Geek Love (41 page)

Miranda hoists her eyebrows at me in surprise. “Sure. I'll check on her. I'm not working tonight. Don't worry.”

Nodding and waving, I retreat quickly. She stands looking after me. As I go down the stairs I hear the soft male voice call, “Miranda?” and then her door shuts quietly.

I stay in my room for a few hours, arranging the papers in the big trunk. At around eleven I hear Miranda on the stairs. Her footsteps pass down to the ground floor and pause for a while at Lily's closed door. Then she goes back up. I find myself smiling as I listen.

I go down myself an hour later. The wheeze and bubble beyond Lil's door is regular and strong. I use the wall phone to call for a cab and wait for it on the front steps.

I sulk all the way back to the tinhorn apartment. I want my own moldy room with its pale stench and its frail, maniac noise. The new building seems lifeless, incapable of decay. Its halls are narrow and pharmaceutically bright. Each floor is the same as all the rest. The only sound is the faint hum of the elevator. The orange carpet from the hall spills under my door, flooding the whole apartment. The rooms are low and square and it feels rented because I refuse to actually live here. In my home the air reeks of dust and jumbled layers of life, and it is dim unless you are right next to a window.

Here the telephone is white and has its own table. Where I live the phone is an ancient black-and-chrome wall box with coin slots and numbers scratched into its paint. It rings often but few people ever use it to call out. It is too exposed there in the grease-brown entryway. Whenever it rings, Lily answers, though it is never for her.

Getting to Know You

and Your .357 Magnum

What a bouncer she would have made! Shy as an egg, but so disguised. I can't help it. She charms me. To see her hunched over her plastic tray-chin shoved straight at the big screen, her paw pokes a fork in the air, and she laughs, “Hu-hu-hu,” through her bulging cheeks.

“Smart little shit, I'm tellin' ya!” she says after cleaning her cheeks with a gulp. “Lookit 'er drive that sucker!”

The young woman on the screen is bent over a complicated hunk of shiny machinery. The driving Miss Lick finds so admirable is a sure-fingered dial-twiddling and button-tapping.

Miss Lick scoots back in her chair and lunges for another flabby forkful of limp turkey from her compartmentalized supper.

She loves this -- carrying our Lickety Split food trays back through the discreet door in the big bathroom to her home-movie theater, perching on straight chairs with the trays on our knees, watching the screen full of Miss Licks girls. She adores the reruns, and nearly cries at the “before” footage, angry grieving for the misery of their lives before she rescued them. She is hypnotized by the surgery or treatment flicks, chewing slowly, nudging me with an informative elbow and a nod when a particularly smooth bit of scissor or saw work is goring its way across the screen. Now that she allows me to see these segments, she is anxious to impress me. But her joy is in the work shots of the “successes.”

“Look at that! Know what she's doing? Reading the rings of rat-assed Saturn! Can you imagine? Six years ago the only rings she knew were for slipping over limp cocks to make 'em rise!”

The young woman in the white coat reaches for the paper that is spewing from a printer. She turns toward us and the light to read. She smiles, a sudden grin of utterly cheerful mischief flashing out of her intense flesh.

I want to ask what it is that she hasn't got anymore. The lab coat hides her chest. Was it breasts? Two new figures appear -- a plain woman and a spavined boy, twenty or twenty-one years old. They stand at attention in front of Miss Lick's girl as she speaks.

“Teaching 'em! See that? She's got these fuckers trailing after her!”

Miss Lick's big hand bunches and jabs my thigh sideways in hilarious friendship. “Eh? Eh?”

My tray flips forward, spewing goo, and she's on her knees choking with apologies as she plucks up the gobs and wipes up the smears. “Creeping Christ! I'm such a clod! Are you all right? Hey, I'll have a fresh new one for you in thirty seconds flat. Just sit. No, no, I'm going to.”

She tears me up. I sit here laughing at her. She is a galumphing dugong, an elvish ox, a sentimental rhino.

“They're like my kids, all of them.” She sniffs, her thick forehead creasing, anxious that I should understand and approve.

“Did you, no offense now, but did you ever wish you'd had kids? Not the man bit, but the kid bit? No? Well, you're right, I know it. You're right. But you want to make a difference. A person wants to feel as though they've accomplished something.”

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 cushions 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, analytical, running them again, backing them up to replay a gesture, a frown, a smile.

“This slut tried a one-handed pigeon drop on me. As soon as she discovered this bag, brown paper bag, under her ass on the park bench, I smelled old tuna. She screeches 'For heavens sakes!' I sat there watching the real goddamn pigeons crapping 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 dick, 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 ass 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 shirttail edgily and looking nervously around. I can't make her face out clearly.

“What do you think?”

I squint through my glasses, 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 breasts under her shoddy shirt, “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 Glass 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 hell 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 sturdy 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 scraps 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 sweatshirt 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 bastard 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 bitch 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 sonofabitch 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 pushing 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! Shit-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 glasses. 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 shit-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.