The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (53 page)
“Party of two?”
“Indeed. I apologize for our earliness.”
“Your reservation is for seven,” she said, snatching a glance at her watch with a scowl of irritation. “Your table is ready anyway. Right this way.”
“Yes, yes,” said Leon, as she led us through the restaurant to a small table in a quiet corner of the room. No one dining in the restaurant could help but stare in our direction as we passed their tables: Leon was still wearing his Henry VIII costume, and I myself was a bit underdressed. “It’s far too early for any civilized dinner,” Leon whispered to me. “Of course our table is ready. We shall probably have approximately forty-five minutes before the real Millers show up.”
We ordered a very nice bottle of wine, which moistened the
braised rabbit and sturgeon steaks we put in our bellies. Over dinner, in varying degrees of detail or abstraction, I told Leon my story from the beginning up until the moment I currently relate. By the time I was finished, we were sipping aperitifs and awaiting our dessert.
“Bruno,” said Leon, when I had come to my unhappy conclusion, “you have led a brief and troubled life, and you have probably noticed by now that ours is a civilization in a state of rapid and hideous decline.” Leon’s eyebrows, it is important to relate, were always twisted into some real or affected expression of righteous indignation. His eyes were always bugging with horror and irritation, and he had an effeminate tic of gingerly sweeping the long, stringy hair from his face with the tips of his fingers, which he was doing at this moment with one hand as he used the other to tilt a wineglass to his mouth. “Every worthwhile art in our world is a dying one,” he went on. “You have had the cruel misfortune to join humanity at a time when most people no longer care about the question of what it means to be human. Thus is the state of the world into which you were unwittingly led, and for this I sincerely apologize to you on behalf of the human race.”
I accepted his apology, which endeared me to him deeply.
“You shall become my student,” Leon announced. “I can think of no more perfect mentor than Leon Smoler to someone in your unlikely situation. I shall give you asylum in my home, and you in turn must enter a period of intensive training in the dramatic arts, for I see clearly that you are destined to become an actor. And of course you shall enjoy it. The theatre is the least degrading calling left in our ruined society, if not the most culturally relevant. But for now, I see that the time has come for us to flee this place.”
I looked behind us across the restaurant, and saw that some sort of squabble had erupted at the hostess’s podium, for the time was upon us (in fact it was more than a quarter past us, because they were late), and it seemed that the real Mr. Burton Miller, party of two, had arrived, and everyone involved was miffed to learn that two
imposters had been dining in his name for the last hour. With ceremonial closure Leon yanked out the napkin tucked into the neck of his doublet for a bib, threw it in a contrivance of disgust across the table and rose to leave. The hostess was now clacking toward us at an angry clip, with a face betraying much vexation with us.
“Come, Bruno,” he said, “let us away from here,” and I followed him as he pushed through the flapping waiters’ doors and into the steam and gleam and clamor of the kitchen. The chefs looked up from their work in faint surprise, then returned their gazes to the food they were busily preparing. Waiters scrambled in and out of the doors in pulses of steam; spoons and pots and ladles dangled from their hooks in the ceiling. Leon led me down an aisle, past the rows of stainless-steel cabinets and counters. We slipped out through the kitchen door into an alley, escaped onto the street, and melted into the crowd on the sidewalk. A few blocks later we descended again down the tile steps to the subway and boarded a train that took us up through the city, out of the darkness, across the water and over the Bronx toward Leon’s home.
Leon lived in a place called City Island. The commute time to City Island from the heart of Manhattan was well over an hour, but, he said, the rent was cheap. City Island is, in fact, an island, cleverly squirreled away off the far northeastern corner of the Bronx, in the westernmost nook of Long Island Sound. Here’s how to get there, because if, like Bruno, your uncommonly slight stature prevents you from being deemed physically capable of piloting an automobile, you must rely on public transportation and your feet. It involves five stations. (One) If you’re coming from Manhattan, board a northbound 6 train and ride it all the way to the end of the line; the 6 emerges into the daylight from its burrow somewhere in upper Manhattan and on raised tracks continues to snake its way north, crosses the river, and turns sharply eastward along a sweeping roller-coastery curve that briefly offers passengers a panoramic vista of the
city on one side of the car and the water crisscrossed with bridges on the other, seen through plastic windows that are thickly engraved in pen, pencil, coin, key, and knife with a palimpsest of graffiti, with words and signs, with the insignia of all things sacred and profane, religious symbols jostling for space among lewd questions, posed anonymously and anonymously answered, hypertexts overscrawling urtexts, vandalism in myriad languages, written and crosswritten in all the nattering tongues of Babylon. (Two) Get off at Pelham Bay Park, last stop. (Three) Fumble through turnstiles and down stairs until you reach the street, where you will turn to your left and see a bus stop. (Four) Board the Bx29 for City Island, which will take you on a journey through Pelham Bay Park, around several traffic roundabouts and finally across an ornate bridge oxidized with age into a picturesque mint green; you will pass beneath an arch that welcomes you with a big sign to City Island. If it is nighttime then you will see from the bridge a seafood restaurant that advertises itself with a giant neon lobster who suffuses the darkness with a satanic red glow and is shakily duplicated in mirror symmetry on the surface of the water below him; this massive crustacean stands on his tail and holds one of his claws aloft, and the neon lights are programmed to scroll back and forth, in order to suggest, at an unhurried but invariant rhythm, the perpetual opening and closing of a single ominous pincer. (Five) Get off the bus. Your nostrils should immediately detect a strong odor: a curious mixture of fried shrimp and garbage. This is City Island. It’s a pleasant enough place, and I called it home while I lived with Leon in New York and worked as an actor and magician’s assistant. It may perhaps occur to you that the neighborhood strives after the aesthetic of a quaint waterfront community, in that if you are standing on City Island you can scarcely throw a rock without hitting some sort of decorative nautical paraphernalia: ship’s wheels, fishing nets, and wooden caryatids ornament the edifices of nearly every storefront, moldy
antique shop, and seafood restaurant, strategically placed so as to absolutely prohibit you from forgetting even for one second that
this is indeed a quaint waterfront community
, although the effect is not achieved in full because all this maritime poseury is reined in by an ambiance of sleaze that lets you know that although this waterfront community may be quaint, you are still in the Bronx, albeit an obscure pocket of it. The high poison content in any aqueous creature you might happen to catch in that part of Long Island Sound makes it illegal to consume; hence the cuisine at all of the many seafood restaurants that line the main street is by law imported entirely from elsewhere. You may also notice a good number of large men in glossy tracksuits, jewelry, and exquisitely coiffed silver hair. There are also a lot of people walking around talking to themselves. For once, even if you are a shaved chimp, you might not be the weirdest-looking person around. The smell of fried shrimp pervades pretty much everywhere. It is a relatively safe neighborhood, and the houses are simple, decidedly blue-collar, and squat. The delicate clinking of rigging against the masts of docked boats is constantly audible. This is where I lived for one year.
We got off the bus in front of a grocery store and crossed the street. Leon lived in a small basement apartment in a white vinyl-sided house behind a restaurant called Artie’s Shrimp Shanty. The door was located at the bottom of a flight of stairs in the alley behind the restaurant, where there were a couple of dumpsters just outside the back door to the kitchen. Whatever refuse Artie stored in those voluminous green metal tanks sure smelled strongly: of shrimp. In fact, the dumpsters in the alley behind Artie’s Shrimp Shanty were perhaps ground zero for the all-pervasive fried shrimp smell on the island. Fried shrimp and marinara, mingled maybe with the saltiness of the nearby sea and the lingering aromata of the waitresses’ cigarette breaks, plus other miscellaneous garbage. The flat gray metal door to Leon’s apartment was without any
extraneous ornament to suggest someone might live there: it could have been a door to a boiler room. Leon removed his keys from the pocket of his Elizabethan fur robe and let us in.
The apartment was small and dark. It featured only two small windows that offered views of the corrugated aluminum walls of window wells. One wall of the apartment was exposed red brick. There was one bedroom and a small bathroom, the floor of which was sticky and peppered with pubic hairs, and the rest of the apartment was a combined kitchen/living room. The place had long ago taken on the odor of shrimp that blew in from the dumpsters behind the seafood restaurant. There was a TV perched precariously on the edge of a coffee table. The room, though sparsely furnished in terms of actual furniture, was densely cluttered with wide-ranging and erratic miscellany. Books, magazines, a dust-coated electric typewriter, a metal twin-bed frame pushed upright against a wall. A heavy plaster bust of Shakespeare and a broken record player rested on top of an upright piano that had four black keys and two white keys missing, all the remaining keys out of tune, and no bench. All kinds of devices, bric-a-brac, and curiosities littered the floor and every flat surface, accumulated in the corners, and erupted forth from drawers too stuffed to shut properly. Boxes of sheet music, broken toys, wind-up ballerinas. The walls were covered with posters and other kinds of memorabilia from Broadway and Golden Age Hollywood. A flabby futon faced the TV. The futon could be collapsed to a horizontal position to become a bed with a slight valley in the hinge of it, and that night Leon covered it with a bedsheet and punched some fluff into a flabby spare pillow for me. The books stood in precarious vertical stacks that reached the ceilings. In particular Leon adored the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There was a complete set of all twenty-four Tarzan novels, leatherbound with gilt lettering on the spines, snugly set in orderly rows in a custom-built bookcase. I slid one out and flipped through its Bible-thin pages.
“It is appallingly obvious,” said Leon, “that of all writers who have ever dared to commit the English language to paper, Edgar Rice Burroughs remains second only to Shakespeare.” He suggested we visit Artie’s Shrimp Shanty for a nightcap. I was tired, but I acquiesced, so we went next door for shrimp and beer. The interior of the restaurant was cluttered with nautical paraphernalia—ships’ wheels, fishing nets, dried starfish, etc.—and lit with winking Christmas lights tacked up in a drooping contiguous string along the perimeter of the room where the wall molding met the ceiling, and the lights pulsed blobs of red and green and blue light, giving the room an undersea feeling. A giant rubber shark, its jaws gaping to show its fearsome rubber teeth, dangled on scarcely visible wires from the ceiling, looming monstrously above the curving rosewood counter of the bar. The bar was in a smaller room that adjoined the main room of the restaurant. The shark was reflected, as if it were swimming past a glass window in an aquarium, in a smudgy mirror behind the bar, which also illusively doubled the number of liquor and wine bottles arranged in three rows along the back of the bar, which was underlit with bluish lights. Leon was clearly a regular at this place: he waved to the two old men sitting at the other end of the bar and sank his body onto a bar stool as comfortably as the king he was dressed as would have sat upon his throne. I climbed onto the stool beside Leon’s, and soon the young woman behind the glossy rosewood counter placed before us two glasses of beer and a shrimp appetizer, their breaded tails fanned around a cup of red sauce. Leon began at once to greedily devour the shrimp.
“Audrey,” said Leon, “allow me to introduce you to Bruno, my acting pupil. Bruno, this is my lovely daughter, Audrey. Bruno has expressed a desire to learn my craft. Under my strenuous and unsparing tutelage, Bruno shall become a great and famous thespian.”
“Hey,” said Audrey flatly, giving me a half wave. “Where’d you meet my dad?”
“He was performing Shakespeare on the subway.”
“Dad,” she said to Leon, who was slurping the squishy wet meat out of a shrimp tail with his teeth. “Mom called earlier.”
“What could that wanton fustilug possibly want of me?”
“She’s pissed that you borrowed her car and returned it with no gas.”
“Pish! Has she no pity for a poor man?”
“Just saying. She said she called your place and didn’t get the answering machine so she called here.”
“It is currently impossible to contact me by telephone because I have been refusing to render my pound of flesh to the AT&T company,” said Leon, gravely shaking his head and brushing his hair back with his fingertips. “In any event I shan’t return her call. What could she possibly want? Financial reparations? To squeeze blood from a stone? The only sane response is to ignore her utterly. Should she call again, you must inform her that I have at long last died of starvation. Come now, Bruno. Eat shrimp.”
Leon delicately licked the beer froth from his mustaches, made a series of nipping noises with his tongue and lips and ordered another round, another shrimp appetizer, and three shots of whiskey. Audrey gamely knocked jiggers with us and we all drank.