Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

But with Marianne, he didn’t mind. There was very little bluster about this quiet, tiny, middle-aged woman in slacks and slippers who floated around him as he applied his makeup, so quiet he nearly forgot she was there, concentrating, completely losing himself, as he always did, in the mirror. Coral lipstick, electric-blue eye shadow that more or less matched the color of his stockings, rouged cheeks, Cleopatra eyeliner that swept out in elegant strokes of black. When he finished with his face, he strapped on his open-toed silver stiletto sandals and his chandelier-drop earrings. They were real crystal teardrop beads from an old chandelier, mismatched (that was part of their charm), and so heavy they had to be kept on by a wire that curled around the back of the ear. (Ethyl had taught him that trick.) Derek stood to go fishing in his bag for his leather miniskirt, but Marianne lowered her camera and beckoned to him from the doorway.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to photograph you just as you are right now.”

Derek shrugged, took his drink, and followed.

The gray afternoon outside the windows suffused the palatial black-and-white rooms in soft pale light. Derek followed Marianne as she looked around the apartment for a good place to shoot him. The spikes of his stilettos made a racket on the parquet floors, echoing solemnly around the half-moved-into apartment.

“I would like it if you would just — just lie down. Right here.”

She gestured toward a smooth circular curve in the ivory-colored paneled hallway. It was just a little niche, an architectural hiccup of space between rooms. Derek guessed when the apartment was fully moved into they might put a marble table there with a vase on it or something. The curved wood was what Derek would remember. He’d heard somewhere about the process of making a curved piece of wood like that, how you warp it with steam. There was a round silk carpet on the floor, and he would remember the soft smooth coolness of it against his back and chest and arms as he lay down on it in a fetal position as Marianne instructed him to do, a position much like Ethyl in that bathtub. The royal-blue rug was as soft and silky as a kimono, with a pattern of vines or birds on it. Marianne stood over him, her face behind the camera.

“I love the way your body looks,” she said in a near whisper.

Derek writhed around on the floor in slow motion, conforming the contours of his body to the curved white wood.

“Please just move your head,” said Marianne.

Obeying her command, Derek quit his full-body squirming and just held still in the pose she wanted, moving his head around. Up, down, side to side, toward her, away from her. In the silence punctuated only by the camera clicks, Derek became acutely conscious of the sound of his own breathing. He looked around at the Escheresque intersection of rooms they were in, at the high ceilings and lighting fixtures, out the windows, which he could see were thinly streaked with the light rain that had broken and was softly pattering the Beresford. He moved his head and looked around at things, and the camera snipped and clacked, followed by the ratcheting sound of Marianne pulling back the lever that advanced the film, followed by a long pause — and then another snip and clack. She went out for a moment and wiggled a stepladder in from another room, climbed it a few steps, and shot downward at Derek as he looked up at her from the floor. The camera snipped and clacked.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Derek felt a head rush as he finally stood, a tingling of blood, a little sore from lying on the floor. He started off toward what he guessed was the direction of the dressing room, to go get en costume in his leather skirt and homemade Balenciaga knockoff. But a feeling made him turn back, to see Marianne putting away her camera equipment, and he realized that “Thank you” meant good-bye. That was all she wanted.

• • •

As a child, Derek had mistaken the black spiral in the opening sequence of James Bond movies for a camera aperture rather than a gun barrel. It was not such a far-flung mistake: What is more symbolic of espionage — a gun or a camera? There is a kinship between the two machines. For one, both are “shot.” There is a dialogue between them as symbols. The camera is a hidden eye, whereas a gun is an element of positive space, a protrusion, male. A camera is negative, a hole, a trap. The silhouette of a man saunters into the viewfinder, stops, swivels, and fires directly into the camera, blinding us, the counterspies, the voyeurs, with our own blood.

• • •

A couple of weeks later Marianne invited him back to a party at her apartment.

“The apartment is finally done,” that quiet voice said through the honeycomb of holes in the plastic receiver. Derek was lying in bed in the early evening, very high on hashish, carefully dipping Chips Ahoy! in blueberry yogurt and trying to eat them without getting crumbs on his sheets. Derek was in a state of limbo: Tom would be out all night at his bartending job, and Derek was in want of company, but unfortunately he’d already made himself way too high to leave the apartment.

“Ken and I are having a few friends over,” the phone said. “It’s a housewarming of sorts, I suppose.”

“Mn?” he said. “Oh, sure. Why not?”

It could have been a paranoid note from the hash bubbling in his nerves, but he sensed a question lurking behind the invitation, possibly a sexual one. These were days of widespread experimentation; Derek had been on the balcony at Studio 54, and was well versed in threeways with straight couples. Which he didn’t mind, necessarily, but in any case, as a sort of buffer, he invited Scott along to the party. Tom knew Derek occasionally had sex with Scott. They weren’t “supposed to,” as they were both in relationships with other people, but again, these were days of widespread experimentation. He knew Tom had his own dalliances. Sometimes Derek would feel a wave of guilt, and would say to Tom, “You know, um, I think we really ought to be monogamous.” To which Tom would say, “Yes, I think you’re right about that, yes, absolutely.” And two nights later Derek would be putting on his jacket with his hand on the doorknob, saying, “Oh, I’m just going over to Scott’s to watch Dallas .”

(Well, Scott actually did like Dallas . Derek didn’t. He never watched Dallas and never spent a second of his life wondering who shot J.R.)

• • •

Scott and Derek climbed out of the Eighty-First Street subway station and into the early summer night. It was the time of year when everyone is still joyfully surprised that the sun is setting so late in the evening, later every day, meaning only more summer to come. The sky was in what photographers call the golden hour; the faces of the buildings glowing like, well, ormolu, and the shadows of the skyscrapers were long across Central Park. Derek was wearing sandals, a faded black T-shirt with a neckline he’d roughly cut out to bare one shoulder, and red Zouave pants tied at the waist with a knotted sash. He loved wearing those pants, especially in warm weather, all that breezy fabric billowing around his legs. Minimal makeup that night — eyeliner, red nail polish, and a touch of glitter on his temple and on his exposed shoulder. He was wearing iridescent dragonfly-wing earrings, and his hair was pinned up but loosely falling about his face in a couple of well-placed tendrils that he’d coiled a few times with the curling iron. Altogether his outfit was a little genderfucky, but certainly not drag. He wasn’t trying to look like a girl. He never tried to look like a girl. He didn’t want to look like a girl, and he didn’t want to look like a boy — but simply something other. Not even something in between. Just something else.