The Fat Woman's Joke (2 page)

Esther looked at Phyllis with distaste. “Oh, go away!” She loomed over Phyllis, dirty-nailed, dirty-faced, brilliant-eyed and dangerous. “Go away! I didn't want you to come here, asking questions, nagging. I came here to have some peace. I don't want to see anyone. What do you want from me?”

“I want to help you.”

“Don't be so bloody stupid. Help me? You're like a mad old woman battering at the prison gates when the hanging's due. All you really want is just to be in there watching. There's nothing here to watch. Just a fat woman eating. That's all. You can see them in any café, any day. They're all around.”

“You are very upset, Esther,” said Phyllis doggedly. “I'm your friend. I'm very hurt you didn't turn to me when you were in trouble.”

Esther beat her head with her hand.

“That's what I mean!
‘I'm very hurt!'”
Her voice, normally soft, rose to a shriek. “I can't stand it. What am I supposed to do now? Comfort your stupid little worries? What do you think it all is—some kind of game? This is our life, and it's the only one we're ever going to get, and it's a desperate business, and you come bleating to me about your being hurt because I, being near to death and madness, don't come bleating to you—with—oh, he treats me so badly, oh, you know what he said, you know what he did—as if talking can make things different. Phyllis, will you please, for your own sake, go away and leave me alone?”

“No.”

Esther gave up.

“Then I will tell you all about it. And when you have drunk your fill of miseries, perhaps then you will feel satisfied and go away. I warn you, it will not be pleasant. You will become upset and angry. It is a story of patterns but no endings, meanings but no answers, and jokes where it would be nice if no jokes were. There has never been a tale quite like this before, and that in itself is hard to endure. Are you sitting comfortably?”

“Yes,” said Phyllis, putting her hands neatly together in her lap.

“Then I'll begin.”

U
P IN HAMPSTEAD, IN
an attic flat, two other women were talking. There was Susan, who was 24, and Brenda, who was 22. It was Susan's flat, and Brenda was staying in the absence of Susan's boyfriend. Just now Susan was painting a picture of Brenda: these days when she came home from the office she would put on a dun-colored smock and take up her brush at once. She said it gave her life meaning.

Susan was tall, and slim to the point of gauntness. She had straight very thick hair, enigmatic slanty green eyes, high cheekbones, a bold nose and an intelligent expression. From time to time, as she worked, she would see herself in the mirror behind Brenda, and would like what she saw.

“It's a pity,” she said to Brenda, “that your legs are so heavy. Otherwise you'd stop the traffic in the streets.”

Brenda had long legs and they were, in truth, fairly massive around the thighs. But seen sideways on she was almost as slim as Susan herself. She had a round face and an innocent look. She thought Susan lived a wild, fascinating, exciting life.

“What can I do about my legs!”

“Don't wear trousers,” said Susan.

“But trousers are no bother.”

“You're supposed to bother. You've got to bother if you're a woman. Otherwise you might as well be a man.”

“It's not fair. I didn't ask to be born with legs like pillars.”

“I daresay they are good for child-bearing.”

“Can I look?” Brenda lived in hope that one day Susan would paint a flattering portrait of her. Susan never did.

The telephone rang.

“You'd better answer it,” said Susan. “If it's Alan I'm not at home. I've gone away for a month to the country.”

It wasn't Alan, but a wrong number.

“Perhaps you should ring him,” ventured Brenda, “then you wouldn't be so edgy.”

“I'm not edgy,” said Susan. “I am upset. So we're all upset. Loving
is
upsetting. That's the point of it.”

“What about his wife? Is she upset?”

“I don't think she feels very much at all. Like fish feel no pain when you catch them. From what Alan says, her emotional extremities are primitive.”

“If I went out with a married man I'd feel awful,” said Brenda.

“Why?”

“I'd worry about his wife.”

“You are very different from me. You are fundamentally on the side of wives, and families. I don't like wives, on principle. I like to feel that any husband would prefer me to his wife. Wives are a dull, dreadful, boring, possessive lot by virtue of their state. I am all for sexual free enterprise. Let the best woman win.”

“If you were married,” said Brenda, “you would not talk like that.”

“If I was married,” said Susan, “which heaven forbid, I would make sure I outshone every other woman in the world. I wouldn't let myself go.”

“Alan didn't seem your type at all.”

“I don't have a type. You are very vulgar sometimes. You know nothing about sex or art or anything.”

“I don't know why you always want to paint me, then. You seem to have such a low opinion of me. It is very tiring.”

“You have a marvelous face,” said Susan. “If only you would
do
something with it.”

“What do you mean, do something with it?”

“Give it a kind of style, or put an expression on it that suited it.”

“What would suit it?” Brenda was worried.

“I don't know. I'm getting very bored. Shall we go to the pub?”

“I don't like sitting about in pubs. All those dreary smelly people, so full of drink they don't know what they're doing. Last time I was in a pub a man peed himself, he was so drunk. How can you
talk
to anyone in a pub?”

“You go to pubs to enjoy yourself, not to talk. Communication is on a different level altogether. Sometimes I think you should run home to Mummy. You have no gift for living.”

“Oh, all right, we'll go to the pub. But will you tell me all about Alan?”

“What about him? What do you want to know? You are very prurient.”

“I don't want to know all about that. I want to know what you
felt.
You make me feel so outclassed. Your relationships are so major, somehow. Nothing like that ever happens to me.”

“He was on a diet,” said Susan. “That's a feminine kind of thing to be really. On the whole, masculine things are boring and feminine things are interesting.”

“Men don't bore me,” said Brenda. “Everything else, but I've never been
bored
by a man.”

“Then you're lucky. But that wasn't what I was saying. You are very dim sometimes.”

Susan took off her smock. Brenda put on her shoes.

“You never know with men,” said Susan, pulling on an open lacework dress over a flesh-colored body-stocking. “The ones who are most interesting before, are often the most boring afterwards, and vice versa.”

“In that case,” said Brenda, “it would be absurd for a girl to marry a man she hadn't been to bed with, wouldn't it? Think of all those poor lovesick virgins in the past, all going starry-eyed to the altar and all destined for a lifetime's boredom. How terrible! And to think that my mother would wish to perpetuate such a system forever!”

“All human activity,” remarked Susan, painting a rim of black around her eyes, “is fairly absurd.”

Brenda put on her jockey's cap and they left. They were a ravishing pair. People stared after them.

Esther had a very pretty soft voice. It was one of the things that had first made Alan notice her. Now, as she recounted her tale, it floated so meekly out of her lips that it was quite an effort for Phyllis to catch what she was saying.

“Alan and I were accustomed to eating a great deal, of course. We all have our cushions against reality: we all have to have our little treats to look forward to. With Gerry it's looking forward to laying girls, and with you it's looking forward to enduring it, and with Alan and me it's eating food. So you can imagine how vulnerable a diet made us.”

“I wish you would stop using the past tense about you and Alan.”

“I know it is only four weeks ago, but it might as well be forty years. My marriage with Alan is over. Please don't interrupt. I am explaining how food set the pattern of our days. All day in his grand office Alan would sip coffee and nibble biscuits and plan his canteen dockets and organize cold chicken and salad and wine for working lunches, and all day at home I would plan food, and buy food, and cook food, and serve food, and nibble and taste and stir and experiment and make sweeties and goodies and tasties for Alan to try out when he came home. I would feel cheated if we were asked out to dinner. I would spend the entire afternoon making myself as beautiful as my increasing age and girth would allow, but still I felt cheated.”

“You were a wonderful cook. Gerry used to say you were the best cook in England. When you two came to dinner I would go mad with worry. It would take me the whole day just producing something I wouldn't be ashamed of. And even then I usually was.”

“People who can't cook shouldn't try. It is a gift which you are either born with or you aren't. I used to quite enjoy coming to visit you two in spite of the food. You and Gerry would quarrel and bicker, and get at each other in subtle and not so subtle ways, and Alan and I would sit back, lulled by our full bellies into a sense of security, and really believe ourselves to be happy, content and well-matched. This day, four weeks ago, I really think I thought I was happy. There were little gray clouds, here and there, like Alan's writing, which was distracting him from his job, and Peter's precocity, and my boredom with the home, and simply, I suppose growing older and fatter. In truth, of course, they weren't little clouds at all. They were raging bloody crashing thunderstorms. But there is none so blind as those who are too stuffed full of food to see!”

“I don't really know what you are talking about.”

“You will come to understand, if you pay attention. You are sure you want me to go on with this story?”

“Yes. Oh Esther, you can't still be hungry!” Esther was taking frozen fish sticks from their pack.

“I have no intention, ever again, of doing without what I want. That was what Alan and I presumed to think we could do, that evening in your house when we decided to go on a diet.”

P
HYLLIS FRAZER'S LIVING ROOM
was rich, uncluttered, pale, and tidy and serene. Yet its tidiness, when the Wellses arrived, seemed deceitful, and its serenity a fraud. The Frazers, like their room, had an air of urbanity which was not quite believable. Phyllis's cheeks were too pink and Gerry's smile was too wide. The doorbell, Esther assumed, had put a stop to a scene of either passion or rage. Gerry was a vigorous, noisy man, twice Phyllis's size. He was a successful civil engineer who had scorned what he considered to be the more effete profession of architecture.

“I hope we're not early,” said Esther. “We had to come by taxi. We have this new car, you see.” She was kissed first by Phyllis and then by Gerry, who took longer over the embrace than was strictly necessary. Alan pecked Phyllis discreetly, and not without embarrassment, and shook hands with Gerry. When they sat down for their pre-dinner drinks, Gerry could see the flesh of Esther's thighs swelling over the tops of her stockings. Esther was aware of this but did nothing about it. She looked, this evening, both monumental and magnificent. Her bright eyes flashed and her pale, large face was animated. Beside her, Alan appeared insignificant, although when he was away from her he stood out as a reasonably sized, reasonably endowed man. He had a thin, clever, craggy face and an apparently urban nature. His paunch sat uneasily on a frame not designed for it. He had worked in the same advertising agency for fifteen years, and was now in a position of trust and accorded much automatic respect. His title was “Executive Creative Controller.”

“I know nothing about the insides of cars,” he now said, “except that whenever I buy a new one it goes for a day and then stops. After that it's garages and guarantees and trouble until I wish I had bought a bicycle instead. I don't even know why I buy cars. It just seems to happen. I think perhaps I was sold this one by one of my own advertisements. I am a suggestible person.”

“You take things calmly,” said Gerry. “If I bought a car which so much as faltered, somebody's head would roll.”

“But you are a man of passions. I am a cerebral creature.”

“It's the British workman,” said Gerry. “No amount of good design these days can counteract the criminal imbecility of the average British worker.”

“Oh please, Gerry darling,” cried his wife. “No! My heart sinks when I hear those terrible words ‘these days' and ‘British workman.' I know it is going on for a full hour.”

“Phil, please. A man buys a new car. It costs a lot of money. If it breaks down it is only courtesy to give the matter a little attention.”

He was pouring everyone extremely large drinks—everyone, that is, except his wife.

“What about me!” she piped, trembling. “I'se dry.”

Grudgingly he poured her a small drink, as a husband might pour one for an alcoholic wife. Phyllis very rarely drank to excess. For every bottle of Scotch her husband drank she would sip an inch or so of gin.

“All this talk of cars,” he said, emboldened by his kindness to her, “I hate it. Don't you, Esther? It's such a bore.”

“If you spend enough money on something you can't afford to think it's a bore.”

“Your wife,” said Gerry, with a disparaging look toward his own, “is a highly intelligent woman.”

Esther wriggled, showing a little more thigh for his benefit. They all drank rather deeply.

“Sometimes,” said Alan, “I am afraid that Esther knows everything. At other times I am afraid she doesn't.”