My Little Blue Dress (15 page)

Okay now. That's enough now.

“Literally drinks and drinks and drinks and drinks and I . . .” Bruno's voice, which had been getting softer all this time, settled now into a hypnotic singsong drawl . . . . “I was just sort of rocking back on my chair . . . rocking back on my chair and looking up at the sky . . . the rectangle of sky where the skyscrapers ended and . . . it was all pale blue with
this sort of . . . sort of yellow mist behind it . . . and I don't know, it was the weirdest, most beautiful thing. The tops of the buildings were going all peach and orange and tangerine and I was looking up at it and . . .” something caught in his throat, “. . . I don't know, I suddenly felt
bad
about sprinting away the other evening when we were together and . . . well, I tried to find a 'phone but there wasn't one and so I just came home and found one here and . . . well, now I'm talking to you and I'm going to go now in case I start . . .”

Hang up
, I pulsed.

Plastic crushed into plastic, then silence.

It was over.

“Oh God,” said Bruno, and may in fact have shed a few tears before stumbling out into the world to buy us dinner, leaving me here alone, desperate to go to the bathroom and feeling very, very sad, reader. Oh, it's nothing new. It's the same old sadness. The exact same sadness I feel every time it's brought home to me how much damage I've done to Bruno Maddox. Tonight, though, was particularly tough. Hearing him drool into the 'phone like that, getting all misty and gooey about the tops of high buildings, being struck by the evening sun . . .

Because he didn't used to be like that.

No, when I first met Bruno Maddox he was altogether different.

In fact, I think I'll spend tomorrow telling you all about it.

June 5th—Saturday

It was February 8 of this year. Around ten o'clock that morning I became aware of voices next door. One of them
was Kevin, my Chinese landlord, who grunts instead of talking, and the other I didn't recognize. I heard the stranger use the word “radiator,” and this precipitated a series of muffled, frenzied
bongs
, as of Kevin kicking a radiator . . . then suddenly
boom:
The fire door crashed open and there was my landlord, whom I hadn't seen in a year, flying through the air in his filthy jeans and his leather jacket and his yellow “SuperStud” T-shirt, and landing in the gap between my electric bed and the window where he began to clank away at the innards of
my
radiator with a metal tool that he had snatched from his belt rather impressively in midair.

And that's when I saw Bruno Maddox. Gliding through the fire door in Kevin's wake came an extremely tall and athletic-looking young man with pale skin, a wild tangle of mahogany hair, and an olive-green business suit of the lowest possible quality, a suit that I could tell immediately was far from representative of his overall attractiveness.

This young man has the Lifeforce
, I remember blurting to myself as Bruno stood there inspecting my furniture, those huge, expressive eyes of his falling upon an object, extracting its essence, filing the information away, then swiftly moving on to another. He stepped down, out of veiw, into the kitchen. I heard a pill jar rattle, a knife picked up and set down again . . . and then
boom
. Suddenly there he was, right in the doorway of my bedroom, peering into the blackness, well-shaped nostrils flaring at the scent of urine.

“. . . Hail . . .” I said, the second-to-last word I would ever utter.

Bruno froze. “Hello?”

Right then Kevin grunted something from the other end of the apartment to the effect that it was going to be springtime in a few short weeks, and so the lack of central heating
didn't matter. Instinctively I felt a throb of apprehension on Kevin's behalf. I'd only known Bruno Maddox a few seconds, but I had already seen enough of his forcefulness, his vibrancy, to realize that Kevin Lee had just made an enormous miscalculation. Clearly, this wasn't the sort of young man one messed with or tried to hoodwink.

“Pardon the intrusion,” said Bruno coolly into the stinking blackness and swiveled on his heel to lay down the law to one Kevin Lee.

Our relationship should have ended then and there, but it didn't. An hour later Bruno was back, tapping on my
front
door and waiting a full five minutes while I decanted myself out of bed, shuffled out of my bedroom and around the little promontory of cornicework, and fiddled endlessly with the latch.

“Fucking hell,” were Bruno's first words upon seeing me. I wasn't offended in the slightest because the fact is, reader, that at this stage of the game I am pretty much the world's
least
attractive woman. My skin is blemished and papery, with black and silver bristles; my mouth is an irregular, lipless hole with horrible lacy edges, and my once-piercing ice-blue eyes have lost both their color and their luster. In fact, the white parts have turned the color of ear-wax.

I could go on, and in fact I think I shall: my hair is sparse and white and seems to float
above
my scalp like thin chemical clouds on some nightmarish alien planet; my body is a little knot of cartilage like you sometimes find in a stew. And on that particular day I happened to be in my least flattering outfit: a tubular smock of caramel-colored nylon, with repulsive stains around the groin.

“Sorry to bother you again,” the boy continued, composure flooding back, “but I was just ducking out to the shops
and wondered if I could get you anything in terms of food or supplies.”

I looked at him.

Could he
get
me anything?

No,
I pulsed him.
You can't get me anything. I'm trying to starve myself to death.

And with that I turned and just shuffled away.

But I
forgot to close the door
. One of the favorite techniques of Ancient Greek playwrights, when composing their tragedies, was to have one of the characters perform some seemingly innocuous action that precipitates a whole chain of increasingly tragic events, and so it proved in this instance. Bruno interpreted my leaving the door open as a request for him to buy me a random selection of groceries, then come back and put them away for me. At the Chinese minimart around the corner he very thoughtfully bought me some half-pulp orange juice, a gallon of whole milk, a sliced loaf of seven-grain bread, but was so struck on his return by the disgusting condition of my refrigerator and, come to think of it, my apartment as a whole, that he decided out of the goodness of his heart—the genuine goodness—to spend the rest of the day cleaning the place up and generally bringing some order to my world.

So he did. He emptied the rotting food from the fridge, swept the floor and wiped the table. He lifted me out of bed, dumped me in the nasty armchair, stripped the sheets from both my beds, and took them to the laundry. For lunch he made me soup, and afterward he consulted the labels on my pill jars and made me swallow a few. When the laundry was done he remade both the beds, reinserted me into the nonelectric one back in my bedroom, washed the lunch dishes in the sink, and signed off around four in the afternoon with
the compassionate words: “I'm off now. Good luck. Hope I was able to be of service.”

I knew he'd be back. The walls are so thin around here that by noon the next day Bruno knew—and I knew he knew—that a) I had received no other callers since he'd left me and b) I hadn't even shuffled to the bathroom or the fridge. All he had heard me do was cough, and occasionally moan. At one o'clock he was back, looming over me in my bedroom, brandishing my copy of
The Caregiver's Bible
, which had been splayed for weeks on the nasty armchair.

“Sorry to intrude again,” he murmured sounding ever so slightly irked, “but I didn't hear anyone arrive and so I thought I'd better check on you. You do have a . . .” He looked at the book jacket. “. . . caregiver, don't you?”

I tried to answer but managed only a hiss. Resourcefully, I attempted telepathy.

No
, I pulsed him.
I don't. That's my book. I bought it when I was just becoming decrepit
.

“Well look. I think what I'd better do is call the health services, see if they have someone who can come and take care of you.”

Just as he was turning away, making for the Yellow Pages and the 'phone, I uttered the absolute last word I would ever speak.

“. . . No . . .”.

And that was that.

Half an hour later Bruno was still pacing about the place, trying and failing to think of a way out of his predicament. Obviously he couldn't just
abandon
me. In my condition that would be murder. But neither could he in good conscience call the Health Services after I'd explicitly asked him
not to. If I had in fact made the gutsy, quite reasonable decision to starve myself to death in my disgusting apartment rather than die at the hands of nurses in some soulless state-run institution, then who was he to override my wishes simply because he'd stuck his nose in where he wished he hadn't?

No, the boy was stuck. He'd got himself into a real pickle, a pickle to which there was a single, morally acceptable solution: continue to care for me until my real caregiver showed up to take me off his hands.

Which is exactly what happened.

The only problem being of course that when my real permanent caregiver did finally show up, it turned out to be him, and the
real
Bruno Maddox, the forceful, happy, motivated one, disappeared.

June 6th—Sunday

The 'phone rang today mid-afternoon while Bruno was changing the sheets on the electric bed. He let the machine take the call, as has been his policy since that fateful day last week when his office called up and made him attend that taping, which resulted, of course, in the disastrous assignation with that girl.

“Hi. This is Hayley Iskender.” The girl's voice was freakishly even-pitched, like the voice they give computers in movies. “Um. I'm calling to reply to your message from the other evening. I didn't really understand it, but if you were calling to ask whether I want to go out with you again, then um, I don't think I want to so . . . Thanks.”

Click.

Bruno failed to react.

He merely stuffed a pillow into its case and shook it down.

Was that really necessary?
I found myself peevishly pulsing the girl through the machine.
How much more demoralized do you think this poor boy can be before he just completely . . . snaps? Hmm?

But there was no response. Obviously.

June 7th—Monday

The heat descended with a vengeance today. Heat and extreme humidity. Less than fifteen seconds into the three and a half minutes it takes me to shuffle to the bathroom in the morning
*
with Bruno gripping me lightly at the elbow and waist, I realized I was sweating like a foundryman and emitting about a hundred times more old-woman stink than usual.

Sorry I smell so bad
, I pulsed my gentle escort.
It's the heat. The last thing you need right now is for me to start smelling. Sorry. I can't help it.

But “Easy does it . . . you're walking very well” was Bruno's faux-cheerful response, a classic example of the sort of upbeat verbal air freshener he uses to cover the horrible scent of old woman.

He is a gentleman, that boy. And a saint.

June 8th—Tuesday

Well here we are: a week into the new format and what do you think? Personally, I reckon it's going very well.

It's bad isn't it, Bruno's life?

You may have a better imagination than me, reader, but personally I cannot even
imagine
the anguish that kind young man must be going through. To be twenty-seven years old, with the greatest city in the world humming away just beyond the window, and yet to have to spend your days trapped in an airless box with an unattractive, and now reeking old woman . . . Can you even imagine? If I were in his shoes I probably would have snapped by now and just quickly
killed
me. Wouldn't be that big a deal. I mean it's not like I'm even really alive, I'm just . . . existing.

He'd do us both a favor . . . but tragically he's far too kind and gentle.

Oh well.

Anyway, I'm pleased with the new format. I know I haven't flashed back to the past yet to give you any more memoir, but even just the poignancy of this diary . . . I reckon my publishers are in for a treat.

Actually did I tell you about my publishing situation? I probably should.

I'm under contract with a major New York publishing house to write this autobiography in exchange for the sum of one million dollars American.

Why so much money? Because of something I probably should have told you earlier, which is that I was born not just in the year 1900, but on the
first day
of that year, January 1. I didn't tell you earlier because I didn't want you
thinking this was one of those . . . those
fictional
books that blind Mexican novelists write about women born on the first days of centuries and for which they are routinely awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is a memoir, not a novel, and I didn't want you thinking I was any kind of “creation.”