The Belly

The Subject Today will be the metaphysics of obesity and I am the belly of a man named Lawrence Farnsworth. I am the body cavity between his diaphragm and his pelvic floor and I possess his viscera. I know you won't believe me, but if you'll buy a cri de coeur, why not a cri de ventre? I play as large a part in his affairs as any other lights and vitals; and while I can't act independently, he too is at the mercy of such disparate forces in his environment as money and starlight. We were born in the Midwest and he was educated in Chicago. He was on the track team (pole vault) and later on the diving team, two sports that made my existence dangerous and obscure. I did not discover myself until he was in his 40s, when I was recognized by his doctor and his tailor. He stubbornly refused to grant me my rights and continued for almost a year to wear clothes that confined me harshly and caused me much soreness and pain. My one compensation was that I could unzip his fly at will.

I've often heard him say that, having spent the first half of his life running around behind an unruly bowsprit, he seemed damned to spend the rest of his life going around behind a belly that was as independent and capricious as his genitals. I have been, of course, in a position to observe his carnal sport, but I think I won't describe the thousands--or millions--of performances in which I have participated. I am, in spite of my reputation for grossness, truly visionary, and I would like to look past his gymnastics to their consequences, which, from what I hear, are often ecstatic. He seems to feel that his erotic life is an entry permit into what is truly beautiful in the world. Balling in a thunderstorm--any rain will do--is his idea of a total relationship. There have been complaints. I once heard a woman ask: "Will you never understand that there is more to life than sex and nature worship?" Once, when he exclaimed over the beauty of the stars, his belle amie giggled. My open knowledge of the world is confined to the limited incidence of nakedness: bedrooms, showers, beaches, swimming pools, trysts and sun-bathing in the Antilles. The rest of my life is spent in a sort of purdah between his trousers and his shirts.

Having refused to admit my existence for a year or more, he finally had his trousers enlarged from 30 to 34. When I had reached 34 inches and was striving for 36, his feelings about my existence became obsessive. The clash between what he had been and wanted to be and what he had become was serious. When people poked me with their fingers and made jokes about his bay window, his forced laughter could not conceal his rage. He ceased to judge his friends on their wit and intelligence and began to judge them on their waistbands. Why was X so flat and why was Z, with a paunch of at least 40 inches, contented with this state of affairs? When his friends stood, his eyes dropped swiftly from their smiles to their middles. We went one night to Yankee Stadium to see a ball game. He had begun to enjoy himself when he noticed that the right fielder had a good 36 inches. The other fielders and the basemen passed, but the pitcher--an older man--had a definite bulge and two of the umpires--when they took off their guards--were disgusting. So was the catcher. When he realized that he was not watching the ball game--that because of my influence he was unable to watch the ball game--we left. This was at the top of the fourth. A day or two later, he began what was to be a year or a year and a half of hell.

We started with a diet that emphasized water and hard-boiled eggs. He lost ten pounds in a week, but he lost it all in the wrong places and, though my existence was imperiled, I survived. The diet set up some metabolic disturbance and he gave it up at his doctor's suggestion and joined a health club. Three times a week I was tormented on an electric bicycle and a rowing machine and then a masseur would knead me and strike me loudly and cruelly with the flat of his hand. Farnsworth then bought a variety of elastic underpants or girdles that meant to disguise or dismiss me and, while they gave me great pain, they only challenged my invincibility. When they were removed in the evening, I reinstated myself amply in the world I so much love. Soon after this, he bought a contraption that was guaranteed to destroy me. This was a pair of gold-colored plastic shorts that could be inflated by a hand pump. The acidity of the (concluded on page 212) Triad/ The Belly(continued from page 102) secretions I had to refine informed me of how painful and ridiculous he felt. When the shorts were inflated, he read from a book of directions and performed some gymnastics. This was the worst pain to be inflicted on me so far and, when the exercises were finished, my various parts were so abnormally cramped and knotted that we spent a sleepless night.

By this time, I had come to recognize two facts that guaranteed my survival. The first was his detestation of solitary exercise. He liked games well enough, but he did not like gymnastics. Each morning, he would go to the bathroom and touch his toes ten times. His buttocks (there's another story) scraped the washbasin and his forehead grazed the toilet seat. I knew from the secretions that came my way that this experience was spiritually crushing. Later he moved to the country for the summer and took up jogging and weight lifting. While lifting weights, he learned to count in Japanese and Russian, hoping to give this performance some dignity, but he was not successful. Both jogging and weight lifting embarrassed him intensely. The second factor in my favor was his conviction that we lead a simple life. "I really lead a very simple life," he often said. If this were so, I would have no chance for prominence, but there is, I think, no first-class restaurant in Europe, Asia, Africa or the British Isles to which I have not been taken and asked to perform. He often says so. Going after a dish of crickets in Tokyo, he gave me a friendly pat and said, "Do your best, man." So long as he considers this to be a simple life, my place in the world is secure. When I fail him, it is not through malice or intent. After a Homeric dinner with 14 entrees in southern Russia, we spent a night together in the bathroom. This was in Tiflis. I seemed to be threatening his life. It was three in the morning. He was crying with pain. He was weeping and perhaps I know more than any other part of his physique about the true loneliness of this man. "Go away!" he shouted at me. "Go away!" What could be more pitiful and absurd than a naked man at the dog hour in a strange country casting out his vitals? We went to the window to hear the wind in the trees. "Oh, I should have paid more attention to spiritual things," he shouted.

If I were the belly of a secret agent or a reigning prince, my role in the clash of time wouldn't have been any different. I represent time more succinctly than any scarecrow with a scythe. Why should so simple a force as time--told accurately by the clocks in his house--cause him to groan and swear? Did he feel that some specious youthfulness was his principal, his only lure? I know that I reminded him of the pain he suffered in his relationship to his father. His father retired at 55 and spent the rest of his life polishing stones, gardening and trying to learn conversational French from records. He had been a limber and an athletic man, but, like his son, he had been overtaken in the middle of the way by an independent abdomen. He seemed, like his son, to have no capacity to age and fatten gracefully. His paunch, his abdomen, seemed to break his spirit. His abdomen led him to stoop, to walk clumsily, to sigh and to have his trousers enlarged. His abdomen seemed like some precursor of the angel of death, and was Farnsworth, touching his toes in the bathroom each morning, struggling with the same angel?

Then there was the year we traveled. I don't know what drove him, but we went around the world three times in 12 months. He may have thought that travel would heighten his metabolism and diminish my importance. I won't go into the hardships of safety belts and a chaotic eating schedule. We saw all the usual places as well as Nairobi, Madagascar, Mauritius, Bali, New Guinea, New Caledonia and New Zealand. We saw Madang, Goroka, Lee, Rabaul, Fiji, Reykjavik, Thingvellir, Akureyri, Narsarssuak, Kagsiarsuk, Bukhara, Irkutsk, Ulan Bator and the Gobi Desert. Then there were the Galápagos, Patagonia, the Mato Grosso jungle and, of course, the Seychelles and the Amirantes.

It ended or was resolved one night at Passetto's. He began the meal with figs and Parma ham and with this he ate two rolls and butter. After this, he had paghetti alla carbonara, a steak with fried potatoes, a serving of frog's legs, a whole spigola roasted in paper, some chicken breasts, a salad with an oil dressing, three kinds of cheese and a thick zabaglione. Halfway through the meal, he had to give me some leeway, but he was not resentful and I felt that victory might be in sight. When he ordered the zabaglione, I knew that I had won or that we had arrived at a sensible truce. He was not trying to conceal, dismiss or forget me and his secretions were bland. Leaving the table, he had to give me another two inches, so that walking across the piazza I could feel the night wind and hear the fountains, and we've lived happily together ever since.