• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 665 0

Because I’m trying to wrest readable material from a nineteen-year-old girl who is very, very nice; I’m trying to build a story that not only unlocks the velveteen secrets of her teenager’s heart, but also contains action, development, along with—God help me—some intimation of meaning. But my problem is this: Kitty’s a snooze. The most interesting thing about her is the effect she has upon others, and since the “other” whose inner life is most readily available for our collective inspection happens to be myself, it is only natural—indeed, it is required (“I’m begging you; please make this work so I don’t look like an asshole for assigning it to you”—Atticus Levi, during a recent phone conversation in which I expressed to him my despair of writing further celebrity profiles)—that the alleged story of my lunch with Kitty Jackson actually be the story of the myriad effects Kitty Jackson has upon me during the course of said lunch. And for those effects to be remotely comprehensible, you must bear in mind that Janet Green, my girlfriend of three years and my fiancée for one month and thirteen days, dumped me two weeks ago for a male memoirist whose recent book details his adolescent penchant for masturbating into the family fish tank (“At least he’s working on himself!”—Janet Green, during a recent phone conversation in which I tried to point out what a colossal error she’d made).

“I wonder that all the time—what will happen next,” Kitty says. “Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now, and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or…or what?”

And how exactly is “a great life” defined in Kitty Jackson’s lexicon?

“Oh, you know.” Giggle. Blush. We’re back to nice, but a different nice than before. We’ve had a tiff, and now we’re making up.

“Fame and fortune?” I prod.

“Somewhat. But also just—happiness. I want to find true love, I don’t care how corny that sounds. I want children. That’s why, in this new movie, I bond so strongly with my surrogate mother…”

But my Pavlovian efforts to suppress the PR component of our lunch have succeeded, and Kitty falls silent. No sooner have I congratulated myself on this triumph, however, than I catch Kitty glancing, sidelong, at her watch (Hermès). How does this gesture affect me? Well, I feel slopping within me a volatile stew of anger, fear, and lust: anger because this naïf has, for reasons that are patently unjustifiable, far more power in the world than I will ever have, and once my forty minutes are up, nothing short of criminal stalking could force the intersection of my subterranean path with her lofty one; fear because, having glanced at my own watch (Timex), I’ve discovered that thirty of those forty minutes have elapsed, and I have, as yet, no “event” to form the centerpiece of my profile; lust because her neck is very long, with a thin, nearly translucent gold necklace around it. Her shoulders, exposed by the white halter top of her sundress, are small and tan and very delicate, like two little squabs. But that makes them sound unappealing, and they were phenomenally appealing! By “squabs” I mean that they looked so good (her shoulders) that I could briefly imagine pulling apart all those little bones and sucking the meat off them one by one. 3

I ask Kitty how it feels to be a sex goddess.

“It doesn’t feel like anything,” she says, bored and annoyed. “That’s something other people feel.”

“Men, you mean.”

“I guess,” she says, and a new expression flickers over her comely face and alights there, a look that I would have to designate as abrupt weariness.

I feel it too: abruptly weary. In fact, generally weary. “Christ, it’s all such a farce,” I say, in an unguarded moment of self-expression that has no strategic purpose and which, therefore, I’ll doubtless regret within seconds. “Why do we bother to participate?”

Kitty tilts her head at me. I sense that she can detect my general weariness, possibly even guess at some of its causes. She is regarding