The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [191]
“I must meet this man. How much does he charge?”
“I don’t know. Cheap, I think. But not free.”
A nose!—to have a human nose! If only I had that, my body would be complete!
A few days later, Leon and I were in Artie’s Shrimp Shanty again after another day of performing Shakespeare in the subway all afternoon and night. We didn’t even stop at home to change into our civilian clothes: Leon was in his Henry VIII costume and I was wearing my costume, which was a Harlequin’s suit checkered with red and yellow diamonds, and a jester hat with floppy red and yellow tassels with bells sewn on the ends of them. This was our usual style of dress during this time. When we came in, Audrey met my eyes, and with a beckoning hand and a jerk of her head asked me down to the far end of the bar, where Sasha sat beneath the rubber shark, with an electric-blue cocktail on a napkin in front of her. Leon squelched his weight onto his usual stool at the other end of the bar. His squishy haunches ballooned over the stool like the edges of a giant flesh muffin.
“I shall have a pint of ale!” he declared in his thespian’s faux-Continental accent. Audrey ignored him for the moment. Leon harrumphed and turned his attention to the baseball game playing on the muted TV bolted to the corner of the wall. I sat down beside Sasha. She had finished her shift but was still wearing her waitressing uniform. Sasha had olive skin, dark hair dyed blond, sharp green eyes, silver hoop earrings, and long artificial fingernails that were polished glossily and painted a neon blue that almost matched the color of her drink. Her false eyelashes were long and brittle, and made very subtle clicking noises when she blinked. I found her attractive, though in a very deliberately organized way.
The doctor’s name was DaSilva. He was a friend of her father’s.
“He did a nose job for my sister,” said Sasha in a Queens-Brazilian accent. “Cost her half a grand. Not too bad.” She shrugged and clicked her nails against the bar counter.
“I can pay!” I blurted.
“I’ll take you to talk to him. But he only works on people he knows. He knows me, so he’ll prolly do it, but he might not want to.”
Some days later Audrey borrowed her mother’s car to take me to Dr. DaSilva. Audrey’s mother—the second of Leon’s ex-wives—lived in Yonkers, and had lent Audrey her wood-paneled 1987 Wagoneer, with forewarnings about the vehicle’s many ailments and electromechanical idiosyncrasies. Audrey and Sasha met me in the morning at the door of the apartment I shared with Leon behind Artie’s, and I went with them. Leon was irritated with what he saw as my insubordination, irritated further that Audrey was playing accomplice to it (Audrey liked me—she had come to regard me as a younger brother, I think), and even further irritated that the Shakespeare Underground would miss a day of performing because of this errand of vanity. I said good-bye to him, but he churlishly refused to answer or get up from where he sat in his terry-cloth bathrobe on the futon, absentmindedly watching Bringing Up Baby while muttering something about my insubordination and eating a ready-made rotisserie chicken in a plastic container that he’d just bought for breakfast at the grocery store down the street. Audrey drove us off the island, through the park, down the expressway, and across a bridge that hung high above the water on stark gray towers before sloping into Queens, into a dizzying web of narrow streets, and then we were in