Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

The Representative was dead. If she had heard of his death from a friend (which would not have happened — the only friend they had in common, the one who had introduced them, she had not spoken to in years), or (more likely) from the news, she would have cried. As it was, she was not crying — not yet — because she was alone with a mind locked in a rattrap of fear and anxiety surrounding the facts of the Representative’s death, and her presence for it.

The Representative was dead. The Representative had been a good man. He’d had that yacht-club swagger, that easy arm around the shoulder. He had never been someone who could be described as a simple man. No, he was a complicated man. But under that there was essential goodness. Under the armor of public life was someone who cared deeply about the poor, minorities, women, the exploited, the underserved, the uninsured, the unemployed, the disempowered. He’d hated Bush passionately, had been against the war. At the bedrock of his many-layered life, he fought on the side of the good. Social injustice drove him to rage, and it was that rage that drove him into politics more than his vanity or his ambition: the desire to do good. And he had done good. He would do no more good, now. The Representative was dead.

Rebecca was sitting in a leather armchair, looking at his body. The Representative had paid, as he always had, for her airfare to D.C., and put her up in her usual suite in The Fairfax at Embassy Row. She had flown in that morning and was scheduled to leave the next day. The hotel was a thirty-minute walk away, at most, or two quick stops on the Metro. She had barely moved in the last hour. The Representative, for his part, had not moved at all in the last hour.

Rebecca Spiegel — Mistress Delilah, once, sometimes — continued to find herself in this unusual and undesirable situation: slumped in an armchair in spike heels, fishnet stockings and garter belt, a leather corset, and the red wig she had always worn when she was Mistress Delilah with the Representative — staring, without really looking, at the body of the Representative, which lay motionless, faceup and (except for the alligator nipple clamps and the rope around his wrists) naked on the concrete floor of the apartment. It was in a luxury high-rise on Virginia Avenue, a newly built mixed-use steel and glass structure with a balcony view of the National Mall and Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac, which proceeded unhurriedly toward the Chesapeake Bay thirty stories below, flowing under the arches of a squat stone highway bridge, its rippled surface glowing yellow in the slant-light of the golden hour.

The apartment was furnished almost in the way a Realtor would furnish a model home: a hollowly perfect simulacrum of a human dwelling that clearly no person actually lives in. It was decorated as if the Realtor were trying to sell it to fussy upper-middle-class yuppies who happen to be into BDSM. The expensive, unused furniture all matched tastefully: Everything was metal, blue-tinted glass, and black leather. The bed had been fucked on, but no one had ever spent a night sleeping in it. The decorative touches were the Representative’s, and he’d had a good eye: rows of photographs framed in ornate tarnished silver frames that surprisingly harmonized with the sleek designer furniture; all the pictures were sepia-toned early-twentieth-century porn — women with round, sweet faces and full, fleshy hips, sleeping masks, riding crops, student-teacher scenarios, naughty maids in the mistress’s boudoir. The floors were smooth, cool concrete. There were iron rings and chains installed in the ceilings and walls. Mistress Delilah rarely made use of them. Likewise the closets were stocked superabundantly with various equipment: whips, ropes, chains, leather hoods, ball gags, harnesses, collars, handcuffs, butt plugs, cock rings, and many other devices more unique and harder to describe.

The Representative had loved his toys. He had liked talking shop with her about different kinds of whips and so on. He had always had a fawning regard for her opinion as a professional. She didn’t especially share his collectorism, his fetish for connoisseurship, except as it related to psychology. (Rebecca found dominance and submission play that leaned heavily on toys a bit graceless, gimmicky. A whip and some good sturdy rope can go a long way. The art of sexual domination is not in the material; it’s in the mind.) The idea of grades and progression excited him, of different sorts of whips for different purposes. Men seem to like seeing tools lined up in a rack ranging from smallest to biggest, they get some sort of primeval kick out of confronting a problem requiring the widest-gauge socket in the socket wrench set. The Representative had recently acquired a whip that Mistress Delilah had to admit was an impressive item (Rebecca herself was more aloof to it). He’d been so excited for her to use it on him, the object had probably occasioned the visit: It was a genuine South African sjambok , a hard, semiflexible three-foot-long whip, traditionally made from twisted rhinoceros hide, originally meant for driving cattle, later infamous as the police and military weapon of choice during apartheid. These days they make them out of plastic or rubber — the real ones are illegal because they’re made from the hide of an endangered animal. The Representative got off on that, and also on the weapon’s troubling symbolic place in a brutal history of colonial subjugation. He’d bought it from a South African antiquities dealer, and it was the real deal — long, stiff, heavy, the handle embroidered with some African pattern — the object was electric to the touch, alive with sleeping evil. Thing was not a toy — when she started using it on him, she immediately realized that the difficulty would be to hit him hard enough to get him off without seriously hurting him.

Mistress Delilah had also brought along, as always, her own special black bag. A professional brings along a bag of tools: the country doctor making a house call, the plumber come to fix the sink. She only brought it because she knew it excited him just to see it in her hand. It was laughably gratuitous — at this point only a reminder of the way things used to be between them. (Once, she’d had to endure a TSA employee spreading the contents of her bag on a counter: She’d stood there while the woman scrutinized her ball gags and nipple pumps with turquoise latex gloves and had to ask someone to check if a cat-o’-nine-tails violated FAA regulations; it did not. Now she just checked the bag.) The black bag sat, rumpled and deflated-looking, in the corner of the living room, the zipper open, the only things she’d removed from it lying in disuse on the glass coffee table: handcuffs, muzzle, nipple pumps. The sjambok, she realized, looking down, was still in her hands, lying sideways across her lap.

Rebecca guessed it was a heart attack. She asked new clients for medical histories, and wouldn’t risk taking them on if she thought something like this might happen. But the Representative had been her client when she was new and green in the business, and not thinking about things like that yet. And he had been forty years old and in better health back then. The years had puffed him out, and he was not really her client anymore, but her friend, confidant, sometime benefactor, and the most complicated lover she’d ever had. Now he was fifty-one, on the hefty side, and not in the best health. Did he have a genetic history of heart disease? Maybe it was a brain aneurysm? She had tried to revive him with the basic CPR she knew. She’d tried to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it had been of no use. He had, quite literally, died in her arms.

• • •

Rebecca had the first inkling that something was wrong when she noticed the Representative convulsing under the scarlet sole of the Louboutin pump squished against his face in a way that did not seem sexual in nature. She glanced behind her and saw that his cock had gone slack. He’d taken his hands off it — his hands were tied together, which restricted the movement of his arms, but he was limply whacking his wrists against his chest, like someone pretending to be retarded. She took her foot off his face, but didn’t break character.