Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“What should we toast to?” he said.

“To us,” she said. “To me. To your retirement. To enchiladas. To margaritas. To us fucking.”

“That’ll do.”

They chimed the glasses together and drank their margaritas. Phil put on James Taylor’s Greatest Hits .

“Where is Diane?”

Veronica was looking at a framed photo on the kitchen wall, an old picture, showing Phil, Diane, Garrett, Julian, and Kyle standing on the deck of the boat, the old one that Phil sold about a year ago, before he bought the catamaran. They were all wearing bright yellow boating gear. The wind pushed their yellow jackets flat against their left sides and made them flap behind them to the right. The boat was docked at the marina. Phil and Garrett were holding up a dead swordfish. They held it upside down between them with their arms over their heads, clutching the end of the tail together, with its ramrod of a nose grazing the deck of the boat. Kyle, a sunny twelve-year-old in the picture, had his shirt off and was standing next to them with his fists on his skinny hips. Julian was sitting next to Diane, with long dyed black hair and a bored, sullen face.

“Diane’s at this, uh, conference or something,” said Phil. “I don’t really know what it is. Said she’d be back on Monday.”

It was Saturday.

“Are these your kids?” she said.

Phil didn’t want to talk about his kids.

“Uh-huh. That picture was taken a long time ago. They’re grown now.”

“Which one’s which?”

“That’s Garrett,” he said, pointing at the lean, muscular young man helping him hold the swordfish in the picture. “He’s the oldest. He’s a good kid. He’s at Harvard Law.”

“Following in his daddy’s footsteps.”

“Not really. He wants to go into constitutional law. He wants to be a good lawyer. Kid’s drunk the liberal Kool-Aid but good. He’s a good kid, though.”

“Are you a good lawyer, or a bad lawyer?”

“I’m a bad lawyer.”

By bad Phil meant the word in a moral sense, not a technical one. Phil was a corporate defense lawyer for ExxonMobil, and he was quite good at it.

“That’s Kyle,” said Phil. “He’s the youngest. He’s a good kid, too. He’s in his junior year at Tulane.”

“And this one?”

Veronica’s vermillion fingernail clicked against the glass at the only seated figure in the picture: the ugly and melancholic teenager with long, limp black hair, sitting closer to his mother than to his father.

“That’s the middle kid, Julian,” said Phil. “Nobody knows where he is.”

Veronica did not inquire further on the matter. Phil did not explain any further, either. He thought about it, and then refrained, mostly because he just didn’t feel like talking about it, but also because for some reason he didn’t want her to think he was a bad father — not that he was afraid she’d care. Phil wasn’t so sure he was a “bad” father, anyway, just like he wasn’t so sure he was a “bad” lawyer. That’s how he felt all the time — like the world was a schoolmarm wagging a moralizing finger at him all the goddamn time: bad, bad, bad! Phil was sick to goddamn death of people who didn’t have the first fucking clue what they were talking about thinking he was “bad” just because he did what he did. If the goodness of a father is judged by the goodness of his sons, then two out of three wasn’t bad. The fact that he had two good sons and one bad one he thought might just be an indication that Julian was the fucking problem, not him. He wasn’t a bad father; Julian was a bad son. He’d done all he could for the spoiled, miserable little shit, and now he was done. Paying for college was fine. Paying for rehab, less fine. Nobody in the family had seen him for a good while. It had been months. They were used to these silences. He might be on his knees in a bar bathroom in San Francisco sucking cock for heroin. San Francisco’s where he was last, in any case. Garrett said he talked to him on the phone a few weeks ago, said it seemed he was in as bad a shape as ever. If Julian didn’t want his help, then fine. Phil was pleased to find himself not thinking about Julian much anymore, although Julian was still an unpleasant fixture in his dreams. The main problem with Julian was that Phil couldn’t relate to him at all. He had no idea what was ever going through the kid’s head. Phil could be a good father to Garrett and Kyle because they were at least halfway normal kids. He could at least vaguely imagine what was going on in their heads. He could understand them. Julian, though, never liked normal kid things. Julian didn’t like fishing. Julian didn’t like sailing. Julian didn’t like sports. Julian didn’t like girls. Apparently Julian didn’t like school either, dropped out after his freshman and only year at Sarah Lawrence. What did Julian like? Apparently Julian liked a hypodermic needle in his arm, pumping poison into his veins. That’s what Julian liked, and Phil didn’t understand it.

He didn’t mention any of this to Veronica. At this point, Phil just wanted to have fun, relax, and grow old disgracefully with a margarita in his hand, watching the sunset on the deck of his boat. He had retired from thinking about Julian in the same way he was about to retire from his career. Letting himself retire, letting himself quit thinking about Julian, letting himself buy that beautiful catamaran, and letting himself fuck Veronica — these things were all somehow connected, these were all things he decided to treat himself to after a life of hard work well done and responsibilities met, and he felt he deserved them — he deserved these things, and he didn’t give a shit anymore if anybody thought he was “bad.”

• • •

They ate the enchiladas on the table out on the back deck.

“This is soooo good,” she said, drawing out the word so and making it the emphasis of the sentence. She spoke in that frivolous, childish way that young women speak these days, and Phil loved it. They were already well into margarita numero tres and Phil was drunk enough that he wasn’t really all that hungry anymore, but he ate anyway. The green backyard sloped down a long hill toward a fence, behind which was a road, behind which were a couple of other houses, behind which was a brick wall, behind which was a stretch of land, behind which was a beach, behind which was the Gulf of Mexico, which they could see from the back porch, and which stretched clear out to the horizon. The sun was going down in the other direction, and the sky above the sea faded from blue to yellow to orange to red to purple. At the bottom of the hill, toward the back of the fence that divided Phil’s property from the rest of the surface of the earth, there was an old swingset and a sandbox. Every time he looked at his backyard he saw the swingset and the sandbox and, now with all three boys out of the house (for better or worse), thought about how he ought to get rid of them. Maybe he would once he retired and had time for things like that. It was almost nine now, the sun setting late in the day in the summer. Veronica looked gorgeous in this light. Phil was in love with life in general right now. She looked gorgeous in this light, with her margarita in her hand and her jaw working on a clump of chicken enchilada. It was June of 2005, and the world had its problems, but Phil felt great.

• • •

Phil went to the bathroom to drain some margarita, and when he came back into the bedroom Veronica had already taken off everything except for her jewelry and was on the bed on top of the pastel-colored patchwork quilt Phil’s mom had made, half sitting propped up on the pillows, still drinking her margarita. Her clothes were strewn all over the bedroom floor, except the candy-apple-red jacket, which she had hung on the back of a chair. Pictures of his three kids, of himself and Diane on various vacations, of himself and Garrett with various fish, of various relatives he barely recognized by sight, of his parents and Diane’s parents, were all over the walls, peeping down at them, as if watching. Let them watch. Veronica put her margarita down on one of the two matching bedside tables, and Phil unbuttoned his short-sleeved Oxford shirt, took off his khaki shorts and his underwear, and, thusly naked, climbed onto the bed and fucked her.