Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

• • •

She took off her shirt and rolled off her jeans and her underwear, and now she was standing naked on a black plastic bag in the middle of the kitchen floor. Seventy-five years before, a man sat in a small white room and sang songs about sex and death and love and murder and the end of the world, and his voice was imprisoned, copied, and pressed onto a vinyl disc that now revolved on a spindle as the stylus tickled over the grooves and resurrected his voice here in Fred’s house.

John the Revelator, tell me who’s that writing?

John the Revelator wrote the book of the seven seals.

Fred was fiddling with a paint sprayer at the kitchen sink. The paint sprayer was a handheld device with a plastic container for the paint that screwed onto a gun-shaped nozzle with an electric cord coming out of it and a tube with a filter that siphoned the paint out of the container and blew it out the nozzle.

Lana had pale skin and sharp hip bones and a tuft of copper-colored hair in her crotch with a trail of tiny hairs leading up to her navel. Her waist was so thin it looked to Fred like he could fit his hands around it and touch his thumbs and middle fingers together, and her rib cage showed. Her skin had that irretrievable glow and smoothness of youth. She was drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette and snicking the ashes on the floor with her thumbnail.

Fred had bought some special paint for this project, which was kind of expensive and came not in a can but in a big plastic jug. Fred opened the jug of paint, mixed it, and poured it into the smaller container that screwed onto the paint sprayer. He screwed the container onto the nozzle and washed the silver paint off his hands. The wet paint didn’t look like much, just like thin gray mud.

“You got any allergies to certain chemicals or anything I ought to know about before we put this stuff on you?” said Fred. He was inspecting the side of the plastic jug of paint for a list of ingredients.

“I’m allergic to penicillin.”

“Well, they don’t make paint out of penicillin, Little Miss Louis Pasteur. This shit’s latex-based, no oil or anything, so I think it should be fine.”

“Louis Pasteur wasn’t penicillin, Fred. Louis Pasteur was milk. Like pasteurized milk. Some other guy was penicillin. Fleming. Ian Fleming?”

“No, that’s James Bond.”

“Didn’t that girl die when they painted her gold in the James Bond movie?”

“I take it you’re referring to the iconic cinematic moment in Goldfinger when the Bond girl’s been murdered in bed by being painted gold and asphyxiated because her pores are clogged or something. That, hon, is a myth. You don’t breathe through your fucking pores. The only way you can asphyxiate somebody with paint is to pour it down their throat.”

Fred opened some windows to ventilate the room and pulled the chain to turn on the ceiling fan. He unwound a yellow outdoor-use extension cord and plugged it in across the room. He gave her a bathing cap that he had also bought specially for this project. She put her hair up and scrunched it inside the cap, and edged it up on her forehead as close to her hairline as possible.

“I’m gonna start at the bottom and work my way up.”

Lana swigged her beer and finished her cigarette and handed them to Fred.

“Here, take these,” she said.

Fred set down the paint sprayer and put the cigarette in the ashtray and the beer on the kitchen table, which had been scooted aside to give them more floor space. Fred wheezed and puffed as he moved around the room, knots of long gray hair falling in his face. Lana stood waiting to be painted, in the middle of the floor on a black garbage bag that crinkled and stuck to her feet.

The song in the next room ended, and in the empty moment between songs there was a brief but oppressive silence in which they could hear the click-click-click of the ceiling fan, the pulsing chirrup of crickets outside, and the crinkling sound of the garbage bag under Lana’s feet.

“What do you think?” she said.

“Honey,” said Fred, “I think I’m fat and old and ugly and you’re my sister’s kid.”

The next song started with that stepping down, down, down and then up that all blues songs seem to start with, and Fred pulled the trigger on the paint sprayer. The paint sprayer made a loud whirring noise, as well as the hiss of the paint coming out of the nozzle, and that brief but oppressive silence was thankfully over. Fred had his painting clothes on: shorts, a moth-eaten Denver Broncos T-shirt, pink plastic Kmart flip-flops. His legs were thin and pale. The flesh on his legs looked like the flesh on the underside of a snail and his toenails were long and flaky and the color of tortoiseshell.

Using a paint sprayer is all about maintaining the right rhythm, trigger pressure, and distance from the painted surface to spread the coat evenly. Fred painted her feet and realized he was holding the nozzle too close to her, so he backed away a few inches.

“It tickles,” she said.

He worked his way up her legs and painted her inner thighs and the area between her legs as quickly as possible, and she spread her legs out to facilitate the process. After that Fred began to relax and got absorbed in the work. He went into a trance of narrow concentration, and the more paint he applied to her body, the more of her skin was covered, the more she became an object he was painting, just like a sculpture or a piece of furniture, and he lost himself in the task. She was art, and he was an artist. Fred breathed more evenly, and he forgot himself. He never even touched her.

“Shut your mouth and eyes,” he said.

He painted her face carefully, aiming the spray at such an angle that it wouldn’t get in her nostrils. Her lips quivered. Her eyeballs vibrated under her eyelids.

“Don’t open your eyes or your mouth until the paint is sorta dry,” Fred said.

She consented by nodding.

Fred sprayed on a quick second coat holding the nozzle at a farther distance, covering up the thin spots in the paint. Then he unplugged the extension cord, disassembled the paint sprayer in the kitchen sink, gave everything a quick rinse, and left the parts to soak in a bucket of soapy water. He wound up the extension cord and lit a cigarette. The blades of the ceiling fan chopped up the mist of tobacco smoke and paint particulate hanging in the room. The room was suffused with the heady chemical smell of the wet paint. Lana stood silent and motionless in a Hail Mary pose under the jittery fluorescent kitchen light and the strobing shadows of the fan blades, her head down, tilted, her arms not touching her sides, her legs apart, her fingers not touching, her lips and eyes closed, waiting for the paint to dry. With her eyes closed, Fred could allow himself to look directly at her. In the next room, Robert Johnson was singing about the end of the world.

• • •

“Dunno the fuck that was,” said Kelly.

He clacked his cell phone shut. He’d been pacing around trying to find a place where he could get reception. He’d wondered if maybe he hadn’t paid the bill and the phone company had shut it off, or if he had paid the bill and they shut it off anyway. Financial causes and effects were unpredictable to Kelly. The company shut off the phone, or they didn’t shut it off. The bank charged him fees or they didn’t charge him fees. But then he found a place with reception, and there was a message from Jackson wondering why he wasn’t picking up his phone. He called him back and then Jackson said something about his grandma, but Kelly couldn’t quite understand what he was saying, both because the reception was choppy and because what he was saying didn’t make any sense.

“What?” said Maggie.