Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

2. Eat something

Hunger was coming on fast. What had she eaten that day? That morning, sitting in LaGuardia’s Delta Shuttle terminal waiting for her one-hour flight to Reagan National, she’d had a latte and a disgusting premade hummus-sprouts-and-tomato sandwich on an everything bagel that came wrapped in a cellophane package; the pale hard slice of tomato had tasted as though it had been grown in a petri dish. The Representative had treated her to a lobster roll and a glass of Sancerre for lunch. (He’d wanted to buy a bottle, but she said she only wanted a glass, and even that she only sipped at. This abstemiousness was uncharacteristic of her; the Representative had thought nothing of it.) Evening was falling and her belly was beginning to gurgle. Acid, gas, something — chemicals weren’t getting along in her stomach. She eased one cheek off the sticky leather seat cushion to let a fart slide out. Why not? — she was alone, now. She needed to eat.

MEDIUM PRIORITY

3. Call Richard back

It could be important. She had no fucking idea what the fuck Richard had called her about, but whatever it was, it was most likely something she did not remotely, pardon the understatement, want to deal with at the moment. It was probably either about the divorce or the apartment. He had called earlier in the afternoon and left a message. She had been preoccupied. Mistress Delilah had one shoe on the back of the Representative’s neck, hissing insults at him and thwacking his ass with the sjambok while he was bent over in worshipful genuflection, licking up the puddle she’d just pissed for him on the bathroom floor (purely as a professional, she was impressed by the sjambok — it had a pleasing heft and grip, and she appreciated the clear, crisp note of its whistle before the crack: What it sang through the air on its way to strike flesh was a love song); meanwhile, a distant, separate, and ever-alert corner of her consciousness (Rebecca’s) registered the faint buzzing sound of her phone vibrating in the next room, and made a quick mental note to check it later; and later, when she had a moment — she put a blindfold on the Representative and ordered him to jack off awhile, but denied him permission to come — she fished the phone out of her purse and glanced at the screen, just to make sure it wasn’t urgent. (It might have been about Severin, was what she feared most — her sister was watching him while Rebecca was away on this quick trip to D.C., and Severin’s regimen of pills was complicated.) It was Richard. And he’d left a message. She could not bring herself, even now, to listen to the goddamn message. The message almost certainly had to do either with the apartment or with their endless divorce. The two issues were closely interrelated. In broad abstract, the conflict about the apartment (third-story two-bedroom, one-bath in East Village with balcony and nice view of Empire State Building, short walk to First Avenue L, pets OK, laundry on-site) was this: (1) they bought and own it together; (2) Richard, who now finally has tenure and lives in Connecticut with the woman he left her for, wants to sell it; (3) Rebecca, who lives in it, does not. It was a never-ending sideshow to the circus of animosity that was their divorce. Richard and Rebecca had separated four years ago, and it seemed now the divorce was finally coming through. She was so used to its terrible weight, at this point it was getting difficult to imagine what life would feel like with this grindstone cut from around her neck. Were one to unwind all the knots and lay it out along the ground, the string of unanswered e-mails and unreturned messages — from Richard, from Richard’s lawyer, from her own lawyer — would stretch for miles. The divorce was a backyard running out of room to bury bodies in. When she asked herself if, at the age of twenty-one, when she met Richard, she had known that it would end like this, would she have still done it? — the answer was no. All those years of love and cooperation and contentment with him were not worth this. It was a bum deal. She had been a twenty-one-year-old college senior in love with a brilliant (so she’d thought) grad student seven years older than her (an age difference that had seemed significant then, and it was laughable to her now that she’d ever thought so), and she wished she could let that person know she would be in love with that man for fifteen years — fifteen years, with a marriage in the middle — if not of bliss, then of relatively functional happiness — that she would give her youth to this man — and he will violate the one rule you will ask him to obey, which he will have agreed to — and he will leave you, and here you’ll be, thirty-nine and single, your married friends cluttering their Facebook walls with baby pictures while you are thinking daily about sperm donors, about freezing your eggs, the window of fertility shrinking, dimming, closing, every day dogging you with worries about having a child in your forties, the rising risk of birth defects, bringing into the world some rubber-faced mutant with flippers and a tail and raising it alone, and you’ll post pictures of you and your malformed freak-child on Facebook and your friends will “Like” them. From the ages of twenty-one to thirty-six, when she and Richard separated, she’d had someone, and had lived her life pretty much as she always assumed she would. And he had been her best friend — that was what made his betrayal doubly horrible: She’d lost both her husband and her best friend. Where would she find someone like that again? How, now, nearing forty, was it possible that she would meet another person who could ever know her that intimately? Someone with whom she had shared so much history, so much of her growing up? It simply wasn’t possible anymore. Not now. It was such a strange feeling, to have these sickening waves of anger toward the one person in the world with whom she’d shared more of herself than anyone else. What she’d wanted, vaguely, but on second thought, specifically (and in retrospect, thank God it never happened), was a child with Richard, to mix their DNA and make a person whose face shared their features, not a cup of frozen come from a stranger, a stranger who at some point had been paid to come into a cup. Remember, Richard, how we’d talked about having kids — a kid, or kids plural, whatever — and you didn’t want to until your career was more settled, until you had tenure? Of course, I said, that’s fine — I didn’t want to yet, either. We would wait. We would have our fun. And boy did we have fun. There was the threesome with Harriet, for instance. When we shut ourselves up in that cabin in the Catskills for a long weekend and smoked opium — whose idea was that, smoking opium like Frankfurt School philosophers in Paris? Where did we get opium of all drugs, anyway? And we all got high as emperors and had a languorous three-day threesome with my former college roommate. Don’t think for a moment that that wasn’t mostly for you. I’m not actually really bisexual like I said I thought I was back then. When I fucked other women, even the ones I fucked without you around — you know what? — the only way I could really get off on it was to imagine a man watching. Male fantasy is a curved mirror that warps female fantasy. We are all at once bodies and mirrors, and our minds are the curves in the mirrors. And then there was that creepy couple we met on the Internet that one time — we went to their hotel room, they were visiting from Toronto — something funny about us fucking a couple of Canadian swingers — and that woman freaked out at you for not switching condoms. And she was right, Richard. What the fuck is the point of safe group sex if you take it out of me and put it right in her without switching condoms? Think , Richard. Richard and Rebecca had had an open relationship. Well, they were supposed to have had an open relationship. The whole open part necessitates that we tell each other when we fuck other people, doesn’t it, Richard? It was supposed to mean no secrets, no lies, no jealousy, honest communication. That was the idea. Rebecca had thought it was working. The one thing I asked of you, Richard, is don’t fuck your students. And you agreed to that. Yes, I took advantage of the open relationship a lot more often than you did. Could I help the fact that I was young and hot and you were such a fucking pussy? You never told me you didn’t want to hear about it. You were with me when I had the job working for the phone sex line. It was the nineties, first Clinton administration, news about Bosnia on the TV, and Rebecca put on her husky honeydrip voice and got off strangers on the phone while Richard cooked paella or whatever for dinner. That was in the toddlerhood of the Internet, when it was still possible to make okay money working for a phone sex line. You were with me when I started working as a dominatrix. You even said you liked it. You helped me put up the website. You helped me pick out the name, you scholar of comparative religions, you. Rebecca had chosen the name Delilah for a range of reasons: The name sounded sexy, and the biblical reference was a private nod to her Jewish upbringing; she liked the nightmare labyrinth of misogynist connotations — Delilah the emasculator, the woman who renders the strongman weak with the snipping of scissors — the symbolic castrator. You said you liked the idea of me tying up and whipping other men. You said you liked to imagine me dominating other men when you slapped me around and shoved my head down to suck your cock… You even asked to watch that one time — with the Director, who fucking adored me, by the way — and I asked if he minded, and mind, hell, he loved the idea of my husband watching. That was fun, wasn’t it? You sat there rubbing yourself through your jeans while I rammed my fake dick up his ass and that avant-garde theater director who’s famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page now and who liked to be called sissyboy clutched the pillows and came like a woman. I told you everything . That was supposed to be the way it worked. You were the one who was hiding things. Or you were in the end, anyway — who knows what you successfully kept hidden. We know you kept it hidden that you were violating the only rules we had: (1) no outside relationships; (2) you don’t fuck your students; and (3) no lying — all three of which you were doing. It’s kind of funny how we thought we were going to have this freethinking bohemian marriage between a couple of people determined not to become another boring bourgeois couple with an interesting but dead past pushing one of those ergonomic mother-facing anti-autism strollers down Wyckoff Street — and yet, and yet, in the end, it all fell apart because of the most boring bourgeois reason imaginable. You had an affair and left me for a younger woman. Unoriginal, Richard. Tawdry. Gross. Predictable. Fucking classic . And now you’ve called me about something, and left a message. It’s probably about the apartment, which is of no use to you as it sits around unsold on Avenue C not making you any money while I live in it. You want to sell it off for less than its current market value — and keep in mind we bought that place pre-gentrification and now it’s worth almost twice as much and prices in the neighborhood are only going up — and you want to pocket the windfall and take it back to Connecticut with the grad student you cheated on me with and never have to see me again. Shove it up your ass, Richard, we will sell when I’m ready, and I’m not ready yet. And yes, I know I haven’t yet returned your last message about it. You cannot fucking begin to fathom how unimportant that seems to me right now. I am in a very strange situation — a life-and-death situation (well, now it’s just a death situation) — and I probably won’t be getting back to you today.