Can one blush from head to foot? One can. One did. I stood like a veritabb hearthfire stoked by a blush of all-encompassing and evet moving color that surged and resurged up and down my hod in tints of pink and rose and then pink again.
“My god!” cried Willy, “you’re the loveliest grand camellia that ever did unfurl!”
Whereupon new tides of blush moved in hidden avalanches within, showing only to color the tent of my body, the outermost and, to Willy anyway, most precious skin.
“What did Willy do then? Guess.”
“I daren’t,” said the doctor, flustered himself.
“He walked around and around me.”
“Circled you?”
“Around and around, like a sculptor gazing at a huge block of snow-white granite. He said to himself – granite or marble from which he might shape images of beauty as yet unguessed.
Around and around he walked, sighing and shaking his head happily at his fortune, his little hands clasped, his little eyes bright. Where to begin, he seemed to be thinking, where, where to begin?”
“He spoke at last. “Emma,” he asked, “why, why do you think I’ve worked for years as the Guess Your Weight man at the carnival? Why? Because I have been searching my lifetime through for such as you.
Night after night, summer after summer, I’ve watched those scales jump and twitter! And now at last I’ve the means, the way, the wall, the canvas, whereby to express my genius!” He stopped walking and looked at me, his eyes brimming over.
“Emma,” he said softly, “may I have permission to do anything absolutely whatsoever at all with you?”
“Oh, Willy, Willy,” I cried. ‘Anything!”
Emma Fleet paused. The doctor found himself out at the edge of his chair. “Yes,
yes, and then?”
“And then,” said Emma Fleet, “he brought out all his boxes and bottles of inks and stencils and his bright silver tattoo needles.”
“Tattoo needles?”, The doctor fell back in his chair. “He … tattooed you?”
“He tattooed me.”
“He was a tattoo artist. He was, he is, an artist. It only happens that the form his art takes happens to be the tattoo.”
“And you,” said the doctor slowly, “were the canvas for which he had been searching much of his adult life?”
“I was the canvas for which he had searched all of his life.”
She let it sink, and did sink, and kept on sinking, into the doctor. Then when she saw it had struck bottom and stirred up vast quantities of mud, she went serenely on.
“So our grand life began! I loved Willy and Willy loved me and we both loved this thing that was larger than ourselves that we were doing together. Nothing less than creating the greatest picture the world has ever seen. “Nothing less than perfection!” cried Willy. “Nothing less than perfection!” cried myself in response.”
“Oh, it was a happy time. Ten thousand cozy busy hours we spent together. You can’t imagine how proud it made me to be the vast share along which the genius of Willy Fleet ebbed and flowed in a tide of colors.”
“One year alone we spent on my right arm and my left, half a year on my right leg, eight months on my left, in preparation for the grand explosion of bright detail which erupted out along my collarbone and shoulder blades, which fountained upward from my hips to meet in a glorious July celebration of pinwheels, Titian nudes, Giorgione landscapes and El Greco cross-indexes of lightning on my facade, prickling with vast electric fires up and down my spine.”
“Dear me, there never has been, there never will be, a love like ours again, a love where two people so sincerely dedicated themselves to one task, of giving beauty to the world in equal portions. We flew to each other day after day, and I ate more, grew larger, with the years, Willy approved, Willy applauded. Just that much more room, more space for his configurations to flower in.”
“We could not bear to be apart, for we both felt, were certain, that once the Masterpiece was finished we could leave circus, carnival, or Vaudeville forever. It was grandiose, yes, but we knew that once finished, I could be toured through the Art Institute in Chicago, the Kress Collection in Washington, the Tate Gallery in London, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Vatican Museum! For the rest of our lives we would travel with the sun!”
“So it went, year on year. We didn’t need the world or the people of the world, we had each other. We worked at our ordinary jobs by day, and then, tin after midnight, there was Willy at my ankle, there was Willy at my elbow, there was Willy exploring up the incredible slope of my back toward the snowy-talcumed crest.
Willy wouldn’t let me see, most of the time. He didn’t like me looking over his shoulder, he didn’t like me looking over my shoulder, for that matter. Months passed before, curious beyond madness, I would be allowed to see his progress slow inch by inch as the brilliant inks inundated me and I drowned in the rainbow of his inspirations.”
“Eight years, eight glorious wondrous years. And then at last it was done, it was finished. And Willy threw himself down and slept for forty-eight hours straight. And I slept near him, the mammoth bedded with the black lamb. That was just four weeks ago. Four short weeks back, our happiness came to an end.”
“Ah, yes,” said the doctor. “You and your husband are suffering from the creative equivalent of the ‘baby blues,’ the depression a mother feels after her child is born. Your work is finished. A listless and somewhat sad period invariably follows. But, now, consider, you will reap the rewards of your long labor, surely? You will tour the world?”
“No,” cried Emma Fleet, and a tear sprang to her eye. “At any moment, Willy will run off and never return. He has begun to wander about the city. Yesterday I caught him brushing off the carnival scales. Today I found him working, for the first time in eight years, back at his Guess Your Weight booth!”
“Dear me,” said the psychiatrist. “He’s . . .”
“Weighing new women, yes! Shopping for new canvas! He hasn’t said, but I know, I know! This time he’ll find a heavier woman yet, five hundred, six hundred pounds! I guessed this would happen, a month ago, when we finished the Masterpiece. So I ate still more, and stretched my skin still more, so that little places appeared here and there, little open patches that Willy had to repair, fill in with fresh detail.
But now I’m done, exhausted, I’ve stuffed to distraction, the last fill-in work is done. There’s not a millionth of an inch of space left between my ankles and my Adams apple where we can squeeze in one last demon, dervish ox baroque angel. I am, to Willy, work over and done.
Now he wants to move on. He will marry, I fear, four more times in his life, each time to a larger woman, a greater extension for a greater mural, and the grand finale of his talent. Then too, in the last week, he has become critical.”
“Of the Masterpiece with a capital M?” asked the doctor.
“Like all artists, he is a superb perfectionist. Now he finds little flaws, a face here done slightly in the wrong tint or texture, a hand there twisted slightly askew by my hurried die to gain more weight and thus give him new space and renew his attentions. To him, above all, I was a beginning. Now he must move on from his apprenticeship to his true master works.
On, Doctor, I am about to be abandoned. What is there for a woman who weighs four hundred pounds and laved with illustrations? If he leaves, what shall I do, where shall I go, who would want me now? Will I be lost again in the world as I was lost before my wild happiness?”
“A psychiatrist,” said the psychiatrist, “is not supposed to give advice. But …”
“But, but, but?” she cried, eagerly.
“A psychiatrist is supposed to let the patient discover an cure himself. Yet, in this
case. . .”
“This case, yes, go on!”
“It seems so simple. To keep your husband’s love..”
“To keep his love, yes?”
The doctor smiled. “You must destroy the Masterpiece.”
“What?”
“Erase it, get rid of it. Those tattoos will come off, won’t they? I read somewhere once that–“
“Oh, Doctor!” Emma Fleet leaped up. “That’s it! It can be done! And, best of all, Willy can do it! It will take three months alone to wash me clean, rid me of the very Masterpiece that irks him now. Then, virgin white again, we can start another eight years, after that another eight and another.
Oh, Doctor, I know he’ll do it! Perhaps he was only waiting for me to suggest-and I was too stupid to guess! Oh, Doctor, Doctor!” And she crushed him in her arms. When the doctor broke happily free, she stood off, turning in a circle.
“How strange,” she said. “In half an hour you solve the next three thousand days and beyond of my life. You’re very wise. I’ll pay you anything!”
“My usual modest fee is sufficient,” said the doctor.
“I can hardly wait to tell Willy! But first,” she said, “since you’ve been so wise, you deserve to see the Masterpiece before it is destroyed.”
“That’s hardly necessary,
