Two Girls Fat and Thin (37 page)

She immediately noticed a difference in Dorothy and was taken aback by it, although she wasn’t sure what the difference was. She surreptitiously glanced across the table as they surveyed their menus; she was touched and amused to see the suppressed excitement in Dorothy’s face. Dorothy seemed solid, stronger than she had at that last encounter, during which, as Justine remembered it, the fat woman, for all her weight, had seemed groundless and insubstantial, floating, sometimes flapping as she was buffeted by the abnormal ferocity of her own emotions. She felt the ferocity was still there, but centered this time, shimmering like precious metals in some invisible cache. Her vague fear of the woman
appeared behind her like a shadow and tapped her on the shoulder. She ignored it and drew forward, unconsciously intrigued by her strength and where it could be coming from. Perversely, she started with a question she knew would provoke Dorothy. Sure enough, although Dorothy answered the question politely, Justine could feel in her voice and see in her eyes that hornet swarm of anger that had thickened the air during the first interview. But instead of releasing the swarm, Dorothy abruptly asked her that question.

She didn’t know what to say, and was glad when their snacks were placed before them and they could become involved in the neutral movements of stirring and arranging. “Just a minute,” she said to Dorothy and then saw that it was quite unnecessary; Dorothy was looking with delighted absorption at the huge piece of chocolate cake that had been set before her and was already reaching for her fork. Justine saw her face become immobile and sealed off, as if all reception of signals from outside had become temporarily suspended so that all units could be devoted to the eating of cake. She felt a flash of repulsion at this sight of greed on automatic pilot, and then that was superseded by an odd feeling of tenderness based on her certainty that behind this mask of blind compulsion was a little girl in a state of solemn ecstasy over an extra-special treat—and then she was saddened by the equally strong certainty that food was the only kind of treat this little girl ever got.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very good,” replied Dorothy. “Really tasty.”

They ate in silence for a moment as Justine reflected on something a girlfriend had said once, that men bond when they drink and women bond when they eat dessert together.

“So,” she said, “I’m doing the piece because I’m fascinated that people would be so influenced by the work of a fiction writer and would base their lives on the acts of fictional characters. Also I think that in spite of Granite’s scorn for collective culture, she in fact embodied—in her work—major contradictions and dilemmas in the way Americans view money and the way individuals interact with groups. And she did so in a very pop culture medium with these archetypal pop characters. That’s remarkable to me.”

As Justine spoke, Dorothy slowly lowered a fork of cake and
fixed her with her large eyes. Justine prepared herself for a burst of indignation and instead felt a chink open in Dorothy’s impenetrability; a soft little beam of light came forth.

She was smarter than I’d thought
. I momentarily lost interest in my cake. Interestingly, once I’d softened in my attitude towards her, due to sympathy for her emotional disturbance, I felt a dispassionate interest in her point of view, which I suddenly saw as an abstract extravaganza of mental reaction, beams of thought darting and ricocheting from one point in Granite’s world to the next, growing in heat and light with each connection. “You’re right,” I said. “It is interesting, and you’ve hit it on the head when you say she embodied the central moral dilemmas in the country. But why are you paying attention to dumb stuff like people thinking her work meant this or that when the important thing was what it did in fact mean?”

“For two reasons. One is that I think Granite was often attacked unfairly by well-meaning liberals who looked at the work from a shallow perspective—”

Ah ha! She was an ally, a defender after all! An explosion of sweetness went off in my mouth as I chewed, coinciding spectacularly with a burst of mental pleasure.

“—and also because when people adopt a political position or philosophy, they rarely take it into their personality whole hog, whether they think they do or not. It is filtered through a life-long construct of individual perception, emotional needs, and unconscious assumptions about life. That doesn’t make the philosophy any less strong or valid. In fact it is a testimony to its vitality and viability that it is capable of subtle transmutation and expansion into various forms without losing its essential characteristics.”

This reeked of subjectivism, and I of course saw it as rot. Yet . . . it was interesting rot. I couldn’t help but be curious even as I rejected it. “But you are making a mistake,” I said. “You are taking sheer confusion for vitality and viability. Yeah, there are plenty of people who misunderstood Granite in many ways but still grasped enough of Definitism for it to be of immeasurable value in their lives. You should focus on the value, not the confusion.”

Her back straightened, and I saw her go into that prim boxed-in
mode that I remembered. “But I think sheer confusion is vitality and viability. The interplay between the imaginary and the real, the private emotional world and the discourse of ideas . . . that stuff. When a person takes Anna Granite’s ideas and—well, like you did. When you first read Granite’s work, you were living in an unbearable situation in which you were forced to hide everything precious in you because there was no place safe for you.”

My stomach shut against the cake, and I put my fork down, pressing my spine against the back of my chair.

“So when you read Granite’s work not only did she awaken your sense of beauty and pleasure in life, not only did she illustrate for you a positive use of strength and power, but she provided a springboard for you to create an internal world richer and stronger than the external world which wasn’t giving you any support at all. But she was only the departure point.”

I stared at her, mortified and speechless. Her impending mental collapse had apparently shattered her judgment, made her reckless, aggressive, oblivious to any concept of the natural boundaries between people, careening into my territory with her wheels spinning. Yet she was right, at least about me. I tried to stir myself into being offended by her reference to Granite as a “departure point,” but I was too confused to do so. I felt invaded and imposed upon, skewed, as I had been so long ago by the kind gaze of Nona Delgado in the hallway. This girl was talking to me as I had fantasized Anna Granite would talk to me before I met her, breaking down doors I couldn’t bring myself to open and storming in. That wasn’t all; when she had talked she was like a tiny magician in a cape and top hat drawing back a velvet curtain and pointing with her wand to the unsuspected tableaux of my life, a place where Anna Granite entered a human woman and was changed into a mythical winged thing with myriad powers—transformed by me and in fact part of me. As I say: rot, but seductive, flattering rot.

“Tell me,” I said, applying fork to cake once more, “what do you think of Granite’s ultrareality work?”

Justine had expressed herself
carefully at first and then more boldly as it gradually dawned on her that as long as she appealed to Dorothy’s taste for drama, maximum impact, and seriousness, she could say
almost anything to her. She wanted to appeal to her intelligence and make her realize that she herself was intelligent too—although she didn’t know why she wanted to do either of these things. She had watched Dorothy’s face as she talked and saw a lot of activity transpiring behind its surface, but she couldn’t read its nature. She was a little shamed by the way she was slanting her words to make it sound as if she took Granite more seriously than she did; ordinarily she felt that this was the prerogative of the journalist, but in this case it seemed unfair. These feelings were further complicated by a skulking wish that she did believe in Definitism in the way Dorothy and Max Nolte did, and her misleading words were in part a playacting meant to momentarily deceive herself as well as her subjects.

“The ultrareality theory,” began Dorothy, enthusiastically mashing her cake crumbs into the tines of her fork, “was the most daring and controversial aspect of Granite’s work. It came about in answer to the challenge made to an objective world view by a certain kind of person. For example, how can you pin reality down like that, how can you restrict what is real? How can all the conflict between people be boiled down to self versus collectivism?”

In between rhetorical questions, she put her fork into her mouth, suctioned off the compressed cake and began methodically to gather more. With each question, her voice seemed to get louder, as if each phrase carried her closer to the center of her imaginary Definitist world in which she, Dorothy Never, was a participant in a complex drama with global import. Justine glanced nervously at the lone dark-haired girl sitting near them, again embarrassed to be heard and seen having a conversation with this crank in Sears clothing.

“Then there’s always the random chaos argument; if logic and reason are the strongest, noblest factors in human life, why is the world such a disaster of chaos and illogic?”

“Well so many people are illogical, for one thing,” said Justine helpfully.

“Yes!” Dorothy’s eyes bulged with excitement, and Justine was again ashamed of creating this artificial bond of assonance.

Dorothy put down her fork; she had by this time annihilated the cake crumbs. “Now the kinds of objections and points of view that I just listed are—were, I mean—totally alien from Granite’s way of
thinking. Her thought processes were so clear, so courageous that she simply went straight for the most fundamental elements of human life and psychology and wasn’t stopped by the complexity that stymies most of us. Of course there is tremendous complexity in human interaction and many different things going on, some of them apparently contradictory. But they are all—all!—linked to those fundamental life issues and the choice we must make between life and antilife. Every human act, every thought, every feeling has in it a direction one way or the other—weakness, collectivism, mediocrity, death, or strength, beauty, selfishness, life. The connections may not be apparent at first, but they are there. You, for example. Your choice to work as a free-lance writer instead of being on staff—that is a choice that speaks of your strength, your need to be apart from the herd. It is a choice for life.” Dorothy took a breath to avoid apoplexy and went on. “Even inanimate objects are statements for or against life. These chairs we’re sitting in—which I think are wonderful by the way, as is this whole place; I’m glad you picked it—have certain qualities of refinement, sensibility,
statements
in their contours and curves about the way life should be lived, which connect them to the abstracts of honor and graciousness without which life wouldn’t be worthwhile. The desserts we just ate—they embody the qualities of lightness, gentleness, sweetness, and comfort—moral qualities because when you decide whether or not to have these things in your life, you make a moral choice. Moral choice is not ambiguous; it is as concrete as these chairs we sit in. There is no chaos, except that which we create ourselves.”

Dorothy’s face radiated certainty and pride, as if she were standing on a mountain peak with the sun streaming down on her, as in one of those car commercials that, by some weird twist of sensibility, place a Cadillac on a mountain peak in the Sierras where fawning cameras circle around it as if it had just found a cure for cancer.

Hopeless, thought Justine, as are most attempts to quantify and contain. Still, she had to admit, there was something consoling, seductive even, about this vision of chairs and pieces of cake suspended, along with everything else, in a glistening web of order that connected them to all the morality in the universe. For all Anna Granite’s trumpeting about arrogance and elitism and how
great it was, her ideas were ingenuously humble and populist. In her vision, there was nothing absurd about a culture that broadcasts images of a car standing triumphant on a mountain peak as if it were a genius who had cured cancer—the car was, after all, connected to the same abstractions of greatness as the scientist and, in a way, represented the scientist! And, after all, you couldn’t very well duplicate the scientist and sell him to people, could you?

“I’m glad you brought that up,” said Justine, taking the tape out, turning it over and popping it back in, “because you clarified some things for me. But I have to change the subject since I have to go soon.”

“By all means,” said Dorothy. “I think I’d like to see the menu again.”

“I was reading the paper the other day and I came across this guy who’s been given a pretty high position in the city financial administration who was quoted as saying Anna Granite was one of his early influences. Did you ever meet Knight Ludlow?”

When she asked that question
, I had the crazy thought that she knew, that she’d interviewed him and he’d told her, and now she just wanted to watch my face. But then she said, “I’ve tried to interview him but I can’t get through by phone or mail. It’s not essential, but since he’s so highly placed, it would be good to mention him. So I wondered if you knew anything of interest about him. Off the record, if you like.”

Either she had calmed herself, called her blind groping energies to huddle around her and thus presented a more stable appearance, or I had adjusted to her neurotic presence. Because suddenly her white, pretty face moved me almost to tears; the childish sweetness of her demeanor was like silver thread guided by the bright needle of her voice. I wanted to be close with her. I had wanted to be close with her from the moment I met her. “This is off the record,” I said, a lump in my throat.

She turned off the tape recorder.

“I had an affair with Knight Ludlow.” I had an image of myself sitting there in front of her sobbing but I was dry-eyed. A cup of cocoa loomed in the back of my mind. I signaled the waitress. “It was the only affair I’ve ever had in my life.”