The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [86]
Although Bruce is twenty-five he looks younger and this is mostly due to his boyish height, his unblemished, consistently hairless, stubble-free face, his crop of thickish, fashionably cut blond hair, and since he does a lot of drugs he’s thinner than he probably should be but in a good way and he has a dignity that most of the men I know don’t have, will never have. He disappears up ahead. I follow him into some new world now: cactus, elephants, more strange birds, huge reptiles, rocks, Africa. A gang of Hispanic boys roams aimlessly, following us, playing hooky but probably not and I check my watch to verify that I will be missing my one o’clock class.
We met at a wrap party at the studio. Bruce came up to where I was standing, offered me a glass of ice and said, “You look like Nastassja Kinski.” I stood there, mute, made a concentrated effort that lasted nine seconds to decode this gesture. Three weeks into the affair I found out he was married and I cursed myself miserably that whole afternoon and night after he told me this at Trumps one Friday before he had to fly to Florida for the weekend. I didn’t recognize the signs that accompany an affair with a married man since basically in L.A. there aren’t any. After I found out, it made sense and things totally came together but by then it was “too late.” A gorilla is lying on its back, playing with a branch. We are standing far away yet I can smell it. Bruce moves on to a rhinoceros.
“They like to be here,” he says, staring at a rhinoceros that lies immobile, on its side, and that I’m pretty sure is not alive.
“Why wouldn’t they like it?”
“They were captured,” I say. “They were put into cages.”
By the giraffes, lighting another cigarette, making a wisecrack about Michael Jackson, Bruce says, “Don’t leave me.”
This is what he said when British Vogue offered me a ridiculously well-paying job that I was not capable of doing and that my stepmother arranged and that, in retrospect, I should have taken and he said it again before he left me that weekend for Florida, he said “Don’t leave me” and if he hadn’t made the request I would have left but since he did, I stayed, both times.
“Well,” I murmur, carefully rubbing an eye.
All the animals look sad to me, especially the monkeys, who mill around unenthusiastically, and Bruce makes a comparison between the gorillas and patti Labelle and we find another refreshment stand. I pay for his hamburger because he doesn’t carry cash. We got into the zoo today because of a friend’s membership Bruce had borrowed. When I asked him what kind of person would have a membership to the zoo, Bruce silenced me with a soft kiss, a touch, a small squeeze on the back of my neck, offered me a Marlboro Light. Bruce hands me a receipt. I pocket it. A newly married couple with an infant sit at a table next to ours. The couple make me nervous because my parents never took me to a zoo. The baby grabs at a french fry. I shudder.
Bruce takes the meat patty off the bun and eats it, ignoring the bread since he considers it unhealthy, “bad for me.” Bruce never eats breakfast, not even on days he works out, and he’s hungry now and he chews loudly, gratefully. I nibble on an onion ring, giggling to myself, and he will not talk about us today. It crosses my mind, stays, starts melting, that there is no impending divorce from Grace.
“Let’s go,” I say. “See more animals.”
“Mellow out,” he says.
We move past uselessly proud llamas, a tiger we can’t see, an elephant that looks as if it has been beaten. This is a description hanging by the side of the cage of something called a bongo: “They are seldom seen because of their extreme shyness and the markings on their sides and back make them blend into the shadows.” Baboons strut around, acting macho, scratching themselves brazenly. Females pick pathetically at the males’ fur, cleaning them.
“What are we doing here?” I ask. “Bruce?”
At some point Bruce says, “Are we as far back as we can get?”