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.
“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?”
“What is it?”
“It” was two small capsules (half midnight blue, half aquamarine) that made me feel as wide awake as I had ever felt in my life. Together Granite and I outlasted everyone, smiling and waving goodbye as one by one, Wilma, Knight, and Bradley expressed their regrets. Indeed, at the very end it was I who fiercely paced the floor taking notes in motion while Granite lay on the couch soliloquizing, cigarette held aloft.
It was seven thirty when she finally gave me my cab fare. “You have pleased me, Dorothy,” she said, and I sailed out into the celebratory sun full of get up and go. It was a Saturday, but instead of going home to sleep I went to a large diner with a sparkling, kidney-shaped counter and ordered french toast. I ate slowly as my usually receptive stomach was still taut with excitement. (I didn’t make the connection between the pills and appetite loss.)
I looked with great interest at the other people at the diner, thinking about the oddness of fate. Who would think from looking at me as I sat mopping up syrup that I had just, of my own initiative, become part of the greatest intellectual vanguard in the country? I looked at the man just across from me. He was only in his late twenties, I guessed, but grizzled and jowly with tough skin and dully thoughtful eyes. He had a crouched, guarded way of sitting that was wary, weary, and sluggish, yet, because of an alertness in his neck and head, he looked capable of sudden quite vigorous action. I wished I could talk philosophy with him. He looked at me.
“You’re a cute little girl,” he said.
I stared.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” I answered. “I don’t. I’ve never had a boyfriend.”
“Really?” He picked up a triangle of dark toast and bit off half of it, chewing with loose, loopy movements. “That’s a shame. I’d offer to be your boyfriend myself but I’m too old and you’re not interested.” He looked sadly off into space. “You’ve got great tits though,” he added morosely.
I knew most people would think this was a rude thing to say, but considering that no one had ever described any portion of my body as “great,” it was hard to view it that way, especially given the wistful tone in which it was said. I started to say “Thank you” but then considered how Solitaire D’Anconti would react to such a remark and flushed with embarrassment to think I’d almost been flattered by it. I glowered in the mirror behind the counter, making my features as cold and imperious as possible while surreptitiously checking to see if there was anything there that could reasonably be described as “cute.” Drained face, wild burning eyes, pale fat too-wide mouth.
“You don’t have to say anything,” continued the man, pulling apart his toast with a certain magnanimous air.
I fled to the comparative serenity of the Euella Parks Hotel.
I slept most of the morning and all afternoon but still found myself a little groggy when it was time to return to Granite’s apartment at six (she ran the meetings through the weekends). I had barely enough time to heat a can of soup on my hot plate and eat it, along with a few pieces of bread, before rushing out. That night and on many of the nights that followed—whenever the conferences went past one’clock—Granite would secretly share with me one or two of her heavenly midnight and aqua capsules. My dictation became ever more quick and sure, my demeanor so optimistic that at times I feared I was losing my mind. I was sometimes so full of energy when I left Granite’s apartment that I walked to my hotel instead of taking the taxi. Knight continued to escort me to the taxi on the nights when we left at the same time and my pill-induced enthusiasm elbowed my shyness to one side. Sometimes when the cab pulled away I would look out the back window and see him turning in the other direction, presumably to walk to his apartment, or perhaps to take a bus. I viewed him romantically, but not with the expectation that anything sexual could happen between us; that didn’t occur to me. It was enough for me to be the recipient of his gallant attention, his smiles, his almost tangible warmth and goodwill. Then something happened to awaken another need which, although it initially awoke with only the feeblest twitch, continued to twitch with larger and larger movements until I saw that it was only the smallest foreclaw of a beast that, once fully aroused, would scream unabated day and night—then sleep again forever.
One evening I arrived at Granite’s apartment so exhausted that I didn’t think I could successfully pick out main points. For the first time I asked her for a pill and she gave it to me. Thus, even though it was only twelve thirty when the meeting broke up, I left with my brain chattering enthusiastically to itself and my body full of energy. When Knight performed his usual courtly gesture, I stopped outside on the pavement and told him I thought I’d walk home.
“Yeah. Maybe I’ll give the cabbie some money so he won’t be upset.” I did so, shut the door in his muttering face, and returned to my Knight.
“How far away do you live?”
“It takes about half an hour to walk it.” We both watched as the cabbie tooled off into the night.
“Do you think it’s safe for you to—”
“Mr. Ludlow,” I said. “I’m, I, I’m grateful for your concern but I’m really not afraid. I’ve done it before, even later. I know I must seem very ordinary to you but—”
“No you don’t,” he murmured.
I hesitated. My stimulated heart ground away, my stimulated brain spewed words. “Well, I’m not. After what I’ve experienced, I doubt that anything on the late-night streets of Philadelphia could throw me for a loop.” Knight looked at me as if I’d said something curious and very cute. My confidence suddenly felt like a heavy, high structure creaking on a flimsy base. I stared at the sidewalk.
“Well, maybe you’d let me walk you home. I’m feeling pretty stirred up and energetic myself. Besides, I’m a terrible insomniac.”
I agreed out of passivity more than anything else; it discomfited me, this familiarity and friendliness. I would have preferred that he remain at a distance, gallant but within prescribed boundaries. I didn’t understand why he wanted to step over those boundaries for me. I’d seen movies in which important handsome financiers became smitten by little secretaries—but those little secretaries looked like Judy Garland and Doris Day, not like me. As we walked, however, my feelings began to change. He didn’t rush into conversation; he didn’t talk at all. He simply walked along, hands behind his back, emitting grace combined with that full and buoyant quality I’d heard in his voice—and now, unlike in the meetings, it was suffused with warmth. I enjoyed his presence in spite of myself. My hopped-up mind spewed words which, since I was too shy to talk, tunneled through my brain and doubled back out until my head was riddled with unspoken words. My thoughts roiled around in such a convoluted way that I wondered how I ever spoke at all. I wished Knight would talk to me.
“Tell me,” he said. “How did you come to work for Anna Granite? I know she just met you the night I saw you.”
So our conversation began. As soon as they found an opening, the words rolled out in proper form, only more freely than usual. I told him that my life at home had been unbearable, but not why. I expanded more on my life at college, ending with my appearance before Granite.
Then he talked about his life, which included leaving home at the age of sixteen to escape an alcoholic father. This prompted me to ask him questions about his apparently quick rise to success at age thirty-three. I had never had a conversation like this before. Every sentence, from him or me, felt new, wobbly, and vulnerable, waving in the air between us like tiny ant limbs. I felt frightened that I would say something wrong, uncertain as to what was appropriate between relative strangers. I tried to stay with the facts, but even so every new phrase added more footage to a bridge, the length and direction of which I couldn’t predict. But despite my anxiety, his voice, as much as the pills, drew me further and further into conversation, unable to resist brushing against this foreign element of gentle strength.
When we reached my hotel, he said good night, smiled, and left. I mounted the stairs to my room, my words and feelings still extended from me like a limb groping the air for something no longer there. I entered my small suite, removed my shoes, dropped my handbag, and walked through the room in the dark to the bathroom (the toilet rather; there was a communal shower in the hall). I turned on the light, stood before the full-length mirror, and, in that narrow space, slowly stripped off my clothes until I was naked except for my socks. I stood for several moments looking, as if I were an adolescent girl just developing breasts. I didn’t look to see whether I was attractive or not, I just looked.
Then I turned off the light and got in bed.
The next day, during lunch hour, I used some of my new financial abundance (Granite’s already generous wage was increased with all the overtime) to buy two new skirts, two shirts, and a pair of pants. All were two delightful sizes smaller than my conspicuously loose-fitting older clothes. I also bought a paper, which I immediately folded to highlight the rental ads. I sat at my desk reading coded descriptions of “sunny efficiencies” and “furnished 1 bedrm.,” my new clothes bundled in exciting bags under the desk, where I could squeeze them between my knees.
That night the dynamic of the conference was rearranged by Knight’s new proximity to me; all night I felt the friendly tug of his warmth, the silent communication of the invisible antennae tickling the air between us. I felt something open in my body, something like a rare flower that absorbs molecules, pheromones, and oxygen, then secretes them in a glittering membrane of vibrancy, fecundity, and power, a membrane that quivered tautly every time Knight’s image came into my mind.
The meetings that week didn’t run as late as they had previously, and Knight walked me home three times. Each time we sent up new flares which left streams of colored light between us, until there was a cat’s cradle of crisscrossing beams that swayed between us.
On the third walk, I asked him, as we stood outside my hotel, why he had said the previous week that I didn’t seem ordinary to him.
“Something in your face,” he replied. “There’s an unusual combination in your expressions. Sometimes you’re so blank and remote, you’re impossible to read. Other times your eyes are so soft and emotional. But also strong. I think you’re very strong.”
He stood, serious and tense. I had the almost physical sensation that he was going to stroke my face. My skin drew tight.
“Good night,” he said.
Fourteen years later, I sat before a legal document, staring into space, stroking my own face with my hand. I had been thinking obsessively of Knight Ludlow for a week, probably because I had seen his picture on a page of the Times, which had been pulled apart and spread open on a table in the cafeteria. He was still handsome. He had just been named financial advisor to the mayor of New York City. This information, along with the auxiliary information in the article (which did not mention Anna Granite), put me in a melancholy state, and I wandered the abandoned halls for a good half hour before returning to my station, staring with disbelief at the tiny stuffed animals and smiling pictures on the desks of secretaries. Who among my co-workers would believe me, if I should choose to tell them, that this man had once stood with me late at night, talking to me about the expression in my eyes? I went into a ladies’ room on the other side of the building where I was unlikely to be interrupted. I stood before a full-length mirror and looked at my huge body, even lifting up my skirt and rolling down my pantyhose to examine the pocked layer of cellulite on my thighs and butt. I looked at it a long time, wondering that this puckered yellow flesh was actually me.
It is probable that the stirred memory of Knight Ludlow played a role in my finally acting on my repeated resolutions to join a gym. I didn’t feel as embarrassed as I’d expected, wading in wearing my monstrous cotton sweats. At first I restricted myself to the weight area, the largest place in the gym. The weight area was prowled by huge muscular men in stylish leotards adorned with enormous leather belts at their waists, who looked straight ahead as they walked and showed their teeth as they strained to lift. Our endeavors were performed in decorous silence far from the disco-throbbing aerobics room where squadrons of little creatures leapt and kicked. It was a calming, contemplative experience to be part of the rising and lowering, continually slow-moving machinery, and no one laughed at me struggling with my light weight.
The experience—especially the fascinating dressing room, everyone with their interesting underwear, their unpredictable body combinations, their fussy animal-like grooming rituals—was an active bustling island on the slumbering sea of my daily life, and a reason to wake up. I now looked out my window at the boy exercisers across the street with camaraderie and felt my new-forming muscles.
I had been going for two weeks when I gave in to my curiosity and stood at the aerobics room door watching the classes. They weren’t all little creatures. Many were middle-aged and plump, a few were men. There was a certain high-chested majesty in their synchronous movements, their bright outfits were emblematic of sex and fun, the music sang about love and destiny and feverish pleading. The teacher, a beautiful black woman with rosy purple-hued skin, paced among the exercisers crying out, “Up and down, up and down, that’s right, that’s right, you got it!” her voice like crimson roses burning in the air. I watched voyeuristically, knowing I was peeping at people in the middle of a collective dream. I imagined myself among them, part of the regimental dance, the teacher’s rosy heat, the huge mobile hope of happiness and vitality. And as I watched, it suddenly occurred to me I had been merely watching the world all my life. I was angered at the banality of this observation and walked away from the aerobics room to push some metal poundage with all my might.
After Knight described my face to me, the cataclysm occurred. My sense of a flower living inside me was torn to pieces and lost forever; I fell in love. The most striking thing about love was its terrible nature. My guts became black and void with dread while my outermost flesh came alive with darting insect dots of energy that boiled under my skin, as if my blood and organs were trying to get out of my body. My thoughts cracked to pieces that banged against my skull again and again, yielding up image after strange, confusing image. I would see Knight’s face smiling at me from that part of the world where pleasure and companionship were the norm; then I would feel the darkness of my deep body go into a slow rolling motion, like the root of a wave in the pit of the ocean or a silent internal moan; then I would see my own hand plunging a knife into my throat. At night I would get under the blankets and think of him. My insides would soften, my awareness would sink down into my lower body, my pelvis would open and expand, and then a convulsion would come from nowhere, and I would emerge from it shivering. I would touch between my legs; my genitals felt like a foreign object. I would lie this way for hours, unable to move until exhaustion pulled me into a sleep populated with Anna Granite, Bradley, the Philadelphia bus system, Nona Delgado and my father, always my father, holding me in an iron grip, his penis, like rotted meat, pressed against me. I would wake up full of fear and sit with the lights on while my thoughts formed and cracked into pieces. And riding a crazy car around these images and thoughts, screaming and chattering, or just plain staring, were the people I had to talk to on the phone at the office, my fellow travelers on the bus, Wilson Bean and Wilma Humple, store clerks, and criminals staring at me from newspaper pages.
I knew this agony had come out of my contact with Knight, yet all I wanted was to be near him. I sat at the meeting absorbing him, pulling his psychic excretions into my body. I told time according to when I might talk to him during a break in the meeting or when he might walk me home.
I don’t remember if I longed to hold him in my arms or to feel him inside me. I do know I wanted to be alone in a room with him. It was to this end that I left (not without a pang of sentiment) the Euella Parks Hotel and rented a room. It was a furnished walkup with a private kitchen and bathroom in the hall. The landlady was a rigid white creature wearing a hairnet and a dress covered with nasty flowers; she tried to be pleasant, but she was too unhappy to make it stick. It didn’t matter; the place had a certain charm, in spite of a greasy stain on the wall. There was sun, blue wallpaper, flower boxes outside the windows, a quilt on the double bed. In addition to the room, I acquired more new clothes, makeup, and a hair cut.
The night I moved into my new home I didn’t get into bed to sleep. I spent the entire night before the mirror trying on clothes and makeup. A young body can withstand a great deal of stress and abuse without showing exhaustion. A few judicious smears of makeup under my eyes erased the circles forming there, pink liquid freshened my cheeks. My weight loss was apparent, and my features had emerged from my face. They fascinated me, although I wasn’t yet sure if I liked them or not. My eyes were large without the surrounding fat, my big lips, instead of adding to the previously exaggerated impression of roundness and slackness, added an interesting dimension to the sharpened planes of my chin and cheeks. The shorter hair drew the movement of my face upward and made my skin appear to open out in radiant petals.
Knight came closer; we crossed the catwalks between us and explored our respective inner girdings. He told me about his childhood. I told him everything about mine, except the one thing. We went to the all night diner where the man had told me I had great tits. It was there, over pieces of wonderfully gooey apple pie, that, during our discussion of ultrareality, a phrase leapt from his mouth and shot into the air between us, urgently flashing. It was “my fiancée in New York.” This flashing sign effectively obscured the rest of the conversation for several minutes. Knight continued talking, happily manipulating his fork to get maximum corn syrup on it. His words fell one atop the other, forming a senseless pile. I felt myself moving away from him in a square section that became smaller and more distant in evenly spaced pulses, like a photograph inset within a larger photograph. My tiny hands played with sugar packets. Far away, Knight moved his lips in crazy silence. Then I opened my mouth, breathed in and ate the fiancée. Vaguely remembering that Asia Maconda, Katya Leonova, and Solitaire D’Anconti all had more than one lover, I swallowed the fiancée information and held it down. It dissolved in my stomach pretty quickly. I ate my pie and smiled at Knight’s ultrareality. We left the diner, and I invited him up to see my new apartment. It was two o’clock Saturday morning. He hesitated only seconds before he said yes.
I don’t think I can chronicle the combination of words, silences, and movements that led to him and me on my bed with our arms around each other. Rather awkwardly he stroked my hair, felt up and down my spine, and adjusted himself against me. He said, “This may not be fair to you, Dorothy. I know I should’ve mentioned Angela before.” I shook my head, my eyes half closed. There was more talk but it was immaterial before the feelings emanating from him, the strength and gentleness, warmth and control, the mystery of masculine tenderness that enveloped me like the wings of a swan. We lay on my bed, his body supporting itself above me. The ricocheting chatter in my mind became inaudible, the zipping comets of quasi thought slowed to melting putty. Rivulets of liquid gold, swollen with nodules of heat, spanned my limbs. A glimmering flower of blood and fire bloomed between my legs, its petals spanned my thighs. He kissed me. He put his genitals against me. I contracted; all the light in my body went out. I had a sensation of falling and then a sudden jerking halt, as if I were a mountain climber who had slipped and been caught in my harness, swaying above a chasm. Knight moved his lips over my face, he put a hand on my breast. My brief desire was dead. I shuddered and grabbed his shoulder. He misunderstood and touched between my legs. I thought: If I control my body and follow his movements, everything will be all right, I’ll be able to do it. Then he raised himself and looked into my face. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”
I moved my hand to my face and felt tears. There was an instant of silence, and then I began to cry in earnest. He moved away from me; I had a glimpse of his stricken expression before I rolled on my stomach and curled into a ball. More words: “I’m sorry baby, I don’t want to hurt you, forgive me,” stuff like that. I gestured irritably. At that moment he seemed almost stupid to me. My heart froze in a desperate palpitation, and I stopped crying.
“It’s all right.” I sat up. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Angela.”
He looked surprised. “What is it then?”
I didn’t know, but I told him anyway. He sat solemnly nodding while I talked about my devotion to Anna Granite and how I didn’t want to be distracted from the important work of her project with an emotional entanglement. I talked about my feelings of friendship for him and how I didn’t want to risk ruining them. I told him I’d never had a lover before, which felt true until the image of my father gestured from a corner. I ignored him, continued talking over him, talking about my feelings of respect for Knight’s relationship with Angela. Knight continued nodding, every now and then interjecting a declaration or protestation of his own. My father stood mute, listening to me talk. Finally I couldn’t talk anymore. Knight talked a little longer while I picked the stuffing from a small hole in the quilt. My body felt wooden. I wished he would go. He stopped talking and sat as though waiting for me to say something. I scanned a list of sentences appropriate for getting him out the door. Then I thought that if he left I would be alone with my father.
“Well,” he said standing up. “Guess it’s time for me to go.”
I cast about for words.
“Dorothy? Are you all right?”
I lunged for a word; it slid away. I began to cry again.
Slowly, I told him. After much more talk, deep under the quilt with our arms around each other, I told him about my father and me. I felt as if there were a hole in my chest and that Knight could look into it as I had once looked into the opened brain of the strange boy sitting in our kitchen. But just as I had felt tenderly protective towards the boy and his poor exposed brain, I felt Knight’s tenderness penetrating my wound, curling around my ribs, touching against the vulnerable red sponge of my lungs, mournfully stroking my heart hiding in its dark nest of muscle.
It was six o’clock when we turned off the light and lay down. We lay under the quilt with most of our clothes on. My back was against his front, and he curled his body around me, his strangely small hand holding my elbow. I lay for hours feeling his eyelashes rise and lower against my shoulder, more and more slowly as his breath took him into sleep. My breath slowed and deepened with his, and I lay with my eyes shut watching long loops of gray move around my head. I opened my eyes. Shadows crawled and crept. Knight’s penis hardened as he slept, and with a pretty moan, he pressed it against my lower spine before falling back into unconsciousness. I took in the feel of it experimentally. It seemed helplessly outgoing and vulnerable in its blind swollen state, yet fussily and ardently friendly. City sounds and voices came through the window at quickening intervals; the bread truck and its cheerful driver firing jokes into space, the grumbling answer of the restauranteur, the brisk hum of passing cars, the bus doing its noisy duty. Knight’s little hand twitched on my arm. All the bones, ligaments, skin, and nerves that felt these things seemed precious to me, and I wanted to stay awake so I could feel them hanging in the hammock of my exhaustion for as long as possible. Knight’s dick sat on my spine with all the dumb insistence of life, and I felt accompanied on my vigil.
We spent several nights in this way, until a week after the meetings ended and he had to return to New York. I received one letter from him. The web that connected us, its shimmering gossamer spanning even the state border, finally broke and disintegrated. During the next few years I saw him occasionally at various Definitist gatherings—sometimes with his fiancée, who became his wife. She was a tall, big-thighed thing with thrusting breasts and quick eyes, and she looked at me as if she knew what had gone on. It didn’t matter. He would fix his eyes on mine with affectionate pain, he would take my hand, and I would feel as I had when he escorted me down to the waiting cab; distant from him and smaller, but connected by respect and gentleness, even though I had put back all the weight I lost during the fevered meeting period and gained yet more weight.
It is strange that I didn’t feel abandoned and betrayed, particularly since, on our last night together, we became lovers. It was unexpected. My body awoke from a shallow sleep suffused with heat, and I pressed myself against him. This time I didn’t become frightened, and we continued. His face swam over mine, his breath coiled in my ear. He nestled his body more snugly between my legs. “All right?” he gasped. I arched against him in hopelessly incomplete meeting. My head became a vague blur, my body a thousand cuplike doors opened to receive him. Drool ran in my mouth; I said yes, my voice rising through my body to emerge from my lips a barely audible breath. His fingers gently pulled my stiff nipples, and the outer petals of my vagina crimsoned and curled inward, burned by their own heat. My womb became a supple muscle of fire, expanded and soft, strong as life. I’m going to do it I thought, and in my mind I leapt. Then he penetrated my knot of fiery muscle, and my body went away from me. In my mind were images of my body, arched and abandoned, my neck thrown back, like a surrendering animal, giving to him all the helpless, ferocious, wounded love in my life. Because I wanted so much to give my life to him, even if it were just a moment of it. But my body, still inwardly burning, moved away from me. I could not feel what it experienced and so could not give my experience to him. Hesitant, he pushed farther in, as if he were frightened. My heart hammered in my throat. He pushed deeper. Pleasure rose up through the distance between me and my body and expired. Moaning in sorrow, I held it close as it faded. He kissed my neck; his full, tender, buoyant spirit entered my skin and for an instant I felt my body alive again beneath him.
So it went, the shy beginning and aborted end of pleasure. When it was over I lay confused and relieved in his arms. The next morning he took me in a taxi to a beautiful restaurant with huge feverish bursts of flowers on every table. We ordered champagne with our omelettes. He left the following day.
The next time I saw him, a year and seven months later, I thought with disbelief that this person, so radiant and handsome, had stuck one of his body parts into me, pulled it out, and stuck it in again, over and over. It was wonderful, but I was glad it was never going to happen again. I preferred the elegance of distance, bridged only by an occasional hand touch, which, as the expression of all emotional language, became more eloquent than the confusing overkill of complete body contact.
Last to go were those moments, scattered throughout the years, when I lay alone in bed, motionless except for the hand wandering between my legs, recalling the feel of his eyelashes against my skin, his breath in my ear, his weight, his genitals. Memory playfully tickled my flesh, but the flesh remained indifferent; my mind would wander to something I’d seen on the street that day, radio jingles would fly by, memory would falter and fail.
Sometimes I tried to excite myself by focusing on the love scenes between Granite’s characters and then putting Knight and me in their places. But the swollen blossoms of passion described in Granite’s novels couldn’t accommodate the scratchy old image of Knight’s body on mine or the strange attendant mix of cold, heat, terror, love, and need.
Gradually I stopped trying.
Longingly I stood and watched the sweating exercisers, slowly rising and lowering, their hands on their hips, their feet flat and thighs spread. Were they people who had had tragic lives, broken love affairs, murdered children, who had, up until quite recently, spent the bulk of their time lying in darkened rooms, just now able to summon the strength to get into their leotards and jump up and down? Some of them looked slightly pathetic in the dressing room, in spite of their rigorous training. There was the thin girl with sharp raw elbows and eyes so one-dimensional in their wounded uncertainty that people probably victimized her reflexively; in the dressing room, she revealed the thick, layered toenails of a dinosaur. Or the gum-chewing young blonde with her bleached hair tortured up on her head and a set of bright rings through her nose, who presented herself, with her ripped flamboyant clothing, as a jangling icon of aggression and mobility, but who sat like a matron, her heavy breasts drooping in her tatty, loose-fitting bra. Or the frail creature with her shoulders hunched as if she was expecting the blows of a whip, burdened with ugly, static, artificial breasts, from which the rest of her body seemed to droop. Did their bodies really register terrible pain, or was I, my own body so muffled in inert fat, simply imagining it? What would it be like to hold one of these complexly injured animals in your arms? Would you feel her slowly come to life as you stroked her bony back, would the innocent ugliness of her toenails scrape you as she murmured in delight, would you see her eyes suddenly expand into beauty as they made room for all the treasures of expression she had held trapped in her frightened heart?
The music asked, “Straight up now tell me do you really wanna love me forever/oh oh oh/Or am I caught in a hit and run?” I kept standing there, inexplicably thinking of Justine Shade and what her problems might be.