The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [236]
There was still something preventing my going to see Lydia. I found a bar on Clark Street, a dark place of brass and leather and lacquered wood, where in silence and solitude I quieted my nerves with three whiskeys while eavesdropping on the nattering conversation of three big pink men in disheveled suits and loosened ties sitting at a corner table by the window. One of them was narrating to the other two men a chronicle of complications surrounding his pending divorce. The other men were warily trying to salve his sadness with the medicines of laughter and anger. The first man joined in the angry laughter, he joined in their raucous tit-for-tatting of misogynist banter, but his sadness seeped through his jocularity like water through cheesecloth. Now I was back once again in the human zoo. All the world’s a zoo, and all the men and women merely animals. The stage and the zoo are interchangeable, Gwen: remember, we have already discovered that theatre is biology, and biology is theatre. All the world’s a zoo.
It was near St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe it was the day before, or maybe the day after. I recalled in a rush how Chicago would dye its river green—so that it looked like a river of toxic waste—and I recalled wondering whether green fish ever turned up weeks later in the slapping and shimmering hauls in the nets of fishermen many miles north of the city. The streets, the windows of the shops and restaurants, were rife with St. Patrick’s Day decorations: lots of green streamers, paper shamrocks, images of leprechauns. I don’t know why the color green is supposed to symbolize Irish heritage—perhaps because of the famous verdancy of Ireland?
In any event, I walked past the window of a flower shop: outside the door, in a basket, the flower shop had green roses on display. Green roses! I recalled Lydia’s weakness for them. As always, the green roses struck me as freakish, fascinating for their proud artificiality, the clear deliberation behind their bioengineering, the dye in the soil, or however it is the skilled florists turn the petals green. It always seemed to me that a flower—especially a rose—ought to be a different color from its stem, at least for contrast’s sake. I entered the flower shop. I walked into a lush blast of fragrance and humidity, and selected one dozen long-stemmed green roses. I had the pencil-mustached man behind the counter roll them up in a cone of cellophane and then in another cone of decorative paper. I carefully carried them out in the hand that didn’t hold my suitcase. Their smell was as intoxicating as wine.
I had a little money left—only a little—so I hailed a taxi on Lincoln Avenue and took it all the way down to Hyde Park, where I directed the driver to drop me off right before the door set in the side of a redbrick slab of apartments that led to 5120 South Ellis Avenue, Apartment 1A. All the while during the drive I spent rehearsing in my mind a thousand things that I would say to Lydia. I was nearly queasy with anticipation. I crushed the green petals of the flowers to my face and felt the velvety wetness of their texture and sucked in their smell. I had no idea what she might say about my new clothes and my new nose. I had so much to tell her. I had so many exciting adventures to narrate, which I would regale her with. We would drink wine as I narrated my tales, and I would make us laugh until we became as light-headed as if we’d been inhaling helium all day, until we’d nearly faint from laughter, and in the end we would go to bed together, and in the morning we would resume our lives together.
I am, at heart, an optimist, Gwen, if that’s the word for willing yourself to hope for the best when you know the truth is probably so horrible you don’t want to look. Of course I knew why I had delayed seeing her after