The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (25 page)

In seemingly no time at all I had become a painter of considerable technical accomplishment. By the time Lydia organized a formal exhibition of my work in a gallery space in the University of Chicago library, I had essentially settled into what would be my medium of choice for a long time to come: oil on canvas. Oils!—after you’ve worked with oils you’ll never want to dally in acrylics again. Acrylics—they’re too thin, too meek, the colors aren’t as vibrant, they don’t feel as real and viscous and, dare I say it, as
human
as oils. And I had started to work with big canvases, also. Most of the paintings included in that first exhibition of my work were painted on four-by-six-foot canvases. Lydia continued to generously purchase all my materials for me.

I would like to describe for you in detail my first gallery exhibition. But before I do, I need to tell you something else, something very important. It has to do, naturally, with Lydia. I apologize for the brevity of this chapter, Gwen—but it is of paramount importance to me that we devote an entire and separate chapter to what I am about to tell you.

Y
ou have got to understand that I had been living with Lydia, and in fact had been platonically sharing a bed—a
bed!
—with her for over a year (in my admittedly hazy recollection) before anything “happened.”

The sexual tension had been there right from the beginning, though. I think it had colored our relationship since the day we met—when I first fell in love with her—when I watched her take a bite out of that peach, when I tapped on that box, demonstrating to the scientists that I, too, could be just as irrational as any human being. My desire for her had gone through different phases. It had evolved and adapted to its environment through many marvelous mutations. Up until this point Lydia had taught me nearly everything I knew—everything
she
knew—because love—and I mean the real thing,
Eros
, romantic, sexual
love
—is possible only between psychological equals. And she raised me up until I was practically her intellectual equal. We had come to a point in our relationship—a point at which there was but negligible difference between our respective levels of reasoning ability (though technically I suppose at this point I could still barely speak a coherent word other than
yes, no
, and my own name, and furthermore
only Lydia could understand my speech), when we had ceased to be simply an educator and her pupil—or even a surrogate mother and her child—and became two true friends, who each learned from the other every day. We were partners in this project of ours, united against the stern world. I filled a vacancy in her emotional life, and she gave me my life as I know it, in the form of culture and knowledge.

In a past life, Lydia had been robbed of a son and a lover. And I, Bruno, eventually gave her back both. So, yes, obviously there was a sense of some deep-seated and dangerous taboo that our relationship violated. But this taboo was not bestiality—it was incest.

My own psychosexuality was (should I say, “is”?) tortured and twisted up and confused. Why? Because I love women, and I am a chimp.

My relationship with Lydia progressed over the same period of time that I entered into manhood, both metaphorically and hormonally. I was sailing through both my intellectual awakening and my natural puberty at the same time. It wasn’t just that, as the intensity of the itches and tingles in my loins were slowly increasing,
Bolero
-like, at a steady cadence but with exponentially rising volume, I had truly begun to see Lydia as a
sexual being
—not just as an unattainable preadolescent fantasy but as a potential reality—but that my now very real sexual attraction to her became interwoven into the fabric of my true love. I longed to see Lydia naked. Just the symbol of her nudity to Bruno—what it meant to me then!

I need to clarify something here. Lydia wasn’t exactly beautiful. She did not shimmer like those unreachable stars, so many impossible light-years in the distance. She was here, she was plain, she was good, she was earthy. She was mine. But she was not mine. I was hers.

It may be occurring to you, Gwen, that my descriptions of Lydia are inconsistent and often contradictory. One moment she’s dazzling, beatific, and now she’s good and plain and earthy. If her
shape shifts it is because memory and perception are fickle mistresses. She was beautiful and she was not beautiful: both these statements are true. You see how well I’ve learned human logic? That’s right—I am the chimp who tapped Pandora’s Box.

But her headaches. Lydia had just experienced her menstrual period, which, as usual, was accompanied by her tempestuous migraine headaches, whose intensity could be only partially dampened with Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets, which caused her insomnia, which was curable only with the extra-strength sleeping pills Lydia kept on hand for the days of monthly torment she was doomed to suffer all her life.

Now this. Look: here lies Lydia—no, not dead, but dead to the world, lying in a motionless—and from the way her eyelids aren’t fluttering with REM, we may assume dreamless—sleep. She’s sweating profusely, because the sleep those gel capsules induce is red, wet, and feverish, like a diseased mouth. The way she is lying on the bed might suggest she fell on it from a tenth-story window. Yes, everything about her posture calls to mind not restful slumber, but a suicide, or some hostile defenestration, lying supine in a crunchy green stardust of broken glass on the sidewalk; she is not, as she usually sleeps, fetally half-curled on her right side, with one hand under the pillow to muffle the thunder of her own amplified heartbeat—no, but on her back she lies, one arm thrown above her head, the other sprawled at an irrational angle across my side of the bed, her legs apart, one outstretched, the other bent. She’s wearing her nightgown, her bone-colored silk nightgown (silk, that texture!), and her bare feet are mouthwateringly desirable, so pale and smooth, her ankles, her insteps florescent with tiny blue hairline veins. In her sweaty drugged sleep, her nightgown has become wadded and crinkled, damply glued to her thighs, and in the night it has ridden up and up her thighs, exposing her legs, reaching almost up to the damp hairy jungle of her crotch.

Now this. Here lies Bruno beside her—not dead, far from it—not even asleep, but wide awake. It is the middle of the night, a rainy night, desultory clusters of raindrops crackling on the roof, and outside the window one can see a murky sky thrown over the city of Chicago like a dirty sheet, the creamy clouds reflecting the light of the city, so that they appear to glow dull orange, as if lit from within. Yes, I am awake, having been stirred to consciousness by uneasy dreams. In the kitchen, the refrigerator quits humming. A clock somewhere is itching out the seconds, slowly driving me insane with sensual desire, the insistent
itch-itch-itch
of the clock like a tiny finger tickling my loins. The
smell
of her. The sweat of her feverish druggy sleep smells intoxicant and delicious. She smells more lushly human now than anything this chimp’s nostrils have previously smelt. I take her in,
snfffffffffffff
. And something, something is happening to me…. My most Darwinian organ is slowly ratcheting to life, itch-itch-itch-itch. My heart is beating faster, boldly ensanguinating this once-harmless tube of flaccid flesh, each successive pump of my wild heart feeding it more blood, the outflow of every beat making it longer and fatter. An errant hand drifts toward the thing, a hand with a flat, elongated palm and a small hooklike opposable thumb, and long purple fingers wrap around it. That
smell
. Not too long ago I would have been chilled, horrified by the idea of Lydia not being able to wake up from her sleep—in the beginning, I didn’t even believe that humans
slept
. Not anymore.

That smell. And where, our hero wonders, gazing pruriently upon a completely zonked-out Lydia, is the source of this most human of odors? It is a humid smell—
earthy
—thick, sultry as a tropical rain forest, oily, metallic, sweet and salty all at once. I am bent over Lydia now, sniffing. I sniff her feet—no, that’s not it. My nose travels up her leg, across tracts of maddeningly soft sticky glabrous flesh—Bruno, the world’s greatest physical anthropologist!
Up and up the length of her body my nose travels, that smell growing stronger and stronger—we are approaching the source! And now I have, as in a dream, positioned myself between this woman’s two big beautiful long thick smooth strong human legs, and I am sniffing her thighs. I seem to be almost involuntarily pressing and rubbing my now fully engorged little monster against the sheets. I dive beneath the rumpled hem of her nightgown, as if diving under a tent flap. I am now in an enclosed environment, a ceiling of bone-colored silk sliding along the back of my furry head and a floor of hot heaving flesh beneath me. And the smell is utterly overpowering—intoxicating—choking—possessing—and my face is right
in
it. Here it is. This is the first time I have seen a real human vulva, in the flesh. I haven’t really even seen them in paintings, before—even the nudes at the Art Institute are always arranged in such a way as to prudishly obscure this mysterious and powerfully odorous yawning animal, this mollusk at the center of existence. How hairy it is! It is shocking! Did you think, Bruno, that all women were like polished marble statues down there? So naïve! How unexpectedly I discover that this oddly nearly hairless creature should have a delta of scraggly black hair decorating her genitals. And the
placement
of this thing! The female human is the only animal in the kingdom to have such a maddeningly, inconveniently located vagina. Right on the very bottom, exactly in between the legs, the weirdest and most inaccessible spot on the body. I inhale deeply, I sniff and sniff, this smell that is almost sickening in its headiness, its passionate intensity. And my mouth opens. The rosy flaps of my pithecine lips peel back and my tongue rolls out. My tongue reaches out into the darkness—the very same curious worm in my jaw who would later learn to perform the glossal acrobatics of human language—to taste it. And the tongue begins to slurp at this thing, to probe its contours. I love the dark sweetness of Lydia’s body. I want to drink her strong biological wine. It tastes like when
I suck on batteries! It has the same fuzzy thrilling coppery-tasting little shock. And the hot somnolent mass that is Lydia begins to respond to this stimulus: from up above I hear a sharp insuck of breath, followed by a slow, staggered release of it. She’s still asleep, you see, but maybe now her brain is groaning with flashes of erotic imagery: the sweaty petals of lusciously colored flowers, sloping desert midnight dunes, waterfalls, glossy-coated panthers… and I, Bruno the incubus, continue to lap at her yonic mollusk, and I feel a languid sleeping hand come to rest on the back of my head and gently press on it through the thin wall of silk fabric, pushing my head downward and in… her breathing quickens… and I realize that what I have been tonguing in fact includes a concavity. It goes inside of her, it is a kind of tunnel. Like Caravaggio’s Thomas the Doubter does to the wound of the resurrected Christ, in disbelief I squelch an inquisitive finger into the folds of the opening:
spplt
. I stick it in as far as I can reach and still cannot feel the end of the tunnel! I wiggle it around, feeling her inner linings, what’s in here? And when I do, her body goes all gelatinous, begins to quake with spasmodic rumblings of passion. Then I get a really good idea. My penis seems to have an intense desire to be put into something, and this slippery feverish envelope of wet flesh seems to have an intense desire to have something put in it. Aha! Thus I make the Great Leap. I climb up onto her body, burrowing further under the silk tent, now encountering her breasts. I’m just tall enough to reach them with my mouth! I gnaw on them a little, and her nipples inflate instantly, becoming like round pebbles between my lips. Now our genitals are aligned. I jab blindly at the area in question, until I am received—the mouth of this great fish swallows me up. It is like pulling on a silk slipper.

Then things really start happening. Every neuron receptor in my brain is firing at once, I’m swept up in a flood, I’m flying, I’m floating, I’m dying, and now the flesh beneath me is roiling like
an earthquake and something just, just
happens
—a feeling of such intense experience that the world goes white, I’m hysterical, I’m
blind!

And there we lay, Bruno and Lydia, gasping, quiescent, silent, and I’m still sandwiched between Lydia’s sweaty flesh and the fabric of her nightgown. My face burrowed between her breasts, my bliss and her arms wrapped around me, and I fall asleep this way, still inside of her.

Lydia woke up the following morning with a chimp in her nightgown.

I was unprepared for her initial reaction. I awoke to the sight of her face, peering down at mine through the neck of her nightgown. Morning had come, leisurely and bright, the sun having burned away the clouds: birds
eep-eep-eep
ing outside the window and sunlight suffusing the membranous fabric of my silk tent, making it warm and reddish. Blinking away my sleep, I looked up at her and smiled, blissfully, I think, and she answered my smile with an aghast look that completely perplexed me, before I was violently removed from my tent—yanked and kicked and jerked and pulled out. This was the only time I can remember Lydia ever being physically forceful with me in any way. When she had disentangled me from her nightgown, she, without offering a word, jumped out of bed—I was still in a daze—ran into the bathroom, slammed the door shut, and locked it.

She remained in there for hours. I bashed my fists against the door and alternated between doleful screams and pitiful whimpers, crying and raging—in apology, in lamentation—inarticulately pleading with her to reemerge from the bathroom. I wailed until my vocal cords were worn threadbare from all my wailing. She would not come out. She would not respond. I heard running water. I heard the toilet flush a few times. Eventually I heard the familiar whisk of the showerhead. Curls of steam escaped from the crack under the door.