“This idea took form in my mind from the very moment I first saw you,” Leon would say much later. “The roots of this idea took hold, the green sapling began reaching out of the soil into the sunlight, and this great idea slowly began to develop into a reality.” When he divulged his plan to me, we had already been giving performances of Shakespeare in the subway together for some time. For obvious reasons, the circuslike spectacle of a monstrously fat man playing opposite a clean-shaven and verbally conversant chimpanzee more than quintupled the average hourly income of the Shakespeare Underground, which now boasted two members.
At first we performed in the subway cars, as Leon had been doing before we met. I would ride like a child on his massive shoulders as he walked down the aisle, rattling the coffee can. This was because it was infeasible to perform any other way in the tight confines of the subway car. Great fun, it was. I would always have to duck to fit under the door as we passed from one car to the next, clinging to Leon’s head with my long purple hands during that terrifying moment of darkness and thunder, stinking hot air and blasting wind between car and car. I stretched out my long arms to grab hold of the poles and the loops of strap in passing, and this also helped to steady Leon’s balance. For sheer amusement we continued to play certain scenes in this way—me sitting on Leon’s shoulders and flailing my long arms high in the air—even after we switched to performing on the floors of the stations. Because after the first couple of weeks we soon found it more advantageous to perform in the subway stations: for financial reasons (higher traffic, bigger audiences), pragmatic reasons (more freedom in terms of staging), and because (as we were at one point somewhat rudely informed by an officer of the NYPD) performing inside the cars while they are in transit is, in fact, illegal. So after that we typically set up shop in the terminal beneath Grand Central Station—that giant, palatial building whose ceiling, ornamented with a golden map of the nighttime heavens, had so dazzled me upon my near-accidental arrival in New York—where the floors are wide and the pedestrian traffic is always bustling, and if we got bored of performing there we would relocate to the Forty-second Street or the Union Square stations.
Leon’s favorite character to play was Falstaff, and he had the physique for the role, so I would oblige him with my Prince Hal. He would lie on a bedroll on the filthy tiled floor of the station, pretending to sleep (which looked plausible enough), and I would stroll by, notice him, and rouse him with a gentle kick. Falstaff half-sits up, and, yawning, stretching, snorting, rubbing his eyes, says: “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?”
And I retort, “Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou has forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day?” And so on. We would do any scene that called for a dialogue between two characters, though we gravitated toward comic scenes, and our tragic scenes for some reason had a way of becoming comic when we performed them. I was Horatio to his absurdly obese Hamlet, I was Cassius to his Brutus, I was Iago to his Othello, Antonio to his Shylock, and I wore a blond wig, lipstick, and a dress to play the Juliet to his Romeo (authentic Shakespearean women are performed in drag anyway), the Cordelia to his Lear, and I was the Lady to his Macbeth, riding triumphantly on the shoulders of my husband as I chastise him for his weakness of heart and exhort him to murder, and now I realize, Gwen, that I’ve gotten ahead of myself and completely neglected to tell you about my nose.
XXXVII
Ah, my nose! My anthropomorphosis was not complete yet. Let’s talk about noses, Gwen. Look at a chimpanzee’s nose. No human being who isn’t grotesquely deformed has a nose like that. It’s barely there at all. The chimp’s face caves inward in the middle like a wad of punched-in dough. The gentle glacis of his lower face into his wide upper lip from his nose holes, these two ugly apertures are flanged with a couple of slight ridges between the eyes, and that is all a chimp has to call his nose. I felt that I could not even begin to convincingly pass for human with an abhorrence like that smack in the middle of my otherwise not entirely unhandsome face. No, that thing had to go. Or rather, it had to become: to become a real man’s nose.
I do not remember at what point I had begun to obsess so much over my nose, but it was before I was accidentally removed to New York, and before I was living with Leon and performing Shakespeare in the subways. But I do know that this was when my vanity finally drove me to rhinoplasty. I was so self-conscious of my nose’s ugliness that I swear I couldn’t go five minutes without thinking about it. I scrutinized my face in every reflective surface I happened to pass, imagining what it would look like with a decently attractive human nose. Noses are strange things, Gwen. There is something innately humorous about them. Noses are silly. While the eyes are the tragedians of the face, the nose is its comedian. The eyes are the windows to the soul: human beings are disturbed and enchanted by their eyes—and amused by their noses.
Anyway, I wanted one. I had to have a nose. I’d made my decision, but there were difficulties. Chief among them: I was illegal. I was off the grid. I had no Social Security number, paid no taxes, had no papers of any kind to prove my existence, outside of some documents moldering in a filing cabinet somewhere in the Lincoln Park Zoo—but they were of course no help to me, not for what I wanted. The Shakespeare Underground was beginning to pull in a decent (but far from exorbitant) amount of cash by this time, due almost certainly to the addition of Bruno to the company, to the freak-show element he added to the act, and so also was the case with Leon’s magic shows. In truth, Leon had never been scrabbling in so much business in a very long time as he was with me. He came to depend on me—he needed me. Like organ grinder and monkey, we were entertainment symbiotes, lowbrow wedded to high. Months passed quietly. Leon and I passed these months in performing Shakespeare in the subway stations, rehearsing our acts in Leon’s squalid apartment on City Island, and occasionally performing our magic shows. Leon made me a present of my beautiful nickel-plated kazoo, and I learned to play it. As I’ve said, I have it still. Sometime I will show you my kazoo, Gwen. Leon would cook spaghetti for us, or instant macaroni and cheese, and we would eat watching old movies on TV—watching Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Cary Grant. We spent many nights at Artie’s, drinking for free at Audrey’s tolerant behest. We became great friends.
Between Shakespeare, magic, and the bar beneath the rubber shark in the back of Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, the months passed, and our finances increased at a modest rate. But I was still a fugitive, and I was still in hiding. During these months, I dared not try to return to Chicago to come back to Lydia, although she was never far from my thoughts. I too much feared what would have become of me. Of course I wondered—bitterly, I wondered—if it had been Tal who had sold me out to the biomedical research lab. I shuddered to think it. I could not believe this seriously, though. I was sure that forces beyond her control—and far beyond Lydia’s—had resulted in my forced removal to New York, and my attempted enslavement. I was on my own. What could I have done? Where could someone in my situation have gone? There seemed but two options: science or entertainment. I could have gone crawling back to science, if it was certain slavery with the benefits of security and relative comfort I had wanted, and of course I did not want that. So instead I went into show business. And I liked it. I liked to regale an audience with my clacking teeth and hideous form, I enjoyed the attention, I loved to act, and I loved to scramble around in the audience riling up all the shrieking children with hat in hand and kazoo in mouth, while Leon’s skilled magician’s hands twisted and bent matter into wild manifestations of apparent magic.
I mentioned to Leon that I wanted a new nose. At first he balked.
“Why in the blighted world would you want to beautify that gloriously revolting face of yours?” he said between a gulp of beer and a belch. “Nature has obviously intended you for a life in entertainment! That face is your golden goose! Don’t bu
tcher it!”
“I don’t care what nature intended me for. I want a human nose! I’m going to get one, and I don’t need anyone’s permission, either.”
“Claptrap, Bruno! I am your employer. I shall decide what your nose looks like, for your appearance is my business.”
“Before you met me, Leon, you were a buffoon shouting Shakespeare in the subway. Business never picked up until I came. You wouldn’t make a pittance without me!”
“Great snakes!” Leon bashed a fist on the bar counter, causing the glasses on it to wobble. “What insubordination! Audrey! Did you hear such vomitous insubordination issue from the mouth of the insolent animal who sits even now beside me? Don’t forget under whose roof you sleep, you ungrateful wretch!”
“I want a new nose! A nose, a nose! Leon, forgive me! I hate my nose! It’s a burden! It is an albatross that hangs from the neck of my face!”
“And how, you vain ape you, would you even begin to pay for cosmetic surgery? Pshaw! Surely it costs many thousands of dollars, if not millions. No, I’m afraid not, not in your income bracket. Such luxuries—such vanities!—are for the rich, and are not afforded the humble Shakespearean actor. This is not even to mention the logistics of it all. You’ve no head for logistics, Bruno. You fail utterly to grasp the delicate interworkings of reality.” A pause, and Leon went on: “And why ever would you want to attach a human nose to your ape face? Why blaspheme it so?”
“Because I’m a human now. I want to look like one.”
“You are not human!” Leon snorted. “Much as it begrudges me to pay you compliments. But call a spade a spade.”
“I am not an animal!” I cried out in frustration.
Leon reified his posture on his bar stool, and with a daintily dismissive flutter of his fingers, said: “I quote Jonson: ‘An ape’s an ape and a varlet’s a varlet, though they be clothed in silk or scarlet.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“That’s you: an ape in scarlet.”
“I meant the quotation.”
“Ben Jonson, obviously!” Leon roared. “The poor man’s Shakespeare.”
“I know a guy,” Audrey offered from behind the bar.
“What?” said Leon. “As do I. I know many ‘guys.’ But only one man.” He indicated himself by cocking his head and raising his eyebrows.
“No, I mean I know a guy who does plastic surgery. Well, I know about him.”
“Silence, shrew!” said Leon.
“Tell me more,” I pleaded. “What is his name? Have you met him?”
Audrey leaned over the counter toward me and spoke quietly, even though there was no one else in the bar besides me and Leon.
“I don’t know his name. I only know someone who knows him. You know Sasha?” I nodded. Sasha was Audrey’s coworker—she was a waitress at Artie’s whom I knew, though not well. “She knows him,” said Audrey. “He did a nose job for her sister. He was a doctor in Brazil before he came to the States. He’s not licensed to practice here, but he does plastic surgery on the sly. He works out of the back of a beauty salon in Astoria. Brazilian women come to him for lipos and nose jobs and stuff like that. He’s clean, he’s safe. Sasha gets a commission if she brings people in, that’s how it works. I think she used to work at the beauty salon before she started waitressing here.”
“I must meet this man. How much does he charge?”
“I don’t know. Cheap, I think. But not free.”
A nose!—to have a human nose! If only I had that, my body would be complete!
A few days later, Leon and I were in Artie’s Shrimp Shanty again after another day of performing Shakespeare in the subway all afternoon and night. We didn’t even stop at home to change into our civilian clothes: Leon was in his Henry VIII costume and I was wearing my costume, which was a Harlequin’s suit checkered with red and yellow diamonds, and a jester hat with floppy red and yellow tassels with bells sewn on the ends of them. This was our usual style of dress during this time. When we came in, Audrey met my eyes, and with a beckoning hand and a jerk of her head asked me down to the far end of the bar, where Sasha sat beneath the rubber shark, with an electric-blue cocktail on a napkin in front of her. Leon squelched his weight onto his usual stool at the other end of the bar. His squishy haunches ballooned over the stool like the edges of a giant flesh muffin.
“I shall have a pint of ale!” he declared in his thespian’s faux-Continental accent. Audrey ignored him for the moment. Leon harrumphed and turned his attention to the baseball game playing on the muted TV bolted to the corner of the wall. I sat down beside Sasha. She had finished her shift but was still wearing her waitressing uniform. Sasha had olive skin, dark hair dyed blond, sharp green eyes, silver hoop earrings, and long artificial fingernails that were polished glossily and painted a neon blue that almost matched the color of her drink. Her false eyelashes were long and brittle, and made very subtle clicking noises when she blinked. I found her attractive, though in a very deliberately organized way.
The doctor’s name was DaSilva. He was a friend of her father’s.
“He did a nose job for my sister,” said Sasha in a Queens-Brazilian accent. “Cost her half a grand. Not too bad.” She shrugged and clicked her nails against the bar counter.
“I can pay!” I blurted.
“I’ll take you to talk to him. But he only works on people he knows. He knows me, so he’ll prolly do it, but he might not want to.”
Some days later Audrey borrowed her mother’s car to take me to Dr. DaSilva. Audrey’s mother—the second of Leon’s ex-wives—lived in Yonkers, and had lent Audrey her wood-paneled 1987 Wagoneer, with forewarnings about the vehicle’s many ailments and electromechanical idiosyncrasies. Audrey and Sasha met me in the morning at the door of the apartment I shared with Leon behind Artie’s, and I went with them. Leon was irritated with what he saw as my insubordination, irritated further that Audrey was playing accomplice to it (Audrey liked me—she had come to regard me as a younger brother, I think), and even further irritated that the Shakespeare Underground would miss a day of performing because of this errand of vanity. I said good-bye to him, but he churlishly refused to answer or get up from where he sat in his terry-cloth bathrobe on the futon, absentmindedly watching Bringing Up Baby while muttering something about my insubordination and eating a ready-made rotisserie chicken in a plastic container that he’d just bought for breakfast at the grocery store down the street. Audrey drove us off the island, through the park, down the expressway, and across a bridge that hung high above the water on stark gray towers before sloping into Queens, into a dizzying web of narrow streets, and then we were in a place where the alphabets of many different languages were jumbled together on the storefronts, where Latinate, Cyrillic, and Greek letters fought for space with Arabic and Chinese, this Babylonian salmagundi of scripts and tongues all nattering in unison—tongues, and musics, too!—strains of polka, samba, reggae, and klezmer intermingled with Persian ululations, the accordion-and-brass oompa-oompa of mariachi music and the fuzzy thumps of rap blasting from car stereos—and the smells!—whiffs of meat crackling over fires and fried dough and who knows what else twisting together with the smells of tobacco and sewage, and there were all kinds of people jostling each other on the streets, women in bonnets and wooden clogs wheeling baby carriages with pudgy children pattering after them past skinny men in glossy tracksuits and jewelry and with glued-in-place hair, and so on and on: this place was like a sprawling fractal of infinitely divisible human complexity, a distracting circus of the senses where everyone was so busy that no one bothered to look anywhere but where they were going. Audrey piloted us in that grumbling behemothic vehicle down the street, past barbershops, shoe stores, bars, gas stations, and donut shops, until we came to where we were going. She gradually seesawed the large automobile into a parallel parking place. We were in a Brazilian neighborhood, said Sasha. Everywhere I saw what I presumed were Brazilian flags draped over things, hanging from awnings or painted on windows, green a
nd yellow with a star-speckled blue orb in the middle, and everywhere I saw people with the same olive skin and green eyes that Sasha had. Here was a storefront embedded in the middle of the block of a medium-traffic street, inconspicuously snuggled between a deli and a store that specialized in doors: a picture of a palm tree and the words IPANEMA BEAUTY dancing in loopy green cursive across the front of a white awning that shaded the front door. We went in.
A string of bells clinked against the glass as the door shut behind us. A long, narrow room: in front, a desk, a register, and a waiting area, with metal folding chairs and a coffee table covered with women’s magazines in Portuguese; in back, a doorless doorway covered with a turquoise curtain; below, linoleum floors; above, a row of three ceiling fans with pull chains clinking against wobbling light fixtures; there was a long counter with rows of metal sinks embedded in it, and scissors, razors, bottles, sprayers, combs and brushes scattered down the length of it; two parallel mirrors stretched along opposite sides of the room; next to the counter, reclining chairs were rooted to the floor on metal poles, with pedals to pump the chairs up on the poles or release them to sink hissing downward, and at the head of each chair a hemispherical plastic helmet fixed on a hinge that would descend over the head of the person sitting in the chair. The room smelled lush with shampoos, soaps, perfumes, wet hair. The feminine energy in this room was sweet and thick as cream. Several women lay in the chairs, and other women stood over them, fixing up the heads of the women lying in the chairs—snipping, clipping, brushing, lathering, rinsing, blow-drying, etc.—and all the women were talking together in the universally recognizable tones of gossip, but were speaking Portuguese—that pretty language, musically mysterious to me, that sounds like Spanish softly brushed with French.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 41
