Russell Banks - Lost Memory of Skin

The Professor likes to eat standing up at the kitchen counter, alone, unseen, without his intake being observed, quantified, and judged, and he arranges to do so at least four times a week and would do it every night, if Gloria did not complain that he should spend more time with his children, since the kids’ bedtime is eight-thirty and they can only be together as a family when they all sit down to dinner. So three and sometimes four times a week, he manages to arrive home from the university by 6 P.M. where he presides over the evening meal — eating restaurant-size portions only, nothing excessive — and afterward conducts a brief interrogation of his children as to the particulars of their schoolwork and extracurricular activities and a television program or two that he personally selects and oversees.

Later, long after the twins have been sent to bed and Gloria, a fan of crime and forensic dramas, has retired to their bedroom to watch television alone, he slips into the kitchen again and again, long into the night, and frequently even after he has gone to bed himself the Professor rises, wraps his body in his bathrobe and strolls through the darkened house, as if he is merely restless, unable to sleep, ending his walk at the kitchen, there to swing open the wide refrigerator door and in the cold light spread onto a platter slabs of meat loaf, piles of potato salad and various vegetables, meat patties, ice cream bars, and so on, an entire multicourse meal, which he proceeds for the next half hour or more to serve himself, chewing and swallowing and cutting off another slice and chewing and swallowing that and spooning another clump and chewing and swallowing that, until the ache in his cells has faded, and he can wash his plate and utensils and pack up the tubs, boxes, and plastic containers, switch off the kitchen light, and return to his study and resume reading or, as dawn approaches, slip back under the covers of his queen-size bed that stands next to his wife’s narrow twin bed and for another hour or two, while his stomach and intestines, injecting the undigested food with enzymes and chemicals, contract and expand and extrude, and his involuntary organs, his kidneys, liver, pancreas, and colon, like miners deep in the dark of the earth, do their mindless slow work, and he falls back to sleep. He sleeps soundly until the work in the dark recesses of his bowels is complete, and then the ache in his cells gradually returns and wakes him again, and it’s time to return to the kitchen again, before Gloria and the kids wake.

His outer body, its enormous size and shape and its social and physical liabilities, is a significant, unavoidable part of the Professor’s public life, seen and in his absence commented on by all. For this reason, he avoids mirrors and cameras and reflecting glass windows and doors. His inner body and its needs, however, are his secret life, which by and large he keeps locked away, even from himself. No one comments on his inner life; no one even observes it: not his colleagues nor students nor any of his friends and acquaintances; not his wife anymore nor his children, for whom their papa’s inner life is a threatening, demanding, impossible-to-please-or-penetrate mystery. No one. Since childhood, the only treatment for the Professor’s sickness that he has been able to imagine is more of the sickness itself. Like a drug addict, he has compartmentalized his life, not simply in order to remain an addict, but so that he can continue to treat his addiction with more of what he’s addicted to without contaminating any other part of his life, public or private, outer or inner.

He has not proven to be a particularly adept participant in any of the forms of therapy or the various self-help and twelve-step programs designed to treat his addiction. All his life he has believed that he is the most intelligent person in the room, and — if you measure intelligence by IQ and memory — he has been for the most part correct. He talks, but rarely listens. And then he leaves the room. At the urging of Gloria, he agreed after the second year of their marriage to attend weekly group sessions with a psychotherapist who specialized in treating eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia and on occasion simple overeating. Judgmental terms like glutton, self-indulgent, and vain were forbidden. Everyone in the group pointed accusing fingers at parents, especially mothers. Even so, it went nowhere. At least for him. After a half-dozen meetings with the group, which was made up of four adolescent girls, who, he believed, were obsessed with media celebrity, like most American adolescents, and two perpetually dieting, slightly overweight middle-aged women, women who he felt were indeed gluttonous, self-indulgent, and vain, he announced to the group and the therapist, There is no apparent conflict between my “body image” and my perfectionism. And my parents had nothing to do with shaping either. In fact, I find the former, “body image,” an essentially meaningless construct, and the latter, “perfectionism,” a virtue worthy of cultivation, an aspect of my character and personality that I actually admire and take credit for having instilled in myself and for which I therefore blame no one. But there’s no polarity between the two, my “body image” and my perfectionism. Only a distinction without a difference. I therefore bid you a fond and respectful good-bye.

After that — again to satisfy Gloria, who was still trying to ignore the dietary needs of her husband’s inner body, his appetite, the way early in their courtship she had learned to ignore the visible size and shape of his outer body — the Professor agreed to attend meetings of Overeaters Anonymous, a twelve-step program based on Alcoholics Anonymous. But he never got to the first step. He didn’t even get beyond the threshold. Meetings were held in a basement room at the Watson Unitarian Church, and the room turned out to be filled with fat people. He left immediately after the group recited the pledge to change what they could change and accept and give over to a higher power what they could not change. Those people offend my eye and dull my mind, especially in such numbers, he explained to Gloria. It’s like being in a room full of remorseful self-mutilating amputees. I am not an aesthete, but there is an aesthetic aspect of the human body which, seen whole, pleases my eye and relaxes, even as it sharpens, my mind.

You can get over that. Can’t you get over that?

Why should I?

Dear, it’s a prejudice. A prejudice against fat people.

Au contraire. It’s a delight in the observable beauty of the human body. How can I be prejudiced against fat people when I am one myself? No, it’s about my aesthetic life, my appreciation of the visible beauty of the human body and the sensual pleasure I take from it. Male or female, it doesn’t matter. Y’all wouldn’t have me give that up, now, would y’all? Just watching y’all undress, for instance, thrills me more and with greater complexity today than it ever did in the past.

No, dear, I wouldn’t want you to give that up. As long as it’s me you’re looking at, and not some other woman taking off her clothes.

Glory-Glory-Hallelujah. There ain’t no other woman I’d rather see naked than y’all.

You smooth talker, you.

The Professor is not merely flattering her. He does indeed like looking at her when she is naked. Several times a month, wearing only his size XXXL terry cloth bathrobe, he sits across from her in their bedroom in his forest green leather Barcalounger, and she takes off her clothes, slowly, article by article, and then poses on her narrow bed, as if modeling for an artist, while he masturbates. That’s the nature and extent of their sexual activities. They did not have sex as such — normal intercourse — more than a few times before the twins were born and have attempted it only once since then. A failed attempt. But they did not marry for sex in the first place, nor was it ever an essential part of their relationship. Sexual intercourse, at least in the beginning, was merely a requirement, an obligation on both their parts determined mostly by convention and proximity and her wish to have a child, rather than by attraction or desire.