Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

“Oh? Something wrong, cuntface?” she said in her belittling-the-baby voice. “Aw, whatsa matter, sweetie-poo?”

The Representative was making a worrisome gakking noise in the back of his throat. He sounded like a dog choking on a bone.

She nudged his shoulder with the toe of her shoe.

“Seriously. You okay?”

He hadn’t used the safe word — he didn’t appear capable of using it or any other word at the moment.

She knelt down beside him. His swollen choking face was red, flaming. A bright sweat had broken out on his forehead.

She said his name — his real name. She said it twice with question marks, and a third time with an exclamation point. Then she was shaking his shoulders, screaming his name. He was unconscious.

The thought would haunt Rebecca afterward — probably for years, maybe for the rest of her life — that if she had called the paramedics right away, maybe they could have rushed him to the hospital, and maybe he could have been revived — by those electric paddle things they use to restart hearts in TV medical dramas, and presumably also in real life (and what is that, really?) — and maybe his life could have been saved, by heart surgery, by a stent, a pacemaker… Instead, she had hesitated. She had hesitated because the Representative had a wife and a family who knew nothing about Mistress Delilah — who knew nothing of his other life, or however many other other lives he had. That was to say nothing of his public life, the things he stood for, his political career, the careers of others he was connected to — a chain of influences that went all the way up to the Oval Office, and, this being an election year, it would not be good to have a Democrat humiliated this way, possibly shamed out of office… God knows how many outward threads of the web would tremble when this hit the news cycle.

There had been a narrow window of time in which there may have been a chance that if she’d made the hasty decision to pick up the phone and dial the three digits every American child learns in kindergarten, she might have saved his life. But instead, because of the world outside — rather than inside — this luxury apartment overlooking the Potomac, she had hesitated, and now, as she had confirmed and reconfirmed and reconfirmed again in the hour since she’d first taken her foot off his mouth, with her thumb on the inside of his bound and motionless wrist and her head on his silent, motionless, cooling chest, the Representative was doubtlessly dead.

It was a sensation of paralysis, sitting in that chair. This must be a little of what it feels like to be paralyzed, a conscious vegetable — the sort of person the Representative may have become had she acted instead of hesitated: seeing, feeling, hearing, thinking, unable to unroot oneself from the spot — passive, helpless, stuck. If she looked down at her legs and arms and willed them to move, they would not.

The plush black leather armchair accepted her body like a gently swallowing mouth. The leather felt smooth and cool on her bare thighs. The back of her leather corset rubbed against the leather of the chair, grunted and squealed if she adjusted her back. Her goddamn back was killing her for some reason. What the fuck she’d done to it she did not know, but this pain in her lower back seemed to return for a few days once a month like a muscular-spinal period. Every time it came back she made a mental note to see a chiropractor, but it always went away before she remembered to make the appointment — and then the motherfucker came roaring back again the next month. Maybe putting on the tight corset today retriggered the back pain. Was this aging?

She had a lot of decisions to make. Some urgent, some middle, some distant. She felt so overwhelmed, so suffocated by the unmade decisions crowding around her that she was for the time being incapable of doing anything but staring at the body of the Representative that lay on the concrete floor in front of her and letting the late-afternoon light fail as she sat in this leather armchair beginning to grow hungry.

In her mind, she began to sketch out a To-Do list. It was an easy exercise suggested by a therapist from years back that she still found a useful way to compartmentalize her problems when she was feeling overwhelmed, and it helped to calm her. When she made these interior To-Do lists, she put items into three categories, according to the urgency of their concern. High Priority, Medium Priority, Low Priority. Her eyes unfixed, she gazed out the window at the river many stories below her. She could see the streetlights beginning to come on, and the colorful lights that spookily underlit the monuments at night: She could just barely discern, not far away on the Mall, a solemn and tired-looking Abraham Lincoln glowing in his cage of columns, sitting perfectly still in his own armchair, as if immobilized for centuries by the weight of his own difficult decisions.

TO DO

HIGH PRIORITY

1. Deal with current situation

What were her options? She would admit, later, that the thought did occur to her of simply changing into her street clothes, packing her bag, and leaving. Who would know she was ever here? What if the Representative had happened to be alone in the apartment when he had his heart attack, or whatever it was? Well — there was the doorman, who knew her, and had seen them come in together, and who would see her leave alone. But who was to say this didn’t happen after she had left? Did anyone else know about this apartment? The Representative had tight, important connections everywhere — he would be missed, conspicuously and immediately. How many hours or days could he lie there decomposing on the floor before anyone found him? She couldn’t do that. Even if she could, what good would it do? The apartment would be discovered, the closets full of BDSM gear, the South African sjambok made out of fucking rhino hide… Questions would arise, and before long, they would be answered. He would be humiliated in his death. He would be a laughingstock, an easy punchline in Leno’s opening monologue. The scandal and embarrassment would come sooner or later; it was inevitable now. In a sudden, brief flutter of hope, she entertained a fantasy of somehow getting in touch with his congressional aides, moving the body to his office, covering it up — which fast spiraled into an oblivion of logistics so delicate and dauntingly complicated that it immediately overwhelmed her. No, that would not work. The safest recourse was the blunt truth. One way or another, she was going to have to pick up the phone and tell someone what happened, hand off the situation to the outside world. She herself had done nothing wrong — except perhaps hesitate past the critical moment when an emergency call might still have been useful. And whom should she call now? Nine-one-one? A bit late for that. Should she tell the doorman? He probably already knew enough about the Representative to infer the general gist of what was going on. The cops? She was loath to talk to “the authorities.” The phrase alone nearly made her shudder. She would want to explain everything deliberately and calmly, not leaving anything out, beginning at the beginning — and she knew that if she were talking to such people, she wouldn’t be allowed to do that — she would struggle against the current, being brusquely cut off over and over by arrogant, unlistening men interrupting her with questions about things that happened on square twenty-seven when she’s still on square one — if they would only shut up and listen to her, she could explain everything — but who would listen? What if — what if, what if, what if — she called his wife? Tracy — Tracy, of whom she had heard a great deal over the last decade — complaints, compliments, grievances, and guileless confessions of enduring love — but had never met. How much did she know? Probably nothing. How much did she suspect? Who could say? If Rebecca were to call his wife and start explaining a lot of very-difficult-to-explain things to his family, it might be possible to keep the whole thing within the inner circle, not let it out into the public sphere… Save his reputation, spare his family the humiliation, and not hurt the Democrats’ image… She chased this line of thought all the way to the bedside table, where the Representative’s iPhone was plugged in, charging. She heaved herself out of the chair — wincing at a sudden spike of back pain — and slogged across the swamp of floor space between living room and bedroom, picked up the phone, slid the lock on the screen, and was immediately confronted with a four-digit passcode. Obviously a man who lived with so many secrets would not have an un-password-protected phone. She went to the desk chair on which she’d earlier that afternoon ordered him to fold and carefully place his clothes. In the pocket of his pants she found his wallet: driver’s license, ID cards, debit card, credit cards, a few business cards, photos of his wife and children (no help there), health insurance card, Metro card noticeably absent (never slums it on the Metro, always takes the car service home from the Capitol), slightly under $280 cash — a recent trip to the ATM minus maybe a cup of coffee. No phone numbers. Of course. No one writes down phone numbers in the year 2012. All information is consolidated on our mobile devices, these guardian angels in our pockets that guide us, protect us, control us. She put it back and returned to the chair. Was 911 really her only option? If she really called the cops she must remember to flush the coke down the toilet before they arrived. It wasn’t hers, but before they started (before Rebecca became Mistress Delilah), he had offered, she had declined, and the Representative had shrugged amiably, chopped out a long fat line on the marble countertop, and sucked it up through a crisp twenty, which now that she remembered it rounded out the amount in his wallet to $300, and was still lying in a gossamer curl on the kitchen counter. Come to think of it, that gulp of cocaine may very well have been what pushed his heart over the edge. Rebecca looked with dread at the cordless landline weakly blinking a green light in its cradle on the kitchen counter. The little green light blinked, and the gulf of dread inside her grew deeper and wider with every second that distanced her from the Representative’s time of death.