The Fat Artist and Other Stories (30 page)

Greg’s wife disliked Peter. She had her reasons.

Most people disliked Peter. Peter disliked Peter. Even Greg seemed to dislike him sometimes, although he always helped him. Greg “loved” him. Some people still loved Peter. He wasn’t sure about his mom, but his dad loved him. His sister loved him. Even his ex-girlfriend loved him. But, coming to the point, they wouldn’t give him any money.

Greg wasn’t giving him any money, either. Just a place to stay, rent free and indefinitely, and a job, which with time and patience and work and saving and not fucking up would turn into money. Greg was doing the whole teaching him to fish instead of giving him fish thing. Peter had never been any good at fishing. He was good at staying up all night doing drugs and playing Nintendo. That he could do.

Greg had gone upstairs, said goodnight, and turned off the light. It was dark all over the house except for the weak white kitchen light above the sink. Greg and Megan’s house was in Somerville, Massachusetts. This was the first time Peter had ever been to Massachusetts. He’d been on a Greyhound all day and the previous night, and hadn’t really slept at all except for little naps in the bus seat for the last like, thirty hours. Megan had made up the futon for him in the basement. That’s what he was going to sleep on until he had enough money to move out. Which was probably going to take awhile. The basement was full of boxes and Christmas ornaments and vacuum cleaners and things like that, and a futon. Peter and Greg had stayed up talking awhile after Megan went to bed. Megan was really, really pregnant. They had gotten married like, a year ago. Peter hadn’t been there. Unless a miracle happened, like finding a magic bag of money that always has money in it, Peter was definitely going to still be living in the basement when their kid was born. This was the newest of the various reasons Megan disliked Peter.

It was a little after midnight. Peter wasn’t tired at all. Peter had a meeting with his prospective employer the next morning at eight.

“Why so early?” he’d asked his brother.

“They’ve already been working for two hours by then,” said Greg. “They get to the lab around six. They have to start working that early because the fishermen bring in the catch even earlier than that.”

The job was driving this truck with a tank full of salt water on it from the marine biology lab at MIT to the docks in New Bedford to pick up all the squid the fishermen hauled in along with the fish. The fishermen just threw the squid back and kept the fish, but MIT needed squid to run experiments on. So he was supposed to get there early in the morning, before the boats came in, ask them to give him their squid, then drive back to MIT, deliver the squid. He would be paid by the squid.

Greg said he had put the word in for Peter. He said they weren’t interviewing anybody else. The job was as good as his; this interview was basically a formality. He said they’d been trying to get students to do it, but none of them wanted the job because it didn’t pay that much and you had to get up at three in the morning to do it. Greg said he’d seen the thing for the job on the job-posting thing, the bulletin board, in the student quad cafeteria whatever area for weeks and weeks and nobody had torn any tabs off it. So he went to the marine biology lab and asked the guys who worked there what the job was and what it entailed and how much it paid. And then he asked them if they’d mind giving his younger brother, Peter, a job.

“What did you tell them?” said Peter.

“Not everything. I said you were in kind of a tough spot and needed to make some money, get back on your feet.”

“What do you mean back?”

“I told them you’d be a reliable worker. So please don’t embarrass me.”

So they didn’t know everything. Everything was that Peter was a twenty-seven-year-old addict with ten thousand dollars in credit card debt, a criminal record, and no college degree, who’d been living in a halfway house in Illinois until last week. But now he was here. So?

Actually, that wasn’t everything, not even close. But those were the big things.

Okay, so we have to be there at eight. It takes like, twenty minutes to get there. Okay, so let’s get up at seven. That means we should go to bed now.

Peter opened his brother’s liquor cabinet. Inside it was a sight that amazed and ashamed Peter, a sight that probably always would: a bunch of bottles of liquor that were half full, three-quarters full . . . you know, bottles that have been opened, but aren’t empty. Greg was the kind of person who could pour himself a glass of Scotch or whatever, drink it, and then stop drinking and go to bed or whatever, instead of drinking until either there was nothing left to drink or he physically couldn’t drink anymore.

Peter got a glass out of the cupboard and poured himself about three fingers of what looked like expensive Scotch. He looked at it, set it down, and poured another finger. He took a sip, put the glass back on the kitchen counter, and started looking around the kitchen for something he could turn into a funnel to pour the Scotch back into the bottle with. He ripped a page out of a
National Geographic
with a picture of whales on it and rolled it into a funnel. He stuck the skinny end into the neck of the bottle and dumped the glass into the fat end. The page instantly got all damp and floppy. Some of the blue ink from the whales slid off the page and got in the Scotch, tiny ribbonlike clouds of whale-colored ink in the Scotch. Oh no. We’re fucking this up. The whisky was running down the sides of the bottle and getting all over his hands and the counter. While Peter was doing this it occurred to him that his mom had a funnel that she used for cooking somehow. A funnel had some sort of cooking-related function. Remember we used to play with it when we were a kid? When we would make potions? Peter had once covered it in aluminum foil and worn it as a hat when he was the Tin Man for Halloween, and Greg had been the Scarecrow and Lindsay had been Dorothy. There was no Cowardly Lion. This led to the thought that Greg and his wife had a pretty nice house and everything, full of grown-up stuff, and they cooked, and they might have an actual funnel somewhere in the kitchen, one that was made to be used as a funnel, made out of metal or plastic or something. But it was too late now.

He put the stopper back in the bottle, wiped the bottle and the counter off with a paper towel, put the bottle back in the liquor cabinet, thought about how weird it was that they even had a liquor cabinet and if they had a fucking liquor cabinet they probably had a fucking funnel, then he looked in the liquor cabinet and realized there was in fact a funnel
in
the liquor cabinet, washed the glass and dried it and put it back in the cupboard, went downstairs, set the alarm clock Megan had given him for seven, took off his clothes, got in bed, and stared at pink tufts of fiberglass insulation stapled to wooden beams in the basement wall until the alarm clock went off.

As soon as he hit the button that shut off the buzzer he was suddenly incredibly sleepy. He heard Greg and Megan moving around upstairs. He fought his way into the same clothes he’d worn the day before, went upstairs, pissed, splashed water on his face, and combed his hair with his hands. His skin looked pink and puffy, and his eyes were narrow and swampy looking. The whites of his eyes were dull gray. He joined them in the kitchen.

“How’d you sleep?” said Megan.

“Bad,” said Peter.

“I’m sorry.”

She was making coffee. Their coffeemaker looked like a futuristic robot or a spaceship or something.

Greg and Megan were both healthy, good-looking people. Greg had always dated girls who were way above Peter’s looks-bracket. Megan had small hands and buggy eyes and skin and hair right out of commercials for skin and hair products. She looked like a pregnant woman on TV. Some pregnant women get fat feet and things like that. But Megan just had a perfectly compact, round belly, like she had a beach ball under her shirt. It looked like when she gave birth it would just kind of make a harmless popping sound like the sound of a cartoon bubble popping, and then she’d go back to exactly what she looked like before.

“You want a ride to the campus?” said Greg. “I’m going to my office early anyway.”

Fuck. We can’t say no. There’s no point. We’re going to the same place anyway, it doesn’t make any sense for us to walk now.

He’d planned on smoking cigarettes while he walked to the campus, and if Greg drove him that meant he wouldn’t get to do that and he probably wouldn’t have time for a cigarette until after the interview.

“Thanks,” said Peter.

They were eating bagels and cream cheese. Peter couldn’t eat anything. He was hungry, but he couldn’t eat anything. He drank four cups of coffee and afterward was light-headed and slightly nauseated.

Greg was reading the newspaper.

“Can I have the funny papers?” said Peter.

Greg slid the cartoon pages out of the newspaper and gave them to him. Peter gulped coffee and read
The Far Side
first, then
Calvin and Hobbes
, then started working his way through the other ones, which are never, ever actually funny, like
Hägar the Horrible.

“So,” said Megan. “Are you going to start looking for a place soon?”

“Megan,” said Greg.

“Well, yeah,” said Peter. “I’ll be out of here pretty soon.”

Greg read the newspaper, ate his bagel, and began to fiercely ignore their conversation.

“I figure maybe a couple weeks,” said Peter. “Depends on when I get my first paycheck and stuff like that. Really soon though.”

“Where are you thinking of living?”

“Well, okay, this one time I was driving by this storage place. You know, where they have all those storage lockers? I once helped a buddy of mine move his shit out of one of those things. Some of them are pretty big inside. His was temperature controlled too, so it was even warm in there. You know what the rent for those things is? It’s like fifty bucks a month. And I thought, fuck, man, I could just rent one of those and live in it. Just put a mattress in it or something, a thermal sleeping bag, maybe get one of those electric camping lanterns. Boom. There you go. Super-cheap place to stay.”

“What about taking showers?” said Megan.

“Thought of that. I’d take showers in the locker room at the rec center. Just like once or twice a week. I read this thing about how modern Americans take way too many showers anyway. It kills the good bacteria. You don’t really need to shower more than once a week.”

Greg folded his newspaper.

“You’re not going to live in a storage locker,” he said.

“Why the fuck not?” said Peter.

•  •  •

After breakfast Greg drove him to the campus. Greg was thirty years old. He worked in a chemistry lab at MIT where he did something that involved testing chemicals on rats. Their sister, Lindsay, was twenty-five. She was in her first year of law school. Peter was twenty-seven, and he was nothing.

“Go in there and ask, they’ll tell you where it is.”

“Okay,” said Peter. The car door was open and Peter was halfway out of it. The car was making a soft, irritating
bong-bong-bong
sound because the door was open.

“I’m going home after I finish in the lab,” said Greg. “If you wait around till then I can give you a ride back, but it’ll be a while. I don’t know how long you’ll be. You can walk around and explore the campus if you want. Or you can go into Cambridge. There are bookstores and coffee shops; you can kill a day there. Or you could come by my office before noon and we can get lunch. Or you could just walk home, it’s not that far.”

Peter started to freak out a little. Greg was giving him too many options. Too many choices to make. When Peter started to get freaked out, when he started to feel like a loosely put-together thing unraveling uncontrollably in every direction, he tried to use a trick they’d taught him in therapy: Try to boil everything down to just one decision at a time. Just choose one item from a pair of options, then go on to the next. Either this or that. Pick one. Next decision.

“I don’t know,” said Peter.

“Well, if I don’t see you later I’ll assume you went home. Okay?”

That made things a little easier. Peter walked up to the building.

It was early and not many people were on the campus yet. It was November. The weather was wet and bleak and made the grass look greener. It was a cold morning. It was an ugly day. Or beautiful. Whatever. It wasn’t either. He never thought of a day as beautiful or ugly. He knew what beautiful and ugly days were supposed to look like, but he wasn’t the sort of person who really cared about the weather.

He could see a clock on another building. We should buy a watch, he thought. He had about five minutes. He lit a cigarette and realized that it might take awhile to find the place he was supposed to find—that he might not be able to just walk in and instantly be there. So if we smoke this cigarette, we might be late for the interview.

Decision: He put out the cigarette even though he’d only just lit it, and went inside. Decision made. He had analyzed the situation, weighed the options, and made a decision, like an adult.

“Can you please tell me where the marine biology lab is please?”

Peter was embarrassed by how small and weak his voice sounded. He was trying to be polite. The girl behind the desk didn’t hear him.

“I’m sorry?”

She craned her neck and slightly tilted the flap of her ear toward him with her finger. She was a sweet-looking, pudgy girl. She was drinking coffee, or some kind of hot drink in a paper cup that steamed up her glasses. Maybe it was tea.

“Can you please tell me where the marine biology lab is?”

“Which one?”

“Um. I don’t know. The one where they do stuff with, um, squid?”

“
Do stuff
with squid?”

“You know, do like, experiments? Study them?”

She looked down at something on her desk, somehow figured out what he was talking about, then gave him directions. His shoes were wet and they squeaked on the hard vinyl floor. The halls were dark and he didn’t see anyone else in the building. He found the right room eventually. He didn’t know what time it was when he knocked on the door. He was probably late. Nobody answered. He opened it and stuck his head inside.