Benjamin Hale - The Fat Artist and Other Stories

Marianne was standing in the marble compass-rose foyer with her husband, Ken, greeting the guests, proper host and hostess. Ken was an attractive man — older than her, about forty, forty-five, maybe, and imposingly tall. So this was the architect. He wore a genuine smile and didn’t seem to talk much, was balding but well built, with eyebrows as white-blond as hoarfrost and kind but arresting blue eyes. He wore khakis and a blue blazer. He had that aura of worldliness architects often have — Derek wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Ken had a passion for sailing, or had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Marianne was in her usual elegant but restrained attire. Pearls, that night. Derek introduced Scott, shook Ken’s large hand, lowered himself to Marianne’s face for kisses on cheeks.

Scott was jittery for the bar, and hunting for a drink he quickly disappeared into the fabric of the party, thereafter abandoning Derek for most of the night. Derek would remember emerging into the living room without anyone to lean against socially, Scott already gone and Marianne occupied in the foyer with her husband: that initial lost feeling of walking into a party at which the other guests know one another well, but no one knows you. It wasn’t a big party — though granted, one would have to invite quite a lot of people to make that apartment feel crowded. There were maybe thirty people or so, most of them older than Derek, closer to Marianne’s and Ken’s ages. The apartment had been transformed. If it was impressive when Derek had seen it not quite finished a couple of weeks ago, now it was nothing short of majestic. Everything was in its place: pictures on the walls, furniture all in position. It was complete. The sky had begun to turn purple, and the windows were open to the warm summer night, as were tall French doors that led onto a terrace overlooking the park, and a magnificent breeze blew transparent voile curtains back into the rooms. Somehow a flute of champagne came to be in Derek’s hand. Truly, it was a lovely evening. That breeze blew the sheer curtains around, there was laughter here and there, cocktail glasses clinking and chiming, kisses on cheeks, soft conversation. Derek stood by an open window holding his glass of champagne, a line of golden bubbles as thin as a necklace chain ascending to its surface from the stem where he held it, and he looked out at night falling across Central Park from the twenty-third floor of the Beresford. Double Fantasy was playing, and he would remember that, too. Double Fantasy was playing at many cocktail parties in the summer of 1981, but this one was playing at a cocktail party on the Upper West Side, ten blocks away from where John Lennon had been shot six months before, at a stately, named apartment building similar to the one he was standing in. Lennon sang: “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… beautiful boy.” It was a disquieting feeling to be living now in a world in which a Beatle was dead. Derek had guessed Marianne was in her midthirties, which put the year of her birth sometime in the late forties, right in the generational crosshairs to be someone for whom the Beatles had truly changed the world: She could have been one of those shrieking teenage girls waiting on the runway at what used to be Idlewild Airport, but had then recently been renamed JFK in the shadow of his assassination (death beatifies). To Derek, the Beatles had never been anything new, but something that simply played in the background of his growing up, as it now played in the background at this party. He had not imagined it would be so soon that he would be listening to this particular dead man’s voice. He liked the album. But to listen to that album on the Upper West Side in the summer of 1981 was not just listening to music, but a table rapping, a séance. It was an album of love songs, unexpectedly sweet and guileless ones, without Lennon’s usual cast of irony, that drop of venom that made his songwriting so much darker and meaner than McCartney’s. And now these love songs had become haunted. The voice of a man who had recently been murdered sang: “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful… beautiful boy.” Death beatifies.

• • •

It took Derek a little while to realize that many of the people at the party were very ordinary (some of them very large) men who were dressed in women’s clothing.

It wasn’t drag at all: They were simply wearing women’s clothing. They were en costume as women who had just come from their jobs at a law firm, or an advertising agency, or perhaps they had picked up their children from school that afternoon. They were wearing conservative, pedestrian outfits: navy-blue polyester skirts with little matching jackets, shoulder pads, salmon-pink pantsuits, ruffled silk blouses with bows on them, sensible, low-heeled pumps, pearl chokers, thick black tights. They wore wigs styled in pageboys and bob cuts and whatnot.

Marianne was at his elbow, introducing him to someone. Hands were stuck out to be shaken. He was introduced to a man named Bill in a mousey-brown curly wig. Bill wore an indigo dress with white polka dots, and a little gold woman’s watch on his thick, hairy wrist.

“This is my wife, Margaret,” said Bill, lightly putting a proprietary hand on the back of the woman who stood beside him, similarly attired. As they stood there in that opulent apartment with their drinks, Derek looked around at Bill and Margaret and Marianne, and at the other men around them, at their wigs and skirts and dresses, their makeup. Bill’s makeup was of a perfunctory sort, appropriate for the office: lipstick, a little powder and mascara, a hint of rouge on the cheeks. It was poorly applied — he could tell Bill really didn’t know anything about the craft of applying makeup. The lipstick spilled over the lines, and his foundation didn’t quite match his skin tone. He had probably borrowed his wife’s makeup. These men were not trying to be beautiful — they were only trying to be female. But not even that, exactly. There are drag queens who change completely when in drag — an inside-out mental, physical transformation. The voice changes, as do the mannerisms. You instinctively do things such as examine your nails by looking at the back of the hand, with fingers outstretched, instead of looking at the palm with the fingers curled in, the way a man does. Bill was en costume , but not in persona as a woman. The blue polka-dotted dress he wore had pockets, and the hand that didn’t hold his drink he kept casually sunk in one of them as they chatted. Men and women mingled together, couples, friends, some of the men in men’s clothing, but most of the men dressed in their pedestrian women’s clothing. No one did or said anything that indicated they even noticed anything unusual at all was happening.

He was introduced to another guy, whom he wound up talking to for much of that evening. The man stuck out a hand in an elbow-length black satin glove and said in a deep voice, “Hi, I’m Cathy.”

He had a good, strong handshake. He was a tall, squarish man in a houndstooth skirt and a puffy silk blouse the faintly yellowish color of a white key on a very old piano. He wore black hose and white peep-toe slingbacks he must have thought matched the blouse, a quiet string of pearls, and a wig of waxy black hair in a China-chop style, chin length on the sides with straight, tight bangs, like Louise Brooks.

“Beautiful place, isn’t it,” said Cathy. Derek noticed that Cathy had missed a spot shaving that day; there was a line of tiny mustache hairs just under his nostrils.

“Oh, yes,” said Derek. “It’s gorgeous.”

“Ken did all this himself,” said Cathy. “Really dynamite work. Ken is a detail-oriented kind of guy. There’s a guy who sweats the details. I can imagine the hell he must have put the contractors through.”