Read Online Don't Cry: Stories by Mary Gaitskill - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mary Gaitskill
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to picture. Of course, it can be fun to picture things you don’t want to picture—but somehow the feminist author had ruined the fun.
After the reading, we all went for refreshments in the hospitality lounge. The Vietnamese girl and the Canadian father, as well as the feminist author, were there, signing books and talking with their readers. There were other authors present, too, including an especially celebrated Somali author known for an award-winning novel of war and social disintegration, and an American womaii who had written a witty, elegant, clearly autobiographical novella about a mother whose child is hit by a drunk driver and nearly killed. The feminist author appeared more relaxed in this setting than she had been onstage; she smiled easily and chatted with the mostly young women who approached her. And yet again I sensed a disturbing subliminal message bleeding through the presenta-tion: a face of sex and woman’s pain. The face had to do with dis-grace and violence, dark orgasm, rape, with feeling so strong that it
obviates the one who feels it. You could call it an exalted face, or an agonized face; in the context of the feminist author, I think I’m going to call it “the agonized face.” Although I don’t know why— she doesn’t look like she’s ever made such a face in her life.
There was only one more person waiting to talk to her, an animated girl with ardently sprouting red hair. I got in line behind her. When I got up close, I saw that the author’s eyes were not sweet, innocent, or sparkling. They were wary and a little hard. As she signed the animate red girl’s book, I heard her say, “Sex has been let out of the box, like everything is okay, but no one knows what ‘everything’ is.”
“Exactly!” sprouted the ardent girl.
Exactly. “I liked the talk you gave,” I said, “before the reading.” “Thank you,” she said, coldly answering my italics.
“But I’m wondering why you chose to read what you read afterward. If you didn’t like what they said about you in that brochure you mentioned. I didn’t read it, but—”
“What I read didn’t have anything to do with what they said.” No? “I’d love to talk more with you about that. I’m here as a journalist for Quick! Would you be able to talk about it for our readers?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not doing interviews.” And she turned her back on me to sign another book.
I stood for a moment looking at her back, vaguely aware of the Somali author talking into someone’s tape recorder. With a vertiginous feeling, I remembered the days right after graduation, when Tom was an artist and I was a freelance journalist hustling work at various small magazines. We slept on a Salvation Army mattress; we ate and wrote on a coffee table. “The grotesque has a history, a social parameter,” said the Somali author. “Indeed, one might say that the grotesque is a social parameter.”
Indeed. I took a glass of wine from a traveling tray of glasses and drank it in a gulp. On one of those long-ago assignments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise-lusterless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche, and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money. In the middle of this power talk, she told me a story about a customer who had said he would give her fifty dollars if she would get on her hands and knees with her butt facing him, pull down her G-string, and then turn around and smile at him. They had negotiated at length: “I made him promise that he wouldn’t stick his finger in,” she said. “We went over it and over it and he promised me, like, three times. So I pulled down my G-string, and as soon as I turned around, his finger went right in. I was so mad!” Then bang, she was right back at the Hegel and Nietzsche. The combination was pathetic, and yet it had the dignity of awful truth. Not only because it
After the reading, we all went for refreshments in the hospitality lounge. The Vietnamese girl and the Canadian father, as well as the feminist author, were there, signing books and talking with their readers. There were other authors present, too, including an especially celebrated Somali author known for an award-winning novel of war and social disintegration, and an American womaii who had written a witty, elegant, clearly autobiographical novella about a mother whose child is hit by a drunk driver and nearly killed. The feminist author appeared more relaxed in this setting than she had been onstage; she smiled easily and chatted with the mostly young women who approached her. And yet again I sensed a disturbing subliminal message bleeding through the presenta-tion: a face of sex and woman’s pain. The face had to do with dis-grace and violence, dark orgasm, rape, with feeling so strong that it
obviates the one who feels it. You could call it an exalted face, or an agonized face; in the context of the feminist author, I think I’m going to call it “the agonized face.” Although I don’t know why— she doesn’t look like she’s ever made such a face in her life.
There was only one more person waiting to talk to her, an animated girl with ardently sprouting red hair. I got in line behind her. When I got up close, I saw that the author’s eyes were not sweet, innocent, or sparkling. They were wary and a little hard. As she signed the animate red girl’s book, I heard her say, “Sex has been let out of the box, like everything is okay, but no one knows what ‘everything’ is.”
“Exactly!” sprouted the ardent girl.
Exactly. “I liked the talk you gave,” I said, “before the reading.” “Thank you,” she said, coldly answering my italics.
“But I’m wondering why you chose to read what you read afterward. If you didn’t like what they said about you in that brochure you mentioned. I didn’t read it, but—”
“What I read didn’t have anything to do with what they said.” No? “I’d love to talk more with you about that. I’m here as a journalist for Quick! Would you be able to talk about it for our readers?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not doing interviews.” And she turned her back on me to sign another book.
I stood for a moment looking at her back, vaguely aware of the Somali author talking into someone’s tape recorder. With a vertiginous feeling, I remembered the days right after graduation, when Tom was an artist and I was a freelance journalist hustling work at various small magazines. We slept on a Salvation Army mattress; we ate and wrote on a coffee table. “The grotesque has a history, a social parameter,” said the Somali author. “Indeed, one might say that the grotesque is a social parameter.”
Indeed. I took a glass of wine from a traveling tray of glasses and drank it in a gulp. On one of those long-ago assignments, I had interviewed a topless dancer, a desiccated blonde with desperate intelligence burning in her otherwise-lusterless eyes. She was big on Hegel and Nietzsche, and she talked about the power of beautiful girls versus the power of men with money. In the middle of this power talk, she told me a story about a customer who had said he would give her fifty dollars if she would get on her hands and knees with her butt facing him, pull down her G-string, and then turn around and smile at him. They had negotiated at length: “I made him promise that he wouldn’t stick his finger in,” she said. “We went over it and over it and he promised me, like, three times. So I pulled down my G-string, and as soon as I turned around, his finger went right in. I was so mad!” Then bang, she was right back at the Hegel and Nietzsche. The combination was pathetic, and yet it had the dignity of awful truth. Not only because it
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