The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (29 page)

I noticed there were two men standing near the doors of the gallery. They were young and healthy, with short hair and thick arms, dressed in uniforms: black shoes, blue pants, crisp tan short-sleeved shirts with flashing metal buttons. They wore badges. They looked like they were not here for fun but rather were only doing their jobs. They very slowly perambulated the room, not talking to anyone, surveying the crowd, paying close attention. What were they here to protect? My art? Their hands were clasped behind their backs. When they turned around, I saw that behind their backs, each of them held a long, thin silver wand, with a red rubber handle and a prong of wire filament on the end of it.

I redirected my gaze back into the middle of our social circle. They were so far up above me, and I was so near to the floor in comparison. I saw everything from below. Norm was having trouble balancing a glass of wine and a pile of cheese cubes held in a napkin. He was speaking animatedly to the Important Man. With the thumb of the hand that held the cheese, Norm struggled to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose and then swipe back the three ribbons of hair that clung to his otherwise bald pate, but it was difficult to perform these small actions with a handful of cheese, and I watched one of the little yellow cubes of cheese tumble from his palm and onto the floor, where it bounced three times like a die on a backgammon board before coming to rest in the
middle of our circle of people. I watched Lydia’s eyes trace the path of the cheese’s escape, and then quickly look up. No one else—not even the Important Man—noticed, or they pretended not to have noticed. Plumlee himself did not notice. Plumlee’s voice escalated in pitch and zeal as he approached the point of whatever he was saying. His hands were thickly padded and the backs of his fingers were almost as hairy as mine. Lydia squeezed my hand. I looked up at her. She smiled down at me, as if to assure me that we would be going home soon. I was feeling terribly bored and uncomfortable.

A new man shouldered his way into our circle. He was tall. He was old, too, but carried himself with the vigor of youth: back straight, chest out. He was thin but robust, he looked like he could run a marathon without breaking a sweat. A beautiful bright white mustache hung below his nose and brushed his upper lip. He wore a suit as silver as a spoon that clung fast to his stringy old muscles, and in lieu of a necktie he wore a bolo that slid through a huge turquoise amulet. And on the very top of his body sat a wide-brimmed white hat: a cowboy hat. He entered the conversation as if he was entering his own home, and as he did, a lean old liver-spotty hand with fat blue veins slaloming over the ridges of his tendons rose up to the top of the hat, where it pinched the shallow recesses in the crown and politely removed it, freeing the springy flaps of his red ears and revealing the shiny pink ball of his head, which was bald except for a semicircular muff of white hair playing ring-around-the-rosy with his skull.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Howdy,” said Lydia, instinctively returning his folksy greeting, then catching herself saying it and immediately self-consciously flushing at how silly it sounded in her mouth. The man extended his hand and Lydia shook it. He seemed to want to kiss her hand like an old-fashioned gentleman, but the angle and position of Lydia’s hand would not allow it.

“My name’s Dudley Lawrence,” the man said. “It’s a real pleasure and an honor to meet you, Miss Littlemore.”

“Mrs.,” said Lydia, then, “Dr.” She was a bit flattered, a bit taken aback by his gentility. Then, before he spoke to anyone else, before he addressed Norm or the Important Man they had been talking with all evening, Dudley Lawrence bent to the floor in his boots, the creases in his silver trousers vanishing at the knees, and said hello to me, warmly shaking my hand.

“Hello, Bruno,” he said. “The pleasure’s all mine.” His white mustache curled into the corners of his grin. He patted my hand twice before releasing it. Without getting up, and looking me directly in the eyes, he said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” And then there knelt beside him a big elaborate woman. “Please say hello to my wife, Regina.”

“Bruno, your art is
wonderful
,” said the woman in a loud, tuneful voice. The encomiastic gush in her tone caused me to redden a little. Regina Lawrence was much younger than her husband, in her forties, maybe. She was short and wide, but attractive in an explosive fleshy way, with a honking big bosom bursting from the neck of her red blouse like two plucked geese. Silver and turquoise jewelry clicked and rattled all over her. A long red and gold shawl was wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes were sea green and her puffy lips as pink and shiny and sticky-looking as recently licked candy, and her earlobes were distended with the weight of two fat earrings made out of turquoise elephants. A white streak ran through the middle of her long orange hair. She beamed broadly at me as she took my hand and squeezed. I could tell at once that this woman was good and kind and bighearted and perhaps absolutely insane.

After they had introduced themselves to me, the Lawrences rose to the conversation level of the other humans and introduced themselves to Norm and the Important Man. I looked up at their
faces. I thought I could detect that Norm was visibly irritated that the man had introduced himself to Lydia—and then introduced his wife to me, the
chimp
—without first acknowledging him, and even further irritated that he had done so in front of the Important Man. The Important Man seemed to consider himself above such things—the battlefield of gestures, words, manners—the whole delicate metalanguage of human social posturing. What apes do with thumping on their chests, throwing clumps of grass, banging on logs—human beings do in subtler ways. There’s very little difference, otherwise.

Dudley Lawrence, however—even then I could tell—thought he possessed something that made him feel perfectly secure in the belief that he was the most important of all. Later, I would learn that this something was lots and lots of money.

So Dudley Lawrence entered the conversation and introduced his colorful wife. He was not a scientist; he was an interested layman. I could see that Lydia was extremely interested in what he had to say. She liked his attention. He wanted to know all about me. He kept asking questions—always addressing Lydia, whom he instinctively trusted more than Norm—which increasingly infuriated Norm. Meanwhile, his wife, Regina, lowered her big body back down to my level. Eventually she decided to actually sit on the floor, right in the middle of the gallery. With all the people milling around in the room, she sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of me.

“How
are
you, Bruno?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she went right on speaking. Her sea green eyes matched her turquoise elephant earrings. “I’ve been dying to meet you, Bruno. I’ve been reading all about you. I
adore
your work.”

I nodded, graciously acknowledging the compliment.

“I wonder,” she continued, “how you would say your unique cultural perspective as a chimpanzee living in our society informs your art?”

I wondered that myself. Since then, I’ve been fielding questions like that my entire career. People never tire of asking it. I think I replied, communicating more or less in breathy, inarticulate puttering noises and vague gestures, that I supposed being a chimpanzee in human society makes one view the human condition in terms not of
being
but of
becoming
, compelling one to understand humanity as necessarily something swept up in the flow of nature, rather than over and against nature.

“Yes of course!” said Mrs. Lawrence.

We chatted some more in this affable fashion.

I had grown comfortable enough with this woman that I had let go of Lydia’s hand.

Meanwhile, in the conversation that was happening up above us—Lydia would later relate to me—Dudley Lawrence had asked at what price he could acquire the entire collection.

“I’m sorry,” said Lydia, or something to this effect, “Bruno’s paintings are actually not for sale. We consider them valuable documents that we need to keep for research purposes, plus—”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Lawrence, or something to this effect, as he slid his pen and checkbook back into the inner pocket of his silver suit jacket, maybe even slightly embarrassed at having asked the question. “I understand. But I would at least like to commission the artist to paint a separate work for—”

“I’m really not sure that that would be appropriate for Bruno—,” Lydia began.

But at this point Norm, whose eyes had been following the exchange with increasingly frantic greed, interrupted: “Hold on, now, perhaps we could, er, maybe we could discuss the possibility of selling some of the works in this collection. We haven’t discussed the idea, actually—”

“Yes we have,” said Lydia. “We agreed that—”

Norm cleared his throat and scratched his cheek.

“Pardon me,” Norm said to Mr. Lawrence. “Would you please excuse us for a moment? I have to consult with my colleague.”

Mr. Lawrence graciously assented, nodding in understanding as Norm grasped Lydia’s arm and led her out of earshot. The two of them walked over to the other side of the room and began to argue in terse quick whispers, with heads bent close together. While they were gone Mr. Lawrence and the Important Man built another, separate conversation together, an unknowable conversation between two supposedly important men.

Lydia was now far away from me. She was inextricably, unreachably engaged in some business all the way on the other side of the room. Norm had stolen her, taken her away from me. I had been left in the company of this Regina Lawrence, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of me, still weaving a tapestry of words that had now become a claustrophobic tent of incomprehensible babble. I realized that I did not have a clue who any of these people were. Not the Important Man, not the tall old man in the silver suit and cowboy hat, not the two men with strange gleaming wands behind their backs, not the big elaborate woman who sat beside me on the floor. I looked around the room. All of my paintings were hanging on the walls. Why? People whom I did not know were walking around and looking at them. Why?

My heart rattled against my ribs with fear and rage. I knew nothing. Who
were
these people? Where was I? What the hell was going on? I panicked. What happened next I’m not proud of. I lost it. If I ever had it, I lost it that night. Lydia, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. (Gwen, when you type up these transcripts, please copy and paste “I’m sorry” until it repeats six thousand times.)

You might say that the animal within me, within this chimpanzee, this mock-man, Bruno, at that moment chose an extraordinarily inopportune time to burst forth from below, come out and
say hello to everyone. You might say that for some reason I chose that moment to rend my garments and commence to scream and howl savagely at the top of my lungs. If you had been there you might have observed people clapping their fat stupid hands to their ugly ears at the sound of all my hideous shrieking and bellowing. You might then have observed me, with my little gray suit already in tatters flapping about my torso, aimlessly tearing around the room, seemingly in every direction at once, scrambling pell-mell and helter-skelter among all those legs, all those pants and dresses and shoes. You might also have seen me overturn both of the two foldout tables, sending all those hors d’oeuvres, all those brownies, cheeses, crackers, cherry tomatoes, and little salami sandwiches scattering across the floor, and you might have heard all the wineglasses and bottles shattering to atoms upon contact with the floor, and in your sudden panic you might have mistaken all the red wine trickling across the floor amid all the broken glass that might have crunched under your feet for blood, for human blood, and you might have helped the others to squish the hors d’oeuvres into the floor, or got the brownies and little cubes of cheese stuck to the bottoms of your shoes when you joined everyone as they stampeded in terror out of the room. And, if you were far from the door when the impromptu mass exodus began, you might have been one of the unlucky ones who got squished and crushed in the doorway by all that panicked humanity, or you might have been one of the screaming ones, who was still in the room and could not get through because the doorway had gotten clogged with humans, clogged like the drain of a bathtub gets clogged with inexplicable human filth, and if so you might have been in a position to watch it happen when those two healthy young men in blue pants and tan shirts chased me into a corner of the room and jabbed me several times with their wands, those mysterious silver machines that of course were mysterious to me no longer. You might have watched
the two men deliver this raging, this “vicious” animal a series of correspondingly vicious electric shocks that instantly incapacitated him, that left him whimpering, shivering on the floor, not unconscious, but for an instant wondering if he were dead. You might—if you are someone who is given to empathy—have wondered for a moment what it felt like, and you might—if you are someone who is given to sympathy (and you are rare)—have even cared.

I gazed—feverish, sick—distantly I gazed up at the ceiling from where I lay crumpled and collapsed in the corner of the room. A moment before, it was as if those things they poked me with had instantaneously replaced every drop of blood in my veins with boiling water, and then instantly replaced it again with ice. I was shaking involuntarily. I had never felt so much pain. So much raw, hideous, physical pain—never. I heard people screaming. I heard them as if they were at the far end of a long tunnel. I heard a woman screaming. Lydia was screaming. Not so much in sorrow, but in anger.