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.
• • •
The doorbell rang. She was peeking through the sandblasted window next to the front door like a neighborhood kid who had come over wanting to know if his sons could “play.” Phil opened the door, and Veronica immediately dumped her big body into his. His nostrils sucked in the sappy smell of her. She had on these knee-high black lizard-leather boots with zippers running up the sides, and a candy-apple-red jacket buttoned over those bounteous earth-mama breasts. Her tongue twisted together with his and he found his hand pawing the plump pillow of her ass. In one hand she held a bottle of mezcal. It was about three-quarters full.
“I bought this in Mexico,” she said, offering the bottle as if it were proof. “It’s the kind with the worm in it and everything.”
A pale, bloated bug was indeed drifting around at the bottom of the rectangular bottle, which glowed gold in her hands in the early-summer sunlight.
“Let’s make margaritas,” she said. This had been the plan, as discussed yesterday over lunch at Dave & Buster’s.
Veronica went to work on the margaritas at the kitchen counter. She found limes in the refrigerator, Cointreau in the liquor cabinet, salt in the cupboard. Phil rifled around in the cabinet under the kitchen sink and found the blender, which was dirty and dusty. For some reason the blender was an appliance that didn’t see much use in the Grassley household. Veronica eyed the condition of the blender.
“Gross,” she opined. She flipped her hair over her shoulder with her fingers. Her round face was framed in long, thick waves of glossy black hair. Her ditzy tic of flipping the stuff over her shoulder was something that might have irritated him if one of his sons had brought her home to dinner in the office of a girlfriend. Veronica was in fact about the same age as his oldest son. But when Veronica did it, he understood what his sons saw in girls like this one.
The blender washed, he gave it to Veronica and returned to the enchiladas. The enchiladas were nested side by side in green chili sauce in a rectangular Pyrex pan, and he was grating cheese over them. Veronica jammed the lip of the blender’s glass container against the plastic lever in the hole in the refrigerator door where ice cubes come out. The light came on, and the machine hummed and churned, but no ice came out. Phil covered the Pyrex pan of enchiladas with a sheet of aluminum foil and put it in the preheated oven. Veronica was still pressing the blender container against the lever in the refrigerator. The refrigerator was still humming and churning, and no ice cubes were coming out. Veronica tapped her foot.
“Maybe it’s broken?” she said.
“Give it a minute. Sometimes it takes a little while.”
“I like your house.”
It occurred to Phil that she had never seen the inside of his house before. If she were anyone else, he supposed he might have taken her on a tour or something. But as it was, he invited her in like she’d already been here a hundred times.
Phil didn’t worry too much about his house. It was a gated community; he often forgot to even lock his door at night. If she’d just walked right in, he wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Thanks.”
“It’s cute.”
“This is all Diane’s shit,” he said, waving a hand to indicate the décor.
“It’s cute.”
“You’re cute.”
He pawed and squeezed her ass again. She still had the lip of the blender pushed against the lever in the refrigerator door; the ice machine still grumbled and hummed, and no ice was coming out.
“What the fuck is wrong with this thing?”
Phil opened the freezer door and immediately identified the problem: no ice. The way the automatic icemaker thing worked was there was this reservoir that emptied through this chute and into your cup when you pressed it against the lever in the hole in the front of the refrigerator door. Above the reservoir was the icemaker, which made ice cubes and spat them out into the reservoir. There was a metal lever on the thing that you could pull up or down to turn the icemaker on or off. The lever was, as a matter of fact, in the “off” position. The on/off lever on the icemaker was in the “off” position because Diane was fucking constantly putting the goddamn icemaker in the “off” position because she had at some point fallen under the benighted impression that this infinitesimal reduction of their carbon footprint would somehow help to allay global warming, and now, as it often happened, there were no fucking ice cubes in the fucking ice cube reservoir.
“Jeez-a-loo!” said Veronica. “We can’t make margaritas without ice!”
“Hold your horses. I think there’s a bag of ice in the other refrigerator.”
There was an old refrigerator in the garage. The bottom compartment contained a mini-keg full of impotable swill left over from Phil’s passing hobby with homebrewing. The freezer contained the stiff, gray, freezerburned slabs of three fish; two black sea bass and an amberjack—and, he remembered, a plastic sack of ice. The ice was left over from a barbecue they’d had a while ago. Phil had bought several bags of ice at the gas station and dumped the bags into a rust-caked red Radio Flyer wagon left over from his three sons’ childhoods. This particular bag of ice had been auxiliary. For all its life as one of Phil’s possessions it had sat forgotten and unneeded in the freezer of the spare refrigerator in the garage—until today.
“Catastrophe averted,” said Phil, and thunked the bag on the kitchen counter. “We got ice.”
“Oh, goodie.”
Phil ripped the plastic bag open. Months of storage in the freezer had caused the ice in the bag to compact and solidify, all the individual ice cubes settling together into one big rock-hard, bag-shaped hunk of ice. He clawed with his fingers at the shapes of the glued-together ice cubes sticking out of the mass of ice, but failed to wrest them from their foundations. Veronica watched as he searched the kitchen for something to crack the ice apart with. He found a rubber meat-tenderizing mallet, which only bounced pathetically off the ice. Then he tried a wooden cooking spoon, with which he was able to hack off a few chips and shavings, but he realized he needed something much harder and heavier to break the ice into several smaller, more manageable chunks, which could then be more easily broken down into chunks small enough to put into the blender for the margaritas. He opened and closed the kitchen drawers—this was Diane’s
territory, he’d never really bothered to learn where anything was—until he landed on a wooden rolling pin, which did the job nicely. It fit in his hands well; it had the right shape, gravity, hardness, and heft. He held the rolling pin by the bottom of the shaft with the handle fulcrumed against the base of his palm, shimmied the skin of the plastic bag back over the hunk of ice, held it down on the kitchen counter by the mouth of the bag, and whacked at it with the rolling pin as hard as he could. He felt the ice crack apart cleanly into two chunks. Beautiful. This is the sort of thing he would always try to teach his sons, helping them with their batting, or their tennis strokes or golf swings or whatever. How to manipulate matter, how to gracefully command the movement and force of an object in your hands, how to handle a racket, a club, or a bat such that you minimize your entropy and maximize your results; and what a beautiful feeling it is, when you feel all the atoms lining up just right, when you hit it right in the sweet spot and hear it go crack, that priceless moment of impact when the thing you’re trying to hit makes contact with the thing in your hands, the physical music of violence. He broke the ice into several smaller chunks, and then hammered it to a crumble with the rolling pin. Veronica was laughing so hard at Phil bashing the bag of ice with the rolling pin that she had to brace herself against the refrigerator. She had a bright, loud, pretty song of a laugh that set her massive breasts to quaking. She was gasping for air. Phil triumphantly poured the ice, now all crumbs and sand, into the blender, sent a burbling golden braid of mezcal in after it, then the Cointreau, then squeezed the halves of the limes that Veronica had earlier bisected on the cutting board into the ice and liquor, then affixed the lid of the blender and pressed the button that instantly filled the spacious white-walled house with its electric shudder, rattle, and roar, then gradually worked his way up the row of buttons, increasing the speed of the motor and the blades to whip the solution into a finer and finer slush. Veronica was on a laughing jag, her brain had come unhinged, she was sick with laughter and couldn’t stop, and now it seemed she was laughing at her own laughter, because there wasn’t anything funny anymore except for the fact that she was still laughing. Veronica’s hand fluttered to her chest, she struggled for air and flung jewels of water from the corners of her eyes with her fingers. She tried to force the laughter to die in her chest by putting on a “serious” face and willing herself to breathe normally. Phil slid a wedge of lime across the lips of the two margarita glasses, ground them upside down in a saucer of uniodized sea salt, set them on the counter, glooped the pale yellow frozen sludge into the shallow glasses, and pierced lime wedges onto their salt-speckled rims: margaritas. He handed one to Veronica. They were tchotchke margarita glasses made of thick Mexican hand-blown bubble glass, with green glass stems designed to look like the trunks of saguaro cacti, with appendages sticking out of their sides, crowned with tiny flowers of red glass.
“What should we toast to?” he said.
“To us,” she said. “To me. To your retirement. To enchiladas. To margaritas. To us fucking.”
“That’ll do.”
They chimed the glasses together and drank their margaritas. Phil put on James Taylor’s Greatest Hits.
“Where is Diane?”
Veronica was looking at a framed photo on the kitchen wall, an old picture, showing Phil, Diane, Garrett, Julian, and Kyle standing on the deck of the boat, the old one that Phil sold about a year ago, before he bought the catamaran. They were all wearing bright yellow boating gear. The wind pushed their yellow jackets flat against their left sides and made them flap behind them to the right. The boat was docked at the marina. Phil and Garrett were holding up a dead swordfish. They held it upside down between them with their arms over their heads, clutching the end of the tail together, with its ramrod of a nose grazing the deck of the boat. Kyle, a sunny twelve-year-old in the picture, had his shirt off and was standing next to them with his fists on his skinny hips. Julian was sitting next to Diane, with long dyed black hair and a bored, sullen face.
“Diane’s at this, uh, conference or something,” said Phil. “I don’t really know what it is. Said she’d be back on Monday.”
It was Saturday.
“Are these your kids?” she said.
Phil didn’t want to talk about his kids.
“Uh-huh. That picture was taken a long time ago. They’re grown now.”
“Which one’s which?”
“That’s Garrett,” he said, pointing at the lean, muscular young man helping him hold the swordfish in the picture. “He’s the oldest. He’s a good kid. He’s at Harvard Law.”
“Following in his daddy’s footsteps.”
“Not really. He wants to go into constitutional law. He wants to be a good lawyer. Kid’s drunk the liberal Kool-Aid but good. He’s a good kid, though.”
“Are you a good lawyer, or a bad lawyer?”
“I’m a bad lawyer.”
By bad Phil meant the word in a moral sense, not a technical one. Phil was a corporate defense lawyer for ExxonMobil, and he was quite good at it.
“That’s Kyle,” said Phil. “He’s the youngest. He’s a good kid, too. He’s in his junior year at Tulane.”
“And this one?”
Veronica’s vermillion fingernail clicked against the glass at the only seated figure in the picture: the ugly and melancholic teenager with long, limp black hair, sitting closer to his mother than to his father.
“That’s the middle kid, Julian,” said Phil. “Nobody knows where he is.”
Veronica did not inquire further on the matter. Phil did not explain any further, either. He thought about it, and then refrained, mostly because he just didn’t feel like talking about it, but also because for some reason he didn’t want her to think he was a bad father—not that he was afraid she’d care. Phil wasn’t so sure he was a “bad” father, anyway, just like he wasn’t so sure he was a “bad” lawyer. That’s how he felt all the time—like the world was a schoolmarm wagging a moralizing finger at him all the goddamn time: bad, bad, bad! Phil was sick to goddamn death of people who didn’t have the first fucking clue what they were talking about thinking he was “bad” just because he did what he did. If the goodness of a father is judged by the goodness of his sons, then two out of three wasn’t bad. The fact that he had two good sons and one bad one he thought might just be an indication that Julian was the fucking problem, not him. He wasn’t a bad father; Julian was a bad son. He’d done all he could for the spoiled, miserable little shit, and now he was done. Paying for college was fine. Paying for rehab, less fine. Nobody in the family had seen him for a good while. It had been months. They were used to these silences. He might be on his knees in a bar bathroom in San Francisco sucking cock for heroin. San Francisco’s where he was last, in any case. Garrett said he talked to him on the phone a few weeks ago, said it seemed he was in as bad a shape as ever. If Julian didn’t want his help, then fine. Phil was pleased to find himself not thinking about Julian much anymore, although Julian was still an unpleasant fixture in his dreams. The main problem with Julian was that Phil couldn’t relate to him at all. He had no idea what was ever going through the kid’s head. Phil could be a good father to Garrett and Kyle because they were at least halfway normal kids. He could at least vaguely imagine what was going on in their heads. He could understand them. Julian, though, never liked normal kid things. Julian didn’t like fishing. Julian didn’t like sailing. Julian didn’t like sports. Julian didn’t like girls. Apparently Julian didn’t like school either, dropped out after his freshman and only year at Sarah Lawrence. What did Julian like? Apparently Julian liked a hypodermic needle in his arm, pumping poison into his veins. That’s what Julian liked, and Phil didn’t understand it.
He didn’t mention any of this to Veronica. At this point, Phil just wanted to have fun, relax, and grow old disgracefully with a margarita in his hand, watching the sunset on the deck of his boat. He had retired from thinking about Julian in the same way he was about to retire from his career. Le
tting himself retire, letting himself quit thinking about Julian, letting himself buy that beautiful catamaran, and letting himself fuck Veronica—these things were all somehow connected, these were all things he decided to treat himself to after a life of hard work well done and responsibilities met, and he felt he deserved them—he deserved these things, and he didn’t give a shit anymore if anybody thought he was “bad.”
• • •
They ate the enchiladas on the table out on the back deck.
“This is soooo good,” she said, drawing out the word so and making it the emphasis of the sentence. She spoke in that frivolous, childish way that young women speak these days, and Phil loved it. They were already well into margarita numero tres and Phil was drunk enough that he wasn’t really all that hungry anymore, but he ate anyway. The green backyard sloped down a long hill toward a fence, behind which was a road, behind which were a couple of other houses, behind which was a brick wall, behind which was a stretch of land, behind which was a beach, behind which was the Gulf of Mexico, which they could see from the back porch, and which stretched clear out to the horizon. The sun was going down in the other direction, and the sky above the sea faded from blue to yellow to orange to red to purple. At the bottom of the hill, toward the back of the fence that divided Phil’s property from the rest of the surface of the earth, there was an old swingset and a sandbox. Every time he looked at his backyard he saw the swingset and the sandbox and, now with all three boys out of the house (for better or worse), thought about how he ought to get rid of them. Maybe he would once he retired and had time for things like that. It was almost nine now, the sun setting late in the day in the summer. Veronica looked gorgeous in this light. Phil was in love with life in general right now. She looked gorgeous in this light, with her margarita in her hand and her jaw working on a clump of chicken enchilada. It was June of 2005, and the world had its problems, but Phil felt great.
The Fat Artist and Other Stories Page 15