The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (13 page)

To the right of the stereo, angled in such a way as to be optimally viewed from the position of one seated at the work desk beside it, is an eight-by-ten-inch photograph (20) in an unadorned black wooden frame of the readymade, commercially available sort with metal clips in the back and a triangular stand that folds out to prop it up for display at a steep, slightly obtuse angle. Inside the frame, behind the glass, a group of people are gathered together in what appears to be a hermetically sealed vacuum chamber, all staring straight ahead with smiles slathered like butter across the white bread of their faces, the very young and the very old sitting in front and everyone else standing behind them. In the bottom center of the photograph sit two elderly people: a man with a gawkily grinning pink bald head bobbing atop a sinewy neck that pokes out of the collar of his corduroy suit like a baby bird breaking out of its eggshell, his teeth like the yellowing white keys of an old piano and his murky gray-green eyes floating like jellyfish in the thick aquariums of his eyeglasses; his skinny arm is wrapped around the woman sitting beside him dressed in a fuzzy white turtleneck sweater and a red vest, whose skin is rusty with liver spots and whose smile does not reveal her teeth, with a brushed-steel bouffant, pearl earrings, and a matching necklace, whose eyes are smoke-colored and haloed with cataracts, who was clearly a beautiful woman in her youth, and whose dense rosy perfume you can almost smell through the photograph, as if, on the day it was taken, her perfume had been powerful enough to waft through the lens of the camera, seep into the celluloid of the film, and later transfer from the negatives onto the matte-finish color print to finally sublimate through
the glass of the frame and into the nose of the photograph’s viewer. Surrounding these two old people in the center of the image are six adults and five children, the adults standing beside and behind them and the children seated in front, three girls in blue dresses with faces flexing authentic smiles and two boys in matching blue jackets sullenly faking theirs. Of the six adults, four are men and two are women, one of whom is Lydia, though her hair is different and she looks younger. Most of them have blond hair and crooked teeth. These are Lydia’s siblings, of whom she is the youngest. This is her family. They are all dressed in cheap formal wear. A gold Wal-Mart logo peeks out from behind the frame in the bottom left corner of the photograph.

Behind the ellipsoidal cherrywood dining table, directly opposite the front door, a sliding glass door (21) opens onto a small patch of backyard, which features a red brick patio and a square of grass surrounded by low-cut hedges, in which tulips grow in the spring.

At this point the living/dining room spills into a cramped and narrow but serviceable kitchen (22), its perimeter defined by the line where the wood floor becomes tile. (The pattern of the kitchen floor tile is big beige tiles set in a grid with smaller, diamond-shaped tiles of lazulian blue set in every
other
conjuncture of four tile corners. Like this:

.) The kitchen features the following amenities, listed counterclockwise from the northwest corner of the room: pantry (23), counter (24), sink (25), dishwasher (26), counter (27), cabinets (28), oven/stove (29), counter (30), refrigerator (31). The stove is gas; the countertops are of
speckled pink Formica; a coffeemaker, a toaster, and a microwave sit to the left of the sink; the wooden cabinets are built into the wall; a window above the kitchen sink looks out into the backyard and the alley just beyond it; three potted philodendrons stand in a row on the windowsill; the kitchen walls are painted pale yellow. The refrigerator is white, and several magnets cling to the surface of its door, pinning in place some slightly unfocused snapshots of Lydia smiling cameraward in the company of various unidentified friends, relatives, or loved ones.

In one of the photographs, Lydia is sitting in the company of three other women, all of whom appear to be about her age. They are all smiling. They are wearing bright swimwear: indeed, they appear to be wearing little but enough clothing to cover their breasts and genitals; their smiles are wide and seemingly genuine; their eyes are shadowed behind sunglasses. Lydia is wearing a canary yellow swimsuit. The women sit together at a table beneath a pink umbrella, on what looks like the outdoor patio of a restaurant, in a sunny, pleasant place that is very far away from here, both geographically and psychologically. The three other women are holding drinking glasses whose stems slope curvilinearly upward into elaborate shapes, containing unknown liquids, decorated with tiny umbrellas and colorful straws that twist up from the bowls of the glasses. Lydia, situated at the far left of the photograph, is conspicuously the only person in the photograph not holding one of these colorful beverages; in Lydia’s hand there appears to be only an ordinary glass of orange juice. Lydia also looks oddly swollen in the picture, with a considerable belly that looks out of proportion to the rest of her body.

Rounding the corner of the half wall that helps define the boundaries of the kitchen, we pass back through the central living area, which empties into a dim chute of a hallway (32); at the mouth of the hallway the hardwood flooring ends and the dun gray
carpeting begins; this short hallway has four doors: two on the left, one on the right, and one at the very end. The door on the right leads to a small room that a Realtor would call .5 of a bathroom (33): mirror, sink, toilet, shower, and tile floor of the same pattern as the kitchen floor. (I apologize that I have not bothered to render these things in detail.) The door at the very end of the hall leads to the master bedroom (34), or in our case the mistress bedroom, I suppose: Lydia’s room. A wooden four-poster queen-size bed (35) dominates the room; the headboard is pushed flush against the south wall; the bed is probably made and draped with a down lavender comforter. Directly opposite the bed a bookshelf (36), fully stocked with dense and difficult volumes on academic subjects, lines the north wall. The bed is flanked on the right by a sleekly architectonic designer lamp that swivels on a long stalk (37) and on the left by a plain wooden bedside night table (38), and to the left of that, in the corner of the room, stands a sturdy chest of drawers (39). Two more windows in the east wall of the room look onto the street, treated with dark red curtains identical to the ones in the living room. On the south wall of the room hangs a framed print of Charles Demuth’s
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold
. On the bedside night table are an alarm clock (not pictured) and two more framed photographs (40, 41).

The first photograph, vertically oriented, shows Lydia standing in an unknown location, and standing in it with a man, both of them barefoot, their toes partially buried in the wet sand, on what looks like a beach. The wet sand is a jumble of footprints. This photograph is also a synesthetic one, its image easily implying sound and smell, the
skweee-skweee
of seagulls almost audible in it, the brackish seaside air almost olfactible. On a rocky hill in the background behind them stand three whitewashed stone windmills, each successively smaller than the next as the ridge they’re
built on curls into the distance, each windmill with a thatched conical roof and a pinwheel fashioned of rickety wooden spokes. The sky is blue, fading toward the horizon into dusky orange and then purple, and the light on the ground, on the two people themselves, and on the white trunks of the three windmills is sharp and golden, and the shadows are long. The shadow of the anonymous photographer stretches far into the frame across the golden sand. Lydia wears a breezy white shirt and a pair of white pants with a drawstring waistband, the bottom hems of which are rolled up to her knees, and her feet and ankles are covered with sand; the man is also wearing white pants with the bottom hems rolled up, in his case not quite to the knees, and below a line in the middle of his shin all his leg hair is flattened wet against his skin and speckled with sand particles. Lydia’s blond hair is whipping erratically in the wind, although one of her hands is caught in the act of trying to tuck some of her hair behind her ear. But the other hand? The other hand is wrapped around the waist of the man beside her. And the man beside her? I’ll admit that he is probably handsome. I’ll admit that his physique is somewhat Adonis-like, that one might consider him tall and the possessor of arguably chiseled features, that his skin could conceivably be described as tanned and robust. I’m also willing to concede that one of his perceivably lean and muscular arms is depicted in the act of insidiously wrapping itself around Lydia’s torso, and that if one looks closely, the tips of his fingers may in fact be, as is not unequivocally deducible from the image before us, digging slightly beneath the waistline of the pants that Lydia wears in the photograph, where they may or may not be in the process of deftly stroking the ridge of her right hipbone. I’m also perfectly willing to admit that these two people are both smiling in an apparently genuine way as they squint into the setting sun, and I will admit these two people are, perhaps, at least
ostensibly, not impossibly, seemingly outwardly clearly painfully obviously deeply in love. But I will not admit that this photograph ever made me jealous.

In the other photograph, the same two people, Lydia and the mysterious man, are standing in some indoor area; unlike the other, this photograph is not a snapshot but rather has been deliberately, professionally staged. Lydia, barely recognizable in the picture, is wearing a long white dress, blinding white, which spills from her beautiful bare shoulders like a frothing waterfall, and her outfit is accompanied by a white headband with a long diaphanous sheet of fabric sprouting from it and trailing down behind her. The man is standing beside her, again, with his arm planted on Lydia’s opposite hip, wearing black. I know now what this photograph indicated. I didn’t then.

I should note that at some point during the time I lived with Lydia, these two photographs went away.

On the west wall of Lydia’s bedroom you will notice two doors; the door on the right leads to a bathroom (42) larger and better accommodated (tub, shower) than the one accessible from the hallway. The door on the left leads to a walk-in closet (43). (Lydia’s closet! That particular treasury of Venus, that Fort Knox of pure feminine gold, I’ll deal with in greater depth later on.) We leave the master bedroom and reenter the hallway. Open the door to your immediate right. It is a small linen closet (44), of little note. Now open the second door on the right, the last unopened door in the apartment.

The first time I ever passed through this door was on that day I went home with Lydia from the laboratory. I was clinging to her, loving, loved, awed. She opened the door and we went inside. On the other side of the door was (45) Bruno’s room.

My room! My, my, my,
my
room! Mine! My
area
! My
space
! (Do you realize what a godly luxury is the first-person possessive
pronoun applied to physical space?) My own human bedroom in a human home! There was a bed made for me, and the walls were covered with sky-blue wallpaper with pictures of clowns all over it, each clown gripping a cluster of bright balloons, and using it to ascend like Icarus into the stratosphere. A mobile of the solar system dangled on a string above the bed. I loved it. The bed (46) was of the sort designed for very young children, with the mattress sunk at the bottom of an open wooden cage to prevent a human infant from rolling out of it. In the corner of the room there was a toy box (47) erupting with all manner of bright things for me to play with—animals and games and puzzles and so forth. There was a short narrow bookshelf (48) containing a modest library of stimulating picture books, each of which I would with time come to know practically by heart, including (but by no means limited to)
Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, Mickey in the Night Kitchen, Aesop’s Fables
and
A Child’s Garden of Verses
. Then there was a little dresser (49) against the south wall, atop which stood a giant hollow plastic goose (50) with an electric cord running from the back of her and into a wall outlet. This goose was a lamp. I loved that goose. I thought it was so wonderful that a lamp could be shaped like a goose, that such a thing was even possible. You turned on her switch, and she softly glowed from within, the shadow of her long curving neck and beak cast against the ceiling by the light of her own body, driving the terror of darkness from my bedroom at night.

The room was such a bright happy place for a young ape to be, just the right environment of whimsy and childlike wonder to aid the early social and spiritual development of someone standing on the threshold of his entry into human civilization. There were so many interesting things to look at in that room—the wild costumery of all the levitating clowns on the walls, a rectangle of light moving across the wall opposite the window, the hypnotizing
oscillation of the ceiling fan, the books, the toys, the illuminate goose, and, most of all, the mobile of the solar system that dangled from the ceiling above my bed—the movement of its heavenly spheres: in the middle, the sun, that glowing gaseous monster constantly exploding with the energy of ten billion nuclear bombs per second, here pictured in the act of spurting a terrifying arch of flame; then hot little Mercury, a little too close for comfort to the big S; then bright sexy Venus coyly wrapped in her bridal veil of toxic clouds; now our own blue-green dot, teeming with all manner of activity, vegetable, animal, and mineral; then angry red Mars, the coral planet who may have once harbored life; then a dusting of crumbs representing the asteroid belt; then Jupiter, massive, swirling with bloody thunderstorms, a flock of moons reeling round him like indignant desert birds; now Saturn with his hula hoop making him the most visually fascinating of the nine; then Uranus and Neptune, cold blue unfriendly twins; and finally the runty Pluto, so tiny that he’s since been demoted to “dwarf planet” and unceremoniously renamed “134340,” swinging around way out there in the frigid boondocks of the system—all of these wandering stars, careening like drunks on orbits eccentric and elliptical, cogs in the celestial clockwork, all revolving above Bruno’s little bed.