Thinner(9)

'This scale weighs light,' Halleck said weakly. 'It always has. That's why I like it.'

She looked at him coldly. 'Enough bullshit is enough bullshit, my friend. You've spent the last five years bitching about how it weighs heavy, and we both know it.' In the harsh white bathroom light he could see how honestly anxious she was. The skin was drawn shinily tight across her cheekbones.

'Stay right there,' she said at last, and left the bathroom.

'Heidi?'

'Don't move!' she called back as she went downstairs.

She returned a minute later with an unopened bag of sugar. 'Net wt., 10 lbs.,' the bag announced. She plonked it on the scale. The scale considered for a moment and then printed a big red digital readout: 012.

'That's what I thought,' Heidi said grimly. 'I weigh myself, too, Billy. It doesn't weigh light, and it never has.

It weighs heavy, just like you always said. It wasn't just bitching, and we both knew it. Someone who's overweight likes an inaccurate scale. It makes the actual facts easier to dismiss. If'

'Heidi -'

'If this scale says you weigh two-twenty-nine, that means you're really down to two-twenty-seven. Now, let me

'Heidi -'

'Let me make you an appointment.'

He paused, looking down at his bare feet, and then shook his head.

'Billy!'

'I'll make it myself,' he said.

'When?'

'Wednesday. I'll make it Wednesday. Houston goes out to the country club every Wednesday afternoon and plays nine holes.' Sometimes he plays with the inimitable titgrabbing, wife-kissing Cary Rossington. 'I'll speak to him in person.'

'Why don't you call him tonight? Right now?'

'Heidi,' he said, 'no more.' And something in his face must have convinced her not to push it any further, because she didn't mention it again that night.

Chapter Five

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

Billy purposely kept off the scale upstairs. He ate heartily at meals even though, for one of the few times in his adult life, he was not terribly hungry. He stopped hiding his munchies behind the packages of Lipton Cup o' Soup in the pantry. He ate pepperoni slices and Muenster cheese on Ritz crackers during the Yankees-Red Sox doubleheader on Sunday. A bag of caramel corn at work Monday morning, and a bag of Cheez-Doodles on Monday afternoon - one of them or possibly the combination brought on a rather embarrassing farting spell that lasted from four o'clock until about nine that night. Linda marched out of the TV room halfway through the news, announcing that she would be back if someone passed out gas masks. Billy grinned guiltily, but didn't move. His experience with farts had taught him that leaving the room to pass that sort of gas did very little good. It was as if the rotten things were attached to you with invisible rubber bands. They followed you around.

But later, watching And Justice for All on Home Box Office, he and Heidi ate up most of a Sara Lee cheesecake.

During his commute home on Tuesday, he pulled off the Connecticut Turnpike at Norwalk and picked up a couple of Whoppers with cheese at the Burger King there. He began eating them the way he always ate when he was driving, just working his way through them, mashing them up, swallowing them down bite by bite ...

He came to his senses outside of Westport.

For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical self - it was not thinking, not reflection; it was separation. He was reminded of the physical sense of nausea he had felt on the bathroom scale the night he and Heidi had returned from Mohonk, and it occurred to him that he had entered a completely new realm of mentation. He felt almost as if he had gained a kind of astral presence - a cognitive hitchhiker who was studying him closely.' And what was that hitchhiker seeing? Something more ludicrous than horrible, most likely. Here was a man of almost thirty-seven with Bally shoes on his feet and Bausch & Lomb soft contact lenses on his eyes, a man in a three-piece suit that had cost six hundred dollars. A thirtysix-year-old overweight American male, Caucasian, sitting behind the wheel of a 1981 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, scarfing a huge hamburger while mayonnaise and shredded bits of lettuce dripped onto his charcoal-gray vest. You could laugh until you cried. Or screamed.

He threw the remains of the second Whopper out the window and then looked at the mixed slime of juices and sauce on his hand with a desperate kind of horror. And then he did the only sane thing possible under the circumstances: he laughed. And promised himself: No more. The binge would end.

That night, as he sat in front of the fireplace reading The Wall Street Journal, Linda came in to bestow a good-night kiss on him, drew back a little, and said: 'You're starting to look like Sylvester Stallone, Daddy.'

'Oh, Christ,' Halleck said, rolling his eyes, and then they both laughed.

Billy Halleck discovered that a crude sort of ritual had attached itself to his procedure for weighing himself. When had it happened? He didn't know. As a kid he had simply jumped on once in a while, taken a cursory glance at his weight, and then jumped off again. But at some point during the period when he had drifted up from 190 to a weight that was, as impossible as it seemed, an eighth of a ton, that ritual had begun.

Ritual, hell, he told himself. Habit. That's all it is, just a habit.

Ritual, his deeper mind whispered inarguably back. He was an agnostic and he hadn't been through the doors of any church since age nineteen, but he recognized a ritual when he saw it, and this weigh-in procedure was almost a genuflection. See, God, I do it the same every time, so keep this here white, upwardly mobile lawyer safe from the heart attack or stroke that every actuarial table in the world says I can expect right around the age of forty-seven. In the name of cholesterol and saturated fats we pray. Amen.