I need to clarify something here. Lydia wasn’t exactly beautiful. She did not shimmer like those unreachable stars, so many impossible light-years in the distance. She was here, she was plain, she was good, she was earthy. She was mine. But she was not mine. I was hers.
It may be occurring to you, Gwen, that my descriptions of Lydia are inconsistent and often contradictory. One moment she’s dazzling, beatific, and now she’s good and plain and earthy. If her shape shifts it is because memory and perception are fickle mistresses. She was beautiful and she was not beautiful: both these statements are true. You see how well I’ve learned human logic? That’s right—I am the chimp who tapped Pandora’s Box.
But her headaches. Lydia had just experienced her menstrual period, which, as usual, was accompanied by her tempestuous migraine headaches, whose intensity could be only partially dampened with Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets, which caused her insomnia, which was curable only with the extra-strength sleeping pills Lydia kept on hand for the days of monthly torment she was doomed to suffer all her life.
Now this. Look: here lies Lydia—no, not dead, but dead to the world, lying in a motionless—and from the way her eyelids aren’t fluttering with REM, we may assume dreamless—sleep. She’s sweating profusely, because the sleep those gel capsules induce is red, wet, and feverish, like a diseased mouth. The way she is lying on the bed might suggest she fell on it from a tenth-story window. Yes, everything about her posture calls to mind not restful slumber, but a suicide, or some hostile defenestration, lying supine in a crunchy green stardust of broken glass on the sidewalk; she is not, as she usually sleeps, fetally half-curled on her right side, with one hand under the pillow to muffle the thunder of her own amplified heartbeat—no, but on her back she lies, one arm thrown above her head, the other sprawled at an irrational angle across my side of the bed, her legs apart, one outstretched, the other bent. She’s wearing her nightgown, her bone-colored silk nightgown (silk, that texture!), and her bare feet are mouthwateringly desirable, so pale and smooth, her ankles, her insteps florescent with tiny blue hairline veins. In her sweaty drugged sleep, her nightgown has become wadded and crinkled, damply glued to her thighs, and in the night it has ridden up and up her thighs, exposing her legs, reaching almost up to the damp hairy jungle of her crotch.
Now this. Here lies Bruno beside her—not dead, far from it—not even asleep, but wide awake. It is the middle of the night, a rainy night, desultory clusters of raindrops crackling on the roof, and outside the window one can see a murky sky thrown over the city of Chicago like a dirty sheet, the creamy clouds reflecting the light of the city, so that they appear to glow dull orange, as if lit from within. Yes, I am awake, having been stirred to consciousness by uneasy dreams. In the kitchen, the refrigerator quits humming. A clock somewhere is itching out the seconds, slowly driving me insane with sensual desire, the insistent itch-itch-itch of the clock like a tiny finger tickling my loins. The smell of her. The sweat of her feverish druggy sleep smells intoxicant and delicious. She smells more lushly human now than anything this chimp’s nostrils have previously smelt. I take her in, snfffffffffffff. And something, something is happening to me…. My most Darwinian organ is slowly ratcheting to life, itch-itch-itch-itch. My heart is beating faster, boldly ensanguinating this once-harmless tube of flaccid flesh, each successive pump of my wild heart feeding it more blood, the outflow of every beat making it longer and fatter. An errant hand drifts toward the thing, a hand with a flat, elongated palm and a small hooklike opposable thumb, and long purple fingers wrap around it. That smell. Not too long ago I would have been chilled, horrified by the idea of Lydia not being able to wake up from her sleep—in the beginning, I didn’t even believe that humans slept. Not anymore.
That smell. And where, our hero wonders, gazing pruriently upon a completely zonked-out Lydia, is the source of this most human of odors? It is a humid smell—earthy—thick, sultry as a tropical rain forest, oily, metallic, sweet and salty all at once. I am bent over Lydia now, sniffing. I sniff her feet—no, that’s not it. My nose travels up her leg, across tracts of maddeningly soft sticky glabrous flesh—Bruno, the world’s greatest physical anthropologist! Up and up the length of her body my nose travels, that smell growing stronger and stronger—we are approaching the source! And now I have, as in a dream, positioned myself between this woman’s two big beautiful long thick smooth strong human legs, and I am sniffing her thighs. I seem to be almost involuntarily pressing and rubbing my now fully engorged little monster against the sheets. I dive beneath the rumpled hem of her nightgown, as if diving under a tent flap. I am now in an enclosed environment, a ceiling of bone-colored silk sliding along the back of my furry head and a floor of hot heaving flesh beneath me. And the smell is utterly overpowering—intoxicating—choking—possessing—and my face is right in it. Here it is. This is the first time I have seen a real human vulva, in the flesh. I haven’t really even seen them in paintings, before—even the nudes at the Art Institute are always arranged in such a way as to prudishly obscure this mysterious and powerfully odorous yawning animal, this mollusk at the center of existence. How hairy it is! It is shocking! Did you think, Bruno, that all women were like polished marble statues down there? So naïve! How unexpectedly I discover that this oddly nearly hairless creature should have a delta of scraggly black hair decorating her genitals. And the placement of this thing! The female human is the only animal in the kingdom to have such a maddeningly, inconveniently located vagina. Right on the very bottom, exactly in between the legs, the weirdest and most inaccessible spot on the body. I inhale deeply, I sniff and sniff, this smell that is almost sickening in its headiness, its passionate intensity. And my mouth opens. The rosy flaps of my pithecine lips peel back and my tongue rolls out. My tongue reaches out into the darkness—the very same curious worm in my jaw who would later learn to perform the glossal acrobatics of human language—to taste it. And the tongue begins to slurp at this thing, to probe its contours. I love the dark sweetness of Lydia’s body. I want to drink her strong biological wine. It tastes like when I suck on batteries! It has the same fuzzy thrilling coppery-tasting little shock. And the hot somnolent mass that is Lydia begins to respond to this stimulus: from up above I hear a sharp insuck of breath, followed by a slow, staggered release of it. She’s still asleep, you see, but maybe now her brain is groaning with flashes of erotic imagery: the sweaty petals of lusciously colored flowers, sloping desert midnight dunes, waterfalls, glossy-coated panthers… and I, Bruno the incubus, continue to lap at her yonic mollusk, and I feel a languid sleeping hand come to rest on the back of my head and gently press on it through the thin wall of silk fabric, pushing my head downward and in… her breathing quickens… and I realize that what I have been tonguing in fact includes a concavity. It goes inside of her, it is a kind of tunnel. Like Caravaggio’s Thomas the Doubter does to the wound of the resurrected Christ, in disbelief I squelch an inquisitive finger into the folds of the opening: spplt. I stick it in as far as I can reach and still cannot feel the end of the tunnel! I wiggle it around, feeling her inner linings, what’s in here? And when I do, her body goes all gelatinous, begins to quake with spasmodic rumblings of passion. Then I get a really good idea. My penis seems to have an intense desire to be put into something, and this slippery feverish envelope of wet flesh seems to have an intense desire to have something put in it. Aha! Thus I make the Great Leap. I climb up onto her body, burrowing further under the silk tent, now encountering her breasts. I’m just tall enough to reach them with my mouth! I gnaw on them a little, and her nipples inflate instantly, becoming like round pebbles between my lips. Now our genitals are aligned. I jab blindly at the area in question, until I am received—the mouth of this great fish swallows me up. It is like pulling on a silk slipper.
Then things really start happening. Every neuron receptor in my brain is firing at once, I’m swept up in a flood, I’m flying, I’m floating, I’m dying, and now the flesh beneath me is roiling like an earthquake and
something just, just happens—a feeling of such intense experience that the world goes white, I’m hysterical, I’m blind!
And there we lay, Bruno and Lydia, gasping, quiescent, silent, and I’m still sandwiched between Lydia’s sweaty flesh and the fabric of her nightgown. My face burrowed between her breasts, my bliss and her arms wrapped around me, and I fall asleep this way, still inside of her.
Lydia woke up the following morning with a chimp in her nightgown.
I was unprepared for her initial reaction. I awoke to the sight of her face, peering down at mine through the neck of her nightgown. Morning had come, leisurely and bright, the sun having burned away the clouds: birds eep-eep-eeping outside the window and sunlight suffusing the membranous fabric of my silk tent, making it warm and reddish. Blinking away my sleep, I looked up at her and smiled, blissfully, I think, and she answered my smile with an aghast look that completely perplexed me, before I was violently removed from my tent—yanked and kicked and jerked and pulled out. This was the only time I can remember Lydia ever being physically forceful with me in any way. When she had disentangled me from her nightgown, she, without offering a word, jumped out of bed—I was still in a daze—ran into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and locked it.
She remained in there for hours. I bashed my fists against the door and alternated between doleful screams and pitiful whimpers, crying and raging—in apology, in lamentation—inarticulately pleading with her to reemerge from the bathroom. I wailed until my vocal cords were worn threadbare from all my wailing. She would not come out. She would not respond. I heard running water. I heard the toilet flush a few times. Eventually I heard the familiar whisk of the showerhead. Curls of steam escaped from the crack under the door.
I worried. I was still essentially dependent on Lydia for basic survival—that is, I needed her to make food for me. I grew hungry. Still, she remained locked up and incommunicado in the bathroom.
I was starting to feel light-headed from hunger, I had to eat something. I could reach the cereal boxes in the pantry, but I could not reach the milk in the refrigerator, nor could I reach the cutlery and crockery above the kitchen counter, so I was forced to dump a pile of Cheerios on the dining room table and dejectedly munch my dry, brittle rings of oats without the help of any moistening agent other than my own spit. Christ, Gwen, that’s the way I took my meals when I was living in the fucking zoo! I was so presumptuous! See how quickly I recidivate to my barbarian habits without Lydia?
That was the longest morning of my life. I had—I had lost my virginity the night before, hadn’t I? The earth had moved! Her Bruno was a man, now! I suppose I had expected there to be some new sense of special communion between us. Instead she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out. What in the world had I done?
I turned on the TV and tried to watch Sesame Street, but it was useless, I couldn’t keep my mind on it. Not with Lydia so apparently upset, and not with me not knowing why. Bert and Ernie were no solace to me now.
Then I got an idea. I was just full of good ideas, wasn’t I? I would write her a letter: a love letter. That would surely entice her to come out from her self-imposed sentence of solitary confinement. So Cyrano de Bruno took up one of his Magic Markers—the red one, the color of fire, blood, passion—and, upon removing a starchy sheet of white paper from my sketchpad that lay on the floor of the studio that Lydia had built for me, and fastidiously peeling off the perforated edge to remove the unsightly serrated strip where I’d torn it from the rings, squatted down right there on the floor of my studio and composed a letter: a love letter. There were, of course, no actual words discernible in it, as I was still illiterate. To the untrained eye it probably would have looked like just a lot of frenzied scribbling. But my intentions were absolutely clear, I think. The spirit of the gesture—if not the letter—was perfectly legible. Contained in this arduous, ardorous scramble of red lines—thick, meaningful, still heady-smelling and damp from the juicy marker tip—was the lucid and simple and absolutely earnest message: I love you.
And then I slipped it, my love letter, this leaf of paper bearing my message of explosive passion, under the crack of the bathroom door. I waited.
When Lydia came out, I wondered at first if she was the same person who had gone in. Could it be that she had been somehow replaced by another woman of very similar stature and carriage, transformed maybe by the mirror—my original Lydia remaining encapsulated in the glass, and the glass Lydia in turn made flesh? Is that possible? I guess that morning she’d spent locked up with herself, she’d spent in reflecting on her life, reflecting on her memories, reflecting on her reflection, until the reflection had bounced back and forth between her eyes and the eyes of the woman in the mirror so many times that it was impossible to tell which was real and which was reflection. When she came out, Lydia was of course clad in exactly the same apparel in which she had gone in—her nightgown—but—she had—she had cut her hair! She’d cut off her hair with the medicine-cabinet scissors! It took me aback. She had hacked off all her long bright beautiful blond hair, cut it down to a spiky boyish mange that was barely longer than the fur on my own ape head.
I probably would have immediately disintegrated into an apoplexy of hot streaming tears of utter confusion if it were not for the composed aspect of grace and authority that she radiated. I was the weak one here, the broken one, the supplicant, the child, the animal—she the mother, the woman, the human being. Was I forgiven? Forgiven for what? What had I done? Why had she made me feel as if I needed to be forgiven for something? Was it—was it about last night?
She picked me up and held me. I snuggled my fleecy face against her cheek. I combed my long purple fingers through her close-cropped hair. In so many gestures and protean wordlings, I asked her where her hair could have possibly gone. (I couldn’t really speak articulately at this time, Gwen. Only Lydia could understand my primitive speech.) We sat on the bed. It was unmade still, the sheets all twisted into a messy wad half spilling off the edge of the mattress.
“I cut it, Bruno. I flushed it down the toilet.”
I asked her why.
“I was having a hard time looking at myself in the mirror.”
I did not understand. Why would it be hard to look at oneself in a mirror?
“I’ve thought things through, Bruno. I’m feeling better now. I guess I cut off my hair because suddenly I wanted to look different. Sometimes that helps someone feel different. Do you like it?”
I wasn’t sure.
“I know you love me, Bruno. Your picture was very sweet.”
I thanked her.
“I love you too, Bruno. But—what you did last night—you’re not supposed to do that unless someone is awake. Do you understand?”
I wasn’t sure.
“Bruno, you can’t do that unless you have the permission of the person you’re doing it with. Do you understand that?”
I shrugged uneasily.
“And if the person you’re doing it with is asleep, then you can’t possibly know if you have their permission. Okay?”
I said nothing.
“So that means you can’t do that with someone who is asleep.”
I was repentant in silence.
“The next time you want to do that with someone, you have to wait until she’s awake. Then ask. And if she doesn’t want to, then that means you can’t. Okay?”
There followed then what was perhaps the most pregnant of pregnant silences in history. Then she embraced me. I hoped that I was forgiven. I felt horrible. Then she got dressed. It was a Saturday morning.
Thus was my lesson in human sexual morality. I had to learn this. When my father, Rotpeter, wanted to stick his dick in something, he simply went and did it. I had to learn restraint. I had to learn empathy. When it came to sex, I had to make the Buberian moral shift from I/it to I/thou. That is, a soul is a thou and a body is an it. The problem with this construct is, of course, that when sex enters into any relationship between two conscious
beings with sufficient theory of mind to cognize the consciousness of the other, we must deal with the philosophical difficulty of seeing another person as an it and a thou at the same time. I have since noticed that not even most humans can do this. At the height of passion, animal solipsism is absolute, and everything but the I is an it.
That day, after Lydia had dressed and we had eaten, she announced, to my delight, that there would be no lessons today and suggested we take the afternoon off instead and go on an outing. It was a pretty day in the fall, in October, I think. The ground was clustered with fallen leaves but the weather was still warm, and all the Chicagoans were out in the streets and parks, taking advantage of the nice weather before winter descended again upon the city: walking dogs, jogging, riding their bicycles, window shopping, all of them up and out and active and happy to be alive. We went uptown on the train and took a long walk in the park. Lydia bought me a balloon.
Balloon: stationed in the park, professionally merry and loudly attired, was a clown. And not just any clown—this was a clown who specialized in twisting long, sausagelike balloons into labyrinthine knots resembling various creatures, as per the request of the child for whom each balloon creation was intended. A child would say, “Make me a giraffe,” and the clown, upon receiving fifty cents’ compensation, would snap from his balloon pouch one of the stretchy raw balloons, pull and knead some more elasticity into it, inflate it with his mighty lungs, and then, with a few artful squeaky jerks, sculpt a sort of expressionistic abstraction of a giraffe, which was usually discernibly enough a giraffe to please the child. Then he would tie a string to the navel of the balloon and deliver the floating animal to his young customer, whereupon a parent or guardian would often loosely tie it around the child’s wrist to prevent its accidental ascension. The clown was standing by a waist-high wrought-iron fence at an intersection of two pedestrian paths in the park, and he had tied samples of his work to the railing of the fence. All around him, tethered to their posts, floated his colorful menagerie, an assortment of animals, but with the overrepresentation of mammals typical to the human zoological imagination: lions, giraffes, bears, dolphins, kangaroos, etc.—but I remember there was one particularly impressive, multiballooned magnum opus, an outlandishly intricate octopus, each tentacle represented by a different balloon, which incited the passersby to point at it and say, “Wow—this guy is good.” I was mesmerized watching the man at work—call it animal magnetism. I asked Lydia to pay the clown to twist up one of his creations for me. She obliged.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 19
