"Hey!" said Toad.  "Let's have a fat girls contest!"
 We were reclining in a sidewalk cafe after the mid-day meal, drunk, orally sated, Paris as it were at our feet.  In order of importance there was me--tall, with refined good looks.  Taller than Toad anyway, as who is not?  I was dressed in a style so subtle it was irrelevant to expense, which was a good thing.  Understated jacket, open collar, my napkin tucked in at the neck.
 Of course the napkin should lie on the lap, I know that, but if you like to lean back with your foot on your knee, or possibly on the table, it's handier to be wearing a bib.  One doesn't want to spear an escargot and drip garlic butter on the lapels.
 And in this laid-backness perhaps we have the best embodiment of my moral being.  The problem as I see it is to negotiate the busy canal of life from the gondola of one's passivity.  I like the little things.  Lunch.  The nap.  The haircut.  Looking in the mirror all that time puts me in such a good mood.  Content merely to exist, sort of thing.
 It was otherwise with Toad.  He was always looking for women with whom to excite himself.  I'd rather just lie here and await ravishment.  Amuse myself with the question, does a fax machine going off in a dark office make a sound.  Drink myself to sleep.  But Toad must up and gather rosebuds, which kept him pretty much on the hop.
 He was not something you really wanted to look at.  Short and watchful.  The pouch under his chin palpitated as he waited, if you could speak of his having a chin.  A mouth was what he had, a wide mouth that seemed to end at his shoulders and gave him a calculating look.  A let's-wait-and-see look.
 And yet withal he had an effect on women that defied comprehension.  No one knew how he did it.  He did not, for example, own toiletries or extra shirts or any of the things we associate with personal pleasantness.  He didn't so much change his clothes as molt.  He was the animal fact, maybe that was it.  His chemistry--filled the air.
 "Hi," he'd say, "can I lick your legs?"
 They loved it, it was irritating to see.  He could unroll his tongue and tickle a nipple into erection at a distance of yards.  At times I was tempted to regard him as the externalization of my own libido.  Wrinkled and mottled in repose, rigid and shiny when alert and so forth.  But the idea of my phallus as a separate entity induces in me a castration anxiety so intense that I thrust it aside.  Besides, he had too much energy to be written off as a symbol.
 And energy was what it took.  He was a connoisseur of female flesh.  Of any flesh, really, you had to watch him.  Continually pushing toward new frontiers, as I suppose he was doing when he sat up and expleted his suggestion.
 I looked at him as at an alarm clock.  "What?" I said.

The Fat Girls Contest Part 1

The Fat Girls Contest Part 2

The Fat Girls Contest Part 3