The Fat Woman's Joke Read online

  “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.”

  3

  PHYLLIS 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 E
sther knows everything. At other times I am afraid she doesn’t.”

  “Why? Are you hiding something from her?” asked Phyllis.

  “I have nothing to hide from my Esther.”

  “You hide your writing from me. Or try to. You lock it away.”

  “Writing?” they cried. “Writing?”

  “Alan has been writing a novel in secret. He sent it off to an agent last week. Now we wait. It makes him bad-tempered. Don’t ask me what it’s about.”

  “What’s it like? Are we in it?”

  “No,” said Alan shortly. “You are not.”

  “He’s the only one who’s in it,” said Esther.

  “How do you know?” he turned on her, fiercely.

  “I was only guessing,” she said. “Or working from first principles. Why? Are you?”

  He did not reply, and presently they lost interest. Phyllis inquired brightly about Peter.

  “He can’t concentrate on his school work,” said Esther. “His sex life is too complicated. But I don’t think it makes any difference. He was born to pass exams and captain cricket teams. Failure is simply not in his nature.”

  “Peter sails unafraid and uncomplicated through life,” said Alan. “We take little notice of him, and he takes none of us.”

  “Shall we eat?” said Phyllis, who appreciated Peter as a boy but not as a son.

  “We’re still drinking,” said her husband. “Give us a moment’s peace.”

  “I’m afraid the beef will be overcooked.”

  “Beef is sacred,” said Alan, so they went in to the dining room, where the William Morris wallpaper contrasted prettily with the plain black of the tablecloth and the white of the Rosenthal china.

  They sat around the table.

  “Alan can’t stand gray beef. He likes it to be red and bloody in the middle. He goes rather far, I think, toward the naked, unashamed flesh. But there we are. Beef is a matter of taste, not absolute values. At least I hope so.”

  “Anyway, Gerry thinks if I cook something it is awful, and if you cook something it’s lovely, Esther, so why bother?”

  “I think you are a superb cook, Phyllis,” lied Esther.

  “Or we wouldn’t come here,” said Alan.

  “Personally, in this house I would rather drink than eat any day,” said Gerry.

  “I wish you would stop being horrid to your wife, Gerry,” said Esther, finally coming down on Phyllis’s side. “It makes her cross and everyone’s gastric juices go sour. Why don’t you just appreciate her?”

  “She’s quite right,” said Alan. “Women are what their husbands expect them to be; no more and no less. The more you flatter them, the more they thrive.”

  “On lies?” inquired Gerry.

  “If need be.”

  Esther was disturbed. “You are horrible,” she said. “Can’t we just get on with dinner?”

  Phyllis passed the mayonnaise, where artichoke hearts, flaked fish, olives and eggs lay immersed. The mayonnaise was perhaps too thin and too salty. They helped themselves, with all the appearance of enthusiasm.

  “It has been a hard day,” said Gerry mournfully.

  “But rewarding?”

  “A new office block to do, if I’m lucky. A new world to conquer.”

  “And a new secretary,” said his wife. “A luscious child, at least eighteen, and nubile for the last five years. Plump, biteable and ripe.”

  “Alan has a new secretary,” said Esther. “I don’t know what she looks like. What does she look like, Alan? There she sits, day after day, part of your life but not of mine.” Her voice was wistful.

  “She is slim like a willow. But she has curves here and there.” The appreciation in her husband’s voice was not at all what Esther had bargained for.

  “Oh dear. And I’m so fat. No thanks, Phyllis darling, no more.”

  “I like you fat. I accept you fat. You are fat.”

  “Not too fat?”

  “Well perhaps,” said Alan, “just a little too fat.”

  “Oh,” moaned Esther, taken aback.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “You’ve never said that to me before.”

  “You’ve never been as fat as this before.”

  “I’m so thin,” complained Phyllis politely, “I can’t get fat. Do you like garlic bread?”

  “Superb.”

  “Well, you can’t spoil that, at least,” said Gerry.

  “More, Alan?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you think you should?” asked Esther. “Every time I sew your jacket buttons on I have to use stronger and stronger thread.”

  “I admit your point. I am fat, too. We are a horrid gross lot.”

  “Eat, drink, and fornicate,” boomed their host. “There is too much abstinence going on.” His wife made apologetic faces at the guests.

  “If you are fat you die sooner,” said Alan.

  “Who cares?” asked his wife, but no one took any notice, so she said, “Tell me about your secretary, Alan. Besides being so slim, but curvaceous with it, what is she like? Perhaps you wish she was me?”

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “It’s us,” said Phyllis dismally. “Discontent is catching.”

  “I am not discontented. I just hope Alan isn’t. Who am I to compete with a secretary fresh from a charm school, with a light in her eyes and life in her loins?”

  “Careful, Esther,” said Gerry. “Those are Phil’s lines, to be spoken in a plaintive female whine and guaranteed to drive a man straight into a mistress’s arms.”

  “One wonders which comes first,” she said brightly, “the mistress or the female whine. It would be interesting to do a study.”

  Alan decided to bring the table back to order.

  “You have no cause for concern whatsoever, Esther. To tell you the truth, I can’t even remember her name. It is entirely forgettable. I think it is Susan. She can’t type to save herself. She is thin. She is temporary. I think she thinks she is not a typist by nature, but something far more mysterious and significant, but this is a normal delusion of temporary staff. She is in, I imagine, her early twenties. She keeps forgetting that I like plain chocolate biscuits, and dislike milk chocolate biscuits. Now you, Esther, never make mistakes like that. You have a clear notion of what is important in life. Namely money, comfort, food, order and stability.”

  “You make me sound just like my mother. Is that what you really think of me?”

  “No. I am merely trying to publicly affirm my faith in you, marriage and the established order, and to explain that I am content with my lot. I am a married man and I married of my own free will. I am a city man, and live in the city of my own free will. A company man, also of my own volition. So I should not be surprised to find myself, in middle-age, a middle-aged, married, company, city man—with no power in my muscles and precious little in my mind. Here in this sulphurous city I live and die, with as much peace and comfort as I can draw around me. Work, home, wife, child—this is my life and I am not aggrieved by it. I chose it. I know my place. I daresay I shall die as happy and fulfilled as most men.”

  “It sounds perfectly horrible to me,” said Esther. “However, I don’t take you seriously, because you have just sent your magnum opus to a publisher, and I know you are quite convinced you will spend your declining years in a aura of esteem and respect and creative endeavor. I believe also, that somewhere down inside you lurks a rich fantasy life in which you travel to exotic places, conquer mountains, do any number of noble and heroic deeds, save battalions single-handed, and lay the world’s most beautiful women right and left. There may well be a more perverse and morbid side to this, but I would rather not go into it here. And you, Gerry, tell me, do you not ever wish to do extreme and fearful things? Is your masculinity entirely channeled into lustful thoughts of the opposite sex? Do you not want to burn, rape, torture, kill? Or at any rate, like Alan, failing that, are you not seized with the desire to break all the best glasses, mi
ss the basin when you pee, burn the sheets with cigarette ends, leave smelly socks about for your wife to pick up—”

  “Women have their revenges, too—” said Alan. “They leave old sanitary napkins around.”

  Abruptly they all stopped talking. Alan crammed more garlic bread into his mouth. He bit upon a garlic clove and was obliged to spit it out. Everyone watched.

  “We all talk too much,” said Esther to Phyllis in the kitchen a little later. “One has to be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts, and by sheer force of definition translate tendencies into habits. Our home isn’t half going to be messy from now on.”

  When they returned to the dining room with the second course, the murmur of men’s voices stopped abruptly.

  “What were you telling Alan to do?” Phyllis asked her husband. “Go off with his secretary? For the sake of his red corpuscles?”

  He did not reply, for this had been the essence of his conversation.

  “Esther,” was all Alan said, “we are going on a diet, you and I. We are going to fight back middle-age. Hand in hand, with a stiff upper lip and an aching midriff, we are going to push back the enemy.”

  “When?” asked Esther in alarm, looking at the mountains of food on the table—the crackling hot pottery dishes of vegetables, the bowls of sauces, the great oval platter on which the bloody beef reposed, “Not now?”

  “Of course not,” said Alan. “Tomorrow we start.”

  “New lives always begin tomorrow,” said Phyllis. “Never now. That’s right, isn’t it, Gerry? Will you carve?”

  Gerry sharpened the knife. It flashed to and fro under their noses. He carved.

  “We’re going to do it, Esther,” said Alan, watching the food piling on her plate. “Look your last on all things lovely. We’ll take a stone off apiece.”

  “If you say so, darling,” said Esther. “I’m all yours to command.”

  “Oh, she’s a lovely woman,” said Gerry.

  “You’ll never stick it,” said Phyllis, jealously. “You’ll never be able to do it.”

  “Of course we will,” said Esther. “If we want to, we will. And we want to.”