Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

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.