The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  They had been so much in love, remembering it made Peter almost physically sick with regret. Peter would always remember this one particular time, when he and Gina had first gotten together, when they were having sex, and they had looked into each other’s eyes and said “I love you,” which they had just started saying to each other—there was something about that one time, it was hard to explain. It was hard to explain because it was such a commonplace-sounding thing when you’re describing it, something predictable, that anyone could experience, that anyone could say. That’s one of the irritating tragedies about being a person these days, is that love is a clichéd emotion, sadly, something used to sell stuff, and it’s hard to talk about it earnestly without sounding like somebody on daytime TV. But this feeling had happened to Peter exactly once in his life, then. It was a moment that, Peter felt, no matter if he and Gina stayed in love or not later on, would tie them together forever. He knew he might not have a moment like that ever again with anyone. In retrospect he was glad it had happened to him at least once. But by the time the thing with her friends from UIC happened, Peter had lost all agency in their relationship. At first it had felt like they had been moving forward, together, at the same time, but by then, Gina was leading and Peter was tottering along behind her every step of the way. She decided when they would have sex and how, she decided what they ate, what they were going to do, what they were going to watch on TV. Sometimes she even walked a pace ahead of him on the street when they were out together. Peter had relinquished any control, and was now helpless, dependent. She removed the need for him to make decisions, she protected him, made him feel loved, safe, taken care of. And she had slid into nagginess, was always castigating him for something, sniping at his every fault, from his pitiful inability to ask his boss at the music store for more hours to what shirt he would wear, and whether or not he would button the collar. Once, when they were driving to a party, trying to follow some complicated, barely sensical directions a stoned friend had given them, Peter, who was at the wheel, had accidentally called Gina “Mom.” But Peter still loved her, even now. Since they broke up she had quit drinking and using on her own. She had never been as bad as he was. He saw her the last time he was in Chicago, a few months ago, during the couple of days he had free between rehab and the halfway house. They had lunch together. Lunch. The least intimate meal of the day. She had been impenetrably distant and polite. As if they were acquaintances. Gina hadn’t seemed happy or unhappy. She was just flat. Flat as the green line of a dead person’s heart monitor on a hospital show on TV. She wasn’t the same person anymore. It was totally Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when the aliens replace someone you love with an eerily disaffected doppelgänger, a person who looks exactly like the person you love but who you know just, just isn’t.

  • • •

  The people at the marine biology lab were a little disappointed with him when Peter made it back to Cambridge. Just a little, which was okay. Peter was used to people being disappointed with him. It turned out a lot of his squid had died on the way back. He hadn’t realized how quickly they could die when they were in shock. Peter watched as the lesbian Viking marine biologist fished around in the tank for the squid with a long net. Standing on the ladder on the side of the truck, swishing the long, skinny net in the tank full of squid, she reminded him of one of those guys in Italy with the striped shirts and the hats who do the thing in the boats with the long poles. One netful at a time, Emma raised the squid dripping and squirming from the water and carefully dumped them out into five-gallon plastic buckets that one of the grad students who worked in the lab held out for her. They counted the squid as they collected them. They were paying him five bucks a squid. He’d picked up almost forty squid at the docks that morning, but by the time he got back, apparently only eighteen of them were still alive enough to pay for. The ninety-dollar take that day was the first money he’d made since he got fired from the record store, almost a year ago, when he was living with Gina in Chicago. Emma told him to get the dead squid out of the tank and put them in these special buckets they used to throw away dead animals. As Peter stood at the top of the ladder in the cold, fishing with the net for dead squid, these sad-looking, bloated lumps of jellied fat, he wondered if he couldn’t make some money on the side by taking the dead ones to a Chinese restaurant or something. He didn’t see why not. Maybe they wanted live ones too, like how you’re supposed to cook lobsters alive. Squid are dead when you eat them, right? A dead squid’s a dead squid. Maybe he could sell them to the restaurant where he ate calamari with Greg. He counted twenty dead squid. That meant his haul was overall more dead than alive. If he’d made it back with all the squid alive, he would have made almost two hundred dollars.

  Peter finished putting the dead ones in the special buckets. Then it was like, well, guess it’s time to go now. He walked through the building toward the front entrance, the way he’d come in the day before, and was in the sort of lobby area when he remembered that he’d wanted to ask Emma if it was okay to park the squid truck at Greg’s house, so he didn’t have to get up even earlier than crazy early to walk to campus and get the truck. He stopped in the middle of the floor of the lobby area and looked at the front door. He’d heard once that there was a phrase in French, because they have a lot of phrases for those kinds of weird feelings that are hard to describe but are incredibly specific, for that weird feeling you get when you realize you just forgot to say something you’d meant to say to somebody before you left, and at the moment you realize this, you’re not so far away from the place you just left that there’s no point in going back now, but you are far enough away that if you did go back and say it, it would be kind of awkward. Peter stood there for a moment, then turned around and started walking back to the lab, then thought, whatever, fuck it, we’ll just try to remember to ask her about that tomorrow, and turned around again and started walking back toward the front door of the building. But then he had the thought that, knowing him, he would probably also forget to ask tomorrow, and he should probably just ask now because he was already fucking here and it was fresh on his mind, so he turned around again and again stalled out when his increasing anxiety about facing the awkwardness of going back to the lab dragged him to a halt. Maybe we can write a note to ourselves on our hand, he thought, to remind us to ask Emma about the truck. Let’s write it in permanent fucking marker, like a Sharpie, and if we write it today, then it’ll probably still be there tomorrow, and even if it washes off a little then the mark will still be there, which will be enough to remind us. So he turned back around.

  “Are you okay?” said the girl at the front desk who’d given him directions yesterday. “Can I help you?”

  Peter realized that to an outside observer, such as the girl at the desk, he’d just been slowly staggering back and forth in the lobby of the building looking confused.

  “Um,” he said.

  He walked up to the desk. The girl was drinking a hot liquid again, which might have been coffee or tea. It steamed up her glasses. She was a little on the heavy side, but she was very sweet looking and had bright, smooth skin, and Peter began to think she was kind of cute. Her glasses were ugly, though, and took away from her face. He tried to imagine what she would look like without the glasses. Peter hated it when he caught himself thinking things like this, because they made him feel like an asshole. He couldn’t help it; they just popped up. When Gina broke up with him, a period of time began that started with a time of utter darkness, during which he got fired from the music store, evicted from the apartment, crashed his car, got beaten up outside outside of a bar and fell asleep in the snow. Then he went to rehab, and then the halfway house, and now this. During that whole period of his life, that kind of thing—girls, love, maybe even sex, that stuff—had been so far out of the question that there was no point in even thinking about it at all, except for small things he almost couldn’t help, like looking at Robin’s breasts during his exit interview.

  “You look like
you’re looking for something,” said the girl at the desk. She smiled broadly at him, in a way that suggested she might want to talk to him in a friendly, non-I’m-at-work way.

  “Are you drinking coffee or tea?”

  She gave him a look that wasn’t an are-you-crazy look, just a low-grade jitter of the needle on her what-the-fuck-o-meter.

  “That’s why I was trying to decide back there. I mean what, not why. When I was walking back and forth.”

  “What?”

  Peter wondered if he was trying to flirt with her. If so, that coffee/tea thing was a train wreck of an opening line.

  He remembered that he’d wanted to write a note on his hand with a permanent marker.

  “I mean, hey, uh. Can I borrow a pen?”

  She offered him the gnawed-on Bic that was in her hand.

  “Actually, do you have like a, a permanent marker, like a Sharpie or something?”

  She glanced at a mug on the desk that was Garfield’s head and full of pens. She found a black Sharpie in it and gave it to him. Peter uncapped the marker and thought about sniffing glue when he was really young. He held the wet, sweetly stinky point of the marker poised above his palm, but had totally forgotten what he was supposed to write on it. He stood there awhile trying to remember, couldn’t, and just pretended to write something on his hand while worrying about how obviously fake the gesture was, gave her back the marker, and slowly wandered out the door like a zombie looking for brains. He figured that from now on he should probably just leave out the back door to the parking lot to avoid her.

  So Peter went home and spent most of the day drinking coffee and watching TV and making the air in the house crackle with uncomfortable tension between him and Megan, who sat at the kitchen table sorting through baby shower presents, such as baby clothes and one of those things with the big brightly colored beads on it that you can push around on the metal things.

  In the afternoon Megan went upstairs to take a nap, and when she’d been up there long enough for him to assume she was asleep, Peter silently poured himself a generous swallow of vodka from Greg’s liquor cabinet, and as soon as it was in him Peter instantly felt calmer and happier and more at peace with himself than he had in a year.

  The next morning he was surer on his feet with the fishermen. Peter had slept well that night. He still didn’t like getting up at three thirty in the morning, but he felt less like death warmed over, and made the drive to New Bedford in significantly less time than the day before. Then it was down to the docks, say hello to the yellow-jacketed soaking men in the boats, the same situation and same faces, dump the squid in the truck and he was off, hauling fucking ass down those adorable little New England highways to get the squid to the lab alive. His foot kept the pedal planted to the floor, the engine roared, and all those trees and fences and black-and-white cows wailed past him like he was playing Tempest and flying through space, hell yeah, warp speed, motherfucker, we are on a mission.

  And when he got back to the lab, the scientists were pleased. Emma the blunt-faced Scandinavian counted thirty-two, we repeat, thirty-two, living squid out of the fifty or so he’d brought back. That meant a hundred and sixty bucks in his pocket. That could pay for at least two months’ rent in a storage locker. At this rate maybe it wouldn’t be so long after all till he could move out of Greg and Megan’s basement. He was getting good at this. He cheerfully fished the dead squid out of the tank, stuffed them himself into the special dead animal buckets, no longer icked out by it all, and before leaving he even remembered to ask Emma if he could park the squid truck at Greg’s house so he didn’t have to get up so early. She said no, because of some rule about school-owned vehicles being parked off campus property. Okay, whatever. At least he asked.

  In the hallway he took a pull from the water bottle full of vodka and 7UP he’d brought with him, to give him the courage he needed to talk to the girl at the front desk in the lobby.

  He smiled at her when he was in the lobby. She smiled back.

  “Hi, weirdo,” she said. Peter figured there was a high probability she was flirting with him.

  “What do you mean, weirdo?”

  “You act weird. You do weird things. You’re a weirdo. So what did you write on your hand yesterday?”

  “Nothing. I just pretended to write on my hand.”

  “I know. I could tell.”

  He explained to her about the squid truck, told her about the job.

  He made her laugh. There is no better feeling in the world than making someone laugh. Her name was Amy. She thought the whole situation was kind of funny. She wasn’t wearing those ugly glasses today, and she really was pretty cute. She was a senior at MIT. Working the desk in this building was her work-study job. It was ridiculously easy, she said. All she had to do was just sit there for four hours on weekday mornings. She mostly just did homework. She also said she was in “biochem.” Peter asked her if she knew his brother. She blanked on him till he said, “Mr. Cast?” (Greg wasn’t the kind of PhDickhead who wants everybody to call him “Doctor.”) Of course she knew him. First she seemed a little impressed that Greg was his brother, and then Peter thought he saw something behind her eyes wonder what Gregory Cast’s brother was doing driving the squid truck, as if she expected the brother of a young professor at MIT to be making something of his life. But she seemed to find the fact that Peter was a loser kind of charming. Maybe it was refreshing to meet him, considering all the other guys she met around here were probably hyperambitious type-A types who didn’t expect to be crashing in their brothers’ basements and getting up at three thirty in the morning to drive a truck full of squid when they were twenty-seven. That’s what Peter told himself, though admittedly he was counting unhatched chickens. Then he surprised himself by throwing himself off a cliff and asking if she wanted to get a cup of coffee sometime.

  “Or tea,” he added. She laughed. That was clever. Peter had actually successfully said something that sounded cool and was flirty and kind of clever. She said yes. If she had said no, then Peter really would have had to start leaving the building through the back door. But she said yes. She said yes. She said she was free tomorrow afternoon. With Amy’s logistical guidance, they arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Cambridge at three in the afternoon tomorrow. Peter left the building in a state of elation.

  His days at this job would apparently be oddly structured: getting up insanely early in the morning, then a few hours of frenzied activity, then a long stretch of time in which he had nothing to do between getting off work and letting exhaustion take him under. Walking around and drinking the vodka and 7UP from his water bottle, he wandered the campus, he wandered the town, he wandered. He went back to Greg and Megan’s house and stole more vodka when Megan wasn’t looking. He took the whole bottle into the basement and, his mind racing with energy, he spent the afternoon drinking by himself in the dark basement while pacing around in circles until he passed out on the futon.

  • • •

  When the alarm woke him up at three thirty Peter was beyond hungover. A hangover doesn’t even adequately suggest what he was feeling. It was an evil black cloud. There should have been flies buzzing around his head. He tried to get out of bed and fell on the floor. In the bathroom his eyes were so heavy-lidded and bloodshot it looked as if he’d been punched in the face, twice. He got in the shower, even though he didn’t have time for a shower, and took a shower anyway, his logic going something like, Maybe if we take a shower, time will stand still and at the end of this shower it will still be now. He downed a glass of water and puked it out half a minute later. Hair of the dog, he thought, and twisted open another bottle of vodka, gulped down a few shots, and instantly felt a hell of a lot better. He dumped half the vodka in the bottle into his water bottle, filled up the rest with 7UP, and he was off, feverishly smoking cigarettes and speedwalking through the dark, empty streets of Somerville and Cambridge, occasionally unscrewing the cap of his water bottle and taking a sip of his tepid vodka-7UP mixtu
re, trying not to think about how late he was, there’s the truck, keys, ignition, let’s go.

  The fishermen at the docks smelled something funny with him, maybe literally, though Peter figured the general ambient stench of the fish was enough to mask any alcohol on his breath. It was like the fishermen knew there was something too buoyant about him today, too gung ho let’s-do-this. He wasn’t his usual anxious, timid, exhausted self. His usual self? How would they even know? This was only his third day on the job.

  There was the usual haul of forty, fifty squid in the bycatch buckets. Back in the truck now, vroom, vroom, tearing ass down the highways back to Cambridge as fast as humanly possible, making up for lost time, working every twitch of horsepower the clunky old truck had in it, doing eighty, ninety, edging up on a hundred miles an hour, which he could do because there were almost no other cars on the road yet, the sun coming up perceptibly later today as it was still quite dark, barely daybreak, though it was hard to tell because the sky was overcast again, a sheet of hammered iron with the newly risen sun a fuzzy white blot in it. And again on the drive back his mind careened back to Gina. Peter thought, in a swirly-headed half-hungover, half-drunk way, about the girl he was supposed to get coffee with later that day, in the afternoon, and figured that today he definitely should leave the building through the back, one, because of the state he was in, and two, because of some sort of like, groom not seeing the bride before the wedding type reason. He would have time to go home, go back to bed, catch a desperately needed chunk of beauty rest before his “coffee date” with Amy. This “coffee date” officially made Amy the first girl who had shown any interest in him at all since Gina dumped him. He would have traded anything to be with Gina again, though of course he had nothing of any value to trade. He again remembered that time in the winter, in December, when those people, the couple, these friends of Gina’s from school, were hanging out with them on a Saturday afternoon, celebrating the end of finals, or something. They played Monopoly on the floor, everybody in socks and hats and draped in blankets with the two space heaters roaring and clinking and water boiling on the stove, and still it was cold. Peter was the ship. Peter was always the ship, because when they were kids, Greg had always gotten to choose first because he was the oldest, and he always chose the top hat, because, duh, it was the coolest piece, and Lindsay had always gotten to choose next because she was a girl, and she always chose the dog for some reason, which left Peter as usual with the leftovers, and he always chose the ship because he thought it was the next-coolest piece after the top hat, and being the ship became a private tradition with him when he played Monopoly. They smoked a couple of bowls and drank hot cider and rum, though they didn’t have all that much rum left, and when that ran out they broke into the beer, and when they ran out of beer they sat for a while around the game board, having crapped out on the game and long ago forgotten whose turn it was, discussing who would brave the elements and death-march it the three long blocks down the street to the store to get more beer. The wind was rattling the sides of the house and the temperature hovered somewhere in the ballpark of zero. Peter volunteered. The guy, the friend of Gina’s from school, offered to go with him, help him carry the beer back, but Peter waved him off, said, Don’t worry, man, I got it. They pooled their cash and Peter crammed the ball of ones, fives, and tens into the pocket of his coat, which he squeezed on over a hoodie, a sweater, and a scarf. Outside, the streets had that desolate, moondust look that very, very cold days sometimes have, puddles fossilized opaque and white into the sidewalk cracks, the wind sifting powdery old snow in wispy waves across the road. He hadn’t worn gloves, and he alternated the hand he was smoking with—when his right became numb he’d stuff it in a pocket and switch to the left, then go back to the right when the left was numb. Instead of going to the store to get more beer, he found himself ringing the bell at Dominick’s place. Dominick lived on the next street over, halfway between their apartment and the store. Looking back on it, Peter supposed that one could call this building a “crack house,” but Peter simply thought of it as Dominick’s place. Then he was inside Dominick’s place, stamping his boots, shaking off the cold, though it was cold inside the house too, colder than Peter and Gina’s apartment. And then Peter was forking over to Dominick all the cash he had just been given.