Geek Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

loiterers and into the faster legs of the midday sidewalk. I feel her behind me, threading the crowd after me, shortening her stride to accommodate me, coming up beside me at the corner.
    Sucking air noisily, I lean forward to discourage conversation. She is wearing dark green, her heels bouncing impatiently beside me. There is no pleasure in having her so close. What does she want?
    “How about the grill at the Via Veneto? They do a lunch buffet. Miss McGurk?”
    I can't look at her. I try to civilize my voice. “I don't eat lunch.”
    The light changes, trapping us on an island in the wide street. The cars swarm around us in a sea of stink. She's caught me on this concrete knob and her harpoon is suddenly revealed, her eyes, her words ripping out of her. “Look, forget that you don't know me. There are two things. First, you've got to model for me.” Her sweet-simp guise is gone. She is green fire above Binewski cheekbones. She means to convince me. The heat of her intention has my throat melting. I want to hold her face in my hands and push her strange hair back from her Binewski forehead. The faces behind the windshields save me. A Binewski never disintegrates in front of the ticket holders.
    She is burning away at me, talking fast, her eyes demanding. The anatomy competition is coming up. She has already won two years in a row. The judges will be reluctant to give it to her again. She needs something special, something hot ... Art school. She is talking art school and she is talking to me. These two facts amaze me.
    “The first year I went to LoPrinzi's gym and did a series on a body builder. Technical, illustrative, and predictable. Last year I went to the medical school and did a flayed, emaciated cadaver. Classic and totally predictable. I've got to show more than a technician's skills this time. I've got to rock them. I've got to yank their hearts out.”
    Her urgency has my stomach cringing, trying to crawl down my leg. Is this an accident? Is it coincidence that she comes to me? All this time of silent watching, my secret care. My anonymous arm holding the invisible umbrella. Could she know? Is this her way of opening me? Slipping in like the knife that unlocks the oyster? Or does some pulse in her bones, some twist in her genetic coil, lean her toward me in a blind craving? The light changes.
    “Look, there's a bus bench. Come sit a minute.” She sails past revving machines in the intersection, collapses onto the bench and waves me up beside her as she yanks a sheaf of papers from her bag.
    “Reduced copies. You don't get the full effect but you can see that I'm serious.”
    The top sheet shows a hip socket, lushly washed, the hard lines impatient and powerful. The second sheet is exposed abdominal muscle, fiercely striated. Then come loving portraits of callused arthritic hands and bunion-twisted feet, a flayed jaw, a joyous nude of the blobby news vendor from the corner. He is hunched on a stool, pudgy hands propped on knees like sagging pumpkins, his acorn head thrown back in surprise on what passes for a neck. I don't understand the drawings, or why they move me. I want to cry, loud and wet with the pain of love. The drawings are as mysterious to me as the school report cards that the Reverend Mother mailed dutifully every few months. No Binewski ever made pictures. I never had a report card. But I saved Miranda's, stacked and wrapped with a rubber band in the biggest of the old trunks.
    Her long hand taps at the dangling ink scrotum, the nearly invisible penis of the news vendor. “Characteristic of the fat-storing pattern in males,” she's saying, “the belly seems to swallow the penis from the roots up, literally shortening it ... ”
    “Disgusting!” snaps a voice behind me.
    “Fuck off!” yells Miranda. The critic sniffs away toward the corner. Just a passerby. Miranda lays an arm over my hump to protect me. Pointing at the line depicting a rumpled buttock drooping from the stool, she