The Fat Artist and Other Stories (18 page)

“God, it smells so bad in here,” she said. “Do you even realize how you
smell
?”

I made a dismissive snorting noise and squeezed a shrug out of my amorphous shoulders. The exertion exhausted me.

“This room smells like death,” she said.

I said nothing. I was busy peeling the skin from a leg of chicken—I’ve always loved the way fried chicken skin slides so easily away from the pale wet meat beneath, like a silk slipper. I lowered the chicken skin into my always-hungry mouth.

“This whole thing isn’t about me, is it?” she said.

I said nothing. I licked the last bits of meat from a chicken leg and tossed the bone from the bed to join the others on the floor. There was a soft drumming of thunder in the sky.

“Anyway. I won’t stay long. I came for two reasons,” she said. “The first reason I came is to tell you some bad news. I’m really sorry. I don’t know if anyone has told you . . . ?”

The rest of her sentence was implied by raised eyebrows and widened eyes. I’m sure the curious look on my face belied that whatever her bad news was, I had not heard it.

“Your father died,” she said.

Olivia walked up to the side of my bed.

“Here,” she said, and handed me the flowers. I accepted them mindlessly. I rested the flowers on the rolling dunes of my torso.

“He had a brain aneurysm,” said Olivia. “Apparently it was very sudden. I happened to see his obituary, and I called your mom. I always read the obituaries. They’re my favorite part. So, I just thought you should know.”

Olivia stood there and looked at the filth scattered all around the room.

“What day is it?” I said, distractedly fingering the damp petals of the roses.

“Friday,” said Olivia.

“No—what is the date?”

She dug her cell phone out of her purse and looked at it.

“August twenty-ninth,” she said.

I had entered the exhibit in May. Had I really been here nearly four months?

Time passed. Above the glass ceiling the sky was a snake pit, squirming with thick muscles of green and black vapor. Soon the clouds broke into rain. Pebbles of rain came down on the roof of my exhibition chamber in pulsing waves of crackling water. The echoes of the rain warbled in the big cubical glass room and lines of water chased each other down the walls, warping and distorting the view of Central Park.

“I’m going now,” said Olivia.

“Please don’t go now,” I whined.

“I have an umbrella,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Please.”

She looked at me with unmistakable contempt.

“Okay,” she said.

Her voice was barely audible over the clatter of the rain echoing in my glass box. The room had become dense with fog, and the glass was nearly opaque with condensation. The inside of my glass box was a small, self-contained universe—nothing had to exist outside of it. I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself the king of infinite space. This room was my kingdom, over which I both presided as monarch and all by myself constituted my only subject.

“Hold me,” I pleaded. I could hear the infantile croak in my own voice.

Olivia scooted aside my rolling glass dining table, removed several buckets of fried chicken from the strategic places where my waiters had nestled them against my flesh, and lay down beside me on my bed. She slid her feet out of her shoes, they tumbled
clop-clop
to the floor, and with careful movements she curled herself beside my mass. She put a hand on my chest and stroked my greasy wet hair with the other. She nuzzled her hair in the crook of my armpit. Rain pummelled the roof. I permitted myself to weep.

When the rainstorm abated, Olivia sat up in the bed, rubbed her eyes, and looked at her watch. She sat on the edge of my bed and put on her shoes.

“Please, Olivia,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go.”

She stood up.

“Wait—” I said. “What was the other reason you came? You said there were two.”

“The other reason was that I wanted to see if anyone had come to get you. But I see now there’s nothing I can do. I just don’t see how it’s possible. I’m sorry.”

“Come to get me? What do you mean? Come get me for what?”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again. “Good-bye.”

Olivia turned and walked out of my box and into a sunny, newly wet world of petrichor and flashing puddles. The light outside had that steamy, crisp, golden quality it sometimes does when the sun breaks out after a long torrent of rain. I watched her go. I don’t know whether or not I would have tried to follow her, even if I had been physically able to move.

Where were my waiters? It was very late. The angles of the shadows were low, stretched long over the wet, golden world.

After Olivia left, I ate the flowers she had brought me. I peeled them apart, petal by petal, put them in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. They had a velvety texture. I felt their lush, wet kisses of life on my tongue. Their strong, sweet odor was undercut by a pointedly acrid taste. I munched slowly on the flowers, internalizing them, making them part of my body.

No one came to feed me.

I
. What, at this late stage (or any other), is truly unprecedented? The anonymous eyes, minds, and hands that overlaid extra-semiotic images on the raw found walls of Lascaux merely forged after the forms of nature, and only because of this very forgery of form is such anodyne work (still!) exalted: typical of self-serving bourgeois approval, then, I’m sure, as now, and my sympathies are with those early cave artists. (“Ooh,” I imagine their naïve fellows saying, “it’s a horse! It’s a buffalo!”)

II
. “The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes between the naked and the nude. To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed”(Kenneth Clark,
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
). I myself was once
nude
(I was a work of art), but now have become again merely
naked
: as embarrassed and defenseless as Adam out of Paradise.

III
. Somewhere (and where on earth does one hear such things?) I heard that, if one is dying of dehydration (in the desert, or wherever you are), one may drink one’s own urine once: There is more water than poison in it the first time round, and it will hydrate the body for another revolution. But don’t drink the next batch: It’s more toxins than hydration. I’m afraid my own leather jacket was just that: twice-recycled piss.

IV
. Suicide is the last remaining method by which an artist might claim original authorship; the risk is, of course, that one will never know whether the gamble worked.

V
. 
Was, was
: As I sit here, alone, naked, and unable to move, with the summer sun roasting the flesh of my enormous belly and my backside rotting against my mold-blackened bedsheets, I have begun to think of my life in the past tense.

VI
. I can at last admit, now that I am probably about to die, and now that the New York art world has as far as I can tell ceased to exist (for the city appears to have been depopulated), that the New York art world was a house so haunted with bullshit that wandering its darkened hallways we sometimes felt like pseudoscientists with silly pieces of beeping, blinking equipment, searching empty rooms for something we wanted to be there, but wasn’t. Admittedly, under any closer than the most pedestrian scrutiny, whole paragraphs of criticism could vanish, like grasping at smoke, as they either meant nothing or expressed ideas so simple they hardly needed to be articulated. Where else but in art criticism was there so little to say and so much space to fill? All of it is gone, now. Do I mourn it? Yes, for even now I remain confident there were babies to be found alive in that sea of bathwater.

VII
. We have time for an amusing anecdote: Sometime later, in her apartment, I was perusing Olivia’s bookshelf while she was in the shower, and found two identical copies of
Kafka: The Collected Stories
. One was battered and dog-eared, with multiple creases in the binding—clearly her own—and the other was brand new. On the inside front cover of the brand-new one the exact same inscription appeared, only this one was signed, “Love, Olivia.” Clearly she had bought the book, inscribed it in this way, then had second thoughts, bought another copy, and signed it
without
“Love.”

VIII
. I.e., “taring” the scale.

IX
. Again, I make no claim to the originality of this observation; Luis Buñuel of course beat me to it with
Le Fantôme de la liberté.
Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

X
. Pizza-flavored potato chips? Yes. One food may be flavored like another. Third-stage simulacra, what Baudrillard called “the order of sorcery.”

XI
. (For reference, a BMI above forty is considered morbidly obese.)

Phil Grassley—still strong, healthy, and handsome in the year of his imminent retirement—stood six feet on the mark in bare feet and khaki shorts on the kitchen floor of his home in a suburb of Houston, cooking enchiladas. Veronica had just called. Phil could tell from the in-and-out reception that she was on her cell phone and driving with the top down. She had called to say she was almost there. She was in the neighborhood, but had managed to get lost in this labyrinthine subdivision of courts and runs and drives and lanes and culs-de-sac lined with behemothic white houses, and needed further directions in order to locate the behemothic white house that belonged in particular to Phil.

Phil was thinking about the fact that he was about to retire. On the one hand, after so many years of working, he’d been greatly looking forward to spending the rest of his life sailing his catamaran, fishing, and drinking beer. On the other hand was Veronica. This meant that, at least for now, the scales were just about balanced. Not that he couldn’t continue this affair with her after he retired, but for some reason it seemed like that would be hard to do. If he wasn’t working, then excuses not to come home on certain nights would be more difficult to conjure up. He had met Veronica three weeks ago. She was new at the office. They’d had sex last weekend. She was thirty years old. When she was born—
born
—Phil had already been married to Diane for six years. Just to put it in perspective. Veronica wasn’t beautiful. She was frankly a bit on the pudgy side. She was attractive, yes, but not in a way that turns heads on the street. Take a look at her picture on the laminated ID card she wore at work, and then take a look at the girl wearing it: The camera wasn’t kind to her. What she had instead of beauty was a certain glow, a certain verve, a certain fun, sexy energy, which was more powerful than just run-of-the-mill physical beauty. Phil’s wife, in her day, had been a beautiful woman—in that run-of-the-mill way. In thirty-six years of marriage, he had never once had anything with Diane quite like the night and subsequent morning he spent one week ago today with Veronica. She had, for instance, given him a blowjob. Bam! First night, first thing, right out of the gate. He hadn’t asked her to. No sooner were their clothes off than his old cock was in her young mouth and she was sucking on it ferociously, until he had no choice but to squirt his come between her cheeks. Diane had never, ever, not once in thirty-six years of marriage, thought to do that without being asked.

Phil’s wife was out of town. Phil was drinking a beer and cooking enchiladas, reasoning, through an admittedly complicated act of moral calculus, that at any one time a man was entitled to one
active
secret from his wife. He was allowed one. See, secrets can be active or dormant, like volcanoes. A dormant secret, like a dormant volcano, is essentially harmless. An affair he had ten years ago, for example, was a dormant secret. Veronica was his one current active secret. Phil didn’t cheat on Diane very often. In thirty-six years, he’d had plenty of Veronicas on the side, and Diane had never once found out. (Or said anything, at any rate.) These Veronicas did not mean that Phil did not love his wife. It’s just that Diane, to Phil, was not
for
sex. She was for wife. Veronica was for sex. Phil thought of his occasional Veronicas as gifts he gave himself every once in a while, well-earned vacations from his otherwise decent record as a faithful and functional husband.

There is nothing that brings two people closer together faster than doing something wrong together, and that’s the greatest psychological kick you get out of infidelity. One criminal acting alone has to live with guilt by himself—but two people, a man and a woman, doing something wrong together? These things wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if Phil
didn’t
love his wife—of course Phil loved his wife, in the repetitive and boring way a husband does, and he did hope that one day, hopefully not too soon (he wanted to get in a good couple decades of unhampered fishing, sailing, and beer drinking), as he lay in some white bed hooked up to all kinds of wires and tubes, it would be her hand, Diane’s, that he would squeeze in his as he breathed his last, as his basically successful but less than remarkable existence was blotted out forever from this earth. But for now, there was Veronica.