Dr. Lafouche shook his head. “No. Nothing like that,” he said. “It’s your health, actually. I’m a bit worried about your weight. I think we really should do something about it.”
Fatty sagged in his chair.
“Oh,” he said. Then, after a pause: “Oh that.”
“Yes,” said Dr. Lafouche, looking at a record sheet in front of him. “Your weight has been going up and up. This trip to Ireland probably didn’t help much. One always puts on weight on holiday. But you really should tackle it for the sake of your heart.”
“I see,” said Fatty. “You know, I don’t feel overweight. I know I might look a bit on the stout side, but I feel quite good, you know.”
Dr. Lafouche sighed. “You may feel all right, but think about all the extra work your poor heart is doing. Thump, thump – all that weight to carry around. Thump, thump. Hearts are only human, you know. They feel it too.”
Fatty was silent. He looked at the doctor mutely. When would the dreaded word “diet” be uttered? Doctors always put you on a diet sooner or later, even an unfussy doctor like Lafouche, who liked to drink and buy antiques. Sooner or later their training got to them and they remembered that they were supposed to put everybody on a diet.
“I think the only way for you to tackle this is to go on a course,” said Dr. Lafouche. “There’s a place not far out of town which has recently opened up. It’s run by a Dr. Herb Meyer, a highly qualified gastro-intestinal-colonic-hepaticologist. He’s very good, I believe. The clinic is residential. Nice grounds. You spend a week or two there and they turn things round. They–”
“You mean they starve you,” Fatty interjected.
Dr. Lafouche laughed. “There’s no need to starve,” he countered. “All they do is change the way you think about food. They train you to eat more healthily. In fact, you’ll probably find some of their menus pretty tasty. Those people can do things with lettuce–”
“I don’t know,” said Fatty. “I’ve just been away, and now to go away again.”
“It’s for your own good,” said Dr. Lafouche. “It’s better going to the clinic than going off to the hospital for weeks and weeks.”
“It’s a fat farm,” said Fatty, miserably. “That’s what it is. You want to send me to a fat farm.”
“Well,” said Dr. Lafouche, “that’s not a term I’d use. But they do a good job, whatever you call them.”
“Are you really insisting that I go?” asked Fatty quietly. “Doctor’s orders?”
Dr. Lafouche pursed his lips. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “I really must recommend it most strongly. Why not give it a try? See if it helps.”
Fatty sat in silence. He had read in the paper about this new clinic, but had turned the page over quickly, in the way in which one does when confronted with pictures of train disasters or other scenes of human suffering. Now his ostrich-like attitude was catching up with him, and he was to enter the clinic portals himself. Oh! he thought, and then Oh! again.
12
BETTY DROVE A PENSIVE FATTY to the Meyer Clinic. It was a pleasant day and the Ozarks were at their best: a limestone landscape of short distances and quiet valleys, but Fatty seemed impervious to the charms of his surroundings. He felt as one might feel on the way to root-canal treatment at the hands of a dentist whose supplies of dental anaesthetic had run out. He did not even recall giving final and unambiguous consent to the undertaking. Dr. Lafouche had telephoned and booked him in there and then, taking Fatty’s silence as an indication of his willingness to undergo the treatment. And then it was too late: once the booking had been made, Fatty was committed. His American Express card number had been taken and to the not inconsiderable expense of the purchase of the horse had been added the outrageous cost of two weeks in the Meyer Clinic (immediately debited and completely non-refundable). This was nine thousand dollars, which would not include extras. No mention was made of bar bills, presumably, Fatty reflected, because there would be nothing to drink.
The clinic had sent him what they described as a “welcome pack,” which Fatty had browsed with a growing sense of doom. On the front page there was a picture of Dr. Herb Meyer himself, a man in his early sixties with dark hair neatly parted down the middle and the eyes of a fanatic – or so Fatty thought. Here was a man who had clearly never enjoyed the pleasure of a generous T-bone steak, nor ploughed his way through a delicious plate of tagliatelle, liberally doused in melted butter and topped with genuine Parmigiano Reggiano. Here was a face which had never known the olfactory pleasures of a sizzling barbecue, accompanied by the tactile delights of a chilled can of high-calorie beer in one’s hand. None of this in such a life! Instead, a life of lettuce and light salad dressing! Poor man, thought Fatty, for a moment even feeling a rush of sympathy for Dr. Meyer.
After the picture of Dr. Meyer, there followed photographs of the clinic’s various rooms. Here was the games room in which two patients appeared to be playing a lacklustre game of table tennis. They held their paddles weakly, as one might after a few days of Dr. Meyer’s regime, and Fatty noted the spare folds of skin about their necks, once filled, no doubt, by life-sustaining adipose deposits but now empty and quite de trop. Then there were pictures of the colonic irrigation room, with its threatening hoses and sluices, the counselling room – very similar to the front room of a funeral parlour – complete with boxes of tissues to deal with the distress of being in the clinic, and finally a picture of the entire staff lined up in serried ranks behind Dr. Meyer, each one of them clad in white jackets of the sort popularly supposed to be worn by the attendants in psychiatric institutions.
“Oh, Betty,” groaned Fatty. “Why do I have to go to this place? What have I done to deserve this?”
“Eaten too much,” replied Betty, cheerfully.
Fatty was shocked by her levity, but the idea for a clever remark came to him and he quickly passed over his sense of betrayal.
“Et tu, Betty!” he said, pausing for her reaction to his erudite reference.
Betty looked blank. “Ate what too?”
“No, not ate, or eat, but et. The Latin word for and. I learned it at Notre Dame. And tu means you. You too! This is what Caesar said when he saw that his friend Brutus was one of the conspirators who stabbed him. He said, Et tu, Brute! That’s what he said.”
“But what’s that got to do with eating?” asked Betty. She thought that she understood Fatty – and generally she did – but on occasion he seemed to drift off into irrelevancies.
Now, slumped in the passenger seat of their car, while Betty drove calmly along the quiet rural back road, Fatty moved from anxiety to resignation. If this had to happen, then he would let it happen. He would simply think about being elsewhere and imagine himself doing something else, the tactic he had adopted during his humiliating experience in the bath in Ireland. So, while Dr. Meyer tormented him with whatever indignities he was preparing for him, he would simply think about great meals he had had in the past. He would imagine the lettuce leaves to be slivers of wafer-thin Parma ham; he would close his eyes and imagine the carrots to be spears of asparagus dipped in butter. And anything they sought to do to him with hoses, or any saunas in which they caged him, would be but the imaginary buffeting of the elements on a restaurant-hike through France, one of those extraordinary organised tours which Fatty had read about in which the hikers made their way from restaurant to restaurant through the Normandy countryside. With this attitude, nothing could harm him, and he smiled as he reflected on the new armour in which he had clad himself.
“Thinking of something funny?” asked Betty.
“No,” said Fatty, still smiling. “Just thinking of how the last laugh is going to be on me. These people may think they’re going to wear me down, but the O’Learys are made of sterner stuff than that.”
“That’s the spirit, Fatty,” said Betty. “That’s the spirit that’s made this country what it is.”
But when a sign for the clinic appeared at the side of the road, Fatty’s brief eleva
tion of mood was rapidly deflated and he shrank visibly back in his seat. Betty, noticing this, took one hand off the wheel and patted him gently on the knee.
“Don’t worry, Fatty,” she said. “It’s only two weeks, and then, when you come back, we can go out and have a lovely celebration dinner somewhere.”
In the clinic, abandoned by Betty, Fatty was shown to his room. He was pleasantly surprised by its comfort and by the view it afforded of the grounds, with their trees and lawns. In addition to the bed and wardrobe, there was a writing desk, an easy chair, and a small exercise bicycle. On the walls there were pictures designed to offend no tastes: a van Gogh hayfield, a picture of two lovers strolling arm in arm along what looked like the banks of the Seine, and an old state map.
Fatty had just finished unpacking his suitcase when there came a knock on the door and he found himself facing a nurse, a chart tucked under her arm.
“Mr. O’Leary,” she said, “I have come to weigh you in. Do you mind?”
She pointed to the set of scales next to the exercise bicycle. Fatty took a deep breath and nodded. Then, in his stockinged feet, he stepped gingerly onto the scales. He did not cast his eye downward, but looked up instead at the ceiling whence his help might come, but there was none – only the sharp intake of breath of the nurse as she read the figures and noted them on her chart.
“Well, Mr. O’Leary,” she said. “You can step off the scales now.”
They moved back into the bedroom, where the nurse extracted a large pair of callipers from a bag. Then, having asked Fatty to pull up his shirt to reveal his midriff, she opened the jaws of the callipers and pinched his flesh. Fatty winced, and closed his eyes; he had been in the clinic no more than fifteen minutes and the indignities had begun. So might the souls in Purgatory be inducted into their regime: their suffering so much less than those consigned to Hell – callipers, perhaps, rather than heated tongs, but suffering nonetheless.
Her survey of Fatty completed, the nurse now invited him to accompany her to meet Dr. Meyer, who would take a full medical history and who would prescribe his treatment over the next two weeks. Meekly, Fatty followed her down the sterile corridor to the door ominously marked with the Meyer name.
“Just knock,” said the nurse. “Dr. Meyer is expecting you.”
Fatty raised a trembling hand to the door and prepared to knock, but at that precise moment the door was opened from within and he found himself confronted by the man whose photograph he had seen on the clinic’s pamphlet: Dr. Herbert H. Meyer, M.D., Ph.D.
“Mr. O’Leary?” said the doctor, stepping aside to allow Fatty to enter the room. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, sir.”
Fatty shook hands with the doctor, feeling his thin, cold hand in his and catching for a moment the scent of cloves.
Dr. Meyer gestured to a chair and invited Fatty to sit down.
“You walked directly from your room?” Dr. Meyer asked. “From Wing B?”
Fatty nodded. “With the nurse,” he said. “She told me you were expecting me.”
Over the next fifteen minutes, Dr. Meyer took Fatty’s medical history and quizzed him about his eating habits. The latter involved searching questions and, on occasion, direct challenges to the veracity of Fatty’s estimates.
“Only one helping of dessert, Mr. O’Leary? Are you sure of that?”
The tone was that of a skilled interrogator or a persistent prosecutor breaking down the defendant’s story.
“And cake? Mr. O’Leary? What about cake? Up to seven hundred calories per slice?”
At the end, Fatty, sweating with anxiety, noticed that his hands were shaking. Dr. Meyer was watching him closely and suddenly announced that he would have to leave the room for a few minutes to check on one of the other patients.
“Nurse Maggio will come in,” he said. “She will look after you while I’m out of the room. She will offer you an herbal tea.”
He pressed a button on his desk and after a few moments the nurse who had accompanied Fatty from his room came through the door. Fatty accepted her offer of herbal tea, and while she prepared the infusion she talked to him in a gentle, friendly fashion.
“Dr. Meyer’s been asking you about food?” she said. “That’s what he usually does.”
Fatty nodded. “Searching questions,” he said. “Fairly intimidating.”
“Dear, dear,” said Nurse Maggio. “I wish that he would be more gentle with the patients.”
Fatty smiled. “It’s his job, I suppose,” he said.
Nurse Maggio handed him the mug of camomile tea.
“And cake?” she said casually. “Did he mention cake?”
“Yes,” said Fatty ruefully. “He mentioned cake.”
The nurse laughed. “And I suppose you told him that you always only had one slice rather than two? And you said that you had never heard of Betty Crocker?”
“Yes,” said Fatty. “I suppose that I rather misled him on the cake. I said–”
He stopped. The awful realisation, vivid and overwhelming in its implications, had just dawned on him. He had fallen for the oldest trick in the interrogator’s book: the nice cop, nasty cop routine. The hard questions come from the nasty cop who is then replaced for a while by the nice cop. The suspect, relieved at the sympathetic tone of the nice cop’s remarks, lets slip the truth, just as he had now done. Now it was too late! He had told the nurse the truth, and that would get right back to Dr. Meyer.
“I see,” said the nurse. “Two slices? And chocolate? Did he ask you about chocolate?”
Fatty said nothing, but took a sip of his camomile tea. He did not have to reply. He could keep silent, as the constitution allowed him. Or, he could turn the tables on his interrogators and ask them about themselves.
“Let’s stop talking about me,” he said at last. “Tell me about yourself, Nurse Maggio. Do you like chocolate?”
The nurse stiffened.
“Chocolate?” she said, her voice strained. “Why would you think I should like chocolate?”
Fatty narrowed his eyes with cunning. It was clear that his question had wrong-footed her.
“Because most people do,” he said. “If they’re honest, they’ll admit to liking chocolate.”
“Not here,” said Nurse Maggio. “We don’t encourage chocolate in the clinic. For obvious reasons.”
“Oh, I can understand that,” said Fatty. “But what about at home? Do you not eat chocolate at home?”
The nurse now began to look flustered. She turned her head and looked at the door.
“I might eat chocolate to some extent,” she said. “Not being an overweight person, I am able to indulge a taste for chocolate now and then. You can’t.”
Fatty bristled with indignation. Who was she to tell him what he could or could not do?
“Why not?” he said loudly. “Why should I not be able to enjoy myself like anybody else? Why should I be made to suffer?”
“Because of your weight,” said Nurse Maggio primly. “I’m sorry to have to say this, Mr. O’Leary, but it’s because you’re greedy. You’ve just admitted to me that you like to have more than one slice of cake. You said so yourself. I heard you.”
“Ah!” said Fatty. “So you weren’t just making conversation, were you? You’re working for him through there, aren’t you?”
Nurse Maggio laughed. “Of course I’m working for him. That’s my job.”
“Disgusting,” said Fatty. “You try to trick your patients into admitting to things and then you run right back to him, to that miserable calorie counter, and tell him his patient’s secrets.”
Nurse Maggio’s jaw dropped. “You mustn’t call him that,” she hissed. “You are a very rude man, Mr. O’Leary. And, what’s more, I could tell you something about yourself. Oh, I could tell you.”
“You tell me something about myself?” said Fatty angrily. “You? You’ve known me for twenty minutes at the most, and you think that you can tell me something about myself. Well, let’s hear it then. Com
e on!”
Nurse Maggio pointed a finger at Fatty.
“All right,” she said. “Since you ask, I’ll tell you. You know what? I don’t think that you really want to become thin.”
The bombshell released, she sat back in her chair and waited for its effect.
Fatty said nothing for a moment. Then, leaning forward, he placed the mug containing the rest of his herbal tea on the desk and rose to his feet. As he did so, Dr. Meyer silently re-entered the room. Nurse Maggio saw him come in, but Fatty, who was facing the other way, did not.
“You’re right!” said Fatty, his voice raised in defiance. “I have no wish to become thin. I am a fat man; that’s what I am. I am proud of what I am, and unlike so many people these days, I have no intention of trying to be something I am not. God, Nurse Maggio, made fat men and he made thin. He also made some in-between. I am a fat man. I am a happy fat man who enjoys the pleasures of the table. I enjoy the smell of steak, and I enjoy eating it. I love large portions of apple pie with whipped cream. I love pistachio nuts. I enjoy red wine. I could go on: there are many other sorts of food. I am happy. This is my nature, and I am not – I shall not be – ashamed of it. And I shall not allow any calorie-obsessed doctor and his sidekick to make me feel unhappy. I shall not! Not now! Not ever!”
No Roman orator could have spoken with greater dignity, but Cato himself would never have felt such conviction as did Fatty. For a moment, there was a silence such as that which must have followed the address at Gettysburg. But even if Nurse Maggio was, in spite of herself, impressed, this was not so with Dr. Meyer, who took the silence as his signal to reveal his presence. He had been standing quite still, but now stepped forward to refute the heresies to which he had been obliged to listen.
“So!” he said, his reedy nasal voice raised, but nowhere near the strength of Fatty’s stentorian tones. “So, you do not want to become thin! And not only that, but you laugh at those of us who are the correct weight. You even manifest your defiance with insults, which, needless to say, I treat with complete contempt. You stand there and say these things in this very office where I have helped so many people like you. You stand there and roar defiance. How dare you, Mr. O’Leary? How dare you?”