Lost Memory of Skin

by Russell Banks

  You might have called me.

  Would you have done anything differently if I had?

  No. But I wouldn’t have worried.

  Did you worry?

  No.

  Well, there you are, then.

  He heads for the restaurant-size refrigerator that they purchased the first week of their marriage, when they realized they’d be sharing food storage, pulls open the door and scans the gleaming contents. Dozens of topped-off plastic, paper, and cardboard containers of ready-to-eat food—potato salad, macaroni and cheese, beef stew, lamb stew, curried chicken, fried chicken, pork dumplings, chicken pot pies, half a ham, chunks of cheese, egg salad, tuna salad, sliced meats, marinated tuna steaks, mashed squash, creamed spinach, meat loaf, Cuban, Chinese, and Indian takeout, Dominican meat patties and Mexican fajitas, and much, much more—all prepared over the last few days by Gloria or, as instructed and listed by the Professor, purchased at the Watson New York Deli or delivered to the house by the nearby ethnic restaurants, everything ready to be eaten cold or else easily heated in the microwave. In addition, stored for his eventual delectation, there’s plenty of backup in the freezer—loaves of bread, cakes, ice cream, custard pies, pizzas and chicken fingers, french fries, onion rings, waffles, and more. He also has a standing order with his wife to keep at the ready a gallon jug of sweetened iced tea and two unopened liters of Diet Coke and a gallon of milk.

  The Professor likes to eat standing up at the kitchen counter, alone, unseen, without his intake being observed, quantified, and judged, and he arranges to do so at least four times a week and would do it every night, if Gloria did not complain that he should spend more time with his children, since the kids’ bedtime is eight-thirty and they can only be together as a family when they all sit down to dinner. So three and sometimes four times a week, he manages to arrive home from the university by 6 P.M. where he presides over the evening meal—eating restaurant-size portions only, nothing excessive—and afterward conducts a brief interrogation of his children as to the particulars of their schoolwork and extracurricular activities and a television program or two that he personally selects and oversees.

  Later, long after the twins have been sent to bed and Gloria, a fan of crime and forensic dramas, has retired to their bedroom to watch television alone, he slips into the kitchen again and again, long into the night, and frequently even after he has gone to bed himself the Professor rises, wraps his body in his bathrobe and strolls through the darkened house, as if he is merely restless, unable to sleep, ending his walk at the kitchen, there to swing open the wide refrigerator door and in the cold light spread onto a platter slabs of meat loaf, piles of potato salad and various vegetables, meat patties, ice cream bars, and so on, an entire multicourse meal, which he proceeds for the next half hour or more to serve himself, chewing and swallowing and cutting off another slice and chewing and swallowing that and spooning another clump and chewing and swallowing that, until the ache in his cells has faded, and he can wash his plate and utensils and pack up the tubs, boxes, and plastic containers, switch off the kitchen light, and return to his study and resume reading or, as dawn approaches, slip back under the covers of his queen-size bed that stands next to his wife’s narrow twin bed and for another hour or two, while his stomach and intestines, injecting the undigested food with enzymes and chemicals, contract and expand and extrude, and his involuntary organs, his kidneys, liver, pancreas, and colon, like miners deep in the dark of the earth, do their mindless slow work, and he falls back to sleep. He sleeps soundly until the work in the dark recesses of his bowels is complete, and then the ache in his cells gradually returns and wakes him again, and it’s time to return to the kitchen again, before Gloria and the kids wake.

  His outer body, its enormous size and shape and its social and physical liabilities, is a significant, unavoidable part of the Professor’s public life, seen and in his absence commented on by all. For this reason, he avoids mirrors and cameras and reflecting glass windows and doors. His inner body and its needs, however, are his secret life, which by and large he keeps locked away, even from himself. No one comments on his inner life; no one even observes it: not his colleagues nor students nor any of his friends and acquaintances; not his wife anymore nor his children, for whom their papa’s inner life is a threatening, demanding, impossible-to-please-or-penetrate mystery. No one. Since childhood, the only treatment for the Professor’s sickness that he has been able to imagine is more of the sickness itself. Like a drug addict, he has compartmentalized his life, not simply in order to remain an addict, but so that he can continue to treat his addiction with more of what he’s addicted to without contaminating any other part of his life, public or private, outer or inner.

  He has not proven to be a particularly adept participant in any of the forms of therapy or the various self-help and twelve-step programs designed to treat his addiction. All his life he has believed that he is the most intelligent person in the room, and—if you measure intelligence by IQ and memory—he has been for the most part correct. He talks, but rarely listens. And then he leaves the room. At the urging of Gloria, he agreed after the second year of their marriage to attend weekly group sessions with a psychotherapist who specialized in treating eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia and on occasion simple overeating. Judgmental terms like glutton, self-indulgent, and vain were forbidden. Everyone in the group pointed accusing fingers at parents, especially mothers. Even so, it went nowhere. At least for him. After a half-dozen meetings with the group, which was made up of four adolescent girls, who, he believed, were obsessed with media celebrity, like most American adolescents, and two perpetually dieting, slightly overweight middle-aged women, women who he felt were indeed gluttonous, self-indulgent, and vain, he announced to the group and the therapist, There is no apparent conflict between my “body image” and my perfectionism. And my parents had nothing to do with shaping either. In fact, I find the former, “body image,” an essentially meaningless construct, and the latter, “perfectionism,” a virtue worthy of cultivation, an aspect of my character and personality that I actually admire and take credit for having instilled in myself and for which I therefore blame no one. But there’s no polarity between the two, my “body image” and my perfectionism. Only a distinction without a difference. I therefore bid you a fond and respectful good-bye.

  After that—again to satisfy Gloria, who was still trying to ignore the dietary needs of her husband’s inner body, his appetite, the way early in their courtship she had learned to ignore the visible size and shape of his outer body—the Professor agreed to attend meetings of Overeaters Anonymous, a twelve-step program based on Alcoholics Anonymous. But he never got to the first step. He didn’t even get beyond the threshold. Meetings were held in a basement room at the Watson Unitarian Church, and the room turned out to be filled with fat people. He left immediately after the group recited the pledge to change what they could change and accept and give over to a higher power what they could not change. Those people offend my eye and dull my mind, especially in such numbers, he explained to Gloria. It’s like being in a room full of remorseful self-mutilating amputees. I am not an aesthete, but there is an aesthetic aspect of the human body which, seen whole, pleases my eye and relaxes, even as it sharpens, my mind.

  You can get over that. Can’t you get over that?

  Why should I?

  Dear, it’s a prejudice. A prejudice against fat people.

  Au contraire. It’s a delight in the observable beauty of the human body. How can I be prejudiced against fat people when I am one myself? No, it’s about my aesthetic life, my appreciation of the visible beauty of the human body and the sensual pleasure I take from it. Male or female, it doesn’t matter. Y’all wouldn’t have me give that up, now, would y’all? Just watching y’all undress, for instance, thrills me more and with greater complexity today than it ever did in the past.

  No, dear, I wouldn’t want you to give that up. As long as it’s me you’re looking at, and
not some other woman taking off her clothes.

  Glory-Glory-Hallelujah. There ain’t no other woman I’d rather see naked than y’all.

  You smooth talker, you.

  The Professor is not merely flattering her. He does indeed like looking at her when she is naked. Several times a month, wearing only his size XXXL terry cloth bathrobe, he sits across from her in their bedroom in his forest green leather Barcalounger, and she takes off her clothes, slowly, article by article, and then poses on her narrow bed, as if modeling for an artist, while he masturbates. That’s the nature and extent of their sexual activities. They did not have sex as such—normal intercourse—more than a few times before the twins were born and have attempted it only once since then. A failed attempt. But they did not marry for sex in the first place, nor was it ever an essential part of their relationship. Sexual intercourse, at least in the beginning, was merely a requirement, an obligation on both their parts determined mostly by convention and proximity and her wish to have a child, rather than by attraction or desire.

  Gloria is shy, withdrawn, sexually naive and, because of it, insecure. She is the sort of conventionally pretty woman who disappears into the background of group photographs or fails to be properly introduced at social gatherings or office parties. She is a quietly competent person whose calm self-containment masks a resentful feeling of superiority, contradictory characteristics that make other women feel judged by her. Men detect that contradiction from halfway across the room, and alarmed by it back off to an even greater distance. All her adult life, therefore, until the Professor came along, Gloria was a very lonely woman.

  The Professor was the first man who treated her as if he were sexually attracted to her. He was not. He was merely looking for a particular kind of wife. She was thirty-one years old at the time, and he had recently purchased a home in the suburb of Watson. He strolled into the branch of the Calusa library closest to his university office one morning before class ostensibly to examine its public programs and holdings, especially the reference section and Internet access and number of computer terminals, as a way of evaluating the educational level and interests of the community. Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America, he explained to her. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.

  Gloria was attracted to the way the man spoke: complete sentences and organized, coherent paragraphs that were essentially pronouncements, beyond opinions or observations. The clarity and authority of his words and grammar made her stomach tighten and loosened the muscles in her legs. But not only his words and grammar drew her to him: it was also the way he spoke, his crisply articulated pronunciation smoothed and diluted by the remnants of a rural Alabama accent that every now and then in a slightly self-mocking way he brought into full use. She also liked the authority of his enormous body, the way it took up so much space in a room, her office, when he first presented himself. When the Professor stands in front of you, no one else in the room is visible: either your eye is drawn to his unusual girth and height, which he does little to disguise, or else he literally blocks everyone else out—even in a very large room, as Gloria discovered when she led him from her office to the reference section of the main hall. The scattered patrons and other library staff members turned toward them and stared at the bearded man walking beside her and saw no one else, especially not Gloria, the short, slender, bespectacled librarian. It was almost as if she had been absorbed by him, as if she had become huge too, four times her usual size, with all the authority and high visibility of a lone adult in a schoolyard surrounded by children.

  Until this moment, she had not realized that all her life she had been waiting to feel exactly this. Large and central. As if spotlighted on a stage. It was an emotion without a name, not exactly orgasmic—as she showed the Professor their encyclopedias and dictionaries, English, Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Mandarin, Russian, German, Italian, and Swahili, and their extensive collection of supplementary reference materials, technical and scientific dictionaries, atlases, medical dictionaries, thesauruses, dictionaries of slang, biography, history, and myth—but close.

  You should be careful, hanging out with sex offenders. Especially homeless sex offenders. Don’t you find them . . . creepy? Scary? Some of them are rapists, I heard. Child molesters.

  Nothing they have done or will do offends or frightens me. I view them scientifically. Like lab specimens. They’re less violent, at least toward other men, than the general population. Quite often they themselves have been the victims of violence, and almost all of them have been sexually abused as children. This young man I mentioned particularly interests me. He calls himself the Kid. He wouldn’t tell me his real name, but I’m sure it’s William Kid, spelled either K-Y-D-D-E or K-I-D-D-E. He’s fairly bright and articulate, and he’s nicely, realistically defiant, unlike most sex offenders, who are usually unintelligent and secretive, either from shame, which is understandable, or because they’re hoping for an opportunity to commit their crime again in the future. They’re unforthcoming, to say the least. And if they do speak of their offenses at all, they justify and rationalize them. They attack the interrogator and blame the victim. This fellow seems unusually honest. I think from him I’ll get the straight story, the truth.

  The truth? The truth about what? His crime?

  No. The reasons for his crime.

  There have to be all kinds of reasons why a person does . . . what they do. What they’ve done.

  I don’t think so, Glory-Glory-Hallelujah. It’s why they often go back and recommit the crime again and again. It’s why sex offenders are viewed as incurable.

  Maybe they’re just programmed to do what they do. You know, hardwired.

  These men are human beings, not chimpanzees or gorillas. They belong to the same species as we do. And we’re not hardwired to commit these acts. If, as it appears, the proportion of the male population who commit these acts has increased exponentially in recent years, and it’s not simply because of the criminalization of the behavior and a consequent increase in the reportage of these crimes, then there’s something in the wider culture itself that has changed in recent years, and these men are like the canary in the mine shaft, the first among us to respond to that change, as if their social and ethical immune systems, the controls over their behavior, have been somehow damaged or compromised. And if we don’t identify the specific changes in our culture that are attacking our social and ethical immune systems, which we usually refer to as taboos, then before long we’ll all succumb. We’ll all become sex offenders, Gloria. Perhaps in a sense we already are.

  Oh, please.

  We cast them out, we treat them like pariahs, when in fact we should be studying them up close, sheltering them and protecting them from harm, as if indeed they were fellow human beings who have inexplicably reverted to being chimpanzees or gorillas, and whose genetic identity with us and their shared ancestry with us can teach us what we ourselves are capable of becoming if we don’t reverse or alter the social elements that caused them to abandon a particularly useful set of sexual taboos in the first place.

  This is a little boring, you know. And far-fetched. These people are sick. That’s all. Sick. Are you coming to bed soon?

  First I have to check the sex offender registry for Calusa and find out how to spell the Kid’s real name.

  You like him, don’t you?

  Personally? I don’t really feel anything personal for him one way or the other. I suppose I admire him somewhat.

  Admire him? He’s a convicted sex offender!

  He’s plucky. And his defiance doesn’t take the form of denial, like most of them.

  “Plucky.”

  Go to bed, Gloria. Please.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE PROFESSOR STANDS BESIDE HIS VAN IN the parking area at the edge of Benbow’s and watches the Kid drag a large plastic bag across the
sand between the buildings and in among the low bushes and trees and mangroves, stopping here and there to collect dropped and discarded empty beer cans and bottles. There’s no one else in sight. The Kid stops for a moment by the bar and appears to be talking with the caged parrot—a short two-way conversation. He listens and talks. The parrot listens and talks. The Kid laughs, as if the parrot’s told a parrot joke, waves good-bye to the bird, and moves on.

  When the bag is filled to bulging, the Kid drags it to the tailgate of the red, rusted-out pickup truck parked next to the Professor’s van, where he separates bottles from cans and tosses them into a pair of metal barrels placed in the bed of the truck. Though it’s still early in the day, the sun is already pounding down and the air is thick as syrup. The Kid moves slowly. He knows how to work in the heat. He’s wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs and sockless sneakers and a baseball cap. The Professor wears his usual dark three-piece vested suit, and though he stands in the shade of his van, sheets of sweat run down his entire body, soaking his underwear and socks. He wipes his face and neck with his handkerchief and folds and tucks it neatly back into the breast pocket of his suit coat.

  The Kid, who until now has not acknowledged the Professor’s presence, tosses a glance in his direction and looks away.

  I see that you are now gainfully employed. Good.

  Benbow told me the deal. Not clear who I’m working for, though. Him or you.

  You’re employed by Benbow. You answer to him. I’m merely the guarantor of your salary. He’s your boss.

  Whatever.

  I brought you a few items.