Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Derek was curious to see the inside of it.

• • •

Derek stood before a doorman in a stately lobby of gold-veined white marble, Derek in jeans and a T-shirt with his long hair knotted loosely in a ponytail and a sparkly purple foil dance bag slung over his shoulder and sagging at his waist, watching the elderly man in his bottle-green uniform with brass buttons murmuring into a desk phone. The doorman’s uniform, with its symmetrical and military ceremoniousness, reminded him of a Christmas nutcracker, an impression helped by the deep-creased jowls that made his chin look separately attached to his face by hidden hinges. Derek had agonized over what to bring. He had figured Marianne would be interested in seeing a few costume changes, so he had brought along as much of the best of his best as would fit in the bag. Lots of makeup, brand-new silver stiletto sandals, the leather miniskirt he’d had on at S.n.A.F.U. the night Marianne had introduced herself to him, jewelry, hairspray, a navy-blue top he’d also made himself, which he called his Balenciaga top because of the way he’d cut it — it had ruffles at the bust, and a wonderful way of swinging out in back.

The doorman hung up the phone, smiled, gestured him toward the elevator bank. He rode the elevator with an elevator man dressed in a bottle-green uniform similar to the doorman’s. The three walls of the elevator that were not doors were floor-to-ceiling mirrors, creating an illusion of the infinite, Derek’s and the elevator man’s reflections diminishing into the distance on either side of them. The doors opened onto a small private hallway with a coatrack. There was only one door in it, which was open, and Marianne was standing on its threshold.

Marianne ushered him inside with a courtly “Good afternoon,” and in a moment he was standing in the most luxurious interior space he had ever stood in. Marianne was at his elbow in an outfit similar to what she had been wearing at S.n.A.F.U. — her hair up, the sleeves of her beige silk blouse rolled up, houndstooth wool trousers, and a thin braided leather belt. She would probably have offered to take his coat had he been wearing one. He wasn’t, as it was late May: It was humid and overcast outside, a dull, dark day, but warm and sticky, the heavy sort of atmosphere that begs for rain all day and doesn’t get it until dinnertime, and then steam rises from the hot streets when the downpour finally splashes them. She didn’t have many lights on, which contributed to the melancholy mood in the vast apartment. They stood in a circular foyer; under their feet was a classic compass design of black-and-white marble. She led him in and around, in and around, deeper into the apartment, apologizing all the while for the mess, Derek half-beside and half-behind her, half listening to her and half ogling their surroundings. She was explaining, in her trim patrician accent, that her husband, Ken, was an architect, and that he had designed the apartment’s renovation himself, and they were just now moving in and putting on the finishing touches. Derek would remember that thick, sleepy smell of wet paint: Everything was freshly done, immaculate, not yet lived in. There were no workmen in the apartment that afternoon, but there were signs here and there of unfinished jobs that someone soon intended to come back to: a paint-speckled ladder, plastic drop cloths, power tools. Unopened cardboard boxes were stacked up in some of the rooms. Most of the rooms had furniture in them, but all the Louis Quatorze tables and chairs seemed to be floating aimlessly in the middle of the parquet and marble floors, awaiting someone’s decisions on where they would go. He saw a Chagall painting in a recessed frame leaning against a living room wall, waiting to be hung.

He followed Marianne as she glided across spotless floors that reflected almost as crisply as a mirror. Derek quickly got lost in the space. He’d been in the apartment less than five minutes, and already, if he’d been asked to find his way back to the door he couldn’t have done so. He would remember lots of rounded shapes, lots of moldings, lots of warm, pale colors: ecru, apricot, champagne. She led him in and around, in and around: living room, dining room, hallway, another living room, another hallway… and finally, into a bathroom. This bathroom was, it may be said without hyperbole, more spacious by the square foot than Derek and Tom’s apartment. Everything blinding white marble: his and hers sinks, toilet, bidet, tub, one of those giant showers you can sit down in, which blasts water at you from the sides as well as from above. The bathroom had an adjoining dressing room — a boudoir, he supposed, with a large vanity table. It was a gorgeous piece — Derek guessed it was something late nineteenth century and French. Three wide mirrors winged out in triptych, their silvered surfaces faintly veined with age. The surface of the table was, what was it called? — ormolu —finely gilt with a coating of high-carat gold.

Marianne gestured toward this museum-quality piece of neoclassical furniture and said, “Please. Do what you do.” And then, “Would you like a drink?”

Derek would not remember what he said then, if anything, but Marianne floated out of the room and a while later floated back in again with a Campari on the rocks in a crystal lowball, in which time Derek had unzipped his sparkly purple foil bag and spread his makeup across the vanity, undressed, and slipped on his pantyhose. He would wear one pair of nude pantyhose to cover the hair on his legs, and then his fancy hose — that day it was a pair of stretchy powder-blue fishnet stockings that he rolled on very carefully, as they ripped easily. He began to put on his makeup. The whole apartment was as hushed as a library, the deft clickings of Derek opening and shutting his compacts or popping the cap off a mascara brush the only audible sounds in it. Derek’s own face looked strange to him in the three antique silver mirrors, as if he’d just taken some hallucinogen whose effect he was feeling but hadn’t started tripping yet. His downmarket makeup — all his little drugstore compacts and cheap Brucci lipsticks — looked so absurdly out of place rolling around on Marianne’s ormolu vanity table.

So he sat barechested in pantyhose and fishnet stockings at the vanity, sipped his glass of Campari, a tinkling red liquid with a spiral of lemon rind in it, and painted his face.

“If you don’t mind, I should like to begin,” said Marianne.

“Oh? No, I don’t mind at all,” he must have said.

As he leaned into the mirrors and worked on his face, he began to hear the mechanical snips of an aperture opening and shutting, opening and shutting. He glanced up in the mirror and saw the neat little woman hovering behind him, her face hidden by a big, black, expensive-looking camera — the most masculine object in the room.

• • •

Derek had already been photographed this way many times. All these photographers seemed to love shooting you as you were getting ready, capturing the transition from male to — not female, exactly, but whatever it was on the other side. Drag, for Derek, was not an imitation of the feminine, but its own third category. Derek had done so many of these in-transition shoots. Every photographer seemed proud of the idea, confident no one had done it before. Derek had begun to find them tiresome. Every goddamn fashion photographer he had met liked to think of himself as David Hemmings in Blow-Up , barking yes! and no! at you as you did your best Vanessa Redgrave, writhing around on the studio floor. He had begun to feel queasy about it. Something lurid or voyeuristic about how those photographers loved shooting you in half drag. There is a photograph of Ethyl this way, curled in a bathtub somewhere in the East Village. He’s wearing a kind of crenulated tutu, his fishnet stockings — the old-fashioned kind, you can tell by the line in the back of the leg — and an impractical pair of six-inch pumps Derek knew he cherished (and would years later remember him shuffling onto the stage in with tight little baby steps, a six-foot-three beanpole under his towering Marie Antoinette wig and polka-band accordion). He doesn’t have any trademark wig on, just his own nearly shaved bare head and wild wings of makeup around his eyes, the angel tattoo visible on his bare back, failing to look comfortable in that cramped bathtub, not smiling, but almost sneering. Derek’s favorite touches in that photo are the half-visible studio portrait of Ethyl hanging above him in the background, and the drink balanced on the rim of the tub, probably likewise given him presession by the photographer. Every drag queen in the early eighties got photographed in a bathtub at some point.