Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

IV. Suicide is the last remaining method by which an artist might claim original authorship; the risk is, of course, that one will never know whether the gamble worked.

V. Was, was : As I sit here, alone, naked, and unable to move, with the summer sun roasting the flesh of my enormous belly and my backside rotting against my mold-blackened bedsheets, I have begun to think of my life in the past tense.

VI. I can at last admit, now that I am probably about to die, and now that the New York art world has as far as I can tell ceased to exist (for the city appears to have been depopulated), that the New York art world was a house so haunted with bullshit that wandering its darkened hallways we sometimes felt like pseudoscientists with silly pieces of beeping, blinking equipment, searching empty rooms for something we wanted to be there, but wasn’t. Admittedly, under any closer than the most pedestrian scrutiny, whole paragraphs of criticism could vanish, like grasping at smoke, as they either meant nothing or expressed ideas so simple they hardly needed to be articulated. Where else but in art criticism was there so little to say and so much space to fill? All of it is gone, now. Do I mourn it? Yes, for even now I remain confident there were babies to be found alive in that sea of bathwater.

VII. We have time for an amusing anecdote: Sometime later, in her apartment, I was perusing Olivia’s bookshelf while she was in the shower, and found two identical copies of Kafka: The Collected Stories . One was battered and dog-eared, with multiple creases in the binding — clearly her own — and the other was brand new. On the inside front cover of the brand-new one the exact same inscription appeared, only this one was signed, “Love, Olivia.” Clearly she had bought the book, inscribed it in this way, then had second thoughts, bought another copy, and signed it without “Love.”

VIII. I.e., “taring” the scale.

IX. Again, I make no claim to the originality of this observation; Luis Buñuel of course beat me to it with Le Fantôme de la liberté. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

X. Pizza-flavored potato chips? Yes. One food may be flavored like another. Third-stage simulacra, what Baudrillard called “the order of sorcery.”

XI. (For reference, a BMI above forty is considered morbidly obese.)

Phil Grassley — still strong, healthy, and handsome in the year of his imminent retirement — stood six feet on the mark in bare feet and khaki shorts on the kitchen floor of his home in a suburb of Houston, cooking enchiladas. Veronica had just called. Phil could tell from the in-and-out reception that she was on her cell phone and driving with the top down. She had called to say she was almost there. She was in the neighborhood, but had managed to get lost in this labyrinthine subdivision of courts and runs and drives and lanes and culs-de-sac lined with behemothic white houses, and needed further directions in order to locate the behemothic white house that belonged in particular to Phil.

Phil was thinking about the fact that he was about to retire. On the one hand, after so many years of working, he’d been greatly looking forward to spending the rest of his life sailing his catamaran, fishing, and drinking beer. On the other hand was Veronica. This meant that, at least for now, the scales were just about balanced. Not that he couldn’t continue this affair with her after he retired, but for some reason it seemed like that would be hard to do. If he wasn’t working, then excuses not to come home on certain nights would be more difficult to conjure up. He had met Veronica three weeks ago. She was new at the office. They’d had sex last weekend. She was thirty years old. When she was born— born —Phil had already been married to Diane for six years. Just to put it in perspective. Veronica wasn’t beautiful. She was frankly a bit on the pudgy side. She was attractive, yes, but not in a way that turns heads on the street. Take a look at her picture on the laminated ID card she wore at work, and then take a look at the girl wearing it: The camera wasn’t kind to her. What she had instead of beauty was a certain glow, a certain verve, a certain fun, sexy energy, which was more powerful than just run-of-the-mill physical beauty. Phil’s wife, in her day, had been a beautiful woman — in that run-of-the-mill way. In thirty-six years of marriage, he had never once had anything with Diane quite like the night and subsequent morning he spent one week ago today with Veronica. She had, for instance, given him a blowjob. Bam! First night, first thing, right out of the gate. He hadn’t asked her to. No sooner were their clothes off than his old cock was in her young mouth and she was sucking on it ferociously, until he had no choice but to squirt his come between her cheeks. Diane had never, ever, not once in thirty-six years of marriage, thought to do that without being asked.

Phil’s wife was out of town. Phil was drinking a beer and cooking enchiladas, reasoning, through an admittedly complicated act of moral calculus, that at any one time a man was entitled to one active secret from his wife. He was allowed one. See, secrets can be active or dormant, like volcanoes. A dormant secret, like a dormant volcano, is essentially harmless. An affair he had ten years ago, for example, was a dormant secret. Veronica was his one current active secret. Phil didn’t cheat on Diane very often. In thirty-six years, he’d had plenty of Veronicas on the side, and Diane had never once found out. (Or said anything, at any rate.) These Veronicas did not mean that Phil did not love his wife. It’s just that Diane, to Phil, was not for sex. She was for wife. Veronica was for sex. Phil thought of his occasional Veronicas as gifts he gave himself every once in a while, well-earned vacations from his otherwise decent record as a faithful and functional husband.

There is nothing that brings two people closer together faster than doing something wrong together, and that’s the greatest psychological kick you get out of infidelity. One criminal acting alone has to live with guilt by himself — but two people, a man and a woman, doing something wrong together? These things wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if Phil didn’t love his wife — of course Phil loved his wife, in the repetitive and boring way a husband does, and he did hope that one day, hopefully not too soon (he wanted to get in a good couple decades of unhampered fishing, sailing, and beer drinking), as he lay in some white bed hooked up to all kinds of wires and tubes, it would be her hand, Diane’s, that he would squeeze in his as he breathed his last, as his basically successful but less than remarkable existence was blotted out forever from this earth. But for now, there was Veronica.

• • •

The doorbell rang. She was peeking through the sandblasted window next to the front door like a neighborhood kid who had come over wanting to know if his sons could “play.” Phil opened the door, and Veronica immediately dumped her big body into his. His nostrils sucked in the sappy smell of her. She had on these knee-high black lizard-leather boots with zippers running up the sides, and a candy-apple-red jacket buttoned over those bounteous earth-mama breasts. Her tongue twisted together with his and he found his hand pawing the plump pillow of her ass. In one hand she held a bottle of mezcal. It was about three-quarters full.

“I bought this in Mexico,” she said, offering the bottle as if it were proof. “It’s the kind with the worm in it and everything.”