The place Justine Shade had chosen for our meeting was one of those fashionable cafés where people with expensive haircuts drink cappuccino and eat plates of fruit and cheese. I had walked by cafés of this sort on my infrequent trips to the Village; when I peered into their windows, I would feel my curiosity press forward with its little pink nose atwitch and then my contempt would stiffly pull itself proud and erect, shutting its ears to curiosity’s pleas to maybe go in and have some expensive pastry. When curiosity had the loudest voice, it seemed to me that the people in these cafés were not only attractive but fascinating, that they were probably talking about the issues that Anna Granite’s characters talked about at cocktail parties, each one representing a different philosophical view. Then contempt spoke, and I saw trivial self-satisfied swine obsessed with fashion and artificial emotion, probably on drugs, people like the awful characters in those short glib books by trendy young writers. Sometimes I would have the wistful thought that it might be fun and certainly novel to be, for just a little while, self-satisfied and obsessed with fashion. Then I would reflect that, fun or not, I couldn’t do it because of who I was.

Now though, I had to go into Gran Caffé Degli Artisti, and in I went. Narrowing my focus so that I would respond only to the visual apprehension of one thin blond girl with glasses (I didn’t want to stand there gaping at the various types that would doubtless abound), I marched through the place. She wasn’t there. I stood a moment, consternated (what if she’d forgotten?) and then sat at one of the cunning little tables across from the door where she’d be sure to see me. I spent some moments arranging myself and then looked up to reconnoiter. I was pleased by the sight of statuettes in niches, candelabras covered with the lavish wax of hundreds of expired candles, and carved, high-backed inquisitor-style chairs. There actually weren’t many people of any description there, probably because it was four thirty, an hour when most people are either at work or getting ready to go to work. A table away from me sat a young woman with long dark hair and soft eyebrows. The multitude of finely wrought silver bracelets on her forearm stirred and gleamed as she lifted and set down her cup. She was reading, with great concentration, a book, the title of which I couldn’t see. Her blouse was plain and gray, but the jacket thrown over her chair was a beautiful little thing of purple, silver, and mauve, and actually had tiny triangular mirrors woven into it. Was this a signal that she was a fashionable person, or was this jacket a personal emblem, a defiance of the tyranny of fashion, possibly even made by the girl herself? I had no idea.

I looked towards the window. Two plainly dressed women in their thirties talked in low voices, their arms stretched towards each other on the table. Next to them was a table of boys with long hair tied back off their faces, a jumble of cups, dishes, and glasses before them on the table. Their profiles, alternately stiff, gentle or fluid were finely chiseled in the sharp relief of the sunlight, like boys who had just moments before been statues sculpted in honor of youth.

This wasn’t what I’d expected, but it was pleasant. I looked at the intriguing glass case of pastries and puddings to my right. I wondered if it would be unseemly to order two. “Hi.” Justine’s flat chirp announced her presence, and she sat down before me, smiling shyly.

I returned her greeting and immediately felt that she had changed since the last time I’d seen her. I couldn’t tell if this change was real or imagined. The waitress, a solemn girl with freckles, brought our menus, and I became too engrossed in mine to examine her further. I would’ve liked to go and scrutinize the cakes in the glass case and select several by hand, but I was embarrassed to do so. The waitress, however, was wonderfully solicitous in describing the imaginatively named confections on the menu, looking at me as she did so with an expression that suggested not only an intimate understanding and acceptance of my cravings, but also that she was happy to be instrumental in satisfying them. What a wonderful place, I thought, closing the menu. My contentment was interrupted when I glanced up and encountered Justine’s face. She too had ordered and closed her menu and, her face turned slightly sideways, was now staring into space, chewing on a piece of lip and covering half her face with her hand. She didn’t notice my look for several seconds, and when she finally turned towards me, I identified part of what was different about her. Her air of self-containment, her annoying detachment, and her sharp, out-thrusting concentration, which she had trained on me like a radar gun during our last meeting, was gone. I could still feel her little mind buzzing away, but its rays were diffuse, wandering, seemingly too weak to penetrate anything. In addition, I felt her groping not only towards me, but groping generally and desperately, like a hungry infant futilely trying to work its will by flailing the air with its tiny hands. One obvious difference; she was now using a tape recorder instead of pen and paper.

“So,” she said, readying the little machine, “I wanted to talk about a couple of things. Do you remember the last time we met how we got into a sort of argument about how many women perceive Granite’s attitude towards sexuality as atavistic and masochistic?”

Her obsession with masochism and perversion was really trying; of course it was her business if she kept it to herself, but for her to invite me out to talk about it was really a bit much, especially since she knew me to be the victim of a sadistic father. She must have noticed my expression because she hastened to make her voice conciliatory.

“You were saying how this isn’t what Granite meant at all. Well, during my research and interviews I’ve noticed—and not just in regard to the erotic aspect of Granite’s work—that her followers often seem to derive meaning from her work that would surprise her critics and even Granite herself. It’s almost as if her work exists here”—she gestured with her hands as if placing a small package on the table—“and that her followers exist here”—another package—“and that here, between them, is something altogether separate, a mixture of Granite’s work and the perception of it. And I was wondering if she was aware of this when you knew her and if so what she thought of it.”

Her bland delivery of this brainless assertion made it all the more exasperating. How could someone who had spent the last month studying Granite and her followers not realize that this way of thinking was the very thing she—and we—most despised? But as my anger came forward, ready to smite her, I sensed, in addition to her diffuse desperation, a scary fragility in her, a psychic quivering which vibrated in her smile and even more noticeably in her trembling hand. I had the distinct feeling that I was in the presence of someone about to have a nervous breakdown, and I lost my interest in rebuking her. I didn’t lose my interest in defending Granite, but I did so gently.

“Such a concept would never have entered Granite’s head. Of course, there were always flakey people around her who misunderstood her work, but if she saw that they were trying their best to grasp it and simply didn’t have the mental equipment to do so, she was very kind to them. The others, those who deliberately misinterpreted—”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean what happens when people look at a thing and see in it something other than what its creator intended and aren’t aware of the difference. That happens all the time, especially to writers. I just think it’s particularly interesting in the context of what Granite said about objective truth.”

Of course I knew what she meant. But why would she focus on something so trivial when the irrefutable grandness of Granite blazed like the sun, illuminating and upholding the existence of so many people who might have spent their lives metaphorically slumped before their televisions, too despondent to move? (I pushed aside the troublesome thought that Granite herself had espoused contempt for people who fastened their thoughts onto the belief systems of others and would never have done so herself.) It was frustrating to be in the presence of someone so interested in Granite and yet to pass her, ships in the night, but ships that scraped and grated against each other on the way by. I was exasperated to have this strange, nervous, delicate being flitting about me, first jangling the alarm bells of my most personal issues, seeming to offer intimacy and then denying it, stirring up old grief and then skipping off, and now sitting before me like a foreign solar system gone awry, broadcasting signals from her distant station too weak and confusing for me to read and then saying things which could only lead away from serious discussion and which, furthermore, I sensed didn’t engage her full attention or express her real concerns.

“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Why are you doing this article anyway?”

When Justine walked into the café and saw Dorothy sitting there, she was reminded, with unexpected vividness, of the power of the woman’s presence. In the precious café she seemed even more huge than she had in her apartment, even more insistently strange, the emblems of her derangement circling her in an invisible but palpable personal mandala. For a moment she felt embarrassed to be sitting next to a fat lady wearing hideous chartreuse sweat pants, big red hair and the plastic jewelry of a drag queen with an ironic sense of humor. Horrified, she considered the possibility of an acquaintance coming in and seeing her with this person, or even the waitress, who would surely notice how odd they looked together. Then the stubborn kid who had defied society once before spoke up; “I don’t care what you douche-bags do. I’m not gonna hate Emotional anymore,” and she sat down, smiling.

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.”

She stared at me, her serene expression scattered by surprise. When her face began to re-form itself, I was surprised that its new expression seemed to be pity.

“I’m not ashamed of it, quite the reverse. It can’t be made public because at the time he was engaged to be married, and he did get married shortly afterward. He could be with her still, so I have to maintain discretion.”

Justine said she understood.

“It started as an affair of the intellect. He told me about his fiancée before it went beyond that, so I knew what I was doing. Of course, when he told me, I was taken aback and upset. Here I was after all, this naïve little girl from the midwest who knew nothing about affairs, who’d never gone on dates, whose only experience with the opposite sex was . . . you know. But it was the work of Anna Granite that helped me get past all that.” I smiled at Justine, giving her a chance to apprehend that she was hearing about a wonderful experience and for her face to change accordingly. It didn’t. “For, according to Granite, there is nothing wrong with an affair with a married man, for anyone involved. It would be wrong for the wife to expect the husband to deny himself something that would give him pleasure—it would be very unloving of her. It would also be wrong of me to deny myself the pleasure of an affair with him—wrong also to expect him to leave the wife he loved. I’m not talking about that hippie free-love merde either. I’m talking about passion between responsible adults.” The shadows on the wall of the Euella Parks Hotel! The traffic noise outside! Knight happily mopping corn syrup from his plate! The dark-haired girl stared at me as she got up to leave. I stared back, and she dropped her gaze.

“Who came on to whom first?” asked Justine.

“What?”

“Who made the advance? Sexually.”

It was uncanny, her intuition for the most irritating question possible. “What difference does that make? We were both passionately attracted to each other, it was obvious. Either one of us could’ve made the first move.”

“Did he know about what had happened to you with your father? Before you had sex I mean.”

“Yes and he was wonderful about it. He never made me feel like there was anything sullied or—”

“Big of him.”

“—ruined about me. He made me feel protected and loved. He made me feel like a beautiful woman. The way he ended it was so poignant and elegant. He took me to a champagne brunch at the best hotel in town. Can you imagine? This little eighteen-year-old who’s never done anything in her life sitting with her lover having champagne for breakfast with a beautiful bouquet of flowers on the table.” Again I saw the flowers, saw their bruised petals fallen on the table, soft and full of repose in their delicate death.

“So it didn’t hurt you to have this affair with a married man?”

Justine’s face had a look of irretrievable sorrow. I resisted its pull. “No, not at all. It was the most wonderful experience of my life.”

Suddenly, I was afraid she was going to ask, Well, if it was so great why didn’t you ever do it again? and I found myself without an answer. Instead she said, “I’m always upset by affairs with married men. I’m upset by affairs period.”

And her upright posture changed into a soft slump, all the weight of her torso on one slim, exquisitely tapered forearm, the blond hairs of which slowly stood erect. I had an impulse to reach across the table and stroke this down.

“I don’t know why that would be,” I said inanely. “You’re such a pretty woman.”

“I don’t think I know how to have relationships.” She rushed her tone to let me know this was the end of the conversation, pulled the tape recorder into her bag, and looked at me with a hurried sidelong glance, part rueful smile, that was like the light in the crack of a door which is closing shut.