Geek Love (4 page)

“There used to be furniture,” I say in shock. Where does she sit? eat? sleep? I thought I had provided for her.

“It was awful.” She pauses, arms half cocked above her head, pulling at her sweater. She disappears in a wrestling frenzy, reappears breathless, hurling the sweater at a distant empty corner. “It's all scattered in other rooms in the building.”

The room is bare. Not a stick. Not a single nail protrudes from the grey walls. Only her clothes trail across the black floor like a love romp. Looking rail-thin in the blouse and skirt, she jerks open a white door hiding canvas chairs folded neatly against the back of the closet. A thin-legged folding table. She whips them out and up, furnishing the place. “Wait till you see my tea cabinet,” she says, slapping the swaying loop of canvas meant to cradle an ass. “I've been collecting for weeks.” Through another white door to the tiny kitchen stands the old refrigerator, no taller than I am.

“Vine leaves.” She snatches out jars and plastic dishes. “Artichoke hearts. Do you like olives?”

The kettle is on the stove, blue flame curling its bottom. She reaches, her long body high above me and her ribs sliding under thin cloth, upward. “Strawberry, jasmine, mint.” Tea boxes rain onto the counter. “This is all for you.” She is huge. Her heat beats through the inch of air between us. “I have no idea what you like so I've been on the watch for anything really special. Just in case you ever came to visit. Now I'm going to get you a dressing gown and you can change in the bathroom.”

The dream lasts only an instant, but in it I have fallen into the cat cage and the tigers are sliding by me, brushing their whole hot length against me. But it is this Miranda, moving liquid past me and out into the big room, miraculously whisking her dropped belongings out of sight, pulling out white painted drawers and doors, allowing glimpses of hidden paraphernalia as she skates, chattering about food, again and again to the resurrected table suddenly crowded with ominous delicacies heaped in small bowls.

A final armload slides onto the table, sketch pads, pencils, a sinister looking camera. Then she takes half a step back and looks at me through half-closed eyes. A flicker of her fathers deliberate calculation passes across her face. An ice knife sticks in my chest.

“It's not cold in here, is it?” she asks.

“No.”

“Good.” She moves to the drawers in the wall. “I'll do some photos first, while you're fresh, and then sketch until you get tired or fed up.” She flips her voice over her shoulder while bent, rummaging to avoid acknowledging my jitter of fear. She is holding me to my promise.

“The photos will make it easier on you. It hurts to hold a pose for a long time.”

She presents me with a green pajama top and, as I grasp it, she swings open the bathroom door, flicks the light switch, saying, “There are hooks on the door for your clothes ... whoops! There's the kettle boiling.”

In the tall bathroom I stand staring at the door. I can hear her moving on the other side. The pajama top trails on the floor beside me and she is whistling in the kitchen. Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass. She is manipulating me. Pushing me around as though I were nothing but a mobile stomach like the news vendor. She fancies she has me under control. Red anger blisters my guts. She doesn't see me at all. She doesn't know who she's dealing with. I am the watcher, the mover, the maker. She is just like her father, casually, carelessly enslaving me with my love. She doesn't know the powers that keep me here. She thinks it's her charm and guile.

“Tea's ready,” she calls.

I answer thinly, “Coming,” but whirl in a frenzy, shoving the grit of the green pajama into my mouth and biting down to keep from bellowing.

Her drawing is suddenly in front of me, framed and glassed on the grey wall beside the sink. The darkness is ink and the eyes and teeth come out of the dark and the screaming chicken is bulging vainly away, caught as the teeth close tearing into exploding feathers and black blood behind its desperate skull. Drawn with a bullwhip at thirty paces. Quietly, in the white at the bottom, her penciled hand has scrawled “Geek Love -- by M. Barker.”

I take off my clothes. I can't reach the hooks on the door. I drape the clothes over the toilet tank, drop the wig on top, and stand my shoes on the floor beside it. The pajama top hangs to my ankles.

I sit. She draws. Wearing only my blue glasses I am not cold but my skin rises against exposure, rough as a cow's tongue. The cups steam upward into the pale air. Our island is the size of two canvas chairs and a small cluttered table. We are marooned in the breathing bareness of the room. Darkness rolls out around us, seeping into the distant softness of the grey walls. The curtains shift slowly in their own whiteness, as though the light pouring through them has a frail, moving substance.

She is gnawing an olive pit and frowning at the sketch pad in her lap. The wild hair torching out of the edges of her face mesmerizes me. The millions of hairs in a dozen smoldering tones are as alien as her size, the outrageous length of her. My mother, Lillian, is seventy inches high. I am thirty-six inches high.

“How tall are you, Miranda?”

She looks up to focus on my chin, frowning, and says, “Six feet,” mechanically before her eyes twitch back to the paper in front of her.

Watching her work is comfortable. I feel invisible again, as though she had never spoken to me beyond “Good morning.” She is not interested in my identity. She doesn't notice it. Her eyes flick impatiently at me for a fast fix -- a regenerative fusing of the image on her retina, the model she inflicts on the paper. I am merely a utensil, a temporary topic for the eternal discussion between her long eye and her deliberate hand.

Downstairs in the first floor front, Crystal Lil sits sliding the magnifying glass back and forth in search of the focal point. The walls around her are slathered with the crumpled glitter of the old carny posters. A dozen glossy young Lilys smile, kick, and reach for the curving gold name, “Crystal Lily,” that arches against midway blue above her. Dressed in white, a paper Lil arches her back against a blue-green sky spangled with stars. Strips of arsenic-green wallpaper peep between the posters.

In my room everything is just as I found it when I moved in. The stuffed furniture molders against the cabbage wallpaper. My real life sits in boxes and suitcases behind cupboard doors. My real bed is not the creaking acre of springs in the corner, but the dark nest of blankets on the floor of the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink.

Miranda rips out the page she has been working on and absently sails it over her shoulder while she eyes a jar bristling with pens. The page settles, belly up on the dark floor, as she begins dashing ink at a fresh sheet of paper.

“What made you,” clearing my throat, “decide to be an artist?”

Her eyes flick at my feet under frowning brows. “No, no. A medical illustrator. For textbooks and manuals ... ” Her tongue sneaks out at a corner of her mouth as she slaps stroke after vicious stroke onto the defenseless page. “See, photographs can be confusing. A drawing can be more specific and informative. It gets pretty red in there. Pretty hot and thick. But the bastards claim I'm undisciplined, too flashy ... ” Whatever she is doing to the innocent sheet has nothing to do with me. She rips it out and drops it, starting immediately on the page beneath.

“There's something I want to talk to you about.” She tries to make it casual.

The bite of fear -- “She knows!” -- grabs my chest and then relaxes. No. I've been sitting here bald and naked for an hour. Too late for that.

She stops chewing her thumb and asks, “Have you ever been to the Glass House?” At my nod she drops the pen, picks up her tame tool, the pencil, and begins work on a fresh sheet of paper.

“Then you know,” eyes on paper, “that the dancers, all of us, aren't there for our dancing skills or even our looks, but ... ” rubbing her thumb vigorously across the page, "because we each have something odd. We call them our specialties.

“What the Glass House calls 'Exotic Features' are all in the back room. You know. Separate cover charges for private shows and private parties. Blondes with Dobermans. Group acts. They stage requests, too, for fancy prices. There are one-way mirrors in the peeper booths and special insurance policies for domination or S&M. That's where the girls make money. The club too.” Her mouth screws up tight as she squints at her sketch.

“Well, there's a regular customer. Not frequent but regular. Once a month or so she comes in for one of the specialty shows. Maybe twice a year she'll foot the bill for a request. At first I thought she was a standard S&M dyke. Now I think it's not pain that she's interested in. She's interested in changing people.”

Something in Miranda's tone catches me. A swirl of familiar fear starts in my gut. She feels it too. I see a bewilderment strange to her face.

“The lady's rich. She pays. She likes transvestites if they want to become transsexuals. If they want to go all the way, she'll pay for all treatments and the surgery. That's how Paulette could finally afford it. He could have gone on strapping his balls up tight for the rest of his life if it wasn't for her. The Glass House keeps hiring transvestites and she keeps shipping them off to get real. But she watches. That's part of the deal. She goes along and watches the operation. And it isn't just sex changes. She actually prefers other things.”

A cold thought sinks quietly through me. Again? Miranda draws and talks, looking at my elbows, forehead, knees, tits, anywhere but my eyes.

The long-haired blonde, Denise, who unfurled her pubic hair and danced on her head hair, had furnished one of the recent command performances. They stretched her out on a chrome table in one of the back rooms, and gave her local anesthetics while they burned all her hair off. They set the fire and then ducked back into the glassed-in booths to escape the smell as the girl shrieked in fear if not pain, and the master of ceremonies, in a gas mask and flameproof suit, stood by with the fire extinguisher.

“The dame paid Denises hospital bills and went to visit her all the time. I went to see Denise the day before she got out. She looks bad. The roots were destroyed and the hair will never grow back. There are a lot of scars on her face. She's not allowed to have any plastic surgery. That was in the contract she signed. You wouldn't believe it but Denise is happy. She says Miss Lick, that's the lady's name, paid her so much she'll never have to work again. Denise says there have been others from the Glass House. One redhead with enormous tits who had them amputated and went to college and is a doctor now!”

My daughter is staring at me. Her eyes are looking anxiously at my eyes. The point is coming. I feel it speeding toward me as she searches my face for a reaction. Any reaction.

“The reason I'm droning on with this silly stuff is that Miss Lick came back to the dressing room after the show last Friday night and asked to talk to me. She's gruff and gross and when she isn't being extremely dignified she's being what she calls a 'straight shooter.' That means the first thing she said to me was, 'Look, I'm not going to make a pass at you, so relax.' Maybe it's nuts but I liked her. She took me out for a fantastic dinner, though she didn't eat. She drank the whole time. She pumped me for my life story and, being the shy, reserved type, I spilled the works. The poor orphan brought up in the convent school. The mysterious trust fund covering my art-school tuition and the permanent rent on this place. I had a glass of champagne and colored the whole yarn a glorious purple. She was fascinated. And what it comes down to is, she isn't after my ass, she's after my tail.”

“Ah,” I say. My mouth stayed open.

Miranda leans forward, eager. “Yes. This is the tale of the tail that I threatened you with, and I figure you will understand what I'm talking about.”

The sketch pad lies unmolested across her knee. One long leg hooked over the chair arm, she looks at me. Her hands are still. Her face is just young now, all the cleverness washed away.

“I was ashamed of it. You know, as a kid. The nuns would tell me it was a cross to bear and a punishment for my mothers sins. I want to just tell you the truth, not purple it up this time. The nuns were good to me. I loved them. In a funny way the fact that the religion never quite took in me has to do with the tail. It's hard to explain. Maybe I don't even understand it yet. My one prayer was that I'd wake up and my tail would be gone. My backside would be smooth like the others.”

My mouth twists wryly. “You hated it?”

“Sure.”

I sit, coolly naked, examining her racehorse legs and the jut of her calf out of incredibly thin ankles and remembering my first sight of her head, emerging blood-smeared and dark from between my legs. Her small rumpled face jerked to the side with a profile like a turtle.

And later, with Lil beside me, stretching out the tiny folded arms and legs by gently pulling on her hands and feet, and finding nothing. Nothing but that little pigtail coiled over her buttocks. And Lil's voice, not broken or shrill in those days, saying, “Well, remember Chick. He didn't look like much either. Go ahead and love her. We'll see.”

Months later she was crawling and learning to stand up, and was getting too big to sleep in the cupboard beneath the sink with me. Her father, whose wide mouth and almond eyes are Miranda's now, looked at her one day when she had tripped and fallen and split her lip on the floor of the trailer and was crying and bleeding, and he said, “Get rid of her.” And I cried and begged and yanked down her diapers to remind him of that tail, pink and charming, and he sneered and said, “Get rid of her or I'll give her to Mumpo for supper, stuffed and roasted!”

Now, twenty years later, in this huge room, with Lil downstairs watching a TV screen through a magnifying glass, her mind steeped in the amnesiac vapor of her own decay, and Arty's wonderful face gone to worms despite me, I sit here looking at the full, ripe flesh of this almost normal young female and for a single satisfying instant see her on a platter with a well-basted skin crackling to the touch.