Two Girls Fat and Thin (28 page)

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?”

“I don’t remember.” He actually seemed to be trying to talk to her, and this show of respect and humanity after his ugliness made him seem complex. “There was good sex in it, but that wasn’t all. I don’t know.”

The moment of genuine conversation seemed to leave him subdued. He sat facing the bar with his body in a curl, staring at his drink as though he’d just realized he had to be at work tomorrow morning. The jukebox was silent.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked.

“I’m an art director for
Grab
magazine.” Without his animating mask of sarcasm, his face was tired and pinched. “It’s dumb but I like it. The people are nice.”

To her dismay she was afraid he was about to get up and leave. “My name’s Justine,” she said with sudden extroversion. “What’s yours?”

“Bryan.” He turned towards her again, his face regaining its life. “Have you ever been to the Hellfire Club?”

“I don’t even know what it is.”

“It’s an S&M club.” He watched her. “You know, master, slave, people being tied up and beaten, women getting fucked by dozens of guys. I’ll bet you’d like it.”

This was a jarring speech, but instead of pushing her away from him she felt it pull her towards him. A bolt of sensation zipped through her genitals and nailed her to her seat, and she felt much as she had when she was a prepubescent cruising the mall with a pack of boys at her heels; dislocated, aroused, and disturbed to be having such a personal reaction in a public place. Oh Christ, she thought. Not this again. Her heart beat arrhythmically against the bones of her rib cage. She looked for Alistair and saw him far, far away, at the other end of the bar, his big once-strong body in an absent-minded slump as he wiped some glasses.

“You
would
like it, wouldn’t you? I’d suggest we go except now it’s just queers giving each other AIDS.”

“I didn’t think it was legal anymore, for straights or gays to screw in public.”

“Murder isn’t legal either, but people do it.”

This frightened her. She suddenly remembered where she had heard the name of this club before; it was the last place a beautiful model had been seen before being ritually murdered. “I wouldn’t want to go anyway.” She frantically tried to make eye contact with Alistair, who smiled and waved.

“Hey, wait a minute, don’t be scared. Shit, you’re really scared!” He stood and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him; his small white face was neither sarcastic nor limp, but taut with an expression she couldn’t identify. “Don’t be scared, I’m not dangerous, I’m just a nut. Okay, I’m a little bit perverted, I admit it. But I wouldn’t really hurt you. I just like to shock people.”

“Yeah, you and Richard Speck.” She shook off his hand and pulled on her coat, digging in the pockets for dollars that flapped around elusively. Alistair moved towards them, slapping his trusty rag on the bar with a professional flourish.

“I’ll get it,” he said.

She got her coat and scarf under control while he reflexively navigated the world of commerce and hearty gestures. “Everybody who finds me attractive is a fucking maniac of some kind,” she thought. “Every time I meet somebody cute he wants me to pee on him or some goddamn thing.” She had the comforting thought that any minute now she would be at home, sobbing on her bed, alone but unmolested. She fought her way through the air, holding back her tears. She had just made her escape out the door when he appeared at her side.

“I hope you were kidding with that Richard Speck crack.”

“I just wanna go home.”

He grabbed her shoulders with both hands. If his grab had felt like the beginning of an attack she would’ve run; had it felt like a full attack she would have turned and hit him. But it was just powerful enough to hold her yet tender enough to paralyze her. “Don’t run away,” he said. “Please don’t be afraid of me.”

She turned to him and saw his face, drained and exhausted, his eyes wide with alarm. He pulled her to him and she collapsed against his small chest, exhausted. She felt his quick heart leaping urgently. He emanated warmth. His dick hardened against her abdomen. He stroked her hair. She began to cry. “Honey,” he said. “Darling.”

My first days of work
for Beau Bradley were so fraught with reverence and vigilance that I existed in a strange state that was both hyperaware and muddled. I arrived that first morning in such a sleepless fever that the physical perfection of tall, smiling Bradley didn’t awe or excite me—I, who usually saw beautiful males as species from a hostile planet. He seemed like nothing less than de rigueur for this storybook I’d stepped into. I was trying with all my flabby concentration to absorb the details, to be a good employee. I’m not sure why I wasn’t too disoriented to function at all, except that my entire life had been made up of incredible situations in contrast to which this one seemed unusual only in that it was positive. The very bizarre and extreme nature of finding myself employed by my idol the day after meeting her was what made it, in a sense, natural to me. The experience was so charged, so heady that I lived those days in my head, my breath high and quivering on the pinnacle of my deserted body. Anything more mundane would’ve sunk me back into my chest and pelvis, right onto my legs where I would’ve felt my old creaking soul slowly doing the hoops and ladders of my life.

But Beau Bradley was anything but mundane. He had black hair, silky, almost feminine white skin, the cleft-chinned square jaw of a
movie star, and blue eyes that matched Granite’s. Even more unusual, his kindness equaled his beauty. When I entered the office—medium-sized, clean, sparely furnished with modern furniture and stark steel sculpture, located in an oblong building that also housed the Philadelphia Mah-Jongg Society—he smiled at me as if it were utterly natural for me to enter his sphere. His hand enveloped mine with warmth and pressure that was respectful and protective as a father is supposed to be. “Anna has told me so much about you,” he said.

I nodded, realizing that he probably knew my secret. I didn’t find this probability shaming or even inappropriate. “Then you know I haven’t had experience,” I said.

“From what I’ve heard, that doesn’t matter. Anna can tell from speaking with someone for five minutes what they’re made of, and she says I should jump at the chance to hire you.”

The phone rang and Bradley, with an “Excuse me,” disappeared into his private office, leaving the door open. I stood in the outer office, in front of what was probably to be my desk, holding my purse against my body, feeling my heart beat against it. I absorbed the cream-colored walls, the skeletal bookcases and their books, the bindings of which seemed to vibrate with color and significance. I stared at a spiney, determined-looking little sculpture of a man hoisting the world on his shoulders and thought, “That’s me.” I knew it was a silly thought, but I excused it on the grounds that it was emblematic and that it was a prefiguring of the new direction my life would now take.

Bradley spent about fifteen minutes explaining my duties to me. They seemed, in spite of Granite’s description of their arduous nature, to be pretty easy. Answering the phone, typing letters, photocopying, dictation, an occasional run to the post office or deli—all in a quiet office that appeared to receive a phone call every two or three hours. The apparent simplicity bewildered and then panicked me—what if it seemed simple because I was not grasping the entire picture but only seeing the most obvious elements in a complex mosaic! I spent the rest of the morning sweating in my woolly skirt, spot-checking the filing system, cleaning the coffee filter, roaring through a letter, pouncing on the phone whenever I could.
Noon arrived and Bradley went out saying, “Take a breather, have some lunch!” I ate my cheese sandwich, potato chips, and candy bar at my desk and allowed myself an hour of feeling superior. If this was hard work then other jobs must be softer than anything I’d ever experienced in my life—and no wonder Granite had such contempt for the common people! I ate my sandwich with one hand and straightened the Rolodex with the other, marveling at my own efficiency.

By the time Bradley had returned from lunch, however, I was again full of self-doubt, which was later exacerbated by a typing mistake which Bradley jovially brought to my attention.

The next two days—half days both—followed the same pattern, except that they were enlivened by the appearance of Definitists from other parts of the country who had long conferences with Bradley. There were three of them, two men—one rotund with a receding hairline, the other weirdly tall, his sensitive brow a-twitch with the weight of heavy glasses—and a big woman with small eyes and a bun of brown hair who breathed in strange broken sighs.

On the fourth day Bradley asked me to join him for lunch. We closed the office and went to a plain, clean luncheonette with speckled table tops. I dimly remember a jukebox playing dramatic love music as we sat across from one another, smiling over our menus. He asked me how I was enjoying the work. I said very much. We ordered our sandwiches. For the first time I felt self-conscious about being fat before him and refrained from ordering the milkshake and double fries I would’ve liked. We ate without speaking for several moments, but rather than feeling isolated from him, I felt bonded by our mutual silent intensity. Besides, this way I didn’t have to worry about saying something stupid.

Mid-sandwich he spoke. “I asked you to lunch for a reason.”

I nodded and my heart sank.

“We—Anna and I—need you just now to do more than your usual duties. You’ve noticed the three people I’ve been meeting with. They are three of the top Definitist intellectuals in the country, and two of them—Doctor Wilson Bean, the English professor, and Wilma Humple, the banker—will be meeting with Anna and me along with Knight Ludlow, a financier from New York, to do
intensive conference work for about two weeks. We would like to have our discussion transcribed, and Anna and I would like you to be the one to do it.”

Mentally I reeled while physically I nodded. I put down my sandwich.

“It will be arduous work and will involve long hours—very long hours. Anna can stay up all night discussing ideas; the others will probably sleep in shifts, but you will be expected to stay up as long as there is discussion. Think you can handle it?”

I nodded and said, “Yes.” My adrenaline rose, and suddenly, I wanted to order a piece of lemon meringue pie.

“Good.” Bradley smiled. “We both know it’s a lot to ask of a beginning secretary, but we felt you would welcome the opportunity to learn more about Definitism. It is the chance of a lifetime in that respect.”

“I’m . . . I’m honored that you asked me,” I replied in all sincerity.

“Wonderful.” Bradley smiled again. “Let’s finish these sandwiches and get back to work.” He said it as though we were about to return to the office and do hours of heavy construction.

I bit my sandwich, mentally scorning the lemon pie as a frivolity that would be stripped off the streamlined life of an intellectual.

The conferences began a week or so later. Bradley and I stayed an uncharacteristically full day at the office then ordered sandwiches which we ate with our feet on his desk, then we took a cab to Granite’s apartment. I felt extreme anxiety on the way up in the elevator. This was not after all, a fantasy or a TV show, even if it felt like it. I was going to be among the most intelligent people in the world, and I was terrified of disappointing them, even if only in a secretarial capacity.

Out of the elevator we marched, entering the apartment with determined purpose. Granite opened the door, her eyes afire and her forehead locked. Mercifully, we were the first to arrive. Unsmiling, she gestured for us to sit on a stiff square-pillowed gray couch before a small, proud coffee table devoid of anything but a pitcher of water, some glasses, and three ashtrays. I would’ve sorely loved to see a decorative jar of French creams or even the cheapest peppermints, but I realized that such an item in Granite’s home
would’ve disappointed me. Granite left the room briefly, and I noticed that she was again wearing her billowing purple-lined cape. Did she wear it around the apartment when no one else was there? How marvelous! When she returned with a sheaf of papers, she sat in a chair opposite us, gazing slightly over our heads as though she were furious about something. Bradley sat against the back of the couch, very relaxed. I found it odd that on this occasion, the first time I had seen Granite since our original meeting, she hadn’t yet spoken to me. But I sat obediently and waited, unable to decide if a slouch or an upright position was most appropriate.