My Little Blue Dress (28 page)

“Nobody cares. Just come out.”

The Chinese have a saying, you know, reader. Be careful what you wish for because blah blah blah. And all of those people who wanted Bruno out of the bathroom should have been careful what they wished for because when he
did
come out into that sea of dim open-mouthed faces he immediately vomited in such a way that it affected nearly all of their shoes, apart from one Chinese guy who'd seen it coming and climbed on a chair.

July 31st—Saturday

Message from Hayley Iskender around noon, an inexplicable one: “[pause] Hi. It's me. Bruno? Are you there? I know you're there. [pause] Look . . . I'm sorry if . . . I'm sorry about last night. You obviously had a difficult time and I want to know you're okay. So if you get this message call me. Please.”

I hear Bruno shift in his sleep next door.

You've got the wrong number
, I pulse the machine in the fraction of a second before Hayley disconnects.
You've got entirely the wrong number. This is where that young man lives, the one from last night. You should exhibit more care when dialing. Dial more carefully in future and you will
reach other residences, where other, better people live. Please. For your own sake. Please. While you're still young.

And that's all I have to say to you, reader.

I'm done.

I've shot my load.

I'm passing out now.

Goodnight.

Sorry if you wanted more. There isn't any more. There was August of course but you're not going to hear it from me. Not, I suspect, that you need to hear it from anyone at this point because August

August

August 1st—Sunday

you can figure out for yourself. Obviously, the boy being the boy, he didn't call Hayley back that Saturday.

Why?

Don't know.

I can tell you that in his
mind
it was the hangover. The revolting little lad's bad insides had a pole through them and even through when he went to vomit he necessarily passed the 'phone it seemed to him no more than common sense that he should wait till he was out of the vomit stage before calling.

He stayed in it though, the vomit stage, all through Saturday, and then Sunday he was in a new stage, just as debilitating in its way, all trembly and braindead,

August 2nd—Monday

and then on the Monday just as he was
probably
about to call her, standing by the 'phone in his bedsheet toga that was practically translucent with sweat and tears and other classic male effluvia, the blessed thing
rang
, and that guy Theo Bakula started purring through the answering machine and then into the boy's ear directly that what Bruno was going to be doing that evening was meeting Theo for drinks and then accompanying him to “some thing for some new thing.”

Reader, Theo wasn't
asking
 . . . he was
telling
! And as I've either mentioned or you've gathered there are these
phases
Bruno goes through when he's feeling rather
flimsy
and anyone whose vocal tone has a certain amount of authority and
zing
to it can in effect just order him around like some sort of robot puppy.

So he went. Bruno met Theo for drinks and then moved on to the thing for the new thing, and there was a great number of whiskeys and banquettes and fun girls who seemed able to appreciate basically
any joke
even if it was just a noise and a hand movement, even if the joke was just you becoming extremely drunk, and the upshot of it all was that

August 3rd—Tuesday

come Tuesday morning not only was the young man in even worse shape physically than on the morning after the Night of the Checkbook but as he knelt to the toilet bowl, taking an unflinching look at what had recently been inside of him,
the quiet realization took hold that he now needed an excuse for having not returned Hayley's 'phone call for four days.

Should he tell her he had food poisoning? Try to explain away some of the Checkbook Night's vomiting as well as his subsequent disappearance?

Mmm . . . no.

August 4th—Wednesday

Food poisoning doesn't stop a person using a 'phone—in fact quite the contrary, in many instances. To a victim of food poisoning the 'phone can be a lifeline. He or she uses the thing to liaise with family and friends, to contact medical professionals, to build and maintain support networks, both emotional and whatever . . .

Maybe something grander was required, such as . . .

Oh wow.

Oh his God.

What if he called and explained that he had been so
disgusted
with himself that he'd rented a car and gone to sit beside a cold clear lake in some random unpopulated state with his knees drawn up to his chest taking an
unflinching look inside himself?

Jesus.

That was an excuse and a half. With material that strong maybe he could get away with not calling her back until the end of the week!

August 5th—Thursday

Right?

August 6th—Friday

Mmm . . . no.
Un
right. Wrong.

Hayley knew he couldn't drive, so that scuppered that.

Damn. But was it . . . was it stretching plausibility to tell her he had learned to drive? What if he had learned to drive on the Sunday, then driven out to the lake on the Monday? Doesn't intense self-disgust sometimes give a person superhuman powers of . . . learning?

No.

No it doesn't. That whole direction was just completely stupid and useless and pathetic and disgusting.

Besides, what if all this while Hayley had been tuning into
Thirty UN!der Thirty
in the evenings? What then? That fucked up every excuse imaginable. A guy who can go to work can use a 'phone. A guy who can contribute meaningfully to a discussion of nuclear proliferation on the Asian subcontinent—even if his meaningful contribution is only “You can't really trust a Pakistani . . . not really . . .”—can surely be expected to at least
contact
his supposed girlfriend just to tell her he's alive . . .

What a fool he'd been for going to work. What a . . .

Then it came to him, in a rush of warmth, the perfect excuse.

Shame
.

Was that not brilliant? He hadn't called her back all week because he'd been
ashamed of himself
.

Not only was it brilliant,
it was true
. In fact . . .

Oh wow. Maybe his shame had been so intense that he'd spent the last seven days composing some sort of
statement
for Hayley, an apology, a
confession
 . . . maybe not just on his own behalf but on that of his entire
generation
 . . . an epic
poem
, even a
novel
 . . .

And maybe the thing to do, just to really add some flesh to the excuse, was for him to just quickly whip off a
first draft
of his generational apologia novel before call . . .

August 7th—Saturday

Bruno finally called Hayley Saturday morning around tenish. He had to.

Only eight hours previously, in the back room of the This Is Not A Bar Bar, all the way uptown, the Sports and Fitness Editor of
come hither
magazine—Jane, the redhead, the one who'd taken him under her wing the night of the rooftop party—had witnessed Bruno poking a cocktail napkin into the bra strap of a consenting plus-size fashion model. Just as he'd straightened up . . . there she'd been, on the far side of the lounge, peering at him evenly as a team of furrows jogged out onto her forehead and arranged themselves into the words “You have, at most, twelve hours before news of where you just poked that cocktail napkin reaches Hayley Iskender.”

So he made a preemptive strike and called Hayley himself, around tenish, as I say. The first part he ad-libbed.

“Hayley? Hi, it's me.”

And the rest he read from a sheet of paper. “Sorry I've
been out of touch all week. I've been a bit depressed. That guy Theo Bakula tried to cheer me up by taking me out last night but . . . [pause] well, it was just a whole bunch of weird
fat
women playing party games with cocktail napkins and frankly it just made me feel
much
worse. Anyway. Here I am. Sorry I didn't call. How are you?”

“Um . . .” This syllable was vastly reassuring to the boy. It was neither the pause he'd been expecting, nor one of those high-pitched, slightly nasal “ums” people emit while they check with their conscience that they really want to make the particularly hurtful remark that's on their mind. (Do you have any idea what I'm talking about?) “I'm okay. I've been worried about you though. I kind of assumed you'd taken some time out to . . . reassess things. But it would have been nice if you'd called. I might have been able to help.”

“Yeah. I'm sorry. Like you say. I just needed some time.”

“I know. It's fine.”

“No. I should have called.”

“It's time. Do you need
more
time? Or should we meet?”

I was staggered, reader, by these words from the girl. In fact the whole tenor of the conversation was literally blowing my mind. Hayley seemed almost prepared to . . .
forgive
Bruno for everything, sweep it all under the rug, offer him a twenty-fifth chance . . .

The boy was stunned as well, and not entirely pleasantly because, reader, you see the fact of the matter was that he had already agreed to go meet that guy
Theo Bakula
that evening to attend a thing in the uptown showroom of a top person's perfumerie, a thing sponsored by a whiskey, and so rather tragically and inevitably he responded with the words, “Okay. That's fine. I'll call you in a day or two.”

August 8th—Sunday

One.

August 9th—Monday

Two.

August 10th—Tuesday

Three.

August 11th—Wednesday

Four.

August 12th—Thursday

Five, and obviously by this point if Bruno was going to call Hayley then yet again he needed an excuse for not calling.

Which is where, reader, this whole thing just gets terribly terribly sad.

Because, you see, he had one, reader. He had an excuse, a terrible, shitty, disgustingly sad excuse that I wouldn't be telling you if I didn't suspect you of already guessing it.

You see, as I can't remember whether I mentioned, Bruno was passing all these evenings out there in upscale
Manhattan with that guy Theo Bakula going to various openings and celebrations and though the evenings were tending to end up identically, in vomit, in loneliness, in a cab ride he couldn't afford back to a stinking Chinatown sweatbox he could hardly stand looking at, they could be counted on, the evenings, to contain certain
moments
in which the tiny little mite felt calmer and more centered than he
ever had in his life
. Watching some other little fuck get turned away or better still
ejected
from the VIP lounge . . . informing a high-quality waitress that his cocktail was too warm and nodding graciously at her
apology
 . . . surreptitiously stroking the hair of the world's third richest fashion model with the back of his forefinger when they coincided in line for the bathroom . . . moments of shallow, vain and utterly insubstantial glory, reader—and he knew this—which nonetheless provoked a Feeling in the boy that could not have been more wholesome. A feeling of clarity. Sanity. The power of reflection. It was the darnedest thing, but it was only when sprawled in some cool-to-the-touch VIP banquette with a lurking paparazzo eyeing him from across the lounge trying to remember who he was, that Bruno was able to remember who he was himself. Only then could he
think about his life
. It would all just snap into focus. He drank too much; he didn't do any work; he was going to lots of stupid meaningless parties at the expense of what he had with Hayley Iskender. Hayley Iskender was excellent, possibly
the one
 . . . it all came clear.

But, tragically, also clear was the fact that his only hope was to
hold on to
the Feeling. If he had to go back to being just another little man, just another speck of scum, of plankton, back to being the same haywire little man that Simon
and Gordon had failed to embrace as an equal on the Night of the Hundred Million Dollars, the same minuscule nonentity that Mark Clark, that proud irrelevant,
had
embraced as an equal that night at Magma, then nothing he tried was ever, ever going to work. Because it was the feeling of being a little man, he now knew, that drove him crazy.

So that was Bruno's Plan for getting back in touch with Hayley: just quickly make the Feeling
permanent
, just quickly get to the stage where the men on the doors let him in because he was Bruno Maddox rather than because Theo Bakula was Theo Bakula, then retire from the Scene, stride directly into Hayley's place of business, scoop her away from her keyboard and then whisk her away to some better place where he'd make her the happiest slightly tired-and-stringy looking blond woman since they started keeping records.

He knew it was a pathetic strategy but the thing seemed doable. The waitresses and doormen were starting to recognize him, possibly. The drummer of a rock band was very friendly to him at the bar one evening, though there were visible grains of cocaine in one nostril. And when finally he did see Hayley, when she saw, when she felt who he'd become, she'd understand that in a sense all his senseless partying had been for her benefit, and she would surely forgive him one last time for everything. Even if the senseless partying were to drag on several days longer than he expected,

August 13th—Friday

for instance six

August 14th—Saturday

or possibly even seven,