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.
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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.
Also, I forgot to mention that there was also a closet in this room (51), containing all sorts of adorable baby clothes—all obviously unworn!
XI
Lydia took me back to the lab at the University of Chicago nearly every day, except on the weekends. The home was the domestic domain, the domain of Lydia, the domain of comfort, of leisure, of pleasure, of love. The lab was Norm’s domain: the man’s domain, the cold hard domain of work. But the lab was a much more tolerable place to spend my days when I knew that at the ends of them I had a comfortable human home to return to with Lydia. The tests continued. All their “language training” continued unabated. The naming of things, the plastic tokens, the stuffed animals, and all the rest of it. I performed their tasks for them, mostly in a state of complacent boredom. I performed their tasks correctly more and more often. As soon as I had one of their tasks down cold, they introduced another. I chose to learn them quickly, simply so that I wouldn’t have to suffer through the boredom of making them repeat their brain-numbingly dull procedures ad nauseam. But the lion’s share of the “work” I did with Lydia was unstructured; it occurred simply in the process of ordinary quotidian life, which of course occurred all the time, not officially beginning when we entered the lab and ending when we left it.
Life at home was cheery and domestic. Every day after we came home from the lab and on the weekends, she would spend hours speaking to me. She experimented with various stimuli—games, puzzles, dolls, flash cards, generally adhering to the Montessori method of pedagogy—unhurried, loosely structured, compassionate nurturing. In the evenings I would “help” her cook, and we ate together. I learned to eat sitting at the table in a chair on top of a stack of phone books, using a fork and knife for solids and a spoon for liquids, and later in the night I would curl up in her lap while she read to me from one of my picture books, clearly articulating the words as she traced them one by one with her finger, and I listened to the words and looked at the words, gradually beginning to learn to attach visual to auditory, signifier to signified.
When she had to leave the house alone, she would put me in my crib and fasten a plastic covering to the top to keep me out of trouble until she returned. But aside from that we were rarely apart, and seldom out of earshot. Gradually, as I became more civilized, she came to trust me enough to let me roam the house by myself when she was out, and I whiled away my time alone by perusing my picture books or watching television, though she told me not to do too much of that because it would rot my brain.
The one small subversive thing I would do when she was out—when I sat there watching TV alone—was to crack open the TV’s remote control to get at its nine-volt battery, which I would gingerly touch to the surface of my tongue to feel a mild but thrilling little fuzzy electric shock. I also loved the coppery aftertaste. I would touch the battery to my tongue again and again.
My favorite program was Sesame Street, which was fine with Lydia because it was covertly educational. And indeed I learned many fundamentals from Sesame Street: how to count to ten, the colors of the alphabet, why not to eat cookies in bed. I particularly adored the segments dealing with Bert and Ernie. I was always rooting for Ernie, the freewheeling embodiment of the id, whom Bert, his stern superego, is forever trying to repress with his uptight inhibitions. Ernie, so naïve, squat, and orange; and Bert, with his yellow napiform head and scraggly black unibrow so quick to V in anger… But Bert is also wise in his own weltschmerzy way, and the two of them usually wind up learning something from each other. Every episode left Ernie a little less innocent and Bert a little more, making me wonder if someday their personalities might meet in the middle, when both achieve a self-actualized balance of wisdom and joy. Through Bert’s admonitions Ernie would come to understand something important, usually relating to his own hygiene or personal safety, and Ernie would sometimes broaden Bert’s mind a little with his energetic love of life, like in the episode in which they go fishing, and Ernie teaches Bert his shamanistic trick of invoking the fishes to simply leap out of the water and into their boat by vocal commands alone, by the awesome thaumaturgy of mere language.
I watched Sesame Street ritualistically every morning before Lydia took me to the lab. It began my day, providing a transition period from my dream state to my wakeful consciousness. If I got up before Lydia did I would report first to the television, to check in on the Muppet-populated universe of Sesame Street. In Sesame Street, as in much children’s entertainment, it is seen as perfectly natural that human beings should freely verbally communicate with nonhuman creatures.
Often, if I happened to rise early enough, I caught a show that preceded Sesame Street on weekdays, called Francis the Gnome. This was an animated series about a gnome named Francis who lived with his matronly gnome wife in a rustic home fashioned from
the hollow of a tree in what appeared to be a temperate pine forest somewhere in North America. Francis wore a pointed green hat and a long white beard with a Tolstoyan fork. Francis served as doctor to the animals of the forest. He did good deeds for woodland animals in trouble: releasing them from hunters’ traps, nursing them back to health when they took sick. Francis was at home in nature. He too communed with the animals.
So I would watch cartoons on TV early in the morning before Lydia got up, licking a nine-volt battery over and over and over.
Lydia also provided me with lots of puffy colorful plastic cases containing videotapes of animated films for me to watch. I appreciated all the Disney films, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Cinderella, The Sword in the Stone and Robin Hood—but obviously, as it touched on certain core thematic elements of my life, my favorite by far was Pinocchio. The literary characters with whom I most strongly identify are Caliban, Woyzeck, Milton’s Satan, and Pinocchio. Pinocchio is perhaps the most important of these. Even at the time I may have associated Lydia with the beautiful blue fairy who floats in through Geppetto’s window to bestow consciousness upon the puppet with a touch of her magic wand.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 10
