My Little Blue Dress (30 page)

August 18th—Wednesday

it tends to be on that first day after he's reinvented himself. Sometimes even the second day.

But by the following evening, though when Hayley got back from work evidence of the boy's enduring magnificence was strewn all around the apartment—the floor had been swept, he had paid some bills with his notorious checkbook and stacked them neatly on the entranceway radiator, he had visited the hardware store and cut himself a copy of Hayley's keys, and her, sweetly, a set of his—hairline cracks were already visible in the newly cast monolith of “Bruno Maddox,” a nervous glow around the eyes, a restless springiness to the legs . . . And by that Thursday evening Bruno

August 19th—Thursday

knew it himself. He knew he was slipping. He managed to muddle through the sex act well enough, no complaints
from the girl, but there in the dark postcoitally Bruno tried to
cradle
the nude Ms. Iskender in the same wholesome, brunomaddoxy way that had served him so well in recent nights . . . and just couldn't remember how it went. Was it mainly wrist . . . or largely forearm?

By Friday he

August 20th—Friday

had deteriorated to the point of asking himself, “What would Bruno Maddox say under these circumstances?” whenever the situation demanded he say something, and over the ensuing weekend, to be perfectly frank,

August 22nd—Sunday

he wasn't particularly magnificent at all. Hayley took him shopping in the sun and though the girl isn't usually a big fan of couplesome hand holding, she found herself having to do so, because otherwise Bruno tended to grind to a halt in front of random shop windows and scour his reflection for clues as to what it was about being “Bruno Maddox” that had so recently seemed so revolutionary. Back at the house he hit the couch and watched the television, hoping Hayley wouldn't notice him there as she vacuumed unhappily around.

Mid-

August 23rd—Monday

morning Monday Bruno's answering machine back here in Chinatown picked up the sound of that fellow Theo Bakula inviting Bruno to join him for a quiet after-work drink “avec certain amigos,” which was all very confusing to the boy when he retrieved the message remotely using Hayley's 'phone. There was a sort of
warm anticipation
in Theo's voice that suggested Bruno
would
in fact be meeting him . . . but then there was also the fact that
not
going out and having drinks with Theo Bakula was practically the only tenet of his new, wholesome personal doctrine that he was currently able to remember. In the cool of Hayley's apartment, the fragmenting young man actually
whimpered
slightly, reader, under the confusion of it all, then put a call through to Hayley at the office to get her take on the whole thing.

“So there's something I need to tell you,” he said to her. “Something bad.”

“What?” Hayley worried.

“A few weeks ago I stupidly made plans with that guy Theo Bakula to go to have drinks this evening.”

A pause while she digested. “That's it? That's the bad thing?”

“Yes.”

“Why is that bad?”

“Um Because you and I were going to cook dinner this evening.”

“And you don't want to go and meet Theo?”

“No, I . . . Look, if I do go do you want to come?”

“Mm . . .” Yawny yawny girly girly. “No. You should go, though.”

“Well I think I might
have
to go.”

“You should.”

He
did
go, reader, and was back before midnight drunk off his face but in a rather upbeat frame of mind having stumbled, if you can believe it, across the Secret of Existence. The Secret of Existence was Moderation. It had been staring him in the face all along. The absurdly monkish and sterile regime he'd been trying to pursue since the day of his haircut, the day of summer's starting to end—and it was continuing to end, reader, continuing apace—was far too severe. Maybe for a simpler man, a man of fewer parts, such a lifestyle was sustainable, but for a man of Bruno's obvious complexity it was not merely
okay
to go get a drink occasionally with Theo Bakula, it was
essential
.

Hayley he found asleep on the couch with an architecture documentary still blaring. He snuffled her awake and rather devilishly proceeded to make her his—right then and there, if you must know, reader.

But it was a fleeting little uptick, by which

August 24th—Tuesday

I mean that he wake up the next morning long after Hayley had left for work and lay there literally for an hour, just blinking up at the immaculate ceiling and failing to remember anything at all: where he was, what the Secret of Existence was, what he was like as a person, any of that. By 6
P
.
M
. he had called in sick to work and was huddled beneath a blanket on Hayley's couch. As the hour of her return approached, he leapt from the couch several times and ran to
the hallway mirror where, miming a handshake with himself, he attempted the act of speech. “Ho ho. How's it going?” he inquired of his image. “Oh really? Man. Wow. Sorry to hear that. Um. Gotta run.”

And run he did, reader, all the way back to the couch where he languished all evening, pretending to be asleep-slash-unwell so as not to have to answer Hayley with anything more than a grunt when she addressed him, which wasn't often. He genuinely did not feel well, for the record. His sinuses or something had snapped shut in his head and he was overpowered by the taste of his own saliva, just like back in the bad old days, a condition that

August 25th—Wednesday

persisted all the following day, not dissipating one iota, getting worse and worse, reaching its nadir when he got to work. The topic of
Thirty UN!der Thirty
that Wednesday evening was The Scourge of Gun Violence in America and the only thing Bruno could think of to say was:

“In England, where I come from, there's a . . . a chinchilla of random violence always lurking under everything.”

Which didn't make any sense, a chinchilla being a fur or an animal or something of that sort.

“Er . . . not a chinchilla, obviously. A . . . skein.”

Which made even
less
sense, impressively, and to anyone floating a foot or so behind his head as I was, bodiless and suspended by cosmic-slash-literary forces above the trading floor of the American Stock Exchange, peeking over Bruno's shoulder into the great black funnel of the camera, there were
audible snickers bleeding from his earpiece from a) Kelly-Ann from Minnesota and b) bow-tied-black-guy Pierre, as they took his measure in their orderly, employable minds.

Cabbing back up to Hayley's Bruno stuck his head out the window for air and I found myself watching with enormous pity, reader, as the very last shred of personality fluttered briefly in the gale and then detached.

Hayley was in her cardigan, leaning against the abutment of her kitchen counter, drinking a bottle of beer. She smiled, when Bruno entered, and nodded over toward the couch where, sure enough, there sat a stranger, a third organism: an older man with a ball of frizzy gray hair, wearing a scuffed old leather jacket and round little sixties glasses. Bruno blinked at him, not knowing what to do.

“Dad, this is Bruno Maddox. Bruno, this is my father, Orson Iskender.”

Oh yes. Oh dear. Hayley had mentioned something about . . . oh dear.

Did I tell you about Hayley's father, reader? I have no memory of doing so but of course in this stage the memory thing is ebbing in and out, in and out. . . . Anyway. Hayley's father Orson Iskender is “Orson,” the brains and the pen behind one of America's least enjoyable syndicated daily cartoon strips, a three-panel nonsense of a thing called “Bring Out Your Dead” detailing the exploits of a squat moronic nobleman in a funny hat and his taller, cleverer manservant. For the last twenty years or so this pair has been wandering pointlessly around plague-stricken sixteenth-century London, engaged in banter that is only superficially
not
about twenty-first-century American politics. “Tell me, Face,” the nobleman says every day in the first panel, “why do the wealthy landowners who grow tobacco give bags of
gold coins to the Members of Parliament? Is that not corruption?” Nothing ever happens in the middle panel. The servant just looks down at the master. Then in the third panel the servant says, “Maybe so, sir, but . . .” and then the supposedly amusing and satirical part, which I apologize for not being able to remember here. No, no, I have to. I have to. I should take a stab. “. . . they say there's no smoke without bribery!” Literally. It's that bad. Or it can be.

Anyway, that's Hayley's father, and there he was in her apartment, on that fateful Wednesday evening. The legendary cartoonist stood and with a craggy, socialist smile offered Bruno his hand from twenty feet away.

And Bruno merely
waved
, reader, limply. “Hello,” he called back in a quiet voice. “How are you? Nice . . . nice
daughter
.”

No one said anything for a second. Hayley stoically sipped her beer.

“Thanks,” said the man, a certain hesitancy in his voice as he wondered whether perhaps his daughter had accidentally landed herself a boyfriend of
low quality
. “Hayley says you're from London?”

“Yes . . .” Bruno nodded, then cleared his throat and chuckled. “I'm . . . I'm
from
there.”

For a second, reader, no one said
anything
. Bruno Maddox broke the silence. “And . . . and you're from . . . someplace else, Hayley was saying.”

“Yup. Philadelphia.”

A glassy bonk from Hayley's direction as she set down her beer upon the pristine countertop. “Shall we go?”

“Sure. Where?” This was the great cartoonist standing up.

“Anywhere you want. What do you feel like?”

“Somewhere close by. I'm starved.”

Oh dear.

It was flooding back to the boy that he'd agreed to go have
dinner
with Hayley's father, ages ago, literally days beforehand, and the sad thing was that that, for the boy, was simply not feasible. He'd had a really tough day. He wasn't sure anymore where he was exactly coming from, what his stance was, and going to dinner with Hayley's father would almost certainly involve certain
questions
being asked, questions about jobs and hobbies . . . maybe even about ambitions . . . maybe even about
preferences for one thing over another,
and right now Bruno just simply didn't have access to that sort of information. No, he just . . .

“Um . . . Hayley?”

The girl was at the fridge, reader. The fridge was open, the girl's hand was inside, storing her beer. She didn't turn. Just kept looking into the fridge, staring at a concrete vision of the near-term future.

“I'm afraid . . .” said Bruno, pausing to clear his throat before every syllable. “I'm afraid I can't come out to dinner. I've stupidly agreed to . . . I've accidentally become thin. I mean I. . . I've accidentally gone and
spread
myself extremely thin.”

“That's too bad,” said Mr. Iskender relieved. “Are you sure?”

“Fuck,” said Hayley into the fridge.

“I'm really sorry. I just . . .”

“Bruno likes Manhattan,” Hayley said, then she turned and the troublesome thing, the unexpected thing, was that she was actually
crying
. Her face was uncontorted, reader, don't get me wrong. She wasn't
crying like a little girl
. She was crying more like a statue, a statue that's also a fountain, like one of those big black blocks of marble in the plaza
outside an investment bank where the water flows down the front and gets pumped back up to the top and then flows smoothly down again . . .

“Ah . . .” Bruno casually started tilting backward.

“Baby?” Orson was up and moving toward his pale bony offspring. “What's the problem?”

“I'm very unhappy.”

Mr. Iskender's progress toward his daughter was interrupted by the kitchen counter.

“You should leave,” Hayley said to Bruno as he struggled successfully to remain upright.

“Leave?” He nodded, nodding nodding nodding like so many times before, fading. “In what . . . in what sense?”

Reader, I shan't trouble you with the rest. The scene with Hayley's father in her airy apartment that terrible Wednesday was merely the latest in a long line of distressing human scenes, and I offered it up within these pages—I realize now with hindsight—primarily by way of
semi-apology
, semi-apology, reader, for having wasted so much of your time.

You see, for close on a million pages now I have been dragging you endlessly through scene after scene to try to show you Why What Happened Happened, why Bruno Maddox is the way he is, and I began, I remember, by trying to fool you into thinking that Bruno's behavior was excusable because of his having Caregiver's Syndrome, and then, when that stopped making sense, some four, four and a half thousand pages ago, I started trying to tell you—much more bogusly—that his problems were more complex, that it was all a matter of me
cramping his style
, that he would be a happy, productive member of society if the ugly-slash-poorly smelling old lady in the apartment next to his weren't denying the chap access to his
true nature
, which
was either to be a Citizen of the Future, a futuristic urban cowboy swashbuckling his way in hi-tech mismatched clothing through the glamorous, seamy underbelly of Twenty-first Century Manhattan, or a Creative Genius, remember all that?