My Little Blue Dress (27 page)

And to my enormous delight it is all about to get worse.

You see, this morning at Hayley's while Hayley was delinting her cardigan and Bruno was hovering around her like a turd, like some absurd little puppy in the kitchen area waiting to walk out with her, he encountered a sleep-puffy S.J. Menges just emerging from her bedroom in an Extra Large black kimono on a mission to make herself the obligatory cup of chamomile tea with which her sort of writers—Eloïse, for one—have historically fueled their morning. Keen to reingratiate himself after all the unpleasantness surrounding his Noise, Bruno congratulated Simon on her new book,
The Queen's Pearl Necklace: Women, Pornography, and the Rise of an American Class System
, into which he had dipped just the night before to quickly check that he could have written all of its sentences. “It was fucking good,” said Bruno to Simon this morning, and suddenly it was if he had never made any Noise. Simon thanked Bruno for his compliment and invited him and Hayley to join her and her good friend
Gordon Gundersson
for dinner and a launch party this Friday night. Yes, that's right. Gordon Gundersson of
Black Current
fame. Author, canoeist, spokesperson of a generation.

Bruno's very excited. Here in the apartment all day it was “
Gor
don . . . how are you . . . brunomaddox” again and again and again, sometimes with Bruno shaking the air's hand, sometimes just glowering at it with an appalling
we-meet-again-old-foe lift of the chin, which made me want to vomit. Even the
memory
of it makes me want to vomit. In fact I
will
vomit.

There.

I feel much better.

In fact I feel
much
better.

The key to this writing thing, I've discovered, reader, incidentally, is absolutely
not
to hunch over the thing and strain to get it right. The key to it . . . the absolute
key to it
 . . . is just to sort of tilt your face back, put as much space as possible between your face and the screen, so the words are so tiny you can barely see them and then . . . and then just imagine you're standing at the top of some sort of metal slope, pouring a jugful of liquid . . .

July 30th—Friday

. . . down the slope the literary liquid runs . . . following its nose, its bliss . . . from Thursday into Friday.

And let me
welcome
you to Friday, reader, to historic Friday evening. I'm here with Bruno Maddox and why don't we say for the sake of argument that we were coming to you live at approximately 1
A
.
M
. in the morning. It'll just be me, unfortunately, because Bruno's passed out in a vomit-slathered heap beside the radiator and will not be able to give us an account of his evening, but the show must go on. Like the professional I am, I shall think on my feet and deduce the events of the evening just passed by examining the evidence at hand.

Exhibit A:
The smell of the boy. There is an odor to him this evening, reader, an odor of sweat that has been warmed
by the rays of the evening sun, from which, as a genius, I am able to deduce . . .

. . . that at thirty minutes past seven this evening Bruno Maddox found himself exploding into the fancy beige confines of the
Capo di Tutti Frutti
Italian restaurant slick with sweat and hair wings a-flap after maniacally shambling the thirty odd blocks from his lonely, unappreciative workplace. The maître d' of the place will have viewed him, correctly, as something of a Tarzanish figure as Bruno pointlessly shielded his eyes and spotted Hayley, Simon and the large brown bulk of Gordon Gundersson, seated at the very farthest table, a round one.

There was another note in his odor, though, a scent of perfume and irritation, which leads me to the assumption that
Capo di Tutti Frutti
was, rather like the steerage section of an aircraft, the sort of place where the slightest movement of one's muscles places some portion of one's flesh in somebody else's face, something that happened significantly more than once, I have a feeling, as Bruno shambled through the gaps between the tables.

One final thing I smell: a tangy cocktail of Hayley Iskender and the boy's own fizzing neurotransmitter that tells me Bruno's first act upon joining his party, even before sitting down, was to pointedly ignore Gundersson, say “Hey,” and plant a firm kiss on the cheek of Hayley Iskender while scraping an unaffiliated diner with his buttock.

Elementary.

 

Exhibit B:
A crease in the muscle above his eyebrow, from which I deduce that what happened next was that Simon Menges greeted him, “How are
you
?” in a weird way
that made him raise that eyebrow as he slid heavily into his chair next to Hayley.

“Oh
I'm
okay,” he tosses out. “Feeling a little . . . diminished. The, uh, camera seizes my essence and distributes it electromagnetically.”

And the table will have fallen silent.

“Bruno . . .” begins Simon.

The young man's head jerks up, cocks.

“. . . this is . . .”

Slow smile of . . .

“. . . my friend Gor . . .”

Recognition changes the shape of Bruno's mouth. “Oh . . . right. Yeah, we've met. Hi.” His fingers flick up. “Good to meet you.”

Gundersson is, geniusly, the only person in the restaurant wearing a T-shirt, a gray one. He is similarly the only person drinking a pint of beer, and not just any pint of beer, but a pint of beer so hoppy and authentic that it looks like it's had a tree dipped in it. Gordon sits there bronzed and humorless and muscular beneath his pile of canoeist ringlets. He nods at Bruno then resumes a conversation with Hayley Iskender. “Iskender. That's a Turkish name, isn't it?”

“Mm hmm.”

“You're Turkish?” says Bruno to Hayley, grandly unflapping his napkin and looking, for some reason, at Gordon.

“Yes. My father's father was from Turkey.”

Bruno winks at Simon. “But you're
blond
.”

“I thought you two were together,” Gordon comments with a frown.

At this Bruno has to guffaw. “Oh we
are
,” wrapping a
thick arm around Hayley's thin shoulders and squeezing. “I suppose it's just that . . . I've been . . . suppressing asking her about her Turkishness.”

“What?” asks Simon, failing to make the connection between Bruno's unfathomable remark and the truth: that he is himself a genius.

 

Exhibit C:
The wrinkle pattern of Bruno's horrible green jacket, which tells me . . .

. . . that after a waitress has recited the specials and selections have been lodged, Gordon sets down his beer and addresses Bruno in a fairly amiable manner, “Sorry what was your name again?”

“Brunomaddox,” whispers Bruno, leaning forward, wrinkling his shoulders.

“Burn . . . eye . . . ?”

“Bruno,
B-R-U-N-O
, Maddox.
M-A-
double-
D-O-X
.”

Gordon has it now. He nods. “Okay. How's it going.”

“
Fucking
well, actually, Gordon.” Bruno jabs a finger at Gordon, congratulating him on his extremely germane inquiry. “
Fucking
well.”

“Why?” wonders Gordon.

Bruno nods. He understands what Gordon is after. Chance for him here.

“Oh, you know. Good day at the . . .” wiggles fingers, miming typing, “. . . endeavors.”

“You're a writer?”

“Oh yes.” This is Simon, the bitch, and her eyes are glittering in a sinister, almost sexual manner. “Bruno has his finger in
many pies
!” Hayley, all this while, is looking at her plate.

Bruno: “I'm not quite sure what Simon's implying, but
yes I am working on quite a few projects at the moment. I'm doing a rock opera about an airline pilot who has a few problems with the . . .” wiggles fingers, miming drinking, “bottle.
Cabin Pressure
.”

Hayley looks up at Simon who is still smirking at Bruno who is staring hopefully at Gordon.

“My friend is an airline pilot.” Gordon takes a bite of his beer.

“Oh really? How does he stand it?”

“Stand what?”

“The awfulness.”

“Awfulness?”

“Yes the . . . the constant fear, the stress, the little chair.”

“What little chair?”

Bruno doesn't know. He unflaps his napkin one more time. “Er . . . don't worry.” He dabs at his immaculate lips with the napkin. “Forget it. It's not that big a . . .” and then inspiration strikes, terribly, cheapening and ruining everything that was good, or even acceptable, about the scene around the table, “. . .
chair,
” he says.

 

Exhibit D:
A crease on Bruno's thigh that I just
know in my gut
was caused by Hayley Iskender reaching under the table and squeezing his leg to make him rein himself in.

“I'm sorry,” Gordon's forehead is knotted like a tree, “I'm not following you.”

“Oh there's nothing to ‘
follow
.' Look, are you okay? I haven't . . . said something to bother you have I?”

Bruno uses this line on Gordon because people are always using it on Bruno, it seems, and it always has the effect of rallying whole tablefuls of people against him.

The line does not work in reverse, though, it seems. Simon and Hayley both stare at Bruno. Gordon shifts comfortably in his chair, scrapes his stubble with the backs of his fingernails. His watch is nice. “No. It's just you seem kind of . . . unsocialized. I don't mean to be rude.” For an instant Bruno considers bursting into tears, but just then the food arrives. “Ah. Food,” he says and steeples his fingers like some weird old German man or something.

 

Exhibit M:
An oval smooth-patch the size of a melon on the back of his jacket, which I can't help feeling must have been caused by Bruno spending the rest of the meal on his absolute best behavior, dominating conversation with his contrition and his increasingly drunken silence. Simon engages Gordon in a somewhat stilted discussion of the difference between Public Space and Private Space, likening the answering machine she shares with Hayley to a
valve
in the skin of her Private Sphere, through which Public Space intrudes in the form of people calling her up and asking her to do things because she is a famous author.

“Like in a dome,” squeaks Bruno, voice sticky with disuse, they all agree, not wanting to set him off. “It
is
like in a dome,” all three of them chime, not knowing what they're saying.

 

Exhibit O:
A stretch mark on the front of Bruno's Housing Department T-shirt presumably caused by the massive sigh of relief he gave when it all, finally, seemed to be over. “Eighty each,” I detect Simon saying, after studying the bill. Three credit cards appear, and Bruno's checkbook.

“Looks like you have a check already made out,” says Simon, squinting, her strange glow returning, forgetting to worry about setting Bruno off.

Gordon, being a canoeist, having constantly to be peering into the distance for semi-submerged rocks, has better eyesight. “Wow,” he observes. “I like the ‘only.' ”

 

Exhibit Z:
And finally: a great crust of milky yellow vomit down the forearm of one of Bruno's sleeves, from which I infer that within an hour of his checkbook appearing Bruno is crouched inside a brushed-steel stall at Aluminum Bertrand regurgitating six quick whiskeys and his penne with Tuscan meat sauce, which tasted like cat food anyway, into the brushed-steel toilet bowl. There is a good deal of banging on the door, much of it official—barmaids, barmen, bouncers, managers, owners, local councillors, congressmen, presidents, kings—and a majority of the remainder coming from Simon Menges, who is having the time of her life. “Bru-no!” roars Simon in a sing-song. “You need to get out of there so that other people can get in!”

“Is he vomiting?” asks a stranger.

“Yes,” choruses everybody.

“ 'Kay!” Bruno shouts, the syllable echoing in the bowl like the foghorn of a ship.

“You guys shouldn't bang on the door,” comes Gordon's voice, an ally all of a sudden, now that Bruno has all of the shallow, wine-drinking Manhattan nightlife belle monde ranged against him. “It's not cool. He may really be ill.”

And then it's Hayley Iskender. Her voice is sad and tired and sober and would have preferred not to be heard . . . and yet it cuts through the tumult like a knife
made of paper. “Hey. It's me. Bruno if you come out of there we can go home.”

“ 'Kay . . . ay . . . ay . . . y.”

Hayley again. “It's okay.” The crowd grows absolutely silent to listen. “Nobody cares about the checkbook.”

“I 'idn't write that!” he thunders incorrectly. “I id
not
write
that
!”