Veronica

by Mary Gaitskill

  I left my temp job before I started in the restaurant, and a week of days lay before me in sweet blank chunks. I went to movies by myself. I went to museums by myself. I went for walks. On one walk, I ran into George and stopped to talk with him. When I mentioned Veronica, he said, “We don’t see her anymore, not Max and I. She started up with it again, and suicide is simply not something I want to watch, thank you very much.”

  It was late autumn and bright, and there was a delighted feeling in the air. A girl with magenta hair walked by in a tiny black skirt and leopard-print boots, swinging her slim hips with delight. George and I stopped to watch her. She smiled.

  “Is Duncan really that bad?” I asked. A bilious look came into George’s pale eyes.

  “Yes, he is that bad. He’s the kind of man who pretends to desire a woman because her desire tweaks his vanity—even when he knows he could... and she knows—” The bile receded. ‘Well, it’s not my business. It’s sad, but there’s nothing you can say to her. She goes right into ‘hon’ mode.”

  I said, “She hasn’t got another mode.” We said good-bye.

  Still, I called Veronica to tell her about my new job. She congratulated me. She said we must keep in touch. I told her about running into George.

  “Oh, don’t believe that old bitch,” she said. “I only saw Duncan a few times for coffee. George is just using that as an excuse. He’s a misogynist, you know.”

  "George?"

  “I was shocked, too. But we had a fight and he said some things that were totally unforgivable.”

  “But a misogynist?” What does that word mean to her? I wondered.

  “Absolutely.”

  She asked if I’d like to meet for coffee. I didn’t want to, but I said yes. I guess she didn’t want to, either; she canceled at the last minute.

  The following months were an oscillating loop of dreams— brilliant and blurred, like a carnival ride at night, lighting up and going dark as its cars toss and churn. From a distance, it is beautiful, even peaceful. From inside, it rattles and roars and roughly yanks you by the neck. I ran from dining room to kitchen with my hands full of plates. The dishwasher creaked and loosed gusts of hot steam, the kitchen boys yakked in Spanish, and the cook spun out plate after plate of flawless food. I ran back through great vases of gaudy flowers, wild ginger and birds-of-paradise with gaping orange beaks. Gorgeous people leaned over succulent plates, gobbling. Earrings flashed and jiggled on jawbones; an eloquent hand drew a lovely emotion out of air; hot eyes fired rounds of arrows at a naked breastbone. Delicacy, roughness, mincing intelligence, and raw, rampant stupidity ran together in the pitched jabber. Back in the kitchen, a radio played sequined songs and the Mexican boys scraped everything off the plates, mashed it up, and washed it down the garbage disposal while the boy at the dishwasher did a butt-bumping dance with the boy mopping the floor. I gossiped with the other wait and bus persons about actresses in the dining room and who was fucking whom as we snatched extra plates of calamari, tuna tartare, bilberries, and lemon cream. At closing, we all piled into a sagging taxi with its seat propped up by oily black springs and got out at a club, where I leaned into a wall of canned music and tongue-kissed a waiter as handsome as Jamie until I passed out, only to wake up alone, slumped on a

  cold banquette. After three days, I pulled myself out of this slop, put on fresh makeup, and went to a new agency, where I met a woman with powerful shoulders and flat buttocks dressed in a tight leopard print. She looked at my pictures, frowned, looked at me, back to the pictures, looked up, and burst out, “But you’re Alison Owen! What are you doing in these awful pictures?”

  Her name was Morgan Crosse. She had unmoored eyes and a voice full of force. I told her what had happened in Paris. It made it more real to describe it to someone who knew what it meant, and I began to cry. She said not to worry. She said I could destroy Alain. She said she’d get me a voodoo doll, which I would stick with pins every day for thirty days, then put in the freezer, and I’d be fine. Soon, I was standing in Central Park, bitterly cold in fluttering underwear. A stolid girl smiled uncertainly as she held the light-blinded eye of the reflector, and the camera saturated me with brilliance. Then I was sitting in an overheated trailer, talking with Pia about David Bowie and Ezra Pound while Ava nibbled cold cream from ajar and mechanical windup stylists tortured our hair. At a magazine party, I sat at a table with the most famous model of the year, a seventeen-year-old whose laughing face was a fleshy description of pleasure, satiety, and engagement that engaged at one decibel again and again. Photographers pitilessly filled her with their radiant needles until she was riddled with invisible holes and joyfully pouring radiance out each one. As an afterthought, a photographer turned and photographed me. My picture would appear later in a magazine society page. In the photo, I was sitting next to the young writer who had briefly occupied the chair next to me when it was vacated by a columnist. He sat down to ask me if I’d ever seen Modigliani’s paintings. “Because you’re like a beautiful Modigliani painting,” he said. “You should go see the exhibit at the Metropolitan.” I waited for him to ask me to go with him, but he didn’t. He just looked at me a long moment. He had intense eyebrows and hazel eyes with bright changeable

  streaks glowing emberlike through the solid color. His name was Patrick. He gave the impression of a fast current that you might ride on, laughing. We talked about nothing and then he got up and left. I waited a very pleasant moment before getting up, too. Six months later, his friends would ignore me and sting me with weapons made of the finest jealousy and gossamer contempt. A woman writing a book on the history of troll dolls would look at me and talk loudly about the trivial nature of beauty and fashion. A short actress would turn her back on me while I was speaking and put her arms around Patrick. I would break a wineglass in a hostess’s bathroom and walk on it until the splinters were unseeable. I would change my mind and guiltily mop the glass with a wet towel. ‘Alison?” Patrick would pound on the door. But that night, he proudly introduced me. That night, I said, “I’m a model,” and it came out shy and shining at the same time. People smiled and parted, and allowed me to enter the social grid.

  I slip, fail, and muddy my knee. The sky beats on my umbrella; the wind tries to take it from me. “Come on, rat face,” said a photographer, “give me a little hope.” My dream loop flies. I walk and pant like an angry wolf. Faces and scenes rapidly bloom, one out of the other, making a living mosaic that fed me and starved me, freed and captured me at once. And deep within the bright swift-changing pattern is the darkness and emptiness of my apartment, where my phone rings and rang. It was, is, Veronica. “Duncan is dying,” she said. “He has it. He has AIDS.”

  We met in a neighborhood bar, a dark rectangle filled with jukebox songs.

  “You might not have it,” I said. “Some people still think women can’t—|

  ‘And you believe that?”

  “I don’t know. But everybody says they don’t know how infectious it actually is.”

  “If I don’t have it, it’ll be another miracle at Fatima.”

  “I thought that maybe, him liking boys, you didn’t actually do—”

  “We did everything, hon. All the time. It was like Histoire d’O.” Veronica sat very erect as she said this, and I saw a flash of pride in her wide, alert eyes. “He liked boys, but he liked me, too. Well, perhaps liked, isn’t the operative word, but. . .”

  A song of betrayal came out of the jukebox like a flare. The faces in the bar suddenly appeared rigid, locked in shapes of willed happiness more terrible than pain. A young waitress danced at her station, anonymous and graceful in the warm light of the clanging kitchen. We hadn’t spoken for nearly a year. I was almost sixteen years younger than she was. We did not belong together. I reached across the table and held her hand. “I like you,” I said.

  The wind is strong now. I’m afraid it will pick me up and throw me off the ridge. I picture falling, breaking on tree branches and cracking my head on the rocks below
. I picture a tree branch falling on me and pinning me. How long would I lie there before someone found me? Night would come. The softness and greenness and moving stillness would make an immense fist and it would close around me. Bugs would come. I would die. Animals would come. Bugs and animals would eat me. I would rot and disperse. The dispersed flesh would travel down into the ground in tiny pieces, burrowing in the dirt, deeper and deeper. I would cease to be an I and become an it. It would get eaten by bugs, come out their assholes, and keep going. It would come to the center of the earth. The heat and light would be like hell for a human. But it would not be human. It would go on in.

  In the bar that night, Veronica talked about Duncan angrily, tenderly. He denied he had AIDS, preferring to think he was losing his life to a tropical fungus he’d picked up years ago in South America. Stripped of his beauty, still he sat upright, bolstered by pillows and glittering desperately. It was a Catholic hospital and fierce comedy manned the batdements as nuns and doctors flapped in and out with prayers, pronouncements, and facial tics as they overacted to Veronica’s wisecracking sound track. She and Duncan giggled at Sister Dymphna Dry-dell (“I kid you not”), who “warbled like Spring Byington” while glowering “like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” They flirted with a handsome black-haired doctor, and refused to cooperate with the one who used the term fag. They earnestly stammered at the one who stammered, even when he stammeringly told them that Duncan had maybe a week to live. “And Sister Drycrotch, with eyes of the purest psychosis, trills, ‘It’s not the end, but a beautiful beginning.’” The enemy rattled at the gate; comedy pulled down its pants and gave it the moon.

  Then Duncan remarked, “Well, I’ve always known something was wrong.” He’d known for years.

  “His whole family knew,” said Veronica. “His sister told me in the waiting room. She smiled and said, ‘You must fee 1 so betrayed! Oh, oh! You must feel so . . . so—’ ” Veronica made her voice high, hysterical, and false, then cut it back to her inflected deadpan. “I’ve had Thanksgiving with them almost every year for the last six. I sent Duncan’s niece a birthday present a few weeks ago—a beautiful French wooden pull toy, a red dog with blue eyes, playing the xylophone.” She shrugged.

  “What did you say?”

  “To whom, hon?”

  “Well, Duncan.”

  “Say to him?” She took a long drag on her cigarette, put it out, and looked at me, puffing herself up like the Red Queen about to open her inhuman mouth and strike. But halfway up, she lost heart and sank back. “There was nothing to say. He cried. He kissed my hands. He said he was sorry over and over again. When he was finished, I couldn’t speak. I got in bed with him instead.”

  I felt my head jerk in disbelief.

  “Not to make love, though I felt like it for an instant. We just held each other. His chest felt so thin, it was like his heart was coming through it.”

  Sister Drycrotch, who opened the door to announce that visiting hours were over, did not try to hide her dismay.

  “You see, hon,” said Veronica, lighting another cigarette, “I knew, too. Of course I did.”

  Two entwined trees with roots that break the ground form a lumpy cradle half on the path and half hanging out over the ridge. I squat between them, umbrella over my head. I drink big mouthfuls of water. I look down into the canyon at the treetops, vast and textured, twisting and moving like sea grass under an ocean of air and mist, full of creatures I can’t see. Veronica raises her wand; it bursts into flame.

  I imagine being in a hospital bed, holding my dying, unfaithful lover in my arms. I imagine feeling the beat of his heart, thumping with dumb animal purity. Once, when I was working in Spain, I went to a bullfight, where I saw a gored horse run with its intestines spilling out behind it. It was trying to outrun death by doing what it always did, what always gave it joy, safety, and pride. Not understanding that what had always been good was now futile and worthless, and humiliated by its inability to understand. That’s how I imagine Duncan’s heart. Beating lijce it always had, working as hard as it could. Not understanding why it was no good. This was why Veronica got

  into the bed—to comfort this debased heart. To say to it, But you are good. I see. I know. You are good. Even if it doesn’t work.

  The rain has dissipated into a silent drizzling mist. The air feels like wet silk. Veronica lowers her wand. I get up out of my squat; in the canyon below I see dozens of ocher-colored trees swathed in mist. I think, They are so beautiful. I think, The disease is spreading. The flame of Veronica’s wand arcs across a gray expanse and goes out. My fever abates. I climb the ridge, heading toward the top of the waterfall. I approach the broad path that will take me farther up the mountain.

  Duncan died. A year later, Veronica tested positive for HIV. Our friendship continued even though there was no obvious reason why it should. Sometimes I would admit to myself that if she had not called me when Duncan was dying, I would never have seen her again. I would admit that if she’d tested negative, I would have let the friendship lapse. I’d admit that I was embarrassed t6 be seen with her, that duty and pity were all that joined us. I’d admit, too, that she was the only one I could trust not to reject me.

  I’m sure she had these thoughts. “She felt sorry for me,” I’d imagine her bitterly telling an imaginary person. “I was a good listener.” Then I imagined her expression draw inward as she considered that no, that was not all there was to it. But the imaginary Veronica did not admit that to the imaginary person. Instead, she drew on her cigarette, smiled ironically, and said, “Of course, she was a darling girl”—leaving the person to wonder what existed between the first two statements and the third.

  I told a makeup artist about Veronica once and he said, “She’s a model hag; it’s obvious. She wants to suck on your life.” Deftly and precisely, he perfected my eyebrows with a tiny brush. “She wants to be invited to the party.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “She’s invited.” But she wasn’t.

  I worked regularly, not constantly. I went to bed at a decent hour. I didn’t drink too much. I showed up on time. I was polite to clients and stylists. As I was no longer the girlfriend of a feared and hated man, my relations with other models were warm and dull as a hair dryer’s drone. I did not let anyone grab my crotch, not even a famous photographer who snickered sideways when I found him banging a fifteen-year-old on a makeup table. (His butt feral, hungrily clenched, and spangled with mauve glitter from a tube the girl had crushed with the heel of her hand; perhaps it was the same glitter she wore on her eyelids as she gloated from the cover of the magazine I was supposed to be on.) I was a shop girl, not a poet. In an inexplicable way, I savored my ordinariness, my affinity with the office girls and waitresses I had briefly moved among. My livid past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart. Sometimes, in certain pictures, I thought I could see this hollow phantom world tingle in the air around me, making you want to look at the picture, sensing something you can’t see. In these pictures, I was what I had once longed for: a closed door you couldn’t open, with music and footsteps behind it. I was holding Ava’s hand, but I was turned toward Pia, and the fire of her eyes was reflected in mine.

  I took the train to see my family almost every month; I brought them magazines with my picture in them. In Paris, I had sometimes torn pages out and sent them across the rumpled sea, but

  I’d never seen a reaction to them. My mother looked at my image as if she were looking at a wicked Jittle girl come to scornfully show herself to her poor mother. There was love in her look, but with such jealousy mixed in that the feelings became quickly slurred. It was what my mother gave me, so I took it and I gave it back; I reveled in her jealousy as she reveled in my vanity. Reveling and rageful, we went between sleep and dreams right there in the dining room. Silent and still, we attacked each other like animals. My father coughed
nervously, pointed at my most mediocre picture, and said, “Well, this one’s right nice.” Daphne said, “Yeah! This is great.” But as she turned the pages, she vibrated with the words she did not say but which I heard anyway: This is meaningless! And shallow! And false! My mother tossed a magazine down with a snap and said she had to go to the grocery store. Daphne went with her. Sara looked up and said, “But why didn’t they put you on the cover? You’re prettier than she is.” But there was no kiss in her eye now. She was still working at the place for old people, and when she got home, she went down into the basement and stayed there.

  Daphne, on the other hand, had gotten a scholarship to Rutgers; she had wrapped herself in a ribbon of A’s while working as a barmaid at a place where students drank and puked amid roaring jukeboxes and pinball machines with streaming globule lights. When she talked about her classes and her job, she strutted and threw off little scrappy airs that said, How’d you like to try that, Miss New York Model? And my parents looked at her with a pride they could not quite feel for paper copies of their pretdest daughter tingling with an air of Europe and statutory rape.

  Still, I tunneled back to my life, happy to be away from them, yet safely attached. One night after a visit home, I lay naked with Patrick on my lopsided mattress, drinking wine and half-hearing my neighbors’ pop songs come through the wall, and I would talk to him about my family.

  “What I love about you is that you’re so beautiful and still so real,” he said. “You care about things.”

  “How could I not care about my own sister? She’s the only one who’s even half on my side, and she’s been totally cheated by life.”

  “Why don’t you have her come visit you?” asked Veronica. “We could take her to the theater, show her a good time. Who knows, she might consider moving here. I’ll tell her, ‘If I can do it, you can do it!’”