Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

As Lydia and I entered the room, the conversation did not die completely, but became muffled, suddenly gone all slack and floppy like the sails of a ship drifting into the doldrums. Most of the people in the room backed slowly away from us, in — what? — awe? — fear? Lydia smiled and waved at all the people. The nervous people smiled and waved back. Lydia tried to bury us in the crowd, but a radius of cautious space always encircled us. Wherever we went, we were the center of the spectacle.

Norm approached us. His pants were slightly wrinkled and baggy. He took Lydia gently by the arm. I was still holding on to her hand at the end of her other arm. With me on one side of her and Norm on the other, Lydia allowed Norm to guide her toward a particular group of people who were standing around together, near one of my paintings — the landscape of the Chicago lakefront. They were holding glasses of wine, and some of them had piles of hors d’oeuvres folded in napkins in their hands.

“I would like you to meet my colleagues, Lydia and Bruno,” Norm said to the loose assembly, and released Lydia’s arm. Lydia shook everyone’s hand in turn, and she let go of my hand so that I could shake their hands. Each one of them, one by one, respectfully half-kneeled to the floor so that their faces were closer to mine, told me their names (not one of which stuck in either my short-term or my long-term memory), and softly squeezed my hand for a moment in theirs. The people could not bring themselves to attempt to converse with me. These people were all smiles — friendly enough. I quickly took Lydia’s hand again.

The room socially relaxed again. The volume and the comfort level of people’s conversations were slowly on the rise. I began to feel slightly agitated.

I watched the people in the gallery moving from one painting to the next with their glasses of wine in their hands, pointing at my paintings and commenting on them. They seemed to be particularly impressed by my representational renderings, as people who know little about art typically are.

One of the people who was standing around with me and Lydia and Norm, one of the people to whom I had just been introduced, seemed to be a particularly important person. An important man. He wore nice clothes. He was an older man and handsome, with sleek shocks of graying hair erupting from his head, a gaunt and serious face and frameless glasses that delicately pincered the bridge of his pointy nose and magnified his watery gray eyes. I noticed that most of the people around us were wearing name tags — these white rectangles with names scrawled on them in black marker, stuck to their outer garments, near their hearts — but not this man. This man wore no name tag. Apparently he either did not wish his name to be known, or else he assumed everyone already knew it. Norm and Lydia were both rapt in conversation with this man. The Important Man was doing most of the talking, and Norm and Lydia were doing most of the polite listening, their heads bobbing like buoys on their necks with nodding and inserting yes es and mm-hmm s in the troughs of his wave of speech. Occasionally Norm, when given the green light, would launch into a torrent of words, speaking rapidly, as if he were afraid of losing the Important Man’s interest before he had arrived at his point. Lydia said something here and there, but mostly she was silent. Their conversation was over my head. Lydia clasped my hand tightly, now and then giving it a squeeze to remind me of her presence, of her closeness. I wanted to go home.

I noticed there were two men standing near the doors of the gallery. They were young and healthy, with short hair and thick arms, dressed in uniforms: black shoes, blue pants, crisp tan short-sleeved shirts with flashing metal buttons. They wore badges. They looked like they were not here for fun but rather were only doing their jobs. They very slowly perambulated the room, not talking to anyone, surveying the crowd, paying close attention. What were they here to protect? My art? Their hands were clasped behind their backs. When they turned around, I saw that behind their backs, each of them held a long, thin silver wand, with a red rubber handle and a prong of wire filament on the end of it.

I redirected my gaze back into the middle of our social circle. They were so far up above me, and I was so near to the floor in comparison. I saw everything from below. Norm was having trouble balancing a glass of wine and a pile of cheese cubes held in a napkin. He was speaking animatedly to the Important Man. With the thumb of the hand that held the cheese, Norm struggled to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose and then swipe back the three ribbons of hair that clung to his otherwise bald pate, but it was difficult to perform these small actions with a handful of cheese, and I watched one of the little yellow cubes of cheese tumble from his palm and onto the floor, where it bounced three times like a die on a backgammon board before coming to rest in the middle of our circle of people. I watched Lydia’s eyes trace the path of the cheese’s escape, and then quickly look up. No one else — not even the Important Man — noticed, or they pretended not to have noticed. Plumlee himself did not notice. Plumlee’s voice escalated in pitch and zeal as he approached the point of whatever he was saying. His hands were thickly padded and the backs of his fingers were almost as hairy as mine. Lydia squeezed my hand. I looked up at her. She smiled down at me, as if to assure me that we would be going home soon. I was feeling terribly bored and uncomfortable.

A new man shouldered his way into our circle. He was tall. He was old, too, but carried himself with the vigor of youth: back straight, chest out. He was thin but robust, he looked like he could run a marathon without breaking a sweat. A beautiful bright white mustache hung below his nose and brushed his upper lip. He wore a suit as silver as a spoon that clung fast to his stringy old muscles, and in lieu of a necktie he wore a bolo that slid through a huge turquoise amulet. And on the very top of his body sat a wide-brimmed white hat: a cowboy hat. He entered the conversation as if he was entering his own home, and as he did, a lean old liver-spotty hand with fat blue veins slaloming over the ridges of his tendons rose up to the top of the hat, where it pinched the shallow recesses in the crown and politely removed it, freeing the springy flaps of his red ears and revealing the shiny pink ball of his head, which was bald except for a semicircular muff of white hair playing ring-around-the-rosy with his skull.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Howdy,” said Lydia, instinctively returning his folksy greeting, then catching herself saying it and immediately self-consciously flushing at how silly it sounded in her mouth. The man extended his hand and Lydia shook it. He seemed to want to kiss her hand like an old-fashioned gentleman, but the angle and position of Lydia’s hand would not allow it.

“My name’s Dudley Lawrence,” the man said. “It’s a real pleasure and an honor to meet you, Miss Littlemore.”

“Mrs.,” said Lydia, then, “Dr.” She was a bit flattered, a bit taken aback by his gentility. Then, before he spoke to anyone else, before he addressed Norm or the Important Man they had been talking with all evening, Dudley Lawrence bent to the floor in his boots, the creases in his silver trousers vanishing at the knees, and said hello to me, warmly shaking my hand.

“Hello, Bruno,” he said. “The pleasure’s all mine.” His white mustache curled into the corners of his grin. He patted my hand twice before releasing it. Without getting up, and looking me directly in the eyes, he said, “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” And then there knelt beside him a big elaborate woman. “Please say hello to my wife, Regina.”