Justine had said that she would call me when the article was going to appear in the Vision, and I believed her. I knew that it often took months for magazines to print articles, so I wasn’t suspicious or impatient when two months passed without my hearing from her. I kept it in the back of my mind like a present to be opened when the time was right. I imagined reading it and then meeting with Justine to discuss it. I would praise her overall insight and then criticize the finer points of her analysis, instructing her in how she might present her arguments better in the future. I imagined her following my finger with her eyes as it traced the place she had gone slightly awry in her article, I imagined her humbly nodding.
But she didn’t call me.
I was leaving work after a grueling twelve-hour shift. It was 10:00 A.M., and I was exhausted. Tiny particles of paranormal light swam before my eyes; the day workers, with their bright, tense faces, their jaunty manic walks, swinging purses and dangling belts were an onslaught. I made my way out of the building, bubbles of disorientation popping about my head.
Ordinarily I rode a company car home from work, but at this hour it was faster to take the subway, so I went to the nearest noise-boiling pit. The train was delayed, or so I deduced from the mangled voice that roared from the speakers above us. The mob on the platform grew in number, everyone bearing down hard on the track of daily habit, staring into the maw of the impending day, pacing in insect circles, pitching their thoughts and feelings into the future or the past, anywhere but the subway.
I spotted a concession stand and thought of little mints and chewy candies. I made my way towards the booth to participate in the mechanical ballet of giving and receiving choreographed by the muttering man behind the counter. As I waited my turn I scanned the magazines and papers, the horrific headlines and happy faces that help give form to our inchoate and vulnerable mass psyche. I looked rather fondly at the Vision—yet another headline about the political import of some rock band—and absently turned the front page to stare at the table of contents. “Anna Granite,” it said, “Yuppie Grandmother—by Justine Shade.”
The snottiness of it was like a bracing blow to the face—but I recovered. Probably Justine had nothing to do with the headline, and not everyone used the word “yuppie” pejoratively. I muffed my part in the newsstand ballet by turning to walk away with the paper without paying, and the newsman screamed at me, scowling at my cheerful attempts at explanation. I paid for it and opened it—there it was again! That classic photograph of Granite’s imperial face, so long absent from public pages! My pleasure rose and combined with my exhaustion, and for a moment my brain came undone from its dense gray coils and merrily bobbed in the colorful miasma of irrationality. I started to read, and the subway came bawling into view. I folded the paper under my arm and fought savagely for a seat so I could comfortably read, shamelessly using my size and weight to get my way. People glared, but I didn’t care. I was smiling insanely as I opened the paper. I was puzzled, even in my magnanimous state, by her first sentence and its metaphor of the bad novel. I was still game though and read on; I became even more puzzled. “Yuppies, power breakfasts, the leering, double-crossing bed-hoppers of ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ stalking their victims in glitzy gowns, a national obsession with exercise and physical perfection, a riot of matching spider-limbed furniture, surreal TV Prayathons . . .” What did this have to do with Anna Granite? She went on in this irrelevant way until I began to think I was reading the wrong article. Then: “It sounds like a bad novel and it is.” My distended happiness hemorrhaged in inky black spurts as I was lashed in the face with that serpentine phrase “a novelist whose books are American fantasies that mirror, in all its neurotic excess, the frantic twist to the right we are now experiencing.”
“That bitch,” I said, “that goddamn bitch.”
The nyloned thighs to my right shifted away from me.
I read on, my concentration now razor sharp. She went on to describe Granite’s influence and its present day manifestations: the taped lectures, the yearly Philadelphian gatherings, the Definitist courses offered at various small colleges, an expensive three-day workshop held in Honolulu, the Rationalist Reaffirmation School, and the fact that Knight Ludlow, “highly placed city financial analyst” had been her “personal protégé.”
“Her novels,” continued Justine “are like phantom comic-book worlds shadowing, in exaggerated Kabuki-like form, the psychological life and anxieties of our society.”
“Shit!” I muttered. “A comic book! A comic book!” I turned to the young black woman on my right with some vague idea of showing her I wasn’t another subway madwoman. “Have you read this?” I asked.
She glanced at me, more with her face than her eyes, tightly shook her head “no” and returned her attention to her paperback.
“Well if you do, you ought to know it’s crap, one hundred percent. I know the writer and I know the person it’s about. I was interviewed by this . . . writer and it’s a vindictive piece of falsification.” She ignored me. Well to hell with you, I thought. I looked at the people across from me. They were staring resolutely in every direction but mine. I cracked the paper assertively and continued reading.
Justine went on for several paragraphs in that breezy pop Vision-speak, invoking television shows, movies, and media jokes about the inner conflicts of American psychology—the “pop icon” of the lone hero versus the “pathological” desire to be part of the crowd, the assumption that the strong individual is somehow inherently in opposition to society. “This confusion extends most painfully into the conflicting American attitude towards money,” pontificated the bitch. “Does an individual with money have a responsibility to society and does the government have a moral right or obligation to oversee this responsibility? This question is overlaid with an almost pornographic fascination with money and people who have it . . .”
I had to concede it was interesting; if it hadn’t been in the service of trashing Granite, I might’ve enjoyed it. Why, I thought in anguish, did intelligent people always try to undermine Granite, even now? “Anna Granite’s novels not only shadow the back-and-forth, one-or-the-other nature of this struggle, they purport to resolve it.” This was followed by an unfair caricature of Granite’s theories concluding with “she reduced the complex dilemma of the individual in society down to either/or moralistic terms couched in the dramatic devices and gestural glitz of a soap opera.”
“Cunt,” I said.
“Excuse me,” said a female wearing purple contact lenses. “Would you mind watching your language?”
“Mind your own business,” I snarled.
She reared back and clicked her tongue.
“The irony is that, like the wicked liberals in her books, Granite’s rational answers are based on illusions. She stood for rationality, yet her novels shamelessly (and what’s worse, unknowingly) use emotional manipulation, melodrama, jargon, and sexual fantasy to make her points. While claiming to exalt the individual, she plugged into a mass psyche, using archetypal characters devoid of real individuality, with the same vulgar emotional power as the Wicked Witch. . . . Granite’s work is a phenomenon worth looking at as a fun-house mirror for a society that is one part sober puritan and one part capitalist sex fiend. . . . It’s an odd thing to watch a culture start to look like the plot of a bad novel.”
“Goddamn it!” I yelled.
There was a rustling sound around me as the commuters strained their bodies to put a token of space between themselves and the crazy person. I the crazy person! When obviously demented people got paid to write stuff like this! I felt and stopped the approach of tears. From that point I only scanned the piece for particularly telling and offensive passages, of which there were many.
“She succeeded because she was, however clumsily, onto something much bigger than a first glance at her silly novels would reveal. Her writing was like the broad slashes and gaudy colors of the cheapest comic strip—but it was a comic strip about life and death and everybody knew it.”
I inhaled deeply and looked up to be sure I hadn’t missed my stop. The doors were rattling open, people were moving in and out, wiping their noses, securing their purses, locking their blank stares into place. I was okay. I looked back down and saw “She was repeatedly molested by her father during what sounds like a horrific childhood, and she says Granite’s books were what enabled her to see that life could be other than hideous.”
My anger suspended itself as I experienced the strange sensation of seeing my life rendered publicly. It was on one hand a demeaning experience, like seeing myself as a paper cut-out doll, marched by a huge hand through the toy landscape of somebody else’s opinions and purposes, unable to register my distaste because my words had been cut into dolly balloons and frozen before my mouth. But it was at the same time aggrandizing. It was only a small part of me, but so enlarged, so magnified, on a national scale, that it was like having a gross image of myself inflated into a giant parade balloon, floating above the crowd, my stubby arms helplessly extended, my face crudely painted in some fiendish expression designed for maximum impact. I watched myself, fascinated, entertained, waving and cheering at the balloon with the rest of the crowd.
I had to admit Justine had quoted me more or less fairly. Of course, my words were taken out of context and distorted as is always the case with such articles, but the quotes were fairly accurate, and I didn’t sound like a fool or a maniac, unlike most of the other people she’d skewered on paper. She couldn’t resist putting in snide parentheticals in which she suggested that my opinions were not well-founded, but there was still room for the intelligent reader to make a decision. Gingerly I moved from reaction to myself as public item and into my life again, unscathed, safe, still me.
Then I read the next paragraph. “Dorothy is a huge woman, who floats with the slow grace of the always fat in airy, gaudy single-cloth garments of indeterminate nature. Her face is intelligent, and her emotional intensity rises from her like a force field. In conversation, she is incisive, and she displays an acute sensitivity to nuance and an uncanny ability to read a situation emotionally by scanning the minutia of expressions and gestures that frame it. When she talks of the early days of the Definitist meetings, she does so in symbolic, mythological terms . . . when she discusses the split between Bradley and Granite she is like a child talking about her parents’ divorce a month after it happened . . .”
I looked up and sat still for some moments, my bulk stewing in isolation from my lone head. I felt much as I had on first meeting Justine; insulted and yet seduced. She did not have to refer to me as “always fat,” and there was condescension in her description. Yet I also felt in her printed words a respect for me, a desire to understand me, to make her readers understand me, and I couldn’t help being touched by this. She said I was “intelligent,” “authentic,” and “incisive,” yet she compared me to a traumatized child. Worse, she implied that my fealty for Granite was the fealty of a traumatized child. I sat still while the possibility that she was right hovered about me like the evil enchanter closing in on Don Quixote.
I noticed that I was three stations past my stop and rose, cursing. My purse fell off my arm and onto the floor, my keys, lipstick, and change poured out of it. All at once I was engulfed by life’s physically mechanical nature, all the tiny movements and functions you have to perform correctly just to get through the day, all the accoutrements you must carry which can malfunction at any time. Panicked, I fell on the subway floor, groping for my belongings. Legs shifted about me as the animated forest of humans came to life like enchanted trees; hands shot forth, stealing my change, helpfully extending my keys to me, returning my rolled-away lipstick with an impressive hand-to-hand relay involving several school children and a “Yo! Lady!” I was helped, hindered, patted, pulled up, and nodded at, and then the people turned into trees again, frozen on their straps. I passed through them to exit with the ritual Excuse me’s, the doors rattled shut behind me, and I realized I’d left the paper on the train.
My hands made fists, released, and made them again. It was too much, it was unbearable. The darting people about me were like the hurtling debris of an exploded planet, and I could not stand to look at them. I fled the subway and found I was just above East 14th Street, where, I realized I could easily buy another paper.
I made my purchase at a newsstand and was soothed by the ease with which this was accomplished. As my panic receded, I remembered that I was exhausted and decided to sit down in a coffee shop to finish reading the article.
Soon I was seated with the paper open in my trembling hands, a cup of coffee on its way. I read on, my attention caught on the protruding nails of the deliberate meanness that held the piece together. The coffee came and I drank the bitter stuff. The shop had few customers and I was grateful for that. A dowdy woman read a soiled paperback. A teenager stared into space. A handsome boy mutely reached across a linoleum tabletop to touch the hand of his scowling handsome boy companion. The small dark proprietor strolled behind his counter, absently pulling his ear.
If I had been seduced, I had also been abandoned. I thought of Justine sitting in my apartment fixing me with that stare, spindly fingers working her pen. Even then she had known she would write something that attacked everything I had founded my sane life on, even as she allowed our words and feelings to twine and knot, bringing us together again in an effort to disentangle them. She had talked to me, too, exposed herself—and yet not really, because it was ultimately she who walked away and made this house of cards, this article, this canned result of our exchange which had meant so much to me and so little to her. It was she who stepped back, wrote in her notebook, and pronounced me a “child.” It was she who, after our intimacy, stroked me with the flattering words “authentic,” “incisive,” “intelligent,” caressing me under the table like a flippant ex-lover, using the remains of her power to invoke the memory of our shared closeness, a memory meant to render me helpless. That was the most painful thing; in this article, in which she used me to further demean the memory of Granite, she also invoked, in an encoded still life, the genuine moments we had experienced. Her sensitivity to me had been real, she had illuminated me gently, with respect, and yet she had done it in a context that made a joke out of everything I believed in, and, indirectly, made a fool of me.
Why did my every close contact become a betrayal? Why did everyone who touched me desert me? Why was I never able to do anything about it?
The waiter wandered by, leaving a greasy slip of paper on my table, his head turned away from me as if it was a secret note instead of a bill. I stared at the objects before me: cold coffee in a cup of thick white glass, folded napkin, spoon with a liquid coffee shadow on its face. Symbols of order and humility, comfort and banality. These were the things of my life; I had been sitting at these goddamn coffee tables all my life recovering from what other people had done to me.
The anger that had begun on the subway rose like bubbles from a deceptively still pool of chemical waste. That little bitch had to have realized how lonely I was, what an easy target for information and confidence. She knew how much pain I’d experienced in life; I’d told her. But she’d exploited me anyway for whatever piddling advancement this article represented to her. It wasn’t the first time; there had been other reporters, other articles as wrong-headed and rude. But I had never had coffee and cakes with any of these reporters, they had never discussed their love lives with me, they had never looked at me with those eyes of hers, those eyes that saw me for who I was, and then betrayed me anyway.
A voice of reason coughed nervously and interjected that perhaps I had misinterpreted the message of her eyes. But I had not! She had silently transmitted promises to me, promises of respect and allegiance and, and . . . I felt like there was an animal trapped in my lower body, pacing furiously, wanting to come out and tear the nearest living creature to pieces.
I stood up, wiping my sweating palms on my dress (a single fucking cloth garment of indeterminate nature) and approached the man behind the counter.
“Excuse me,” I sweetly said. “Do you have a current Manhattan phone book I could look at?”
He ran his eyes the length of my body with habitual suspicion and mumbled an affirmative. He found the book in his gleaming cabinets. He handed it to me and leaned on the counter, dreamily gazing out the window. The animal in my abdomen roared and reared as I found the massive “S” listing. I flipped the pages and ran my damp finger down the columns. I was right. There was only one J. Shade. She lived at 33 Charles which, I surmised, was in the Village.
I hurled a wadded dollar at the man behind the counter and I was on the street again, my arm raised stiffly in the cab-flagging salute. This was Monday, the same day of the week Justine had met me at the coffee shop—as she had remarked at the time, her day off.