The Fat Artist and Other Stories (21 page)

Phil sank to the floor, sat down cross-legged, and began to try to pick the shards of broken glass out of the bottoms of his feet. Already bleeding like a stuck hog.

“Good
God
, Phil,” said Veronica, stamping into the kitchen. “Lemme see it.”

To avoid the glass on the floor, she quit stamping and instead tiptoed over to Phil, sat down in front of him, and put one of his bloody feet in her lap.

“Try not to get blood on that thing,” said Phil, referring to Diane’s blue silk robe.

“You can get her another one.”

“Not by Monday. It’s monogrammed.”

“It’s not that bad,” she said. “Show me the other one.”

Phil switched feet.

“I think you got all the glass out. Look, it’s not that bad. Lemme get you cleaned up. Have you got Band-Aids and alcohol?”

“I think there’s some stuff like that in the drawer under the sink in that bathroom.”

She went down the hall into the bathroom. Phil heard drawers squealing open and rolling shut, heard her digging around in the contents of the drawers. She ran the water in the sink for a moment. She came back balancing in her arms a damp washcloth, a brown bottle of rubbing alcohol, a bag of cotton balls, some cotton pads, and a roll of gauze tape in her arms. Veronica sat down in front of him. She wiped his feet with the wet washcloth, then put a cotton ball to the neck of the brown bottle, dumped it once upside down, and stung his wounds with the alcohol.

Phil winced.

“It’s okay. The bleeding’s already stopping.”

She pressed the cotton pads to the bottoms of his feet and wound the gauze tape around them, securing them in place.

“What did you hit him with?” she said.

“A rolling pin.”

“It’s not a good sign that he threw up. He might have a concussion.”

“What, did you used to be a nurse or something?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Oh.”

Veronica got up and gave him her hand and helped him climb to his feet.

“
Son
ofabitch.” He grimaced at the pain.

“It’s not bad. Your feet’ll be fine in a couple of days. I’m more worried about your son.”

“
Fuck
him, the fucking asshole. Haven’t seen him in a year. Haven’t heard from him in a month. No phone call, nothing. Could’ve been dead for all anybody knew. Then he comes back in the middle of the night to steal my goddamn TV.”

“Do you love him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have a broom or something?”

“In the pantry. Down the hall to the right.”

Veronica swept the broken glass on the kitchen floor into a dustpan and poured the tinkling debris into the big garbage can under the kitchen sink.

“The hell with him,” Phil said. Remembering his original intent on coming into the kitchen—a drink—he opened the liquor cabinet, uncorked a bottle of Scotch, and took a slug from the bottle. He coughed and cleared his throat. His breath was staggered and shallow, his hands were trembling with anger, and now his feet hurt like a motherfucker.

“Shhh,” said Veronica.

Phil was leaning with his back against the kitchen counter. The floor swept, Veronica walked over to him, wrapped her arms around him, and said, “Shhhh.”

She stroked the arches of his wounded bare feet with her own bare feet. She entwined her legs with his, and he felt the skin of her smooth, thick young legs rubbing against the skin of his thin hairy legs, and felt the smooth coolness of the fabric of the silk robe against his bare torso. She reached her face up to his and kissed him seriously on the mouth, and bit his lower lip as she disengaged. She reached around him, grabbed the open bottle of Scotch, and took a drink from the neck of it.

“Let’s calm down, okay?” she whispered carefully, and wiped a trickle of Scotch from the corner of her mouth. “We’ll clean him up, put him on the couch, and deal with it in the morning. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Phil.

Phil and Veronica went back into the living room. It didn’t smell good. Julian was lying on the floor in front of the couch, right where he had passed out the second time, with his cheek pressed flat in the vomit. They took off his shirt—God, he was so skinny—and wiped him down with the rag, then mopped up the puke that was all over the floor with the shirt, threw the rag and the shirt in the plastic garbage can, and dumped the whole mess in the garbage. Then they picked him up—he got the arms and she got the feet—and laid him out on the couch again. They covered him with a yellow wool afghan that Phil’s mom had knitted, which had been draped over the back of the couch. Julian, sleeping under that yellow afghan on that couch—despite his shaved head and skinny, bruised, tattooed junkie arms—looked like he had when he was a kid, home sick from school, watching TV all day: It was the same yellow afghan, same couch, same kid. Phil and Veronica turned off all the lights and went back to bed.

•  •  •

When they got up in the morning he was dead. Phil, for his part, hadn’t slept well. Veronica, amazingly, even after all the hubbub in the middle of the night, had just conked right out again and slept like a baby—but Phil had sweated and thrashed around in bed with an angry heart hammering at his ribs, guts in a snarl, and blood galloping in his temples until the windows began to grow light and the birds began to tweet, and Phil finally decompressed into a nauseated vertigo of half sleep that eventually became full sleep, and he woke up just a few hours later at about nine in the morning, with his headache from last night still not completely gone and the bottoms of his blood-blotted-bandaged feet swollen and smarting.

Phil and Veronica showered and dressed in turn. Veronica rebandaged Phil’s injured feet for him after his shower. Veronica put on the clothes she had worn yesterday, and Phil put on another pair of khaki shorts and a pink short-sleeved Oxford, clothes that were very similar to, but different from, what he’d had on yesterday. Phil shaved, spritzed his armpits with deodorant, and combed the hair that over the course of his life had thinned to near baldness but stopped with enough left over to still comb. They went downstairs and inspected Julian, who still lay supine beneath the yellow afghan on the couch in the living room. His eyes were closed, and his face was pale and bluish, with a mouthful of white vomit that was leaking out of the corner of his lips and had dribbled down onto the couch beneath his head. It seemed that in the night he had thrown up again without waking up, choked on it, and died.

Veronica checked his pulse, though it was so obvious just from looking at him that he was dead that there was hardly any need to, and confirmed that there was nothing moving in him. The blood was cold; the organs were motionless. The electricity that had animated this matter was gone. He had stopped.

“Huh,” said Phil.

They continued to stand over the couch and look down at Julian’s pale, skinny body. Veronica looked back and forth from Julian on the couch to Phil standing a few feet away at the foot of the couch. Phil’s hands were submerged in the pockets of his khaki shorts. Veronica’s eyes were huge and scared and she was biting the knuckle of her forefinger.

“What should we do?” she whispered.

Phil didn’t say anything. He was rolling his tongue around in his mouth. He could see in his peripheral vision that Veronica was trying to make eye contact with him. He kept looking at Julian’s pale blue face. Phil had never seen a dead body before, for one thing. He’d made it through all these years without ever actually having seen a real dead body. Well, actually, he’d been to a couple of open-casket funerals, but that didn’t seem to count. He’d never seen his father’s body; it had been cremated by the time he’d made it home. Phil’s mother was ninety-one years old and somehow not dead yet. Thus, Phil had never actually seen a dead body—a raw, unembalmed, un-cleaned-up one—until now. Phil pulled the yellow afghan over Julian’s face.

“I need some coffee,” said Phil.

He went into the kitchen, noticed that the floor was sticky from where the wine bottle had broken and spilled last night, replaced yesterday’s soggy filter and grinds with fresh stuff, filled the glass pitcher of the coffeemaker with cold water—not from the tap, but from the spigot in the refrigerator door next to the automatic icemaker, which was filtered and extra cold and made for better-tasting coffee—poured it into the percolator, replaced the pitcher, and flipped the switch, and in a moment a thin brown thread of liquid began to dribble through the hole in the lid of the coffeepot and steam up the sides of it.

“You want some coffee?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Veronica from the other room.

When it was ready he poured the coffee into two mugs. One was a conference-swag mug that said
BAIN CAPITAL
on it, and the other had a picture on it of Snoopy wearing a scarf and aviator helmet pretending his doghouse was an airplane.

“Milk or sugar?”

“Little of both.”

Phil glooped some two-percent milk into the mugs and shot a few dashes of sugar into each from the sugar dispenser, opened the silverware drawer, selected a spoon, rattled the spoon around in the cups, and watched the ribbons of milk in the black coffee eddy and blur into homogeneous shades of tan.

The items of the night before—the blender, the limes, the mezcal bottle, the ice bag, the cutting board, the bottle of Scotch, the rolling pin—were still sitting on the kitchen counter. Phil put the two cups of coffee on the kitchen table. Phil and Veronica sat at the table and sipped their coffee. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day: a sunny, wet, thick-aired, late-summer Texas Gulf Coast kind of day.

They drank the coffee, and Phil told Veronica everything she needed to know about Julian. When he was done, she said, again:

“What should we do?”

“What’s this
we
stuff,” he said, Tonto to Lone Ranger. “This is my problem. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I want to help.”

“That’s sweet.”

“It was an accident.”

“Sort of.”

“It was an accident. There was somebody robbing your house, and you hit the guy and knocked him out. Case closed. It’s not your fault. It’s totally understandable. You have nothing to hide. You have nothing to fear.”

“Jesus. All this is gonna be a barrel of laughs to try to explain to Diane. For one thing, you weren’t here. Let’s get that straight.”

Apparently for lack of anywhere else to look besides at Phil, Veronica looked down into her cup of coffee and said nothing.

“Is that gonna be a problem? Is it? I need you to promise me that, at least. Anybody asks, you weren’t here last night.”

“Phil. It was an accident. I’m a witness. I saw what happened. I’m the only one who knows it was just an accident.”

“No. Period. No. How many surprises at once do you want me to spring on Diane when she comes home tomorrow?”

“I don’t want you to get in trouble. Just call the cops and we’ll tell them what happened.”

“Look,” said Phil. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers, drew a breath, and let it out slowly. Veronica rubbed his arm, which was resting on the kitchen table holding the cup of coffee. After a long time, he said: “None of this had to happen. Why do this to our lives? Why do this to my life? Why drag you into all this? Why put Diane through all this? This didn’t have to happen. Right now, it might as well not have happened. Nobody knew where the hell Julian was for a month, or more. He was totally incommunicado. We still don’t know, actually, and probably never will at this point. Point is, this didn’t have to happen. You see what I mean?”

Eventually, she saw what he meant.

A cardinal landed on the birdfeeder outside.

•  •  •

They prepared and ate breakfast. Phil cut two bananas into slimy pale yellow chips and fanned them out on top of two bowls of Wheat Chex. They had orange juice and toast with butter and raspberry jelly, and finished off the pot of coffee.

Veronica washed the dishes from breakfast and from last night while Phil rooted around in a linen closet—comforters, blankets, fitted sheets, pillows, pillowcases—until he found a ratty old blue bedsheet. They never used it anymore. It was thin and threadbare and washed-out and had a bunch of little moth holes in it. It wouldn’t be missed.

Phil came back downstairs. From the kitchen, noises of running water and clinking plates. Phil pushed some furniture aside and billowed the sheet out flat on the living room floor. He threw off the yellow afghan, picked up Julian, who had already begun to stiffen, laid him down on the sheet, and rolled him up in it. Then he went out to the garage and found a roll of duct tape. He unpeeled long strips of the tape and wound them around the bundle. He propped open the door to the garage, picked up the taped bundle, heaved it over his shoulder, took it into the garage, and dumped it in the truck bed of his silver Chevy Silverado. He scooted the plastic truck bed cover on top and drummed on it until he felt it snap down into place.

Veronica was done with the dishes.

Phil squeezed his wounded and bandaged feet into his boating shoes and put on his yellow all-weather boating jacket and the blue Beneteau cap he received as a prize the time he won the Wednesday-night Galveston Yacht Club Open Regatta, which he always wore when he went sailing, for good luck.

“I can do this by myself, but it’ll be easier if I have another pair of hands,” said Phil.

“I know,” she said. “I want to come.”

Veronica sat on the bottom step of the stairs and began to pull on and zip up the black lizard boots she had left by the front door the night before.

“I’ve got an extra jacket you can wear,” Phil said from the foyer closet, flipping through a rack of coats and jackets. He pulled out another yellow boating jacket.

“Oh,” he said, looking at Veronica. “You can’t wear those boots. The soles’ll scuff up the deck. What size do you wear?”

“Women’s nine.”

“Uh-oh.”

Phil sorted through the white-soled boating shoes in the bottom of the closet.

“Diane’s would be too small for you.” He found the pair that Garrett wore when he was home. “Try these on.”

She took the shoes.