The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [101]
Now my body lay rumpled, shaking, slack, in Lydia’s arms. I looked up at her face through the gauze curtain of my delirium and saw that her face was slick, bright with tears.
Norm, keeping his distance, stood a little ways off and to the side. He looked bashful. He looked afraid. He looked like he did not know what to do with his hands. Something passed over the features of his face that suggested he had just remembered something. Then he went out the door, probably to look for the Important Man. The Important Man had been among the first to flee.
Now everyone who had been in the gallery was gone, except for me, Lydia, and the two thugs who had shocked me into submission. No. There were two more people there. Dudley and Regina Lawrence stood still, side by side, in the middle of the room. They did not look like they had been frightened in the least by the regrettable events of the last minute and thirty seconds. They seemed to understand. They looked far more composed than Norm had been. They were keeping their distance not out of fear, but out of respect for me and Lydia. Even in my trembling stupor, even in my pain, even in my hate and misery—this endeared them to me.
As we were leaving, Dudley Lawrence cautiously approached us in the doorway. His hat was in his hands. With my mind in a very distant place but my body present, I watched him hand Lydia a card, and wink knowingly, and whisper something into her ear that I did not understand. His wife blew me a kiss. Lydia was now in possession of a small starchy paper rectangle that would soon dramatically alter my future. If I could have read the card that Lydia had just been given, I would have read:
Dudley Lawrence
Co-Founder
The Dudley and Regina Lawrence Foundation
for Animal Rights & Habitat Conservation
This was followed by an address and a phone number. But of course I could not read it yet.
Somewhere, somehow, Norm came back into the room, and there followed some terse, whispered, angry—very angry—dialogue between Norm and Lydia. Norm was enraged. Rage and bombast puffed him up like a zeppelin. Lydia was still crying, trying to blink back her unprofessional, unscientific tears. I hated Norm. Somehow we got away from him. We parted from Norm’s company and went home.
If you had been standing outside of the building, standing in the parking lot and looking at the side entrance of the University of Chicago Main Library, then you might have seen a beautiful and beautifully dressed young woman with short blond hair, in a black dress and high-heeled shoes, carrying in her arms a heavily subdued chimp, who wore the tattered remnants of a little gray suit and a lime-green tie.
Actually, Lydia must have been wearing a coat and a scarf on top of her dress, because it was so cold that night. It was the dead of winter. The first dustings of what would become a blizzard were fluttering down to us from above, in snowflakes so big and wet and fat you could actually hear the noises they made as they hit the ground.
Lydia and I exited the building into this skull-achingly cold night. The streetlights painted the dismal slab of urban sky above us with their sickly penumbras of orange light.
Lydia carried me. Her heels went scrap-clock, scrap-clock on the asphalt, our mutual shadow shifting under us as we passed beneath one streetlight to the next, toward her car at the back of the long and now-deserted parking lot of the library.
She stopped. Silence and the sounds of fat falling snowflakes replaced the rhythm of her footfalls.