expressed in gentrification and the slashing of social programs, has had its spokesperson and prophet for the last fifty years, a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing. Anna Granite, who coined the term ‘the Truth of Selfishness,’ has been advocating the yuppie raison d’être since the early forties; it is only now that her ideas are being lived out, in mass culture and in government.”

  The phone rang again.

  “How about if I just come over and whip you and then leave so you can keep working?”

  She hung up, cursed, unplugged the phone, and kept writing.

  Justine had said that she would call me when the article was going to appear in the Vision, and I believed her. I knew that it often took months for magazines to print articles, so I wasn’t suspicious or impatient when two months passed without my hearing from her. I kept it in the back of my mind like a present to be opened when the time was right. I imagined reading it and then meeting with Justine to discuss it. I would praise her overall insight and then criticize the finer points of her analysis, instructing her in how she might present her arguments better in the future. I imagined her following my finger with her eyes as it traced the place she had gone slightly awry in her article, I imagined her humbly nodding.

  But she didn’t call me.

  I was leaving work after a grueling twelve-hour shift. It was 10:00 A.M., and I was exhausted. Tiny particles of paranormal light swam before my eyes; the day workers, with their bright, tense faces, their jaunty manic walks, swinging purses and dangling belts were an onslaught. I made my way out of the building, bubbles of disorientation popping about my head.

  Ordinarily I rode a company car home from work, but at this hour it was faster to take the subway, so I went to the nearest noise-boiling pit. The train was delayed, or so I deduced from the mangled voice that roared from the speakers above us. The mob on the platform grew in number, everyone bearing down hard on the track of daily habit, staring into the maw of the impending day, pacing in insect circles, pitching their thoughts and feelings into the future or the past, anywhere but the subway.

  I spotted a concession stand and thought of little mints and chewy candies. I made my way towards the booth to participate in the mechanical ballet of giving and receiving choreographed by the muttering man behind the counter. As I waited my turn I scanned the magazines and papers, the horrific headlines and happy faces that help give form to our inchoate and vulnerable mass psyche. I looked rather fondly at the Vision—yet another headline about the political import of some rock band—and absently turned the front page to stare at the table of contents. “Anna Granite,” it said, “Yuppie Grandmother—by Justine Shade.”

  The snottiness of it was like a bracing blow to the face—but I recovered. Probably Justine had nothing to do with the headline, and not everyone used the word “yuppie” pejoratively. I muffed my part in the newsstand ballet by turning to walk away with the paper without paying, and the newsman screamed at me, scowling at my cheerful attempts at explanation. I paid for it and opened it—there it was again! That classic photograph of Granite’s imperial face, so long absent from public pages! My pleasure rose and combined with my exhaustion, and for a moment my brain came undone from its dense gray coils and merrily bobbed in the colorful miasma of irrationality. I started to read, and the subway came bawling into view. I folded the paper under my arm and fought savagely for a seat so I could comfortably read, shamelessly using my size and weight to get my way. People glared, but I didn’t care. I was smiling insanely as I opened the paper. I was puzzled, even in my magnanimous state, by her first sentence and its metaphor of the bad novel. I was still game though and read on; I became even more puzzled. “Yuppies, power breakfasts, the leering, double-crossing bed-hoppers of ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ stalking their victims in glitzy gowns, a national obsession with exercise and physical perfection, a riot of matching spider-limbed furniture, surreal TV Prayathons . . .” What did this have to do with Anna Granite? She went on in this irrelevant way until I began to think I was reading the wrong article. Then: “It sounds like a bad novel and it is.” My distended happiness hemorrhaged in inky black spurts as I was lashed in the face with that serpentine phrase “a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing.”

  “That bitch,” I said, “that goddamn bitch.”

  The nyloned thighs to my right shifted away from me.

  I read on, my concentration now razor sharp. She went on to describe Granite’s influence and its present day manifestations: the taped lectures, the yearly Philadelphian gatherings, the Definitist courses offered at various small colleges, an expensive three-day workshop held in Honolulu, the Rationalist Reaffirmation School, and the fact that Knight Ludlow, “highly placed city financial analyst” had been her “personal protégé.”

  “Her novels,” continued Justine “are like phantom comic-book worlds shadowing, in exaggerated Kabuki-like form, the psychological life and anxieties of our society.”

  “Shit!” I muttered. “A comic book! A comic book!” I turned to the young black woman on my right with some vague idea of showing her I wasn’t another subway madwoman. “Have you read this?” I asked.

  She glanced at me, more with her face than her eyes, tightly shook her head “no” and returned her attention to her paperback.<
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  “Well if you do, you ought to know it’s crap, one hundred percent. I know the writer and I know the person it’s about. I was interviewed by this . . . writer and it’s a vindictive piece of falsification.” She ignored me. Well to hell with you, I thought. I looked at the people across from me. They were staring resolutely in every direction but mine. I cracked the paper assertively and continued reading.

  Justine went on for several paragraphs in that breezy pop Vision-speak, invoking television shows, movies, and media jokes about the inner conflicts of American psychology—the “pop icon” of the lone hero versus the “pathological” desire to be part of the crowd, the assumption that the strong individual is somehow inherently in opposition to society. “This confusion extends most painfully into the conflicting American attitude towards money,” pontificated the bitch. “Does an individual with money have a responsibility to society and does the government have a moral right or obligation to oversee this responsibility? This question is overlaid with an almost pornographic fascination with money and people who have it . . .”

  I had to concede it was interesting; if it hadn’t been in the service of trashing Granite, I might’ve enjoyed it. Why, I thought in anguish, did intelligent people always try to undermine Granite, even now? “Anna Granite’s novels not only shadow the back-and-forth, one-or-the-other nature of this struggle, they purport to resolve it.” This was followed by an unfair caricature of Granite’s theories concluding with “she reduced the complex dilemma of the individual in society down to either/or moralistic terms couched in the dramatic devices and gestural glitz of a soap opera.”

  “Cunt,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” said a female wearing purple contact lenses. “Would you mind watching your language?”

  “Mind your own business,” I snarled.

  She reared back and clicked her tongue.

  “The irony is that, like the wicked liberals in her books, Granite’s rational answers are based on illusions. She stood for rationality, yet her novels shamelessly (and what’s worse, unknowingly) use emotional manipulation, melodrama, jargon, and sexual fantasy to make her points. While claiming to exalt the individual, she plugged into a mass psyche, using archetypal characters devoid of real individuality, with the same vulgar emotional power as the Wicked Witch. . . . Granite’s work is a phenomenon worth looking at as a fun-house mirror for a society that is one part sober puritan and one part capitalist sex fiend. . . . It’s an odd thing to watch a culture start to look like the plot of a bad novel.”