My Little Blue Dress (33 page)

“Oh
really
?” The Hunter sounds fascinated. “Now why would he go and do something like that?”

“He's had a thing for me, apparently, since that night at that volcano place.” She bites her lip.

“A-
ha
.”

“And I said yes because I needed . . . I needed to get away from New York and from you and from everything.”

Hayley says this last part quickly, with no particular emphasis on any particular words, but of course the Hunter did not get to be the Hunter by allowing people to slip things past him.

“From me? What are you talking about?”

Oh,
now
she looks up. Hayley Iskender ceases her examination of the Hunter's tattered napkin and indeed glares at the Hunter full in the eyes.

Does he crumble, Michelle? Does he crumble and look away?

No
. He meets her glare and holds it. Because, of course, he's the Hunter now. The Hunter, Michelle, with eyes as deep as jungle watering holes, eyes as dark and green as an outsize sail of shiny leaf being toted along a branch by a tiny ant on television, eyes shot through with the sadness and wisdom of the coconut as it plummets from the hairy crotch of the palm tree, the only home it has ever known. Bruno Maddox is the Hunter now, and these are the eyes Hayley Iskender must deal with now, if she can.

“You know, I, uh . . .” The Hunter's neck hurts suddenly and he has to look away, in order to grimace and rub it. “I'm sorry about what happened with your dad. I really . . . dropped the ball on that one. I was having a tough day.”

And this, Michelle, turns out to be the wrong thing to say.

“Tough day?” is how Hayley begins and it's awhile before she stops. Methodically, starting at the very beginning, she reexamines her entire unfortunate relationship with the Hunter, building a fairly convincing case that it is
always
a tough day for the Hunter. It was a tough day for the Hunter, she reminds him, when they first met, that night they went out for drinks and he had to bolt home unexpectedly after blurting something about wanting to live in an undersea dome. There then ensued approximately
twelve
tough days
in a row,
if he recalls, lasting the length of their ill-conceived probationary period. And who could forget the tough day in
whose later hours the Hunter unloaded in Mark Clark's face for no reason whatsoever at Magma, plus of course the tough night out with Gordon . . .

“Well actually,” the Hunter interrupts, sounding an awful lot smaller, “you're not being one bit fair. I really had just had a particularly tough day. I'm not trying to make excuses but I was having . . . having real trouble with my work.”

“You don't do any work.”

“Yes I do.”

“No you don't. You don't do anything. You never even called those numbers I gave you.”

“Yes I did. No one was in.”

And she begins again, Michelle. She begins to savage him afresh, cracking the cellophane on a whole new
ream
of facts he didn't know she knew about his working habits, and the holes in his personality, and his private, secret opinions about the world, leading him literally to the brink of
tears,
Michelle, before finally, stopping. “I'm sorry. I'm tired. I'm going to leave now. We shouldn't be together.”

“Yes we should,” Bruno squeaks.

“Why? I don't even remember why we were together in the first place.”

But I do.

Michelle,
I
remember. Or at least I have a theory.

It was the
dome
. That first night when Bruno stammered that nonsense about how his ultimate, overweaning ambition was to live in an undersea dome . . . well, I reckon something clicked inside the girl. She'd been thinking the same herself, Michelle, it occurs to me now. She'd been thinking it was probably about time to flee New York, long past time to flee the booths, the banquettes, the towers of zany conceptual
food, the parties, the synergy, the speed . . . the terrible media jobs like flypaper once they got you . . . and the men. The men most of all. The endless sequence of men beneath whose surfaces, if you scratched, you found a fermenting plan to one day soon whip off a quick rock opera and funnel the proceeds into a pair of interlocking swimming pools in the shape of their own initials. I reckon she was probably done with those men, Michelle, and wondering where she might possibly go to hide, at the moment that Bruno Maddox came along, that night, with his talk of domes and solitude. Clearly here was a fellow sufferer. I mean just look at him. Shambling and twitching . . . unable even to stand up straight for the sheer tonnage of fraud and meaninglessness. And listen to what he's mumbling! A dome beneath the sea! Away from the awfulness.

What she failed to appreciate was that the dome Bruno Maddox had in mind could not be built for less than ten billion dollars and that, if everything worked out, the color supplements of the world's newspapers every Sunday would feature double-page spreads of Bruno Maddox and Companion in the dome's master bedroom, wearing matching white terry-cloth robes, sipping freshly squeezed guava-pineapple blend shipped in via trained dolphin from Florida, opening his fan mail while just beyond the toughened picture window sharks and plankton cavorted. Hayley never realized, Michelle, that there was room in Bruno's dome for a staff of Filipinos. But she appreciates it now.

“You're just like the rest of them.”

“What do you mean? The rest of who . . . m?”

“The rest of the twenty-seven-year-old guys who write themselves checks for a hundred million dollars and want to rule the world.”

Hayley's jaw has gone all square. The Hunter blinks at a loss.

“Are you finished?”

“Yeah.” She swings her eyes vaguely in the direction of Mark Clark, though not with love, or interest, or even recognition. Just because things are less cluttered over there.

“Can I speak?”

She has no opinion.

“Okay. Well, to start with, that first day I met you at that . . .”

“No.”

“What?”

That head of hers swivels back. “Don't. I'm not going to sit here and listen to you make up excuses for every time you fucked up.

“Why not?”

“Because that's what you always do.”

“Oh.” The Hunter is hurt.

“Well in that case I won't say anything.”

“Okay. I'm going to leave.”

She tries to. Tries to exit the booth but her long limbs get tangled in the strut work beneath the table, and now she looks confused, frightened. This is not an ergonomic
American
booth like she is used to. This is a very poorly designed
English
one, and Hayley, for a moment, is stuck in it.

 

Michelle, to the best of my recollection it is right about . . .
now
that I make my entrance. I'm in a place called Books Plus, a standard-issue airport newsagent. An extremely old woman, I am hunched painfully over a stack of newspapers, presumably
The Irish Times
or
The Sporting News
or
Old Women's Wear Daily
—speaking of which, I am
in: a clear plastic head scarf, a beige-gray old-woman coat of low-cost lightweight tweed, and some flat brown shoes, lusterless and clunky as hooves. I'm nowhere near a hundred years old, Michelle, but then again, like a fine wine, I am very old indeed. I feel the young man's eyes upon me. He blinks.

“You can't leave,” mutters Bruno to the trapped young lady, not trying to be funny. “You don't have enough information to leave me. You have no idea who I am.”

“Yes I do.” She stops struggling.

It is the Hunter's turn to glare. Hayley's long limbs are still entangled. It's her turn to be uncomfortable. “No, you don't. You've only seen the edges.”

“The edges?”

“The tiny . . .” He clenches his jaw. “The tiny residue.”

“What?”

Michelle, I've reached the cashier. In my hand, my gnarled old hand, is a little red leather change purse that I have had in my possession for simply years. A line is forming behind me as I poke for coins.

Bruno Maddox lifts a hand to his eyes and in a single gorgeous sigh exhales the entire pain of all the summer. “You don't know what I've been through.” He sounds serene.

“No.” She starts to struggle again, makes some headway.

“I should have been more open with you.”

“Yes.”

“Is it too late?”

“Yes.”

“No. I mean is it too late for me to be open with you?”

“Yes.”

“I've been having some family trouble. All summer. It's been really difficult. I should have told you.”

She stops. “Someone's ill in your family?”

“No. Not my actual family. Felt like family.”

“Sorry?”

“She . . . felt like family. Hayley?”

“Yes?”

“The thing is this. I've been looking after an old woman all summer. In the apartment next to mine. I should have told you about her obviously but . . . well, she really didn't want me to. It's been very . . . stressful as you can imagine, and I'm sorry I've been such a freak.”

Michelle, if you were to put a gun to my head and force me to go with an adjective, I think I'd probably end up saying that Hayley appears . . .
interested
by Bruno's statement. Her entire face retreats fractionally on its chassis. Her eyes narrow. Her lips part. An involuntary sound makes it past the various medical structures of her long throat, a little preliminary “ah” of comprehension . . .

Because for the briefest of moments she knows it's true.

Not
actually
true of course. She's not a moron, Michelle, as she would surely have to be to believe that Bruno Maddox had been an old woman's caregiver all summer, but true in the following way: that if you were to take a proper, complete young man—a
really
proper one, the sort whose hair doesn't vary wildly in length, who dabbles in sport, who calls his parents occasionally, who has given at least fleeting thought to joining the army, who looks you in the eye when he shakes your hand, who impregnates, at twenty-two, his averagely attractive childhood sweetheart . . . Mark Clark, I suppose. Take Mark Clark, force him to look after a hundred-year-old woman for a while, and you'd end up with Bruno Maddox: a miserable creature whose mind is always elsewhere, whose stamina and sense of purpose have
been eroded by months of toil and futility, who seems clearly to have at some point
been
complete—why else would he keep trying to exercise those inner muscles, and be so dismayed to find them missing?—but is now just a ravaged and grieving mess.

So yes. Hayley does, for a moment, know that Bruno is telling the truth, but then, understandably, allows herself to be sidetracked by the fact that he isn't.

“You're lying.”

This remark is very hurtful. Bruno Maddox, the Hunter, call him what you will, was just about to have a full-blown epiphany—and now here Hayley is messing the whole thing up. Why does she have to be this way, always? She knows as well as he does—he can see it in her face—that there clearly
is
a sense in which he's been looking after a one-hundred-year-old woman all summer, but rather than help him work out what it is, thereby making everything okay, she's making a conscious choice to be difficult. Why? Why are other people always so difficult? Bruno sighs. “I wish I was.”

“The apartment next to yours is empty. I looked in there once.”

“I know. You were looking right at her. You just didn't see.” The young man speaks quietly, grimly. He does not enjoy being forced to lie.

“That's not true.”

“Yes it is. Why do you think I kept the fire door open? That was how I tended to her.”

Actually, Michelle, Kevin Lee broke the fire door, exploded its latch that day he charged through to assault my radiator.

“Can I call her?”

“Who?”

“The old woman.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's dead. She died yesterday.”

(Big mistake, Michelle. Big mistake killing me off. Leave me alive and maybe I just didn't feel like answering the phone—sorry the 'phone—maybe I just wandered off as oldsters are wont to do. But a
dead
old woman . . . well, she's fixed data. Somewhere there has to be a 'phone number, or a birth certificate, or dental records. Something. No, Michelle. Never should have killed old woman in first place. Stupid stupid stupid.)

“I'm sorry for your loss,” says Hayley, who isn't believing all this I've-been-tending-to-an-old-woman-type material.

“Thanks. It's fine. She was at peace. Her affairs were in order. She'd finished writing her memoirs. She lived to see the new millennium. She was ready to go. But anyway, this is why you can't leave me.”