Two Girls Fat and Thin (2 page)

I shifted my recalcitrant laundry in my arms and snatched the card from the board, not caring if anyone else wanted to read it or not. I went home, put away my laundry, and sat brooding with coffee and card. It had been years since anyone had expressed professional (or was it professional?) interest in Anna Granite, philosopher and literary genius. I read the card repeatedly, trying to deduce something from its hieroglyphical simplicity. Granite had enemies, even in death. I had made the mistake of talking to them in the past, seduced, as all of us were, by the glamour of flashing lightbulbs, microphones, hysterical questions, and so on. But that had been at least fifteen years ago, and this “writer” seemed too insubstantial to bear the weight of such mania.

Why talk to an insubstantial person? I finished my coffee, ate a Gruyère brioche, and left the apartment to go to work. I am thirty-four years old and I live in Queens. I am a proofreader on the midnight shift at a Wall Street law firm, and the hour of my departure for work is bleak and dark. That night the street featured only a few abstracted pedestrians: a guarded young woman in a raincoat carrying a brown-bagged carton of milk, a pair of subdued boys coming around the corner with their hands thrust into their pockets, a dog-walker clutching a wad of paper towels, and a moody doorman pacing in a vigilant circle. I entered a delicatessen which displayed boxes of detergent, stomach medicines, and bottled spring water in its windows. I purchased a handful of rum-flavored marzipan candies, each wrapped in bright red tinfoil bearing a picture of a mysterious brown-haired Victorian lady in décollétage, then I stepped into the street and hailed a cab. The driver and I exchanged mumbles, his ticking metal box lit up, and I sped to the office
where my booth awaited me, nestled amid the flanks of word-processing machines, all faithfully burning their little green lights.

But I couldn’t forget “writer.” As I re-entered my apartment at 9:00 the following morning, I felt the harsh splendor of Granite’s presence arrayed through all my rooms. I had never forgotten her, of course. Her books were all upright on my shelves, and the mighty power of her ideas continued to form the undercurrent that bore along the details of my uneventful and increasingly rancorous life. But Anna Granite had died two years earlier, and I had been disassociated from the remnants of her dwindling movement for longer than that. This was the first time in years that I had felt the almost visceral sensation of the woman’s presence, which was nothing short of a shimmering, diamond-studded aurora borealis. It was as if this star system had become hidden, bound in a thick skein of ordinariness, and that “writer,” with his/her innocuous request, had peeled off a corner of the binding, causing all that I had never really abandoned to come tumbling into my living room.

As I lay in my bed in my plaid flannel nightgown, Granite’s characters crowded round me. Solitaire D’Anconti, oil magnate and lonely woman, paced the room in her black plunge-necked jumpsuit, one arm wrapped around her own slim waist, the other holding the cigarette which issued the snake of smoke that was coiling around her. Bus Taggart, the hood who worshipped her, sat on the windowsill, struck a match against his shoe, and sighed. Skip Jackson, newspaper baron and Solitaire’s lover, leaned against the wall, watching Solitaire with a savage smirk on his face. What were they going to do? Eustace Kwetschmer, editor of a rival newspaper, had started a series of stories exposing Solitaire’s connections with Bus; she had been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. Skip was willing to fight back on her behalf, even if it meant destroying his own newspaper empire. Solitaire, who scorned public opinion, was pleading with him to stay out of it. Meanwhile, the world was on the brink of destruction.

I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to look at the card. It seemed foreign, forlorn yet compelling for an index card. I returned to bed with it and snuggled under the blanket; I had been working the graveyard shift for six years, but my body still contracted
at various crucial points in my neck, pelvis, and shoulders after staying up all night. I tried to relax my spastic muscles and lay on my stomach to reach for the sleek pink phone beside my bed. I dialed the number offered by “writer.” There was no answer, not even a recorded voice informing me that its author could not “come to the phone right now.” I hung up, relieved; my mental state, induced by such sudden contact with Granite’s fictional universe, was not one that could be shared with the prosaic writer.

I dug back into bed, cozily rubbing the inevitable granules away with my feet. In my mental parade, Granite’s characters were followed by the four-square humans who had surrounded her, and the sensational drama of her life began to merge with the drama of her books. I saw Granite at the podium, her eyes storming as she lashed out at an idiot heckler from the audience who had stood during the question-and-answer period to say, “Doesn’t your insistence on strictly objective truth lead to a kind of authoritarianism that—” “You are an authoritarian of the worst kind!” snarled Granite. “The authority of ignorance, of nothingness, of hallucination!” The article that appeared in
Demograph
that month read: “With a voice that would tuck a dog’s tail between its legs, Miss Granite scourged the few non-believers who managed to get a word in edgewise,” and the photo that accompanied it showed a homely little woman who could barely make herself seen behind a podium, pointing her thick finger at the world. I saw the journalists, who were allowed to attend the early meetings, clustered in their cheap suits, frowning with the greedy outrage of the self-righteous as they hunched and scribbled Granite’s words on their pads of lined paper. Large, old-fashioned cameras emitted sour blooms of light as stern, unblinking Granite marched by, her purple-lined cape streaming behind her. I felt her outrage as columnists and third-rate thinkers denounced her everywhere. And I felt her glory as I beheld her, bedecked in a necklace of heavy turquoise, on the arm of Beau Bradley, her devastating raven-haired lover. Her short frame lengthened and liquified, her ruddy skin paled, her tight mouth swelled into a vicious pout as I watched her transforming into her creation Asia Maconda, the international beauty and art critic who was swept off her feet by the brilliant sculptor, Frank Golanka, even as she fought to discredit him
socially. I heard her rough, sorrowful voice, the Romanian accent that made her sound as if she’d swallowed a mouthful of ground glass and been surprised by how good it was. I saw myself, a near-psychotic child cuddled in the melancholy armchair in my father’s room, dappled by splotches of sunlight through the cheesy curtains veiling the windows.

When I woke late in the afternoon, I called “writer” again. Again, no response. Instead of relief, I felt irritation. Why had this person put his/her number on a bulletin board if he/she didn’t have a machine to take calls? I called twice in the following three days and was rewarded only with ringing. My irritation increased; still I was grateful to the nincompoop who didn’t answer the phone. My life, divided into habitual motions of eating, reading, shopping, carrying loads of laundry back and forth on the same street, taking cabs to work, clutching my bags of snacks, had become laconic and disconnected; my strongest feeling in this scheme of things was the settled sense in my stomach when I sat before my desk at work. “Writer” had sent a current quivering through my quotidian existence, and now everything was significant. As I rode to work at night, I saw New York from Granite’s perspective for the first time in eight years. The buildings of Wall Street became symbols of conquest, power, and money, the luscious fruit of life lived in the solid truth. The men who drove cabs and manned the rickety wooden candy/newspaper stalls were soldiers in the battle to uphold these standards. Mary, the white-haired word processor who works with me, was transformed from a cranky old woman into a fighter for the cause of concrete ideals; she was an excellent and compulsive worker who skipped lunch breaks, eating instead from a green box of Mystic Mint cookies in her drawer. Opposite her was the enemy, Joan, the complaining young woman who let her stomach hang out, who wrote articles on leftist painters who “challenge even our most basic assumptions about what is moral,” and who would sneak away from her machine whenever she could to call her boyfriend and yell at him.

My almost daily calls to “writer” took on the ritual quality of my calls to Dial-A-Horoscope. It was a useless gesture and I knew it, yet somehow it was satisfying, a duty performed, a pretension of contact. I was taken off guard when she finally answered.

“Hello?” Her voice was flat, nearly metallic, except for the high pitch that made it the voice of a prematurely serious child. She said she was a free-lance journalist and that she wanted to write an article on Granite’s philosophy, Definitism.

“I’ve just recently realized what an impact it has had on this country’s psychology,” she said solemnly. “It’s quite remarkable. I don’t think any other novelist has done anything comparable.”

We talked enough for me to feel reassured that she wasn’t one of Granite’s enemies. I was lulled by the expressionless, melancholy quality of her voice.

“There’s one thing I’d like to know,” I said. I paused. “Let me preface this. During the beginning stages of the movement, there were a lot of people attracted to it who were a bit crazy. They would come to the meetings and say things about banding together and going off to an island to build a Definitist society—crazy. Granite was very kind to them of course, but she wasn’t interested in those people. And I don’t think their nutty ideas were any reflection of Definitism. I just think that any major movement will attract its share of fanatics.”

“Oh, I agree.”

“And I wondered if those were the kind of people you’ve been seeing, so far.”

The voice retained its flat thoughtfulness. “Well, I haven’t done an interview yet. On the phone a few have sounded a little unhinged, but most of them seemed pretty ordinary, as far as I could tell. But I’m the last person to make judgments of other people’s sanity.”

“Yes, there is always that,” I agreed. “There have been times, in the past, when I was a little bit . . . crazy myself. But those days are over. In any case, it wasn’t the craziness in me that was responding to Anna Granite. It was the sanity.”

“Well, seriously, I expect most Definitists to be quite sane,” she said.

I was pleased after we hung up, and ready to start the project of the interview. I wrote “Justine Shade—10:00
A.M
.—interview” inside one of the red-numbered squares on my calendar.

That was how it began, although to an objective party, it might
look as though I were the strange world into which Justine unwittingly pitched herself. In any case, her effect on my mind and heart was immediate: the sad, voluptuous memories of Anna Granite would become, in the three or four days that would pass before the interview, memories of my childhood, as well as other things I don’t like to think about. I spent hours before my legal documents, in my bed, and in the dream state of my cab rides, speculating on what kind of person Ms. Shade might be. I hadn’t had a conversation about Anna Granite in at least eight years; in fact I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a genuine conversation at all. I invented possible scenarios daily, growing more and more excited by the impending intellectual adventure.

My wildest invention, however, didn’t prepare me for what actually happened, which was mind-boggling even in the context of my circuitous and exhausting life. I had thought of Anna Granite as the summit of my life, the definitive, devastating climax—and yet perhaps she had only been the foreshadowing catalyst for the connection that occurred between me and Justine, the bridge without which our lives would have continued to run their spiritually parallel courses. But that is probably just the way it looks now.

Justine Shade was a neurotic
, antisocial twenty-eight-year-old. She had few friends, and as she saw them infrequently, her main source of entertainment was an erratic series of boyfriends who wandered through her small apartment, often making snide comments about her decor. She was serious about her career as a journalist, but she sold very few articles. This was because she got ideas at the rate of about one a year, and once she had one, she went through a lengthy process of mentally sniffing, poking, and pinching it before she decided what to do with it.

To support herself, she worked part time as an assistant secretary for a doctor of internal medicine. The job was lulling and comfortingly dull. Dr. Winkgard was an energetic, square, bad-tempered, good-hearted man, and his wife Glenda was a beautiful forty-year-old whose bright, erotic spirit, in combination with the stubborn way she held her mouth, made Justine think of a pungent, freshly cut lemon. The living room-like office was furnished with proud armchairs, a fiercely thin-cushioned sofa, a drawing of a geometric cat, and a radio that perpetually leaked a thin stream of classical music. The black-and-white striped walls and the purple carpet haughtily complemented each other. This office was the last place Justine would have expected to get an idea. But the fateful
article on Anna Granite, which would, in an entirely unforeseen fashion, alter the course of her life, was born as she sat behind her desk, peacefully sorting papers.

She spent much of the day behind this desk with Glenda, welcoming the patients as they teetered in on their canes, hats listing on their heads. She wrote down their names, addresses, and birth dates on large index cards and guided them down the treacherously rumple-rugged hall to the electrocardiogram room, where she got them to take off their clothes and lie on the table so she could wire them to the machine. The EKG was a uniquely intimate process. The old, often odorous and clammy body lay spread out before her, affable and trusting, willing to let her squeeze blobs of white conducting glue on its ankles and wrists. Women lay docile as she lifted their limp breasts for the little red suction cups, even if there were lumpy brown sores beneath them. She saw eczema and swollen ankles and fragile chests bearing terrible scars. A lady with one eye blinded by milky fluid showed her the dainty bag of protective talismans she kept safety-pinned to her dirty bra.