Trivia

I found myself playing trivia with a cute girl at the elbow of the bar. We hadn’t signed up to play, so we just called out the answers.

“Which John Steinbeck novel revolves around the characters Lenny and George?”

“Of Mice and Men!” we said.

“Which American novelist wrote the Rabbit tetralogy?”

“John Updike!” we cried.

We couldn’t miss. We were getting some good glares from the tables behind us. The host, a man-child who was halfway through his third Dr. Pepper, sat at a foldout table with a microphone and a laptop. He seemed very content and I didn’t see him pull his eyes away from the screen once.

“Who in the 1940s invented the Aqua-Lung?” he asked.

“Jacques Cousteau,” I said, “that one was easy.”

“And Emile Gagnan,” she added. I looked at her. She was wearing a black and white dress with diagonal stripes that turned horizontal below her chest.

The bartender walked over to our corner. “If you two keep calling out the answers you’re going to have to leave.”

“Give me two PBRs.”

“I’m serious, one more time and you’re out.”

“Sure.” I gave him a five and put a dollar on the bar for tip. The host was feverishly scoring the previous round. I turned to my teammate.

“I was under the impression that it was just Cousteau.”

“They were co-inventors: Cousteau was the rockstar, Gagnan was the engineer.”

“I didn’t think anybody spent more time on Wikipedia than me, except maybe the host.”

“Well that’s depressing.”

“I like it. What’s your name?”

“It’s a normal name,” she said, “It’s not interesting. What about yours?”

“My last name looks French, but it’s not. People say it’s difficult to pronounce.”

“I’m jealous.”

“You shouldn’t be. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind your name.”

She nodded, but seemed doubtful. The bartender brought the beers and I handed one to my teammate. She looked at me. She had big, dark eyes.

“Is there an interesting story behind your last name?” she asked.

“I’ve heard two. The first, which I heard from my uncles as a child, is kind of mysterious and romantic, but it hasn’t been substantiated by the internet. They said it meant People of the snow. I wish it were true. People of the snow. Isn’t that nice? The second story is that it’s a Gaelic translation of the Germanic name Siegfried, which means Victory. You know like the Nazis, ‘Seig Heil!’”

“My first name is Spanish for pillar.”

“Like a pole?”

“Like a support beam.”

I didn’t hear the next question of the next round, but apparently she did.

“Cheese!” she yelled, and there were some groans from the tables behind us. The host put his Dr. Pepper down loudly on the table. The bartender stood up from taking an order down the bar and pointed at us. “That’s it you two, out!”

We walked out to the street and I saw lights above the houses. It looked like a stadium, but I guessed that it was a port on the river. We were close to the river, but you couldn’t see the lights during the day and you wouldn’t know.

“Where are you staying?” she asked.

“With some friends on the couch. You?”

“With my mom, but just for now.”

I took a step forward and brought my lips to hers, accidentally imagining her mother: a woman with the same face, hair, and dress, but with more makeup, black stockings, and a larger bust. I pulled back.

“You know,” I said, “you’re the best trivia player I’ve ever met.”

“I’m an insignificant-information specialist.”

I asked her what she wanted to do, and she took me by the hand and led me down a street where quaint little houses and banana trees stood over a sidewalk made of brick. There was a bike with thin tires and a large seat locked to a stop sign. She unlocked it and I told her to straddle the front tire and walk and then jump up on the handlebars when I started pedaling. I took care to avoid the parked cars. It was damp and dark and brisk with her good-smelling hair in my face. The world of drunk bicycling is a wonderful world. It has to be at least as good as drunk driving, and it’s probably better, because there is less guilt and less danger of anyone but yourself getting killed.

We rode our strange vehicle for two blocks, and then the pedaling became incrementally more difficult. The back wheel was under-inflated. I told her to hop off when I hit the brakes, and she pushed off and her legs cleared the front wheel. We walked onto a street with a boulevard and large houses with wide, deserted porches. There was a heightened perception and an intimacy and measuredness to time that we’d not felt on the bike. The streetlights illuminated the lower branches of huge oak trees and on the ground the moist-looking roots pushed the sidewalks up from the ground.

We found a dark place along the side of a house and we kissed and I turned her around and pulled up the back of her black and white dress. I liked what I saw, maybe as much as I’d ever liked anything else, but there was also an unexpected feeling of familiarity, a sudden sense that I was participating in some ubiquitous and ultimately banal enterprise. Of course, this did not stop me and I was glad to find that once again we were of the same mind. I probed her every centimeter, exploring with my hands, growing more depraved with every passing moment, as she ducked, spun, and fluttered, letting me know her body in segments, engaging with pieces rather than the whole. What we were doing was more like watching professional sports than making love and it took great focus and encouragement to achieve anything substantial, but I finally did.

I walked home and forgot about her that night. I don’t know when I first started thinking about her again, but a week later I was back for trivia night sitting at the elbow of the bar. I couldn’t remember her face, so I sat and listened for someone calling out the answers. There was a pretty girl next to me. We looked at each other, but she didn't have anything to say and neither did I. It went like that all night, these looks. Finally I leaned over. “Your name means pillar in Spanish," I said. "Pillar, like a pole.”

“Like a support beam.”

She looked at me, smiling very large, and I remembered her eyes. She was more dark and wonderful looking than anything I'd expected to see that night.

“There are two stories about your name,” she said. “One your uncles told you. It’s mysterious and romantic and it’s the one you’d like to believe, but the other story is true."

I was in love.

"Do you want a drink?"

"No."

"Me either."

“Then let’s go."

She was the best teammate I ever had and we never played trivia again.