My Little Blue Dress (24 page)

Look, I'm sorry if this narrative is getting slightly thin. I'm
tired
is the truth of the matter. Really really tired.

It's been creeping up on me for a few weeks now.

I didn't mention it before because it's hardly newsflash material that a woman in her early hundreds has an issue with fatigue.

But I'm mentioning it now because I fear it's about to affect my performance. If I start to disintegrate then I want you to know exactly why it is that you have to forgive me. And now you do. Old womanly fatigue.

July 8th—Thursday

Bruno started his new job today (the working from home, the writing) and I am pleased to report the spunky young chap really hit the ground running.

9:00
A
.
M
.
He called all those magazine editor 'phone numbers Hayley gave him last week. None of them answered, perhaps because he called too early.

9:15
A
.
M
.
He settled down to work next door, scratching away at his yellow legal pad with an intensity I hadn't heard since my first boyfriend, whose name escapes me right now,
came home injured from the First World War and started spilling his guts in verse.

1:00
P
.
M
.
Nearly four hours later we had lunch: a can of tunafish on a bed of Chinese lettuce. Very healthy.

1:20
P
.
M
.
Bruno called Hayley at work. His voice on the 'phone was very soft and tender, like a doctor in an emergency room speaking to a beautiful little girl who has fallen off her bike and sustained a concussion. By the sound of it, their relationship has entered a second golden age.

1:30
P
.
M
.
He went back next door and the scratching sound resumed.

5:30
P
.
M
.
The scratching stopped, Bruno readied himself for work, fixed me a bowl of guacamole with a protruding spoon and disappeared to his other job, the one at N!.

It was all very impressive. Reader, you'd be impressed yourself if you knew how hot it was here in Chinatown without an air conditioner. Myself, I hardly moved a muscle all day and did only limited thinking, yet from 8
A
.
M
. onward I was as slick and slippery as an eel.

July 9th—Friday

Good news. Over dinner last night at a popular new Malaysian restaurant called 112 West 13th Street Middle Buzzer Bruno Maddox told Hayley Iskender about the intolerable conditions down here in Chinatown and she generously extended him the use of her quiet, dustless, artificially cooled apartment to work in during the day.

He's over there now, slaving away, forging us a brighter tomorrow.

And I am here alone in my bedroom, with a whole day's
worth of food and water weighing down the swingable side table, which has been detached from the electric bed and propped up beside the . . . the acoustic one.

Feeling tired.

July 10th—Saturday

Bruno out with Hayley all day. Nothing to report.

July 11th—Sunday

Gordon Gundersson's
Black Current
, which I dipped into today, is more than twelve hundred pages in length and tells the story, according to its back cover, of a freak, once-in-a-millennium river swelling several years ago that resulted in the deaths of eight weekend canoeists in the Pacific Northwest. For prospective readers worried that Gundersson might not be qualified to handle this material, the inside back flap informed us that not only was his first book
The Slowness of Rapids
also about watersports gone horribly wrong, specifically a loner friend of his who canoed out to sea and didn't canoe back, but he has a bronze medal from the 2000 Olympics as a member of the Canadian kayak team. The author photo shows a wet-suited Gundersson in a field of waving swamp grass, his ringlets damp, scowling like he wishes the camera would go away so he could get back to his writing.

What Bruno was doing with a copy of
Black Current
, or why he discarded it this morning on the foot of my electric bed, I do not know, but after reading the flap information I
was glad he had done so. It so happened I was utterly in the mood to lose myself in a classic “tale of adbenture” such as me grand-da used to read me.

But then after wrestling with the giant volume I successfully opened it and discovered
Black Current
to be the following sort of gibberish:

Vontroni:
Fir! When the Tide furges white beneath my paddle this hull muft be ftiff.

The Manchild:
Ftiff? Nuncle, this is no common plaftic fhell, you know. This have thirty percent more Compreffive Ftrength than the ftandard urethane fhell you are ufed to—+plus I have fupplemented it with extra core material in high-impact areas . . .

Page after page after
page
—if you can believe it—of two seventeenth-century adventurers arguing in screenplay format about modern canoe technology on the banks of the St. Lawrence River!
Christ,
it was bad. And then just as you've resigned yourself to that, suddenly,
boom
. Everything changes. The prose gets all dense and italicized and a teenage babysitter is having her intestines shoveled out with the blade of an oar while trying to watch something called the
General Motors Jack Benny Hour
on television in the nineteen fifties. No suspense. No human interest. The only jokes are of the “darkly, profoundly comic” variety. Just a total lack of value, reader, clever-sounding nonsense spun out to inordinate length. In fact I found myself pulsing the words,
What a steaming pile of shit
, at Gundersson's author photo
and then slamming the book shut with as much force as my withered arm could muster prior to falling back into my pillows, depressed to my core about the state of modern letters.

July 12th—Monday

Bruno stopped by for twenty minutes this morning to feed me and drain me of waste before heading back to Hayley's and I'm glad he did, because on the way to the bathroom I caught a glimpse of his yellow legal pad, which he had tossed onto the nasty armchair, and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw thereon.

All this while I've assumed the boy's been working on journalism or something but it seems instead that he's set his sights slightly higher and has in fact broken ground on a
theatrical
piece entitled
Shades of Manhattan
.

As far as I could make out—Bruno has that wild, sexy sort of handwriting—
Shades of Manhattan
is a stage play about a woman, Amanda, who has lost her sunglasses and is hunting for them with the help of her boyfriend, whose name is Orlando. The action takes place on a scale model of snow-covered Manhattan, twenty feet long by eight feet wide and for all sixteen hours of the performance Orlando and Amanda lie sprawled gigantically on top of the buildings, facedown, fumbling through the canyons of a cold, deserted city for a pair of sunglasses that they never find. The dialogue is mumbled and banal, the action slow, but in time the audience comes to understand that the real subject of
Shades of Manhattan
is not in fact a pair of missing sunglasses but rather the relationship between two emotionally
stunted protagonists. For Orlando the search is his way of proving to Amanda that he loves her, without having to actually say so. Amanda realizes this and resents Orlando accordingly. As far as
she's
concerned, the hunt for the sunglasses is a chance to do something on her own for a change without Orlando muscling in and taking charge, as is his style. They are
her
sunglasses. Why can't it be
her
search?

Do you see? They aren't really looking for Amanda's sunglasses, they're looking for something bigger. Possibly themselves—though having said that let me also make the obvious point that they
are
looking for sunglasses, if by sunglasses you mean the masks we all wear to disguise our true feelings, and/or the filtering devices we interpose between ourselves and reality to shield ourselves from its intensity . . .

All right, I need to calm down. I'm getting overexcited. Let me just say this. Bruno Maddox's
Shades of Manhattan
is one good fucking play.

July 13th—Tuesday

It doesn't bother me being here alone, perhaps because I was alone in the early sixties too, to start with, tramping the streets in a threadbare old housecoat, sitting in coffeeshops with steamed-up windows, reading the paper. The Scene was nowhere near as vibrant as it had looked on the TV from Fordham, and what there was of it didn't really appeal: a few bald old men taking speed pills, wearing sunglasses, performing bongo poetry, etc. To be frank, it felt more like the tail-end of something than a beginning.

But still I was optimistic. Out there in the street I kept bumping into people with whom I felt a kinship. Like me, they were small-town dreamers with their collars bent up against the January chill, pacing the crevices of downtown less to
find
something than to kill time before it arrived.

By February 1962 we were a legitimate “band of friends.” Every evening that month found me climbing the stairs to a loft in Soho, easing out of my icy boots, turning to find that there was a fire going, wine mulling on the stove, long-haired girls in turtleneck sweaters stretched out like cats on the cushions and the ottomans, exhaling jets of clove smoke, eyes closed, breasts rising and falling as they allowed their minds to be transported by one of the men, who'd be plucking at a classical guitar and using free-form cosmic imagery to weave fantastical tales of magical lands that were peopled with exotic characters . . . What dreams our flickering line of windows must have conjured for the overcoated masses shuffling home in the snowy streets below I can't imagine. But if they were picturing a cozy and transcendent world of gentleness, art and comfort . . . well, they were to be commended for their accuracy.

July 14th—Wednesday

Still tired as billy-o, reader, and still alone, but I'm feeling a strange contentment, possibly occasioned by how well this memoir's suddenly going. I'm getting into a rhythm now. I feel I'm marshaling my material very effectively. With my memories of the sixties plus my occasional glimpses of Bruno's legal pad when he stops by in the morning I think I
have more than enough material to sustain both of us, reader, for the foreseeable future.

July 15th—Thursday

For instance,
Shades of Manhattan
is really coming together. It's
really
coming together. This morning I glimpsed the following in the margin of Bruno's pad:

Amanda: Don't worry . . . it's no big deal . . . I'm sure they'll turn up . . .
Orlando: Yeah . . . [then to himself]: I remember when I was a child [long monologue].

Jesus. I'm getting chills just remembering it. So much being said without
actually
being said, do you know what I mean?

Seeing those jottings really cheered me up. It's so easy, when you're caught up in a situation as tense as the one involving me and Bruno and Hayley Iskender, to forget that the people involved
are
real people, with fully blown interior lives. All this time I've been worrying about what Bruno's going to “do,” how he's going to “behave” . . . whereas the fact of the matter is that however this all turns out there will always be a chunk of him that's above the fray, aloof, dreaming of giant figures and white-dusted cityscapes . . .

In fact, you know what?

Actually?

I was so invigorated by Bruno's jottings that I
did something
. I performed an
act
.

To give me a change of scenery Bruno had deposited me this morning on the electric bed, as opposed to the other one. The door had just slammed shut downstairs when I realized he had left his old green suit jacket hanging from the side rail of my electric bed, and that poking from the inside breast pocket was his
checkbook
. I found myself suddenly inspired. Using the switch on the chassis of the bed I whirred myself up to maximum verticality . . .
whirr
 . . . and after some flailing managed to grab the checkbook and remove it from his pocket. A narrow-gauge felt-tipped pen was clipped to the front, which I uncapped with my teeth and, steadying the checkbook on my atrophying thigh, carefully wrote, on the Pay to the order of line of the topmost check, “Bruno Maddox.” In the Memo box I wrote “For Creative Services Rendered” and then, after resting and thinking, I carefully made the thing out in the sum of “One Hundred Million Dollars Only,” prior to signing the thing in a crude approximation of Bruno's own signature, returning it with difficulty to his pocket, then whirring myself back to the horizontal, tired but happy.

In the evening he showed up again to change his clothes and reinstall me in my bedroom. Obviously, I was hoping to actually witness the moment that he found the checkbook and registered how much faith I have in him, how badly I wish him well . . . but sadly, no. He just took the jacket and left.