The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

by Benjamin Hale

  The gallery opened at 8:00 p.m. Before the guests in attendance entered the gallery space, they watched Norm deliver a presentation in a nearby lecture hall, followed by a twenty-minute film of me performing tasks in the lab. I did not actually see the film, but from what I understand, the people were awfully impressed by my cognitive faculties. In one of the more telling segments of this film, there was footage of me sitting at a table in the lab, sorting photographs at Norm’s request. I remember the experiment. Norm handed me a stack of photographs. There were about twenty glossy five-by-three-inch photos. About half of them were pictures of people—some of whom I knew (Lydia, Norm, Prasad, Tal—this footage was shot before the finger-biting incident), some of whom I did not (random idiots off the street), and half of them were pictures of chimpanzees. One of the pictures was of me. Norm asked me to sort the photographs into two categories. At first I thought maybe he was asking me to sort them into two piles, one for men and one for women. So I assorted them accordingly, putting all the human women in with the female chimps. Norm then took back the photos and scrambled their order again. I received no reward, so I knew I must have been sorting the pictures in a way that did not accord with Norm’s taste. The deck reshuffled, Norm handed me back the stack of photos and asked me again to order them into two categories, like with like. Then I realized that of course he wanted me to divide the pictures into a human pile and a chimp pile. I included my own picture in the human pile. I am sure that at this moment in the film, a collective moan of compassionate heartbreak rose up in the audience.

  I was not watching the film because I was with Lydia, getting ready for my first big introduction into society. My cotillion. In a small murky bathroom somewhere in the building, Lydia prepared me for the evening. All afternoon we had been bustling around in the gallery, making sure everything was just so: assuring that all the paintings had been hung properly, that all the lighting was just right, not too dim, not too glaring. Lydia was wearing a beautiful black dress. She had been romping around the gallery in bare feet all afternoon, the bottoms of her feet sticking to and unpeeling from the hard waxy floor, because she had worn pretty but locomotionally impractical high-heeled shoes for the occasion, and was uncomfortable in them—they “killed” her, she said. Planning to put her shoes on only at the last possible minute, she secreted them in her purse and had gone barefoot (like Tal) until now. In the little bathroom where we were preparing for the gallery opening, I stood before the mirror, Lydia standing behind me, her head more than a full two feet above mine in our reflected image, and she brushed the unruly fur on the top of my head. She kept twisting the knob of the sink faucet to dribble warm water over her fingers, then smoothing my fur out with her hand and straightening it with her hairbrush, her movements made savage and jerky by her nervousness. I wore a small gray suit, with my stubby legs sheathed in a pair of pants selected by necessity from the Marshall Field’s boys’ department, and a matching suit jacket selected from the men’s. Lydia tucked, tugged, buttoned, zipped, prodded and pulled my Sunday-bests into place, knotting the verdant lime-green tie that I myself had selected, pulling my socks over my feet and lacing my smart tan shoes.

  She sat on the closed lid of the toilet, opened her purse, and rooted around among its contents. She found her pantyhose. She hiked her dress above her waist. I hurriedly sucked in the smell of her feet and bare legs and crotch. She slipped her slender bare feet into the translucent and weightless bags of the black nylon pantyhose, and tugged on them until they melded to the contours of her feet. Then she pulled the hosiery up until it conformed to the contours of her legs and enveloped her thighs and waist, and the hose became a thin protective membrane clinging to her skin. There may still be nothing, nothing I love to watch more than a beautiful woman rolling on or peeling off a pair of nylon pantyhose. Then she shimmied her dress back into position—good-bye, Lydia’s vagina!—and she took her shoes out of her purse. Lydia almost never wore shoes that were anything other than principally utilitarian. She hated high-heeled shoes, hated, hated, hated them. She nearly always put comfort before aesthetics, in all things—thus she was unused to walking in heels, and thereby particularly vulnerable to their blistering pinches and bites.

  Lydia checked her appearance one last time in the mirror. Her hair was still short, but had grown out some, it just covered the tops of her ears. She went through the motion of sliding a wisp of hair behind her ear, but her hair was not yet long enough to stay put, and it immediately sprang out again. She was not wearing her glasses. She turned to me, watching her look at herself in the mirror. Our eyes made contact in the mirror.

  “We’re going to be on our best behavior tonight, aren’t we, Bruno?”

  I nodded yes.

  Lydia sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, steadying herself with the extra oxygen, conscientiously trying to make her breathing natural and normal. Then she bent down slowly to the floor. She kneeled, folding her long powerful legs—made even longer by the high-heeled shoes she so violently loathed—until her face was level with mine, and she looked directly into my eyes. She wrapped her hands around the back of my head, and I wrapped my gangly arms around her back, and we exchanged a long and passionate kiss. Our lips mingled, our tongues wound together, we breathed each other’s hot breath and drank each other’s spit. It is painful—almost physically painful to me, it sickens me, it gives me a heartache as real and visceral as a bellyache—to remember how in love we were.

  Lydia took my hand, squeezing it in hers.

  “Okay,” she whispered in my ear. “Let’s go.”

  She rose to full standing position, and, leading me by the hand, unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  The gallery opening. I’m sure you know what these things tend to look like. There were a couple of inexpensive tables covered with expensive tablecloths: on one of them stood many wineglasses and bottles of wine, ice buckets for the white wine, which the caterers poured for the guests, and on the other table was an arrangement of hors d’oeuvres: brownies, cheeses, crackers, little tomatoes, miniature salami sandwiches and such. Most of the event’s attendees were dressed nicely. Hands were shaken, limp embraces exchanged, spouses introduced, wineglasses dinged like bells, fancy shoes clopped on the waxen concrete floor and a liquid hum of general conversation sloshed around inside the echo-conducive white room, in which waves of polite laughter crested and broke here and there. Have you ever noticed how similar the ambiance of an art gallery is to that of a laboratory?

  Fifteen of my larger paintings hung on the white walls of the gallery space. I chose, following Lydia’s suggestion, not to display the exploratory forays into the abstract that I was already beginning to paint, but to stick with the more meticulously rendered representational pieces in order, at this early stage in my career, to showcase my mastery of technique rather than my innovative approach to concept. Four of them were self-portraits modeled after my reflection in Lydia’s bathroom mirror, at such an angle and using such a palette as to deliberately evoke Van Gogh—in one of them I even depicted myself wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, in obvious homage to my favorite mad Dutchman, though only a handful of those philistines got the joke. One was a portrait of Norman Plumlee, fleshed out of a charcoal sketch of him that I dashed off once when visiting the lab with Lydia (I have since destroyed that painting). Two were paintings of Lydia. (The many nudes that I had painted of her were not on display for obvious reasons. Many of those were later destroyed as well. The one that hangs above the couch on which I am at this moment reclining is the only extant one that I know of.) Another one was a landscape—technically impressive but conceptually bankrupted by my then immaturity as an artist—looking southward on the Chicago lakefront in the summer; it is maybe a little reminiscent of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte, with all the pretty girls slothing an afternoon away on the beach, dogs teething on frisbees, the Hancock Center with its latticework and horns in the background, and the big blue expanse of Lake Michigan, pepp
ered with sailboats, which dominates the left half of the painting.

  I imagine that the people in attendance at the gallery opening would have had an experience something like this: As soon as there are enough people present, as soon as there are enough mouths in the room to produce enough conversation to swirl around in the airspace between enough warm bodies to subdue the echo effect in the starkly empty space—which is painted white all around and unfurnished except for my paintings on the walls, the two foldout tables that hold the hors d’oeuvres and the wineglasses and the wine, and a couple of black leather Mies van der Rohe couches in the center of the room, facing my paintings—as soon as the ambiance of the room is just right, the social atmosphere comfortable enough, there enters through the open front doors of the gallery a beautiful and beautifully dressed young woman in a black dress and short blond hair, and there—holding her hand, walking beside her, proudly, on two legs, like a man, wearing shoes even, dressed in a little gray suit with a lime-green tie and his hair perfect—is the artist.

  Yes, he happens to be a chimp. A chimp dressed in the trappings of human civilization is ordinarily funny to you. That is why we see chimps dressed up in idiotic costumes on TV commercials. It’s the stuff of the circus, of vaudeville, of the burlesque, the freak show. Obviously, the reason why you think it is so fucking funny to see a chimp dressed in human clothes and taught to ludicrously mimic human behavior is because you think of yourselves as having the only proper culture. You define yourselves as the only cultured species, and this has allowed you to believe that your culture has helped you break away from the rest of nature. You think that your precious culture is what makes you human. Therefore, the sight of an ape—so close to you, and yet seemingly so far—dressed up in human clothes and behaving like a human being is utterly incongruous—hence, funny. But what if—what if you see an ape who wears a suit and a tie and walks on two legs, an ape who has made this step into human culture not simply to appease his trainers, who mock and pimp and debase him to provide cheap titillation to the drooling hoi polloi—but of his own free will? Suddenly it’s not so funny anymore. Is it?

  That is why this particular chimp is not funny. He is not cute. He does not look like a circus chimp, riding around in circles honk-honk on his little scooter, who has been dressed in the borrowed robes of human civilization for everyone’s sophomoric amusement. He is dressed this way because he wants to be. He is a chimp, yes, his hairy arms and fingers are long and spindly, his lips and chin protrude from his rubbery, hairy, masklike face—but in all other respects, he looks like a man—you can see the light of human culture glowing in his eyes like magic stones. And the effect is all the more unsettling because of it. No one would think him funny or cute. The image is far too disturbing. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the artist.

  As Lydia and I entered the room, the conversation did not die completely, but became muffled, suddenly gone all slack and floppy like the sails of a ship drifting into the doldrums. Most of the people in the room backed slowly away from us, in—what?—awe?—fear? Lydia smiled and waved at all the people. The nervous people smiled and waved back. Lydia tried to bury us in the crowd, but a radius of cautious space always encircled us. Wherever we went, we were the center of the spectacle.

  Norm approached us. His pants were slightly wrinkled and baggy. He took Lydia gently by the arm. I was still holding on to her hand at the end of her other arm. With me on one side of her and Norm on the other, Lydia allowed Norm to guide her toward a particular group of people who were standing around together, near one of my paintings—the landscape of the Chicago lakefront. They were holding glasses of wine, and some of them had piles of hors d’oeuvres folded in napkins in their hands.

  “I would like you to meet my colleagues, Lydia and Bruno,” Norm said to the loose assembly, and released Lydia’s arm. Lydia shook everyone’s hand in turn, and she let go of my hand so that I could shake their hands. Each one of them, one by one, respectfully half-kneeled to the floor so that their faces were closer to mine, told me their names (not one of which stuck in either my short-term or my long-term memory), and softly squeezed my hand for a moment in theirs. The people could not bring themselves to attempt to converse with me. These people were all smiles—friendly enough. I quickly took Lydia’s hand again.

  The room socially relaxed again. The volume and the comfort level of people’s conversations were slowly on the rise. I began to feel slightly agitated.

  I watched the people in the gallery moving from one painting to the next with their glasses of wine in their hands, pointing at my paintings and commenting on them. They seemed to be particularly impressed by my representational renderings, as people who know little about art typically are.

  One of the people who was standing around with me and Lydia and Norm, one of the people to whom I had just been introduced, seemed to be a particularly important person. An important man. He wore nice clothes. He was an older man and handsome, with sleek shocks of graying hair erupting from his head, a gaunt and serious face and frameless glasses that delicately pincered the bridge of his pointy nose and magnified his watery gray eyes. I noticed that most of the people around us were wearing name tags—these white rectangles with names scrawled on them in black marker, stuck to their outer garments, near their hearts—but not this man. This man wore no name tag. Apparently he either did not wish his name to be known, or else he assumed everyone already knew it. Norm and Lydia were both rapt in conversation with this man. The Important Man was doing most of the talking, and Norm and Lydia were doing most of the polite listening, their heads bobbing like buoys on their necks with nodding and inserting yeses and mm-hmms in the troughs of his wave of speech. Occasionally Norm, when given the green light, would launch into a torrent of words, speaking rapidly, as if he were afraid of losing the Important Man’s interest before he had arrived at his point. Lydia said something here and there, but mostly she was silent. Their conversation was over my head. Lydia clasped my hand tightly, now and then giving it a squeeze to remind me of her presence, of her closeness. I wanted to go home.

  I noticed there were two men standing near the doors of the gallery. They were young and healthy, with short hair and thick arms, dressed in uniforms: black shoes, blue pants, crisp tan short-sleeved shirts with flashing metal buttons. They wore badges. They looked like they were not here for fun but rather were only doing their jobs. They very slowly perambulated the room, not talking to anyone, surveying the crowd, paying close attention. What were they here to protect? My art? Their hands were clasped behind their backs. When they turned around, I saw that behind their backs, each of them held a long, thin silver wand, with a red rubber handle and a prong of wire filament on the end of it.

  I redirected my gaze back into the middle of our social circle. They were so far up above me, and I was so near to the floor in comparison. I saw everything from below. Norm was having trouble balancing a glass of wine and a pile of cheese cubes held in a napkin. He was speaking animatedly to the Important Man. With the thumb of the hand that held the cheese, Norm struggled to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose and then swipe back the three ribbons of hair that clung to his otherwise bald pate, but it was difficult to perform these small actions with a handful of cheese, and I watched one of the little yellow cubes of cheese tumble from his palm and onto the floor, where it bounced three times like a die on a backgammon board before coming to rest in the middle of our circle of people. I watched Lydia’s eyes trace the path of the cheese’s escape, and then quickly look up. No one else—not even the Important Man—noticed, or they pretended not to have noticed. Plumlee himself did not notice. Plumlee’s voice escalated in pitch and zeal as he approached the point of whatever he was saying. His hands were thickly padded and the backs of his fingers were almost as hairy as mine. Lydia squeezed my hand. I looked up at her. She smiled down at me, as if to assure me that we would be going home soon. I was feeling terribly bored and uncomfortable.

  A new man shouldered
his way into our circle. He was tall. He was old, too, but carried himself with the vigor of youth: back straight, chest out. He was thin but robust, he looked like he could run a marathon without breaking a sweat. A beautiful bright white mustache hung below his nose and brushed his upper lip. He wore a suit as silver as a spoon that clung fast to his stringy old muscles, and in lieu of a necktie he wore a bolo that slid through a huge turquoise amulet. And on the very top of his body sat a wide-brimmed white hat: a cowboy hat. He entered the conversation as if he was entering his own home, and as he did, a lean old liver-spotty hand with fat blue veins slaloming over the ridges of his tendons rose up to the top of the hat, where it pinched the shallow recesses in the crown and politely removed it, freeing the springy flaps of his red ears and revealing the shiny pink ball of his head, which was bald except for a semicircular muff of white hair playing ring-around-the-rosy with his skull.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “Howdy,” said Lydia, instinctively returning his folksy greeting, then catching herself saying it and immediately self-consciously flushing at how silly it sounded in her mouth. The man extended his hand and Lydia shook it. He seemed to want to kiss her hand like an old-fashioned gentleman, but the angle and position of Lydia’s hand would not allow it.

  “My name’s Dudley Lawrence,” the man said. “It’s a real pleasure and an honor to meet you, Miss Littlemore.”

  “Mrs.,” said Lydia, then, “Dr.” She was a bit flattered, a bit taken aback by his gentility. Then, before he spoke to anyone else, before he addressed Norm or the Important Man they had been talking with all evening, Dudley Lawrence bent to the floor in his boots, the creases in his silver trousers vanishing at the knees, and said hello to me, warmly shaking my hand.

  “Hello, Bruno,” he said. “The pleasure’s all mine.” His white mustache curled into the corners of his grin. He patted my hand twice before releasing it. Without getting up, and looking me directly in the eyes, he said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” And then there knelt beside him a big elaborate woman. “Please say hello to my wife, Regina.”