The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [53]
state of limbo between sleeping and waking, when the hands of clocks seem to circumnavigate their faces at several times the usual speed. Following breakfast Lydia would disappear into the bathroom, and I heard the blubbery thunder of the bathtub faucet change to the hissing-snake sound of the showerhead, and she later emerged from her room as if she had just peeled herself out of a cocoon—moist and new—and clad in her official outfit for the day. And it was never anything flashy or particularly descript. As I’ve indicated earlier, Lydia favored turtleneck sweaters and pants. I don’t think she even owned a skirt or a dress that ventured north more than a centimeter or two above the latitude of the knee. Lydia was not an overtly feminine woman—not a girly woman, maybe I should say. She was certainly feminine; she had a good but conservative fashion sense. I don’t think I ever saw her wear pink, for instance, and she almost never wore high heels. On her feet were usually sneakers for utility and inconspicuousness, or else that inelegant pair of dirt-brown clodhoppers she often wore. But Lydia had an intense relationship with the color green. It was her favorite color. She looked beautiful in green. Not that she didn’t look beautiful in other colors—or most beautiful of all in no clothes whatsoever (but I will get to that later). But green looked particularly good on her because it established a dialogue with her eyes. A casual perusal of Lydia’s closet would reveal a whole jungle of verdant items: green scarves, green dresses, green shirts and pants. In the early days I loved to play dress-up with Lydia’s clothes, before (and sometimes even after) I had clothes of my own to wear. It wasn’t just the fun of dressing up that I got a kick out of, but rather the tingling sensation that skittered all over my flesh when I slipped inside Lydia’s garments, the sweet flutter of feminine fabrics against my skin, these things that had clung as close to her naked flesh as I wanted to cling. For a while Lydia patiently suffered my love of dress-up: sometimes, as soon as we got home from the lab I would want to put on one of her dresses, and it was not easy to convince me to take it off. Sometimes, when Lydia was away on an errand and trusted me with free range of the apartment, I would sneak into her closet and not only put on one of her dresses, but sometimes I would awkwardly slip my legs into the holes of a pair of her panties from her underwear drawer, or stretch her pantyhose over my legs or arms. I knew by the special electric charge I received out of playing with these things that somehow they were more secret, more intimate, and more darkly passionate than Lydia’s hats or scarves or even her dresses. I sensed taboo in them, which was why I could bring myself to put them on for only a brief time, quickly parading a few turns around the apartment in her underwear or pantyhose before my cowardice got the better of me and I had to return them to the drawers where I had found them before Lydia came home. Then I would pry open the remote control and lick its nine-volt battery.
Eventually my obsession with dress-up reached such a fever pitch that Lydia decided it was time I had clothes of my own. I was to be naked no longer.
As it happened, by this time I did own one—only one—article of clothing. Whenever Lydia and I left the home together in those early days—say, on one of our fun/educational outings to the Field Museum or the planetarium—she would bundle me up in a big baggy sweatshirt with droopy sleeves and a kangaroo pocket on the front, and a hood that could be scrunched into a small round window for my face by means of a drawstring. When we went out in public Lydia would pull the hood low over my face to conceal my apeness, and the shirt was big enough that it came down to my ankles, like a dress. Like much of Lydia’s clothing, it was green. I wore this green hooded sweatshirt so often that it had gradually passed into my possession, and Lydia effectively made a present of it to me. This was the first article of clothing I ever