Geek Love Part 28

She mooches around for my approval. She's a sullen buffalo with the world but she's a child to me. She is bigger than Papa. She could break me with two fingers. But she can be small around me. She can chatter to me though she sticks to brusque efficiency with everybody else. Oh, she is solicitous and protective with her girls, but never childlike. It's because I like her. Arty was right. She soaks it up like booze and it turns her to water, makes her defenseless.

Am I the first person who's ever liked her? It makes me sad. She's pretty lovable, after all. She knows how to enjoy things, and she's so decent it's scary.

There she sits, sprawled in a hard, straight chair, hour after hour. It never occurs to her to drag in a soft chair for herself. She thought about cus.h.i.+ons for me, though. Draped my straight chair with towels from the bathroom because one day in the pool she saw red lines on my hump. I'd been leaning on a locker. She never forgot. She always makes sure I'm comfortable.

"So why don't you bring in an armchair for yourself?" I asked her.

"What? Too much trouble. I don't need it. I'm padded."

She's wearing flannel pajamas and a floppy bathrobe. Her potato feet stick out, the soles jammed against the tile floor, propping her in the chair as she reaches, sorting through the film disks. Her chubby toes sprout, wiggling, from the main tuber.

"Got a new scout flick today." Her approach to the scouting tapes of potential recruits is different, intense, questioning, critical, a.n.a.lytical, running them again, backing them up to replay a gesture, a frown, a smile.

"This s.l.u.t tried a one-handed pigeon drop on me. As soon as she discovered this bag, brown paper bag, under her a.s.s on the park bench, I smelled old tuna. She screeches 'For heavens sakes!' I sat there watching the real G.o.dd.a.m.n pigeons c.r.a.pping on the lawn, listening to her go on about 'Where could all that money have possibly come from?,' and then finding a little brown envelope of snapshots. Twelve-year-old sucking a Doberman's d.i.c.k, and she's miscarrying with righteous indignation and trying to get me to pay attention and all the time I'm thinking, This is where I've got to at last. I'm looking like a gobbling pigeon, just like all the drooling biddies shuffling on the mall.' It makes me bitter. I reached in my wallet and pulled out a hundred. 'Now, honey,' I says, and I hand it to her, watching her eyes freeze as she shuts up. 'You take this so you don't get your a.s.s kicked when you get back to the slimy pimp that runs you. Save us all trouble and time.' She starts up protesting, waving this lunch bag of funny money at me. 'Believe me, sweetheart,' I says, 'you're not cut out for this business.' I went back to the office and crabbed at people all afternoon. Anyway, I saw her again in the Park Blocks while I had the equipment."

The frail, colorless girl on the screen is far away and small on a park bench. She sits, twisting her s.h.i.+rttail edgily and looking nervously around. I can't make her face out clearly.

"What do you think?"

I squint through my gla.s.ses, trying to see the wispy features. "Isn't she like an 'after' already?"

Miss Lick slaps her knees. "True enough!"

"I mean," I try to see the outline of the girl's b.r.e.a.s.t.s under her shoddy s.h.i.+rt, "she's got nothing to sell you."

"Oly! What do you think I am?" Miss Lick is hurt. "She could use some schooling and a decent job. Those skinny mice have got nothing. All they can do is latch onto some man or die."

"I didn't mean ... "

"Sure. Forget it. Here's the bang-tail filly again. I'll think about that con sharper. Maybe something can be done. The bang-tail has me flummoxed, though."

I clench my teeth and telescope my head downward between my shoulders. The "bang-tail" is Miranda. I've already spent hours watching replays of Miranda lounging on the steps of the art school, eating ice cream as she walks down the street, waving her tail on a velvet-draped stage during one of the Gla.s.s House private showings. Here she is again, flirting with her Binewski eyes, stretching her wide Arturan mouth to loll a tongue suggestively around the ice-cream cone, alert to the effect she's having on the guy in the coveralls waiting beside her for the traffic light to change. It screws me up totally to see Miss Lick's films of Miranda.

"What's she about? Hopeless, you think?" Miss Lick is sensitive to my moods. "Say it, Oly, is she useless?"

"No!" I snap and then wave my hand weakly, trying to soften it.

"I haven't heard a peep out of her in weeks. There's one month left to her school year. She's supposed to go straight in to surgery the week after the semester ends. But you'd think she'd call. I have a bet with myself that she'll hit me up to double my cash offer. The h.e.l.l of it is, I don't know if it's worth it. Art types. But I made the offer and I'll stick by my word. She'll do the tail and then we'll see. Thing is, she's made the tail erotic rather than a disfigurement. Maybe I'll stop with that. I'm soft but I'm not nuts. No use wasting money and time and energy on a stupid cow who can't benefit ... "

"She's not stupid." It slips out before I could stop it.

"Yeah, she is, but I can never resist ... "

"Not stupid!" Miss Lick looks at me with her mouth poised for a word, her clever eyes calm on me, waiting. I feel everything slipping away from me, all the care and planning, and volunteer misery. "I don't know! Don't mind me. I feel sorry for her."

Miss Lick always melts at "feeling sorry."

"Hey, don't I know? Don't I just know precisely?"

"I mean," I dig my fingertips into my knees for control, "she's already in school. Where's the percentage?"

"The men like that tail. I could subtract that distraction for her as a start. That's what I had in mind."

I take a taxi back to my alien apartment, crawl under the bed with two blankets, and huddle there on the orange carpet.

"So the nutso wants to sell me a nine-millimeter full-auto with a clip as long as an elephant's dong and he won't let up. He's revving his tonsils and I'm standing there staring at him, thinking what he'd look like with that clip rammed up his ... "

Miss Lick is lolling on the fir-needle sponge beneath the trees. She stretches out on her belly, arms stuck out in front of her, hands clasped warmly around what looks like a small gun, just the tip of the barrel showing beyond her puffy knuckles. The thing blaps like a knife in the eye when she squeezes. A dark blotch appears on the sheet of typing paper tacked to the tree fifty feet away. She milks off four shots and then pushes up to her knees and breaks the pistol open, its barrel lifting at the root like a shotgun as she nips the casings out with a st.u.r.dy fingernail.

"Hot!" she winces. "Want to look?"

By the time I reach the shredded target paper, she's reloaded and caught up with me, the ground snapping and hissing under her weight. She flicks the paper sc.r.a.ps away and fingers the yellow splinters that look as though somebody small and very rough had busted out of the old fir. "Nice tight pattern." She looks at me for praise.

I nod, though it's too high up for me to see inside the teacup-sized crater. I don't tell her for fear she'll lift me up to look.

"So I walked out," she continues the tale. "If the silly sucker had just sold me what I wanted he could have made his money and saved his breath."

She sticks the gun into the holster under her left arm. I hear a small snap as she buckles the gun nest closed.

"Ready for work?" she claps and grins and reaches for the heavy machete leaning at the foot of the tree.

She gives me thick gloves and I follow her all afternoon as she chops at the saplings and brush and blackberry vines that clog the back acres of "the homestead" as she calls it.

The big brick house with its turrets and diamond-paned windows sits close to the road, surrounded by civilized green and leased to the regional director of a major computer manufacturer. "He always invites me to his sociable dos on the terrace," says Miss Lick, "and his wife tries to maroon me in the library with one of the firm's middle-aged bachelors or get me drunk and show me pictures of starving babies to make me blubber before she tells me how much the firm contributes to famine relief. She's inventive, I have to admit. And he's subtle."

The wooded acreage isn't included in the lease. "I get my firewood here," she explains. She just likes it out here. She wears boots and a wide tweed bag of a skirt with her hooded sweats.h.i.+rt to wallop around in the woods. She calls it "tending the park" or "minding the homestead."

She cuts brush and I drag it out and throw it on a heap that rises and spreads in the small clearing.

She's rambling on about guns. "I used to carry my old man's .45 but the b.a.s.t.a.r.d was built for a hip holster. Barrel was too long to be discreet in a lady's suit. The poor broad that makes my clothes got old suddenly every time I walked through her door. So I got this little b.i.t.c.h of a COP. Stands for Compact Off-duty Police. Fires a .357 Magnum round. Has a rotary hammer like the old Sharps and Brownies. Guy, when I bought it, tried to sell me a little automatic. Told me a lady needed more than four shots. I says to him, Well, if I shoot some sonofab.i.t.c.h I'm not gonna miss, ya know. And he shuts up like a bank on Sunday. I think it's a cute gun. I like those four big barrels looking down on anybody who'd give me a hard time. Little gun, big bite. Always liked a .45 though. Cut my teeth on them because my dad always had them. He taught me to shoot."

She talks and swings the heavy blade, tearing the cuttings away with her gloved left hand and pus.h.i.+ng them behind her to where I plod.

Thomas R. Lick seems to have been the only man in her life. Her tongue is modeled on his. Without ever having known him or heard him speak, I know she mimics him. She moves like him. She looks like him. Her politics and prejudices and pride are almost certainly his. And I look like Arty.

I am thinking about Arty and throwing an armload of spider-and-scratch onto the heap when she hollers, "Hey! s.h.i.+t-for-brains!" in her jollying-the-help tone. "Boss is gone! Break time!" She comes red-faced from the dark of the trees. I sit down, suddenly nauseated.

"Hey! Don't faint." She is patting me clumsily, smoothing my hump, pressing my head down so my wig slides to my gla.s.ses. I start giggling helplessly and bat at her to get free. "I'm all right."

"You were pink and sweaty and then boom, your face was ... "

Laughing, I flop back on the heap so I can look up at her. "I had a brother who used to call me s.h.i.+t-for-brains."

She grabs at the ancient wheelbarrow that lugs the tools and drags it toward me. "Brother? That's something. Is he dead? You never mention family. Kind of figured you for an orphan. Born of joy and mirth, like. Something like that."

She's reaching under my arms to lift me like a child. I hate having her lift me. She does it too easily. She folds me up tidily in the wheelbarrow and I lean back, trying not to be angry. Her chin stretches like the prow of a Buick as she shakes her head. "Hang on for the ride!" and she runs, trundling me and the barrow, the branches whipping the sky above her and her pink and blinking face grinning like the hilarious moon, all the way to her car.

"If I could think of a way to seal her a.s.shole, I'd do it. And maybe st.i.tch her mouth shut and feed her with a tube going in under her chin." Miss Lick is half-joking in the elevator. Her hands are shoved flat into the pockets of her suit jacket and she rocks back on the thick heels of her crocodile shoes and rolls a chuckle at the mirror-bronze ceiling of the rising cubicle. "You'll see what I mean. This little broad hasn't a hair left, bald as you are. A double mastectomy. And she's still got that s.e.x thing. If I let her walk from her room to the can, three men would climb out of the light sockets on the way and find holes in her to cram their d.i.c.ks into."

The elevator stops and the door sighs open. Miss Lick lowers her voice and mutters down at me, "I've been thinking testosterone. You'll see what I mean." A silvery grandma-nurse pa.s.ses us in the hall, nodding her little grey bun and her perky white cap and twinkling, "Good afternoon, Miss Lick!" with only a slight hesitation in her smile for me.

We are visiting Miss Lick's latest, a nineteen-year-old gymnast with a bent for engineering and a yen to get into the s.p.a.ce program. Miss Lick likes the idea of producing an astronaut but is hampered in her efforts by the requirements of the work. "She's got to be physically functional all the way. It's a nuisance."

Jessica H. is in Miss Lick's favorite nursing home, recuperating from the relatively minor surgery that closed her v.a.g.i.n.a and removed her c.l.i.toris. The girl has pushed her sheets off and is languidly stroking her firm, golden belly with one finger. The bandages look like a diaper. Her chest is blank and nippleless but the scars are almost invisible.

"Jessica!" booms Miss Lick from the doorway. The girl's smooth, oval head turns casually on the pillow and she looks at us with long, oval eyes, the lids as hairless as sea sh.e.l.ls. Then her lush, wide mouth opens slightly in a smile and she is looking at me as Miss Lick bustles with the flowers and rumbles awkwardly, "Want you to meet Miss McGurk. Olympia McGurk. A good pal of mine."

The girl is smiling gently with cheekbones that could cut your throat and a nose and chin from some old painting that I can't quite remember. While this face is delicately smiling, the long throat and the flat muscular chest and the round shoulders begin to shake with laughter. With this laugh still going she says to me, "How much did she pay you? A few million, I hope!"

28.

One for the Road

Miss Lick watches me surface and blow. She grins as I scrabble for the guttered side of the pool. "It's amazing that you and I are so much alike, isn't it?" I kick off on my back, paddling away from her, grinning.

She's right. We each appear totally alone in our lives. I'm the shy, isolated dwarf creeping in and out of my shabby room, living only through my throat and my inherited work. She is the muscular monolith, cut off by bra.s.s, stalking around in her old man's ambition, too imposing in finance and physique for the regular commerce of talk and touch. We choose to seem barren, loveless orphans. We each have a secret family. Miss Lick has her darlings and I have mine. All we've really lacked is someone to tell. Now she tells me, and I tell all to these bland, indifferent sheets of paper. The only point where our narrow tracks converge is her bid to turn my darling into one of hers.

Does she lie to me? She keeps things from me. She wouldn't let me watch the surgery or treatment sections of her home movies for a long time. Does she keep more aside? Hide more of herself? Horrors she doesn't trust me with? t.i.tillations she is ashamed of? I sail along thinking she is perfectly open. Her eyes are as wide as a child's when she talks to me. But maybe I'm the fool. Maybe lying so constantly has burnt my view. Believing that she is fooled, I consider her too simple to lie.

We are alone in the pool. The lifeguard has gone for the night, trusting Miss Lick to lock up. Miss Lick sits on the side, her huge legs drooping into the water. She shudders as I stop to breathe at her end.

"Do you ever," her eyes circle the echoing green of the big room, "do you ever get the feeling somebody's watching us?"

My head swivels, searching automatically, though I know that the watcher is me. "You're just tired and spooky. You need your supper."

She shrugs it off. Forgets. But does she really know? Is she playing me while I play her?

It rains every night now and the air is soft in the morning. Almost warm. A faint haze, not quite green, softens the iron branches of the trees. Miranda's anatomy drawings are finished. She has mounted them on cardboard and she stores them in a huge plastic binder.

"I want you to look at them."

"I can't."

"All this time you've never looked."

"Just not at the ones of me. I don't want to see myself."

"You look in mirrors. I'm better than any G.o.dd.a.m.ned mirror."

"It's not your work. I like your other drawings. This just scares me."

"I take it personally. This is my best work. The best I've ever done. I don't see you as ugly. I see you as unique and wonderful."

"It's hard dealing with you seeing me at all."

"Miss-f.u.c.king-steerious! I'm handing the whole mess in tomorrow morning. The compet.i.tion results will come out in two weeks, the day before I go into the hospital."

"Hospital?"

"Or whatever. I don't know where Miss Lick has that work done."

"I have to get back to work now."

"The semester ends Friday."

"Thank you so much for the tea."

"I'm calling Miss Lick today to arrange things."

"See you soon."

"I may not come back here afterward."

I trotted down the hall with her leaning out of her doorway to talk to my back.

"I'll be in a nursing home for a while and then I'll probably move away."

I'm not even tempted to anger. Time is a rap on the ear with a bra.s.s knuckle. I've been letting it ride. Having my little cake-chummy with Miranda over tea, chummy with Miss Lick over home movies-snuggling down in a thick-headed fantasy that what little I was doing would make the difference, as if putting across the lie was success. All I had to do was accept mild discomfort in a strange room, sneak up the fire escape to visit Lily and Miranda, and this puny martyrdom would miraculously obliterate the problem.

The next morning I get to the club an hour before the lifeguard arrives and use the key Miss Lick has given me to get into the pool locker room. I lug two gallon jugs of concentrated ammonia in a shopping bag into the dressing room, stack the plastic bottles in my locker, and cover them with the bag.

The door from the locker room into the footbath is solid wood hung in a steel frame. The auger is an ancient handcrank from the landlord's tool kit in Lily's bas.e.m.e.nt. On my knees on the cold tiles I open the door slightly to slide a single sheet of the Oregonian underneath. The door swings shut, leaving half the paper on each side to catch the wood dust. I drill the hole under the lowest hinge and within a quarter inch of the frame. The bigger bit enlarges the hole to a one-inch notch in the door's edge. I wrap the dust in the paper, ready to carry away with the auger.

The clear plastic tubing slides easily through the hole. On the footbath side of the door a few inches of tubing droop toward the chlorine reek of the blue surface. I bend to suck air through it. The tube is clear, not pinched by the door closing. With the tube gone the hole is in the dark below the hinge, hardly visible unless you are on your hands and knees.

I work the narrow end of the funnel into the end of the tube, coil the arrangement tidily, and tuck it under the bag in my locker. As I walk out through the big gla.s.s doors in the front lobby I see the glossy young lifeguard putting her bicycle into a stanchion.

Miss Olympia Binewski McGurk, the albino dwarf, takes two steps to the average one because her mystic breastbone has spent thirty-eight years trying to increase its distance from her agnostic spine. Those two steps carry our Miss Oly, the hunchback, into the tidal stench of corned beef and cabbage filling the dim cove of McLarnin's at ten o'clock on a Tuesday morning when Jimmy McL. himself is steaming the wherewithal for the famous eleven-to-four buffet. The bar is clean. The gla.s.ses wait, glittering in their racks.

Miss Oly hoists her twisted frame onto the least spinnable bar stool and nods encouragingly at Jimmy. The mirror is obscured by bottlenecks, leaving shards in which Miss Oly catches a flicker of her blue-tinted spectacles and goat-grey wig bobbing over the waxy wood. Her big, soft voice is deeper than the tenor McLarnin's.

"A shot of Jameson's please, Jimmy," she says, and McL. sways toward her, wrapped in cabbage mist from the kettles and flapping a bar towel in front of his red k.n.o.b nose to clear the view.

"Celebrating, are we?" gurgles Jimmy in sympathy with the tall, tipping bottle.

"You too?" asks Miss Oly, squinting her rose-pink eyes behind the sapphire lenses.

"Thank you," McL. deliberately misunderstands. "I'll stick with Murphy's though. I was weaned on it."

"Is that so?" Miss Oly would like to know.

Jimmy gives a slow, thoughtful swipe at the bar with his towel and raises his crisp white eyebrows. "True enough. I was colicky as a babe and my mother'd send me off to sleep with a rag-t.i.t tied up in thread and soaked in Murphy to suck on. She swore by it for a whole nights rest."