Two Girls Fat and Thin (35 page)

“Did you explain to them that men here have ways of shoving their masculinity down the throats of other people?” she asked drily.

His eyes narrowed and his lower lip dropped a centimeter, like the mouth of a cat using his scent organs to test the wind. His face registered that he had taken in the scent and understood it; a smirk flickered in his eyes. “People in this country,” he continued, his voice bemused and contemptuous, “have it so easy they don’t even know what life is anymore. No one has real problems here, so they have to make them up.”

“What do you mean by real problems?”

“Like hunger and—”

“Bryan,” she said, “look out the window. There’s a guy sleeping on the subway grating. On my way over here I passed two people begging for change. You don’t think they have a problem with hunger?”

“Oh, well yeah, but I’m talking about the vast majority of people here.”

“Anyway,” she said, “there are other problems besides hunger and shelter. Can you really believe that there’s no such thing as psychological pain?”

He shrugged. “Well, really, if you want to know the truth, what I
like about Southeast Asia is that you can get a gorgeous twelve-year-old to suck your cock for two bucks.” His voice was like a tickle on the middle of your back where you can’t reach it. “Just kidding,” he said.

She decided to change the subject. “So you like Anna Granite’s stuff.”

“Yeah, I do.” He abandoned his orphanlike method of drinking from the sake cup and upended the little bottle, draining it in a gulp. He signaled the waiter for more with a gesture of satirical politeness.

“Why?”

“Mainly because it’s a lot of fun. She writes about stuff that’s serious and it engages you mentally, but at the same time it’s so exaggerated and goofy that you can see the ridiculousness even while being swept up in it. And I especially like the cartoony renditions of the art world, being an artist myself.”

“You’re an artist?”

“Yeah. I just do that shit at the magazine for money.” He grabbed the sake as it floated towards them on a tray, ignoring the sleek waiter’s indignant look.

She was relieved to find that his conversation, heard in sobriety, suggested that he had actual thoughts, feelings, and sensitivities, that she might be curious about him. It was also obnoxious, but she was willing to let that pass. She imagined them sitting together in restaurant after restaurant, talking about everything that had ever happened to them, telling each other things they had never told anyone.

“I like you,” she said. She was surprised by the sweet tone of her voice.

He smiled, and she saw an expression of tenderness in the center of his eyes. “I like you too.” He reached across the table and took her hand. His tender look was subsumed by a strange, forward gloat. “You’re like a little girl,” he said softly.

“No. I’m really not.”

“I think you are. Not a nice little girl though. You’re like one of those little monsters who tortures other kids on the playground. I can just see you now making some poor fat kid cry.”

She stared at him, shocked, flattered, and slightly frightened. She felt him looking through the layers of her adulthood, peeling away the surface until he found hot little Justine Shade of Action, Illinois, posing on the playground—he was right!—she had never really left. The child Justine pouted flirtatiously as he eyed her.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “Let’s go to a bar.”

They went to a dark bar with rotting wooden booths and two big pool tables around which men stalked in various attitudes of predatory langour. Cigarettes drooped from their casual lips, their stomachs protruded majestically. Justine watched their deliberate movements and inhaled the reassuring odor of french fries boiling in grease. Bryan was talking about a pathologically violent boy who had lived next door to him when he was ten years old.

“The girls in the neighborhood were terrified of him, and with good reason. I think he might’ve actually raped a couple of girls. I was with him once when he tricked a girl into climbing down into this hole he’d dug and threatened to bury her unless she stripped and danced naked for us. He even tried to force me to fuck his little sister at knife point.”

“Why were you friends with him?”

“I had to be. I lived right next to him, and he would’ve killed me otherwise. He almost killed me anyway. He beat the shit out of me a couple of times, and once he pushed me out the third-story window and I had to go to the hospital—”

“Didn’t your parents get upset about this?” Justine vaguely remembered giggling outside the principal’s office with Debby as they listened to the distraught Mrs. Wolcott complain about the D girls pulling down Johnny Wolcott’s pants and spanking his butt.

He shrugged. “There wasn’t much they could do. My mother said I’d have to learn to take care of myself. Besides, he was fun sometimes.”

“I raped someone once, when I was a kid,” said Justine dreamily.

“Yeah?”

She hesitated; since the vanished Dr. Venus, she had never told anyone about Rose. She wasn’t sure why she’d started to tell Bryan; she suddenly wanted to reveal herself to this person who’d recognized the cruel child of Action, Illinois, and stated that he liked her.
Nonetheless, as she told the story, which was still painful and sad to her, she disguised the truth of it by relating it with a smile on her face, as if she wanted only to excite him.

He received the story with greed in his eyes and his body in a posture of assessment. “You really were a mean kid,” he finally said.

“It wasn’t just meanness,” she said, confused. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t even know if it was really sexual.” She felt exposed, extended towards him, and a little sick at having displayed her private life for a relative stranger’s titillation—and yet she felt titillated herself.

“It sounds like a military maneuver,” he said. “You entered the city, you pillaged, plundered, mauled everything of value, and withdrew.”

“Nooo.” She ducked her head and giggled. What he said bore no relation to what she felt, but she was seduced by the idea of herself prancing through his imagination as a tiny porn queen while the truth of what had happened lay safely hidden in a pocket of misunderstanding. At the same time, she felt a compulsion to make him understand her, and she was disconcerted to realize that the more he refused to do so, the more desperate the compulsion would become. “Really,” she said, smiling. “It wasn’t like that.” And she told the story again.

Glenda handed her a warm
Styrofoam cup of tea with oil glimmering on its surface. Justine sipped and was comforted as associations with safety and ordinariness were triggered by the sweet taste.

“Glenda,” she said, “have you ever had a real anxiety attack?”

Glenda looked at her and nodded; the expression that rose on her face spoke of a deeply disturbing experience, muted with time, and now about to take the tame form of an anecdote. “It happened when I was living in Miami shortly after my divorce from my first husband. I was staying in this sleazy rooming house with cockroaches and I was drinking pretty heavily. One day I made the mistake of calling my ex-husband while I was drinking. He had a woman living with him by then, and I heard one of my daughters call her ‘Mama.’ It was like a knife in my heart; when I got off the phone I almost lost my mind. I ran to the medicine cabinet and took
tranquilizers, and when that didn’t help I followed them with sleeping pills. And Justine, when I lay down in my bed I could actually see demons, one black and one red, coming to turn my bed over. It went on for hours, with me fighting to keep them from doing it. And you know, I’m still not convinced that they weren’t there.”

“
Have you ever read
Hegel?” asked Bryan.

“I guess, I don’t remember.” She was feeling drunk; she felt herself slouched on the table in an attitude of belligerent indolence. “Why?”

“I was just thinking of an essay he wrote. I can’t remember the name of it. But it has to do with human freedom and its natural limits.”

She came out of her slouch to watch as this new vista of his mental processes displayed itself. She felt confused by the ease with which he alternately skimmed and dove into conversation, one moment leading her down into the tunnels and caverns of his psyche to show her the strange stones and stalactites studding the walls and then, without warning, springing up to run away over the barren surface, laughing like a hyena.

“His basic idea is that people crave freedom but that, because of the realities of their lives, they are inherently unfree. And that the only way people can have a sense of freedom is by taking the freedom of others—enslaving others.”

“That doesn’t sound so original to me,” she grumped.

“So that every human interaction, whether on a national or individual level, is a war over who will be enslaved and who will rule.”

Justine pictured a bleak landscape occupied by two people, one of whom was groveling in the dirt while the other stood exulting in the vast black emptiness of his freedom. “That sounds hopelessly neurotic to me,” she said.

“Well then you must be pretty neurotic to do what you did to that girl in the bathroom. A toothbrush, God.” He smiled as he swigged his beer.

“Fuck you,” she said, and withdrew haughtily into her booth.

“Don’t you think it’s true?”

“I told you a personal thing about myself that’s actually sort of upsetting to me, and you act like it’s some fucking joke.”

He inhaled cigarette smoke and aggressively released it towards her. “It’s so cute when you have these little moments of self-respect and integrity.”

“You’re lucky there’s a table between us,” she said. “If there wasn’t, I’d smack your little face.”

He smiled like an animal showing its teeth.

Something old stirred in her.

“Have another drink,” he said.

She walked into Dr. Winkgard’s office
to put his mail on his desk and heard him haranguing a patient.

“Mr. Nelson, I have told you repeatedly, we have run every possible test, and there is nothing wrong with you. We cannot assume that you are sick because of ‘feelings’ and the premonitions of your aunt, who is, I’m sure, a wonderful lady.”

She lingered in the examining room next to his office to hear the rest of this speech.

“However, one thing is for sure and I’ll tell you what it is: If you continue to believe that you are sick, you will become sick. The mind, Mr. Nelson. The mind!”

She had heard this all her life, that if you believe things, they will come true. Bryan had said in a drunken moment the previous night that he could change reality by his perception of it, or something to that effect. Well it didn’t work for her; she had believed in things as hard as she could, she had decorated her beliefs with bells, ribbons, and streamers, she had made winged boats for them to go flying out into the world, and although they had looked wonderful sailing into space, they had crashed in a heap.

Dr. Winkgard obviously didn’t have this problem. She could hear the rippling muscularity of his belief system flexing through his words, taking up all the space in his office, possibly forcing Mr. Nelson to cower under the desk. This was, she supposed, what was meant by having a strong personality. It galled her to think that Dr. Winkgard had a stronger personality than she. Then she thought of Bryan’s nutty Hegelian ideas and was further galled to think that he would see them embodied in the fact that she worked for Dr. Winkgard.

“So,” concluded Dr. Winkgard, “stop worrying yourself into illness, Mr. Nelson. Go and be happy and stop thinking about the demons that populate the dreams of your aunt.”

More demons, thought Justine as she left the examining room. Demons are the theme this morning. The thought frightened her.

She was very drunk
by the time they returned to his apartment, and she barely remembered the at first playful exchange of shoves, slaps, and verbal abuse, the escalating bolts of aggression that flew between them.

“I’d like to tie your ankles up by your head, with your legs pushed straight back until I could see up your asshole.” His voice jerked as he fucked her. “I’d like to stick a lit candle all the way up your snatch and lick your pussy until it starts to singe.”

“An homage to Hegel?” she asked.

She felt the teeth of his ferocity cut open her body, and she felt her poisonous response spill into his mouth like blood. She lifted her pelvis off the bed and fucked him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “Turn me over,” she whispered, “and stick your cock up my ass.”

“No. I’m going to fuck your pussy until I feel you start to come and then I’m going to cram it up your ass. Then I’ll stick it down your throat.”

“You stupid prick.” But she said it like a caress, slowing her pelvic movement, slowly gripping and releasing his cock with the rhythmic stroke she would use to pet an animal.

“You might hate me but your cunt’s begging for it, isn’t it?”

She sank beneath the dark current that bore them along, rose and sank again. She saw herself frozen in disbelief at what she was doing and then herself as a child, alone in the apartment after school, running through the rooms, smashing windows and destroying furniture like she had never been able to do, jumping up and down with delight to see big Justine doing the nasty with this dirty boy. The strange thing was that this excitement didn’t affect her cunt. She felt it there, but only dimly, as if there was a thin but firm barrier between her genitals and the rest of her body. Stranger still, it didn’t matter.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, rolled him onto his back and sat on him. The smell of her cunt floated up to her; she felt like she’d dipped her hand in her own guts. She whispered to him, “I want you to play with my cunt until I’m almost ready to come and then I want you to whip me.”

He poked his head up. “You want to be whipped?”

“Yes.”

“Then get up. I’ll whip you right now.”

Fright leapt in her stomach, and she jammed it down. He got a small whip from a drawer across the room. She had never seen a whip before and she was frightened again. Even the rampaging child paused, wondering. Then he grabbed a long candle from its holder and continued towards her.