Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Veronica wasn’t a sailor. He could tell that at once. She didn’t have the lust for the wind and the sea in her blood. You can tell that immediately about people. Even if they’ve never sailed before in their lives — and Phil considered the souls of such people to be unknowingly and infelicitously impoverished — you can take them sailing and know instantly whether they’ve got the potential but unused love for it buried inside them. Some people immediately understand the greatness of what they’re doing. Other people — and Veronica appeared to be one of them — seem to fear the feeling of the boat’s constant pitching and rolling, its rising up and slapping heavily down again into the water, they are afraid of the sea, they miss the land — they miss the way gravity and the solid properties of the earth cooperate to firmly and comfortably station their bodies in space. Phil could move around aboard the boat quite naturally. Veronica, though, for the most part timidly kept her ass rooted as if nailed down to the semicircular wooden bench set in the bridge deck between the helm and the cabin. Meanwhile Phil stood at the helm, gleefully tilting the wheel of the boat in such and such a direction, now in another direction, cooperating with the wind to take them farther and farther out into the hot, breezy gulf, and the black and green and blue water chopped and frothed all around them for miles.

And Lord, was it a pretty day. To be honest, Phil didn’t really mind the fact that Veronica didn’t appear to love sailing. He liked that there were still some things, certain experiential preferences, which divided the psychology of men from that of women. The more girlish she acted, the more of a man he felt. More than anything, he liked for her to see him enjoying this.

Soon they had sailed far enough away from the land that the coast of Texas — Galveston Island, and beyond it, the southern suburbs of Houston where he lived — was now just a flat brown line on the horizon to the north. To the south, the moisture in the air blurred away the line between the sea and sky. Somewhere in that blue-gray blur, the water bent out of sight over the surface of the planet. Although the radius of visibility at sea, on a perfectly clear day, is only twelve miles in any direction, for some reason you grasp the bigness of the world when you’re out on the open water more than you ever can on land. It has something to do with the absence of any references by which the eye might measure the depth of the space, the perfectly unbroken flatness of your field of vision.

There were now no other boats around anywhere within easy eyeshot.

“She’s in a good place, now,” said Phil. “Come on up here.”

Veronica timidly rose from the wooden bench, groped and picked her way across the deck to the front of the helm.

“All I need you to do is just keep your hands right here,” he said. She put her hands on the spokes of the wheel where Phil’s hands were. Phil stood behind her and wrapped his hands around hers, demonstrating to her the right amount of pressure to apply and the right amount of resistance she should be feeling. Her thick black hair flew into his face and tickled his nose and lips. He breathed in the smell of her skin and hair.

“Just keep her right there.”

“Like this?”

“That’s right. Just like that. You want to feel about this much resistance. That’s it. You want to be pushing on it, but not too hard. Easy does it. Now keep her right there. If all of a sudden she gets too hard or too easy on you, then you know something’s wrong.”

With Veronica positioned at the helm, Phil stepped out onto the back of one of the twin hulls of the boat. He reached out into the net strung between them, where he had put the body. He dragged it toward him, got a good grip on it, and rolled it out of the net into the sea. It dropped into the water. The body floated briefly, and the bedsheet dampened, then it turned over several times, and began to fall under. A gust of wind came and puffed the sails up like fat wings, and took the boat away from the place where the body was falling, sinking from an active secret into a dormant one, a secret that would sleep forever on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

Phil came back to the helm and took over from Veronica.

“Good job,” he said.

She hurriedly sat down again.

There were a couple of other loose ends to take care of before Diane would come home tomorrow. Such as, for instance, that shitty little Toyota still parked in front of the house. It would be easy enough for Veronica to follow behind him while he drove it to some far-flung place and parked it there, and then drive him back home. He would ask her to do that when they got back ashore.

He looked at Veronica. She wasn’t looking at him. She was watching the sea. Her head was half turned away from him. Lord, she was beautiful. She was so full of energy and brightness and life. Look at how the light just bounces off that smooth young skin. Her hair blew around behind her like streaks of ink. Phil was, in fact, in love with her. Of course he was in love with her, and of course he assumed this meant she was in love with him, too, and of course she would never tell anybody about all this. This secret was dormant; it would sleep forever. Once again, Phil had just one active secret, and Veronica was it.

And then Phil noticed an amazing thing: Up ahead of them, obviously moving very fast, and yet seemingly not moving at all because of the lack of visual references all around them, there were several dolphins — they looked like bottlenoses but he wasn’t sure. Just hopping in and out of the water. There were three or four of them. Their sleek silver bodies were looping in and out of the water in perfect sequence, moving together all at once, as graceful as — what, as ballerinas? — no, ballerinas hobble like gimps next to the dazzling physical grace of these creatures. They were traveling through the water in a perfect wave, each one coming up and going down at the exact same time, their athletic bodies working with the material around them, harmoniously collaborating with the media of the world as they moved through it, constantly accounting for the gravitational difference between air and water, their heads, necks, noses, fins, and tails all working together with physics to make them move, and move beautifully. How the hell do they know how to do that? Where’d they learn that? Who taught them? Why do they all jump out of the water and dive back in again at the same time? Surely there’s a reason for it. Surely there’s a real and important reason. An animal’s body does everything it can to maximize its results by minimizing its entropy, always conserving its energy. Everything like that has some kind of reason. Animals don’t do things without a good reason for it.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

— John Berger, Ways of Seeing

The Representative was dead. He would have been one of Rebecca’s oldest clients, except Rebecca had long ago ceased to think of him as a client. Yes, he was generous — he always paid for everything, that was a given — but he had not directly paid Rebecca for her services in years. They weren’t services, anymore, they were just things they did together.

The Representative was dead. Rebecca Spiegel had known him for eleven years, and she was no longer sure what one would call their relationship. What began, long ago, as a rather businesslike arrangement between two people — one of them paying money for services rendered, the other receiving the money and rendering services — had over the years turned into other things: a deep friendship, a partnership, a secret bond that somehow because it had begun as a balanced relationship between equals was truly closer than most romances ever are. Sometimes, they had sex. Now, sometimes (though rarely), they had ordinary vanilla intercourse, without role play, without restraints, without toys, without make-believe. It wasn’t that she had quit charging him. One day, about two years ago, he seemed to have forgotten to pay her (the usual stack of hundreds in an unmarked white envelope on the kitchen counter was not there), and she had not reminded him. Since then, he no longer paid her, and she no longer accepted payment — which, she supposed, made their relationship perfectly legal now, though it was still fraught with secrecy. Was she, in a sense, his mistress?