Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Rebecca didn’t know how much longer she could keep on doing this. She had been doing more pro-Domme work recently because she was short on money. She wasn’t young anymore. She had relaunched her website last month. It had been dormant for years, as she hadn’t needed it. She’d had the same roster of ten to fifteen clients for nearly a decade now, and they kept her in business. All the pictures on her site were taken six years ago. She was opening the door to new clients for the first time in a while. She was staring forty in the face. It stared back at her: her face. It was beautiful, but Venus in the mirror had deep laugh lines now, and two vertical creases in her forehead above the bridge of her nose. She hated looking at photos of herself from just five, six years ago — such as, for instance, the ones on her website. Mistress Delilah, specializing in whipping, caning, flogging, bondage (light or heavy), leather and/or latex fetish, foot fetish, anal femdom, face sitting, cock torture, pissing, edgeplay. She’d gotten Ike, the photographer who always gave her the friend discount, to take those newer pictures in his studio: corsets, wigs, masks, leather boots that laced up to the thighs… She looked gorgeous in them, and that was just six years ago. Was it false advertising to still be using those pictures? It wasn’t an illusion: She had aged perceptibly in the last six years. Stress accelerates the effects of aging, doesn’t it? And with the divorce, the apartment, the being broke, the Severin getting cancer, the hurtling childless and single toward menopause, the possibility of never getting to share the common experience that has united women since the days of goddamn pagan moon rituals and the Venus of Willendorf, for the last few years she had been pretty stressed out. There was a time, in her early twenties, when she looked at small children with confusion and maybe mild disgust — only mild disgust, the way you would look at something that is visually interesting but which you’re not planning to touch, like a slug; they were cute things in the strollers that took up a lot of space on the subway, brief obstructions in the path of a young woman who was on her way to spend a night careening barefoot around Manhattan with her heels in her hands and eventually spill out of a cab at dawn, drunk and shaky with blow, to curl up in the arms of the fiancé who’d been dealing with his own demons all night. Later, when she was in her early thirties, and had been married a few years, her heart, to her own self-reflective annoyance, would gelatinize at the sight of an infant — the cooing, gurgling, finger-grabbing monkey-faced goblins with bright, smooth, smooth, smooth, soft skin that were beginning to emerge from her friends, she looked at them with warmth and tenderness… And now? The other weekend, she woke up at noon on Sunday, parked herself at the kitchen table to eat breakfast in front of her MacBook Pro, and when she looked up, the sun was setting and she had lost the entire day to YouTube videos of babies: a video of a baby being weirded out by a talking Elmo toy, a montage of babies tasting lemons for the first time, a montage of babies laughing hysterically, a baby laughing hysterically at a person jingling car keys, a baby laughing hysterically at herself tearing up a piece of paper, a baby laughing hysterically at an ice cube, a baby laughing hysterically at absolutely nothing, a video of a baby petting a cat, a video of a baby being petted by a cat, a video of twin babies in diapers flapping their hands and squawking at each other in their own strange made-up language, a video of two babies on a couch, holding each other and laughing, hysterically. Feeling like the false mother at the judgment of Solomon. Elohim! Yahweh! Let me conceive like Sarah at the age of ninety-nine! She was irritated at herself for feeling all this maternal yearning, in the same way she was irritated at herself for fantasizing about male fantasy, for getting off under the male gaze. One of the regular crazies who peregrinated Rebecca’s chunk of the East Village between Tompkins Square Park and Stuy-Town was a woman with frazzled crazy-person hair bundled in ratty shawls who walked around in clogs all day, murmuring to herself and pushing a baby stroller full of broken baby dolls with clicking eyelids. The woman terrified her.

She’d voiced these complaints to Colin, her brother — her younger, her only brother — last time she was visiting their mother, in whose basement he dwelled with his lovingly hand-painted Doctor Who memorabilia. Colin! — five years younger than her at his still-virginal thirty-four. A lost cause, a lost soul, a lost child. Colin lives in the dark — sticky and pale like a grub, eating garbage, fearing sunlight, sleeping till noon, one, two, three in the afternoon on a soggy futon in the wood-paneled half-finished basement of that shabby split-level ranch house in Caldwell, New Jersey — the very same room in which she had eaten mushrooms and lost her virginity to her boyfriend at fifteen (and hell, he slept on the very same futon). There Colin lived with his eyes glued to the Internet, a man (strange as it sounded to call him that) who would likely leave little behind in the world but an exhaustively complete collection of Doctor Who and Red Dwarf figurines and a really impressive World of Warcraft Gear score. She had come to visit because her mother, long since divorced from her father, a long time alone, a long time lonesome, was in poor health, recovering from hip surgery. (Mom — why do you let Colin live like that? Why do you allow him to treat you like a live-in servant when you are old and frail, when you should be the one in bed, not doing his goddamn laundry and making him sandwiches for lunch, which you leave on the top step of the basement stairs for him to find when he gets up, as if feeding a troll?) Anyway. She’d sat with Colin in his moist underground lair, drinking most of a box of Mom’s Chablis while he drank a liter of Mountain Dew, unloading her heart to what had become of the little boy whose hand she’d held on the way to his first day of school. And it was Colin, Dorito-munching amateur psychoanalyst who dwells in Mom’s basement, to whom she confessed her anxieties about growing older alone, about the terrible dread she felt facing her imminent fortieth birthday. And you were so understanding, and so helpful, Colin, when you shrugged, and offered what I guess was the most reassuring thing you could think to say: “It’s merely the accident of a base-ten number system.” I think it was that “merely” that made me throw your fucking Dalek at you. I didn’t mean to break it. I’m sorry. I love you. I wish I could help you, but you seem to be beyond help. In a way, your problems are worse than mine, even though sometimes it’s hard to find sympathy for a thirty-four-year-old man whose sick and elderly mother washes his underwear.

4. Severin

Severin was dying. Severin was dying of cancer. Poor thing was only eleven — not that old for a dog. He was a shih tzu, a boutique breed notorious for chronic health problems. She was pretty sure he was mostly blind. He had respiratory issues, too — he grunted and grumbled, fighting for breath as he scuttled around the apartment, or lay in bed with her snoring like a jackhammer all night long: She’d grown to tune it out, while every boyfriend she’d had since Richard left had whined about never being able to get to sleep with this stinking, wheezing, farting, dying little dog curled into a ball at the foot of the bed making weird, gross, and for such a small animal, astonishingly loud noises. (No, not boyfriends — she hadn’t had any boyfriends, only New York single men, who were all the same in the end: selfish, childish, spiritual weaklings, commitment-phobic assholes who wanted to fuck her occasionally but kept their distance wide enough to never be called anyone’s boyfriend — say the word boyfriend and watch them skitter down the drainpipe like a roach when the light’s flicked on.) Her sister, Liz — her much younger half sister from her dad’s second marriage to the younger woman he left her mother for (boys will be boys, won’t they?) — was watching Severin while Rebecca was out of town for the weekend, and even that much time away made her nervous. It wasn’t an ordinary pet-sitting job: Severin had a daily regimen of medications he had to be tricked into taking that was as complicated as that of a dying human’s, and came in the same tray of little plastic boxes labeled by the time of day they had to be given. They were supplementary to the chemo somehow, and Rebecca followed the vet’s orders with religious obedience. No, Severin’s hair didn’t fall out — that doesn’t happen with dogs in chemo for some reason — and yes, she had a shih tzu in chemotherapy, and if you just rolled your eyes at the idea of “wasting” money on chemotherapy for a shih tzu then fuck you, I don’t care what you think. Have you never loved a dog? Have you never loved anyone? All her life Rebecca had given out love, and Severin was the one creature alive to which she gave her love who honestly and reliably and unconditionally gave it back.