The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [87]
She remained in there for hours. I bashed my fists against the door and alternated between doleful screams and pitiful whimpers, crying and raging—in apology, in lamentation—inarticulately pleading with her to reemerge from the bathroom. I wailed until my vocal cords were worn threadbare from all my wailing. She would not come out. She would not respond. I heard running water. I heard the toilet flush a few times. Eventually I heard the familiar whisk of the showerhead. Curls of steam escaped from the crack under the door.
I worried. I was still essentially dependent on Lydia for basic survival—that is, I needed her to make food for me. I grew hungry. Still, she remained locked up and incommunicado in the bathroom.
I was starting to feel light-headed from hunger, I had to eat something. I could reach the cereal boxes in the pantry, but I could not reach the milk in the refrigerator, nor could I reach the cutlery and crockery above the kitchen counter, so I was forced to dump a pile of Cheerios on the dining room table and dejectedly munch my dry, brittle rings of oats without the help of any moistening agent other than my own spit. Christ, Gwen, that’s the way I took my meals when I was living in the fucking zoo! I was so presumptuous! See how quickly I recidivate to my barbarian habits without Lydia?
That was the longest morning of my life. I had—I had lost my virginity the night before, hadn’t I? The earth had moved! Her Bruno was a man, now! I suppose I had expected there to be some new sense of special communion between us. Instead she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out. What in the world had I done?
I turned on the TV and tried to watch Sesame Street, but it was useless, I couldn’t keep my mind on it. Not with Lydia so apparently upset, and not with me not knowing why. Bert and Ernie were no solace to me now.
Then I got an idea. I was just full of good ideas, wasn’t I? I would write her a letter: a love letter. That would surely entice her to come out from her self-imposed sentence of solitary confinement. So Cyrano de Bruno took up one of his Magic Markers—the red one, the color of fire, blood, passion—and, upon removing a starchy sheet of white paper from my sketchpad that lay on the floor of the studio that Lydia had built for me, and fastidiously peeling off the perforated edge to remove the unsightly serrated strip where I’d torn it from the rings, squatted down right there on the floor of my studio and composed a letter: a love letter. There were, of course, no actual words discernible in it, as I was still illiterate. To the untrained eye it probably would have looked like just a lot of frenzied scribbling. But my intentions were absolutely clear, I think. The spirit of the gesture—if not the letter—was perfectly legible. Contained in this arduous, ardorous scramble of red lines—thick, meaningful, still heady-smelling and damp from the juicy marker tip—was the lucid and simple and absolutely earnest message: I love you.
And then I slipped it, my love letter, this leaf of paper bearing my message of explosive passion, under the crack of the bathroom door. I waited.
When Lydia came out, I wondered at first if she was the same person who had gone in. Could it be that she had been somehow replaced by another woman of very similar stature and carriage, transformed maybe by the mirror—my original Lydia remaining encapsulated in the glass, and the glass Lydia in turn made flesh? Is that possible? I guess that morning she’d spent locked up with herself, she’d spent in reflecting on her life,