The Fat Artist and Other Stories (28 page)

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Derek felt a head rush as he finally stood, a tingling of blood, a little sore from lying on the floor. He started off toward what he guessed was the direction of the dressing room, to go get
en costume
in his leather skirt and homemade Balenciaga knockoff. But a feeling made him turn back, to see Marianne putting away her camera equipment, and he realized that “Thank you” meant good-bye. That was all she wanted.

•  •  •

As a child, Derek had mistaken the black spiral in the opening sequence of James Bond movies for a camera aperture rather than a gun barrel. It was not such a far-flung mistake: What is more symbolic of espionage—a gun or a camera? There is a kinship between the two machines. For one, both are “shot.” There is a dialogue between them as symbols. The camera is a hidden eye, whereas a gun is an element of positive space, a protrusion, male. A camera is negative, a hole, a trap. The silhouette of a man saunters into the viewfinder, stops, swivels, and fires directly into the camera, blinding us, the counterspies, the voyeurs, with our own blood.

•  •  •

A couple of weeks later Marianne invited him back to a party at her apartment.

“The apartment is finally done,” that quiet voice said through the honeycomb of holes in the plastic receiver. Derek was lying in bed in the early evening, very high on hashish, carefully dipping Chips Ahoy! in blueberry yogurt and trying to eat them without getting crumbs on his sheets. Derek was in a state of limbo: Tom would be out all night at his bartending job, and Derek was in want of company, but unfortunately he’d already made himself way too high to leave the apartment.

“Ken and I are having a few friends over,” the phone said. “It’s a housewarming of sorts, I suppose.”

“Mn?” he said. “Oh, sure. Why not?”

It could have been a paranoid note from the hash bubbling in his nerves, but he sensed a question lurking behind the invitation, possibly a sexual one. These were days of widespread experimentation; Derek had been on the balcony at Studio 54, and was well versed in threeways with straight couples. Which he didn’t mind, necessarily, but in any case, as a sort of buffer, he invited Scott along to the party. Tom knew Derek occasionally had sex with Scott. They weren’t “supposed to,” as they were both in relationships with other people, but again, these were days of widespread experimentation. He knew Tom had his own dalliances. Sometimes Derek would feel a wave of guilt, and would say to Tom, “You know, um, I think we really ought to be monogamous.” To which Tom would say, “Yes, I think you’re right about that, yes, absolutely.” And two nights later Derek would be putting on his jacket with his hand on the doorknob, saying, “Oh, I’m just going over to Scott’s to watch
Dallas
.”

(Well, Scott actually did like
Dallas
. Derek didn’t. He never watched
Dallas
and never spent a second of his life wondering who shot J.R.)

•  •  •

Scott and Derek climbed out of the Eighty-First Street subway station and into the early summer night. It was the time of year when everyone is still joyfully surprised that the sun is setting so late in the evening, later every day, meaning only more summer to come. The sky was in what photographers call the golden hour; the faces of the buildings glowing like, well, ormolu, and the shadows of the skyscrapers were long across Central Park. Derek was wearing sandals, a faded black T-shirt with a neckline he’d roughly cut out to bare one shoulder, and red Zouave pants tied at the waist with a knotted sash. He loved wearing those pants, especially in warm weather, all that breezy fabric billowing around his legs. Minimal makeup that night—eyeliner, red nail polish, and a touch of glitter on his temple and on his exposed shoulder. He was wearing iridescent dragonfly-wing earrings, and his hair was pinned up but loosely falling about his face in a couple of well-placed tendrils that he’d coiled a few times with the curling iron. Altogether his outfit was a little genderfucky, but certainly not drag. He wasn’t trying to look like a girl. He never tried to look like a girl. He didn’t want to look like a girl, and he didn’t want to look like a boy—but simply something other. Not even something in between. Just something else.

Marianne was standing in the marble compass-rose foyer with her husband, Ken, greeting the guests, proper host and hostess. Ken was an attractive man—older than her, about forty, forty-five, maybe, and imposingly tall. So this was the architect. He wore a genuine smile and didn’t seem to talk much, was balding but well built, with eyebrows as white-blond as hoarfrost and kind but arresting blue eyes. He wore khakis and a blue blazer. He had that aura of worldliness architects often have—Derek wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Ken had a passion for sailing, or had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Marianne was in her usual elegant but restrained attire. Pearls, that night. Derek introduced Scott, shook Ken’s large hand, lowered himself to Marianne’s face for kisses on cheeks.

Scott was jittery for the bar, and hunting for a drink he quickly disappeared into the fabric of the party, thereafter abandoning Derek for most of the night. Derek would remember emerging into the living room without anyone to lean against socially, Scott already gone and Marianne occupied in the foyer with her husband: that initial lost feeling of walking into a party at which the other guests know one another well, but no one knows you. It wasn’t a big party—though granted, one would have to invite quite a lot of people to make that apartment feel crowded. There were maybe thirty people or so, most of them older than Derek, closer to Marianne’s and Ken’s ages. The apartment had been transformed. If it was impressive when Derek had seen it not quite finished a couple of weeks ago, now it was nothing short of majestic. Everything was in its place: pictures on the walls, furniture all in position. It was complete. The sky had begun to turn purple, and the windows were open to the warm summer night, as were tall French doors that led onto a terrace overlooking the park, and a magnificent breeze blew transparent voile curtains back into the rooms. Somehow a flute of champagne came to be in Derek’s hand. Truly, it was a lovely evening. That breeze blew the sheer curtains around, there was laughter here and there, cocktail glasses clinking and chiming, kisses on cheeks, soft conversation. Derek stood by an open window holding his glass of champagne, a line of golden bubbles as thin as a necklace chain ascending to its surface from the stem where he held it, and he looked out at night falling across Central Park from the twenty-third floor of the Beresford.
Double Fantasy
was playing, and he would remember that, too.
Double Fantasy
was playing at many cocktail parties in the summer of 1981, but this one was playing at a cocktail party on the Upper West Side, ten blocks away from where John Lennon had been shot six months before, at a stately, named apartment building similar to the one he was standing in. Lennon sang: “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful . . . beautiful boy.” It was a disquieting feeling to be living now in a world in which a Beatle was dead. Derek had guessed Marianne was in her midthirties, which put the year of her birth sometime in the late forties, right in the generational crosshairs to be someone for whom the Beatles had truly changed the world: She could have been one of those shrieking teenage girls waiting on the runway at what used to be Idlewild Airport, but had then recently been renamed JFK in the shadow of his assassination (death beatifies). To Derek, the Beatles had never been anything new, but something that simply played in the background of his growing up, as it now played in the background at this party. He had not imagined it would be so soon that he would be listening to this particular dead man’s voice. He liked the album. But to listen to that album on the Upper West Side in the summer of 1981 was not just listening to music, but a table rapping, a séance. It was an album of love songs, unexpectedly sweet and guileless ones, without Lennon’s usual cast of irony, that drop of venom that made his songwriting so much darker and meaner than McCartney’s. And now these love songs had become haunted. The voice of a man who had recently been murdered sang: “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful . . . beautiful boy.” Death beatifies.

•  •  •

It took Derek a little while to realize that many of the people at the party were very ordinary (some of them very large) men who were dressed in women’s clothing.

It wasn’t drag at all: They were simply wearing women’s clothing. They were
en costume
as women who had just come from their jobs at a law firm, or an advertising agency, or perhaps they had picked up their children from school that afternoon. They were wearing conservative, pedestrian outfits: navy-blue polyester skirts with little matching jackets, shoulder pads, salmon-pink pantsuits, ruffled silk blouses with bows on them, sensible, low-heeled pumps, pearl chokers, thick black tights. They wore wigs styled in pageboys and bob cuts and whatnot.

Marianne was at his elbow, introducing him to someone. Hands were stuck out to be shaken. He was introduced to a man named Bill in a mousey-brown curly wig. Bill wore an indigo dress with white polka dots, and a little gold woman’s watch on his thick, hairy wrist.

“This is my wife, Margaret,” said Bill, lightly putting a proprietary hand on the back of the woman who stood beside him, similarly attired. As they stood there in that opulent apartment with their drinks, Derek looked around at Bill and Margaret and Marianne, and at the other men around them, at their wigs and skirts and dresses, their makeup. Bill’s makeup was of a perfunctory sort, appropriate for the office: lipstick, a little powder and mascara, a hint of rouge on the cheeks. It was poorly applied—he could tell Bill really didn’t know anything about the craft of applying makeup. The lipstick spilled over the lines, and his foundation didn’t quite match his skin tone. He had probably borrowed his wife’s makeup. These men were not trying to be beautiful—they were only trying to be female. But not even that, exactly. There are drag queens who change completely when in drag—an inside-out mental, physical transformation. The voice changes, as do the mannerisms. You instinctively do things such as examine your nails by looking at the back of the hand, with fingers outstretched, instead of looking at the palm with the fingers curled in, the way a man does. Bill was
en costume
, but not
in persona
as a woman. The blue polka-dotted dress he wore had pockets, and the hand that didn’t hold his drink he kept casually sunk in one of them as they chatted. Men and women mingled together, couples, friends, some of the men in men’s clothing, but most of the men dressed in their pedestrian women’s clothing. No one did or said anything that indicated they even noticed anything unusual at all was happening.

He was introduced to another guy, whom he wound up talking to for much of that evening. The man stuck out a hand in an elbow-length black satin glove and said in a deep voice, “Hi, I’m Cathy.”

He had a good, strong handshake. He was a tall, squarish man in a houndstooth skirt and a puffy silk blouse the faintly yellowish color of a white key on a very old piano. He wore black hose and white peep-toe slingbacks he must have thought matched the blouse, a quiet string of pearls, and a wig of waxy black hair in a China-chop style, chin length on the sides with straight, tight bangs, like Louise Brooks.

“Beautiful place, isn’t it,” said Cathy. Derek noticed that Cathy had missed a spot shaving that day; there was a line of tiny mustache hairs just under his nostrils.

“Oh, yes,” said Derek. “It’s gorgeous.”

“Ken did all this himself,” said Cathy. “Really dynamite work. Ken is a detail-oriented kind of guy. There’s a guy who sweats the details. I can imagine the hell he must have put the contractors through.”

It turned out that Cathy was also an architect, a friend of Ken’s from “way back,” as she put it, “way
way
back.”

“This is her virgin voyage,” said Cathy. “This little soirée is Ken’s way of showing off his work, you know. And it’s damned impressive work, I’ll say that.”

They stood in the apartment and talked about the apartment. Somehow, Cathy fell into taking him on a tour of this apartment neither of them lived in, which Cathy in fact was seeing for the first time and Derek was not. Cathy pointed things out to him, talking about how such and such a detailing element was constructed. Derek glazed over a bit, drinking but trying not to let himself get drunk, finding himself on the receiving end of a lot of prattling straight-guy
explanations
of things. The difference between Greek and Italian marble, things like that. The apartment looked so different from the last time he’d seen it that he couldn’t be sure whether or not it was the same place where Marianne had shot him, but it was that same smoothly curved wall that Cathy ran his satin-gloved hand across while explaining how this was done, how they steam the wood to get that curve.

“Damned impressive work,” said Cathy, again, for emphasis.

It was fully night, now. People were laughing and smoking on the terrace with the city glittering all around and below them, everyone milling about, waves of people moving through one another. He watched Marianne moving around the rooms, gracious hostess making sure all her guests were enjoying themselves, lightly touching backs and elbows and shoulders, gliding across the radiant parquet and marble floors. She moved so quietly, so elegantly. If there were a pencil attached to her head she could have drawn a straight line across a wall. She reminded Derek of those bar games where you push the stick and the little hockey player moves across the ice: She moved as if she didn’t have feet, as if her body rolled along a fixed track in the floor. She was such a serene human being.

Scott had vanished to who knows where, leaving Derek on his own to make it from the Upper West Side all the way back to his shitty apartment in Forest Hills, which would mean spending at least an hour drunk on several subway cars and platforms in his sandals and Zouave pants and eyeliner, and it was getting late. It would involve a lot of kissy faces and fag-bashing from gangs of teenagers to be resolutely walked past, through, away from. Not the safest prospect, but he’d done it before, and what else could he do?