The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (55 page)

“I don’t care what nature intended me for. I want a human nose! I’m going to get one, and I don’t need anyone’s permission, either.”

“Claptrap, Bruno! I am your employer.
I
shall decide what your nose looks like, for your appearance is my business.”

“Before you met me, Leon, you were a buffoon shouting Shakespeare in the subway. Business never picked up until I came. You wouldn’t make a pittance without me!”

“Great snakes!” Leon bashed a fist on the bar counter, causing
the glasses on it to wobble. “What insubordination! Audrey! Did you hear such vomitous insubordination issue from the mouth of the insolent animal who sits even now beside me? Don’t forget under whose roof you sleep, you ungrateful wretch!”

“I want a new nose! A nose, a nose! Leon, forgive me! I hate my nose! It’s a burden! It is an albatross that hangs from the neck of my face!”

“And how, you vain ape you, would you even begin to pay for cosmetic surgery? Pshaw! Surely it costs many thousands of dollars, if not millions. No, I’m afraid not, not in your income bracket. Such luxuries—such vanities!—are for the rich, and are not afforded the humble Shakespearean actor. This is not even to mention the logistics of it all. You’ve no head for logistics, Bruno. You fail utterly to grasp the delicate interworkings of reality.” A pause, and Leon went on: “And why ever would you
want
to attach a human nose to your ape face? Why blaspheme it so?”

“Because I’m a human now. I want to look like one.”

“You are
not
human!” Leon snorted. “Much as it begrudges me to pay you compliments. But call a spade a spade.”

“I am not an animal!” I cried out in frustration.

Leon reified his posture on his bar stool, and with a daintily dismissive flutter of his fingers, said: “I quote Jonson: ‘An ape’s an ape and a varlet’s a varlet, though they be clothed in silk or scarlet.’ ”

“What’s that?”

“That’s you: an ape in scarlet.”

“I meant the quotation.”

“
Ben
Jonson,
obviously
!” Leon roared. “The poor man’s Shakespeare.”

“I know a guy,” Audrey offered from behind the bar.

“
What?
” said Leon. “As do I. I know many ‘guys.’ But only one man.” He indicated himself by cocking his head and raising his eyebrows.

“No, I mean I know a guy who does plastic surgery. Well, I know
about
him.”

“Silence, shrew!” said Leon.

“Tell me more,” I pleaded. “What is his name? Have you met him?”

Audrey leaned over the counter toward me and spoke quietly, even though there was no one else in the bar besides me and Leon.

“I don’t know his name. I only know someone who knows him. You know Sasha?” I nodded. Sasha was Audrey’s coworker—she was a waitress at Artie’s whom I knew, though not well. “She knows him,” said Audrey. “He did a nose job for her sister. He was a doctor in Brazil before he came to the States. He’s not licensed to practice here, but he does plastic surgery on the sly. He works out of the back of a beauty salon in Astoria. Brazilian women come to him for lipos and nose jobs and stuff like that. He’s clean, he’s safe. Sasha gets a commission if she brings people in, that’s how it works. I think she used to work at the beauty salon before she started waitressing here.”

“I must meet this man. How much does he charge?”

“I don’t know. Cheap, I think. But not free.”

A nose!—to have a human nose! If only I had that, my body would be complete!

A few days later, Leon and I were in Artie’s Shrimp Shanty again after another day of performing Shakespeare in the subway all afternoon and night. We didn’t even stop at home to change into our civilian clothes: Leon was in his Henry VIII costume and I was wearing my costume, which was a Harlequin’s suit checkered with red and yellow diamonds, and a jester hat with floppy red and yellow tassels with bells sewn on the ends of them. This was our usual style of dress during this time. When we came in, Audrey met my eyes, and with a beckoning hand and a jerk of her head asked me
down to the far end of the bar, where Sasha sat beneath the rubber shark, with an electric-blue cocktail on a napkin in front of her. Leon squelched his weight onto his usual stool at the other end of the bar. His squishy haunches ballooned over the stool like the edges of a giant flesh muffin.

“I shall have a pint of ale!” he declared in his thespian’s faux-Continental accent. Audrey ignored him for the moment. Leon harrumphed and turned his attention to the baseball game playing on the muted TV bolted to the corner of the wall. I sat down beside Sasha. She had finished her shift but was still wearing her waitressing uniform. Sasha had olive skin, dark hair dyed blond, sharp green eyes, silver hoop earrings, and long artificial fingernails that were polished glossily and painted a neon blue that almost matched the color of her drink. Her false eyelashes were long and brittle, and made very subtle clicking noises when she blinked. I found her attractive, though in a very deliberately organized way.

The doctor’s name was DaSilva. He was a friend of her father’s.

“He did a nose job for my sister,” said Sasha in a Queens-Brazilian accent. “Cost her half a grand. Not too bad.” She shrugged and clicked her nails against the bar counter.

“I can pay!” I blurted.

“I’ll take you to talk to him. But he only works on people he knows. He knows me, so he’ll prolly do it, but he might not want to.”

Some days later Audrey borrowed her mother’s car to take me to Dr. DaSilva. Audrey’s mother—the second of Leon’s ex-wives—lived in Yonkers, and had lent Audrey her wood-paneled 1987 Wagoneer, with forewarnings about the vehicle’s many ailments and electromechanical idiosyncrasies. Audrey and Sasha met me in the morning at the door of the apartment I shared with Leon behind Artie’s, and I went with them. Leon was irritated with what he saw as my insubordination, irritated further that Audrey was playing
accomplice to it (Audrey liked me—she had come to regard me as a younger brother, I think), and even further irritated that the Shakespeare Underground would miss a day of performing because of this errand of vanity. I said good-bye to him, but he churlishly refused to answer or get up from where he sat in his terry-cloth bathrobe on the futon, absentmindedly watching
Bringing Up Baby
while muttering something about my insubordination and eating a ready-made rotisserie chicken in a plastic container that he’d just bought for breakfast at the grocery store down the street. Audrey drove us off the island, through the park, down the expressway, and across a bridge that hung high above the water on stark gray towers before sloping into Queens, into a dizzying web of narrow streets, and then we were in a place where the alphabets of many different languages were jumbled together on the storefronts, where Latinate, Cyrillic, and Greek letters fought for space with Arabic and Chinese, this Babylonian salmagundi of scripts and tongues all nattering in unison—tongues, and musics, too!—strains of polka, samba, reggae, and klezmer intermingled with Persian ululations, the accordion-and-brass
oompa-oompa
of mariachi music and the fuzzy thumps of rap blasting from car stereos—and the smells!—whiffs of meat crackling over fires and fried dough and who knows what else twisting together with the smells of tobacco and sewage, and there were all kinds of people jostling each other on the streets, women in bonnets and wooden clogs wheeling baby carriages with pudgy children pattering after them past skinny men in glossy tracksuits and jewelry and with glued-in-place hair, and so on and on: this place was like a sprawling fractal of infinitely divisible human complexity, a distracting circus of the senses where everyone was so busy that no one bothered to look anywhere but where they were going. Audrey piloted us in that grumbling behemothic vehicle down the street, past barbershops, shoe stores, bars,
gas stations, and donut shops, until we came to where we were going. She gradually seesawed the large automobile into a parallel parking place. We were in a Brazilian neighborhood, said Sasha. Everywhere I saw what I presumed were Brazilian flags draped over things, hanging from awnings or painted on windows, green and yellow with a star-speckled blue orb in the middle, and everywhere I saw people with the same olive skin and green eyes that Sasha had. Here was a storefront embedded in the middle of the block of a medium-traffic street, inconspicuously snuggled between a deli and a store that specialized in doors: a picture of a palm tree and the words I
PANEMA
B
EAUTY
dancing in loopy green cursive across the front of a white awning that shaded the front door. We went in.

A string of bells clinked against the glass as the door shut behind us. A long, narrow room: in front, a desk, a register, and a waiting area, with metal folding chairs and a coffee table covered with women’s magazines in Portuguese; in back, a doorless doorway covered with a turquoise curtain; below, linoleum floors; above, a row of three ceiling fans with pull chains clinking against wobbling light fixtures; there was a long counter with rows of metal sinks embedded in it, and scissors, razors, bottles, sprayers, combs and brushes scattered down the length of it; two parallel mirrors stretched along opposite sides of the room; next to the counter, reclining chairs were rooted to the floor on metal poles, with pedals to pump the chairs up on the poles or release them to sink hissing downward, and at the head of each chair a hemispherical plastic helmet fixed on a hinge that would descend over the head of the person sitting in the chair. The room smelled lush with shampoos, soaps, perfumes, wet hair. The feminine energy in this room was sweet and thick as cream. Several women lay in the chairs, and other women stood over them, fixing up the heads of the women
lying in the chairs—snipping, clipping, brushing, lathering, rinsing, blow-drying, etc.—and all the women were talking together in the universally recognizable tones of gossip, but were speaking Portuguese—that pretty language, musically mysterious to me, that sounds like Spanish softly brushed with French.

When we came in, the women smiled and blew kisses and flicked feminine waves hello to Sasha, and one of the women—she was heavyset and middle-aged, with heavy purplish pouches under her green eyes, pink lipstick, and dyed bronze-blond hair—said something to the woman in the chair whose head she was working on, and came smiling and clacking on her heels toward us across the linoleum. She and Sasha embraced, exchanged kisses on cheeks. Then Sasha and this woman had a lightning-quick conversation in Portuguese, and Sasha pointed at me. The woman held out her hand to me, palm down.

“Hello, Mr. Bruno,” she said, in an accent with feather-dusted consonants. I put a small kiss on the top of her plump brown hand, because that seemed like the thing to do, and she was introduced to me as Cecília. With a long fingernail, painted pink to match her lips, she beckoned us to follow her through the mirrored corridor of the beauty parlor, where in passing she bid one of the other women with a signal and a flutter of Portuguese to finish her work for her. She scraped aside the turquoise curtain covering the doorway at the back of the room and directed us through a dingy storeroom filled with damp cardboard boxes, down a short, dim hallway, through another door and into another waiting room, which looked much like the waiting area in the front of the front room, with the same metal folding chairs and coffee table with the same magazines on it. There was a plastic potted plant in one corner and a framed mirror on the wall.

This room essentially looked like the waiting room of a normal
doctor’s or dentist’s office, in that it was clean and well-lighted and so on, and even professional-looking—but what was missing from it was a feeling of legitimacy, of—well,
legality
, a basic lack of fear. Yes, that’s it—this room had a little
fear
in it, a fear that slightly soured its mood; but only
slightly
soured, like a whiff of milk that’s just beginning to turn but would probably still be safe to drink. The carpet was a little too thin or too questionably stained, the décor a little too shabby, the walls a little too naked of ornament. We sat down in the cheap metal folding chairs, and Cecília went out and brought us coffee in Styrofoam cups, and sat down to ask me a few polite questions, nothing too serious yet, which questions I answered as politely and as well as I could between sips of coffee. Then Cecília turned to Audrey, asked her a few similar questions, and apologized to us before turning to Sasha and launching into a rapid exchange in Portuguese. I liked Cecília—she was businesslike, but beneath that there was something almost grandmotherly about her, something worldly and kind that I trusted.

The other door in the room softly clicked open and two women came out. They looked surprised to see us sitting there. The older of them held the younger one by a linked arm. I realized from their synchronized gait, bodies, and eyes that they were mother and daughter. The daughter’s face, from her upper lip to her eyes, was covered in a bandage: plaster-wetted gauze was wrapped across her nose, a big adhesive bandage secured it to her face, and a cotton pad strapped over that with white tape wrapped around the back of her head beneath her hair. Both her eyes were swollen-lidded, bloodshot, and bruised purple, as if she’d been in a fistfight. She was breathing through her mouth. The mother dipped a careful nod at Cecília, who nodded back with pursed pink lips and knowing eyes, and they went out. The other door was still slightly ajar. The door swung outward and a little man came out: he was middle-aged,
thin, and delicate-looking, with pronounced cheekbones, pewtery hair that glistened like fish skin slicked flat to the sides of his mostly bald head, and a neat black mustache that pointed down from his nose to the corners of his lips; the overall effect of his face evoked an aging matinee star from the era of silent film. A pair of wireframe glasses pincered the bridge of his nose. He was snapping off a pair of bloody surgical gloves and whistling. He wore a string-tied white apron, covered in blood. Then he saw us sitting there, and, still whistling, he jabbed an index finger in the air, probably pretending to have forgotten something, turned back inside and shut the door behind him. For a while we heard the clank and scuttle of things being cleaned up or thrown away, the
eek-eek
of faucet knobs and the hush of water, accompanied all the while by his tuneful and insouciant whistling. Cecília excused herself, rose, went into the room and added the sound of their muffled conversation to these noises. She came back and sat with us again, reassured us with a smile and a wink, and patted me twice on the knee. Soon the man came out again. The wireframe glasses were now pushed higher up on his nose and the gloves and bloody apron gone. He wore elegant shoes and a purple shirt tucked into pinstriped gray slacks; his sleeves were rolled up past his hairy forearms, and a silver watch with a segmented band flashed at his wrist. This was Dr. DaSilva.