My Little Blue Dress (18 page)

Bruno and Hayley spent this evening just past at a popular nightspot called The Nineteenth Hole, a bar that's been designed to resemble an upscale suburban country club. The place features plush armchairs, an actual eighteen-hole miniature golf course running all the way around the room, and sepia-tinted photos on the walls of old-fashioned miniature golfers in caps and plus-fours posing in front of mini-windmills and open-mouthed clowns, etc.

I know all this, tragically, because this morning, while on
the 'phone to Hayley, Bruno, who was using the rollicking fat-man voice again, insisted on repeating the salient features of the place with faux delight as Hayley explained them to him.

It was a pretty grim audio spectacle, but here's the thing:

Bruno actually looked
okay
just now when he rolled in. Not exactly happy. Not happy per se. More like
un
happy, but he looked unhappy in a calmer, more resigned way than last week, which strikes me as fantastic news. If he can just detach himself from what's happening out there with the girl, just muscle through it like you muscle through any unpleasant task, then he might be able to avoid any more actual
damage
.

June 22nd—Tuesday

Boy continues to bear up well. You should have seen his jaw just now as he put me to bed. It was firm, and resolute, and
invincible
, reader, like the side of a mountain.

He's toughing it out.

June 23rd—Wednesday

I'm already thinking about next week. I can't wait, reader. I simply cannot wait. This madness will be behind us. However damaged Bruno is right now, it doesn't matter. Because for the first time ever I'll be watching Bruno's mental health
improve
on a daily basis, as the memory of this horrific fortnight recedes, rather than crumble apart. It'll be a time of
healing, of stock taking, a chance for Bruno to make some hard, but necessary decisions: for instance calling the Health Services and getting me out of his hair, or killing me, or something. Whatever. It doesn't matter. At the risk of counting my chickens prematurely, reader, my message for you this evening is that in my humble opinion we have made it through the minefield. Crisis has been averted. Everything is going to be fine.

Just fine.

June 24th—Thursday

Look, don't panic, all right? But something appears to have occurred, exactly what I don't know. Let me give you what information I do have and maybe we can piece it together.

Four minutes ago my eyes snapped open and I found myself still lying on my electric bed, out in the main body of the apartment. It was dark outside, the TV was on, the lights were glaring down and I saw by the clock on the video that it was 3:31. In the morning, reader. Three thirty-one in the morning.

And that's when I saw the boy through the fire door.

Bruno was sitting sideways in the open window of his apartment, gazing placidly out into the night. The topmost five buttons of his shirt were unfastened and in his hand was a little plastic bottle of mineral water whose cap, as I watched, he twirled off with his long, elegant fingers. He swigged, sluiced, and casually screwed back on the bottle cap, as if he hadn't a care in the world. So stunned was I by the apparent change in him that I made an involuntary
gagging noise with my throat. He glanced over. “Oh hey,” he said, in a soft, confident voice I hadn't heard since that first day back in February, the day we met. “How was dinner?”

Bruno set down his water and came through. His face, it struck me, had a glow to it, an inner radiance, and the touch of his hands as he helped me down off the electric bed was like the upholstery of a luxury car. I felt safe and supported, literally in good hands. “Easy now” were his tender words as I teetered on the little step, then “Well done,” when my foot found the lower surface. In the bedroom he pulled the sheet up to my chin like a mother does to a child. “Goodnight,” he said sincerely.

Something's happened.

Something
good
.

But what?

Could it simply have been the climate? The moment I woke up I knew the weather had improved. The street noise of Chinatown is usually just a big tangle of undifferentiated sound by the time it filters back to my windowless bedroom, but this morning I could hear all the different sounds distinctly: every clanking metal storefront, every
eep-eep-eep
of a reversing truck, every
tumf
of a falling cabbage. The pillow of humidity had been lifted from the city's face and the sounds bounced around in the thin air all clean and shiny, like the apartment was an aviary, filled with freshly painted metal birds.

Not that Bruno gave a shit. His grip on my body was as flaccid and corpselike as ever during the Bathroom Shuffle and he spent the Morning Session curled again on the nasty armchair, repeatedly knocking his head back on the upholstery. I have been skeptical since infancy of the proposition that cooking is an art form, that you can express via food
ideas, feelings that other media won't support, but then came lunch—rough-hewn cubes of cheese on a bed of moist napkins—and I was forced to rethink that position.

So no. It can't just have been the weather.

Was it the party?

They went to a party this evening. I know, because ninety seconds after Bruno left for work at five-thirty there came a message from Hayley Iskender:

“Hi, it's me,” she sighed, sounding even tireder than usual, “I hope you get this message before you leave for work. I'm going to be late to the
come hither
party. Be there closer to eight-thirty than seven-thirty because I [she sighed] I have to go and interview an astrophysicist about the effects of neutrino storms and gamma radiation on the human complexion. It's stupid. Anyway, the party starts at six so feel free to go straight up to the roof and have a drink. My office is on the twenty-third floor if you want to wait there but . . . look, anyway I'll see you at eight-thirty.”

Hmm.

Bruno
didn't
get this message before leaving for work, nor did he call in to retrieve it, and so I think I can safely assume that directly after
Thirty UN!der Thirty
, say at 7:05
P
.
M
., Bruno Maddox will have been climbing into a cab outside the American Stock Exchange and directing it uptown to the midtown offices of Hayley's magazine
come hither
. At 7:20
P
.
M
. he'll have been giving his name to someone with a clipboard, squeezing into an elevator, and a minute after that emerging onto the rooftop of a building with at least twenty-three stories, possibly a good deal more.

With a start time of six o'clock my guess is that the party will have been in semi to full swing at 7:21, and for the sake
of argument let's say it was a fairly standard magazine party of the sort they feature quite regularly on the Glamour Channel: hordes of attractive young people, exuberantly dressed and milling about between giant blowup reproductions of magazine covers; white-jacketed barmen behind tables full of liquor; a band playing music . . . possibly on some sort of raised dais . . .

Is that as far as good old-fashioned logic and deduction can take me?

No.

It isn't.

Hayley being Hayley, a young lady burdened with a sense of responsibility so keen and inflexible that she'd rather drag three innocents through hell—only two that she knows about, I suppose—than break off a ridiculous “probationary” relationship founded on a gross misunderstanding, I bet my bottom dollar that she will have
allowed
for the possibility of Bruno not getting her 'phone message and will have . . . will have, I'm almost certain, left word with one of her colleagues to keep an eye out for a tall young man in a horrible green suit who may or may not be nodding his head uncontrollably. No later than 7:30
P
.
M
., this colleague, probably a woman, given
come hither
, will have spotted Bruno Maddox looking lost, will have accosted him, explained Hayley's lateness, showed him to a drink, engaged him in small talk, then, finding the small talk rather heavy going, will have started introducing him to other people. That much is just common sense.

Where are we now? Quarter to eight? Ten to eight . . . ?

Hmm.

Okay, I'm stuck.

Maybe this is where the weather
does
come into play. Even from my filthy, low-rent vantage point down here in Chinatown I could tell it was a pretty damn magical evening out there in the World. The air was warm and light, the sky a long, drawn-out blue with a thumbnail scratch of white moon at its apex . . . Frankly, reader, it was the kind of evening that makes old ladies like me wish we could have the use of our legs back just for ten short minutes, to one final time stride out and feel the air infiltrate our clothing, the nip of evening on our naked forearms. And for Bruno? After months of claustrophobia and fetid old-woman-stinky air? To be up beneath the luminous dome of the sky with nobody needing to be fed or walked to the bathroom or have pills counted out for them, nor with any stone-faced person in a cardigan hunched across a little table from him in a bar, sucking the straw of her drink and blinking wizzically because whatever he just mumbled was inaudible or nonsensical? To be able, for the first time since arriving in this notoriously liberating country, just to talk to people without having to make any particular kind of sense, or come across as any particular sort of person . . . just to drink whiskey after whiskey without caring how it seems . . . ? It must have been fantastic.

Eight-thirty.

Hayley Iskender arrives.

So there she is, she's there by the little brick cabana that houses the elevator, looking around for him, just like he did for her, and now, like the colleague, it is Bruno's turn to go and accost.

He is ready.

He feels fine.

He feels
fine
.

Jacket and trousers moving smoothly in unison, the boy knifes through the crowd . . . and then he is with her.

“Hi,” is his first line.

“Hi.”

She will have studied him, at that point, studied him with her tired eyes. How could she not have done? He must have been looking so . . . so different. So let's give her a line expressing that. How about “You look . . . better.”

Boy has to nod . . . but not furiously. Just once. Calm. Contained. “I
feel
better. Look . . . Hayley, I'm sorry about the last two weeks. I've been a freak.”

Does she accept the apology? Mmm . . . yeah, what am I talking about? Of course she does. No reason not to.

“It's fine.”

Of course she does. As bad as it's been for her she knows it's been ten times worse for him. No hard feelings.

“Sorry about before, as well. That night I told you I wanted to live in an undersea dome. I was having a tough day.”

“Don't say that.” She has to smile. “I liked the dome.”

And what then? What next? They go to get Hayley a drink . . . ?

No.

She's too tired.

She probably just wants to go home.

And Bruno Maddox is a gentleman. He rides with her in the elevator . . . even helps her find a cab . . . and then . . . and then . . .

And then the next thing I know he's back here at three in the morning with a radiant glow and an open shirt and a little bottle of mineral water and also, if I'm to be perfectly honest, the tiniest whiff of vaginal fluid clinging to his . . .

Oh my God.

It can't be.

June 25th—Friday

But it is.

After clearing away breakfast this morning Bruno Maddox, still visibly loose-limbed and reeking of inner tranquillity, put a call through to the girl at her workplace and held up his end of a conversation that I can only describe as
unmistakably postcoital
, involving lots of quiet little chuckles and examining of fingernails.

And if further proof were needed that something sexual and cataclysmic happened last night, the time now, as I write these words, is fiveish in the afternoon, and I have already been put to bed. In other words, Bruno's out there with her again, voluntarily, and so he's not planning on coming back until morning—which I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, reader, is the characteristic behavior pattern of a Young Man Having Sex.

And I don't know how I feel about that.

I don't know what to say.

I'm just stunned.

June 26th—Saturday

I continue to be stunned by the fact that Bruno Maddox and Hayley Iskender have managed to convert their nightmarish, frigid, and doomed relationship into a steamy and fluid one that seems to be thriving—and as far as I can tell the two of them spent this sun-soaked, midsummer Saturday ambling idyllically in and out of shops—but I think it behooves me to be supportive. So I'll just state my reservation once and never mention it again.

My reservation is this:

What if Bruno Maddox, rather than being cured of his Caregiver's Syndrome, is merely in some flukish remission brought on the other night by a never-to-be-repeated convergence of drunkenness, good weather, and possibly even the altitude of the
come hither
building roof? Surely Caregiver's Syndrome isn't something you can just shake off in a single evening like a dose of the flu. What if the remission wears off? What if it all crumbles apart, as the strain of caring for a hundred-something-year-old woman once again wreaks its inexorable havoc? Reader, what
then
? I can't help but think that after enjoying this short taste of happiness, after—as the poets say—having “supped on Paradise,” Bruno Maddox now has a lot further to fall should the bad old days reassert themselves. His face today was full of relief and gratitude and surprise, the same surprise that I feel at his evidently having managed to use the flimsy shovel of his genitals to tunnel his way out of prison. I just hope it doesn't turn out that he's actually dug his own grave with it.