The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [88]
I probably would have immediately disintegrated into an apoplexy of hot streaming tears of utter confusion if it were not for the composed aspect of grace and authority that she radiated. I was the weak one here, the broken one, the supplicant, the child, the animal—she the mother, the woman, the human being. Was I forgiven? Forgiven for what? What had I done? Why had she made me feel as if I needed to be forgiven for something? Was it—was it about last night?
She picked me up and held me. I snuggled my fleecy face against her cheek. I combed my long purple fingers through her close-cropped hair. In so many gestures and protean wordlings, I asked her where her hair could have possibly gone. (I couldn’t really speak articulately at this time, Gwen. Only Lydia could understand my primitive speech.) We sat on the bed. It was unmade still, the sheets all twisted into a messy wad half spilling off the edge of the mattress.
“I cut it, Bruno. I flushed it down the toilet.”
I asked her why.
“I was having a hard time looking at myself in the mirror.”
I did not understand. Why would it be hard to look at oneself in a mirror?
“I’ve thought things through, Bruno. I’m feeling better now. I guess I cut off my hair because suddenly I wanted to look different. Sometimes that helps someone feel different. Do you like it?”
I wasn’t sure.
“I know you love me, Bruno. Your picture was very sweet.”
I thanked her.
“I love you too, Bruno. But—what you did last night—you’re not supposed to do that unless someone is awake. Do you understand?”
I wasn’t sure.
“Bruno, you can’t do that unless you have the permission of the person you’re doing it with. Do you understand that?”
I shrugged uneasily.
“And if the person you’re doing it with is asleep, then you can’t possibly know if you have their permission. Okay?”
I said nothing.
“So that means you can’t do that with someone who is asleep.”
I was repentant in silence.
“The next time you want to do that with someone, you have to wait until she’s awake. Then ask. And if she doesn’t want to, then that means you can’t. Okay?”
There followed then what was perhaps the most pregnant of pregnant silences in history. Then she embraced me. I hoped that I was forgiven. I felt horrible. Then she got dressed. It was a Saturday morning.
Thus was my lesson in human sexual morality. I had to learn this. When my father, Rotpeter, wanted to stick his dick in something, he simply went and did it. I had to learn restraint. I had to learn empathy. When it came to sex, I had to make the Buberian moral shift from I/it to I/thou. That is, a soul is a thou and a body is an it. The problem with this construct is, of course, that when sex enters into any relationship between two conscious beings with sufficient theory of mind to cognize the consciousness of the other, we must deal with the philosophical difficulty of seeing another person as an it and a thou at the same time. I have since noticed that not even most humans can do this. At the height of passion, animal solipsism is absolute, and everything but the I is an it.
That day, after Lydia had dressed and we had eaten, she announced, to my delight, that there would be no lessons today and suggested we take the afternoon off instead and go on an outing. It was a pretty day in the fall, in October, I think. The ground was clustered with fallen leaves but the weather was still warm, and all the Chicagoans were out in the streets and parks, taking