So I had to sate myself with watching in glazy-eyed awe as the tempests of numbers and other symbols shot from the tip of her pencil as if from the end of a wizard’s wand.
“Fuck off,” she said, in a voice unheated with any real anger. “I can’t concentrate with you standing there, like, breathing on me. Go away.” I retreated from looking over her shoulder in remorse, and instead occupied myself with her books, or in inspecting all the artifacts contained in the room. Dejectedly, I sat down and played with the sexless woman-dolls in their dollhouse. So we passed the remaining hours of the waking night, she bent monastically over her studies with pencil, calculator, and book, and I sitting on her floor playing with dolls. It is a woeful thing to be a striver like me.
The hours ticked away like this until the house gradually grew silent and dark. Other noises had helped to animate this house—footsteps and so on from downstairs, and the murmur of a TV—but these noises died away as the evening wore on, and soon in little Emily’s bedroom we could tell by the silence and the absence of vibration in the rest of the house that everyone else in it had gone to bed. There was a soft knock on the door. I abandoned the dolls and swiftly hid myself amid the lint and dust under the bed.
“Come in,” sang little Emily. In the sliver of visibility beneath the scrim of her bed, I saw a pair of slippered feet quietly enter the room. The slippers crossed the carpet to where little Emily sat at her desk, the desk lamp burning her shadow long across the room. The slippers walked up behind her chair, and a female voice said: “Good night, sweetie.”
“Good night, Mom,” said little Emily, with a note of annoyance.
“I love you.”
“Love you too.” Little Emily’s voice was quick and flat. The slippers left the room, the door shut. I dared not emerge yet from beneath the bed. I saw the crack of light under the door go dark. Little Emily did not tell me to come out from under the bed, so there I remained. I heard the thump of her shutting her mathematical textbook, and the click of her pencil lain to rest on the desk. I saw her small bare feet step swiftly out of the room. Her bare feet came back a few minutes later.
“You can come out now. My mom and dad went to bed.” I slithered out from beneath the bed. Little Emily was pouring red wine into two wineglasses on the desk.
“They have so much wine they never notice when I steal a bottle,” she said. We drank the wine in the bathroom, where little Emily stood on the lid of the toilet seat and smoked another cigarette, surreptitiously blowing the smoke through the window, which she’d propped open to the cold March night. We talked for a long time after that. Little Emily told me all about her complex family and social lives. She told me that she was a four-time child beauty pageant winner. She told me that as far back as she could remember her life had been a harried circus of traveling, preening, and display. She also told me that her mother wanted for her a life of celebrity. She told me about being dragged to auditions in the city, about endless hours of acting lessons, singing lessons, lessons in any discipline that might increase her value in the entertainment industry, about her mother taking her to be consulted by certain professionals on matters like what clothing would most flatter her unripe physique, what hair and what makeup. She said her summers were always eaten up by all these lessons and auditions, and by rehearsals for the plays and TV commercials she had successfully auditioned for, and in flying back and forth to Hollywood to film these commercials when they couldn’t be filmed in New York. She said she had been in TV commercials for all sorts of various products: for fast food restaurant chains, for toothpaste, for waffles, for breakfast cereals—any sort of product that a smiling, adorable young girl might help to sell. She told me that she was currently slated to star in a production of Little Orphan Annie. All this she told me, and more. In a way I sympathized with her, even identified with her life. Both of us had been selected by forces greater than ourselves for lives of careful study and display. Little Emily had been sold into entertainment, just as I had been sold into science.
XXXV
In the morning I woke alone in little Emily’s pink bed, where she had let me sleep beside her. She had long since gone to school. I could tell it was late in the morning by the angle and quality of the light, and by the quietness outside that it had snowed overnight. I did not want to leave her bed. That big fat squishy mattress was so impossibly soft, and warm from the warmth of our two blood-filled bodies. I had little desire to expose my sore, battered little body to the fatalistic whimsy of the outside world. I wanted only to let my eyelids slide back over the wet globes of my eyes, submerge my brain again in darkness, steep it in dreams, my body safely enveloped once in pink sheets and again in the curtains, kept company by little Emily’s stuffed animals. I wanted to never leave that bed, to exist in that room for the rest of my life as little Emily’s kept ape. Whenever little Emily’s mother or father would enter the room I would make my eyes look glassy, like marbles, and hold very still, so they would think I was a very realistic-looking stuffed animal. And why not? Because my hairlessness would give me away.
So I got out of bed. I showered in her bathroom, carefully leaving everything in it exactly as I’d found it. I put on the clothes little Emily had procured for me the day before, the shoes and the corduroy pants and the floppy green sweater. I crept out of her room and shut the door. I listened: heard nothing. In a hallway closet I found a black coat, a flannel scarf, and a hat—a black snap-brim felt fedora with a silk hatband. I put them on. In the dressing mirror on the back of the closet door I turned the brim of the hat low over my eyes, wound the scarf over my chin and cheeks, knotted and stuffed it into the breast of the coat and flipped up the collar. The coat was also too big for me. It came down to my ankles. With my chimp features thus hidden beneath collar, coat, hat, and scarf, I set out. The little dog downstairs lunged into a fresh fit of yapping as I descended the stairs, and I ignored it, though it growled and scampered circles around my feet as I headed to the door. I stood on a chair to unlatch the dead bolt, opened the front door, and squeezed myself through it, trying not to let the dog escape. I crammed my hands into the pockets of the coat for warmth, and my fingers found a few crinkled twenty-dollar bills—another boon. The new snow sparkled, clean and radiant on the ground, the sun high and pale in the sky. Birds twittered in the dead trees. My stubby legs waddled my coated and hatted form down the walkway leading from the front door to the street and the sidewalk, where I made a left turn that took me down a narrow road lined with houses, trees, bushes, driveways, mailboxes. I walked on, hoping to encounter something that would suggest a direction, something that would take me somewhere. That was all I had in me to call a plan. I was fortunate enough to have what I had: the stolen clothes on my body and a precious bit of money in my pockets, and I hoped these alone would tide me over until I managed to get somewhere. I do not believe I had an immediate plan to return to Chicago. That was my distant plan, not my immediate one. My first plan was to figure out where exactly I was. Then decide what to do. In a certain way I was enjoying my new freedom and independence, however unasked for it was. There was a streak of adventure in my misfortune.
Though I did not know it then, I was in the village of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York: a smallish town nestled on the side of a steep hill on the Hudson River, north of New York City. I walked a way through this upscale and quiet residential area until I came to a thicker and more heavily trafficked road, which I walked alongside, downhill, coming to a place where the buildings were closer together, where there were shops and restaurants flanking the streets and people moving here and there up and down the sidewalks. The people passing me on the street flicked their eyes down at me in mild surprise or curiosity as I waddled past them, and then politely, or disinterestedly, they looked away. I came to the top of a hill, which sloped steeply downward and ended in a wide river: across the river was a long wall of tall flat gray cliffs, and very far away but visible in the distance a massive blue bridge, built like a metal spiderweb, conne
cted one bank of the wide black river to the next. I did not know it then, but the river was the Hudson, the cliffs across it were the Palisades, and the bridge in the distance was the George Washington. Seagulls reeled overhead. I saw railroad tracks running along the bank of the river. There was a train station where the town sloped downhill and came to an end at the water. I headed for the station.
I climbed the stairs to the station platform, my stubby legs by necessity taking each of the metal steps one at a time, and found myself standing on a long flat slab of concrete. It was a sheer accident that I decided that day to climb the stairs to the southbound train station platform, rather than the northbound platform on the other side of the tracks, which was accessible via a raised walkway. I hadn’t a clue as to what lay either to the north or the south of me. Who knows what my story would have become had I boarded a northbound train, which would have whisked me upstate, to Albany or Buffalo, or even to the icy and moose-infested climes of Canada, or northeast to New Haven, or Providence, or Boston? I haven’t a clue what might have befallen me if I had chosen the northbound train, what I might have learned, who I might have become. All I know is that the fast-spinning wheels of the Fates had it otherwise, for when I saw the specks of headlights in the distance, and I heard the bellows of the whistle, two short and one long, and this enormous metal caterpillar came clattering to a stop, and the doors slid open, and I stepped onboard in my coat and low-pulled hat, expecting nothing more particular than to be taken someplace else, it so happened—it just so happened—that it was the southbound train I chose, and that, as the poet says, has made all the difference; for that rolling and bellowing metal caterpillar took me not to Albany, not to Canada, not to Connecticut or Boston, but to New York—to New York City, where I met a friend, and a little glory, and the beginning of my downfall.
I found an unoccupied booth upholstered with orange plastic pads, curled up against the wall beside the heating vents, and looked out the window west across the river at the granite cliffs. Thank God that money had been in the pocket of the coat I had liberated from the closet of little Emily’s parents’ house, or else I would have had nothing to buy my ticket with when the conductor clumped down the aisle between the seats. A voice came on a loudspeaker and chanted off a litany of destinations the train would reach: Greystone, Glenwood, Yonkers, Ludlow, Riverdale, Spuyten Duyvil, Marble Hill, University Heights, Morris Heights, Harlem, Grand Central Station. I handed a crinkled twenty-dollar bill to the conductor, and he handed me a ticket and change, perforated a paper card with a hole puncher and stuck it in a slot above my seat.
We rolled beneath the blue metal bridge I’d seen in the distance, we bumped and shuddered past telephone poles and ragged brown brick buildings, until we were in a city, a huge and dense city of, I thought, potentially infinite complexity. The train filled up with more and more people after each stop, and with each stop the litany of destinations the voice on the loudspeaker chanted off shrank shorter by one place name. Three more passengers had to cram themselves in beside me in the orange booth. I kept my head down and pulled the brim of the hat lower, not wanting to expose my face to any undue scrutiny, but I felt their big bodies press warmly beside me. We were barreling headlong into New York City. After the penultimate stop—Harlem, 125th Street—we gathered speed, rolling high above the buildings and crowded streets alive with voices and honking cars, and soon after that we plunged into a profound and vacuous darkness, and in this darkness we remained until we slowly rolled to a stop—our final destination, apparently. The train’s electricity was cut, the long metal serpent sighed away to silence, and all the people crowded thickly around me—the train was crammed absolutely full by the time we descended into the darkness—erupted into sudden activity, everyone jostling each other, all knees and elbows, fists held to coughing mouths, rolled-up newspapers and magazines, coats buttoned, fat-stuffed luggage heaved from overhead racks, and they all lined up in the aisle to funnel out the doors. I joined the crush, and the flow of people pushed me through the door and onto another long concrete platform.
We were in a vast cavern, dimly lit by feebly buzzing lamps hanging high above us. In one direction the cavern stretched far away and out of sight into darkness, and in the other direction the concrete platform became a bright staircase. All the people who had just stepped off the train were swarming onto this staircase; I followed them. The weight and pressure of their stream of moving bodies pushed me along the platform, up the stairs, and into the light. At the top of the stairs the crowd dispersed, each person going his or her own way to private destinations. I wandered around the floor like a chunk of flotsam on the surface of the sea, knowing neither where I was nor where I was going. I was in an underground network of ornately carven stone and golden-veined marble. Currents of human traffic rushed in many different directions, the waves of people meshing here and there into cross-streams, forming interference patterns of coming and going, some people bustling this way and others bustling that. They dragged suitcases on rollers behind them on the floor. They sat still or slumped over on benches. They sat at tables sipping coffee, reading magazines splayed flat before them. Shops, restaurants, cafés, bars, and news vendors operated out of nooks set in the walls. I found a set of wide marble stairs and climbed them. When I emerged at the top of these stairs, I was in a huge, glittering, beautiful room, what looked like the grand ballroom of a palace, where people wearing powdered wigs and whalebone corsets and masks ought to be waltzing to “The Blue Danube.” Instead, people in modern dress scrambled across the floor in frenetic hordes. In the center of the room a circular booth stood sentinel, glowing from within, with a huge round clock on top of it, like a temple to the concept of time, an altar to Chronos. Then I looked up: the huge, high, vaulted ceiling of this spectacular room was painted blue, and decorated with stars, the whole night sky spangling the robin-egg blue ceiling of the room, with golden outlines of animals drawn over the points of light, some of which were represented by real electric lights embedded like jewels in the ceiling! I must have stood there for half an hour at least, drop-jawed at the sight of this. It looked just like the planetarium that Lydia used to take me to so long ago, in Chicago. All those beautiful zoomorphs, the shaggy lion frozen by the suggestion of his stars in midpounce, the ethereal, sexy nymphs and goddesses and gods stretching their bows taut and aiming their arrows, creatures with wings and horns and men whose torsos melted into the bodies of horses. I guessed that this huge and religious room was like a throbbing heart to this city, pulsing as it was with humanity, its valves taking people in through its arteries and pushing them out again through its veins, a big, bloody, pumping muscle of energy, of commute, of communication, of civilization, its ceiling painted with stars whose warm, audacious artifice dared to rival the more indifferent beauty of real nature. Indeed, I thought back on the sky at night over the Lawrences’ ranch in the wilderness of Colorado, with all its unfriendly and unhelpful and useless wonder, with its undercurrents of loneliness and fear, and wondered if this version wasn’t, in a way, an improvement.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 38
