one of them looking wide-eyed over his shoulder as he went. Duncan said, ‘Just a minute,” then got up and walked away. Veronica was left alone with love creaking and straining in the dark. An enormous cloud streamed across the sky, making the moon a radiant blur. It was beautiful, the voices coming out of the tiny machine to deepen a patch of night, a shimmering skin of eternal love cracked and strained, with mortality coming through. “Cosi I’effluvio del desio tutta m’aggira, felice mi fa,felice mi fa!” Her heart beat. She was afraid. Some bushes stirred. Had Duncan gone to the wide-eyed boy? She sat up, heart pounding. But it was him, coming back to her—and with him were two ragged white children, a small boy and a smaller girl.
“Who were they?” I asked.
“They lived in the tunnels under the subways. They’d come up looking for food for their family. Duncan knew the boy somehow—not that way, he said.”
The boy stood whispering to Duncan. The girl squatted next to Veronica, blinking curiously. Her clothes, her face, her hair were coated in oily gray dirt. When Veronica called her “hon,” she bared her teeth, then smiled. Veronica wanted to take them to the police, but they shook their heads vehemently; the cops would take them from their parents, said the boy. Instead, they greedily ate the grapes and then the bread. Veronica wished they had cookies to give them; she wished she could comb the girl’s hair. Duncan asked about somebody named Ray; in a careful voice, the boy said he was sick. They put the rest of the food in the basket and gave it to the children. They watched them carry it into the dark, each holding the handle like a modern Hansel and Gretel, filthy, sick, and innocent.
“Who was Ray?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Another of Duncan’s boys, I assume. Excuse me, hon.” In a curve of light on the convex face of my screen, Veronica’s tiny reflection approached the supervisor’s tiny desk. The fun-house curve stretched her body pencil-thin,
then mashed it, then pulled it grossly wide. I had a second of feeling—what was it? She came back, gross, mashed, elongated, then, stepping out of the curve, disappeared.
Another time, they went to the Museum of Modern Art, then returned to the park to ride the carousel, where stumbling security guards chased a shrieking homeless woman around the rising, falling ponies. They dined with an elegant old man, an author and lover of opera—“He once cared for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dogs, exquisite chows”—who called them “Lord and Lady Bracknell.”
“To lose one’s girlfriend is perhaps careless,” said Lord Bracknell. “But to lose one’s boyfriend is incorrigible.”
“To lose one’s boyfriend is also impossible,” replied Lady Bracknell, “when one has so many.”
“Ah, but so many is the same as one, my love, and their one is nothing to your two.”
Lady Bracknell’s words were elegant in fragrant shapely smoke fresh from her throat. The red impress of her striated lower lip was perfect on her Styrofoam cup. The sugar sign beamed its red message across the river. Safety, it said. Stillness. Sweetness.
Lord Bracknell’s young lover arrived and there was a scene. He was a somewhat unclean but fetching boy with pocked skin and sullen, flashing eyes. He looked at Lady Bracknell and said, “Who’s the fish?” “Better fresh fish than rotten meat,” said she. “You don’t look so fresh to me,” he sniffed. “I’m still fresher than you smell, young man.” Lord Bracknell laughed like a hyena in a lace ruff and kissed his lady good-bye, first on her lips and then her hand. He was off into the night with his protege. Veronica shared a cab home with the elegant and embarrassed old man. The little wooden doors had whirred shut on the litde kissing figures.
I stop to wipe the sweat gathered at my eyebrows. My bad arm twinges as I crush it against my side, pinning the umbrella in place while I get the aspirin and water botde from my bag. I imagine massed atoms of gray and green rising from the ground in a moving cloud, twinkling like motes of dust, except alive, complex, full of joy and perversity. Alain’s eyes—perhaps they were the human form of this. Perhaps Duncan was the human form of this in his entirety. I imagine myself blundering through a night haunt, amid plain people dressed so fantastically, they make my beauty trite—an enormous cloud streams across the room and there is Duncan, singing, “E tu che sai, che memori e ti struggi da me tanto rifitggi.” I go into a bathroom, where the thudding music is dulled, and there a tinny thread of La Boheme flashes and disappears amid voices and rushing water—back to the enchanted park where Veronica and Duncan picnicked with their children. Walking home one morning—cold white sky with a thin aura of liquid gold quivering on buildings and roaring trucks—I saw a prostitute haggling with a john. Mockingly, she shouted, “Hey, blondie!” There was Duncan kissing Veronica in the street, and I did not care about heaven.
I smiled and said, “Good morning!” with such warmth that the prostitute looked abashed.
“Have you ever thought of modeling, hon?”
“I already was a model.” I didn’t take my eyes off the word processor.
“Really? What kind? Catalog or—”
“Print. Runway. Paris.”
“And what are-you doing here?' she asked.
“I’m here because I got cheated out of all my money and made bad enemies.” I trembled inside to talk about it. My contempt rose up to steady my trembling. “It’s a horrible business,” I snapped. “I’d never do it again.”
There was a wondering silence. Veronica smoked with her lips in a sideways purse so she could stare at me as she inhaled; her eyes flared with each tiny facial twist.
“How did you get into modeling to begin with?”
“By fucking a nobody catalog agent who grabbed my crotch.”
I didn’t have to be embarrassed or make up something nice, because Veronica was nobody. My disdain was so habitual, I didn’t notice it. But she did. She said, “Every pretty girl has a story like that, hon. I had that prettiness. I have those stories. I don’t have to do that anymore, though. It’s my show now.” And she turned into a movie star, strutting past me while I gawked.
It’s raining again. I am deep in the unfolding All around me living green opens and closes, undulating in ripples and great waves. The creek flashes, eager for the piercing rain, its hard, concentrated pouring A slim tree naked of bark, ocher, smooth, comes out of the ground in a sinuous twist. A piece of fungus grows in a neat half wheel around a twig, like a hat on a lady with a long neck. I think of Veronica. I speak aloud. “I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s nobody’s show now.”
“Well, hon, if I were you, I’d try again. This is New York, not Paris.” She lighted another cigarette. “But this time, don’t let anybody grab your crotch.” And she smiled.
One evening when I was walking in the East Village with Candy, we came on a party that had spilled out of an apartment building; people stood on the sidewalk, drinking from plastic cups, or lounged on the hoods of cars, like the girl in black laughing at the boy who tried to kiss the bottom of her silver shoe. Music fell out windows, splattered on the ground, got up, and walked away. Candy recognized somebody; he invited us into a tiled hallway (blue, gold, and ruined white) and up a linoleum stair to a large apartment sagging on its moldings and vibrating with many feet. Because I had to work that night, I drank orange juice straight and wandered through the party, bored by but still accepting the expression that rose on every face as I went past. “Beautiful.” “Beautiful!” “Bee-oot-ee-fool.” The expression might be formed with wonder or contempt or warmth or disinterest, but it was still the same coin I mechanically took and tossed on the pile. Half-looking for something else, I walked past a partially open door and saw a well-dressed boy sitting on a bed, gazing at the party with a look of intent, distant amusement. He held a worn toy dog on his lap, which he stroked as if it were a pet. There was something mocking in the gesture, as if it were meant to subtly ridicule anyone who saw it. When he saw me, his expression offered me the coin, but so casually that it fell on the floor before I could take it. He was very handsome himself.
“Hello,” he said, holding the toy dog up to his face. “Would you like to meet Skipper?”
His name was Jamie. His soft voice was desiccated and voluptuous at once. He said he was in his room because it was his roommate’s party and he didn’t expect to be interested in anyone there, and besides, he was shy. A fragile system of model airplanes hung from the ceiling over his bed, casting soft, gently stirring shadows. “These are beautiful,” I said. I reached up to touch one; shyly, the system dipped and bobbed.
“Skipper likes you,” he said.
We left the party and went for a walk. On the bottoms of his severely pointed shoes, Jamie wore cleats, which clicked loudly on the pavement. The only people I’d ever known to wear cleats were middle-school boys, who wore them so they could kick hard and make a lot of noise when they walked. I asked Jamie why he wore them, and he said, “I just like them.” His words were modest, but they whirred with secret importance. He said everything that way. The British monarchy was very important; Prince Charles’s recent marriage was particularly so. Ornette Coleman was the only good jazz musician. He approved of men’s shoes on women. He approved of Buckminster Fuller and Malcolm McLaren. He approved of Bow Wow Wow.
His opinions were frivolous, fierce, and exact. He worked in a small graphics plant that made logos and labels for sundry products. But he was as proud and particular as any Parisian playboy. His favorite logo was the brand name of a line of white paper sacks commonly used by small grocers; I had never noticed, but tornado was printed in brown letters with a vibrant round T at the top of each bag. “It’s so elegant,” he said, and it was.
When I told him I had to go to work, he asked if he could see me again, and I said yes. He hailed me a cab and I got into it even though I could only afford to take it to the nearest subway.
I think of Jamie and silliness pops out of the ground in the form of a California hazelnut, bearing its tasseled foliage on each slim branch. Amid death and groaning wooden power and the wet complexity of moss and fungus and vines—from the same solemn pit, silliness pops up to dangle its tassels. Jamie. Alain. Joanne. We all came up out of the ground and took our forms. So much harder for us to have a form because we have one on
the outside and too many inside. Depth, surface, power, fragility, direction, indirection, arrogance, servility, rocks, roots, grass blossoms, dirt. We are a tangle of roots, a young branch, a flower, a moldy spore. You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for. Time parts its shabby curtain: There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand. I touch the hazelnut bush gently as I pass.
I saw Jamie again and we went for another walk. We bought tinned sardines and potato chips and candy, then went back to his apartment to eat. His roommates weren’t home. We finished our dinner and talked until it was so dark, we could see each other only as dim shapes. Jamie didn’t turn on the light. Shadow airplanes appeared and disappeared as headlights swept the wall. “Would you like to take a bath together?” he asked.
In the claw-foot bathtub, I sat between his legs while he held me from behind. Out a low half-moon window was the back of an abandoned building and a piece of illuminated street: the deep gray stone of the building stippled with scars and holes, squares of sidewalk, a lip of curb, a groove of gutter, the melancholy gray of the street. On the street a dog came trotting, chin raised and tail up, all brisk paws, ears, and snout. Jamie laughed; laughing, I turned and he held my face in his wet hands and kissed my forehead, then my closed eyes.
He was gentle in a way that I had not experienced before. He touched me intimately but also somewhat impersonally. He was polite, yet dirty, too. He was . covered with soft black hair, which seemed at odds with his sleek habits of dress; with his clothes off, he revealed his nature, without any cleats or clothes
to hold it up, and it was wonderful to see, like the coarse little dog prancing down the street.
“You should model,” he said. He was lying on top of me, feeling my eyebrows with his lower lip. ‘You could make money.” “I already did,” I said. “I didn’t like it.”
“Class,” he said warmly. “You have class.”
But I was lying.
Candy didn’t like Jamie because he was affected and because he was short and cold with her. “He makes such a big deal out of himself—those stupid cleats and that toy dog—and I don’t think there’s anything there.”
But that wasn’t true. There was something “there.” Something so scornful that it willfidly stunted itself just to withhold itself; something so scared that it blindly clung to objects like toys and cleats, pitifully trying to blossom, jealously nursing its own pathos and mocking it, too,
“It’s glamour in its purest form,” said Veronica. “I approve.’tit,;
She spoke of fey youths she had known, of their clothes and hair, the petulant swing of their slim hips. Of one who tried to kill himself with pills and wound up curled in a corner of her apartment, alternately sobbing in her lap and barfing in her wicker basket.
“It’s so moving, that artificiality,” she said, “moving and wistful. Of course there’s something there; unfortunately, there’s always something ‘there.’ Something you will one day be sorry you ever saw. But my advice to you, hon, is not to go looking for it. You’ll see it eventually.” She exhaled a noseful of smoke. “Probably in your nice wicker basket.”
Of course, she was wearing men’s shoes. She was also wearing a cable-knit sweater with raised colored animal shapes
knit into it: a cat, a dog, a rooster. Red, green, and orange on peach. Frivolous, exact, and fiercely ugly.
In September, the sublet with Candy ended. I found a new sublet, a tiny apartment in the West Village; I used the last of my French money for the deposit. It was a studio with a stove, a refrigerator, and a sink on one wall and a bed on the other, both walls boxed in by a window on one end and a closet on the other. The window was protected by a metal grid that had gotten stuck shut; to open it, I had to poke a broom handle through one of the grid’s diamond-shaped gaps, manipulate the latch with it, and nudge the window open. Not much sun came irij| but when it did, it made a wobbling grid of diamonds on the floor.
When Sheila came to visit from New Jersey, she said, “God! You have to do that every time you open the window?*’ She told me Lucia was pregnant again. She told me she had been promoted to store manager. We went to Central Park, where we rented a rowboat and rowed on the lake. She let her hand trail in the water and her face grew wistful and luminous. Her face was tense for a twenty-year-old girl. Heavy like her will was pushing down, trying to crush something deep inside her, tense like the crushed thing was pushing back. I thought, She is ugly already. As if she heard me, she frowned and drew her hand from the water. “Did you know Ed is seeing Denise?” she asked.
I didn’t see Sheila or Candy again. I saw Jamie every night I could. We would go for walks and buy our dinner to take back home and eat. Sometimes he would take me to secondhand stores in the East Village and tell me what clothes to buy. Sometimes we would go to clubs and meet his friends, people with changeable hair and light, pointedly civil manners. One of them, a pleasant blond named Eric, with the faintly impossible
air of someone who had never been hurt, told me I was stupid not to model. He worked at a magazine made up almost exclusively of pictures of models and actors. “Nobody likes it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter; you only do it a few years and make a lot of money.” When I told him about Alain, he scoffed.
“Did you steal anything from him?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “he stole from me.”
“Then he doesn’t remember you. Everybody knows he’s crazy anyway.”
Eric was only an assistant at the magazine, but he said he could introduce me to a photographer. “You just need pictures. Go to an agency; you
’ll be working again. Just lie about your age.” He gave me his number. He smiled at the hunger that suddenly came into my eyes.
The photographer lived with his assistant in a loft in the flower district. It was cold and the flower stands were closed. Their rough doors looked boarded up; their dark windows were haunted by ghosdy stalks and stems and cold, faint-gleaming pots. The photographer was three flights up. We sat in his kitchen smoking hash and drinking tea from china cups, talking about Paris. There was a big tub in the kitchen, an unhinged door on the tub and a dish drain on the door. Old trunks and makeshift wardrobes draped in musty clothes spilled in from the bedroom, and the assistant, a serious boy with the short, sweet legs of a child, deftiy picked through them. They dressed me in a red jumpsuit with a white plastic belt and matching white boots. The photographer said, “You’re a Bond girl!” From out of the past, spy music brayed. I grinned and, legs widely akimbo in my litde boots, pointed my finger to shoot Alain through the heart.
“Do you think he was a real photographer?” asked Joy.
“Real, yes. Good, I don’t know.”
We were at her house, drinking red wine and halfwatching a black-and-white movie on TV Except for one little lamp draped with a shirt, the lights were off to hide the mess. In the gray glow of the television, Joy applied hot blue nail polish and talked about another audition that had gone badly. As she talked, a girl’s face appeared on the television, ardent and soft, with millions of light cells flowing through it. Her dark liquid eyes were vulnerable, joyful and radiant with hope.
Veronica Page 13