The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [95]
Lydia checked her appearance one last time in the mirror. Her hair was still short, but had grown out some, it just covered the tops of her ears. She went through the motion of sliding a wisp of hair behind her ear, but her hair was not yet long enough to stay put, and it immediately sprang out again. She was not wearing her glasses. She turned to me, watching her look at herself in the mirror. Our eyes made contact in the mirror.
“We’re going to be on our best behavior tonight, aren’t we, Bruno?”
I nodded yes.
Lydia sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly, steadying herself with the extra oxygen, conscientiously trying to make her breathing natural and normal. Then she bent down slowly to the floor. She kneeled, folding her long powerful legs—made even longer by the high-heeled shoes she so violently loathed—until her face was level with mine, and she looked directly into my eyes. She wrapped her hands around the back of my head, and I wrapped my gangly arms around her back, and we exchanged a long and passionate kiss. Our lips mingled, our tongues wound together, we breathed each other’s hot breath and drank each other’s spit. It is painful—almost physically painful to me, it sickens me, it gives me a heartache as real and visceral as a bellyache—to remember how in love we were.
Lydia took my hand, squeezing it in hers.
“Okay,” she whispered in my ear. “Let’s go.”
She rose to full standing position, and, leading me by the hand, unlocked the door and pushed it open.
The gallery opening. I’m sure you know what these things tend to look like. There were a couple of inexpensive tables covered with expensive tablecloths: on one of them stood many wineglasses and bottles of wine, ice buckets for the white wine, which the caterers poured for the guests, and on the other table was an arrangement of hors d’oeuvres: brownies, cheeses, crackers, little tomatoes, miniature salami sandwiches and such. Most of the event’s attendees were dressed nicely. Hands were shaken, limp embraces exchanged, spouses introduced, wineglasses dinged like bells, fancy shoes clopped on the waxen concrete floor and a liquid hum of general conversation sloshed around inside the echo-conducive white room, in which waves of polite laughter crested and broke here and there. Have you ever noticed how similar the ambiance of an art gallery is to that of a laboratory?
Fifteen of my larger paintings hung on the white walls of the gallery space. I chose, following Lydia’s suggestion, not to display the exploratory forays into the abstract that I was already beginning to paint, but to stick with the more meticulously rendered representational pieces in order, at this early stage in my career, to showcase my mastery of technique rather than my innovative approach to concept. Four of them were self-portraits modeled after my reflection in Lydia’s bathroom mirror, at such an angle and using such a palette as to deliberately evoke Van Gogh—in one of them I even depicted myself wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, in obvious homage to my favorite mad Dutchman, though only a handful of those philistines got the joke. One was a portrait of Norman Plumlee, fleshed out of a charcoal sketch of him that I dashed off once when visiting the lab with Lydia (I have since destroyed that painting). Two were paintings of Lydia. (The many nudes that I had painted of her were not on display for obvious reasons. Many of those were later destroyed as well. The one that hangs above the couch on which I am at this moment reclining is the only extant one that I know of.) Another one was a landscape—technically impressive but conceptually bankrupted by my then immaturity as an artist—looking southward on the Chicago lakefront in the summer; it is maybe a little reminiscent of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Grande Jatte, with all