around in bars that cater to smelly, belching assholes, with other smelly, belching assholes because like attracts like. I would grow crude from my proximity to such company. I would end up slavering at any woman who crossed my transom, because I saw so little of women as a rule, thereby rendering me as repulsive in terms of personality as I was physically. Oh yes, I was winning this war. I was deteriorating nicely. I was one in a long line of mythic heroes acting in defiance of the gods.
When one day she appeared to me. The fat lady.
I felt a distinctive shift in the booth where I’d been sitting playing bar trivia with my usual drunken rabidity. A heavy shift. A protesting sort of creak. I looked up and I thought: Oh no. Mon doux, as Sylvie used to say.
Well hello, she said to me.
This, I thought. This is the kind of woman you attract now, hotshot. This is where you find yourself at twenty-six.
I just saw you sitting here all hunched over, she explained, and I thought you looked a little abject.
Ab-ject, she pronounced it. It was jaunty, her pronunciation; it made me smile. Abject was not the kind of word I heard a lot of lately, even as an obsessive player of bar trivia — my single intellectual pursuit.
She smiled back. Her lipstick was bright pink — a shade you might see on twelve-year-old girls in plastic barrettes. Her hair, like her lipstick, was frosted, sprouting stiffly from her scalp in aggressively gelled tufts.
She liked gold, the fat lady. Her wrists jangled with bangles. Her earlobes drooped with hoops.
She was wearing a velour purple hoodie, the luxuriant and authoritative colour of Monsignor’s robes.
The overall effect was queenlike.
I’m Beth, said the fat lady.
I’m Rank, I said.
You are most certainly not rank, replied Beth, folding her hands (the mere act of which caused an unholy racket of jangling bracelets). I’m sitting right across from you. I should know.
A thin, frosted smile.
She was quick, the fat lady. Most people just frowned and asked me to repeat myself a couple of times when I told them my name.
Ha ha, I said, to show Beth my appreciation.
Now tell me your name, insisted Beth.
I’m Rank, Beth. Rank is my name.
Rank is not your name.
She lowered her head as if peering at me over glasses. But she wasn’t wearing glasses. I shrugged: What do you want? It’s my name. But she continued to peer like a schoolmarm waiting for a math lesson to sink in. This was an very odd mode of flirtation.
Gordon, I said at last.
Her face expanded — beyond even its current expanse — in a beatific smile. She spread her hands and her bracelets clattered, sliding down her thick wrists.
Now, see? said Beth. That’s a perfectly lovely name.
Oh what the hell, I thought, draining my rye. Let’s have sex with the middle-aged fat lady. It’ll be freaky. It’ll be one for the books.
Can I buy you a drink? I asked, waving with both hands at the bartender.
No thank you Gordon, but that’s very kind. I didn’t come here to drink. I came here to talk to you.
Beth. I’m flattered. You don’t even know me.
I knew you, Gordon, the moment I saw you.
Over at the dartboard, a couple of my buddies had been entranced by the situation from the moment Beth sat down. Every once in a while I’d shift my eyes and see them performing various obscene pantomimes for my benefit, but now that the glee had worn off, they shot me more serious, questioning looks to ask if I needed a little conversational interference run. I leaned back and gave them a no-worries wave.
Beth glanced over her hulking shoulder when I did.
Your friends?
My friends, yeah. Best there are.
You know, Gordon, I’ve only caught a glimpse of them, but I find I really doubt that.
I’d been waving my arms at the bartender again when she said this. Now I stopped and dropped my hands onto the table.
You know, this isn’t a criticism or anything, Beth, but you’re very direct.
(Of course it wasn’t so much that she was so direct, but that she was so accurate. They were by no means a quality pair of friends. They were sort of thick and irritating. One of them ingested nothing but creatine shakes three times a day in an eternal obsession with “getting big,” and clearly hung out with me in the surreal hope of somehow absorbing a percentage of my body mass. The