I, Fat Man

by Paul Negri

Joao Vitor Marcilio

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. It is a truth universally ignored that a 350-pound man with no fortune must be in want of a wife too. Or at least someone to sleep with, now and then. Or at very least a reasonable facsimile. Such a man is sometimes forced to resort to an inflatable blonde with unbearably chafing though cooperative vinyl parts, until one day he can stand it no longer and takes desperate steps.

And so it was that midway in my life’s journey (assuming I live to age 76, the life span of the average American male), I found myself in a dark bar called The Woods in Newark, New Jersey, awaiting the arrival of a woman named Brandi.

Brandi’s ad on the Internet site I habitually haunted in the dead of night, where you could find anything you needed, from hubcaps to hubba hubba, read: “Bad girl good at doing what I do best and that’s whatever you want. Certain restrictions apply. Buy me a drink and we’ll see what’s what and what’s not. I host.”

What attracted me to Brandi’s ad compared to the hundreds of others shamelessly vying for my attention (some made me chuckle, others cringe) was its straightforward yet ambivalent message. After years of teaching literature to high school students who were remarkably immune to the sense and sensibility of the great writers and whose own writing efforts had the eloquence of a bad stutter, I was acutely susceptible to anything written with a modicum of literary skill. I liked the way Brandi expressed herself and I was willing to believe that it was intentional. If I were going to have to pay for sex, I wanted it to be with someone I could at least enjoy talking to after it was all over. It had been a long time since I’d had the pleasure of a post-coital chat. Vinyl Doll, or VD as I called her, was a good listener but a bit deficient on the response side.

It was a Tuesday night in bleak December (ah, distinctly I remember), just after ten, and the semi-dive of a bar Brandi had selected for our “ass — signation,” as she so wittily phrased it in her email, was a pretty lonely place. I had drawn few stares and just one “Jesus!” when I came in and deposited myself on a stool and a half at the end of the bar, draping my coat over the half stool left over. Two men of dark complexion, one shiny bald and one wearing a red baseball cap, sat further down the bar. They were arguing in what I recognized to be Portuguese. Once upon a time — six years and one hundred pounds ago — I had a Portuguese girlfriend and knew the tongue. Midway down the bar, eight stools away, was a middle-aged man who would have been considered impressively fat had I not arrived on the scene, but in comparison was reduced to merely chubby at best. There were a few people at tables against the wall opposite the bar and one lone young black man in a camouflage jacket shooting pool at the dimly lit table in the back toward the rest rooms. The periodic clacking of his balls annoyed me. On the mirror behind the bar was writ large in spastic white soap letters MERRY XMAS AND GOD BLESS US EVERY ONE, as if scrawled by the hand of a drunk Tiny Tim.

The bartender had told me to call him Mickey, but I heard the mini fat man at mid-bar call him George. He was standing at the far end of the bar and if I wanted another beer I had to call him something, but I wasn’t sure what. So I just waved, like a man bidding a fond adieu, until I caught his attention. He came over and said, “Again?”

“Yeah, please,” I said. “Did you say your name was Mickey?”

“No. I said call me Mickey. My name is George, but I don’t like it. I like Mickey. I don’t mind Frank either.” He was old, tall, gaunt and Irish as hell with short spiky hair and a face like Sam Beckett on a bad day. He took my glass, went over to the tap, filled it and brought it back. He looked at the small bowl of peanuts I had already exhausted, then looked at me. He reached under the bar and brought out a bigger bowl and a bag of peanuts and filled it up to overflowing.

“You waiting for Brandi?” he asked.

I was taken aback by his question. I wasn’t sure if I should admit it or not and I thought of answering ‘Who wants to know?’ like a tough guy in the movies, but I already knew who — George or Mickey or Frank or whoever he wanted to be at the moment. It was just easier to tell the truth. “Yes,” I said.

George put the big bowl of peanuts in front of me, as if rewarding me for my honesty. “There may be a problem,” he said.

“A problem? What kind of problem?”

“I’m just saying. There may be. Brandi’s kind of particular.”

“Particular about what?” I asked.

“Her work,” said George. “No offense, buddy.”

I admit that hurt a little, like someone puncturing my scrotum with an ice pick. “Does she have some kind of weight restriction?” I said, trying to make it sound like a joke, but George didn’t laugh or even smile.

“I’m just saying,” he said and walked off to the other end of the bar to serve the squabbling Portuguese.

The funny thing was I didn’t think of myself as fat. I was just me, and the me was on the inside and didn’t weigh anything, had no adipose, no love handles, no stretch marks, no bitch tits, had no bulk, no body at all, just floated around in a place free of gravity. I had gotten good at deflecting the looks and laughs, ignoring the jokes and gibes that my flesh was heir to. It took a lot to jolt the little planet I had become out of its familiar and solitary orbit. But the idea that I might not be acceptable to a hooker gave me painful pause.

And in that pause, I started to get anxious. I had never been to a prostitute before and was unsure of the etiquette. How did you introduce yourself? Did you use your real name or an alias? (In our email exchange, I had stuck with my screen name, ReadyReader). Did you specify what you wanted or wait for her to offer a selection of services, like a menu? How did you know what it cost? (No prices on a menu are always a bad sign). When did you pay, before or after? Did you tip in addition to the agreed upon fee (and was 15 percent sufficient)? Did you bring your own condoms or were they provided? (In a fit of hubris, I’d put three in my wallet).

I was beginning to think I should just forget it and go back to my inflatable sweetheart VD and breathe some life into her for the evening when I noticed George giving me what looked like a little wave and a nod. I waved back and it took me a second or two to realize it wasn’t me he was waving at. I turned around and found a pretty young woman standing just behind me.

“Are you ready?” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“ReadyReader?”

“Oh, yeah. Brandi?” I asked and began to slide off the stool.

She put a hand on my arm. “Don’t get up. Not yet. Let’s talk.” She perched on the stool next to me and called, “Hi, Mickey.”

George popped open a can of ginger ale, poured it into a glass, dropped in a lime slice, and put the glass in front of her.

“Can I buy you a drink?” I said. Even I could hear the nervous quiver in my voice.

“You just did.”

“I mean a beer — or wine — or whatever you want.”

Brandi took a long swallow of ginger ale. “I don’t drink when I’m working.”

I wondered where Brandi’s coat was. She seemed to have come in off the street in her gray long-sleeved turtleneck dress that fit her to a lovely T and seemed to show what she had without showing anything at all. She wore black leggings and knee high black boots. Her hair was blonde and straight and shoulder length, her complexion fair, almost pale, her eyes big and hazel, her make up modestly applied. She had a small scar over one eye. She was neat as a pin and to my mounting alarm — petite. Sitting on my stool and a half next to her, I felt like a very big bull about to enter a very small china shop.

“What’s your name?” asked Brandi.

I hesitated. I decided to play it safe. “John.”

Brandi sighed. “John Smith by any chance?”

That made me feel badly, like a bit of a fraud and an asshole to boot. “Okay. Sorry. It’s Darcy. Darcy Gross.”

“Suit yourself,” said Brandi.

“I mean it,” I said. “You know Pride and Prejudice?”

“I’ve seen the movie.”

“It’s my parents’ all-time favorite book. They’re English teachers. I’m that Darcy. Had I been a girl I would have been Elizabeth.”

“You’re lucky their favorite book wasn’t Moby Dick,” said Brandi. She smiled and it was a pleasant sight. “Darcy Gross. That must have been fun for you in high school.”

“It still is,” I said. “I’m still in high school. I teach English. The difference is now I can send the smirking little bastards to detention. The fat boy’s revenge.”

Brandi laughed and I began to relax a little. Maybe everything would be all right, I thought. Brandi was a professional, after all, and probably knew how to handle any challenge that her work might entail. I once saw two moving men hoist a baby grand piano on ropes and swing it through a sixth story window with barely an inch to spare. They were pros. The pros know their jobs. Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead! Brandi wouldn’t have a problem.

“Darcy, I think we have a problem,” said Brandi.

From the back of the bar, the pool player’s balls clacked and he shouted “Shit!” I looked at him over Brandi’s shoulder. He was giving the corner pocket the finger.

“I don’t think I can do it,” said Brandi.

“But you don’t even know what I want to do,” I whispered.

“There are just four things the average man wants to do. And none of them are things I could do with you.”

“Just because I’m so — ample?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant, like it was a problem countless others had easily surmounted.

“I’d really be forcing myself and you’d know it. I’d end up making you feel bad.”

George came over and put more peanuts in the bowl even though it was still full. I was glad for the interruption. I didn’t know what to say. “You want a hard-boiled egg?” asked George.

“A what?”

“A hard-boiled egg. I got some in the back. Don’t usually put them out on Tuesdays. But I could get you a few.”

I realized George was feeling sorry for me, and that made me feel worse. “No thanks, Mickey. I’m good.” George nodded at Brandi and drifted back down to the other end of the bar.

Brandi put her hand on my arm. “Are you mad?”

“No,” I lied. “I’m not mad. Why should I be mad?”

“That’s what guys always say. The guy who gave me this wasn’t mad,” said Brandi and touched the scar over her eye.

I didn’t say anything. “You know what I was really looking forward to?” I said. I couldn’t stop myself.

Brandi shook her head.

“The pillow talk. Just a chat in a warm bed with a pretty woman.” I reached for my coat.

“Just talk?” asked Brandi. She gave me a long look. “That I could do.”

“Do what?”

“Talk, Darcy. We get comfortable. We get into a nice clean queen size bed. We keep our hands to ourselves. And we have a nice talk. One hour, one hundred dollars.”

I draped my coat back over the stool. “What would we talk about?” I couldn’t believe I was even considering it. Had it come to this?

“Anything you want. But no dirty talk. That wouldn’t be good for you in the end.”

“Merda!” yelled the bald Portuguese man at his friend. George told him to take it easy.

The man playing pool chalked his cue. A woman at one of the tables laughed and kissed the man with her. Brandi sipped her ginger ale. For an instant everything froze and I was somewhere else. I saw myself standing at the foot of a steep snowy hill and wondering if I could get to the top or would I just stumble and come rolling back down, not like Sisyphus, but like the huge rock he pushed eternally. This was a new low for me. For my self-respect I had to decline, with a Falstaffian flourish, and make a graceful exit.

“Where’s your coat?” I asked.

“Upstairs. That’s where I work. Right over the bar. It’s nice.”

“Okay.”

“You’re sure now?” Brandi gave me a cautionary look.

“Yes. I’m sure.” I tried to smile, but only half-succeeded.

Brandi waved George over. “Mickey, we’re going upstairs for a while.”

George looked surprised. I put a twenty on the bar. He picked it up and handed it back to me. “It’s on the house, buddy. Enjoy.” There was a hint of something — approval, satisfaction? — in his craggy Irish face.

“Thanks, Mickey.” I gave him a five.

Brandi led me out the door into a hallway on the side to a steep flight of stairs. I climbed steadily behind her and made it to the top without even breathing hard, although I coughed a bit.

“You okay?”

“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves,” I quoted.

“Oh, yeah?”

“That’s Edmund Hillary. The man who first climbed Everest.”

“Well, Edmund, the meter starts running as soon as I open this door. One hour, one hundred dollars. Right?”

“Right,” I said. Apparently talk was not cheap.

The apartment over the bar was as Brandi had described it — nice. The living room was neat and plain, furnished with a comfy-looking couch, a wood coffee table marred by intersecting coffee cup rings, like the trademark of the Olympics, and an old leather easy chair facing a TV between two windows. The windows looked out onto the snowy street. On the seat of the easy chair I saw, with the shock of recognition, a doughnut pillow, comforting friend to those aggrieved by hemorrhoids (a truth universally acknowledged by those in need of such friendship). The fact that it was in Brandi’s apartment led me to wonder about some of the things she was best at doing, as her ad proclaimed, and inflamed my imagination.

Off the living room was a small kitchen and down a little hall what looked like a bathroom and two other rooms, bedrooms I assumed.

“Kind of a convenient place to live,” I ventured, looking for a place to put down my coat.

“Yeah, if you’re an old Irish barkeep,” said Brandi. “It’s Mickey’s place. We have an arrangement. I rent work space from him.” She looked at me and frowned. “You don’t think I live here, do you?”

I thought of George and the doughnut pillow took on a whole other character, one which poured ice water on my fervid imagination. “Of course not,” I said. “This place is nice, but it’s certainly not you.”

“Nice recovery, Darcy.” Brandi took my coat and put it in a closet by the front door.

“Bathroom’s down the hall there. Now you go in and get comfortable. But leave your shorts and tee on. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And don’t come in to the bedroom until I call you. I’ll just be a minute.”

The bathroom was decidedly male, unadorned to the point of being blunt. The toilet seat was up and I responded immediately to its open invitation. I got out of my clothes and hung them on a wood hangar on the back of the door. I tried tucking my white tee into my black boxers (I know black is supposed to make you look smaller, but apparently there’s a limit to its sartorial magic). I pulled the tee out and let it drape over the shorts. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink and asked, “What the hell are you doing here?” But then I thought, you’re about to get into bed with a beautiful — well, pretty — woman. When was the last time that happened? Yeah, but you’re not allowed to touch her, I countered. Who the hell do you think you are, Mahatma Gandhi? What if you can’t control yourself? But Brandi, in addition to being pretty, seemed like she could take care of herself. That reassured me. “She probably knows a thousand ways to permanently disable a man if she had to,” I told the mirror. That thought comforted me only for a moment, then sent me into a panic. I had the wild urge to grab my clothes and escape through the bathroom window.

“Darcy,” called Brandi. “You can come in now.”

I gave myself a hard look in the mirror and thought, you’ve got performance anxiety and you’re not even required to perform. Somehow it didn’t make me feel better. I walked down the little hallway and glanced into the bedroom on the right. It was dark and had an old man’s smell in it. George, I thought. The door to the left was closed. I knocked.

“Come in already,” said Brandi.

The room was full of candles. Little tea lights cast a dim glow on the Chinese black lacquer high chest against the wall, the matching dresser, and make-up table with oval mirror. The single window had jade colored curtains and scarf. The Asian style carpet was shadowy and soft under my feet. And in the queen size bed with its black lacquer headboard adorned with cranes in flight was Brandi — in homey pink cotton pajamas. She watched me gawk for a minute and said, “So what did you expect? A kimono?”

I snapped out of it. “No. You look — great. And I love the decor. Really.”

Brandi laughed. “I talk best in PJ’s. Come on.” She pulled the blanket down and patted the bottom sheet.

I sat on the edge of the bed, swung my legs over, and got my feet under the top sheet. Brandi pulled the sheet and the thin blanket up over me. She fluffed the pillow behind my head. Even in her pedestrian pink pajamas, she was so pretty it hurt. I stared up at the ceiling and tried to think of something to say. I was at a loss for words.

“So, is Pride and Prejudice your favorite book, too?” asked Brandi, lying sideways, one arm under her head. “I mean like your parents.”

“I like it. But it’s not my favorite.” I actually didn’t feel much like talking.

“What’s your favorite?”

“I like Dante. Well, more than like. I read him every day, pretty much.” I had a hard-on so monumental I thought any minute it would pop through my shorts, the sheet, the blanket, and the ceiling.

Brandi came a little closer, still without touching me, and whispered “Nel mezzo del cammin di rostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita.”

“You know the Inferno — in Italian?” I said. My erection forgot itself.

“Don’t get all excited. That’s all I know. I remember it from my Italian classes in college.”

“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood,” I quoted.

“You sure know how to turn a girl on.”

“Sorry,” I said. Beneath the sheet, sex was rearing its ugly (and circumcised) head once more.

Brandi sighed. “Now don’t go all melancholy on me, Darcy.”

Through the window we could hear the wail of a siren getting louder and louder until it was right outside and passing by. We were quiet and listened to it gradually fade away. I could feel her warmth even without touching her, see the sheet rise and fall gently with her breathing, smell her scent, light and suggestive, not something she could get from a bottle, something hers and hers alone, and something only someone lying in bed next to her could share. She shifted her weight and as petite as she was sent a little ripple through the bed and I felt like I was floating.

“There’re a lot worse places to be than in this bed tonight,” said Brandi.

And I knew she was right. I frequented some of those places regularly. Little walled-up places in the mind, vast dark places in empty dreams, cramped places in the heart so tight you couldn’t turn around. The kind of places you can’t get out of unless somebody else opens the door, and no one’s ever there. Well, almost never. But tonight was different. I took a deep breath and a good stretch and turned on my side, facing Brandi. “How about you? Where’d you go to school?”

So, we talked. Brandi didn’t tell me much about herself. Just little things, but the kind of little things that put all together tell you more about a person than their history can. It turned out talking wasn’t really what I was after so much as listening, listening to someone talk to me, tell me the little things and be happy doing it. We kept the conversation light. Nothing weighty. We talked and talked and laughed a bit. We filled up every passing minute with our chat.

Brandi reached over me and for a moment I thought I had somehow unconsciously worked a miraculous seduction and she was about to initiate me into the rapturous secrets of her body. She turned the clock on the night table toward her. “Hour’s up.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

She was out of bed in a flash and donning her robe. I got out of bed a bit more awkwardly, went back to the bathroom, and got dressed. I checked my wallet. I had three hundred dollars in cash and my three condoms in their cheery red wrappers. For one crazy moment, I thought of doing another hour. But something told me that would ruin it.

Brandi was waiting for me in the living room. She was looking out the window. “Where are you parked? Not far I hope.”

“Just around the corner.” I handed her two fifties.

“Thank you, Darcy.”

And then I said something I knew I shouldn’t have said. “I’d like to do this again sometime.”

“No. No you wouldn’t. And I wouldn’t either.” She put her arm through mine and walked me to the door. “But I’m glad we did it this once. Aren’t you?”

I knew she was right. “Yes, I’m glad. Thanks.” We shook hands and I left.

It was midnight, very cold and very clear and the snow crunched under my feet as I walked down the block. Sitting in the doorway of a derelict building, his black-booted feet stretched out awkwardly in front of him, was a very fat man in a Santa Clause suit. I stopped and looked down at him. He was clutching a Salvation Army red kettle to his big belly. He was plainly very drunk. He looked up at me and began to cry. I opened my wallet, took all the cash and the three condoms and dropped them in the kettle. I walked quickly with light brisk steps to my snow-mantled car. All I wanted now was to get home, shuck off my clothes and climb into my warm and lonely bed.

Good night, ladies, good night.

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Paul Negri is the former publisher and president of Dover Publications, Inc. His stories have appeared in The Penn Review, Vestal Review, Bartelby Snopes, Pif Magazine, Jellyfish Review and other publications. He has twice won the Gold Medal for fiction in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Writing Competition. He lives in Clifton, New Jersey.