The Thin Man

He was losing weight—not continuously but periodically. At age 76 and 6 feet 3 inches tall, he was only 153 pounds. The Merck Manual, which he had taken to consulting, gives the normal weight range for his height as 153 to 192 pounds, so he was technically within the normal range. But he had become un-American in his thinness. He would look at himself in the mirror and see the strong outline of his ribcage, his legs as long strings, his face gaunt and angular. He had the long mournful face of a basset hound, increasingly resembling his mother, who had died at the age of 101. He consumed vast amounts of food, but his metabolism refused to convert it to additional weight. Not a single commercial on TV told him how to gain weight. Since obesity is the American plague, there is little commercial interest in helping people to gain weight. Everyone suggested milkshakes, rich cookies and cakes, meals of meat and potatoes; but he was of an age when his body could be threatened by high cholesterol and high blood pressure. The fates that controlled his body had him coming and going. After every significant weight loss he submitted himself to X–rays, CAT scans, and MRI’s, hoping not to find a reason in their results, and his hopes were realized.

A friend told him that he saw him as an El Greco, but at the rate he was going he would wind up a Giacometti. Like an old soldier he would simply fade away. Someone who ran into him after a long time in which they had not seen each other remarked how thin he had become: a tactless woman, she said “You look like a cadaver.” He should have replied, “And you look like shit.” But he kept the remark to himself. In a rare newspaper article on the subject of thinness, a thin man reported his experience with a woman who refused to have sex with him for fear that she would break him in two. He had taken defensively to wearing turtlenecks and long pants to conceal his anatomy. His belts required periodic revision to secure his baggy pants around his waist. New holes had to be added from time to time. His wife, who loved him in spite of everything and anything that might happen to him, assured him that thin rats lived longer than fat rats and that he had secured for himself a long life. He would not be consoled: “But I am not a rat.” So she reminded him of the childhood rhyme in which skinny always wins the race. A heavyset friend, the same age as he, had a large belly that he tried in vain to lose. If he could, he said, the heavy-set man would trade places with him. If a procedure could be found for transferring weight, he would eagerly submit to it. He assured his friend that he was good looking despite his belly, and the friend returned the compliment, saying that his face was interesting.

Wintertime made him vulnerable to the cold. His body was like a poorly insulated house, and in fact his own house was poorly insulated. It was an interesting house (vintage Craftsman), the walls of the living room framed by gum and cherry wood and painted white, the kitchen also white with an oven encased in brick. The dining-room table was golden oak, as were the chairs. There were no paintings on the wall—like himself, stripped of ornament. As the days grew colder and the heating system was less effective, he layered himself with a sweater and bathrobe to cope with the pervasive chill. When the outside was bitter cold and he needed exercise, he would walk up and down the stairs. Summertime exposed him to the look of others; he thought twice about wearing short pants and collarless shirts.

He felt an odd kinship with the obese who cannot escape bodily awareness. They see their corpulence as disfigurement. They want to rid themselves of excess. In the eyes of others they are heaps of...