Geek Queen

Michael Arner

A note had been scotch-taped to the smallest of Mr. Bendices' (pillaged) rose bushes:

Dear Sir,

I have stolen your lovely white roses -- the most beautiful flowers I have ever seen -- to give to a girl named Sonia who I am in love with.

We might consider this, philosophically speaking, not as an act of particular malice, but rather, and at worst, as a sort of pretty instance of the transition between golden rule and ugly self-interest: the impersonal theft that becomes the gift with signature. I can only just vaguely imagine you standing or stooping on the lawn here, perusing these words, but I see so clearly her soft red lips pressed against these delicate petals, her sweet -- forgive me -- her sweet green eyes like these thorns and these leaves.

--sincerely yours.

It wasn't the flowers exactly. Granted, he felt perhaps a little wistful at being on the unromantic end of such a venture, fancied in fact that snatching roses was exactly the sort of thing he might very well have done once himself. When he had loved Annalisa, for example. Or rather, the sort of thing she would have asked him to do for her. (Annalisa: her black skirts and sweaters on such powder-white skin. Her warm, pouting smile and her urgent whispers. How cruel and happy she had been!)

It wasn't then the flowers exactly, but something else ineffable about his circumstances, some other condition, of which his loss was only a symptom, that continued to disturb him during the long drive from Mr. Bendices' home to the college that his daughter attended.

Certainly, some large part of his unease was nervousness about seeing his daughter again for the first time since she had visited at Christmas. Among his circle of high school friends, he remembered, it had always been the girls who had come back most changed by that first year away. How had they changed? At the time, he had suggested (in jaded tones) that he missed a certain aura of innocence about them, but his real feeling was a kind of fear that they had outgrown the old reasons people sometimes have for being intimate and that he had not.

He pushed a cassette into the tape deck, Ghould's recording of the Goldberg Variations -- which he had bought expressly for listening to on this trip. He had used to listen to them so often, as an undergraduate, on late winter and early spring afternoons, when the notes smelt to him like the thick pages in his collections of Milton and Spenser, and felt to him like the pleasant weight of theater curtains and the texture of evergreens, and held for him such clear and detailed images of secret and enormous worlds, such spirits of awe and inquiry.

On this day though, the notes sounded a little hollow. Although he tried, with mounting kinds of misgivings, alternately relaxing his mind and then forcing what he thought he ought to be seeing and feeling (at this moment, some fragile arrangement of fountains and statues and skies; in the following moment, some vast expanse of soft gray patios, some peaceful motion of swaying trees), his vision kept dissipating whenever he paused to compare it with his memories, or whenever he groped for stronger inspiration or recollection; and his thoughts kept being being strangely and unkindly invaded by the rhythm of phrases he had inadvertently memorized from the roses note. `Pretty instance of, let's see; pretty gift with signature, pretty sweet, my sweet -- forgive me -- her sweet -- forgive me -- her sweet, let's see; thorns and leaves.' In the background, one could hear Ghould moaning as he played. What had that moaning meant to the young Mr. Bendices? Something about compassion that he couldn't quite recollect. He waited for his passions to swell with favorite and familiar passages, only to realize moments later that they had passed unnoticed. And the green countryside rolled idly by Mr. Bendices' car windows and he was so uneasy and so uneasy about being uneasy that he could neither calm his thoughts nor concentrate.

Once Annalisa had worn this impossible lily white dress and her hair in wet braids. They had entered some restaurant together and she had smiled shyly at the room as everyone fell in love with her. A waiter watching her stumbled over a stray cart, throwing his tray and sending dozens of glasses and plates crashing into pieces. What color WERE her eyes? Goldberg. Golden rule; ugly self-interest. Once he had given money to an old man on the street and the man had hugged him and wouldn't let him go. One year they left his name off the list and he didn't get any valentines. He was still attractive. He was still romantic. As a baby, his daughter Tracy had been unusually assured and social. Someone had told him that.

At length, the disordered vale he had been driving through gave way and the university grounds wound slowly into view. They were peppered with young brown bodies, reveling in their newfound freedom like so many oasis prairie dogs. Some aspect of late May, some essence of frisbees and lemonade, and Mr. Bendices felt a rising sense of shyness and excitement, tugged at his eyebrows absent-mindedly. Girls lay tanning on arrays of blankets. Faint breezes scattering abandoned papers. He saw bare-chested boys and felt that he understood something about their shorts and their sunglasses and their cheerful vulgarity. On the lawn before her dorm, his daughter Tracy played aerobee with a group of her friends.

That her friends should also be enjoying the turning of seasons seemed to Mr. Bendices to be a little bit obscene. He had met a number of them before and knew that he didn't much like them. They appeared to him now as a mass of pale, plump white bodies. They were all males, scraggly and unshaven and invariably crouched as cowardly lions, out-of-place out-of-doors, poorly washed and poorly dressed. Their smiles had too much lust and innocence about them.

He had listened to them speak, so arrogant and passionate and smug about their silly fantasies, so delighted in their tiny introverted, well-ordered worlds, so vicarious and lifeless with their science-fiction and their computers and their ludicrous games. And his daughter in the midst of them, worshiped like some reigning geek queen.

Tracy was lovely. She had auburn hair and gray-brown eyes and such soft, peach, freckled skin. He watched her play -- so young and happy, her movements so graceful.

He pulled up alongside the curb where her laundry bags and suitcases lay in a heap. When she finally turned to see him, a wide, pretty smile spread across her face.

"Daddy!" in the feigned little-girl voice that had always annoyed him (this time it didn't) and the gnomes she had been romping with stopped and stood up straight and looked at him as if he'd disturbed playing kittens or frightened away some just-discovered gazelle.

"Put the napkin in your lap, Dad." Tracy had arranged for the two of them to have dinner with a few of her friends and their parents at Seagull Street. They were seated closely and uncomfortably around a polished wooden table set at the edge of a dock over an artificial lake. Fragments of conversation drifted down to them occasionally from a sexless couple seated at a balcony somewhere in the darkness above them. Everything was lit dimly: the walls adorned with anchors and lengths of rope and paintings of ships and storms and seas.

Mr. Bendices was irritated at being instructed in etiquette in front of Tracy's friends' parents. He was irritated by the situation in general, especially anxious as he was to speak with his daughter again alone, and he waited with a sublimity of patience for the evening to end.

Tracy's friend Gavin balanced a steak knife between the prongs of his fork, held it there unsteadily with his thumb. "Hand phaser," he declared, "Meem." His skin was tragic and he would always laugh too loudly and too long.

"Cricket, might you pass me the wine list," Tracy's friend Richard suggested in a strained English accent.

"Huh, what?" asked Mr. Bendices.

"He calls me Cricket," Tracy explained.

He kept thinking that his situation was an almost laughable one, but couldn't make himself take this attitude towards it and only became (by slow degrees) more angry. That Richard's father, for example, with his round, wrinkled gray face and his blue velvet bowtie, should be smiling with insane pride as his son scrambled for intimate tones with Tracy -- seemed to Mr. Bendices almost conspiratorial, almost too comic to be believed.

"Ale!" screamed Gavin, adopting an earthy tone, "tankards here, wench!" Their waitress -- an attractive college-age girl, wearing a half-slit bermuda skirt and a hawiian-print polo shirt -- paused at another table to look towards Mr. Bendices' group with some disdain. He was uncomfortable at the head of the table. Sitting there indicated too much authority over and association with the assembly, like being the best man in a ceremony where one hates the bride. He stared intently at the empty chair at the end of the table across from him.

"Gavin has an exceptional imagination," his mother confided. She wore a faded blue jumpsuit with a golden belt around her waist. Heavy black earrings hung within the coils of her dirty-blond hair. She kept rubbing her eyes, which caused the powder on her face to roll up into tiny balls. "He's always off working on one of his dungeons," she said. "Or doing research for one of his medieval dungeons." Gavin's mother beamed beneath her powder. "Gavin always says that it's so important for every little detail to be AUTHENTIC," she said, touching Mr. Bendices' hand and pronouncing the word authentic as if it were some epically clever punch-line.

"Is that so?" Mr. Bendices inquired. He had noticed a pink splash of calomine lotion on his daughter's ankle before she had changed clothes and it had set him to remembering something. He and Annalisa had once slipped through the locked gates of Los Altos Golf Course on a humid August evening, the moon and headlights from the rustling highway shone reflected in the course's various ponds.

"He's also a POET..." Gavin's mother began.

Tracy's friend Daniel hiccupped at the opposite end of the table without seeming to notice that he had done so. Daniel's parents hadn't come; they wouldn't arrive until the following day. Of all of Tracy's friends, Mr. Bendices liked Daniel the least. His body was always making strange noises, but he almost never said anything himself. He would sit and stare at Mr. Bendices with dull, subdued eyes as if he would rather be in anyone else's company. He smelled like fallen crabapples.

Across the restaurant, a young blond-haired man, wearing black suspenders and a black tie over a baggy white smock, jumped suddenly to his feet, fell to his knees, and asked the woman he was with if she would marry him. The woman laughed and blushed and cried a little and said that she would.

Richard's mother noticed that there were bright orange fish swimming in the artificial lake and that they looked a little sickly.

Daniel smiled stupidly at Tracy and she regarded him, for a moment warmly. Their meals had been ordered ages ago and still hadn't come. Only Mr. Bendices seemed to realize that something was wrong. He leaned to his daughter and whispered in her ear, "I think you are wasting your talents, honey, on hearts too easily broken." Although he was serious, he meant for her to take it jestingly. He meant to sound tender, even accepting. But he felt compelled also to make her see that he still believed she had a destiny in leagues above those of her playmates and that he wanted to re-establish an old sort of candor between them. She looked at him with an odd mixture of love and disappointment and he felt afraid for an instant that someone must be scheming to take the loveliest things in his life away from him.

The dandruff against Gavin's glasses was sparkling in the candlelight as he discoursed giddily on; surely everyone was staring or pretending not to except for Daniel now smiling absently into space. Sometimes Annalisa would get up in the middle of class, run wonderfully out and into the street, trailing scarves or papers or whisps of perfume.

Mr. Bendices loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top of his dress shirt. It was as if he had been sitting in that chair his entire life, as if he could hardly breathe. He was aching to move, to run perhaps and to feel the night air against his face, and to take Tracy away with him and away from them. Free summer evenings spread before him like well-ordered constellations. He could remember quite clearly when they had first driven her to school nine months earlier. They had traveled late at night, and the stars and the lights of the towns, and the soft green glow of the console instruments in his car, and the weight of the darkness, make him feel as if they were inside of some slow spacecraft, moving bubblelike between immense and mysterious worlds.

He stood up and was a little dizzy and faltered somewhat on his feet, pushed hard against the table, tipping the empty chair at the other end into the artificial lake, scattering pumpkinseed fishes. He had taken hold of Tracy's wrist and she was looking at him quizzically. Gavin and Richard laughed with abandon. Their parents looked ready to forgive him. A group of busboys moved to fish the chair out of the lake. There was a long moment of silence.

"She cracks me up," one of the voices in the balcony above them was saying, "She'll tell you TO YOUR FACE that she'll do it and then just like that, she won't do it. What is she THINKing? It's like absolutely TO YOUR FACE and she doesn't even try or anything..."

"Daddy?" Tracy laughed nervously.

"I've just remembered," Mr. Bendices stammered. "I've just remembered, so sorry." He let go of Tracy's wrist, brought out his wallet and began shuffling through bills but found that he couldn't count them, threw them all on the table. "It was so nice to see all of you again, it just can't be helped," he said. "Difficult to believe. I've only just remembered."

"What is it, Dad? What?" He turned away from them and found his footing. "We'll be right back," Tracy said. That was good.

He was more anxious still because their looks around the table had been so sad but that escape he experienced as a moment frozen -- or rather his egress seemed to have no ending, as one falls in dreams. Bric-a-brac evolved on the restaurant walls with endless variation around their flight. Hostesses and busboys wove lethargic about them. He couldn't look at her. Directionless, they kept making wrong-turns into the same cloak-room and he felt their progress slow and slow, collapsing almost into point where he felt that his failure was much less recent, more ineluctable than he had originally believed. An old and impersonal theft. Then, also suspended, there was the melancholy and the relief of a sort of surrender to it and he held so tightly to his daughter's hand, feeling nothing.

Michael Arner is a Math/Computer Science and Creative Writing Major at Carnegie Mellon University. He divides residency between the Huckleberry Ashram in Pittsburgh and his home in Albuquerque. His current projects include a study of Eliot's "Four Quartets," a history of computer chess, and a prose poem novella.

ma1v@andrew.cmu.edu

Quanta is Copyright(c)1994 Daniel K. Appelquist.
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