Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

“Do you think he enjoyed it? Wouldn’t it be awful if he didn’t? Maybe that’s why he ran off so soon. It’d be terrible if he gave us all that money and didn’t like it.”

“Money?” This last was me. Somehow it hadn’t sunk in when Iphy said Elly had “sold” their cherry.

“Sure, money.” Elly reached under the sofa and pulled out that same envelope I’d delivered to the judges’ stand. He’d come up to talk to them after their show the day before. He’d asked if he could visit them, said he’d drop by after he finished judging the beauty contest.

“Is he a schoolteacher?”

“We don’t know what he does. He was polite. Kind of gentle. I thought he’d be good to start with. He didn’t seem rich so I just said fifty dollars in the note and that he should come after closing.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. It’s just that I was saving mine and he was so heavy on me and it hurt.”

“Iphy, listen. He wouldn’t have hugged us anyway. They are never going to want to hug us or cuddle up afterward. They are always going to get right out of bed and zip up still wet and go away.”

Iphy looked down at their knees, her slender hand folding a hunk of the bathrobe nervously in a movement so much like Mama’s that I stared.

Elly peeped seriously into the envelope. “Maybe I was dumb about this. A virginity like ours could be worth a lot. Maybe we should have taken bids. Kind of an auction. Maybe we could still do that. We’ll get better. We can send out flyers. Put it up in lights, ‘The Exquisite Convenience of Two Women with One Cunt!’ ”

“Arty will be mad. Arty will just die.” Iphy pleated at the robe. I saw how pretty she was and I hated her.

“He won’t care,” I tossed out. “He does it himself.”

“Arty?!!?” Their twin voices blended in a harmony of shock.

“For money?”

“Well,” now I was confused, off balance. “I don’t think he makes them pay, but … I’m not sure. Does he, maybe, pay them?”

“Who?”

“All the girls who come to his door at night in shiny clothes.”

Iphy’s face stiffened. Elly hooted, laughing. “Norm girls?” Iphy’s lips didn’t move over the words.

“Yeah. All sorts.”

“Arty, the preacher!” Elly looked up at the ceiling as she giggled. I decided she wasn’t a bad sort. But I knew about the pain in Iphy’s gut and was glad and ashamed of being glad. If I couldn’t have him, she wouldn’t either. That was enough to go on. At least I could work for him and be close to him. Elly wouldn’t let Iphy do that. I decided I really liked Elly. Her chin dropped down so she could look at me. “Do Mama and Papa know?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“How long have you known?”

“Months.”

Elly grinned at me. Iphy’s face suddenly relaxed into mild questioning. “Elly, we’re never going to do it with anybody old or fat, are we? Let’s not.”

Sometimes just looking at Al and Crystal Lil I wanted to bash their heads with a tire iron. Not to kill them, just to wake them up. Papa strutted and Mama doddered and neither of them had a glimmer of what seemed to me the real world. I suppose I wanted them to save me from my own hurts and from the moldering arsenic ache of jealousy. I wanted back into the child mind where Mama and Papa lived, the old fantasy where they could keep me safe even from my own nastiness.

Sometimes when Mama put her arm around me and kissed my smooth skull and called me her dear dove, I almost puked. If I had ever been a dear dove it was in some dream. I still wonder what she would have done if I had been able to tell her. Maybe she could have helped. Maybe she could have saved us.

I didn’t understand what Elly was up to with her whoring but I was glad because it made Iphy dirty. I didn’t know what Arty was building with his religious trappings but I was happy that he had lots of work for me to do.

Arty in his tank flashing wildly from glass wall to glass wall with the lights flaming on his gleaming body, light exploding out of the rushing froth of bubbles he beat into being until his whole tank roared with fire — then, suddenly, Arty motionless, floating four feet off the bottom, caught in the soft gold light. Arty talking to the people through the microphones set against the glass. Talking until the people talked back, talking until they cried for him, talking until they called out his name, talking until they roared, stamping in the bleachers.

Arty in his golf cart, waving a flipper at the crowd on the other side of the chain-link fence. Arty working in his van, receiving guests while I hid quietly in the stuffy security room behind one-way glass with a goofy little gun in my hand just in case. Arty surrounded by books, tapping notes with one educated flipper on a humming keyboard. Arty reading, muttering into his phone transmitter, Arty reading all the way from Mesa, Arizona, to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, without looking up, without noticing that the guy driving his rig was battling a stripped gear box the last few hundred miles because the brakes were gone.

Arty in his shower after the show, grey with the drain of whatever was eating him. Arty lying back against the wall of the shower as I scrubbed him with a brush, his eyes closed, his face smooth and dissatisfied.

Iphy decided that if I delivered the messages to their prospects I’d eventually tell Arty everything. The twins got their own phone hookup. They also recruited their piano teacher, Jonathan Tomaini, who protested that he was a musician! An artist! Not a pimp! He announced solemnly that he would inform Al immediately.

And, surprisingly, it was Iphy who sweetly, soothingly explained that if he ever did such a thing they would be forced to scream rape and point all four of their delicately accusing index fingers at him as the culprit. He quieted immediately and Elly gave him her line. He lay back on the blue sofa in obvious defeat and took in every word.

“You know what the norms really want to ask?” said Elly. “What they want to know, all of them, but never do unless they’re drunk or simple, is How do we fuck? That and who, or maybe what. Most of the guys wonder what it would be like to fuck us. So, I figure, why not capitalize on that curiosity? They don’t care that I play bass and Iphy plays treble, or whether we both like the same flavor ice cream or any of the other stupid questions they ask. The thing that boggles them and keeps them staring all the way through a sonata in G is musing about our posture in bed.

“Believe me, some of them are willing to pay a nice price to find out. The clincher is that you get ten points of the profit for your efforts. That’s a little bonus for your salary, isn’t it? Won’t that sweeten the smell just a little?”

“Ten percent?” he frowned.

“Ten,” Elly nodded.

“Gross?”

“Profit. But we’re not a cheap item. We’re setting a minimum of a thousand dollars for two hours with additional fees for any variations on the traditional.”

He couldn’t help showing his puzzlement. “I wouldn’t have thought that you needed money. It would appear that you are very comfortably provided for, and your concerts are always well attended.”

Elly smiled. “At our prices we won’t be dealing with a waiting line.”

“They’ll be people,” Iphy explained, “who are truly interested in what we have to offer.”

Arty always had a great skin — smooth and tight — never a zit or a boil. Not so much as a wart. He claimed, and it was probably true, that it was all the hours he spent submerged in the heavily chlorinated water of the tank. “I don’t even have itch mites,” he’d say. The time when Chick and the twins and I all had ringworm from mucking with a leopard cub that Horst had picked up cheap Arty didn’t get it and he wouldn’t let us touch him until we were clean again.