Veronica

by Mary Gaitskill

  I don’t know what I said when I danced. Probably nothing. Probably “I’m a pretty girl, I’m a pretty girl, I’m—”

  Veronica began to cough. She ran a low fever. She fell during an aerobics class and began to pour cold sweat. I yelled at her about seeing a doctor.

  “My main problems are yeast, perpetual herpes, and hemorrhoids,” she said. “The first I can take care of at the drugstore, the second they can’t do anything about, and the third I’m not going to some swinish doctor about.”

  ‘Why not if you can get them removed?”

  “Hon, don’t be naive. I’m not going to some clinic on Broadway with a red neon arrow that reads ‘Hemorrhoid Removal—Stricdy Confidential,’ where they’ll core me like an

  apple and I’ll be expelling bloody rags for a week. I know I’m going to die soon, but I’d rather it not be like that.”

  “Then get your lungs looked at,” I said sulkily. “Or get something for the fever.” os

  Eventually, she did see a doctor, but she pronounced him a bastard and wouldn’t go back.

  "I had to wait for hours in a roomful of men with sores on their faces, and there was this one dreadful woman who sat on the edge of the couch like she had a boil on her ass. She went in before me and came flying out like a witch on a broom. Then I went in, and the doctor, who, of course, was a heterosexual with the face of a drunk pig, went on this self-congratulatory rant about how she’d complained about being in a room with AIDS patients. ‘I told her to get the fuck out,’ he said. ‘I don’t need her; nobody needs her.’ Like I’m supposed to think he’s so great.”

  / “Don’t you agree with him?”

  “Not really. Of course she doesn’t want to be in a room with AIDS patients. Who would? I told him—I said, ‘Sir, I have AIDS, and /don’t want to be in a room full of—’ ”

  “You don’t have AIDS yet. And I thought you said she was dreadful.”

  “They were both dreadful,” she snapped.

  I sighed. “Look,” I said. “I know it’s shit. But you’ve got to decide if you want to live or not. Because if you do, you’re going to have to start fighting for your life.”

  “Yes, I know, hon. I’m just not sure it’s worth it.”

  “Okay. Maybe it’s not. Probably it’s not. You’ve got insane parents and your sister is useless to you. You’re lonely and you have a crummy job. And you’re not going to beat the disease whatever you do.”

  Veronica stared like I’d slapped her out of a crying jag At least I’d refrained from telling her she looked like shit.

  “But even if you live only five more years, even if you live only two more years or one year, if you use that time to really... to really ...” I fumbled, embarrassed.

  She looked at me, sorry for me.

  “To really find out who you are and care for yourself and ... and forgive yourself—I mean—I don’t mean-—5*

  “I’ll let that pass,” she said softly.

  “I don’t mean forgive yourself for getting sick. I mean caring for yourself.” My words were wooden and trite. I had gotten them out of articles in health-food magazines. I did not know what they meant any more than she did. Still I said them: “I mean loving yourself.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Alison.” Veronica spoke gently. “I think it’s lovely. But it’s just that it’s ... it’s not my personality.”

  “Okay. But then there’s the physical stuff. If you don’t like that doctor, there’s others. There’s herbs, there’s acupuncture, there’s yoga. There’s GMHC, there’s Shanti, there’s support groups—women’s groups, too. Medicine won’t cure you, but it’ll ease the pain. It’ll let your body know you’re caring for it, loving it. I know it’s corny, but—”

  “I don’t have insurance.”

  I stared. “But I thought you got insurance a while ago.”

  “I did, but it lapsed. It was lousy insurance anyway.”

  I was speechless.

  “I tried an acupuncturist a year ago. I can’t say it did much for me, though he was awfully nice. He talked about the organs and how they relate to different emotions. Lungs are sadness; liver is anger. He said my main weakness was my small intestine. Would you like to guess what emotion that’s related to? Deep unrequited love. The small intestine! Who knew?”

  Sometimes I had contempt and disgust for Veronica. It would come on me as I lay alone in bed, drowsy but unable to sleep. I would picture her with one of her false smiles or arranging her cat coasters or adjusting her jaunty bow tie, and I would fill with

  scorn. I didn’t try to fight it. I let it snort and root. Why had she been involved with someone like Duncan anyway? Someone who let her be called an old fish in public and then went off holding hands with the guy who’d said it. She wanted to be a victim. Probably she even wanted to die—she’d said so herself. Most people, when something like that happens, they run. Of course they did It was horrible. People like Veronica dragged everyone down; it was paralyzing to be confronted with such pain. Especially since she’d chosen it for herself. How could anyone respect a person like that? She’d made choices. She’d made choices!

  “You made choices,” my mother said to my father. “If you’re not happy with your life, you can choose to make it different. That’s what I did. I chose to come back to you, and I can choose differendy.”

  AJazz Age band was on loud and jumping The TV was on, too, and Sara was hunched up in front of it, doing a crossword puzzle with one hand pressed against her ear to shut out the jazz.

  “Choices! Choices! What choices do you make when you’re fifty years old? What choice did I have then with a baby to feed and another one coming and another one after that? I had to take what they gave me!”

  His voice was pleading, but his rumpusing music mocked us all. Sara made a fist of her ear-blocking hand, muttering curses and gripping her hair as if to tear it out.

  “She also means choices inside yourself about how you handle things,” I said. “Like you can let the people at work upset you or you can—”

  “Fuck!” shouted Sara, and stormed up the stairs.

  “Sara, you do not talk that way!” shouted my mother.

  “I do too and so do you!”

  “Choices inside you! Do you think a human being’s a fun house with something behind every door?”

  “Yes!” I said, laughing.

  “Maybe in the New York City fashion world they are! But not here. Not here. Oh, Lordy.”

  When I came back the next month, he was reading aloud from a book about queers and the awful things they did. According to this book, all men had the potential to be gay, to fuck anything, all the time, and they got better only with the influence of women. “These guys don’t have to be that way!” he cried. “They have a choice!”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in that.”

  “I’m not talking about ‘inner choices’! I’m talking about behavior! I’m talking about reality!”

  Sara quietly ate her dish of ice cream. My mother rolled her eyes.

  Veronica quit temping and took a full-time job with excellent insurance. She joined a support group for women with HIV She quit smoking. She found a doctor she could tolerate. She double-shifted for a year and bought a large and expensive co-op. She filled it with heavy furniture and blinds, which made her rooms quiet and dim as an aquarium.

  I moved into a bigger apartment, too, with high ceilings and casement windows and a bar down below that was full of music, faces, and sweet-colored drinks. As soon as I did, work fell off. I was supposed to be in a swimsuit spread, but I stood next to a girl with big boobs and a butt like a mare, and the photographer said, “You look like her twelve-year-old sister!” During an evening-wear shoot, a client suddenly appeared with a tape measure and held it to my hips and said, “Look at this! We can’t have this!”

  “Crazy bitch!” said Morgan over sushi. But then she paused, chopsticks poised over a slice of fish shaped like a lovely tongue. “Were you about to have
your period, by any chance?”

  It’s Alain, I thought. Finally. It has to be him.

  Morgan arranged for me to meet a photographer named Miles. Miles was an eccentric who’d made his reputation working with slighdy unusual girls ten years earlier. He’d been recendy taken up by a maverick designer whose tiny lace skirts and flowered chenille leggings were everywhere; there was a sense that his face was going to pop noisily out of the background at any minute.

  I had drinks with him and a sixteen-year-old starlet named Angelique, a tiny Hispanic girl with a narrow body that made me think of a salamander in a column of fire. By way of greeting, she bit me on the cheek, then on the arm. When she went to the bathroom, I asked Miles if she was crazy. “No,” he said. “She’s just a scared litde girl trying to take on the world. But she does bite. She told me once she bit through a box of Kleenex when she couldn’t sleep.”

  Miles was a tall, rangy person who wore red plastic sunglasses and carried his bald head the way a certain kind of truculent person carries his butt—high, proud, and glandular. He wanted to know the most embarrassing thing I’d ever done, the sexiest thing, the crudest thing. I told him and he said, “She’s telling me the truth. That’s lovely!” Angelique frisked like a puppy. “I never tell the truth!” she said. “I know you don’t, darling,” he replied, and took her picture with a small Polaroid camera.

  We spent the night going from bar to bar. Wherever we went, Miles took Polaroid pictures of whoever was in front of us; a well-dressed middle-aged woman with wild eyes and a tough shiny nose; a sleek redhead in a T-shirt with a hairy grinning rat on it; a very blond man in a black shirt and thick black glasses, standing ramrod-straight and looking weird on purpose. I noticed Miles didn’t choose anyone too fashionable or too beautiful. He was going for real. The real women tried to look sexy. But there was uncertainty at the bottom of their eyes. Miles threw their pictures on the table with our drinks. I looked at a

  picture of a woman in a suit. Her clothing was rumpled; her forehead and nose shone with splotches of abnormal light. She was smiling like she believed “fun” was something that could be grabbed and held, and she was still trying very hard to grab it.

  “Why do you do this?” I asked.

  “I like to see people have some fun.”

  “This woman doesn’t look like she’s ever had fun in her life.”

  He regarded the picture. “Probably not. But she’s trying, and that’s what’s interesting to me.” He held up the camera and took my picture. I made the ugliest face I could. Angelique put her arms around me. She said, “I want to marry you,” and bit me.

  At the end of the night, we had to walk a block to find a cab. Angelique ran ahead of us; when we caught up with her, she was flirting with some Hispanic men on a public bench. They were rough-looking and wore shabby clothes; they had unshaved faces and meaty shoulders just starting to go round. But they were still full of sex, and one of them was handsome. Angelique darted around them like a drunken little bird twittering in Spanish. They were so smitten that they didn’t notice Miles taking pictures. Angelique put her arms around the handsome one and made as if to kiss him. Miles took another picture. One of them did notice, and he glanced at us, frowning “Pose with them,” Miles said to me.

  “No.” I moved away.

  “Okay,” he said. “Come on, Angelique, quit kissing the criminals.”

  Heat shot through each man on the bench and brought all of them to their feet. Angelique started talking, her voice quick and supplicant. The handsome one snapped at her; she stepped back.

  “You call me a criminal?” said one of them. “I’ll fucking kill you.”

  “I was only kidding,” said Miles.

  “You’re nobody to kid with me, faggot.”

  “Look, why don’t you—” i J

  “You’ve got AIDS, don’t you, faggot? Go home and die, faggot”

  We walked down the street and they followed us, yelling at Miles’s aggrieved butt of a head.

  When we were in the cab, he said, “So that’s what they’re saying in the street—‘You’ve got AIDS.’ That’s the worst thing you can say.”

  “That didn’t mean anything,” said Angelique. “They were just barking.”

  “They didn’t want to be used,” I said.

  There was a silence and in it I knew Miles would not work with me.

  “But that was okay, wasn’t it?” he asked. “That wasn’t too scary, was it?”

  “No,” said Angelique. “That was fun!”

  That night, I dreamed I was in Paris, posing for a magazine cover. The studio was filled with people—Rene, Alana, Simone, Cunt Face, every drunk bitch and bastard from rue du Temple. And sliding among them, bending and flattening his body like a snake, Alain showed his white flattened face. There was no movement in his eyes now. They were still and empty as a waiting grave. The photographer was furious, but there was nothing he could do. Alain smiled and disappeared. The crowd milled. The photographer cursed and pinched me.

  So I left my body and went to a place more empty than a desert, a place that seemed to stretch into forever. In it shimmered thousands of veils and masks and personalities, each as still as a statue and waiting for someone to step inside them and make them live. Quickly and lightly, I stepped from one to the next. Pleasure zipped across my surface like a water bug

  But under the surface, something heavy pulled and twisted. It pulled and twisted because it did not want to take these shapes. It pulled me back into my body and twisted my face off my head. But it was okay. No one noticed; the camera flashed. I smiled and woke up thrashing, like I was trying to throw off a great blanket of darkness.

  Hungover and haunted, I went to the next day’s go-see. Grainy light fell on the bent heads and shining hair of a dozen wan, yawning beauties. The booker opened my book and closed it. He said, “Honey, your look is dead.” Once again, I thought, Alain. He had entered my world through my dream and poisoned it for me. I knew this was absurd. But I thought it anyway.

  That night, I showed Patrick the Polaroid Miles had taken of me. My eyes bugged out. My hands were claws. My mouth was open so wide, my cheekbones seemed to pop off my head and my discolored tongue stuck out as far as it could go. My throat was a mass of wet redness.

  Patrick looked at it for a long time. “It really is heinous,” he said finally. “It’s the throat that does it. It looks substantial— like there’s something trying to get out.”

  Veronica said she hated the people at the office and that they hated her. She said she was forced to work with men who said filthy misogynistic things and that no one would listen to her complaints. She was terrified they would discover her illness, fire her, and cancel her insurance. Yet she worked double shifts,

  putting in sixty-hour workweeks because she was behind in her taxes.

  I thought she was wrong. I thought if they knew she had HIV, they would treat her better. “They’ll be more understanding if they know,” I said. “They’ll go easy.” >

  “Nonsense,” she snapped. “They’d circle for the kill.” She’d left her support group by then because, she said, the women were all stupid cows and the moderator was a condescending queer.

  “One day, I made the mistake of being vulnerable around them—if you can’t be vulnerable with cows, then who? I told them what was going on at work, all of it. I said I felt like God hated me, and the snotty faggot said, ‘Oh come on. I know you’re bigger than that.’ I said, ‘My fucking God! How big am I supposed to be?’ And the cows just pursed their detestable lips. No wonder men hate us. No wonder.”

  Finally, the moderator told the group that he was writing a book on women with AIDS and that they were going to be part of it. Veronica found this outrageous, and she tried to unite the other women against him. One of them snitched on her and she was asked to leave the group.

  During the same week, her sister called and told her to stop sending presents to her niece. “She says whether I’m sick or not, I need to
live my own life and stop trying to glom on to the child. She said once I scared Sunny on the phone. Of course she wouldn’t tell me how.” Veronica sat straight, her smoking hand quivering with rage. “She talks like I’m going to contaminate her.” Rage filled her eyes with streaks of yellow bile. “She talks like I’m going to eat her.”

  She fought with people at work, until no one would partner with her anymore and she had to work alone. When she and I went to the movies, she accused the people behind her of kicking and screamed at the people in front when they asked her to please stop talking. She fought with people in our aerobics class

  for getting too close to her on the mat. Once, she fought with the instructor during class. We were on our elbows and knees pulsing one leg at a time up toward the ceiling. “Hold that pelvis firm!” shouted the instructor into her mouthpiece. “Pretend your favorite person is behind you, holding it very firmly!” * “Excuse me!” Veronica’s voice rang through the room, rising over the music. “Excuse me!” The instructor turned. Veronica was already on her feet, eyes crazy with rage. “One,” she said, “that was a very rude remark. Two, my favorite person is dead.”

  I argued with my father about choices. I made fun of him when he talked as if he didn’t have any. But when I talked about Veronica with Daphne, I argued the other way. Daphne lived in Hoboken with her boyfriend, Jeff. She was almost done with graduate school. She had grown steady and a little plump and her eyes had an expression of gathering power. Her kitchen had blue wallpaper and smelled of garbage and lilac. We sat in an oval of sunlight and drank mugs of honeyed tea and talked as if we were walking around the block at Christmas.

  “She acts like a demented bitch,” I said, “and I want to tell her that, but I can’t. I don’t know how I’d be if I were her. People say you have a choice about how you act. But it seems like she really doesn’t.”