The Fat Girls Contest Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

 I listened warily while he sketched the idea.  It was a mistake to allow him to involve me in these things.  Walking around in the service of your intentions is what gets you on the treadmill.  The trick is not to have any intentions.  But who escapes them?
 And indeed, how was such a man to be accommodated?  He wanted to soak himself in flesh, drown in it, extinguish for a moment his Toadness--and who can blame him?--in it.
 Consider the luxury for someone like Toad, for someone like anyone, of encountering in the object of desire a maximum amount of flesh, of finding the object of desire if not limitless at least global.  Planetary.  The woman as world, if you will.  Habitable.  Not just the image of what is bigger than oneself, of what threatens, nay promises, to engulf one, but the very thing.  I mean he'd done everything else.  If I'd had his money I'd have hired a churl to carry me to the bathroom.
 For Toad was rich.  The idle rich, is what he was.  Idleness is one of the few things I envy them.  He could borrow money from you as only the rich can, as if conferring favor on an underling.  Leave you feeling helpless and stupid.  He could penetrate your resistance, that's what it was.  I am embarrassed by the sexual implications of the metaphor but it is useless to be embarrassed by Toad.  One endures.
 This, then, was my friend.  My evil twin.  Of course he wasn't a gentleman.  More or less of a cockroach, really.  But each in his way gives his heart to the world.  And had we not wept together over love, over the young girl's heart?
 "The prize is a thousand bucks," he said.  "We'll sell tickets for fifty.  Between us we must know thirty guys!  If twenty buy we've got the prize money!"
 We, notice.  Already I was spinning in the washer-dryer.  "Your boredom is getting petulant, Toad."
 "If more than twenty buy in there'll be enough to cover expenses!" he said.  Even the rich have expenses.
 "I've sat in on some fairly twisted lives, Toad--"
 "You don't know shit!"
 Of course shit is precisely what one does know but it was like trying to describe smells to the noseless when he was like this.  He had a momentum all his own.  I invite you to laugh at me.  Always ready to help people, I guess.
 Step One was the weighing in.  Each escort had to be weighed.  Toad lived in a loft on the fourth floor of the kind of building that has a ballet studio, a driving school, a shirt-maker and so forth.  You rode up on an elevator, pushed aside the accordion gate, opened horizontal sliding doors like jaws and confronted a large room with a plank floor and irregularly-spaced wooden pillars holding up a low ceiling.  A few steps before you was the steel slab of a scale that was flush with the floor.  You rolled your handtruck of cheese or whatever onto the scale and the meter, a sheet-metal headstone set into the floor beside it, gave you the weight in kilos.
 It was the perfect place.  Toad's encampment comprised a double cot and a blanket, both of which, for the blanket was stiff with whatever, could be stood in the closet.  Caterers would furnish food, wine and a table to lay it on and a radio would be purchased out of the expense money and turned to the jazz station.  He proposed to cover the scale with a carpet and the meter with perhaps a table and cloth that would hide the dial facing the scale and hood the one facing Toad.  He would stand by in a butcher's apron holding a clipboard, greeting his guests as they paused before him and recording the reading.  It was vital that each couple linger long enough for the needle to steady.  This might require some care but it was generally felt that the French love of the receiving line and its attendant formalities would hold them till their statistic clarified.  In the case of American or otherwise fidgety females Toad would undertake to detain them as best he could.  Within the limits of dignity, of course.
 Then the escort's preregistered weight would be deducted from the couple's total et voila!  In fine, the only consideration was to be mass.  There would be no points for volume or distribution and in each case Toad's ruling, with my corroboration as Second Judge, was to be final.
 But, "Wait a minute, wait a minute," said Chester.  "They're gonna know!  They're gonna look around the room at all the other fat broads and they're gonna know!  They'll fuckin' kill us!"
 Toad smiled patiently.  "All women," he said, addressing the applicants as if handing down the tablets, "see themselves as fat.  It is a condition of femaleness that it is incapable of distinguishing between itself and obesity.  They will see nothing but what they feel to be the truth projected before them."
 There was a rhubarb of assent to this and the men shuffled forward in their line-up.  Each had his weight recorded on The List and was handed an engraved invitation that specified "NO PETS OR CHILDREN."  They weren't much to look at.  Teachers, hobos, actors--dispossessed second sons sort of thing.  Marks looking for a little hope.  Most of them had never seen a thousand dollars in actual cash.
 It was a sober occasion.  They had been careful not to drink because a liter of wine on board meant an automatic kilo to one's detriment, a kilo more to be subtracted from the weight of one's date.  And in such a state to be handing over a fifty--Their faces were grimly fixed on the big prize.
 "And," said Toad, "there will be a bonus for anyone whose partner tops the hundred-kilo mark!  We got thirty entrance fees here, that's five hundred extra to be shared by all contestants with ladies over two hundred and twenty pounds!  I," he added with a flourish, "will pay the caterers myself."  That's the kind of dog biscuit the rich can throw you.
 The men listened open-mouthed as he thus wrung from them their maximum effort and, looking at each other, broke into a collective murmur of wretched optimism and pressed forward as in leg-irons.
 Modulations on the mottled surface of all that is, so to speak.  Unhappiness is so fatiguing.
 And soon the big night arrived!
 A finger-food buffet was spread on a long table, bottles of wine stood breathing and the caterers had laid on streamers and balloons.  Louis Prima was on the radio.  Large-ish women in dresses that looked like chesterfield covers rhumbaed with shifty-eyed, ill-shaven, relatively emaciated men who were not yet drunk enough.  Of course women blame you anyway, it doesn't matter what you do.  They elect you president and blame you if it doesn't rain.  When the music became particularly lively the floor hammocked so hard it made the pillars lean.
 The people in the apartment below, for there were other residences in the building, were a couple in late middle age who, singly or in tandem, approached Toad as he came and went in the hall (which he did to loiter by the ballet studio sniffing as at the bouquet of bicycle seats) and asked him not to creak the stairs so loudly, not to run the water full-force when he was making coffee, not to cross certain areas of the floor with his shoes on at given times of the day and like that, and feeling they had not engaged his best efforts on the matter had taken their case to the landlord, reported him to the police and had his visa reviewed by the immigration authorities, so they were fairly sensitive to noise.  It was their habit to sit in bed together holding an awning crank with which they hammered on the ceiling at the merest groan of a plank, after which they would dash upstairs in nightgowns, somehow they were always in nightgowns, bang on the door, interrupt his schtup with the evening's blondette and demand an explanation.
 But on the present occasion it was Friday night, and though the odd blow from below did work its way up through the stomping, we felt we could count on their indulgence just this once.
 I of course was on the door.  You didn't expect Toad to do it.  He hadn't even arrived yet.  My date was in there dancing solo, curling up floorboards where she moved.
 She was one of my students.  You can only live on loans for so long and certain among my friends had identified their shallowness by suggesting I Seek Work.  The ocean of English washes all shores and so forth.  At least I didn't have to leave the flat, go out and trudge around in the dog shit.
 In some cases I didn't even get out of bed but for Marie-Danielle I made sure I was up and dressed.  Few beds can have accommodated Marie-Danielle without steel slats and a joist.  A little flabby-pooh.  She looked like a kiosk.  A news stand walking around.
 She was bored with her husband, her husband was bored with her, I don't know.  Boredom had set into the marriage and she was taking English lessons.  We were working on her R's.  Pronouncing the French R puts brackets around the mouth and we were trying to smooth out her brackets.  Sit around and talk English sort of thing.
 "Marie-Danielle," I called as she jiggled past, "come here."
 She came over straight toward me and I had to direct her with maestro movements onto the rug.  That was the hard part, getting them onto the rug.  They came off the elevator in fours and sixes and I had to fabricate no end of persiflage to engage one couple while the other guys got their dates off the scale, after which it took a moment for the needle to settle.  Then each of the other honchos in turn would have to say "Oh! Marcelle!  You must come and meet Toby!"--c'est moi--and guide his entry onto the carpet where they posed as if to be photographed.
 "Hi," I'd say, watching the dial, jotting the number on the score sheet.  "Having a good time?"  We'd chat for a while and they'd move on, the guy watching my eyes for an indication of success or failure, and I would give him a minimal shrug, a mere drop of the eyelids because I had Marie-Danielle!  She couldn't miss.
 It had all seemed too easy.  God had dropped her into my hands so to speak, I just had to lie there!  She stood before me now, arms out even as they hung at her sides.
 "You wore that dress to excite yourself," I said, not insincerely.  She had breasts like apartment buildings.  "Do you want me to give you an orgasm right now?"
 "In the middle of everybody?"
 "In the bathroom."
 It was a compliment rather than a serious offer but she was something of a literalist.  She looked around at the room in question, a bare toilet bowl half encircled by a shower curtain that hung a foot off the floor, while I took her statistic.
 I have elsewhere had occasion to mention the matter of British bathing habits.  But the English and the French, though they've been throwing themselves at each other for a thousand years, are remarkably similar people--witness their tendency consciously to impersonate themselves--and not least in their disinclination to bathe, to which we owe an entire perfume industry.  Until recently few Paris apartments had baths and this one was typical.  Which suited Toad.  Even on the seatless bowl his feet didn't touch the floor.
 "Wise idiot," said Marie-Danielle, and floated off.
 I would have given odds she'd break a hundred but she tipped in at ninety-five.  Two hundred and nine pounds.  Nine short of the money!  I could have bumped it, I mean who'd know, but those were restless guys out there, I didn't know what kind of audit they might insist on.  I wrote her down as ninety-seven and a half.
 There was still the grand prize, I didn't see any real threats.  But as I was indulging this smugness the jaws of the elevator parted and I felt rather than heard the approach of steps, as of a dinosaur in a movie.  I turned to see Toad in the company of a woman I don't quite know how to describe.  Big, I guess.  Six-eight or so.  Across the shoulders.  In her company Toad looked like a hood ornament.
 As they came to a halt on the carpet I felt the frailty of my human existence.  It was a profoundly disturbing experience.  I was afraid!
 So please you, his look said.  "This is Toby.  Toby, this is Olga."
 "Hi, Olga," I said.
 "Yes," she said.
 I looked at Toad.  At her.  "Gee," I said, "you're tall."
 "Yes.  Is good.  All the top models are tall."
 "Oh!" I said, improvising, "you're a top model?"
 She smiled, flattered, shy.  "Not really."
 She weighed two hundred and seventy-five pounds, I clocked her.  You didn't want to give her any mouth.  A single backhand could affect your dental work for decades.  I smiled and waved them through and the scale gave a little groan as she stepped off.  Each step she took shook me.  I turned a softly eager face to the next arrival.
 Soon though I persuaded Toad to take over and went to dance with Marie-Danielle.  It was clear now that she was not to be the evening's winner and I felt the irrational impulse to comfort her.  Nice try, sort of thing.  I mean where's the logic there?  I didn't mention it.
 The girls were fluid dancers, most of them.  They were like naked porn stars running in slow motion, the flesh bouncing on their bones.  Of course they were women, properly speaking, not girls.  One wants to be politically correct.  Fat women.  Dancing among them was like being squeezed through an intestine.  Massaged by flesh, one couldn't really help it.  I was beginning to see Toad's point.
 "Watch out for the pillows," said Marie-Danielle.
 "Pillars," I suggested, ever the professional.
 "They make me bruisers," she said.  "What's the funny  thing?"
 "Is something funny?"
 "You are the terrible babies, you and Toad."
 "The sorry?"
 "Les enfants terribles.  You have the reputation to don't be serious."
 The hour arrived when Toad felt he could abandon his reception duties without fear of reproach and he got in there squeezing through, rubbing himself along the wall of orotundity, dancing for joy as a kind of asteroid around Olga.  Must have been a hundred people there--word had spread and extra tickets had been printed and sold--but not one of the women came near Olga and he knew it.  He was making money here.
 Indeed it was difficult to think, now that one saw the shape of things, that he hadn't had Olga in the bullpen when he talked us all into this idea, which of course was of questionable ethics.  Hard glances from some of the men bespoke their suspicions but he exulted among them undismayed.  A subcurrent of mutinous murmuring was beginning to be audible, along with the pounding of the ceiling below, beneath the music and laughter.
 But I had already switched anxieties.  Something now happened that brought me, propelled as I was by Marie-Danielle, to a standstill.  The elevator doors opened and Gabrielle walked in.
 Now, in order for you to understand this I have to go back and tell you about this kiosk in our neighborhood that we had to pass to get to Toad's place, run by a guy named Gaston.  Bad-tempered guy, and big enough that you didn't call him on it.  You took your Trib over the counter, waited for your change and steeled yourself against the inevitable sneer with which he dropped it onto your palm.
 Toad noticed one day that the price he charged was in excess of that listed in the box in the corner, and pointed this out to Gaston, who merely sniffed and twitched his little mustache.  "I put it to you," Toad said, "as I put it to your wife last night."
 "My wife is dead, M'sieur."
 "I didn't say it was fun."
 Gaston spoke English with just that degree of hesitation that placed Toad beyond retribution, but he suspected.  He watched Toad.  He listened to what he said, weighed it, handed him his change, watched him walk away.
 He had a girl working for him called Gabrielle, and perhaps for her "girl" is a more appropriate term.  She was opera-singer fat, tall like Gaston with a derriere like a pair of watermelons which she displayed in X-L coveralls that strained at the inner seam when she bent to heave a bundle of magazines, stabbing me with involuntary joy.  Her relation to Gaston was unspecified--a girl in a leather change apron who tended the counter when he was out on the sidewalk stacking newspapers and clipping Match to the side of the kiosk, or when he wasn't there at all.
 On such occasions Toad would engage her in conversation.  "I want to have sex with you," he'd say, she perhaps less dismissive than was entirely appropriate.  Which Gaston took note of when, down behind the counter at the endless sorting and filing that is the lot of the kiosk manager, he stood up and caught them.  "Vas te faire foutre!" he leaned over and shouted.  Go yank your yam.  I urged Toad away but he hung from my grip and said, "Listen, fly, why don't you stick your head up your hole and roll away," and Gaston came out around the kiosk and we had to walk off real fast.
 He didn't know the meaning of fear, Toad.  He didn't know the meaning of anything.  He didn't know the meaning of three.
 After that it would have been better to avoid the place--certainly we bought our newspapers elsewhere--but some combination of sleepwalking and daring and yearning after Gabrielle's buns brought us along the same street some days later.  There were customers at his counter anyway and we were passing along behind when Toad suddenly woke up and said, "Fuck!  Where's Gaston?"
 "Touch wood," I said and, all unconscious, I rapped on the door with a passing knuckle--at which Gaston opened it sharply, just a crack but enough to show us an eternal snapshot of Gabrielle, bent toward the people she was serving at the counter with her overalls at her knees while Gaston, ostensibly crowded behind her in the cramped space, was in fact, well, need I say?  Her cheeks were vast, flour-white-pimpled-with-blue-goose-flesh, monumental.