My Little Blue Dress (29 page)

August 15th—Sunday

or even
eight
.

August 16th—Monday

Didn't matter, ultimately, because by the time Bruno finally did call the girl the Plan had been discarded. He came awake that Monday morning in darkness with an abdominal pain of the stabbing variety that was stronger than anything anyone had ever felt and the
bad
news, reckoned
The Caregiver's Bible
, was that it was definitely either diverticulitis—an exclusive disease of elderly people like me—or stomach cancer, probably stomach cancer. Skipping the traditional sequence of Denial, Anger, Hiding Under Doctor's Desk, etc., the microscopic little shit went straight to Crying. In his bedsheet toga on the creaking predawn floor Bruno rocked back and forth and grieved the unfairness, and yet the inevitability, of his having been struck down only a day or two—three at the most—from his ultimate becoming.

By mid-morning he was bravely appreciating the irony of it. Ironic that it would take something like this to finally make the Feeling permanent—remember the Feeling, reader?

The future was simple now, and obvious, and eerily similar to the one he'd been planning in the VIP lounges: his
diagnosis was the occasion to renounce the Scene, renounce everything and spend what time remained to him making Hayley Iskender happy. It was the obvious foolproof move, which is why it was so distressing to him when she seemed reluctant to play along.

“Why do you think you have stomach cancer?” was what she asked through the 'phone, after a short bored pause.

“It's the . . . aaugh! . . . It's the
symptoms
. I've got them exactly. Hayley . . .”

“Do you have a hangover?”

“No.”

“Well, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you'll be okay.”

“Um . . . thanks. Um . . .”

“Is that it?”

“
No
. Hayley . . .”

“Yes?”

“Is something wrong? Are you mad at me? I'm really picking up a tone.”

He really was, reader. Hayley was using a tone. Even when she wasn't speaking—like now—she was pausing—there was palpable hostility coming through the 'phone.

“Bruno, I'm sick of this.”

“Sick of what? What? Are you sick of
me
?”

“Yes.”

“
Hay
ley.
Listen
. Are you listening?”

“I'm working. I have a deadline.”

“So do
I
! But Hayley . . . look, listen. I'm sorry. About everything. I've been a moron. But I'm not fucking joking about this cancer thing.” He gave one sob. “I am dying. Even if you don't want to be with me anymore . . . I need you. Look, I'm not from around here. I'm a traveler alone in
a foreign country with a fatal disease. I just need someone to talk to. Just for five minutes. Just for
one
 . . .”

And Bruno Maddox began to cry, like a tiny little girl, faux-stifling his sobs until Hayley, as she had to, relented and agreed to meet him. Let me tell you, as a woman myself, it's very hard as a female organism in Nature to refuse the requests of a grown man who is actually crying, even if he's the sort who basically cries all the time.

So they met, in the evening, at Midnite Xpress, a twenty-four-hour Turkish take-away franchise with exactly one plastic table. Bruno chose the venue. It was his stupidly clever way of paying homage to the tiny drop of Turkishness apparently rolling like a marble down Hayley's bloodless, echoey veins—the one that Gundersson had so cunningly zeroed in on that night of all the nonsense at
Capo di Tutti Frutti
. Precisely what subliminal effect this was meant to have on the girl he didn't know—the same way he didn't know how the
Shades of Manhattan
audience member who discovers Amanda's sunglasses beneath his or her chair was supposed to feel—but he found her hunched above the plastic table looking tired and bothered and even a good deal
older
than he remembered her. The eight Turks behind the counter thought Hayley looked good though, they were lusting at her visibly, speculating in Turkish about what fun it would be to penetrate her in a special tent during a sandstorm.

Bruno's conversation with Hayley Iskender went like this:

“Hey,” said Bruno.

“How are you?” said Hayley.

“Fine,” said Bruno. “How are you?”

“You're fine?” said Hayley, the legs of her plastic chair creating a barking sound as she stood.

“Ye . . . oh oh oh oh,” said Bruno. “The stomach thing. Yeah, it's the weirdest thing but it's actually feeling much . . .”

Hayley didn't wait to hear about his miraculous recovery. She exited at that stage, reader, and stalked away into the hot night and the crowds of people with her usually limp ponytail swinging like a stiff and unfeeling pendulum.

How did Bruno feel about her sudden departure? Oh come on, reader. You know how he felt. There in that glaring cube of aromatic space? Under the glittering eyes of those terrible Turks? Having just been jettisoned by the woman on this planet who most precisely fit the definition of his “girlfriend”? He felt like the Turks were
judging him
.

“She's . . .” he announced, rubbing his chin like an adventurer. “She's an untamable stallion, that one.” And then he laughed, “No problem, though,” and resolved not to deal with the larger issue until he'd made it back to Chinatown, downed his massive Turkish sandwich, and watched a documentary about some scientists examining a corpse in order to determine who had killed it.

By morning, though, of course,

August 17th—Tuesday

The thing had become a proper crisis. He couldn't
believe
it, reader, couldn't
believe
that he'd actually been fool enough to exchange his one shot at finding love in this appalling universe for . . . for what? For the transient cool of a super-model's hair against his forefinger? For the hollow,
ephemeral clinking of cleverly shaped, complimentary ice cubes? It hardly seemed worth it.

Oh, and also summer was ending, reader. Another thing to spark regret. That end-of-Summer atmosphere was fully noticeable in the air: the one where you step outside in the morning and notice that the air is fractionally cooler and the light fractionally more orange and more angled than you remember, as if the Earth has tilted slightly on its axis while you've been asleep, which I suppose is actually pretty close to the scientific truth of the situation, and some pieces of paper are blowing around in a circle at the corner of the street and you think you might even smell a distant
wood-fire
 . . . and possibly even hear the bonging of a distant
churchbell
 . . . and all of a sudden it's like your mam calling you home for your tea or something because you get all overwhelmed with poignancy and regret and a strange
nostalgia
that isn't for anything in particular. I mean you're nostalgic for the summer just ending, of course, but when you try to actually put your finger on it you find you're merely nostalgic for the day you went to the Post Office and bought stamps, and for the day you saw a dog with a set of small wheels instead of a set of hind legs, and for the day you did laundry . . .

The young man felt
old
all of a sudden, reader, slightly. Venturing out for his morning sandwich he caught sight of his clothes and could no longer see the point of them, get the joke of them. No longer did his clothing make him feel like a
god
, reader, a god reaching languidly down from a cloud and plucking the trousers off a nineteen forties paratrooper and the shirt off the back of a 21st Century Housing Department worker . . . no, instead they made him feel like a man who lacked either the money or the basic common sense to dress appropriately.

And so he acted. Bruno bent his steps west and at a vast discount clothing emporium on the huge wide street that runs the length of Manhattan Island he conducted a transaction and emerged not long after wearing two of the
plainest
items of clothing that you ever did see, reader: a gray collarless shirt so utterly unremarkable that one of those puppeteers who usually perform in black clothing against a black background with their head in a black cowl could have worn it in a pinch without ruining the audience's experience, and a pair of black denim trousers, reader, so spectacular in their featurelessness that even a writer of my own demonstrated
excellence
has absolutely
nothing
to say about them.

His next move was to fix his hair. At a giant mechanized barn of a barbershop the protagonist Bruno Maddox maintained perfect unwavering eye contact with himself in the mirror while an elderly Italian soccer fanatic relieved him of the appalling hair wings upon which he has been propelling himself all summer and left with what can only be described as “a very poor haircut indeed.” His head now resembled a potato, and truth be known Bruno
felt
rather like a potato as he made his way back through the teeming, steaming streets. He felt like a knobbly old gray spud rolling lumpily home between the weightless, gallivanting strawberries and kumquats that people the streets of Manhattan. He felt stupid, ugly, and miserable . . . and it felt good to feel that way. After months of juggling all those glamorous, unfeasible identities? To be able to let them all thud to the ground and just for better or worse be “Bruno Maddox”? A humble normal man with a name and a telephone number and a troubled past and a difficult recovery and a new, hard-won appreciation of his limitations? A solid citizen who if you called out “Hey!
Bruno Maddox!” from across the street would probably lift his face to see if he could be of any assistance?

It felt fantastic.

He'd finally got it right.

After one of the longest periods of trial and error in the entire history of the phrase, Bruno Maddox had finally
got it right
.

Bruno pinged Hayley's bell at eight o'clock that evening after a day of housecleaning and vegetable eating, to say good-bye, and possibly do some more suffering. She opened the door and looked at him. “Hello,” she droned inscrutably. “What do you want?”

“Can I come in?”

She blinked up at his head. “What happened to your hair?”

“I took care of it,” said Bruno Maddox. “Do you think I could come in?”

“. . .”

Reader, the word she was groping for was “No.” It was right on the tip of her tongue. Knowing the boy as well as she did, Hayley had been braced all day for a surprise visit, but this . . . this she was
not
prepared for. The tragic haircut, the unspectacular clothing, the quiet yet forceful vocal tone . . . Curiosity alone would have probably made her stand aside and bid him enter—even if there hadn't been something else, something she couldn't quite put her finger on.

Sitting with him on the black leather couch Hayley stopped trying to put her finger on what else was different about Bruno and switched her attention to the sensation in her
genitalia
, reader. For the record Bruno was pouring his heart out in a long, unstructured ramble about his family, his
childhood, a recurring dream of his in which he's dangling irrelevantly from the undercarriage of a plane . . . but Hayley was seeing past his words to the big picture, to the man himself, and having a response that was largely physiolog . . .

“Do you want to stay?” she heard herself interrupt. “Simon's at a writer's retreat till the end of the month. You could stay here till then.”

“Um . . .” The young man chewed his lip and gathered his thoughts, then launched into a whole new speech about how
careful
he was going to be about making decisions like that from here on in, and what a fool he'd been in the past for just rushing into . . .

Hayley prodded him with her toe. “I think I need to be naked with you” were her exact words and trust me, reader, you would have said the same.
Anyone
would have done. Any man, or woman, or child. Any rock, or stone, or tree. Reader, a
jar of mineral oil
seated next to him on the couch that evening would have also started to fizz and steam and tilt slightly in his direction.
And I'm not being sarcastic
.

Because the thing was this:

Bruno Maddox was
magnificent
. He really was. All those horrible defects that were all the
old
Bruno Maddox really had in the way of a personality were beginning to look an awful lot like
virtues
now that they were organized around this soulful, clear-eyed core. The megalomania was a nice balance to the crippling low self-esteem, the compulsive socialite glibness—when you thought about it—worked rather well with his occasional spasms of clinginess . . . just as long as at the eye of the storm there was a self-awareness and a goodness and a
reason
for it all . . .

Look, I'm sorry, reader. I'm not being clear. The hour is late and I have been losing focus for some time now, truth be
told. The only point I'm trying to make is that you too, in Hayley's position, would have informed Bruno Maddox of your need to be naked with him, and that you too, frankly, would have also allowed him to pump himself empty inside you with the power and sincerity of an early steam train and would probably, just like Hayley Iskender, have melted off to sleep with the warmth of his magnificence still dying on your tongue like the warmth in a spoon that you have used to stir your coffee and are using now to eat your cereal. His magnificence, reader, was just that intense. As