"I understand. Of course." Basil Remington frowned gravely, wisely, Scotchly, as he tickled the receiver with his moustache. "No, I'd not worry about Miss Porter--at all now, my dear Polluck. We had a very pleasant session." He looked with pride at his newest artistic endeavor, drying neatly on the easel. It had been about twenty hours since Megan Porter had left his little cottage, and he had worked hard during most of them to put the finishing touches on her portrait.
"It's the best work I've yet done," he crowed into the phone. "What's that...why Missus Polluck, is that jealousy in your voice? If you want me to paint you as well, just say...Ha! I didn't think you would, m'dear. Yes, I suppose I am impossible when I'm like this. So why call me? Never fear, young Miss Porter will be coming along, soon enough. All right, m'dear, you too. Good night, luv."
He put down the phone and turned once more to his masterpiece, giving it his full attention for the twentieth time in the last hour. "Oh, Basil, Basil, you are good." There she was, sitting half-concealed behind an easel of her own, and looking directly out at him with her caramel bedroom eyes and her golden ringlets gathered behind her head. He had caught her in a moment of intense artistic concentration, biting half of her lower lip and scratching her head with the handle of her own brush. Here and there, streaks of blue and green paint were smeared across her otherwise spotless face and low-cut, but otherwise modest, blue dress.
All of it was precisely correct, he thought--a better image of her than any photograph could manage--except, of course, for the obvious. For this version of Megan Porter was roughly twice the heft and substance of the woman who had come to have her portrait painted yesterday. "Miss Porker," he said again, and chuckled. She very nearly burst from her blue dress, from above, its fabric ran like water over her sloping, widened middle and between her bulky, dimpled legs. He was glad she had this dress, as it would continue to be kind to her figure once the changes he had painted had begun to take effect. Oh yes, he thought. Miss Megan Porter would soon be a very fat woman indeed.
He laughed. He had even called her "Miss Porker," and even that hadn't given the game away. He felt a lot less guilty, he realized, about the teachers. The students were, often enough airheads who had been shallow and vain and needed to be taught the unique sort of lesson that was his specialty. But they were so young, so trusting, so...without agency. Their parents had been told what a fine opportunity their daughter was receiving, and the poor, slim, silly things hadn't had a choice in the matter. There had been one girl, he knew, who had not availed herself of the...unique option offered to Buttercombe students after graduation, and who had committed suicide after graduation when she couldn't get a date or lose the weight. But most of them did take the unique option, and were, he supposed, the happier for it. Still...he felt conflicted at times.
He looked again at "Miss Porker's" face, where bright golden curls traced their way past an ear to the beginnings of a triple chin. "Then there's you, Megan. You teachers practically knock down my door begging to be a bit more...rubenesque--even if you don't yet know that that's what you want. And I comply." Not a twinge of guilt, though, if he looked for long enough, the expression on Megan's fat face seemed almost to accuse him.
He looked at a few of the other paintings--of the freshmen--that he had finished in September. One of them, he thought--had her name been Raquel--was quite nearly as thin as the girl who had shyly, self-consciously, stood in his cabin for her portrait a few months ago. That meant that the real Raquel must have packed on the pounds with even more gusto than the average Buttercombe student. The painting would, soon enough, be ready to be brought to her, he thought. Other freshmen, who looked a bit more obese in their paintings (none so much so as Megan), were all coming along as well. It always made Basil sorry to see his masterpieces shrivel on canvas to the sizes the girls had been before coming to Buttercombe, but he knew that was the entire point. And he was always rewarded for having to see his masterpiece destroyed when he would come to campus and deliver it personally to the girl who had been his model, and who had, by that time, taken on the exact proportions which the girl in the painting had lost. They--the Buttercombe girls--were his true masterpieces. It would be so sweetly satisfying, he thought, in seven months' time or so, to give this painting to Miss Porter. Both would, of course, during the interim, slowly exchange shapes, so that he would be delivering a picture of a thin, leggy woman in a blue dress to a living, three-dimensional "Miss Porker," all curls and corpulence. She would, of course, blush (as most of them did), and then make some joke about how that all seemed so long ago.
And back in his cottage, he would laugh.
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