My Little Blue Dress (21 page)

There.

June 29th—Tuesday

Once again I want to say how truly sorry I am about yesterday's sudden foray into metaphysical navel picking. As yours was, probably, my first thought was that there's really no place for that sort of material in an old woman's memoir, even a clever, fancy one like this.

But on reflection you know I'm not so sure.

What about this:

What if Bruno Maddox never had Caregiver's Syndrome in the first place?

That would make sense, because to be honest with you I was never wholly convinced that Bruno Maddox had Caregiver's Syndrome. Dr. Hearne states pretty unambiguously in
The Caregiver's Bible
that it's the awfulness of watching
someone you love
deteriorate on a daily basis that gives you the syndrome, and Bruno's affection for me, from the outset, has been as strong as a cup of weak coffee into which someone has poured an entire gallon of water.

So if he never had Caregiver's Syndrome, why has he been such a mess all these months?

It's going to sound slightly bogus but I'll tell you.

Because he's a Citizen of the Future, reader. Because Bruno Maddox was born to participate in this crazy whirling endless era where the old rules of who a person can or can't be have been retired. That's why he came here to New York. He was driven here by his soul, which had recognized in the televised images of this teeming, chaotic city the backdrop for its liberation.

But instead what happened? A few short hours after his plane hit the tarmac? That's right: a horrible old woman came along and denied him his destiny, ripped it away from him just as he was about to sink his teeth into it, and all these months, these cramped and tedious months, he's had to watch the Future dance and frolic through a grimy set of windows, close enough to touch but utterly unattainable because of a certain disgusting old woman. Do you follow? It hasn't been the strain of looking after me that's made him so miserable. It's been the frustration of having all this Futuristic Chaos so close and not being able to just . . . dive in. Freedom, freedom everywhere—as a poet might say—but not a drop to . . . have.

I know this new theory sounds somewhat abstract and unconvincing but sometimes that's how truth is, at first glance. And it really does make sense. Think about the night of the
come hither
party.

Up there beneath the dome of the sky, having high-speed and largely meaningless conversations with wild, exotic people . . . women in long flowing gowns of the Past . . . a muscular Negro in an “I [heart] My Cat” T-shirt . . . three men who weren't lumberjacks but who were
dressed
like lumberjacks . . . Bruno was finally among his people, his environment. . . . What if he finally got in touch with himself? What if all at once it clicked into place?

What if he really is cured?

I think he might be.

And that's good news.

I mean obviously if something were to happen to
deprive
him of his new freedom at this stage then all bets would be off. His reaction would be extreme, sudden and completely understandable.

But . . . maybe that doesn't need to happen.

June 30th—Wednesday

I conclude this turbulent month of entries with the news that today I ate some beef with gold oh and, reader, you may want to read this sentence again.

Yes, that's right.

Beef with
gold
.

The beef with gold was an appetizer from a Japanese restaurant called F2 that Bruno and Hayley seem to have visited last night and it arrived at my swingable side table in the smallest and most delicate paper bag I had ever seen. In fact, so entranced was I by the flimsy lustrousness of the bag that I barely noticed as Bruno tipped its contents onto my scratched, plastic plate.

But then came his words: “Oh, that shiny stuff is gold.” My eyes swung to the dark-red blob and my mind got blown clean out the back of my skull. For minutes I lay there in the midday heat, staring at the little moist mound of redness with the yellow metallic flakes.

You see, we never used to eat beef with gold in the past, reader. Beef was a meat, and gold was a metal—a
precious
metal no less. Whole nations fought
wars
over gold . . . and
now here people are eating it as a garnish? Not even as a main course but just as an
appetizer
?

I mean, do you see? It's like everything else in this crazy, fluid culture called “the future.” Everything's out of context, forming wildly playful combinations with everything else . . . taking on new functions . . . laughing at all the old functions . . .

Life is crazy, here in the Future.

Crazy, reader, and pretty damn beautiful.

[28 AUG--2:04
A
.
M
rein it in, motherfucker. long way to go.]

July

July 1st—Thursday

When the 1960s dawned I was teetering on the edge of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue in a whirling blizzard awash in a complex set of emotions that stemmed, in large part, from the fact that just the night before, New Year's Eve, as my husband, Chester McGovern, and I sat in matching recliners, with matching gin and tonics, listening to the world welcome in the new decade on the radio, I had sent the words “I just can't keep on living like this” spinning across the gilded tile-and-ormolu coffee table. Chester, to his credit, had merely nodded. Why? Because he'd seen it coming (my departure). We both had. As the years had disappeared amidst the cocktails, pies and
ffft
-ing garden sprinkler systems of Fordham, Wisconsin, so had whatever smidgen of love it was that had drawn me and Chester together. By 1955, we had basically stopped speaking. By 1957, we were eating our meals at different times, in separate rooms. By 1959, there was a slightly childish strip of duct tape dividing
Chester's side of the living room from mine, if he trespassed over which I would hurl my gin and tonic at the wall and accuse him of being a shitty husband.

Being a typically solipsistic American male, Chester blamed himself—I think—for the breakup of our marriage, but he was only half right. There was an additional factor. On the TV news I had recently been seeing reports from New York of something called the “Beatnik Scene,” a half-lit world of drugs and free-form poetry and smoky jazz dives where anyone who liked could just jump up on stage and start hammering away at the bongos. The spectacle was so achingly reminiscent to me of Paris in the twenties, in so many ways my finest hour, that even if Chester had been the least annoying man in the world I think I still would have had no choice but to gather my belongings into a bundle, snick my front door quietly shut in the night, and beat a path once again toward a lawless, enchanted city where people were free to be themselves.

However, that midnight bus from Fordham was cold and uncomfortable, and as I wriggled around on the token upholstery, my suddenly sixty-year-old cheekbone yammering against the frigid pane, I allowed myself to wonder whether perhaps I had made an enormous mistake in leaving Fordham's comforts and security. Mile after sleepless, frozen mile the misgivings intensified until the bus shuddered up over the lip of the Midtown Tunnel and I felt my old womanly chin start to tremble, and when we came to a stop and I dismounted I began to cry.

But then I felt it, the energy, flowing all around me as I stood like a speck of dust in the great jeweled trench of Fifth Avenue, beside the river of groaning traffic, being jostled,
and cursed at by purposeful unashamed fat men and gorgeous, scowling young women in fur hats and toughened leather clothing, I had made the right decision. This was where I needed to be, and not a moment too soon on that first day of the sixties, because there was something in the air. Something big. Just like back in Paris, I was in at the start, and right at the heart, of something truly
massive
.

And why am I telling you this, reader?

Why do you think? Because that exact same feeling is abroad in my apartment these days, the scent of new beginnings. It's a scent, of course, that has been building steadily in strength for the last few weeks, but it attained a whole new level of pungency today, this first day of July when after lunch, around noon,
*
Bruno Maddox headed off for his daily grocery run and returned an hour later with the words, “Sorry I was gone so long. I took a stroll. It's really nice out there.”

Because that's when the weirdest thing happened.

The instant Bruno finished speaking it was like my vision melted away and got replaced by a flood of
pictures in my mind
. I'm not talking about imaginings, reader, or visualizations. I'm talking about
actual cinematic pictures
of Bruno Maddox . . .

. . . out there on the streets of Chinatown, knifing through the hordes of miniature ethnic people in his gel-cushioned hi-tech shoes like some sort of . . . some sort of space detective in a movie, poking his head on a hunch into a
crazy little aisleless shop where an old Chinese man is selling circuit board by the square foot and old remote controls by the pound . . . then he's back on the street, following his nose, his bliss, keeping pace for a while with a gang of Asian youths, all angular dyed-tuft hairstyles and beepers and pocket 'phones, and then having his attention suddenly seized by the way that
boom:
in the middle of a row of crumbling mossy tenements there has violently been inserted an immaculate, dustless nest of automated bank machines . . . in other words an explosive, organic collision of different textures, and eras, and socioeconomic strata . . .

Then the vision faded, leaving me moist and exhilarated upon the electric bed, staring up at the same old battered tin ceiling and thanking my lucky stars, both for the substance of what I'd seen—a fully realized Bruno Maddox, happy at last, reveling in the futuristic paradise of Manhattan as he was destined to do, I now realize, all his life—and for the fact that I'd seen anything at all. To a younger woman it would probably be pretty disturbing to suddenly develop extrasensory perception; I imagine she would think she was going mad. But to a housebound old biddy such as me it's obviously a godsend.

In fact, it's a godsend for
both
of us, reader, for you and me
both
. If this . . . this
pipeline
into Bruno's larger life remains intact—and I've a feeling it's going to—well then this is obviously going to become a much richer narrative. No longer am I going to have to
guess
what's happening to the chap out there in the world. I'll be able to simply see what's happening and then tell you about it, which with any luck will make this book a substantially easier read—as well as, frankly, an enormously easier write.

As to
why
we've been blessed with this paranormal development I have a theory, a theory in two parts:

1. When two people have lived as deeply in each other's pocket as Bruno and I have these past five months, I think they quite naturally become sensitive to tiny variations in each other's speech patterns, to the extent that when one says, “I went for a walk,” the other is able to glean a lot more information about what the walk was like than would an eavesdropping stranger, especially when one party, namely me, has no actual life of her own and
   

    
   

2. Bruno is finally happy. The clairvoyant pipeline would probably have opened up months ago, except that back then I don't think he was even seeing the outside world
   himself
   . Not properly. He was too depressed. Everything he pointed his eyes at had a horrible old woman superimposed on it. But now . . . well, now he sees, and, therefore, because of a), so do I. Do you see?
   

It's simple, really. A simple miracle.

In the afternoon, we sat together in silence and watched a movie on television about a small boy out playing in the woods who finds an eagle with a broken wing. Perhaps you've seen it yourself. The boy wraps the eagle in his jacket, sneaks it into his house, and nurses it secretly back to health in a cardboard box in his closet. Guess what, though? On some nonchalant laundry mission one day the small boy's
mother
finds the eagle, prompting a tearful scene at the
kitchen table in which she explains to her devastated son that an eagle can never be truly happy living in a closet, no matter how much love it is showered with. Later that day, with the mother waiting respectfully in the car, the small boy unfastens the top of the cardboard box in a field, lets the eagle go free, and then a smile breaks through his tears as he watches his new best friend soar upward to exult against the grandeur of the sky.

That's you
, I pulsed Bruno, sitting erectly in the nasty armchair attentive and immaculate in his Housing Dept. T-shirt and his paratrooper's trousers and his bone-white gel-cushioned basketball player's sneakers.
You're the eagle. And I'm the small boy or the cardboard box or the accident that broke the eagle's wing in the first place—whichever fucked up the eagle's life the most.

And do you know what the sky is?

The sky is modern Manhattan, your natural habitat. Welcome home, Bruno Maddox. Welcome home.

Bienvenu à votre maison.

July 2nd—Friday

One thing I forgot to mention about yesterday's small-boy-and-eagle movie was that it had a moving epilogue:

A few weeks later, long after his tears had dried, the small boy walked out of school one day to find the eagle waiting for him on a railing! The boy ran home, laughing and rejoicing, while the eagle swooped deliriously around his head. When they came in view of his kitchen window the boy's mother started to cry happy tears, because she saw
what was happening. Her son's relationship with his best, feathered friend was now stronger than ever, because the eagle was spending time with him
on a voluntary basis
.

Which is what I have a feeling may be happening between Bruno and myself.

This morning after breakfast he sank into the nasty armchair and rather than activate the television, the young man actually talked to me. I mean
really
talked to me, using phrases like “you know?” and “if that makes any sense,” as if he were conversing with an actual person rather than an insensible old drooling crone.

Things I learned from our “chat”:

Hayley Iskender's apartment, where Bruno is spending his nights, is on the other side of the city directly laterally from our apartments and sounds like an altogether higher class of real estate: a spacious, split-level apartment, clean and air-conditioned, featuring—among other items, I'm sure—a big black puffy leather couch and a smooth glass coffee table.

Oh, and in a massive coincidence Hayley shares her apartment with a woman Bruno and I once heard being interviewed on
Rod and Tod in the Morning
. The woman's name is Simon Menges and she's a young nonfiction author, most famously of a book entitled
Taking Us from Behind: The Media Ambush of Women in America
. She was on
Rod and Tod
just after that book came out and it was a fairly memorable interview, I have to say.

Rod and Tod are both very zany and hilarious men, even at six in the morning, and as I recall they were a good deal more interested in discussing whether there was a chapter in
Taking Us from Behind
about Lisa the Weathergirl—a member of their staff—than in actually addressing its themes.
Then they got onto Simon's name. Tod wanted to know why Simon's name was Simon, given that she was a female, and Simon explained rather cryptically that publishing was an old-fashioned industry and that “when walking through a minefield one wears the smallest shoes one can find.” There was a pause, broken only by a mysterious
boing
sound effect for which I cannot account, and then Rod chipped in, “Tod has small shoes . . . or so I hear,” after which the interview drew to a close.

“Anyway,” Bruno finished up, with an adorable little sheepish smile, “sorry to bend your ear. I just thought maybe you'd like to know a bit about what's going on with me.”

Like it? I
loved
it. Made me feel human again, reader.

Positively
human
.

July 3rd—Saturday

More
good news. In fact, in its own strange and traumatic way today was possibly the most encouraging day we've had around here since this whole nightmare began.

Ten in the morning, while Bruno was still in the shower, a man identifying himself as “Theo Bakula” rang up and invited the boy to “some thing for some new thing tonight at a place called . . . hold on, hold on . . . pieces of paper they
torment
me so . . . Magma.”

Mr. Bakula's message continued for at least another minute and a half, but I don't feel able to do it justice in this medium. It was less what he said than how he said it. His tone of voice, for instance, was just
outrageously
decadent and relaxed, like he was lying on some sort of ottoman being oiled up by slave girls, and at unpredictable intervals
he would stop talking and yawn, make some percussive noise with his mouth, or strangest of all, which he did several times, simply recite Bruno's name “Bruno . . .
Maddox, Bruno
 . . .
Maddox
,” just sort of mulling it over, for no reason.

“So see you there,” the message ended eventually, “bring anyone you like.
Adios, mon capitaine
.”