The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (32 page)

Lydia and I awoke the following morning, showered in the adjoining bathroom, dressed from our suitcases, and went out to explore the house. The house was vast, bright, and silent. Hand in hand, we wandered through the impeccably clean wood-floored and white-walled hallways. There was a lot of art on the walls. The excessive bigness, brightness, and cleanliness of the house made it a pleasant but strangely unhomelike place to be in. A giant upside-down cone of a chandelier hung from the high ceiling over the cavernous living room, which was made entirely out of real deer’s antlers linked together in a thorny spiraling tessellation. A wide staircase wrapped around half of the space and gracefully spilled into the room, moving us through the house less like wood than water. The staircase was like a wooden waterfall, a cascade of frozen visible music. The interior spaces of this house, in contrast to the rigid, boxy architecture I was used to—which always makes it seem like the architect’s top priority was to keep the lineaments between one room and another crystal clear—flowed in such a way that all the rooms melted smoothly together. At the bottom of the stairs, beneath the antler chandelier, a furry white rug lay on the wooden floor, and several white and brown couches and armchairs assembled around a low glass table beside a flagstone fireplace that contained a glass window, behind which the smooth flames of a gas fire burned in silence. Above the fireplace hung an oil painting of a group of cowboys riding muscular white horses across a snowy plain, with mountains in the background, and a storm threatening overhead in the top right corner. The walls to the left and right of the fireplace consisted of towering windows that filled the room with blinding bright light. Outside these windows, the earth all around the house crested into hundreds of cragged peaks, pink slabs of rock with clusters of pine trees between them, all powdered with bright snow. I had never seen mountains before. The light in the sharp blue sky was amazingly bright.

Dudley Lawrence sat in one of the white armchairs beside the glassed-in silent fire. He had not noticed us descending the stairs, noiselessly, in our socks. He was reading a newspaper and smiling to himself. His face looked like it smiled perpetually. He was barefoot in blue jeans and a blue denim shirt, from the open neck of which his white chest hair burst forth, and he wore reading glasses to see the paper. It was still quite early in the morning, but he looked as alert as if he had already been awake for hours. This man was a living illustration of wholesomeness, happiness, and vitality. Lydia and I were still damp-headed from the shower, and wearing clothes that were rumpled from being compressed two days in our suitcases.

Dudley Lawrence noticed us, looked up, snapped the newspaper in half backward and threw it on the side table next to the chair. Then he stood up, and I saw the giant decorative brass belt buckle that connected the lower half of him to the upper half. He radiated robustness and cheer. His white mustache lived inside of his smile like a snail lives in its shell. He opened his lean, strong, denim-clad arms to us.

“Mornin’!” he roared. “Welcome to the ranch!”

A
fter our reunions and obligatory small talk, Dudley Lawrence clapped his hands and rubbed them rapidly together with friction vigorous enough to start a fire had there been kindling between his palms, and thereupon conducted us into the dining room, where Lydia and I sat at one end of a long dining table, a maroon mahogany oblong polished so sleek as to reflect images as sharply as a still lake. Mr. Lawrence sat at the head of the table, which was already set for seven. Nearby, from the adjoining kitchen, emanated the smells and noises of cooking. The woman who had opened the door for us late last night brought us a carafe full of coffee and a pitcher of orange juice and set them on the table, to join the glass pitcher of water already on the table.

“Thank you, Rita,” said Mr. Lawrence from beneath his white mustache, and the woman answered with a barely perceptible nod and returned to the kitchen. Presently we were joined by Regina Lawrence, full-bosomed and resplendent in a flowing white Christ-like garment that billowed breezily around her body, her white-streaked red hair twisted into a long braid behind her, with three fully dressed chimps. Two of them were holding hands, and one of them held Mrs. Lawrence’s hand.

The three chimps were named Hilarious Larry, Hilarious Lily, and Clever Hands. Informally: Larry, Lily, and Clever. All of them were older than me (I was still in my adolescence). For the most part they all walked upright, though Larry, the biggest and oldest of them—he was over forty!—still occasionally regressed to the déclassé habit of knuckle-walking. Larry was a huge, fat, dark-furred chimp. He wore a red-and-black-checked flannel shirt and jeans, like a lumberjack. Lily, the female, was smaller and lighter, and wore a blue dress with white polka dots and a silver crucifix around her neck. Clever was twenty-five years old when I met him—about my age now—and he was smaller and shyer than Larry and Lily. Clever was an introvert, a dreamer. He was carelessly dressed in a red T-shirt and sweatpants. Clever had been the subject of a previous—and failed—language acquisition experiment (this I will get into later, Gwen) who had been “retired” to the ranch. None of them could speak, but they were all quiet, civilized, and fairly well behaved in human society.

We sat down at the table, and Rita served breakfast: spinach quiche, with toast and croissants, butter, and jam. It was delicious. The noises of chewing and slurping and of forks tinkling against plates filled the bright room. Regina, a big-personalitied and loquacious woman, did most of the talking, but her husband seemed to be closely monitoring the conversation from behind the bristly white ramparts of his mustaches.

“We founded the ranch and the organization over ten years ago,” she said. “Just after Dudley and I were married.” Her husband nodded over his coffee cup in verification of this information. “We wanted to do something kind for the animals. Provide a safe haven. Larry and Lily were the first chimps we brought to the ranch. Hilarious Larry was a circus chimp. He was captured as an infant in the Congo. They probably had to kill his parents to catch him. He’s an old chimp, now. He’s the dominant male of our little group. He’s been through a lot of bad luck in his life.”

Hilarious Larry, stonefaced and indifferent, shoved a forkload of quiche into his mouth and took a sip of orange juice.

“They made him wear a clown suit and ride a tricycle,” said Mrs. Lawrence. “He did tricks, he juggled. He would smoke cigars and drink brandy, and everybody laughed when he fell down drunk. When he was young, they removed his teeth, so he couldn’t bite.”

“Oh, my God—,” Lydia said, her hand instinctively rising to her mouth.

“We had him fitted with dentures,” said Mrs. Lawrence. Hilarious Larry smiled sardonically, showing us his false teeth. She went on: “Then the circus acquired a female chimp to be his ‘wife.’ That’s Lily. Lily was originally one of the chimps Bill Lemon raised for cross-fostering experiments in Norman, Oklahoma.” Lydia nodded. “Lily is deeply religious. She was raised in the home of a woman who brought her up Catholic—she was baptized, she had her first communion. Dudley and I aren’t religious, but we respect her faith. That’s why we built a chapel for her on the ranch. Lily goes there to pray almost every day. Rita takes her to confession on Sundays at the Catholic church in Montrose. She always feels better after she’s confessed her sins.” (I silently wondered how much sin Lily could possibly accumulate in her life of idleness on the ranch.) “The woman who had had her baptized eventually gave her back to Bill Lemon. A few years later, Lemon ran out of money and started selling off his chimps. That was in the seventies. Most of them went to biomedical research facilities. Lily went to the circus. I don’t know which is worse. They billed them as a husband-and-wife chimp act, ‘Hilarious Larry’ and ‘Hilarious Lily.’ It was disgusting. They carted them around the country in a cage in horrible conditions, dressed them up in degrading clothes, forced them to perform tricks. They were given no compensation. They were slaves. They made them sit down to ‘tea’ at a table, with a little tea set. Hilarious Larry juggled and rode his tricycle. They trained Lily
to do an Arabian striptease act. They would make them sit in a set made to look like a Bedouin tent, and Larry would wear a turban and sit and clap as she took off her pink scarves, the dance of the seven veils… and they would play that awful music….”

Rita gradually galumphed into the room to collect our dishes. Mr. Lawrence thanked her, and she refreshed our beverages. Hilarious Larry tilted back in his chair and began picking at his false teeth. Larry lazily radiated the air of a comfortably entitled patriarch. Clever Hands stared out the window at the sparkling pockets of mountain snow in the near distance. For her part, Hilarious Lily gazed absently, not out the window like Clever, but into a knot of nothingness floating somewhere above my left shoulder—thinking, presumably, of God.

“We acquired Larry and Lily together from the circus not long after we bought this ranch and started the foundation,” said Mrs. Lawrence. “They’ve been with us for ten years. We consider them family. We bought Clever a few years later.” Clever’s interest in the conversation perked up slightly at the sound of his name. “And Clever of course you know, if only by reputation. He’s modest. He doesn’t even realize how famous he once was.”

Clever shrugged humbly and smiled, then resumed his staring out the window. It was clear that although he couldn’t talk, Clever essentially understood human conversation. His was a silence not of any cunning, or fear, but of listening.

“After he was retired from the language acquisition experiments,” Mrs. Lawrence continued, “he was passed from one place to another until he eventually wound up at a wildlife sanctuary in Texas, where he was the only chimp. A social animal—alone. It was as if he had been imprisoned in solitary confinement, and never told what crime he was charged with. He went insane from loneliness and boredom. His hair was falling out. We bought him four years ago and brought him here to the ranch. He’s been so
much happier since he’s been given back his freedom and has Larry and Lily to play with.”

As his wife spoke Dudley Lawrence was tilting back in his chair, rocking it with his foot, and twiddling the ends of his mustache. I looked from Mr. Lawrence to Larry and back again, and gathered at once where my fellow enculturated chimp had picked up his mannerisms. Larry behaved much like an oldest and beloved son, imitating his father. Then Mr. Lawrence wrapped his hands together behind his shiny bald head and began to move his elbows symmetrically in and out, like the wings of a butterfly, and soon thereafter Larry—probably subconsciously—copied these postures and motions as well.

I heard from somewhere nearby an unnerving clicking noise. I looked in the direction from whence I perceived the noise: what I had heard was the sound of a dog’s toenails clicking on the wooden floors, a sound that heralded the approach of the dog that made it. It was a medium-sized and intensely furry black and gray dog, with sweet wet black marbles for eyes and a blue bandana knotted around its neck like a bandit’s.

“Hey, Sukie,” Mr. Lawrence affectionately intoned upon the entrance of the dog. He decanted the angle of his chair until each of its four legs was again in contact with the floor. The dog clicked its way across the floor and rested its furry head on Mr. Lawrence’s knee.

I was startled at the sight of this animal. I had never before been in such close contact with a dog—at least not in an interior space. I had seen them in parks in Chicago before, but always at a distance, for ordinarily creatures of the canine ilk were distrustful of me and tended to keep their distance. Not this dog, though. Apparently this dog was accustomed to cohabiting not only with humans but also with enculturated chimps, and thus was not put off by my unusual appearance. Noticing me sitting not far away
from its master, this dog soon lifted its servile and loving head from the cushion of Mr. Lawrence’s leg, and came clicking and panting directly up to me. I recoiled, not from disgust as much as confusion and alarm. Lydia sensed my discomfort.

“Is he friendly?” asked Lydia.

“She’s perfectly friendly,” Mr. Lawrence said. “She loves to play with chimps.”

Lydia reached out to the dog and stroked the thick glossy fur on top of the beast’s head, and this
Canis lupus familiaris
answered her gesture with an unmistakable smile. Then the dog returned its attention to me. Following Lydia’s example, I reached my hand out, tentatively, to make physical contact with the animal. The hair on top of its head was warm, soft, downy. Suddenly, it
licked my hand
, and I jerked it back in shock. Lydia laughed.

“It’s okay, Bruno,” she said. “Relax. She won’t hurt you.”

Such a strange feeling, that ridiculous little tongue against my flesh, like a flat wet rough worm. The dog nudged my leg with its slimy nose. I felt my heartbeat quicken. The dog tried to lick me again. I tried to push it away, but it continued to lick me.

“She won’t hurt you, Bruno,” said Lydia. “Let her lick you.”

Let her lick you
: does that sentence, in or out of context, I don’t care, not strike you as strange? And yet—Bruno bravely consented to offer this creature his palm, and she (I suppose I should begin applying a gendered pronoun to her, though Sukie was still an “it” to me) slurped at his skin, as if she derived the greatest of earthly pleasures from licking things. To her, life must simply have been a grand procession of things to lick, as if the whole corporeal world were divided into two camps: things licked and things left yet to lick—and the unlicked life was not worth living. She kept licking me, and I even grew, before long, to like it. Thus was my introduction to the concept of “pet.”