The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (16 page)

I was now walking bipedally almost all of the time. It was also around this time that I realized I was naked. And because I expressed a desire for clothing, Lydia took me shopping.

I had spent most of our life together naked before Lydia’s eyes, but for most of that time I did not yet know that I was naked. In fact, in my ape days I don’t think I even really realized that humans’ clothing was something physically apart from their bodies. Does that
sound quaint to you? Such things are not necessarily immediately apparent. I failed to understand that clothes did not simply grow and regrow again on human flesh overnight, like a fungus. But as I became human, through careful observation I came to understand what clothes are. In the beginning of my acculturation, whenever Lydia took me to the lakefront in the summer, I would marvel to see the beautiful
sapiens sapienettes
all cavorting around on the sand with only two tiny membranous bits of elastic fabric keeping them from their animal nakedness. And I would watch and silently remark upon the changes of wardrobe Lydia went through in a day, the fascinating ephemera of her morning-to-night garment cycle: in the morning she peeled herself out of bed in her larval pajamas, of which she owned several pairs, including a nightgown of the old-fashioned variety typically worn by little girls in latently pedophilic Victorian children’s books, a slippery silk affair that her deceased mother had once sent her for a Christmas present, which shimmered and slithered all over her big mysterious body like a school of fish over underwater dunes (make a note of this nightgown, as it will later become important), and in this outfit she emerged from her sleeping chamber, rubbed at her eyes, padded around the house, woke Bruno if he wasn’t already awake, prepared a light breakfast for us while I exuberantly retrieved the newspaper from the doorstep—one of my few domestic chores in those early days, which I performed with the zeal of a fresh recruit—then ate with me, all in that woozy, discombobulated state of limbo between sleeping and waking, when the hands of clocks seem to circumnavigate their faces at several times the usual speed. Following breakfast Lydia would disappear into the bathroom, and I heard the blubbery thunder of the bathtub faucet change to the hissing-snake sound of the showerhead, and she later emerged from her room as if she had just peeled herself out of a cocoon—moist and new—and clad in her official outfit for the day. And it was never anything flashy or
particularly descript. As I’ve indicated earlier, Lydia favored turtleneck sweaters and pants. I don’t think she even owned a skirt or a dress that ventured north more than a centimeter or two above the latitude of the knee. Lydia was not an overtly feminine woman—not a girly woman, maybe I should say. She was certainly feminine; she had a good but conservative fashion sense. I don’t think I ever saw her wear pink, for instance, and she almost never wore high heels. On her feet were usually sneakers for utility and inconspicuousness, or else that inelegant pair of dirt-brown clodhoppers she often wore. But Lydia had an intense relationship with the color green. It was her favorite color. She looked beautiful in green. Not that she didn’t look beautiful in other colors—or most beautiful of all in no clothes whatsoever (but I will get to that later). But green looked particularly good on her because it established a dialogue with her eyes. A casual perusal of Lydia’s closet would reveal a whole jungle of verdant items: green scarves, green dresses, green shirts and pants. In the early days I loved to play dress-up with Lydia’s clothes, before (and sometimes even after) I had clothes of my own to wear. It wasn’t just the fun of dressing up that I got a kick out of, but rather the tingling sensation that skittered all over my flesh when I slipped inside Lydia’s garments, the sweet flutter of feminine fabrics against my skin, these things that had clung as close to her naked flesh as I wanted to cling. For a while Lydia patiently suffered my love of dress-up: sometimes, as soon as we got home from the lab I would want to put on one of her dresses, and it was not easy to convince me to take it off. Sometimes, when Lydia was away on an errand and trusted me with free range of the apartment, I would sneak into her closet and not only put on one of her dresses, but sometimes I would awkwardly slip my legs into the holes of a pair of her panties from her underwear drawer, or stretch her pantyhose over my legs or arms. I knew by the special electric charge I received out of playing with these things that
somehow they were more secret, more intimate, and more darkly passionate than Lydia’s hats or scarves or even her dresses. I sensed taboo in them, which was why I could bring myself to put them on for only a brief time, quickly parading a few turns around the apartment in her underwear or pantyhose before my cowardice got the better of me and I had to return them to the drawers where I had found them before Lydia came home. Then I would pry open the remote control and lick its nine-volt battery.

Eventually my obsession with dress-up reached such a fever pitch that Lydia decided it was time I had clothes of my own. I was to be naked no longer.

As it happened, by this time I did own one—only one—article of clothing. Whenever Lydia and I left the home together in those early days—say, on one of our fun/educational outings to the Field Museum or the planetarium—she would bundle me up in a big baggy sweatshirt with droopy sleeves and a kangaroo pocket on the front, and a hood that could be scrunched into a small round window for my face by means of a drawstring. When we went out in public Lydia would pull the hood low over my face to conceal my apeness, and the shirt was big enough that it came down to my ankles, like a dress. Like much of Lydia’s clothing, it was green. I wore this green hooded sweatshirt so often that it had gradually passed into my possession, and Lydia effectively made a present of it to me. This was the first article of clothing I ever owned. As a matter of fact, I suppose it was the first thing I ever personally owned, period, and because of this, the shirt has always had a feeling of juju, of magic power for me. I still have it.

One Saturday afternoon Lydia took me shopping at Marshall Field’s. Lydia and I took a bus uptown to the Loop, and she carried me in her arms, buried in her green hooded sweatshirt, into the store. I was stricken silent with awe at the place. It was like a cathedral, a temple to commerce, to all the potential beauty of human
vanity. Floor cascaded above floor through that dizzying shaft of space in the middle of the room—the gilt decorations, the Old World grandeur, the marble everywhere: I thought we had entered some sort of palace.

I liked to look at all the mannequins. It was so fascinating to observe the personality differences in all the different sorts of mannequins. Some of them are deliberately designed to look very humanlike: they have skin and hair and eyes. Sometimes they have icily detached expressions on their beautiful faces. Sometimes their fragile fingers and slender hands looked so realistic that one half-expected them to move. Others are more abstract: some are of unpainted white plastic or plaster. Some of them are realistically proportioned, with detailed hands and feet and skeletomuscular definition under their hard shiny skin, tendons in their necks and clavicles under their shoulders—and yet are eerily missing their heads, as if they have just been executed under the guillotine, for real or imagined crimes. The more impressionistic ones might have hands like mittens, with thumbs separate but the other four fingers fused together, and with no faces, their heads being mere smooth plastic ellipsoids—giving them an alien appearance. Others are half-abstract, with noses and forehead ridges and mouths, but no eyes. Still others are designed to look humanoid, but in a deliberately unrealistic or exaggerated way. These last are the type of mannequins on display in the lingerie department, which happens to be right next to the children’s department, way up on the fourth or fifth floor, where I went with Lydia so I could try clothes on. Lydia picked out some shirts and pants and sweaters and whatnot for me. I appeared to have a predilection for stripes: especially shirts with broad, horizontal stripes. I loved to hold her hot human hand and gaze up at the glittering frescoed ceilings as she flipped through the racks of clothing that were on sale in the children’s section, selecting things for me to try on, folding them over the arm that held
mine, the sound of the metal hangers scraping against the rack. Then she took me by the hand back to the fitting rooms and helped me put them on.

“Do you like this, Bruno?” she would say, tugging a shirt over my body as I sat on a bench and she crouched before me in the mirror-walled fitting room. If I did not like it I would fling it away. If I did like it I would pant-hoot with enthusiasm, and Lydia would press a finger to her lips to shush me, lest we be found out. I was wearing my collar, but Lydia always hated to put the leash on me. She kept the leash in her purse, having sworn me to a blood oath of good behavior.

We selected several pairs of jeans, a pair of fancier black slacks, some T-shirts, a stalwart winter coat to fend off the Chicago winter, and a few shirts that snapped rather than buttoned because my then-clumsy fingers were not yet dexterous enough to perform the complicated operation of slipping a button into a buttonhole. She even bought—because I insisted, and she spoiled me—she even bought me a shiny pair of sneakers, extra large ones due to the preposterously unusual shapes of my feet. All of these items had to be bought with an air of utmost secrecy: with me plodding alongside her with a long hairy arm stretched up to hold her hand and the hood of my floppy green sweatshirt pulled low over my face. Lydia had to constantly shoo away commission-eager salesgirls, who were always nosily seeking her eye-contact and asking her in tones that made us panic despite their well-intentioned sweetnesses (whenever anyone spoke to her, I felt a sudden spike of galvanization on the flesh of Lydia’s palm) if she would like help finding anything, and Lydia would always respond by tightening her grip on my hand, fluttering the fingers of her free hand in dismissal, shaking her head back and forth in such a way that the strands of hair not bound back in her ponytail whipped about her face, and brusquely saying, “No thank you, we’re just browsing.” To which the salesgirl would
respond with some pleasantry and turn to go—then turn back for a moment, and quizzically scrunch up her brow as she filched another look at me, Bruno, Lydia’s presumed child, her long-armed, ugly, hairy freak of a child—before shrugging with the resignation that all was well, and skulking away on her click-clacking pumps to assist another customer.

As I was saying, though, it was this last variety of mannequin that held the most interest for me: the detailed yet deliberately unrealistic humanoid mannequin, the expressionistically stylized variety, the ones on display in the lingerie section, which adjoined the children’s section of the store. Lydia was paying for my new clothes at a counter in the children’s department; all my new clothes were folded up on the countertop, and the clerk behind the counter was removing the plastic hangers from the garments, pressing their sales tags against something on the counter that for each item produced a shrill electronic beep, then folded the items and put them into big plastic sacks while Lydia waited. I padded away from the counter in boredom during this procedure. My fascination was tugging my attention away from them. Whither was it tugging me? It was tugging Bruno’s feet in the direction of the lingerie department. The mannequins there were unlike any other mannequins on display anywhere else in that palace of commerce. The mannequins here had hair, and facial features, and detailed hands and feet, and yet they were still strangely abstracted: their heads were cartoonishly larger than normal human heads, their huge eyes painted onto their faces. They were also clearly sexualized, with thick lush pouty lips, and with larger breasts and wider hips than the other female humanoid mannequins in the store. I fell in love with those plastic girls. They were so sweet-looking, so elegant and delicately sexy—and so apparently unabashed to stand there in full display in public in their dainty underthings, all their pretty frilly bras and panties and corsets, with all kinds of filigrees and silk
and satin ribbons and lace embroidery. This was underwear that existed only to be displayed briefly, then slowly (or rapidly, rabidly) removed…. I crept up onto the dais where all these slender, doe-eyed nymphs stood on display. These girls stood or lounged, icy-expressioned, coyly silent, in various poses or reposes of sumptuous seductiveness. One of them lay semireclining, one leg stretched out and the other half-raised, leaning back on her elbows and throwing her head back, showing her body, begging to be desired, asking to be taken. Another stood in a black negligee with matching high-heeled shoes, her weight sunk into one foot, one hand on her hip, the other seemingly frozen in the act of reaching up to her pretty bare plastic shoulder to remove the first of the two straps of the negligee, and a single springy ringlet of dark glossy hair—
real
hair—dangled wantonly in her fake-eyed face. I reached up to her with my long hirsute arms and my long purple fingers. I reached up to her, to lift up the hem of her negligee, to peer under it, at that beautiful body, those hard shiny legs, to see what lay beneath…