The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [84]
The sexual tension had been there right from the beginning, though. I think it had colored our relationship since the day we met—when I first fell in love with her—when I watched her take a bite out of that peach, when I tapped on that box, demonstrating to the scientists that I, too, could be just as irrational as any human being. My desire for her had gone through different phases. It had evolved and adapted to its environment through many marvelous mutations. Up until this point Lydia had taught me nearly everything I knew—everything she knew—because love—and I mean the real thing, Eros, romantic, sexual love—is possible only between psychological equals. And she raised me up until I was practically her intellectual equal. We had come to a point in our relationship—a point at which there was but negligible difference between our respective levels of reasoning ability (though technically I suppose at this point I could still barely speak a coherent word other than yes, no, and my own name, and furthermore only Lydia could understand my speech), when we had ceased to be simply an educator and her pupil—or even a surrogate mother and her child—and became two true friends, who each learned from the other every day. We were partners in this project of ours, united against the stern world. I filled a vacancy in her emotional life, and she gave me my life as I know it, in the form of culture and knowledge.
In a past life, Lydia had been robbed of a son and a lover. And I, Bruno, eventually gave her back both. So, yes, obviously there was a sense of some deep-seated and dangerous taboo that our relationship violated. But this taboo was not bestiality—it was incest.
My own psychosexuality was (should I say, “is”?) tortured and twisted up and confused. Why? Because I love women, and I am a chimp.
My relationship with Lydia progressed over the same period of time that I entered into manhood, both metaphorically and hormonally. I was sailing through both my intellectual awakening and my natural puberty at the same time. It wasn’t just that, as the intensity of the itches and tingles in my loins were slowly increasing, Bolero-like, at a steady cadence but with exponentially rising volume, I had truly begun to see Lydia as a sexual being—not just as an unattainable preadolescent fantasy but as a potential reality—but that my now very real sexual attraction to her became interwoven into the fabric of my true love. I longed to see Lydia naked. Just the symbol of her nudity to Bruno—what it meant to me then!
I need to clarify something here. Lydia wasn’t exactly beautiful. She did not shimmer like those unreachable stars, so many impossible light-years in the distance. She was here, she was plain, she was good, she was earthy. She was mine. But she was not mine. I was hers.
It may be occurring to you, Gwen, that my descriptions of Lydia are inconsistent and often contradictory. One moment she’s dazzling, beatific, and now she’s good and plain and earthy. If her shape shifts it is because memory and perception are fickle mistresses. She was beautiful and she was not beautiful: both these statements are true. You see how well I’ve learned human logic? That’s right—I am the chimp who tapped Pandora’s Box.
But her headaches. Lydia had just experienced her menstrual period, which, as usual, was accompanied by her tempestuous migraine headaches, whose intensity could be only partially dampened with Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets, which caused her insomnia, which was curable only with the extra-strength sleeping pills Lydia kept on hand for the days of monthly torment she was doomed to suffer all her life.
Now this. Look: here lies Lydia—no, not dead, but dead to the world, lying in a motionless—and from the way her eyelids aren’t fluttering with REM, we may assume dreamless—sleep. She’s sweating profusely, because the sleep those gel capsules induce is red, wet, and feverish,