My Little Blue Dress (31 page)

Well, none of it was true, obviously. As you will have realized yourself if you have half a brain—even
half
of one, reader—the only thing wrong with Bruno Maddox is that he is one of those standard young men who Doesn't Really Know Who He Is—except of course on those days when suddenly
boom:
he
does
know who he is, and everything clicks into place, for about forty-eight hours, before he forgets—which is not, to be frank, a terribly interesting thing to have stayed up all night writing an entire book about. That's what all the other books are about: young men not knowing who they are.
Gary's Song,
by Greg McEwan, in particular, I suspect. In other words, I have wasted both our times. Which is why I am offering you an apology.

Or rather a semiapology.

It is only a semiapology, reader, because I am also aware that for the last hundred thousand pages you have been sitting there in your little reading chair with your piped-in classical music and your nearby strokable cat,
hating
Bruno Maddox for the way he is, when the truth of the matter is that you yourself are just as bad. Of course you are. We all are. Don't even
try
to tell me that you're so sure and settled in your personality that you don't occasionally get seduced by some shiny New Way To Be, even if it's just a resolution to be nicer to animals or eat nothing but fresh fruit each day for breakfast, and don't even try to tell me that within the week you aren't back to whipping your donkey and wolfing down great slabs of blood sausage with bolognese sauce
before you've even stepped out of bed. That's just the way we are, reader, all of us, as human beings. Even you.

Even you, reader. Which is why it's such an unappetizing spectacle to see you squatting there in your chair and detesting Bruno Maddox. For God's sake. The only difference between you and him is that Bruno possibly tends to try to reinvent himself on a slightly larger scale, his entire personality, from soup to enchiladas, but even that has its precedents.

In fact, I call your attention to years 1967–69, during which—if you consult your history book, reader—you will find that an
entire generation
of young men
and women
suffered a somewhat brunomaddoxish episode: deciding, in 1967, that they finally had it all figured out, that the unimpeachable secret of life was to renounce all human values but Love; managing, throughout 1968, to keep the dream alive despite the novelty wearing off slightly, despite a drip in the roof of the teepee; succumbing, in 1969, to pent-up hatred and recrimination, drowning en masse in a sea of mud, brown acid, and recrimination.

But perhaps you hate them too, reader. Perhaps you hate the hippies. Perhaps you're the sort of person who dons a long-haired wig for Hallowe'en, who allows a hint of a wry smile to mangle the corner of their mouth as they watch old footage of some sun child placidly inserting a flower into a soldier's gun.

Jesus,
you're vicious.

How can you hate the hippies, reader?
How?
They were only trying to do the right thing, just like Bruno Maddox. It wasn't their fault that they came of age in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity that led them to the utterly understandable, though false conclusion that the boring and interminable process of the World's coming of age was over
and that it was time for mankind to see to the business of living for all eternity in peace and love and harmony.

Which
, now I think of it, and at the risk of saying something frighteningly intelligent, may be Bruno Maddox's problem as well.
He
thinks the Past is finished and that we're all living in the Future. Of course we are. Why else, as discussed, would everyone be dressing up ironically in mismatched clothing from earlier decades? Why else would this entire culture so proudly consist of nothing but recycled, re-animated artforms of yore? How can you blame Bruno Maddox for constantly trying to transform himself into a god, reader, when he gets reminded at every turn that he's living in a futuristic age without limitations in which anything is possible and divinity is not merely attainable but his
birthright?
Hmm?

You can't.

You can blame me, though.

Because, if you think about it,
I
am Bruno's sense of history. It is because he thinks the past was as quaint and cartoonish as the early sections of this book, the early sections of
my
life, that he has such high expectations for the world he lives in.

So it's all
my
fault.

In
fact
, reader . . .

(And I refuse to call you “reader” anymore. We're beyond that now, reader. We can put down our masks. No need to stand on ceremony. We're closing in on something. I'm sorry I yelled at you earlier. I . . . I was angry. We should put that time behind us. What if I just call you “Michelle”?)

In
fact
, Michelle, if you've been teetering on the edge of your seat for the last thousand or so pages waiting for the
next installment of my memoir, then why do we not just say that all throughout the period of Bruno Maddox's growing-up, throughout the nineteen seventies and the nineteen eighties and the nineteen nineties, I had my mouth jammed to his ear and was telling him telling him the same steaming pile of nonsense I was telling you earlier, Michelle, that the Past was quaint and ridiculous and small-minded and unambitious and inward-looking, and most important, that it was very, very different from the glorious golden Future in which he was very,
very
fortunate to live? He believed me, too. Perhaps because the television was saying the exact same thing.

And perhaps, Michelle, from time to time, if ever we found ourselves alone, I would dig out the old Super-8 movie projector that I had salvaged from my sinister nineteen fifties living room back in Fordham, Wisconsin, and show the young Bruno Maddox a
movie
, Michelle. Any old thing would do: a thrilling old war film with a stubbly hero mowing down hundreds of faceless Germans with a gun made out of his shoe . . . maybe a flick involving a modest, thoughtful scientist in the fifteenth century getting roundly ridiculed by a panel of kings and queens in large bulbous hats for having dared to suggest that the world is round or that grass is green . . . or maybe just one about a young boy with nothing but a guitar and a dream, growing up in a little rural village where everyone thought his music was shit. Didn't matter, as I say, because when the film was ended, when the tail end of the celluloid was flapping round and round in the projector, I would infallibly turn to the very young Bruno Maddox and demand to know where his sympathies lay. “Do they lie with the ordinary, clear-thinking hero?” I would ask. “Or with the stupid faceless masses?”

“With the hero?”

“I'm . . . I'm sorry?”

“With the hero?”

At which point, Michelle, I would pretend to fall over. Well, I actually
would
fall over, but it would all be a sham, and when I regained my footing, after a minute on the floor, I would lean into the face of the tiny little guy, my features white and sharp with urgency, and inform him of the following: that he was a genius, just like the man in the movie; that unlike the man in the movie he wasn't living in the drab and piddling Past, but the sparkling, unlimited Future and would therefore be rewarded for his genius, not with millions of dollars, but with
billions
of millions, if not in fact more.

“But . . . but what'll be my field, my . . . zone of expertise?” the little tyke would bleat, regurgitating vitamin-fortified pear mash onto his plastic bib with the picture of the cow on it.

“ ‘Field'?” I would thunder. “Did Albert Einstein have a ‘field'? Was he paid his measly million dollars for being quote unquote ‘a physicist'? No. He was paid those monies in return for being Mr. Albert Einstein, for allowing the world access to his
personality
. And it will be the same way with you, as long as you don't fuck it up.”

“How might I do that?” he would wonder aloud, his tiny forehead crinkling.

By failing to keep his options open, I'd explain. By allowing the hordes of little people to define him as one of them, as a particular sort of person, with a particular sort of job, from whom a particular set of behaviors could be expected. That was not how geniuses had behaved. Geniuses were limitless. They didn't join the army. Or get a job. Or marry some moderately attractive woman at the age of
twenty-four. Geniuses stayed true to themselves, doing nothing that required any effort or compromise, until they woke up one morning and found that their entire personality had been smoothly converted into a glittering mountain of money and renown, sitting there at the foot of their bed.

And that, Michelle, is why Bruno Maddox is the way he is. That's why he just keeps starting again . . . starting again . . . starting again. He's waiting for life to feel like I told him it was
supposed
to feel. He's been keeping his options open, Michelle, all this time, wide, wide open. Nobody knows how to keep his options open like Bruno Maddox. Jesus, Michelle, he won't even let you
take his photograph
for fear it might establish irrevocably that he was in a particular place at a particular time. If you approach him at a party and say “Hello. How are you?” then
no way in hell
will he respond “Fine. How are you?” Because he's wise to your little game, Michelle. He knows what you're up to. How dare you assume he's just like you, some tiny-minded nobody who plays by the rules and engages in the standard small talk. No, Michelle, you can expect the unexpected if you ever try a stunt like that. You'll get a “
fucking
well, actually,” for your trouble, or an “I have a brain tumor, thank you, and I'm
dying
.” And if you're working behind the checkout counter, Michelle, of an emporium that happens to purvey gentlemen's toiletries, and an extremely stubbly Bruno Maddox approaches you to purchase a bag of disposable safety razors, well, then brace yourself, because as he slides his cash toward you he's going to mumble something like “These are for my goldfish,” thereby puncturing the arrogant hypothesis you were quietly forming that you knew what he was going to do with them.

Yes, Michelle, bad things happen to people who think
they know what “sort” of person Bruno Maddox is, or what to expect of him, or what he's capable of.

Case in point, one Ms. H. Iskender of Manhattan Island, who called us up in Chinatown that

August 26th—Thursday

Thursday morning to leave the following supposedly devastating message, which I shall embolden for emphasis:

Hello? It's me. Um, I'm . . . I've decided to go to England for two weeks with Mark Clark, starting today, and I don't want you using the apartment, okay? Pause. I guess pause I guess I'll speak to you in two weeks. Mm . . . 'bye. Click. Buzz. Click.

Bruno didn't think much of Hayley's message. In bed, beneath a greasy sheet, he frankly didn't
understand
the bulk of it. All that stuff about Mark Clark . . . and going to England for two weeks . . . and that whole subtext about her and Bruno not being an item anymore. It all seemed pretty opaque.

No, the only solid information he was able to glean from those few seconds of staticky droning was that Hayley Iskender was clearly under the impression that Bruno Maddox was the sort of person for whom she could safely leave that type of message. The sort of person who will just lie back and take it. The sort of person, frankly, whom she could count on
not
to roll commando style from his bed, squat above the 'phone, ingeniously consult with Directory Assistance in Kansas City, Missouri, and place a call to
Clark's Quality
Optical Frames
to extract the flight information that he knew in his gut all members of the super-intimate, recently bereaved Clark family were routinely filing with one another, then jump into his nasty green suit, ride via cab to the airport, wander about feeling completely insane, lurk behind a nest of 'phones while she and Clark—exhibiting to his relief no obvious signs of intimacy or even affection—checked their bags and disappeared into the bowels of the airport, and after suffering a moment of intolerable hollowness and desperation, consult the screenful of Departures and book passage himself aboard a flight that was due to reach England before her own.

That was a big mistake on her part, Michelle, thinking he wouldn't do that.

Because it meant that that was what he had to do. A genius cannot let himself be defined by others, can't let them make him small like that. Or so I told him.

Which is what I've been trying to tell you, Michelle.

That it's all
my
fault.

Mea culpa.

Whatever the German is for “It's all my fault.”

And that's why
everything
 . . .

That's

PART III
Why
Everything,
Michelle