“Well now,” said the clown as we approached, “would the monkey like a balloon?”
“He’s a chimpanzee,” Lydia corrected him.
“Well excuse me!” he said through an exhalation of boisterous laughter.
Laugh, clown, laugh.
“Monkeys have tails,” she said. “Apes don’t have tails.”
Lydia handed him fifty cents, which he deposited, clink-clink, into a fanny pack.
“Now what kind of animal would you like me to make for you?” said the clown to me.
A human, I communicated.
“What?” said the clown.
Lydia, who could understand my gestures and noises, translated:
“He said he wants a person.”
“Gee,” said the clown, snapping a fresh balloon from the dispenser he wears on his belt, “I’ve been making balloon animals ever since I was debarred from practicing law, and that’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me to make a balloon human!”
Make me a human! Bruno demanded.
“I’ll see what I can do,” said the clown, these words half-muffled as he puts the limp red bag to his lips and puffs it into a long, ellipsoidal tube of air.
Twist, squeak, squeak, twist, scrunch, squeak—and behold! My own balloon person!
He had created a miniature pink effigy of a human being: what the clown had succeeded in creating for me looked something like the internationally recognized pictogram for the men’s restroom. Simple, featureless, classically proportioned and racially indistinct, standing, frontally or antipodally we cannot tell, with his feet together and his arms at his sides, with maybe a hint of masculine aggressiveness implicit in his stance: Ecce Homo—Behold the Man.
Leaving the clown, Lydia tied my floating pink man around my wrist with his string. As we walked down the path in the park, Lydia held my left hand, and my balloon man bobbed on a string two feet in the air above my right wrist.
Then we purchased ice cream cones. Lydia selected strawberry ice cream and I, now a man, deliberately opted for a manlier flavor: chocolate. We consumed our ice cream while sitting on a park bench, watching people jog past us on the path. Nearby, a deranged ruffian with one eye made guttural choking noises in the back of his throat as he loped crazily from one public wastebasket to the next, pausing at each to peek for scraps. I slipped my hand from the loop of string, let go, and my balloon man drifted heavenward.
“Bruno!” Lydia snapped. “I’m not buying you another one.”
I don’t want another one, I communicated.
“Why in the world did you do that?”
I wanted to see what would happen if I let go, I communicated.
“That’s what happens. When you let go of your little human, he flies away.”
I need hardly bother to explicate the metaphorical implications of this moment.
We watched my balloon homunculus soar into the ether, shrinking from sight until he became an indistinguishable speck of pink against the blue of the sky. This was the ascent of man.
Where does it go? I asked.
“Africa,” said Lydia.
Africa, I wondered. My ancestral homeland. That’s where Zaire is, the birthplace of my biological father. I inwardly repeated the word to myself, codifying it to a mantra: Africa, Africa, Africa. The heart of darkness. The cradle of civilization. I understood it to be a violent place where one can never be safe. Where human beings eat chimps. The setting of my nightmares. Why did she say that so easily? So thoughtlessly? Africa.
On the way home, we stopped at a flower shop, where Lydia bought a bouquet of green roses.
When we arrived at home that evening, Lydia cooked one of my favorite foods: spaghetti. It’s such a cartoonish food. I loved to slurp up the long, slippery noodles. Damn it, I still do. Lydia opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass. I expressed a desire to imbibe as well, and she poured me a tiny amount—not in a wineglass, because she was afraid my maladroit hands would shatter such a delicate drinking vessel—but one of the nearly indestructible and spill-proof plastic sippy cups that were designated in our household specifically for my use.
Over dinner, our conversation was long and deep. She told me about her life. About her family, her upbringing in Arkansas, how she came here to Chicago to be educated, just like I was being educated. Talk gradually drifted to lighter topics. We joked. We laughed. She drank a few more glasses of wine, and became flushed and silly.
When our eyes met, I got a tingling feeling deep in my gut, a feeling like our two brains were directly connected by invisible electric wires running between the pupils of our eyes. And, with the dirty dishes still on the table, Lydia took my hand and guided me into our bedroom. She sat me on the bed, and we looked closely into one another’s eyes, shortening the lengths of the invisible electric wires connecting our brains. She brought her face to mine, and our lips met. Our mouths opened, and our tongues slithered together in salivary bliss. And we collapsed together back onto the bed, still unmade from that morning, and—but what else can I possibly say, without straying beyond the parameters of good taste? What words can graze the surface of such a subject, let alone explain it or express it? We made love. That night, Lydia and I truly, reciprocally, made love.
Actually, what I just described may be a lie, or a lie-like thing. Albeit a fiction, it is a useful fiction. We will use it for narrative purposes. The scene I just described—it happened—it happened many, many times—but I don’t think it happened like that, that first night, the night after I sort-of raped her. In truth the sexual relationship between me and Dr. Lydia Littlemore did not begin with a bang, but a whimper. There were many times we had to do it in the dark, very quietly, very slowly, before it was okay to bring it into the light.
Every word is a category, a tool of abstraction, a criminal approximation. Every word removes the thing it is supposed to represent from the real world. Thus, every word is a lie. And that is why it is so damnably difficult to speak about sex—or anything for that matter, but especially sex—in words. Just when you want most to speak the truth, the ineffable nature of your subject matter clogs your mouth with lies. An unchewable wad of lies, like a mouthful of cotton balls. Words get in the way of what you want to say.
At first these incidents were hazy fever dreams of sex more than the thing itself: both of us half-asleep and lazy-blooded, moving slowly and silently, enjoying the interplay of skin and tongues and fingers and membranes and fluids and the sensitive, primitive organs of pleasure that we both possessed. Lying beside her in bed, I would gently prod her shoulder with a long purple finger, asking if she was awake. Sometimes she would murmur something in response, which did not necessarily mean yes. Sometimes an erection would slink out of my loins on its own accord, and sometimes I would hintingly nudge it toward her, and sometimes she would feel it—it would brush against her thigh or her haunches or her belly—and then sometimes she would take a commanding grasp of it, and after this decisive moment I suddenly and drunkenly cared for nothing in the world but the white heat of our mutual and imminent ecstasies. And then our sex was like a viscous liquid, sweet and slow as honey drooling from a spoon. And then we would wake in the morning vaguely wondering if we had really done what we had done, as if perhaps it had been only one movement of a half-remembered, and shared, symphony of dreams.
Later, we would be more upfront about things. More conscious, more deliberate. Soon Lydia and I were secretly living in sin. Like Anna and Vronsky. Reflecting back on that time, that period when we were living happily together in our apartment in Hyde Park—the stretch of months after we had become physically intimate, but before the project collapsed in a ruin of debt and doubt—was one of the happiest times in my life.
The arrangement was not without its problematic aspects. Perhaps the friendship between me and Lydia on the one hand had been deepened and solidified by the bond of our total physical intimacy—and on the other hand threatened by it, due to the host of complicated and often conflicting
feelings that this free license of bodily contact introduces between two people in love. Also there was the emotional awkwardness of the fact that for obvious reasons, our sexual relationship had to be kept absolutely secret at the lab. Lydia was terrified of exposure. It was heartbreaking to me that every day at the lab we still had to pretend that the relationship between us was still businesslike, still scientific, still chaste—that we were not utterly in love.
There are no animals on this planet, at least not that I’m aware of, so squeamish about touching one another as humans. Go to a zoo and watch the chimpanzees. You’ll probably see them all tangled together in one big cuddly heap. They feel most comfortable that way, most safe. Humans, though, make much talk of “respecting personal space,” and behave toward one another as if their bodies are hostile nations buffered by hazardous frontiers of no-man’s-land, traveling radii of airspace surrounding every body, into which another’s ingress may be considered an unauthorized invasion, even when the intent is peaceable. This fierce physical mistrust goes away—goes away completely—only among lovers. Lydia and I had developed that total physical comfort with one another that comes with sexual intimacy—when we were alone together at home, our bodies were free to touch and be touched by each other, to give one another pleasure—but at the lab, we had to maintain the façade that we knew each other only as human and animal, as experimenter and subject, as scientist and science.
Sometimes on the weekends we would spend the whole day in bed. Sometimes we would spend two days at a stretch naked. Sometimes we would get home from the lab—finally released from the watchful and loveless eyes of Lydia’s colleagues, finally unlocked from a long chain of hours stressed tight with the laborious theatre of trying to act like we weren’t in love—and we would walk in the door and race immediately to the bedroom, articles of clothing flying from our persons all down the hall so that we arrived antecedently disrobed in our chamber of clandestine lust. We were partners, Lydia and I, united in our sin. We behaved like two children when we were alone together, two sexually active children. We developed a complex lovers’ dialect of inside jokes and pet names. Here’s a montage for you. Please cue Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and imagine these scenes fading in and out. One: Lydia and Bruno sitting together in the bathtub, their faces softly underlit by a constellation of lit tea candles, Lydia leaning against the back of the tub and regulating the temperature of the water by twisting the faucets on and off with her toes; Lydia is sipping a glass of white wine, and Bruno is in her lap, eating a slice of chocolate cake à la mode. Two: Lydia reclining on the couch in absolute, resplendent nudity, while Bruno, wearing a floppy black beret in order to denote his office as an artist, paints her image on canvas with an easel. Three: Lydia and Bruno strolling hand-in-hairy-hand in the park, probably chatting about art or philosophy. Cut back to the bathtub scene, where Lydia and Bruno are giggling and flicking water at each other. Cut back to the painting scene, where Bruno is furiously ripping sketch after not-to-his-exacting-satisfaction sketch out of his pad of paper, crunching them up and flinging them away to join the small mountain of paper building behind him. Now cut back to the park (still strolling). Cut back to the bathtub, where Lydia splashes too much water at Bruno, causing him to drop his plate of chocolate cake à la mode in the water with a startling sploosh; in response their giggling crescendos into uproarious laughter. Now back to the painting scene, where we gaze over Bruno’s shoulder as he puts the final touches onto his completed painting of Lydia (who has long ago fallen asleep on the couch without his noticing) as a reclining nude. Finally, cut back to the park, where Bruno and Lydia have stopped strolling to sit awhile on a bench overlooking a view of an electrically aglitter Chicago skyline at twilight; they are now staring dreamily into one another’s eyes; their faces converge for a kiss, and the camera drifts up to the stars as the final notes of music tinkle away to silence.
I do not know whether Dr. Plumlee suspected us of anything back then. He was already backing away from the project. It had gotten out of his control. Surely he noticed that there was something going on between us. His suspicion may also have been fueled by jealousy. That I can understand. How could he not have been secretly in love with her to some degree? Maybe without even consciously realizing it himself? Anyone could see that Lydia was a woman in love, and anyone could also have seen that whoever was the object of her love, it was not Norman Plumlee. I suspect that this jealousy of his lay close beneath his decision to terminate the project. I honestly don’t know how long Norm had suspected that Lydia and I were having an affair, but eventually—as did everyone—he found out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As I have said, Lydia and I were in love, and it made us reckless. We probably could have—should have—been more careful, and obviously in hindsight I realize this, but I don’t know if we ever could have possibly realized it at the time. The blinders were up. We were not thinking of the consequences. Lydia and I were addicted to each other. And as is the case with all addicts, the short-term ecstasy of our love was so overpowering that we always gave in to it, and all censorious long-term logic immediately vanished into mist every night we went to bed together.
XX
Now the wheel of the seasons had made a full revolution, and Chicago found itself sunken once again at the bottom of winter. Hats, boots, scarves, gloves. Icicles, snow, streets all mushy with gray-black sludge, and slicing winds that freeze the snot in your nose before you’ve taken ten steps outside. When I think back on it, I seldom remember Chicago in any season but winter. Some cities are like joyful little children, they live for their summers, and other cities have personalities more like curmudgeonly old men who live for their winters, simply because it means they may wear big coats with lots of pockets to put their things in. Chicago is such a city.
As I mentioned earlier, Lydia had arranged an exhibition of some of my best work in a gallery space in the University of Chicago Main Library. Until the very end, it was a fantastic evening. It was only a week after Norm and Lydia officially went public with me, in a paper that was published in Volume 367, Number 6464 of Nature, which Lydia coauthored with Dr. Norman Plumlee, her immediate supervisor at the lab, even though Plumlee had very little to do with the project anymore—that is, the BRUNO Project (Behavioral Rearing into Ultroneous Noumenal Ontogenesis—a clunky acronym, but whatever; I didn’t come up with it). The paper was written almost entirely by Lydia. Perhaps Dr. Plumlee peppered it with a few anodyne footnotes that the paper frankly could have done without. I suspect there were two principal reasons why Plumlee’s name appeared on that paper—placed unjustly and unalphabetically before and above that of Dr. Lydia Littlemore: (one) because Lydia feared that her research—with the cataclysmic paradigm shift in our understanding of humanity and animality that her conclusions necessarily demanded, and seeing as she was still a very green unknown in her field at the time—would not be taken seriously (there it is again!) by the scientific community unless she could lean on the crutch of prestige that was Dr. Norman Plumlee’s name; and (two) because of Plumlee’s vain and childish desire to attach himself like a leech onto the body of research that was pretty much all Lydia’s, Lydia’s and mine.
Anyway, Volume 367 Number 6464 of Nature, in which appeared the article “The BRUNO Project: One Extraordinary Chimpanzee Provides New Potential for Studies in Complex Linguistic Communication in Great Apes,” by Dr. Norman Plumlee of the University of Chicago and Dr. Lydia Littlemore, also of the University of Chicago, pages 247–255, had gone to press one week before the opening exhibition of my artwork.
Although the paper went into great depth regarding my impressive ability to understand much spoken English, it did not mention my capacity for producing spoken language. This is mostly because I wasn’t really saying anything yet. I spoke, of course—I was an irrepressible chatterbox, I was speaking constantly!—but for some reason, at this point, only Lydia could understand what I was saying. I even began to suspect that the other
scientists in the lab had been ever increasingly falling under the persuasion that Lydia’s nearly fluent comprehension of my speech was a bit of specious and irresponsibly unscientific wishful thinking on her part, that she overinterpreted all my breathy, inarticulate puttering, grunting, and squeaking noises as burgeoning speech—which is exactly what they were. The other scientists did not understand my speech because they did not spend even a fraction of the amount of time with me that Lydia did, because they did not know me, because they did not love me.
In any event, the fact that I was—however indiscernibly to outsiders—speaking at probably the language-competence level of about a two-year-old child was the source of a disagreement between Lydia and Dr. Plumlee. Lydia had wanted to include this in the paper, and Norm advised her against it, as he was concerned that such an amazing claim would not be believed and would be difficult if not impossible to prove to naysayers. In the end, Norm, predictably, won, Lydia acquiesced, and I was presented to the public not yet as a talking ape but as a listening one, which for some reason was less impressive.
The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore Page 20