The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  TO DO

  * * *

  HIGH PRIORITY

  * * *

  1. Deal with current situation

  What were her options? She would admit, later, that the thought did occur to her of simply changing into her street clothes, packing her bag, and leaving. Who would know she was ever here? What if the Representative had happened to be alone in the apartment when he had his heart attack, or whatever it was? Well—there was the doorman, who knew her, and had seen them come in together, and who would see her leave alone. But who was to say this didn’t happen after she had left? Did anyone else know about this apartment? The Representative had tight, important connections everywhere—he would be missed, conspicuously and immediately. How many hours or days could he lie there decomposing on the floor before anyone found him? She couldn’t do that. Even if she could, what good would it do? The apartment would be discovered, the closets full of BDSM gear, the South African sjambok made out of fucking rhino hide . . . Questions would arise, and before long, they would be answered. He would be humiliated in his death. He would be a laughingstock, an easy punchline in Leno’s opening monologue. The scandal and embarrassment would come sooner or later; it was inevitable now. In a sudden, brief flutter of hope, she entertained a fantasy of somehow getting in touch with his congressional aides, moving the body to his office, covering it up—which fast spiraled into an oblivion of logistics so delicate and dauntingly complicated that it immediately overwhelmed her. No, that would not work. The safest recourse was the blunt truth. One way or another, she was going to have to pick up the phone and tell someone what happened, hand off the situation to the outside world. She herself had done nothing wrong—except perhaps hesitate past the critical moment when an emergency call might still have been useful. And whom should she call now? Nine-one-one? A bit late for that. Should she tell the doorman? He probably already knew enough about the Representative to infer the general gist of what was going on. The cops? She was loath to talk to “the authorities.” The phrase alone nearly made her shudder. She would want to explain everything deliberately and calmly, not leaving anything out, beginning at the beginning—and she knew that if she were talking to such people, she wouldn’t be allowed to do that—she would struggle against the current, being brusquely cut off over and over by arrogant, unlistening men interrupting her with questions about things that happened on square twenty-seven when she’s still on square one—if they would only shut up and listen to her, she could explain everything—but who would listen? What if—what if, what if, what if—she called his wife? Tracy—Tracy, of whom she had heard a great deal over the last decade—complaints, compliments, grievances, and guileless confessions of enduring love—but had never met. How much did she know? Probably nothing. How much did she suspect? Who could say? If Rebecca were to call his wife and start explaining a lot of very-difficult-to-explain things to his family, it might be possible to keep the whole thing within the inner circle, not let it out into the public sphere . . . Save his reputation, spare his family the humiliation, and not hurt the Democrats’ image . . . She chased this line of thought all the way to the bedside table, where the Representative’s iPhone was plugged in, charging. She heaved herself out of the chair—wincing at a sudden spike of back pain—and slogged across the swamp of floor space between living room and bedroom, picked up the phone, slid the lock on the screen, and was immediately confronted with a four-digit passcode. Obviously a man who lived with so many secrets would not have an un-password-protected phone. She went to the desk chair on which she’d earlier that afternoon ordered him to fold and carefully place his clothes. In the pocket of his pants she found his wallet: driver’s license, ID cards, debit card, credit cards, a few business cards, photos of his wife and children (no help there), health insurance card, Metro card noticeably absent (never slums it on the Metro, always takes the car service home from the Capitol), slightly under $280 cash—a recent trip to the ATM minus maybe a cup of coffee. No phone numbers. Of course. No one writes down phone numbers in the year 2012. All information is consolidated on our mobile devices, these guardian angels in our pockets that guide us, protect us, control us. She put it back and returned to the chair. Was 911 really her only option? If she really called the cops she must remember to flush the coke down the toilet before they arrived. It wasn’t hers, but before they started (before Rebecca became Mistress Delilah), he had offered, she had declined, and the Representative had shrugged amiably, chopped out a long fat line on the marble countertop, and sucked it up through a crisp twenty, which now that she remembered it rounded out the amount in his wallet to $300, and was still lying in a gossamer curl on the kitchen counter. Come to think of it, that gulp of cocaine may very well have been what pushed his heart over the edge. Rebecca looked with dread at the cordless landline weakly blinking a green light in its cradle on the kitchen counter. The little green light blinked, and the gulf of dread inside her grew deeper and wider with every second that distanced her from the Representative’s time of death.

  2. Eat something

  Hunger was coming on fast. What had she eaten that day? That morning, sitting in LaGuardia’s Delta Shuttle terminal waiting for her one-hour flight to Reagan National, she’d had a latte and a disgusting premade hummus-sprouts-and-tomato sandwich on an everything bagel that came wrapped in a cellophane package; the pale hard slice of tomato had tasted as though it had been grown in a petri dish. The Representative had treated her to a lobster roll and a glass of Sancerre for lunch. (He’d wanted to buy a bottle, but she said she only wanted a glass, and even that she only sipped at. This abstemiousness was uncharacteristic of her; the Representative had thought nothing of it.) Evening was falling and her belly was beginning to gurgle. Acid, gas, something—chemicals weren’t getting along in her stomach. She eased one cheek off the sticky leather seat cushion to let a fart slide out. Why not?—she was alone, now. She needed to eat.

  * * *

  MEDIUM PRIORITY

  * * *

  3. Call Richard back

  It could be important. She had no fucking idea what the fuck Richard had called her about, but whatever it was, it was most likely something she did not remotely, pardon the understatement, want to deal with at the moment. It was probably either about the divorce or the apartment. He had called earlier in the afternoon and left a message. She had been preoccupied. Mistress Delilah had one shoe on the back of the Representative’s neck, hissing insults at him and thwacking his ass with the sjambok while he was bent over in worshipful genuflection, licking up the puddle she’d just pissed for him on the bathroom floor (purely as a professional, she was impressed by the sjambok—it had a pleasing heft and grip, and she appreciated the clear, crisp note of its whistle before the crack: What it sang through the air on its way to strike flesh was a love song); meanwhile, a distant, separate, and ever-alert corner of her consciousness (Rebecca’s) registered the faint buzzing sound of her phone vibrating in the next room, and made a quick mental note to check it later; and later, when she had a moment—she put a blindfold on the Representative and ordered him to jack off awhile, but denied him permission to come—she fished the phone out of her purse and glanced at the screen, just to make sure it wasn’t urgent. (It might have been about Severin, was what she feared most—her sister was watching him while Rebecca was away on this quick trip to D.C., and Severin’s regimen of pills was complicated.) It was Richard. And he’d left a message. She could not bring herself, even now, to listen to the goddamn message. The message almost certainly had to do either with the apartment or with their endless divorce. The two issues were closely interrelated. In broad abstract, the conflict about the apartment (third-story two-bedroom, one-bath in East Village with balcony and nice view of Empire State Building, short walk to First Avenue L, pets OK, laundry on-site) was this: (1) they bought and own it together; (2) Richard, who now finally has tenure and lives in Connecticut with the woman he left her for, wants to sell it; (3) Rebecca, who lives in it, does not. I
t was a never-ending sideshow to the circus of animosity that was their divorce. Richard and Rebecca had separated four years ago, and it seemed now the divorce was finally coming through. She was so used to its terrible weight, at this point it was getting difficult to imagine what life would feel like with this grindstone cut from around her neck. Were one to unwind all the knots and lay it out along the ground, the string of unanswered e-mails and unreturned messages—from Richard, from Richard’s lawyer, from her own lawyer—would stretch for miles. The divorce was a backyard running out of room to bury bodies in. When she asked herself if, at the age of twenty-one, when she met Richard, she had known that it would end like this, would she have still done it?—the answer was no. All those years of love and cooperation and contentment with him were not worth this. It was a bum deal. She had been a twenty-one-year-old college senior in love with a brilliant (so she’d thought) grad student seven years older than her (an age difference that had seemed significant then, and it was laughable to her now that she’d ever thought so), and she wished she could let that person know she would be in love with that man for fifteen years—fifteen years, with a marriage in the middle—if not of bliss, then of relatively functional happiness—that she would give her youth to this man—and he will violate the one rule you will ask him to obey, which he will have agreed to—and he will leave you, and here you’ll be, thirty-nine and single, your married friends cluttering their Facebook walls with baby pictures while you are thinking daily about sperm donors, about freezing your eggs, the window of fertility shrinking, dimming, closing, every day dogging you with worries about having a child in your forties, the rising risk of birth defects, bringing into the world some rubber-faced mutant with flippers and a tail and raising it alone, and you’ll post pictures of you and your malformed freak-child on Facebook and your friends will “Like” them. From the ages of twenty-one to thirty-six, when she and Richard separated, she’d had someone, and had lived her life pretty much as she always assumed she would. And he had been her best friend—that was what made his betrayal doubly horrible: She’d lost both her husband and her best friend. Where would she find someone like that again? How, now, nearing forty, was it possible that she would meet another person who could ever know her that intimately? Someone with whom she had shared so much history, so much of her growing up? It simply wasn’t possible anymore. Not now. It was such a strange feeling, to have these sickening waves of anger toward the one person in the world with whom she’d shared more of herself than anyone else. What she’d wanted, vaguely, but on second thought, specifically (and in retrospect, thank God it never happened), was a child with Richard, to mix their DNA and make a person whose face shared their features, not a cup of frozen come from a stranger, a stranger who at some point had been paid to come into a cup. Remember, Richard, how we’d talked about having kids—a kid, or kids plural, whatever—and you didn’t want to until your career was more settled, until you had tenure? Of course, I said, that’s fine—I didn’t want to yet, either. We would wait. We would have our fun. And boy did we have fun. There was the threesome with Harriet, for instance. When we shut ourselves up in that cabin in the Catskills for a long weekend and smoked opium—whose idea was that, smoking opium like Frankfurt School philosophers in Paris? Where did we get opium of all drugs, anyway? And we all got high as emperors and had a languorous three-day threesome with my former college roommate. Don’t think for a moment that that wasn’t mostly for you. I’m not actually really bisexual like I said I thought I was back then. When I fucked other women, even the ones I fucked without you around—you know what?—the only way I could really get off on it was to imagine a man watching. Male fantasy is a curved mirror that warps female fantasy. We are all at once bodies and mirrors, and our minds are the curves in the mirrors. And then there was that creepy couple we met on the Internet that one time—we went to their hotel room, they were visiting from Toronto—something funny about us fucking a couple of Canadian swingers—and that woman freaked out at you for not switching condoms. And she was right, Richard. What the fuck is the point of safe group sex if you take it out of me and put it right in her without switching condoms? Think, Richard. Richard and Rebecca had had an open relationship. Well, they were supposed to have had an open relationship. The whole open part necessitates that we tell each other when we fuck other people, doesn’t it, Richard? It was supposed to mean no secrets, no lies, no jealousy, honest communication. That was the idea. Rebecca had thought it was working. The one thing I asked of you, Richard, is don’t fuck your students. And you agreed to that. Yes, I took advantage of the open relationship a lot more often than you did. Could I help the fact that I was young and hot and you were such a fucking pussy? You never told me you didn’t want to hear about it. You were with me when I had the job working for the phone sex line. It was the nineties, first Clinton administration, news about Bosnia on the TV, and Rebecca put on her husky honeydrip voice and got off strangers on the phone while Richard cooked paella or whatever for dinner. That was in the toddlerhood of the Internet, when it was still possible to make okay money working for a phone sex line. You were with me when I started working as a dominatrix. You even said you liked it. You helped me put up the website. You helped me pick out the name, you scholar of comparative religions, you. Rebecca had chosen the name Delilah for a range of reasons: The name sounded sexy, and the biblical reference was a private nod to her Jewish upbringing; she liked the nightmare labyrinth of misogynist connotations—Delilah the emasculator, the woman who renders the strongman weak with the snipping of scissors—the symbolic castrator. You said you liked the idea of me tying up and whipping other men. You said you liked to imagine me dominating other men when you slapped me around and shoved my head down to suck your cock . . . You even asked to watch that one time—with the Director, who fucking adored me, by the way—and I asked if he minded, and mind, hell, he loved the idea of my husband watching. That was fun, wasn’t it? You sat there rubbing yourself through your jeans while I rammed my fake dick up his ass and that avant-garde theater director who’s famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page now and who liked to be called sissyboy clutched the pillows and came like a woman. I told you everything. That was supposed to be the way it worked. You were the one who was hiding things. Or you were in the end, anyway—who knows what you successfully kept hidden. We know you kept it hidden that you were violating the only rules we had: (1) no outside relationships; (2) you don’t fuck your students; and (3) no lying—all three of which you were doing. It’s kind of funny how we thought we were going to have this freethinking bohemian marriage between a couple of people determined not to become another boring bourgeois couple with an interesting but dead past pushing one of those ergonomic mother-facing anti-autism strollers down Wyckoff Street—and yet, and yet, in the end, it all fell apart because of the most boring bourgeois reason imaginable. You had an affair and left me for a younger woman. Unoriginal, Richard. Tawdry. Gross. Predictable. Fucking classic. And now you’ve called me about something, and left a message. It’s probably about the apartment, which is of no use to you as it sits around unsold on Avenue C not making you any money while I live in it. You want to sell it off for less than its current market value—and keep in mind we bought that place pre-gentrification and now it’s worth almost twice as much and prices in the neighborhood are only going up—and you want to pocket the windfall and take it back to Connecticut with the grad student you cheated on me with and never have to see me again. Shove it up your ass, Richard, we will sell when I’m ready, and I’m not ready yet. And yes, I know I haven’t yet returned your last message about it. You cannot fucking begin to fathom how unimportant that seems to me right now. I am in a very strange situation—a life-and-death situation (well, now it’s just a death situation)—and I probably won’t be getting back to you today.

  Rebecca didn’t know how much longer she could keep on doing this. She had been doing more pro-Domme work recently because she was short on money. She wasn�
��t young anymore. She had relaunched her website last month. It had been dormant for years, as she hadn’t needed it. She’d had the same roster of ten to fifteen clients for nearly a decade now, and they kept her in business. All the pictures on her site were taken six years ago. She was opening the door to new clients for the first time in a while. She was staring forty in the face. It stared back at her: her face. It was beautiful, but Venus in the mirror had deep laugh lines now, and two vertical creases in her forehead above the bridge of her nose. She hated looking at photos of herself from just five, six years ago—such as, for instance, the ones on her website. Mistress Delilah, specializing in whipping, caning, flogging, bondage (light or heavy), leather and/or latex fetish, foot fetish, anal femdom, face sitting, cock torture, pissing, edgeplay. She’d gotten Ike, the photographer who always gave her the friend discount, to take those newer pictures in his studio: corsets, wigs, masks, leather boots that laced up to the thighs . . . She looked gorgeous in them, and that was just six years ago. Was it false advertising to still be using those pictures? It wasn’t an illusion: She had aged perceptibly in the last six years. Stress accelerates the effects of aging, doesn’t it? And with the divorce, the apartment, the being broke, the Severin getting cancer, the hurtling childless and single toward menopause, the possibility of never getting to share the common experience that has united women since the days of goddamn pagan moon rituals and the Venus of Willendorf, for the last few years she had been pretty stressed out. There was a time, in her early twenties, when she looked at small children with confusion and maybe mild disgust—only mild disgust, the way you would look at something that is visually interesting but which you’re not planning to touch, like a slug; they were cute things in the strollers that took up a lot of space on the subway, brief obstructions in the path of a young woman who was on her way to spend a night careening barefoot around Manhattan with her heels in her hands and eventually spill out of a cab at dawn, drunk and shaky with blow, to curl up in the arms of the fiancé who’d been dealing with his own demons all night. Later, when she was in her early thirties, and had been married a few years, her heart, to her own self-reflective annoyance, would gelatinize at the sight of an infant—the cooing, gurgling, finger-grabbing monkey-faced goblins with bright, smooth, smooth, smooth, soft skin that were beginning to emerge from her friends, she looked at them with warmth and tenderness . . . And now? The other weekend, she woke up at noon on Sunday, parked herself at the kitchen table to eat breakfast in front of her MacBook Pro, and when she looked up, the sun was setting and she had lost the entire day to YouTube videos of babies: a video of a baby being weirded out by a talking Elmo toy, a montage of babies tasting lemons for the first time, a montage of babies laughing hysterically, a baby laughing hysterically at a person jingling car keys, a baby laughing hysterically at herself tearing up a piece of paper, a baby laughing hysterically at an ice cube, a baby laughing hysterically at absolutely nothing, a video of a baby petting a cat, a video of a baby being petted by a cat, a video of twin babies in diapers flapping their hands and squawking at each other in their own strange made-up language, a video of two babies on a couch, holding each other and laughing, hysterically. Feeling like the false mother at the judgment of Solomon. Elohim! Yahweh! Let me conceive like Sarah at the age of ninety-nine! She was irritated at herself for feeling all this maternal yearning, in the same way she was irritated at herself for fantasizing about male fantasy, for getting off under the male gaze. One of the regular crazies who peregrinated Rebecca’s chunk of the East Village between Tompkins Square Park and Stuy-Town was a woman with frazzled crazy-person hair bundled in ratty shawls who walked around in clogs all day, murmuring to herself and pushing a baby stroller full of broken baby dolls with clicking eyelids. The woman terrified her.