Two Girls Fat and Thin (29 page)

“So, Anna,” said Bradley. “What is the topic for tonight?”

“The conflict between the individual and society, focusing on whether or not the will of the individual genius can ever be compatible with that of society.”

Having spoken, she sharply adjusted her line of vision to include us and seemed to see me for the first time. Tenderness suffused her eyes as thoroughly as had determination a moment before. “So little one,” she said, “how are you?”

Little one! When had I ever been called that? “Very well, ma’am,” I answered absurdly.

She smiled at me and then her expression shifted, her eyes again assumed their martial energy, and she began talking to Bradley. I was relieved; her maternal words somehow strained the moment we had had in the hotel.

The others arrived, and the only thing worth noting about their perfunctory arrival, greeting, and seating arrangements was that the wonderful man who had smiled at me at the lecture was among them. Knight Ludlow, financier, nodded at me with incomplete recognition and turned away—then turned back and smiled with full acknowledgment of our last contact.

He turned from me again to talk to Granite, and the room fractured, my ears were filled with the buzz of my own internal circuitry, and I was afraid that the building was going to collapse, catch fire, or be struck with lightning.

Fortunately I went emotionally blank—I say fortunately because the meeting was beginning and my mind is more acute when my feelings are gone.

“Let me introduce to you our new secretary, Dorothy Never.” The standing Granite indicated me with a sweep of her arm. “She will be taking notes as the meeting progresses.” She then gazed at me, exuding support and confidence. “You understand, Dorothy, I don’t want you to take it down word for word; it would be too much. Just the important ideas, yes?” I nodded, heart in throat. I had never taken dictation before.

Granite stood and paced the room as she talked, her cape framing her, a cigarette sprouting from an elegant arm. She spoke at length while the others listened, and I plunged blindly into that state of refined consciousness necessary for taking dictation or any other highly concentrated task. So many words so quickly! All of them seemed to be important! Granite’s phrases were so complicated, by the time I had determined that something was important, and went back to retrieve it, I found that other important words had bounded far ahead of me and I was thus in a continual breathless chase. I trembled, my hand sweated and ached, I wanted to cry, I can’t do it! I can’t! But fast after this feeling came another, a deep dark surge of “Oh yes you can” that seemed to come from my lower body, my stomach, ovaries, and bowels. It was a proud, stubborn, angry feeling that made me picture a harsh thin-lipped mouth setting itself in determination. My will, usually wandering my body in various pieces, suddenly coalesced, and I waded among the words like a Viking in a foreign swamp, sword aloft, striking hither and yon, mercilessly, instinctively, without analyzing whether or not they were important. I felt my pupils dilate. The others began to talk.

“But, theoretically, society is made up of many individuals,” said the woman banker. “Theoretically one could pose the problem that it is the violation of many individuals when one imposes his will—”

“Bosh! Illogic!”

“Hitler, Anna, Hitler. Fascism is the antithesis of individuality, yet Hitler was an individual who imposed his will—”

“You have answered the question yourself, Wilma. Hitler was a weak collectivist as is clear from his doctrine of the
Volk
, the blood, the irrational belief in the innate superiority of a nationality. This belief in and of itself is anti-individual.”

“It is something you will have to deal with, Anna.” Him! His voice! “As well as the misconception that thieves and thugs are truly acting selfishly.”

After the first hours had passed, my frayed perception forked into two—one navigating the landscape of words, phrases, and ideas, the other absorbing the sounds, inflections, and tonal habits of the voices. This secondary perception transmuted words and phrases into sounds that took on shapes of gentleness, aggression, hardness, softness, pride, and happiness, shapes that moved through the room, changing and reacting to one another, swelling and shrinking, nosing against the furniture, filling the apartment with their mobile, invisible, contradicting vibrancy, then fading away. With a half-conscious puzzlement I absorbed these sounds; Wilma Humple and Wilson Bean did not sound like I would’ve expected, and their voices often seemed to contradict their words.

“We don’t have to placate anyone,” said Dr. Bean. Yet his voice had the dry raspy sound of defeat and passivity; it moved sluggishly, with a great aggrieved effort.

“Of course,” said Wilma Humple, “there is the issue of judgment—the indoctrination of ‘judge not lest ye be judged,’ the willful paralyzation of the intellect!” She projected the words stridently, but there was an effort in her projection that was like a child yanking its mother’s hem and whining, afraid it won’t be heard.

Of the three strangers, only Knight’s voice was full and buoyant; it reminded me of the easeful support a body of water, miles deep and full of ferocity, can give a human relaxed enough to trust it.

I sat among these diverse energies feeling them clashing against and complementing each other while my mind resolutely held its beam of light on the business at hand. It was beginning to be difficult to go on when Granite called for a break. There was a moment of silence during which Granite lit another cigarette, and then Wilma H. and Wilson B. rose and paced to the windows. Granite asked if anyone was hungry. I was, but when everyone said they weren’t, I was too embarrassed to say so. Granite sat near Knight on the couch, and they talked. I was surprised to see a girlish quality come into her face as they spoke; she even slid her feet out of her shoes and flirtily tucked her legs up against her body in my mother’s habitual way.

“How’re you doing, champ?” Bradley spoke kindly, leaning towards me with an elbow on his knee.

I cringed a little at “champ.” “Okay I think.”

“Are you able to keep up with the discussion?”

“Pretty much.” It amazed me that he was adopting such a comradely attitude and that I took to it so naturally.

“Ah! Dorothy!” Granite got to her feet and into her shoes and joined us on the couch, very close to me. Once again I noticed the dull grainy texture of her skin, the multitude of tiny lines; then I made myself widen my focus to take in the fullness of her face. “You are doing well?” Her eyes were gentle but serious.

“I think so. Would you like to look?”

“Yes, I would.” She took my notebook from my hand! I was reminded of the gravity of my position as I watched her eyes rapidly traverse my pages. Her jaw twitched passionately. Bradley and Knight began to chat.

“Pretty good for your first time,” said Granite turning to me. “But you are wasting time with asides and extra words. Then you have to waste time crossing out, see?” She pointed to a nasty knot of ink. “Listen as if you were a reporter and wanted to find the main points of this discussion.” She emphasized the last six words with a measured up-and-down movement of her hand, fingers bunched together, hooklike. “Also don’t worry about the handwriting. I don’t need to read it, you are the one who will type it out. Understand?”

“Yes but I . . . I don’t know if I’m capable of deciding which are the important points.”

“Dorothy!” Her eyes blazed! “That is a weak statement and unworthy of you!” Her severity pinned me through the eyeballs, and we sat staring at each other, she discharging bolt after bolt of sharp indignation. I felt my pores dilate helplessly to receive her until the tissue beneath my facial skin seemed composed of her indignation. Then abruptly she softened. “I know I can trust your judgment. Can you trust mine?”

“Of course!”

“Good.” She spoke this word with wonderful finality. “Carry on.” These last two words she said with a certain childishness, almost as if she’d heard them recently on TV and had been waiting
for a chance to say them, but I didn’t mind. The meeting resumed and so did I, my pen flying with renewed vigor. Hours passed. The ashtrays were gradually loaded with pale gray refuse. Wilma’s face became soft and ivory with sleepiness, the men took off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves, and still Granite paced and talked. I thought of malteds and potato chips, jelly beans and roast beef sandwiches dripping gravy. I pressed on.

It was one thirty when the meeting ended and I was released into a yellow cab dispatched especially for me. Bradley actually stepped out of his conversation with the still-pacing Granite and offered to go down in the elevator and wait for it with me under the awning of the apartment.

“No, Bradley, it’s all right, finish your discussion.” Knight was suddenly behind me, manning the buttons of his coat. “I’ll take the young lady down, I’m ready to go.”

It seemed as though Wilma jerked her head in surprise, but that only added to the pleasure of the whirring fluorescent descent, during which I could not once raise my eyes. I looked at the buttons on my cheap red corduroy jacket and at Knight’s shoes, his wonderful sharp-toed gray suede shoes.

He said, “I remember you from the lecture.”

I said, “Yes.”

“I was very moved by your response.”

I gestured with a hand. “I couldn’t help it,” I murmured at my buttons.

“Yes I know. That’s what made it so moving.”

I looked up in surprise. The door burst open. We proceeded through the lobby out into the damp night where the taxi awaited. He opened the door of the car for me, and I got in, looking at him for the first time. According to his face he did this sort of thing all the time. “See you tomorrow, Dorothy.”

“Goodnight,” I gasped. I was sealed into the cab in a state of shock, staring at the smiling jiggling hula girl on the dashboard and glad to be sitting down. I thought of my former high school companions sitting around their lunch table in their pink and chartreuse skirts, the occasional triangle of pantie, their “Luv” pendants, their stupid dates and proms. Which of them would ever have what I had now?

I rode home obsessively noting the tatty little buildings of Philadelphia, the romance of neon, fluorescence and electricity, even the traffic lights swaying heavily on their wires, the hydrants, the jumbled angles, the splayed newspapers flapping against public benches. I wanted to remember every detail of this night and reconstruct it in miniature, a tiny world into which I could repair at any time.

Beau and I went to the meeting the next night and the next. They followed the same pattern; Granite would prowl the room in her cape, expounding, while the others constructed rhetorical arguments for her to refute or expand upon. I picked out the main points rather timidly the second night and then, emboldened by Granite’s approval, more cavalierly the third. Now comfortable with what I was doing, I had, to my delight, more time to observe and digest what was going on.

My first observation was the tension between Bradley and Granite. I noticed first that he was the only one of the group from whom she would accept contradiction. Further, when he spoke, her composure fell from her in delicate shudders, leaving her gentle, soft-mouthed, eyes bright and wide. And when she spoke to him, he seemed subtly to expand, to emanate heat, to release some muscles and tense others, as if her voice simultaneously stroked and tickled the length of his body.

Second was that Wilma and Wilson did not radiate any of the energy the others had. Wilson in particular seemed to sit in a patch of personal cold, his thin limbs held stiffly, his comments merely affirmations or repetitions of what Granite had said. To my surprise, Granite didn’t seem to mind or even to notice; she treated his contributions as seriously as she did Knight’s. Even more puzzling, when Wilma sallied forth, Granite barely acknowledged her or sometimes even scolded her unfairly, it seemed to me. Wilma’s pointy brittle face would remain impassive, perhaps tighten a little more, but she never argued.

The philosophy itself was wonderful. Most of it was an elucidation of the points I had already understood from
The Bulwark
and
The Gods Disdained
, but on the third night, a topic was introduced that I hadn’t yet encountered: the ultra-real, the apparently patternless structure of the universe that seems random and chaotic
(causing some people to despair and turn to religion or nihilistic philosophy) but was in fact a super-rational pattern too intricate to be discerned and comprehended by us right away.

The meetings lasted until one or two o’clock in the morning, and I returned to my bed so stimulated it was hard for me to sleep right away. I was thus sleeping only about four hours a night and skipping my dinner (I considered the sandwich Bradley ordered from work a snack). The happy result was that, for the first time in my life, I was losing weight. The waist-bands of my skirts were sliding towards my hips, and my only pair of pants fit loosely. My appearance hadn’t noticeably changed, but I nonetheless rejoiced.

On the fifth night, however, my stamina began to give out. One o’clock then two o’clock came and went, and still Granite discussed. At two thirty Wilson Bean went home. At three Bradley retired into Granite’s bedroom for a nap. Fifteen minutes later Knight rested in an easy chair to close his eyes. For the next interminable half-hour, it was only Granite, me and the haggard Wilma. The air was heavy with swarming yellow granules, all light was an assault. To my dismay, I saw my dictation stumble, get up, stumble, and proceed along on its knees. Every sentence was a marathon with a lung-bursting explosion at the end. Wilma curled up on the couch and went under. Granite turned to me.

“And how are you feeling, Dorothy?” Her eyes were encircled with bruise-like purple but they retained their intensity. I felt her hot noisy heart pumping in her chest and my own dull organ making its reply. “Are you tired?”

“Yes, Anna, I am.” My blood roared in my head; I had involuntarily used her first name.

“Yes, I can see.” She leaned forward and turned away, and I thought she was displeased. Then she turned back. “I would like to offer you something to help you stay awake. But only if you want it, you understand?”