The Fat Woman's Joke (9 page)

“I feel quite happy quite a lot of the time,” said Brenda, as one who apologizes.

“Oh, you! You are just a whore at heart. I was quite wrong about you and you being a mother. Your thighs are money-makers, not creators.”

“It is a funny kind of love you talk about,” said Brenda, incensed. “It seems to have nothing to do with the man loved. You have too much of it inside. It overflows and attaches itself at random, like a kind of blood-sucking slug. If I was a man I would most certainly want to brush off.”

Susan looked at the painting on her easel. “My painting makes me sick, too. It just makes matters worse. There is no point in it. It's just more of me, spreading into another dimension. If you're a woman you never win. Look at it. It's so bloody fucking personal! I don't know why I bother.”

“Why are you sitting here listening to me?” asked Esther of Phyllis. “Why aren't you at home warming Gerry's slippers, or sulking, or putting on a flimsy nightie to tempt him, or whatever you are accustomed to doing at this time of night?”

“He had to work late at the office, so I thought I wouldn't be there when he came home, just to show him.”

“Show him what?”

“That I can have a life of my own, too.”

“Do you play this game all the time, Phyllis, or only some of the time?”

“Game? It isn't a game. It's very serious, and very painful.”

“Supposing he comes home and finds you gone and goes straight out to revenge himself?”

“I know. It does happen, I suppose. It is very worrying. Perhaps I should go home.”

“I suggest you do.”

“You haven't told me a thing yet. You've just talked and talked. No, I don't think I should go home. Gerry must be taught a lesson.”

“No wonder he looks elsewhere.”

“It's not that Gerry
looks.
It's that unscrupulous women place themselves where he can't help seeing them. Some women are like that. And if he's angry with me—Gerry gets angry very easily—then terrible things happen.”

“Terrible for whom?”

“For me. And for Gerry. It complicates his life, and he has a strong sense of duty. He wouldn't keep seeing his wife, otherwise.”

“You're his wife, Phyllis.”

“His ex-wife, I mean. It's hard to remember. I feel she's his real wife, you see, and I'm in the wrong to be living with him at all. Please go on with your story. Can I have some of that luncheon meat, please?”

Esther cut Phyllis a slab of luncheon meat, and another one for herself. They gnawed its pink flabbiness with pleasure.

“Talking of girls standing in the way to be looked at,” said Esther, “it was exactly what this stupid child Susan Pierce was doing. Alan was not exactly a romantic figure, but he had written a book and that was enough to set her going. Her usual style, I gather, is any man of letters, preferably married, who has an assured future and frequent mentions in the Sunday papers. A very suburban creature, I thought her, and her true stereotyped self very easily got the upper hand. The slightest stirring in her loins—and Alan is remarkably good at the promise of pleasure, if not its fulfillment—and her suburban little heart cried love. And that was not what Alan meant at all.”

“What did he want, then?”

“He was hungry. A hungry man grabs what he can get.”

“But you were hungry, too.”

“Hunger made him aggressive. It merely bored me. So much of my daily life had been taken up by shopping and cooking, and eating and washing up after the cooking, and now it had all evaporated. There was nothing left to do in the long hungry hours but work myself up into a state about Alan's betrayal of me.”

“How did you know he had betrayed you? How could you tell?”

“The upheaval in my routine had left me paranoiac, I admit. I would have suspected him of infidelity with his secretary, simply because she was temporary and named Susan, whether I had grounds for my suspicion or not. I had no grounds, but I suspected, and as it transpired, quite fortuitously, I was right.”

“I don't regard Gerry's affairs as a threat to my marriage. They are very trivial. He says so and I agree.”

“What other choice have you but to agree? Divorce? You are not brave enough to be a single woman. You are a coward. You have played at being helpless for so long that now you are. And Gerry knows it. He doesn't have to bother. Your friends are Gerry's friends, not yours at all. Your home is Gerry's home, bought with Gerry's money. You just don't exist without him. And again, a single woman over thirty is an object of pity, or so you think. So you agree with Gerry that such masculine affairs are trivial; you tell yourself it is not in a man's nature to be monogamous; but neither of these things are any more true of men than they are of women, and your misery is no one's fault but your own because you are craven and a betrayer of your sex. You suck up to the enemy. I despise you.”

“Thank you very much, I'm sure. I love Gerry, as it so happens.”

“You are incurable. You comfort yourself with words. I will continue. I was getting thinner. I had lost eight pounds in just over a week. I was pleased with myself, but no one would allow me comfort. I was tormented.”

On the ninth day of the diet Peter said to his mother, as he sat at the kitchen table eating steak pie and chips from the fish-and-chips shop round the corner, “I think you are out of your mind.” His mother was eating three ounces of cottage cheese and two tablespoonfuls of spinach. Alan was not yet back from the office. “Why don't you eat? No one cares whether you are fat or thin. Let's face it, you are out of the age group where it matters. You just be a nice cozy comfy mum and leave it at that! What more do you want? You've got a nice home and a good husband and I'm no trouble to you, and an easy life—and when you think of the lives most women have to lead—seven children and a drunken husband—I think there's something rather awful about middle-aged middle-class people going on diets, when all over the world people are starving to death—literally—”

“My troubles are not outside me,” said Esther, “they are inside me. Those are the worst troubles of all.”

That evening Alan and Esther lay in the double bed they had owned for eighteen years. It was five feet wide. Once they had occupied, happily, the two feet in the center. Now they used the peripheries.

They lay staring up at the ceiling, hungry, and presently they began to talk, which was not their usual custom in bed.

“Steak and kidney pudding,” said Esther, “with mushrooms and oysters and the gravy oozing out. And mashed potatoes and a cauliflower cheese, all golden and bubbling on top, with bits of green stalk right down at the bottom where the sauce is thinner and buttery.”

“Hare soup,” replied Alan, “with fresh rolls and lots of butter. And then roast duck with roast potatoes and green peas. Followed by apple pie and cheese and biscuits. A Brie, I think, just at the right point of squishiness, with that slight and marvelous taste of something on the verge of going bad. Something you can suspect of being rotten, but you know you're allowed to eat.”

“I'd have apple pie. You break through the crust, and it's juicy underneath. Chocolate mousse is nice, of course, with chopped walnuts on top. With whipped cream flavored with rum.”

“Or apricot crumble. My mother used to make that.”

“I know.”

“That's why I never get it, I suppose.”

“Don't be silly. We all know, of course, what a marvelous cook your mother was and how beautifully she kept her house. How the clean warm wind blew freshly through the windows, which were always opened in every bedroom at the same time every morning. That it was an Indian wind, of course, you forget. That there is nothing outside our windows but a fall of damp black soot from a sulphurous heaven you prefer to overlook. You still make faces at the closed bedroom windows. Men are very good at making faces over domestic details. They say nothing, but with the merest look they can drain all joy from any minimal sense of domestic achievement one may have painfully acquired.”

“You speak out of intimate knowledge of the domestic nature of dozens of men, I notice. You must have crammed a great deal into your life before you met me. And indeed, I may say, after.”

“I did. Another thing you forget is that your mother had some twelve Indian slaves, whereas I have the dubious advantage of a daily help a couple of hours every day.”

“I was making no comparison between my mother and you. It was you who decided I had. All I said was that my mother made apricot crumble, and I liked it, and for some reason I never get it from you.”

“You could always cook it yourself.”

“Charming! Back from a hard day at the office to cook my own dinner. Why don't you ask me to sweep the floors, too?”

“The more you complain about your hard day at the office, the less plausible it seems. Just sitting at a desk all day, talking, writing, lifting up the telephone, do you call that work?”

“People who have never worked in offices have no idea of the tensions, the decisions and the crises which attend one's every hour. I am worn out by mid-day, exhausted by the time I get home.”

“So I'd noticed.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, never mind. I'm too fat and unattractive, anyway. Unlike your—what's her name—Audrey? Janet? Susan? That's it. Susan. The willowy, artistic one.”

“For God's sake, what do you want? We've been married nearly twenty years.”

“Oh, don't pretend—”

“What is the matter with you?”

“I think she should leave. It's not fair to me.”

“Now what in the world—? What earthly reason have you—”

“You only talk about her when you're drunk, that's why. Not a mention of her when you're sober. You inhibit your conversation on her account. The only way I ever know anything about you is by listening to you when you're drunk, did you know that?”

“You speak as if I was some kind of alcoholic.”

“Perhaps you are. Anyway, there it is. You don't talk about Susan when you're sober.”

“Don't be silly. The truth is, of course, that I daren't talk about her. You are so impossibly jealous. You are mad. It is this diet. I think you had better give it up. I can't live with you while you're like this.”

“But you will carry on, of course, being so strong-willed and self-disciplined.”

“Yes.”

“Charming.”

Esther sat upright in bed. The tops of her arms were flabby, but her flesh was still very white and smooth. “So I've got to be fat and ugly while you get thin and carry on with your secretary.”

“You are quite impossible. It's no use trying to reason with you at all.”

Tears fell out of Esther's eyes.

“It's not fair to me. It's not fair. It's not my fault I'm fat.”

“Well, it's certainly not mine. If it's not one thing, it's another. Go to sleep. Stop behaving like a little girl. You'll feel better in the morning. Incidentally—”

“Yes—” said Esther, comforted by this exercise in uxorious authority, and wanting to hear more.

“Marriage isn't a prison. You remember what Gerry was saying the other evening? Unfaithful husbands are made by jealous wives.”

They lay silent for some minutes, both with their eyes open, carefully not touching, despite the dip in the middle of their marital mattress. Presently Esther stretched out her hand to lay it on his belly.

“Alan?”

“Go to sleep.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You always are, afterwards. Why do you start?”

“I don't know. I thought it was you who started. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I love you.”

“Then I wish you would show it rather more. Why don't you trust me? You've got nothing to worry about. Can't we just leave it at that? You've always got to have something to worry about. I just wish you wouldn't make it my secretaries, because that makes me angry.”

“Alan—”

“Do you have to talk? The sooner we get to sleep, the sooner breakfast will be.”

“You'll never really discuss anything, will you? I want to talk about everything, and you want to keep silent about everything. Just suppose I was unfaithful to you, what would you do?”

“You have a great gift for forgetting things.”

“That was different, that was a long time ago. We were apart, of our own free wills, and it didn't count. But in general terms, husbands get interested in other women, wives are supposed to be tactful and silent and not make scenes, and put on new corsets and get their hair done, and win their straying spouses back by patient loving endeavor. Now if
I
had a lover, would you try and win me back by behaving with restraint? Would you buy me roses and wash your feet and have your toenails manicured to please me better? Like hell you would!”

“What are you talking about now?”

“Just that there's one law for husbands and another for wives.”

“Of course there is. Wives need husbands more than husbands need wives.”

“What a terrible thing to say.”

“It is not terrible, it is simply true. Such is the structure of our society that women without husbands are scorned, and men without women admired. Provided they are known to be heterosexuals, of course. I notice an increasing tendency in women to label any unmarried man a queer, however; and they are, moreover, putting about the rumor that any fornicator is merely over-compensating. The male-female war is hotting up.”

“You are being flippant. It is not fair.”

“Of course it is not fair.”

“I wish I had been born a man.”

“You make that very apparent.”

“Now you are being unpleasant. Men are always accusing women of being unfeminine, and at the same time making sure that the feminine state is as unendurable as possible. You leave your dirty socks around for me to pick up. And your dirty pants. It's my place to pick them up, because I'm a woman. And if I don't, you accuse me of being unfeminine. It's my place to clean up the coffee cup when you've ground out your cigarette. I am only fit to serve and to be used and to make your life pleasanter for you, in spite of such lip service as you may pay to equal rights for women. You may
know
that I am equal, with your reason, but you certainly don't
feel
that I am.”