A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [71]
We sit together on a grassy slope. Kitty has resumed talking dutifully about her new movie, the specter of her returning publicist doubtless having reminded her that the promotion of said movie is the sole reason she is in my company.
“Oh, Kitty,” I say. “Forget the movie. We’re out here in the park, it’s a gorgeous day. Let’s leave those other two people behind us. Let’s talk about…about horses.”
What a look! What a gaze! Every cheesy metaphor you can fathom comes to mind: sun breaking through clouds, flowers yawning into bloom, the sudden and mystical appearance of a rainbow. It’s done. I’ve reached behind or around or within—I’ve touched the real Kitty. And for reasons I cannot understand, reasons that surely must rank among the most mysterious of quantum mechanical mysteries, I experience this contact as revelatory, urgent, as if, in bridging the crevasse between myself and this young actress, I am being lifted above an encroaching darkness.
Kitty opens her small white purse and takes out a picture. A picture of a horse! With a white starburst on its nose. His name is Nixon. “Like the president?” I ask, but Kitty looks disturbingly blank at this reference. “I just liked the sound of that name,” she says, and describes the sensation of feeding Nixon an apple—how he takes it between his horsey jaws and smashes it all at once with a cascade of milky, steaming juice. “I hardly ever get to see him,” she says, with genuine sadness. “I have to hire someone else to ride him because I’m never home.”
“He must be lonely without you,” I say.
Kitty turns to me. I believe she’s forgotten who I am. I have an urge to push her backward onto the grass, and I do.
“Hey!” my subject cries, her voice muffled and startled but not yet frightened, exactly.
“Pretend you’re riding Nixon,” I say.
“HEY!” she yells, and I cover her mouth with my hand. Kitty is writhing beneath me, but her writhing is stymied by my height—six foot three—and my weight, two hundred sixty pounds, approximately one-third of which is concentrated in my “spare tire of a” (—Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) gut, which pinions her like a sandbag. I hold her mouth with one hand and worm the other hand between our two flailing bodies until finally—yes!—I manage to seize hold of my zipper. How is all this affecting me? Well, we’re lying on a hill in Central Park, a somewhat secluded spot that is still, technically speaking, in plain sight. So I feel anxious, dully aware that I’m placing my career and reputation at some risk with this caper. But more than that, I feel this crazy—what?—rage, it must be; what else could account for my longing to slit Kitty open like a fish and let her guts slip out, or my separate, corollary desire to break her in half and plunge my arms into whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her. I want to rub it onto my raw, “scrofulous” (ibid.), parched skin in hopes that it will finally be healed. I want to fuck her (obviously) and then kill her, or possibly kill her in the act of fucking her (“fuck her to death” and “fuck her brains out” being acceptable variations on this basic goal). What I have no interest in doing is killing her and then fucking her, because it’s her life—the inner life of Kitty Jackson—that I so desperately long to reach.
As it turns out, I do neither.
Let us return to the moment: one hand covering Kitty’s mouth and doing its best to anchor her rather spirited head, the other fumbling with my zipper, which I’m having some trouble depressing, possibly because of the writhing motions of my subject beneath me. What I have no control over, unfortunately, are Kitty’s hands, one of which has found its way into her white purse, where a number of items are sequestered: a picture of a horse, a potato chip–sized cell phone, which has