My Little Blue Dress (17 page)

Bruno called the girl again just before lunch and once again did a perfectly workmanlike job of saying hello and copying down directions, today to a place called “Aluminum Bertrand,” but when the 'phone call was over he remained in the nasty armchair with his thumb on the plunger of the 'phone, jiggling his foot and running a crooked finger back and forth across his upper lip, not looking very content.

“Toast,” I learned during the Bathroom Shuffle this morning, turned out to be a bar quite near here whose interior resembles the inside of a giant bread toaster: with walls of scorched and dented tin, sawdust “crumbs” all over the floor, and one drinks one's drink out of a beige-painted tumbler that has TOAST in gold letters down the side and a ring of darker brown plastic fitted over the rim like the crust on a piece of bread. “I have to say,” Bruno chuckled flatly as we choochooed slowly between the television and the foot of the electric bed, “that I felt slightly like a piece of bread . . . sitting in a giant toaster!”

Really?
I pulsed him as the bathroom door swung shut behind me.
Was it that bad? I mean, are you saying that seriously, or
 . . .

The bathroom door swung shut behind me.

And that's all I got to hear about TOAST.

I get the impression things are going poorly out there in the steaming city, though I could be wrong—which obviously I hope I am.

June 16th—Wednesday

No, I'm not wrong.

The topic of
Thirty UN!der Thirty
this evening was “Does Trial by Jury Always Mean Justice?” and I'm afraid I have to report that when Bruno Maddox in New York whispered his contribution (“Yes . . . I really think it does”) there was real fear in his eyes. This was about five minutes before seven, thirty-five minutes before he was scheduled to meet the girl, and the boy was white—literally—as a sheet, and then just like last night when he got back to the apartment Bruno was blinking and sniffing and swallowing in that same post-excruciating-evening manner that I was trying to describe yesterday.

In fact, I think he may be losing his mind. This morning during the Bathroom Shuffle he told me about “Aluminum Bertrand,” a Belgian restaurant with a futuristic, silvery spaceship theme, in a voice that was not his own. It was all hearty and rollicking, like the voice of a happy fat man. “And at one stage,” he boomed as we neared the little step, “I drank a glass of fermented beer that had the flavor . . .” Bruno half bent his left leg, steadied me with one hand and
slapped his thigh
with the other, “. . .
of an orange
. Ho ho.”

Obviously, I've
read
about people slapping their thighs, reader. I think most of us have. But until you've actually seen it done in the flesh . . . well, it's not a very natural gesture and it only went to heighten my sense of terrible foreboding.

Things are not going well for the boy out there.

June 17th—Thursday

Yes. Bruno Maddox is in hell. I witnessed him there myself this evening, with my own two earwax-colored eyes.

Ten past eight there were footsteps in the stairwell and Bruno's voice apologizing to someone for the conditions. (The conditions are very poor out in our stairwell: very cramped and pungent. Back when I could walk I would always get a vision of the
a
and
e
in “fæces” being squished together into one letter whenever I used the stairs. It was weird.) Then the door next door opened and shut. “I'll just quickly find the . . .” Bruno announced in a strange, disappearing voice, then came the sound of banging drawers in his bedroom.

Then came words I couldn't make out, in the same deep-ish female drone that was on the answering machine that day. Hayley made two remarks in all, each with an identical rhythmic structure: a few staccato, Morse codelike syllables, and then a long stream of sound as if the Morse code operator got shot mid-transmission and slumped forward onto his equipment.

That's when I looked at the fire door and saw that it was open. And I suddenly realized I had no idea what Bruno's policy is about keeping me secret.

Had he told the girl about me? Was that why she was here? To meet me? To help facilitate my transfer to a state-run institution?

Or had he genuinely left something in his bedroom drawers that he needed to collect, and he was just taking the chance that Hayley wouldn't push open the fire door? Or was that what he wanted? For her to discover me on her
own, so that the cat could be free of the bag without his having actually willfully betrayed my confidence? Or was he trying to disgust her? Trying to make her leave him alone? That made sense. For his apartment is disgusting: not just messy but depressing. It's like a diorama of the caregiving mind, with half-finished plates of food and half-finished do-it-yourself projects all over the place, and instead of a traditional bachelor-style pile of laundry in one corner, Bruno has a
ridge
of laundry extending diagonally across the carpet from his bedroom door, formed over time by the failure of each item of soiled clothing lobbed out of his bedroom at night to reach
quite
as far as the last.

No matter what his motivation for bringing the girl here, Bruno had left the fire door open, leaving
me
open to discovery, and now I could hear strange sliding footsteps and then in the window, in the wedge of light reflecting through from Bruno's apartment, suddenly there she was, in shimmering silhouette. The girl was tallish, not visibly obese, and had long, straight hair. That was all I could see. She was just standing there, not moving, semitransparent and hovering like in that detective story about the nun without a face who appears to hikers in Scotland and scares them silly.
*

Come on in
, I pulsed her.
Discover me
 . . .

“Eureka!” bellowed Bruno. “I have been successful!”

And the girl was gone.

When they reached the street I saw Hayley Iskender properly for the first time. Her hair was long and straight and pale, her eyes were set right at the edge of her face like some
sort of frog or fish and she was slouching in a certain willowy way that thin blond women often do. She was attractive, I decided, though in a musty-looking sort of way. Her skin was pale, hardly glowing with health, and her clothes were fairly drab, from bottom to top: canvas shoes, faded blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt curling up at the lower hem to bare the merest sliver of midriff. Frumpiest of all was her cardigan, grayish purple and woolly, possibly homemade. It threw me slightly, that she was wearing that cardigan. Not only was it easily eighty degrees out there in the street—though she wasn't sweating—but people in New York don't usually wear items of casual, almost whimsical knitwear, even in winter. People in New York tend to dress either grittily or glamorously, and her cardigan was neither, about as jarring against the urban backdrop as my baggy black sweater had been back in early twentieth century rural England.

And then there was her . . . bearing. Hayley and Bruno were on the sidewalk outside the blasted shell of International Buckets Inc. to discuss routes or destinations or something, and so there was no particular reason why the girl's body should have been
moving
 . . . but it absolutely wasn't at all. She was perfectly motionless, inert, standing like a statue with her thumbs hooked into the belt loops of her jeans. Even in the absence of wind the tops of the tied black garbage bags were stirring more than Ms. Hayley Iskender, and it occurred to me suddenly that maybe at some point she'd been a fashion model, not because she was that attractive, but because she embodied the sort of supernatural impassivity I imagine one would need to stand in the same spot all day long being accidentally stuck with pins by homosexuals. Then I changed my mind. A fashion model
would never wear that cardigan. On further inspection there
was
actually a little ripple of movement around the girl's mouth as she spoke, and every ten seconds or so a slow blinking of the large eyes, which then returned to watching . . . watching . . .

Watching Bruno Maddox, who was a complete fucking mess. As Hayley spoke Bruno was violently jerking his gaze back and forth between the rusted legs of a fire escape's ladder and the pile of black garbage bags and furiously nodding his head. Then he started tugging at his nose, again and again, as if he genuinely wanted to remove it. His back suddenly buckled as if he'd been jumped upon. He straightened it. It buckled
again
. He straightened. “Shall we go?” said the girl (I read her flickering lips), at which Bruno suddenly threw back his head and
guffawed
, like a vampire in a movie when his dinner guests ask if they can have their coats back so they can go home. While his head was thrown back I caught his eye through the window. It was terrible what I saw: a lot of plain pain, of course, but also a dreadful surprise such as coroners famously see on the faces of gunshot victims. “Why am I like this?” he seemed to be pleading. “What happened? I used to be so . . .”

Because you're a caregiver
, I pulsed down at him.
And I'm really, really sorry
.

Watching him prance wretchedly away in Hayley's wake, the guilt came over me stronger than ever. A young man should never have to look the way Bruno Maddox looked this evening.
Never
.

I sign off this evening forced to entertain the idea that I may in fact be the worst old woman in the history of the universe.

June 18th—Friday

Good news, bad news, reader.

The good news is that Bruno has the weekend off. “So that girl I've been seeing has to work this weekend,” he whispered around tennish, upon his return from a place called Sushi Proto-Kyoto. “So I am going to be around this weekend and . . . and . . . and I'm sorry I'm putting you to bed so early. I'm just . . . shattered.”

Please don't say you're sorry
, I pulsed.
Just go and get some sleep
.

In fact, he went and got some whiskey.

The bad news is that on Monday morning the 'phone is going to ring and that girl is going to drag us all through a second week of this madness, despite the torment of Week One.

Mm?

How do I know?

Because I saw it in her face. Saw it in her face on Thursday, reader. She finishes what she starts, does Hayley Iskender. She has visible inertia. She said she'd give him two weeks and so, by criminy, two weeks it'll be, no matter the human cost.

June 19th—Saturday

Today was awful. Incredibly depressing.

The boy has been completely destroyed by the last five days. His grip on my shoulder during the Bathroom Shuffle was weak as spaghetti, and after serving me my cereal he
tumbled into the nasty armchair and curled up fetally, watching TV with his eyes closed.

Had he stayed there in the armchair I think he could have done himself some good, recouped a little strength, but he didn't. Periodically he would jump to his feet, clap his hands, say something brisk and no-nonsense such as “Right!” and then proceed to squander whatever smidgen of energy he'd just accrued on a pointless and symbolic act of rebirth—loading the first eighteen inches of his Laundry Ridge into a pillowcase, folding an old newspaper in half as a prelude to recycling—before emitting a shuddering groan and diving back into the chair.

It was awful. It
is
awful. I feel like one of those marine biologists who ties a lamb carcass to a rope and throws it off the back of a boat to gauge how many sharks and piranhas there are in a particular stretch of sea—Bruno being the lamb carcass, and this dreadful week just ended, the sea. Today was the day I pulled in the rope . . . and there really doesn't seem to be much of him left. If I were a marine biologist this is the point where I would be gazing into the middle distance and saying “There's something down there.”

June 20th—Sunday

Better day today. There was golf on television, the final round of a tournament. From eleven in the morning the young man Bruno Maddox was able to replace the dark pictures in his head with lovely green vistas of lawn and scapes of whizzing sky, sprays of sand and bushes of azalia, wise old voices murmuring praise . . . . Lying there in the armchair, wrapped tightly in a bedsheet, he drifted in and out of sleep,
looking stronger and more alert each time he awoke. By 3
P
.
M
. he had healed enough to order, receive and tip onto plates two portions of diverticulitis-friendly Chinese bean curd, and by late afternoon he had shed his sheet-cocoon and was sitting there quite erectly in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, looking rested and ready.

Thank you,
I pulsed the television set.
Thank you for being kind to my friend
.

But then the sun began to set. On the screen an old man was trudging up to the eighteenth green with a commanding three-stroke lead in the golden light of a southern evening. As he lifted his putter and touched his cap to the crowds a whimper came from the armchair. With effort I swiveled my eyes. Bruno Maddox's chin was on his chest, and drops of liquid were falling from the poor lamb's eyes to his T-shirt.

Tears, reader.

The drops of liquid were tears.

June 21st—Monday

More golf to report, believe it or not, and possibly, just possibly, some good news as well.