Thinner(5)

'It's a myth,' Billy said, grinning.

'That you can come your brains out?'

'Nah. That's the truth. The myth is that you lose those brain cells forever. The ones you come out always grow back.'

'Yeah, you say, you say.'

She snuggled more comfortably against him. Her hand wandered up from his thigh, touched his penis lightly and lovingly, toyed with the thatch of his pubic hair (last year he'd been sadly astounded to see the first threads of gray down there in what his father had called Adam's thicket), and then slid up the foothill of his lower belly.

She sat up suddenly on her elbows, startling him a little. He hadn't been asleep, but he had been drifting toward it.

'You really have lost weight!'

'Huh!'

'Billy Halleck, you're skinnier!'

He slapped his belly, which he sometimes called the House That Budweiser Built, and laughed. 'Not much. I still look like the world's only seven-months-pregnant man.'

'You're still big, but not as big as you were. I know. I can tell. When did you weigh yourself last?'

He cast his mind back. It had been the morning Canley had settled. He had been down to 246. 'I told you I'd lost three pounds, remember?'

'Well, you weigh yourself again first thing in the morning,' she said:

'No scales in the bathroom,' Halleck said comfortably.

'You're kidding.'

'Nope. Mohonk's a civilized place.'

'We'll find one.'

He was beginning to drift again. 'If you want, sure.'

'I want.'

She had been a good wife, he thought. At odd times over the last five years, since the steady weight gain had really started to show, he had announced diets and/or physical-fitness programs. The diets had been marked by a lot of cheating. A hot dog or two in the early afternoon to supplement the yogurt lunch, or maybe a hastily gobbled hamburger or two on a Saturday afternoon, while Heidi was out at an auction or a yard sale. Once or twice he had even stooped to the hideous hot sandwiches available at the little convenience store a mile down the road - the meat in these sandwiches usually looked like toasted skin grafts once the microwave had had its way with them, and yet he could never remember throwing away a portion uneaten. He liked his beer, all right, that was a given, but even more than that, he liked to eat. Dover sole in one of New York's finer restaurants was great, but if he was sitting up and watching the Mets on TV, a bag of Doritos with some clam dip on the side would do.

The physical-fitness programs would last maybe a week, and then his work schedule would interfere, or he would simply lose interest. In the basement a set of weights sat brooding in a corner, gathering cobwebs and rust. They seemed to reproach him every time he went down. He tried not to look at them.

So he would suck in his gut even more than usual and announce boldly to Heidi that he had lost twelve pounds and was down to 236. And she would nod and tell him that she was very glad, of course she could see the difference, and all the time she would know, because she saw the empty Doritos bag (or bags) in the trash. And since Connecticut had adopted a returnable bottle-and-can law, the empties in the pantry had become a source of guilt almost as; great as the unused weights.

She saw him when he was sleeping; even worse, she saw him when he was peeing. You couldn't suck in your gut when you were taking a piss. He had tried and it just wasn't possible. She knew he had lost three pounds, four at most. You could fool your wife about another woman - at least for a while - but not about your weight. A woman who bore that weight from time to time in the night knew what you weighed. But she smiled and said Of course you look better, dear. Part of it was maybe not so admirable it kept him quiet about her cigarettes - but he was not fooled into believing that was all of it, or even most of it. It was a way of letting him keep his self-respect.

'Billy?'

'What?' Jerked back from sleep a second time, he glanced over at her, a little amused, a little irritated.

'Do you feel quite well?'

'I feel fine. What's this "do-you-feel-quite-well" stuff?'

'Well ... sometimes ... they say an unplanned weight loss can be a sign of something.'

'I feel great. And if you don't let me go to sleep, I'll prove it by jumping your bones again.'

'Go ahead.'

He groaned. She laughed. Soon enough they slept. And in his dream, he and Heidi were coming back from the Shop 'n Save, only he knew it was a dream this time, he knew what was going to happen and he wanted to tell her to stop what she was doing, that he had to concentrate all his attention on his driving because pretty soon an old Gypsy woman was going to dart out from between two parked cars - from between a yellow Subaru and a dark green Firebird, to be exact - and this old woman was going to have a child's five-and-dime plastic barrettes in her graying grizzled hair and she was not going to be looking anywhere but straight ahead. He wanted to tell Heidi that this was his chance to take it all back, to change it, to make it right.

But he couldn't speak. The pleasure woke again at the touch of her fingers, playful at first, then more serious (his penis stiffened as he slept and he turned his head slightly at the metallic clicking sound of his zipper going down notch by notch); the pleasure mixed uneasily with a feeling of terrible inevitability. Now he saw the yellow Subaru ahead, parked behind the green Firebird with the white racing stripe. And from between them a flash of pagan color brighter and more vital than any paint job sprayed on in Detroit or the Toyota Village. He tried to scream Quit it, Heidi. It's her. - I'm going to kill her again if you don't quit it! Please, God, no! Please, good Christ, no!