The Fat Artist and Other Stories

by Benjamin Hale

  She’d voiced these complaints to Colin, her brother—her younger, her only brother—last time she was visiting their mother, in whose basement he dwelled with his lovingly hand-painted Doctor Who memorabilia. Colin!—five years younger than her at his still-virginal thirty-four. A lost cause, a lost soul, a lost child. Colin lives in the dark—sticky and pale like a grub, eating garbage, fearing sunlight, sleeping till noon, one, two, three in the afternoon on a soggy futon in the wood-paneled half-finished basement of that shabby split-level ranch house in Caldwell, New Jersey—the very same room in which she had eaten mushrooms and lost her virginity to her boyfriend at fifteen (and hell, he slept on the very same futon). There Colin lived with his eyes glued to the Internet, a man (strange as it sounded to call him that) who would likely leave little behind in the world but an exhaustively complete collection of Doctor Who and Red Dwarf figurines and a really impressive World of Warcraft Gear score. She had come to visit because her mother, long since divorced from her father, a long time alone, a long time lonesome, was in poor health, recovering from hip surgery. (Mom—why do you let Colin live like that? Why do you allow him to treat you like a live-in servant when you are old and frail, when you should be the one in bed, not doing his goddamn laundry and making him sandwiches for lunch, which you leave on the top step of the basement stairs for him to find when he gets up, as if feeding a troll?) Anyway. She’d sat with Colin in his moist underground lair, drinking most of a box of Mom’s Chablis while he drank a liter of Mountain Dew, unloading her heart to what had become of the little boy whose hand she’d held on the way to his first day of school. And it was Colin, Dorito-munching amateur psychoanalyst who dwells in Mom’s basement, to whom she confessed her anxieties about growing older alone, about the terrible dread she felt facing her imminent fortieth birthday. And you were so understanding, and so helpful, Colin, when you shrugged, and offered what I guess was the most reassuring thing you could think to say: “It’s merely the accident of a base-ten number system.” I think it was that “merely” that made me throw your fucking Dalek at you. I didn’t mean to break it. I’m sorry. I love you. I wish I could help you, but you seem to be beyond help. In a way, your problems are worse than mine, even though sometimes it’s hard to find sympathy for a thirty-four-year-old man whose sick and elderly mother washes his underwear.

  4. Severin

  Severin was dying. Severin was dying of cancer. Poor thing was only eleven—not that old for a dog. He was a shih tzu, a boutique breed notorious for chronic health problems. She was pretty sure he was mostly blind. He had respiratory issues, too—he grunted and grumbled, fighting for breath as he scuttled around the apartment, or lay in bed with her snoring like a jackhammer all night long: She’d grown to tune it out, while every boyfriend she’d had since Richard left had whined about never being able to get to sleep with this stinking, wheezing, farting, dying little dog curled into a ball at the foot of the bed making weird, gross, and for such a small animal, astonishingly loud noises. (No, not boyfriends—she hadn’t had any boyfriends, only New York single men, who were all the same in the end: selfish, childish, spiritual weaklings, commitment-phobic assholes who wanted to fuck her occasionally but kept their distance wide enough to never be called anyone’s boyfriend—say the word boyfriend and watch them skitter down the drainpipe like a roach when the light’s flicked on.) Her sister, Liz—her much younger half sister from her dad’s second marriage to the younger woman he left her mother for (boys will be boys, won’t they?)—was watching Severin while Rebecca was out of town for the weekend, and even that much time away made her nervous. It wasn’t an ordinary pet-sitting job: Severin had a daily regimen of medications he had to be tricked into taking that was as complicated as that of a dying human’s, and came in the same tray of little plastic boxes labeled by the time of day they had to be given. They were supplementary to the chemo somehow, and Rebecca followed the vet’s orders with religious obedience. No, Severin’s hair didn’t fall out—that doesn’t happen with dogs in chemo for some reason—and yes, she had a shih tzu in chemotherapy, and if you just rolled your eyes at the idea of “wasting” money on chemotherapy for a shih tzu then fuck you, I don’t care what you think. Have you never loved a dog? Have you never loved anyone? All her life Rebecca had given out love, and Severin was the one creature alive to which she gave her love who honestly and reliably and unconditionally gave it back.

  Then she remembered she had gotten Severin at the same time she had met the Representative. Eleven years ago. She had not thought that Severin would outlive him. What had gone on between them in the last couple of years no longer felt like a performance she was being paid to give, but a mutual give-and-take between friends (they had always been equals), between almost lovers. In a certain way, they had loved each other. They were lovers who could do certain things with each other because they had started out without the usual invisible walls, the walls that are there when people meet each other in the “real world,” out there in the wild, with all the complex uncertainties of sex and power and emotion unspoken and unsolved between them—the way it is between two people who are not sure, or who are afraid to say, exactly what it is they want from each other.

  However, that simplicity, that clarity, had thrillingly, unsettlingly, gone away. This was not ordinary. This was not responsible. Rebecca had no other relationship like this with any other person who had begun as a client. The first time they’d had sex (ordinary, unadorned sexual intercourse) was two years ago—afterward it had felt to her deeply, inexplicably wrong, almost like incest. She could not forgive herself for a long time, and had refused to see him for months afterward. He had acted in an appallingly unprofessional manner, and she had not stopped him, which was appallingly unprofessional of her. She had allowed the boundary between them that had kept things simple to drop. He had flooded her voice mail with messages, sent her strings of increasingly desperate e-mails, sent her flowers. Eventually, she allowed him back. She had genuinely missed him. She missed his company. She missed his very genuine wit and charm, his warm, confiding conversation in the apartment, sitting around drinking wine after a session, or in one of the restaurants where he wasn’t likely to be recognized. When she returned, something between them had changed forever. There was a new sense of intimacy between them; now they could never go back to the satisfying but emotionally safe relationship they’d had before. They had ruined one thing, and made something new, something else. They showed each other their souls as well as their bodies, and this was when he quit paying her. He still paid for her airfare, her meals, her drinks, her hotel room—everything extraneous that needed paying for—but this was when he quit paying her any money directly, and she never asked for it or expected it again. It was different, now. This became the new norm. Sometimes she would be in character as Mistress Delilah, and sometimes she was herself, Rebecca Spiegel. The Representative was in love with both women, but in very different ways. When they had ordinary sex—when she was Rebecca—she didn’t wear her costumes: no corsets, no wigs, no whips or bondage or toys. They were two people naked in bed together in the most predictable arrangements: an affair that was perfectly legal, but came with all the usual lies and complications of infidelity (on his part). Rebecca had quite recently realized that she had something with Sam (for that was the Representative’s name) that she had never quite had with Richard.

  A month earlier they had been in Rebecca’s hotel room in The Fairfax. It was risky for Sam to be seen there, even by the desk clerks. It was after a session at the apartment. The risk was stupid, but they had wanted to have sex as Rebecca and Sam—without Mistress Delilah or the Representative around—and he didn’t want to do it in the apartment, because he wanted to keep his fantasy sex life separate from his other sex life, which was in turn separate and kept secret from the rest of his life. (It was frightening how many lives Sam juggled.) When he came, she felt at once that the condom had broken. He pulled out, and they both looked down at the sleeve of latex wi
th a broken flap loosening its grip around his softening penis. He had a sheepish, embarrassed look. In that moment, Sam, still breathing heavily after coming, naked in her bed in her hotel room, fat and white and growing old, on his knees with his cock retracting between his legs, looked helpless—less than ever like a powerful and influential and principled man, and more like a fragile adolescent boy who did not yet know himself. He began to stammer his way through saying he was clean as far as he knew, and, um, well.

  “Don’t worry,” Rebecca had said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  * * *

  LOW PRIORITY

  * * *

  5. The secret

  How did she come to be here?—sitting in this chair at the age of thirty-nine, not dead broke, but zero nest-egg in savings, single, growing older, wanting a child but having no one to have it with, and no career outside of sex work, which had always felt like a side career anyway. She’d never really planned on making a living off it. Mistress Delilah got her start back in the nineties, working in a fairly aboveground dungeon in TriBeCa—there were private rooms where things could get a little more intimate, but it was all low-grade stuff—mostly fantasy, role-playing. Nobody came; no fluids other than sweat and maybe a little blood were expurgated from anyone’s body. It was all light whipping and caning, usually with sleazy Eurobeat crap blasting through the speakers. The place had a façade that made it clear what it was. It was a legitimate business, the building passed code. It was decorated to evoke a medieval castle (or something), black iron chains, fake stone walls, spooky candelabras dripping red wax: something about the aggressive fakery of the place she’d found distasteful. She felt the décor called attention to the fantasy rather than melding it with the real. The joint was even still there, though in a reduced state, one of the few true BDSM clubs that survived Giuliani’s Disneyfication of Manhattan. Sometimes gawkers would come just to hang out at the bar and watch. After a year or so there she’d moved on to working at a much sketchier sex club, behind an unmarked metal door on a nondescript side street in Chinatown. You had to get buzzed in, and then push your way through two layers of black velvet curtains and down a set of stairs, then another door, where the guy who scrutinized you and then maybe let you in sat on a stool in the hall. That place had class, a sense of reality, of a little real danger. People really got hurt there. Not badly, of course, but there were definitely patrons who left with marks they would want to conceal with strategic clothing for at least a few days. She’d liked the aesthetic of the place: mirrors everywhere, red floors, all the furniture ornate and old-fashioned, fake Louis Quatorze chairs and tables—it had a very Story of O look. You had to know someone to get in. It was the kind of place where people who were hard-core into the BDSM scene went; you would never see a lifestyle tourist there. That was where Mistress Delilah started picking up her first private clients, and from there she set off on her own. She got Ike to take the first set of photos, got Richard to help her set up the website. That was how she’d met the Representative, through a referral from someone at the club who knew him. Back then he was getting ready to run for city council. He only met dominatrices in private sessions—he was too afraid to show his face at even the most secretive, discreet sex clubs. When Mistress Delilah did private sessions, she let her clients come. Usually not until the very end, due to the nature of the male orgasm, with its punctuative finality. But that was not usual. Those were the ones who made the most money—the ones who let their clients come. It was slightly dangerous: The involvement of an orgasm pushes the session into the gray area of what may or may not be prostitution. Legally, it’s a hard thing to define. Sometimes she let a client see her breasts, or she would push her underwear aside to piss on the floor or a client’s face, but she almost never took off any more of her costume than she began the session in. There was a foot fetishist she had who got off simply on giving her a foot massage and a pedicure. At the end of the session, she would relax in the recliner, wiggling her toes, tufts of cotton stuck between them, toenails freshly filed and lovingly painted valentine red, kissable as lips—why not let him come? Admiring his handiwork, that Goldman Sachs executive on his knees at her feet inhales the toxic sweetness of the drying nail polish and plants timid, delicate kisses on her feet while he masturbates with the feverish, trembling hands of a starving man fumbling with the cellophane packaging of a premade airport bagel sandwich. It had been a jarring contrast, to be pampered, adored, worshiped in this theatrical way by powerful men who paid her to let them do so, while at home, when Mistress Delilah was folded in the black bag in the closet and she was only Rebecca Spiegel, she was being taken for granted and lied to by her husband, treated like shit—treated merely (merely, Colin) like someone’s wife. At times she wished she could step through the mirror’s membrane where fantasy touches the fingertips of reality.

  How did she come to be here? How was it that she was dressed in fishnet stockings, a garter belt, a leather corset, and a red wig, holding a creepy South African rhino-skin whip and sitting alone in a luxury apartment in Washington, D.C., with the dead body, which was naked except for the rope on his wrists and the nipple clamps still on his nipples, of a US congressman?

  There was more. Rebecca had begun to experience an inexplicable feeling that she had never quite felt before. It was a vaguely pleasant feeling, and hard to describe: a warmth—a sense of calm she had not felt in a long time, if, in just this way, ever. For various reasons, she had not thought it likely, but suspicion had driven her to the drugstore down the block from her apartment, and earlier that day, she had met Sam for the first time with a secret of her own, one she very literally carried inside her. She had not yet made a decision. Until today, she had been leaning one way, and now, she was leaning another.

  Rebecca thought again of her mother. Well, Mom, she said to her, so it goes. We don’t plan to be disappointed. We don’t plan to be betrayed. We both know that. Nobody plans to suddenly leave a lover with a body on her hands and the eyes of a watchful nation to face, to be seen by, to stand before naked, nude, on display, Venus looking back at them in the mirror, gazing at her gazers. They will not understand. You will not understand. We are all at once bodies and mirrors, and our minds are the curves in the mirrors.

  • • •

  Rebecca Spiegel went into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

  The Dakota, 1 West 72nd Street. Edward Cabot Clark, head of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, commissioned the building’s design from architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh; construction broke ground in Manhattan’s then-undeveloped Upper West Side on October 25, 1880, and was completed four years later. Its layout and floor plan reflect French trends in interior design popular in New York City in the late eighteenth century, and its decorative exterior shows strong influence of North German Renaissance architecture: high gables, deep roofs, turrets, dormers, terracotta spandrels, panels, niches, and balconies with balustrades. Square-shaped and eight stories high, it fills the city block between Seventy-Second and Seventy-Third Streets on Central Park West, with a porte cochere leading to a courtyard that served as a turnaround for carriages. No two of the building’s sixty-five luxury apartments are alike, as many of them were designed to the specifications of their first occupants, which would have included Edward Cabot Clark himself had he not died two years before construction was completed. Soon after its construction it became a point of pride among New York high society to live in the Dakota, and it is still among the most exclusive and expensive addresses in Manhattan. Famous residents have included Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, Rosemary Clooney, Judy Garland, Lillian Gish, Boris Karloff, Jack Palance, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.