by Wilson Barbers
Illustrated by Vic Martin
Five minutes after he came, gasping and pumping into his moaning wife, Jack started to feel guilty again. They were in their bedroom, David Byrne yowling on the Panasonic, the sweat of finished sex puddling their navels, and Jack was replaying his mind's fantasies. It was happening more frequently when they made love: he'd start out admiring his wife's body - the full breasts over a lean athletic waist, the strong hips and fulsome thighs - tracing the form that he knew so well. . . and it wouldn't be enough. Suddenly, he'd start looking inward, imagining his wife not as he knew her but larger, her belly grown out, her hips grown bigger, her face now round and smiling. As he began to thrust inside her, he'd start fantasizing that she was filling out beneath him, as if he were somehow pumping his wife into delightful rotundity.
It wasn't, he knew, the way you were supposed to be thinking at such times. They had a good marriage, good jobs (he at the local insurance headquarters, she at a radio station), a comfortable condo. What was he doing to his wife in his fantasies?
"There's something wrong," he told her, once they'd finally gotten up for Saturday breakfast. Trina was standing by the microwave over a readymade piecrust, a thawed carton of Pour-A-Quiche in her right hand, her terrycloth robe unfastened at the front. Occasionally, a white breast would peak through the opening. At thirty-two she had kept herself firm and beautiful, and he wondered why it didn't mean anything to him.
"How's that?" she asked, after first taking the time to make sure their breakfast had been properly poured. The kitchen teevee was tuned into a wire service channel, which was broadcasting the day's horoscope to a bosa nova beat, and she was watching for her sign out of the corner of her eye. Now that he'd started, Jack wasn't sure he could explain things to her, for fear of sounding insulting or abnormal. You no longer turn me on, he wanted to say, because your body - which you've worked so hard to keep up - isn't round enough for me. Perhaps they were too middle class for their own good, too aware of the way they were supposed to look. He knew he still loved his wife, had a difficult time imagining his life without her. But he also knew their sexual life had grown increasingly frustrating.
"There's something wrong," he feebly repeated instead. "Wrong with us." And then he was talking about a trial separation, forgawdsakes, right there in their kitchen. Here he was, babbling at the breakfast table, unable to eat his helping of quiche for all the agitation he felt, while the teevee set flashed the forecast for Gemini ("You'll make unsteady progress through much of the day.") and his wife quietly worked on her own plate. Her self-possession was almost irritating. He stammered through some lame explanation, full of dead phrases about "finding their individual space and not stepping on each other's toes," just the sort of crap he used to ridicule as seventies and narcissistic. She just sat there, her mouth full of egg, and said, "I see." He didn't know how long their separation was going to last, he finally finished - just long enough to give him time to "get his head together." (Jesus!)
Jack packed two weeks' worth of work clothes plus a pair of jogging suits and left that afternoon, parking at the Regal Eight Inn. For the rest of the day he sat in his room, watching the Dead End Kids on a matinee movie marathon until the evening came. That night he dressed himself with an eye for action, first checking out the motel's lounge (empty but for a middle-aged couple and a weather-beaten salesman) then honing in on the city's downtown bars. He was going to make his first night of separation one to remember.
It didn't work, of course. One of the reasons Trina and he had stayed together so long (ten years, give or take a month) lay in their respective insecurities, their inability to open themselves to anyone new for fear of exposing secret parts of themselves to ridicule. For Jack (though it took quite a few years to acknowledge this) his biggest secret was his attraction to women far larger than his peers accepted; for Trina, it was a continuing obsession with food. . .
Ever since she was a girl (and a rather scrawny one at that) Trina had it drummed into her: you can never be too rich or too thin. The former she didn't have much hope of attaining; the latter seemed feasible given the nature of her mother's cooking. As a youngster in a moderately small Midwestern town, Trina found herself growing into teenhood well-shaped and without much worry until her junior year. Whether it was hormones, the ongoing evolution of her taste buds or years of fast food deprivation (or perhaps just the opening of a Burger King two blocks from their house), Trina suddenly found herself thinking of food at all hours of the day.
She became an expensive date by senior year, plowing into Whoppers and large milk shakes with an abandon that her boyfriends found scary. The inevitable occurred. By college, she was a regular pudge, and the only the reason she kept from sliding into outright obesity was her chance dorm rooming with a fascistic P.E. major. She learned both a dietary and an exercise regimen at college, and for fourteen years she stuck to it.
Except now that Jack was gone, with everything seeming so hopeless, she didn't know why she'd bothered. When her husband had dropped his bombshell that morning, all she could do was sit and stuff her face with quiche and think about how satisfying it felt. When he'd gone into the bedroom to pack, she even finished his plate. In the past, one carton of quiche would give them a second day's worth of leftovers; today, she thought, it was food for one.
And to make matters worse, it hadn't been enough. Once Jack left and she managed to dress herself in a pink sweatsuit, Trina found herself ransacking the refrigerator. She couldn't ever remember feeling so hungry. The trouble was, she'd spent too many years buying healthy to be able to come up with anything fully satisfying. After staring into the cupboards for fifteen minutes, the muted sound of dated Latin music in the background, she finally decided to head for the Renault and Fast Food Lane. Then she hit the frozen lanes of Kroger. By evening Trina had glutted herself on Whoppers, ice cream, two Hungry Man teevee dinners and a Pizza World small. It was only the beginning, however.
As the weeks progressed, Trina found herself spending more and more free time in the local mall (where you could visit four or five fast food joints easily in an evening) and at the kitchen table (where you could cook, eat and watch the thirteen-inch teevee all at once) and less time at the health club. During work breaks, she kept upping her donut intake (sparking a station pool in the second month of her separation), filled her purse with packets of honey roasted peanuts and chocolate bars that she gobbled at her desk. By the end of their first month of trial separation, she gained twenty-five pounds, a mirror of herself from her pudgy college days. She'd look at herself naked in the mirror - the extra hang on her breasts, the widening of her upper arms, her rounded belly and secretarial butt - and think, I've got to stop this. But the resolution was a feeble one. At a deeper lever she was making up for years of deprivation. Somewhere, she thought, she was coming to a truer picture of herself than she'd ever seen before.
The separation lasted six months, more from Jack's embarrassment than anything else. It certainly wasn't because of all the fun he was having as a "single man." Years of marriage and fidelity had made him a novice at groundbreaking, and those few dates he did have were made disastrous both by Jack's underlying feeling of guilt about the situation and his dates' consistent neurotic chatter about their weight. No matter how often he would tell them that, yes, he was attracted by the way they looked, his dates kept denying it. Eventually, he got tired of arguing.
She wasn't home when he got back, and for a minute, he thought he'd wandered into the wrong condo. Not that anything immediately looked untoward: the place was clean and nothing was out of place, except for a robe that he didn't remember Trina wearing which was draped over the kitchen chair. From its size he'd have guessed it was a man's robe, but its colors where feminine, an echo of the clothes he remembered seeing on his wife. My God, he thought, she's got a gay man living with her! He went to the fridge for a low alcohol beer and was amazed to see how full it was, filled with food he'd never seen before in their refrigerator. Looked like her condo mate was a junk food junkie.
Jack sat in the living room, which felt stale and unused, and waited for his wife, rehearsing and revising his apology, alternating between eagerness and dread. When it grew near dinnertime, he finally heard her turning the key to the front. He wanted to get up to meet her but couldn't get off the couch. What if her friend was with her?
When she walked in by herself, two bags of Kentucky Fried in her arms, he was thunderstruck. Trina was nearly twice the size he remembered her, dressed in a pantsuit that struggled to keep from gapping over her protruding buttocks. Her blond hair spilled onto fully rounded shoulders, while her breasts jiggled and strained against her blouse. Her belly spilled roundly before her, and if she'd been within arms' reach he'd have pulled those polyester slacks down right then just to see it opening up to gravity. Her face was full and more relaxed than he'd ever remembered seeing it.
He never felt more in lust than he did at that moment. She was glorious, a vision of plump femininity: the woman he'd been looking for all this time.
"I saw your car in the street," she said, waddling into the kitchen with her bags of chicken, potatoes and slaw. "If I'd known you were coming, I'd have gotten something for you."
He followed her and stood by the refrigerator. Her eyes had a question in
them, and he smiled in answer. "We can get more," he said.
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