And so I did. It was summer and the apartment smelled of ripe foliage and rotten drains. When Sara arrived, I pulled the mattress off the box spring and we flipped a coin to decide who would sleep on which. (I got the mattress.) Then we went to meet Veronica in an ornate cafe lit with white lamps and candles that dripped and pointed with trembling witch fingers. Classical music, rampant and riven with dainty feeling, announced and upheld the display of cakes, which were swollen with sugar and cream. Veronica and Sara talked warmly about the eccentrics they worked with and their weird ways. In Veronica’s baubled words, her bland nest of disaffected temps became a snappy sitcom where people suffered, strove, and lost and yet emerged with rueful grins wrinkling their eyes, ready for the next episode. And Sara told her own stories, about valiant old ladies and tough, salty aides as the candles slowly dropped their fingers into baroque heaps of dust-covered wax. We went to see Vampire Lesbians of Sodom and then ate dinner in Chinatown.
It was late when we left the restaurant through a swinging stream of plastic beads. The potholed street steamed with warm garbage and the chemical discharge of air conditioning. We walked around moldy cardboard, mashed fruit, fetid porridge, and crumpled vegetables still green and breathing on the pavement. An off-duty cab roared up; we shouted and waved our
arms but it sped away. We stepped past a fish with gelatinous, death-webbed eyes, each stiff red-speckled scale like a stone that for a short magic time had rippled through water as flesh and now was turning back to stone. “Pee-U!” cried Sara, and pinched her nose. But the stench buoyed us and filled the air with energy. Another off-duty cab roared up; Veronica stepped in front of it, tilting her hip, pointing her toe, and lifting an invisible skirt. Dark eyes flashed through the blurred windshield; the driver lustily hit the brake. As we climbed in, he smiled, newly awake and grateful, into his rearview mirror. “It never fails to stop a vehicle of some kind,” purred Veronica.
“Veronica is great,” said Sara as we dragged the mattress off the box spring into the center of the room.
“Yeah,” I said, and meant it.
My sister wanted to meet models, and so the next day we had lunch with Selina, an ex-cover girl attractively worn at twenty-four. I had prepared her for Sara, but still I was afraid that on sitting down, each would look across the table and see the enemy. But that didn’t happen. They got along. They discussed reincarnation, phobias, and nightmares: the psychic who told Sara she was antisocial because she had once been an African noble put to death by the tribe for her refusal to kill a beautiful animal; Selina’s recurring dream, in which she discovered herself as a child, shrunken like a mummy, eyes tighdy screwed in permanent sleep in the baggage rack of a highspeed jet.
“Your sister is so spiritual,” she said to me later. “You could say anything to her and she’d talk back to you.”
“I don’t know if she’s spiritual, but she’s certainly lovely,” said Veronica. We were back eating cake amid candles and heaped wax. “She’s got to move here; it would change her life.
She—” A soprano voice floated from the sound system and unfurled, shimmering. Veronica put down her forkful of blond cake.
“What is it?”
“This aria,” she said. “It’s from Rigoletto.”
“Oh,” I said. “I think my father has that on record.”
“I saw it with Duncan. Years ago.”
“Oh.” She had not mentioned Duncan for months; I had almost forgotten him. “It’s beautiful,” I said uncertainly.
“It’s a love song. Only I can’t remember what it’s called now.” Her skin shone, like an eye might shine with tears. “We loved each other, you know. I know that must sound sick to you after what happened. But there was love there.”
“I don’t understand,” I said slowly. “But I believe you.” “Nobody understands. I don’t understand. My aunt was the only person who got it at all—my aunt! That dismal old bitch who once said to me, ‘It’s all about self-hate, isn’t it?’ She said, ‘It must be terrible to lose someone you love.’ And it is.”
I thought of my father lost in his own house, his own family, his own chair. “I’m sorry,” I said.
The singer opened wide her voice, like passionate hands, like arms of light.
“He wasn’t a cunt,” she said. “I’m sorry I ever said that.” Her voice tried to open, to come free of its rococo shape. “He was a Ganymede, a beautiful boy. Royalty in disguise.” Her voice broke free—the terrible freedom of shapelessness and grief. Anguish flooded her eyes. “The ‘Caro nome. i That’s what it’s called.” Tears ran down her face. I looked away, as if she were naked. I didn’t know what else to do.
When I was a young child, my mother told me that love is what makes the flowers grow I pictured love inside the flowers, opening their petals and guiding their roots down to suck the earth. When I was a child, I prayed, and when I prayed, I sometimes would picture people not as flowers but as grass—plain and uniform, but also vast and vibrant, each blade with its tiny beloved root. By the time I moved to New York, I had not prayed for
many years. But there was a soft dark place where prayer had been and sometimes my mind wandered into it. Sometimes this place was restful and kind. Sometimes it was not. Sometimes when I went into it, I felt like a little piece of flesh chewed by giant teeth. I felt that everyone was being chewed. To ease my terror, I pictured beautiful cows with liquid eyes eating acres of grass with their great loose jaws. I said to myself Don’t be afraid. Everything is meant to be chewed, and also to keep making more flesh to be chewed. All prayer is prayer to the giant teeth. Maybe sometimes there is pity for the chewed thing, and that is what we pray to. Maybe sometimes there is love.
Veronica said she and Duncan had loved each other. She said her parents loved her, too. My parents would say they loved each other, if you asked them. Patrick and I had loved each other, or at least we had said so.
I met Patrick for drinks after I left Veronica. I told him about how Rigoletto had come on the sound system and how her proud voice had broken.
“That’s so touching and poignant,” he said. “Is she a model?”
“No. I met her when I was temping.”
“That’s even more poignant,” he said. “The poor girl.” “She isn’t a girl,” I said. “She’s forty.”
“My God!” He gripped the table and flung himself back against his chair. “That’s not poignant; that’s tragic!” His eyes flashed.
I drank up his flashing eyes. The day before, he had knelt naked between my spread legs, streaked eyes fluxing Light flooded the room. Feelings of tenderness and devouring streamed through and lit his varicolored eyes. With a soft sound, he took my foot in both hands and bent my leg as he brought it to his mouth to kiss my instep, sole, and ankle.
He took a great gulp of strawberry frappe. His eyes flashed more faintly; he looked at his watch. We went to eat at a fancy place with four of his friends. We had precious dinners on big white plates, huge glasses of wine, and sweet-colored cocktails. Thick mirrors on each wall increased us. Bright music played and made pictures of abundant brightness: lips and teeth, soft breasts saronged in silk, warm skin, cut figs, wine and sunlight. The founder of a tiny magazine talked about writers who were supposed to be good and were terrible. The film critic for the tiny magazine talked about a bitchfest between a director and a writer whose story he’d adapted. The troll biographer denounced all that was shallow and vulgar. I listened to them and thought of a photographer who habitually held his arrogant head turned up and away from his body, as if pretending it wasn’t there. His pretense somehow accentuated his hips, his thighs and butt, and made it impossible not to imagine his asshole.
A short actress with sleek black hair looked at me and said, “Thinking hard?”
“No,” I replied. But I was. I was thinking of myself presenting my body without bodily reality, my face exaggerated by makeup and artificial feeling, suspended forever on an imaginary brink, eyes dimmed and looking at nothing. I thoug
ht of Duncan dancing in a dark place that glinted with hidden sharpness, his face set in curious determination. I thought of Veronica with her penny loafers and her fussy socks. But my thoughts were naked, and I had no words for them.
“You are too thinking about something,” said Patrick. “I can hear you.”
“I was thinking of things that don’t seem to go together but do. Only I can’t say how.”
“Can’t connect the dots?” asked the actress in a barely audible voice.
“And I was thinking about Veronica.”
“Your friend with AIDS?” asked Patrick.
There was silence filled with quick-running currents. The actress turned abruptly away. Softness and apology rose from her shoulder and came toward me. Talking resumed.
Later, Patrick and I fought about his friends as we stood on the sidewalk in the spilled watery light of an openmouthed bar. I turned to walk away. He grabbed my elbow; I turned away from him and for a ridiculous second we pivoted around each other. A table of drunks near the bar’s blurry window burst into laughter. I turned toward him and he banged into me. The table applauded.
“Come on,” he said. “Don’t be angry now. Let’s go where there aren’t any friends.”
And he took me up and down two twisty streets to an office building with a blank-faced door and a back stair that led up a hot stairwell to a tar roof illuminated by a tin lamp clipped to a wire strung between two chimneys. On the roof was a rough stone bench made bluish in the angled light, a matching table, wooden planters ragged with roses, and cage upon cage of purling gray pigeons. There was an unlit candle on the table and a rain-warped book with its pages stuck together. The tin lamp wobbled slighdy in a low wind and the pigeons wobbled with it.
“What is this?” I asked.
‘A life raft in the sky. Come look.”
The pigeons moved like dark water at our approach—soft and rolling, with little tossing plaps.
“The janitor of this building keeps the birds—his brother owns the building, so he lets him. I know the janitor and he lets me come here if I sort of pay him.”
The pigeons purled like dark water, evenly stroking a dark shore. The burning roof released its acrid tang Grainy light poured up off the city, reached into the sky, and sank back with a darkish milky glow. Patrick took off his shirt and spread it on the mattress. Smiling, I sat on it. He scooped up my hips and, with hands on either side of my wakened spine, used his thumbs
to open my body. Wave after wave reached the soft dark shore. An hour later, Patrick left ten dollars flapping under a corner of the milk crate.
A month later, he left me for the black-haired actress, whose shoulder had apparently apologized ahead of time. He told me after a torpid dinner, while I was trying to pull him down onto the bed with me. Frowning, he refused to come. I stopped pulling. He came and sat and told me. He had not slept with her yet, he said. He didn’t want to disrespect me. His sense of honor shocked me; I lay in a state of dull shock, letting him kiss and stroke my hair until he left. He stroked me like he didn’t want to leave. He stroked me like the pigeon sounds reached for the shore, again and again. I lay there, hearing those sounds for a long time after he left.
When I finally sat up, it was two o’clock in the morning. The apartment was dark and someone outside it was moaning. The gate on my window made a shadow window of gray diamonds on the floor. I thought of the shadow bars of a prison window striping an upturned face, one eye unstriped. I felt for the phone. I didn’t expect Veronica to be in; I just wanted to hear and speak into her answering machine. The electronic bleat of the phone rippled and rose like a stair into the night sky, each step a bar of light. I saw myself and Sara, two tiny girls, climbing it step by step, each helping the other.
“Hello?” said Veronica. She had been sent home early and had just made herself a nightcap.
I arrived at her apartment moments later. She opened the door in a flowered floor-length gray gown with a yoke of lace on the breast and furry pink slippers on her feet. She gave me a mug of cocoa and white rum. We sat in front of the mumbling TV, and Veronica rapidly changed the channel as we talked.
Patrick and I had nothing in common, but he could hear me thinking. He was smarter than I was, but most of what he said was dumb. His friends were horrible, but I wanted to please them. I loved him, but I kept planning when we would break
up. Heureux et malheureux. I would be with someone else and someone else and then someone else.
“Frankly,” said Veronica, “it’s hard for me to see this as a problem. You should enjoy it while it lasts. I’ll never get laid again, and if I do, I’ll likely infect him.”
On the screen before us, faces cycled past—human, animal, monster, human.
“Veronica,” I said. “What was it like between you and Duncan?”
“Like? Haven’t I told you? Essentially, it was male-female relations. We enjoyed the same things—film, the arts.” Human, monster, animal. The silhouettes of lions walked the African delta with alert ears. Veronica lighted another cigarette. “If you mean deeper, it’s hard to explain. Together, we were able to express something in ourselves that was buried—I don’t quite know what it was, but I’ve been thinking. It sometimes felt like I was something he needed to knock down over and over, and I would always pop back up. He needed that and so did I, the popping back up.”
“He hit you?”
“No, hon, I’m speaking metaphorically. Anyway then we would step back and crack a joke and laugh, and everything else would fall away. And we’d just laugh.” She filled her lungs with fiery smoke, then let it go. “It was a narcissistic game maybe.
But still, when you go through that with someone, it can feel like something very profound has happened between you. And it has, actually. That person’s your partner, and there’s honor in it.”
I didn’t understand. I glanced at the TV Nature workers were filming a dominant lion killing a rival’s cubs in order to protect his gene pool. Three terrified cubs watched him knock their sibling on its back.
“Nature,” said Veronica. “How dreadful.” She changed the channel. Human beings smiled over drinks. She changed the channel.
“Anyway, fifteen years ago, there was a precursor to Duncan, this beautiful man I met when I was traveling in the Balkans. He didn’t speak English, so we couldn’t understand each other, but for the week or so we were together, it didn’t matter. Sometimes this look would come into his eyes, and I would feel the same look in mine. All this awkwardness and phony smiling and pidgin English—all of it was just for the times we got to that look. I remember this one time we made love. We were up in the mountains and we did it literally on the edge of a precipice. He turned me around so we were front to back, and if he’d let go of me, I could easily have gone over.” She changed the channel. Small paws resisted the big snout, then fell as the jaws came down. The lion squatted and ate. She changed the channel. Human beings kissed.
“I remember this tiny figure on the side of a mountain down below, someone in a field of something blue, filling a basket. Then rolling green, and the sun, and the sky going up and up. It was the most erotic experience I ever had.”
One of the Siamese cats walked across the band of TV light and paused, its ears in fine bestial relief against the bril^ liant screen. There were only three cats by then. Veronica had already started finding homes for them through a service at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
“I’ve done things that looked self-destructive all my life. But I wasn’t really being self-destructive. I always knew where the door was. Until now.”
The nature workers scared the lion away and scooped up the remaining cubs. Veronica turned off the television. She invited me to sleep over. She gave me a flannel nightgown imprinted with violets and green ribbons. The print was faded from many washings and there was a ragged hole in one elbow; it was so unlike Veronica to own such a decrepit item that I thought it must be from her childhood. As I slipped it over my head in the bathroom,
I inhaled deeply, imagining ghost scents
wafting off the gown. Childhood smells: silken armpit, back of the neck, fragrant perfect foot. Adolescence stronger, more pungent, heavy with spray-can deodorant, then secretly, defiantly rank. An adult snow cloud of soap and bleach, and the ghosts still whispering through it. The gown was tight across my shoulders; its sleeves went just past my elbow and its hem just past my knees. I smoothed it lovingly and left the bathroom, ready to get in bed and put my arms around Veronica; I imagined us together in our flannels, cuddling until we woke.
But as soon as we lay down, she said, “Good night,” and turned on her side. I stared at the ceiling and listened to her snore. My heart said, Where am I? Where am I? Where am I? I remembered myself in bed with Daphne, and how I would’ve ground my teeth if she’d put her arm around me. I thought of the young Veronica, held on the edge of a cliff in the arms of a stranger she never had to know, embraced like a beloved child and penetrated with the force of one adult to another. That person did not want the reassuring arm of a sister. She did not want to cuddle.
I fidgeted until the day came through the blinds. One of the cats approached; I reached to touch it and it recoiled as if it were shocked. I got out of bed and softly walked the apartment in my ragged gown. The cats stared, lemurlike. The furniture slowly groaned awake. I went to a window and slit the blind with a finger. I watched people and cars pass in a trance of fixity and motion. Now the diamonds on my floor would be filled with light and gentiy moving. Now there would be no prison bars. Now I could go home.
I got back in bed and lay close enough to Veronica to feel the heat come off her. The week before, I had heard a man who had AIDS interviewed on TV He said that on top of dying he constandy had to comfort his well friends, who were terrified that he was dying, and that it was exhausting to have to do that.
I’m not terrified, I thought.
My father stormed across the living room floor. “Do you know what that son of a bitch is doing to his family by going on a television show?”
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