The Fat Artist and Other Stories (29 page)

So when Cathy offered him a ride, of course he took her up on it. Cathy had mentioned that she lived in, what was it?—Connecticut? Some tony exurb of New York—Greenwich, perhaps—to which he would be driving home over the series of tolled bridges that would bear him back to a gabled Tudor colonial, to wife and children and dog and cat.

It was hardly out of her way, said Cathy; she didn’t mind dropping him off at all.

People were collecting their spouses and jackets and purses, slowly filtering toward the door. Cathy, with her blouse and satin gloves and China-chop bangs, excused herself to the restroom, where she was gone for a very long time. Perhaps she was in that same enormous white marble bathroom with the adjoining dressing room, with that nineteenth-century French ormolu vanity table on which Derek’s cheap cosmetics had looked so hilarious a couple of weeks earlier. Derek was talking with the host and hostess on a couch in one of the living rooms as the party wound down around them, waiting for his ride. Ken was sitting in the corner of the couch with a leg crossed, holding a half-drunk Old Fashioned on his knee, looking on with comfort and a gentle aura of ownership (Derek by now suspected Ken was wearing lingerie under his clothes) as Marianne perched beside him, depressing the white couch cushions just as much as if she were made of air, Derek nodding along as she talked, trying not to reveal that he had drunk too much. She had the floppy black-and-white contact sheets from their session in her bony little hands, was telling Derek he could come back and have any prints from the shoot he wanted. He would never take her up on the offer. It wasn’t because he didn’t care, but because he never sufficiently got his shit together for long enough to make that long subway journey back to Eighty-First and Central Park West, and the more time and silence he let pass, the more his embarrassment grew, and the greater became the courage it would have required to pick up the phone and get back in touch with her. Many years later—years after most of his friends had died, and years after he had gotten sober—a friend would call and tell him she thought she saw his picture hanging on a wall in the Bowery Bar. It wasn’t a far walk from his apartment in the East Village anyway, and out of curiosity he went in and scanned the walls until he found it. And there he was, nearly thirty years ago, twenty-four, in fishnet stockings and sparkly silver stilettos, makeup, chandelier-drop earrings, and nothing else, lying in a fetal position against the curved white wall on that blue silk rug (which you can’t tell because the picture is in black and white). It only has her name credited on it, and the date: 1981. Derek was one of the ones who would survive the years that followed the shutter that opened and closed on that image. AIDS wasn’t even called that yet. It didn’t have a name. It was only a dark rumor that most people mistrusted. Ethyl would fire him soon after that picture was taken. Despite his calculated ridiculousness, Ethyl was a very serious performer. He didn’t want anyone involved with his act who had problems with drinking or drugs, which naturally soon came to preclude Derek from performing with him. They lost touch afterward, though he bumped into her occasionally, and sometimes went to her shows. He saw her at Charles Ludlam’s funeral in 1987, which he attended in drag. They chatted awhile outside the funeral home, Derek having swept aside his netted black veil to smoke a cigarette. Ethyl would die three years later. A suicide, but he had AIDS too. He was on AZT, the only drug available then, and it ravaged his body. He was starving and going blind. Ever the control freak, Ethyl was unwilling to wait for the disease to kill him. Derek heard he had died from Black-Eyed Susan, who had acted with the Ridiculous and still kept in touch with Ethyl. She’d found him in the apartment he was sharing with a roommate in Staten Island. “He slit his wrists like an old Roman in the bath,” Susan had said. That phrasing he would remember: “like an old Roman in the bath.” She saw Ethyl, emaciated and naked, lying in a bathtub in Staten Island, blood marbling the water, swirling about his body.
Exit Ethyl
. Death beatifies.

•  •  •

Cathy returned from the bathroom, and it took Derek a moment to recognize her. Or him. It was the man beneath the Cathy. He had removed his perfunctory secretary makeup, and his wig, and changed out of his skirt, hose, heels, gloves, pearls, and blouse. He was a tall and blandly handsome man with short blond hair, dressed in a tucked-in yellow Lacoste polo shirt with the little alligator over the heart, khaki shorts, and boating shoes with no socks. He carried an oversized gym bag, which must have contained Cathy. It looked as if he were coming out of the locker room after a tennis match.

They bid good-bye to Marianne and Ken, then rode the mirrored elevator to the lobby. He was parked on the street, not far from the Beresford. He stuffed the gym bag into the trunk of his gold Buick, and they got in. Ken drove them through the park and over the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge out to Queens. The night was still warm and the windows were rolled down. Wind roared in the car, and behind them the blue and yellow lights of Manhattan on a crisp clear night were mirrored upside down in the East River. There wasn’t much conversation in that car, in part because it was loud with the windows open, and in part because of something else. At first Derek’s aim had been to make it home without getting propositioned, but he sensed an alteration in the mood between them that told him Cathy was completely uninterested in him sexually. They had been chatting quite a bit at the party, and Derek had very lightly flirted with him, as Cathy—but now, they were only a gay man and a straight man who didn’t know each other very well in a car together. The man’s left arm hung out the window, resting on the side of the door, and his right hand was on the wheel; Derek’s hands were in his lap. The space between them had become awkward and stilted. He had learned the man’s name by then, but wouldn’t remember it: It was something like Chuck, or Charles, or Chase. Chase seemed to fit him, anyway. In striving after things to talk about, they wound up in desultory intervals of conversation discussing the various neighborhoods of Queens, the tennis stadium, the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows. He seemed comfortable talking about buildings and landscaping and things like that—those concrete, emotionally neutral subjects that straight men gravitate toward in conversation, the histories and properties of things. Well, a certain kind of things. There are of course feminine things, such as makeup and chandelier-drop earrings, and there are masculine things, such as buildings and machines. One thing Derek would remember about the 1980s was that there seemed to always be a great deal of the discussion of things going on. Stick and carrot, yearning and having, desire and possession.

Derek tried to draw personal information out of him—gently, not wishing to pry, but spurred ahead by frustrated curiosity. What had been bizarre to him was seeing drag that was somehow still inside the box of heterosexual gender relations. This man was not gay. Chase did not want to fuck him. His offer of a ride home was just him being friendly. Derek asked if he was married.

“Uh-huh,” said Chase. “The Big Ten’s coming up this fall.”

“Do you have children?”

“Uh-huh. Two. A girl and boy.”

By this time they’d come off the highway, and the Buick was idling in front of Derek’s squat, cheap apartment building on Jewel Avenue. The odds of ever seeing this man again felt low, and perhaps that was what prompted him at last to just ask him directly.

“What does—” Derek faltered. His hand was on the door handle, and it was late. “What about Cathy? What does your wife think about her?”

“Oh, no. She doesn’t know anything about that.”

“Oh? She thinks you’re—?”

“At a club.”

“A club?”

“You know. Athletic club.”

“So—you don’t identify as gay, or . . . what?”

Chase smiled and shook his head. He shrugged. The explainer was out of explanations. He didn’t seem to like talking about it. He made a sort of gesture toward the back of the car with his head.

“Cathy stays in the trunk. I think it’s best that way.”

“I saw this documentary? About DARPA?”

Greg obligingly nodded for him to go on. Megan was watching the ceiling. Peter had spent the evening nervously shoving conversation across anxious waves of silence.

“You know DARPA? Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They’re involved with all kinds of black helicopter shit, like training spies to do ESP, invisibility shields, the Montauk Project, all that shit, but okay, so they’ve developed this thing called the Exoatmospheric Kill Machine—it’s this satellite with a really,
really
fucking powerful laser on it that can just zoom in on anybody anywhere in the world and kill them from outer space. One second you’re walking around, hum-de-dum, doing your thing, then all of a sudden,
bzzzzt
, you’re dead. That’s our fucking tax dollars at work.”

Megan was lying on the couch with her bare feet in Greg’s lap and Peter sat hunched on the edge of a chair, rapidly bouncing his leg on the ball of his foot. Since they’d gotten home from dinner he’d been sucking down glass after glass of orange soda so quickly the original ice cubes hadn’t had time to melt. It was getting late. Megan gave Greg a seemingly meaningful look that Peter couldn’t interpret.

“I really don’t think they have the capability to do that,” said Greg.

“Do
not
be a fool,” said Peter. He could feel how agitated his voice was. It had a quivering edge of emotion that he couldn’t swallow. “It’s the fucking government. They have the money. They have the power. Do
not
be naïve.”

“I’m going to bed,” Megan said to Greg.

It was the first night Peter would be staying with Greg and Megan. They had picked him up from South Station that afternoon and taken him out to dinner in Boston, then come home and talked for a while. Greg had had a beer with dinner, and that’s it. Megan was pregnant, and Peter of course was not drinking. The air was awkward with sobriety.

Peter kept on trying to think of interesting things to say. Every time he tried to make conversation Megan looked at him like he was crazy.

During his exit interview, Robin had told Peter he needed a fresh start. Robin was the counselor-therapist woman. She was nice to him but he never believed anything she said. She always did the therapist thing of being nice to you but not getting remotely emotionally involved. Her face was round and so deliberately earnest looking that there was obviously nothing earnest in it at all. She was wearing this sort of low-cut shirt, and Peter’s eyes kept getting stuck in her cleavage. During the interview she shrugged up the shawl thing she was wearing and wrapped it across herself, and Peter wondered if she’d noticed him looking at her breasts. She probably had. Peter had finally learned that women are better at knowing when you’re looking at their breasts than you think they are. He was a little embarrassed but it wasn’t like he was ever going to see her again. This was his exit interview. She told him he needed a fresh start.

Yeah, well. Peter was edging up on the realization, the main part of him had already admitted it, but out of fear he’d not yet let his conscious mind admit it, that there is no such thing as a fresh start. Not in life. In a Nintendo game, if you fuck up beyond the hope of ever pulling your shit together again you can always press the reset button, and you’re back at the beginning, and Mario is little again and running down the brick pathway ready to encounter the mushrooms and the turtles, but you, playing him, now know exactly when and where the dangers will come. When the mushrooms and the turtles slide onscreen from the right-hand edge of the TV, you will be ready for them. At least until you get to the last place where you died. Life is not like that. No matter how badly you fuck up, you cannot ever press the reset button and start over. All you can do is pull the plug.

Peter needed help. His parents wouldn’t help him anymore, his sister wouldn’t help him, his ex-girlfriend, Gina, wouldn’t help him, his friends wouldn’t help him, and he wasn’t sure he had any more friends. Other relatives were out, too. All of the possible people who might help Peter had been overfished, like a sea that has no more fish in it. But Greg, Greg had fish left for him.

As soon as we can, Peter promised himself, we will pay Greg back for the many times he’s helped us when we didn’t deserve it.

(Ever since he was a kid, Peter had always talked to himself using the first-person plural. The we was always the external, rational voice talking to him, Peter. Superego talking to id. He only did this in his head, though, or out loud when he was alone. If people had heard him talking to himself in the first-person plural they might think he was crazy.)

“As soon as I can,” he said to Greg, “I will pay you back for this.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Greg, and went upstairs to join his wife (the word
wife
still sounded weird) in bed.

Greg clearly didn’t expect to ever be repaid. Part of Peter also knew he’d probably never repay him.

“We have to pay him back,” said Peter to himself when he was alone. “We have to pay him back.”