The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  There were now no other boats around anywhere within easy eyeshot.

  “She’s in a good place, now,” said Phil. “Come on up here.”

  Veronica timidly rose from the wooden bench, groped and picked her way across the deck to the front of the helm.

  “All I need you to do is just keep your hands right here,” he said. She put her hands on the spokes of the wheel where Phil’s hands were. Phil stood behind her and wrapped his hands around hers, demonstrating to her the right amount of pressure to apply and the right amount of resistance she should be feeling. Her thick black hair flew into his face and tickled his nose and lips. He breathed in the smell of her skin and hair.

  “Just keep her right there.”

  “Like this?”

  “That’s right. Just like that. You want to feel about this much resistance. That’s it. You want to be pushing on it, but not too hard. Easy does it. Now keep her right there. If all of a sudden she gets too hard or too easy on you, then you know something’s wrong.”

  With Veronica positioned at the helm, Phil stepped out onto the back of one of the twin hulls of the boat. He reached out into the net strung between them, where he had put the body. He dragged it toward him, got a good grip on it, and rolled it out of the net into the sea. It dropped into the water. The body floated briefly, and the bedsheet dampened, then it turned over several times, and began to fall under. A gust of wind came and puffed the sails up like fat wings, and took the boat away from the place where the body was falling, sinking from an active secret into a dormant one, a secret that would sleep forever on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Phil came back to the helm and took over from Veronica.

  “Good job,” he said.

  She hurriedly sat down again.

  There were a couple of other loose ends to take care of before Diane would come home tomorrow. Such as, for instance, that shitty little Toyota still parked in front of the house. It would be easy enough for Veronica to follow behind him while he drove it to some far-flung place and parked it there, and then drive him back home. He would ask her to do that when they got back ashore.

  He looked at Veronica. She wasn’t looking at him. She was watching the sea. Her head was half turned away from him. Lord, she was beautiful. She was so full of energy and brightness and life. Look at how the light just bounces off that smooth young skin. Her hair blew around behind her like streaks of ink. Phil was, in fact, in love with her. Of course he was in love with her, and of course he assumed this meant she was in love with him, too, and of course she would never tell anybody about all this. This secret was dormant; it would sleep forever. Once again, Phil had just one active secret, and Veronica was it.

  And then Phil noticed an amazing thing: Up ahead of them, obviously moving very fast, and yet seemingly not moving at all because of the lack of visual references all around them, there were several dolphins—they looked like bottlenoses but he wasn’t sure. Just hopping in and out of the water. There were three or four of them. Their sleek silver bodies were looping in and out of the water in perfect sequence, moving together all at once, as graceful as—what, as ballerinas?—no, ballerinas hobble like gimps next to the dazzling physical grace of these creatures. They were traveling through the water in a perfect wave, each one coming up and going down at the exact same time, their athletic bodies working with the material around them, harmoniously collaborating with the media of the world as they moved through it, constantly accounting for the gravitational difference between air and water, their heads, necks, noses, fins, and tails all working together with physics to make them move, and move beautifully. How the hell do they know how to do that? Where’d they learn that? Who taught them? Why do they all jump out of the water and dive back in again at the same time? Surely there’s a reason for it. Surely there’s a real and important reason. An animal’s body does everything it can to maximize its results by minimizing its entropy, always conserving its energy. Everything like that has some kind of reason. Animals don’t do things without a good reason for it.

  Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

  —John Berger, Ways of Seeing

  The Representative was dead. He would have been one of Rebecca’s oldest clients, except Rebecca had long ago ceased to think of him as a client. Yes, he was generous—he always paid for everything, that was a given—but he had not directly paid Rebecca for her services in years. They weren’t services, anymore, they were just things they did together.

  The Representative was dead. Rebecca Spiegel had known him for eleven years, and she was no longer sure what one would call their relationship. What began, long ago, as a rather businesslike arrangement between two people—one of them paying money for services rendered, the other receiving the money and rendering services—had over the years turned into other things: a deep friendship, a partnership, a secret bond that somehow because it had begun as a balanced relationship between equals was truly closer than most romances ever are. Sometimes, they had sex. Now, sometimes (though rarely), they had ordinary vanilla intercourse, without role play, without restraints, without toys, without make-believe. It wasn’t that she had quit charging him. One day, about two years ago, he seemed to have forgotten to pay her (the usual stack of hundreds in an unmarked white envelope on the kitchen counter was not there), and she had not reminded him. Since then, he no longer paid her, and she no longer accepted payment—which, she supposed, made their relationship perfectly legal now, though it was still fraught with secrecy. Was she, in a sense, his mistress?

  The Representative was dead. If she had heard of his death from a friend (which would not have happened—the only friend they had in common, the one who had introduced them, she had not spoken to in years), or (more likely) from the news, she would have cried. As it was, she was not crying—not yet—because she was alone with a mind locked in a rattrap of fear and anxiety surrounding the facts of the Representative’s death, and her presence for it.

  The Representative was dead. The Representative had been a good man. He’d had that yacht-club swagger, that easy arm around the shoulder. He had never been someone who could be described as a simple man. No, he was a complicated man. But under that there was essential goodness. Under the armor of public life was someone who cared deeply about the poor, minorities, women, the exploited, the underserved, the uninsured, the unemployed, the disempowered. He’d hated Bush passionately, had been against the war. At the bedrock of his many-layered life, he fought on the side of the good. Social injustice drove him to rage, and it was that rage that drove him into politics more than his vanity or his ambition: the desire to do good. And he had done good. He would do no more good, now. The Representative was dead.

  Rebecca was sitting in a leather armchair, looking at his body. The Representative had paid, as he always had, for her airfare to D.C., and put her up in her usual suite in The Fairfax at Embassy Row. She had flown in that morning and was scheduled to leave the next day. The hotel was a thirty-minute walk away, at most, or two quick stops on the Metro. She had barely moved in the last hour. The Representative, for his part, had not moved at all in the last hour.

  Rebecca Spiegel—Mistress Delilah, once, sometimes—continued to find herself in this unusual and undesirable situation: slumped in an armchair in spike heels, fishnet stockings and garter belt, a leather corset, and the red wig she had always worn when she was Mistress Delilah with the Representative—staring, without really looking, at the body of the Representative, which lay motionless, faceup and (except for the alligator nipple clamps and the rope around his wrists) naked on the concrete floor of the apartment. It was in a luxury high-rise on Virginia Avenue, a newly built mixed-use steel and glass structure with a balcony view of the National Mall and Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac, which proceeded unhurriedly toward the Chesapeake Bay thirty stories below, flowing under the arches of a squat stone highway bridge, its rippled surface glowing yellow in the slant-light of the golden hour.r />
  The apartment was furnished almost in the way a Realtor would furnish a model home: a hollowly perfect simulacrum of a human dwelling that clearly no person actually lives in. It was decorated as if the Realtor were trying to sell it to fussy upper-middle-class yuppies who happen to be into BDSM. The expensive, unused furniture all matched tastefully: Everything was metal, blue-tinted glass, and black leather. The bed had been fucked on, but no one had ever spent a night sleeping in it. The decorative touches were the Representative’s, and he’d had a good eye: rows of photographs framed in ornate tarnished silver frames that surprisingly harmonized with the sleek designer furniture; all the pictures were sepia-toned early-twentieth-century porn—women with round, sweet faces and full, fleshy hips, sleeping masks, riding crops, student-teacher scenarios, naughty maids in the mistress’s boudoir. The floors were smooth, cool concrete. There were iron rings and chains installed in the ceilings and walls. Mistress Delilah rarely made use of them. Likewise the closets were stocked superabundantly with various equipment: whips, ropes, chains, leather hoods, ball gags, harnesses, collars, handcuffs, butt plugs, cock rings, and many other devices more unique and harder to describe.

  The Representative had loved his toys. He had liked talking shop with her about different kinds of whips and so on. He had always had a fawning regard for her opinion as a professional. She didn’t especially share his collectorism, his fetish for connoisseurship, except as it related to psychology. (Rebecca found dominance and submission play that leaned heavily on toys a bit graceless, gimmicky. A whip and some good sturdy rope can go a long way. The art of sexual domination is not in the material; it’s in the mind.) The idea of grades and progression excited him, of different sorts of whips for different purposes. Men seem to like seeing tools lined up in a rack ranging from smallest to biggest, they get some sort of primeval kick out of confronting a problem requiring the widest-gauge socket in the socket wrench set. The Representative had recently acquired a whip that Mistress Delilah had to admit was an impressive item (Rebecca herself was more aloof to it). He’d been so excited for her to use it on him, the object had probably occasioned the visit: It was a genuine South African sjambok, a hard, semiflexible three-foot-long whip, traditionally made from twisted rhinoceros hide, originally meant for driving cattle, later infamous as the police and military weapon of choice during apartheid. These days they make them out of plastic or rubber—the real ones are illegal because they’re made from the hide of an endangered animal. The Representative got off on that, and also on the weapon’s troubling symbolic place in a brutal history of colonial subjugation. He’d bought it from a South African antiquities dealer, and it was the real deal—long, stiff, heavy, the handle embroidered with some African pattern—the object was electric to the touch, alive with sleeping evil. Thing was not a toy—when she started using it on him, she immediately realized that the difficulty would be to hit him hard enough to get him off without seriously hurting him.

  Mistress Delilah had also brought along, as always, her own special black bag. A professional brings along a bag of tools: the country doctor making a house call, the plumber come to fix the sink. She only brought it because she knew it excited him just to see it in her hand. It was laughably gratuitous—at this point only a reminder of the way things used to be between them. (Once, she’d had to endure a TSA employee spreading the contents of her bag on a counter: She’d stood there while the woman scrutinized her ball gags and nipple pumps with turquoise latex gloves and had to ask someone to check if a cat-o’-nine-tails violated FAA regulations; it did not. Now she just checked the bag.) The black bag sat, rumpled and deflated-looking, in the corner of the living room, the zipper open, the only things she’d removed from it lying in disuse on the glass coffee table: handcuffs, muzzle, nipple pumps. The sjambok, she realized, looking down, was still in her hands, lying sideways across her lap.

  Rebecca guessed it was a heart attack. She asked new clients for medical histories, and wouldn’t risk taking them on if she thought something like this might happen. But the Representative had been her client when she was new and green in the business, and not thinking about things like that yet. And he had been forty years old and in better health back then. The years had puffed him out, and he was not really her client anymore, but her friend, confidant, sometime benefactor, and the most complicated lover she’d ever had. Now he was fifty-one, on the hefty side, and not in the best health. Did he have a genetic history of heart disease? Maybe it was a brain aneurysm? She had tried to revive him with the basic CPR she knew. She’d tried to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it had been of no use. He had, quite literally, died in her arms.

  • • •

  Rebecca had the first inkling that something was wrong when she noticed the Representative convulsing under the scarlet sole of the Louboutin pump squished against his face in a way that did not seem sexual in nature. She glanced behind her and saw that his cock had gone slack. He’d taken his hands off it—his hands were tied together, which restricted the movement of his arms, but he was limply whacking his wrists against his chest, like someone pretending to be retarded. She took her foot off his face, but didn’t break character.

  “Oh? Something wrong, cuntface?” she said in her belittling-the-baby voice. “Aw, whatsa matter, sweetie-poo?”

  The Representative was making a worrisome gakking noise in the back of his throat. He sounded like a dog choking on a bone.

  She nudged his shoulder with the toe of her shoe.

  “Seriously. You okay?”

  He hadn’t used the safe word—he didn’t appear capable of using it or any other word at the moment.

  She knelt down beside him. His swollen choking face was red, flaming. A bright sweat had broken out on his forehead.

  She said his name—his real name. She said it twice with question marks, and a third time with an exclamation point. Then she was shaking his shoulders, screaming his name. He was unconscious.

  The thought would haunt Rebecca afterward—probably for years, maybe for the rest of her life—that if she had called the paramedics right away, maybe they could have rushed him to the hospital, and maybe he could have been revived—by those electric paddle things they use to restart hearts in TV medical dramas, and presumably also in real life (and what is that, really?)—and maybe his life could have been saved, by heart surgery, by a stent, a pacemaker . . . Instead, she had hesitated. She had hesitated because the Representative had a wife and a family who knew nothing about Mistress Delilah—who knew nothing of his other life, or however many other other lives he had. That was to say nothing of his public life, the things he stood for, his political career, the careers of others he was connected to—a chain of influences that went all the way up to the Oval Office, and, this being an election year, it would not be good to have a Democrat humiliated this way, possibly shamed out of office . . . God knows how many outward threads of the web would tremble when this hit the news cycle.

  There had been a narrow window of time in which there may have been a chance that if she’d made the hasty decision to pick up the phone and dial the three digits every American child learns in kindergarten, she might have saved his life. But instead, because of the world outside—rather than inside—this luxury apartment overlooking the Potomac, she had hesitated, and now, as she had confirmed and reconfirmed and reconfirmed again in the hour since she’d first taken her foot off his mouth, with her thumb on the inside of his bound and motionless wrist and her head on his silent, motionless, cooling chest, the Representative was doubtlessly dead.

  It was a sensation of paralysis, sitting in that chair. This must be a little of what it feels like to be paralyzed, a conscious vegetable—the sort of person the Representative may have become had she acted instead of hesitated: seeing, feeling, hearing, thinking, unable to unroot oneself from the spot—passive, helpless, stuck. If she looked down at her legs and arms and willed them to move, they would not.

  The plush black leather
armchair accepted her body like a gently swallowing mouth. The leather felt smooth and cool on her bare thighs. The back of her leather corset rubbed against the leather of the chair, grunted and squealed if she adjusted her back. Her goddamn back was killing her for some reason. What the fuck she’d done to it she did not know, but this pain in her lower back seemed to return for a few days once a month like a muscular-spinal period. Every time it came back she made a mental note to see a chiropractor, but it always went away before she remembered to make the appointment—and then the motherfucker came roaring back again the next month. Maybe putting on the tight corset today retriggered the back pain. Was this aging?

  She had a lot of decisions to make. Some urgent, some middle, some distant. She felt so overwhelmed, so suffocated by the unmade decisions crowding around her that she was for the time being incapable of doing anything but staring at the body of the Representative that lay on the concrete floor in front of her and letting the late-afternoon light fail as she sat in this leather armchair beginning to grow hungry.

  In her mind, she began to sketch out a To-Do list. It was an easy exercise suggested by a therapist from years back that she still found a useful way to compartmentalize her problems when she was feeling overwhelmed, and it helped to calm her. When she made these interior To-Do lists, she put items into three categories, according to the urgency of their concern. High Priority, Medium Priority, Low Priority. Her eyes unfixed, she gazed out the window at the river many stories below her. She could see the streetlights beginning to come on, and the colorful lights that spookily underlit the monuments at night: She could just barely discern, not far away on the Mall, a solemn and tired-looking Abraham Lincoln glowing in his cage of columns, sitting perfectly still in his own armchair, as if immobilized for centuries by the weight of his own difficult decisions.