Veronica

by Mary Gaitskill

  I have some codeine to prep the arm, then walk around the office smoking. I look at the photographs on the walls; John’s got pictures from three decades. The ones from the seventies are the best. The models aren’t professionals; they are just people John knew. They are male and female and they are all naked except for boots or a hat or underpants, something to give thefn style. Most of them don’t have good bodies, but they are looking at the camera like they are happy to be naked, either just standing there or posing in the combination of relaxation and sexual nastiness that people had then. They all look like people whose time had given them a perfect style suit to wear, a set of postures and expressions that gave the right shape

  to what they had inside them, so that even naked, they felt clothed.

  I drop ash into the potted plant by the desk and rub it into the dirt with my finger. I get up and go into the bathroom for the cleaning supplies, a yellow bucket full of rags and spray botdes of cleaner so potent, I once killed a giant spider with it.

  I put the bucket in the sink and run water into it. I spray the mirror with cleaner and fine blue poison twinkles into the filling bucket, bright ammonia and dull smell memories of cafeteria food and public piss, my mother kneeling and cleaning. I wipe the mirror with a store-bought rag and drop it in the bucket.

  There is always a style suit, or suits. When I was young,

  I used to think these suits were just what people were. When styles changed dramatically—people going barefoot, men with long hair, women without bras—I thought the world had changed, that from then on everything would be different. It’s understandable that I thought that; TV and newsmagazines acted like the world had changed, too. I was happy with it, but then five years later it changed again. Again, the TV announced, “Now we’re this instead of that! Now we walk like this, not like that!” Like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessandy looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trait at a time; you had to grab on to one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, “we” were loving; then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed. Although we are at war with terror, fashion magazines say we are sunny now. We wear bright colors and choose moral clarity. While I was waiting to get a blood test last week, I read in a newsmagazine that terror must not change our sunny dispositions.

  Of course, there is a lot of subtlety in all this, and complexity, too. When John took those naked pictures, the most

  popular singer was a girl with a tiny stick body and a large deferential head, who sang in a delicious lilt of white lace and promises and longing to be close. When she shut herself up in her closet and starved herself to death, people were shocked. But starvation was in her voice all along. That was the poignancy of it. A sweet voice locked in a dark place, but focused entirely on the tiny strip of light coming under the door.

  I drop the rag in the bucket and smoke some more, ashing into the sink. A tiny piece of movie from the naked time plays on my eyeball: A psychotic killer is blowing up amusement parks. At the head of the crowd clamoring to ride the roller coaster is a slim, lovely man with long blond hair and floppy clothes and big, beautiful eyes fixed on a tiny strip of light that only he can see.

  Lift up the toilet lid—filthy again—and drop the cigarette in. Turn off the water and lift the bucket down. I set my teeth as pain tears a hole in my shoulder and I get sucked inside it. The roller coaster roars and everybody screams with joy; the blond man screams in terror as his car flies off into the sky and smashes on the ground. White froth gently disperses on the stirring bucket water as I set it down.

  It’s not an easy thing. If you can’t find the right shape, it’s hard for people to identify you. On the other hand, you need to be able to change shape fast; otherwise, you get stuck in one that used to make sense but that people can’t understand anymore. This has been going on for a long time. My father used to make lists of his favorite popular songs, ranked in order of preference. These lists were very nuanced, and they changed every few years. He’d walk around with the list in his hand, explaining why Jo “G.I. Jo” Stafford was ranked just above Doris Day, why Charles Trenet topped Nat King Cole—but by a hair only. It was his way of showing people things about him that were too private to say directly. For a while, everybody had some idea what Doris Day versus Jo Stafford meant; to give a preference for one over the other signaled a mix of feelings that were secret and tender, and people could sense these feelings when they

  imagined the songs side by side.

  “Stafford’s voice is darker and sadder,” he said. “But it’s warmer, too. She holds the song in her voice. Day’s voice is sweet, but it’s heartless—she doesn’t hold it; she touches it and lets go—she doesn’t mean it! Stafford is a lover; Day is a flirt—but

  what a cute flirt!”

  “Um-hm,” said my mother, and she gritted her teeth on

  her way out of the room.

  But my father didn’t see my mother’s teeth. He was too charmed by Day singing “Bewitched.” He can laugh, but I love it. Although the laugh’s on me...

  My father was right. If Jo Stafford sang that song, you would feel the pain of being laughed at by the one you love, and still you would love. When Doris Day sang it, the pain was as bright and sweet and harmless as her smiling voice. I’ll sing to him, each spring to him. And long for the day when I cling to him.... My father smiled and imagined being the one she painlessly longed to cling to; then he went home—to Jo. She sang, “But I miss you most of all, my darling,” and hurt was evoked and tenderly held and healed, again and again, in waves.

  But eventually those feelings got attached to other songs, and those singers didn’t work as signals anymore. I remember being there once when he was playing the songs for some men he worked with, talking excitedly about the music. He didn’t realize his signals could not be heard, that the men were looking at him strangely. Or maybe he did realize but didn’t know what else to do but keep signaling. Eventually, he gave up, and there were few visitors. He was just by himself, trying to keep his secret and tender feelings alive through these same old songs.

  I thought he was ridiculous. But I was only a kid. I didn’t see that I was making the same mistake. He thought the songs were who he really was, and I thought the new style suit was who I really was. Because I was younger, I was even more naive:

  I thought everything had changed forever, that because people wore jeans and sandals everywhere and women went without bras, fashion didn’t matter anymore, that now people could just be who they really were inside. Because I believed this, I was oblivious to fashion. I actually couldn’t see it.

  I remember the first time I was made to see it. It was the first time I met a fashion model. Strangely, it was also one of the first times I saw someone for who she really was inside.

  I was sixteen when this happened. I had run away from home, pardy because I was unhappy there and partly because running away was what a lot of people did then—it was part of the new style. This style was expressed in articles and books and TV shows about beautiful teenagers who ran away even when their parents were nice; the parents just had to cry and struggle to understand. The first time I left, I was fifteen. My parents had fought and refused to speak to each other for three days; I slipped out through the silence and hitchhiked to a concert in upstate New York. United by my disappearance, my parents called the police, who picked me up in a shopping mall a week after I’d returned of my own accord. Daphne said that while I was gone, our mother acted like somebody on one of the TV specials about runaways—always on the phone talking to her friends about it. “I think she enjoyed it,” said Daphne.

  But our mother said she did not enjoy it. “We won’t let you put us through that again,” she said. “If you leave now, you’re on your own. We won’t be calling the police.”


  So a year later, I left again. I packed right in front of them. I said I would just be gone for the summer, but they assumed I was lying. “Don’t call here asking for money!” shouted my father. “If you walk out that door, you are cut off!”

  “I would never ask you for money!” I shouted back.

  “She thinks she won’t need it,” said my mother from the couch. “She thinks being pretty will make her way.” Her voice was angry and jealous, which made me think that leaving must be something great.

  “She thinks she’s going to make her way in the world,” she said. But this time her jealousy was touched with wistfulness. She could’ve been talking about a girl in a fairy tale, walking down a path with her bundle on a stick.

  I lived from apartment to apartment, sometimes with friends, sometimes strangers. I got a ride to San Francisco and stayed in a European-style hostel, where you could stay a limited number of nights for a fixed fee. It was a large dilapidated building with high ceilings and sweet, moldy drains. The kitchen cabinets were full of stale cereal, the kind with frosting or colored sweet bits made to look like animals or stars. You had to chip in for food staples. You weren’t supposed to bring in drugs; people did, but they were moderate and they shared. The man who ran it, a college student with a soft stomach and a big ball of hair on his head, even kept a record player in one of the common rooms, and we gathered there at night to share pot and listen to playful elfin songs about freedom and love. These songs had the light beauty of a summer night full of wonderful smells and fireflies. They also had a feeling of sickness hidden in them, but we didn’t hear that then.

  For the first few days, I was one of two girls, the other being a little fifteen-year-old with suspicious eyes and a sexuality that was sharp and raw as her elbows. But she was with a boyfriend in his thirties, the kind of guy who put on airs about his clothes and manners even though he looked like shit. I tried to be friends with her, but she acted like I was beneath her, maybe because she had an older boyfriend who bought her dresses. The only time she was friendly with me was when she let me see her dresses, pulling them out of a canvas bag and laying them across her arm, smoothing them with her free hand and telling me where and how Don had gotten each of them for her. Otherwise, when we were in the kitchen with the others, she’d roll her eyes when I talked. The boys were nice to me, though; it was a treat for them to have a single girl around. Even the older boyfriend was secredy nice to me. He told me I’d be beautiful in ten years if I “cleaned up.” But in ten years, I thought, I’ll just be old.

  Then a German woman came to the hostel. She was already old; she was thirty-one. But the boys were stunned by her. Even before they said so, I could tell. When she came in the room, they looked alert and dazed at the same time, like the beautiful night world of the music had appeared before them and begun swirling around their heads. When she left, they all said, “She is so beautiful!”

  I didn’t understand; she just looked like a girl to me, only old. Then someone said, “She used to be a model,” like that explained everything. “She was very famous ten years ago,” he added.

  The feeling of dazzlement increased. The next time she appeared, conversation stopped, and people were self-conscious about starting it again. The fifteen-year-old girl didn’t even try. She just sat there smoking and staring, not even suspicious anymore, like finally here was something that was exacdy what it was supposed to be. She didn’t even care that her boyfriend was staring at this woman like he was in love with her. She looked at the model as if she were a glimmering set of dresses, like she’d drape her over her arm and stroke her if she could.

  Every day, the German woman would walk into this reaction, eating her cereal, taking her turn at the toilet, sometimes joining in a smoke around the stereo. If she walked into the kitchen, carrying a book: What was she reading? Oh really! And what did she think of it? The German woman answered thoughtfully and pleasantly, but also stiffly, like she was trying to pass a test.

  I still didn’t understand. I didn’t think she was beautiful and I didn’t care that she had been a model. This is probably hard to believe. It is hard for me to believe. Now everybody knows models are important; everybody knows exacdy what

  beauty is. It is hard to imagine that a young girl would fail to recognize a former model with full, perfecdy shaped features as beautiful. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about beauty; I liked beauty as much as anyone, but I had my own ideas about what it was. This woman didn’t look like anything to me. Now I would be staring at her like everybody else. But back then, I was the only person in the house who did not react to her appearance. The few times we were alone in the kitchen together, we made small talk, and I didn’t think she was paying me any more attention than I paid her.

  I left the house after a week. I moved into a rooming house with an older boyfriend who made a living handing out flyers on the street. One day in the fall, I was walking down the street, doing nothing, when suddenly the German woman was there—so suddenly, it felt like she’d leapt out from around a corner.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “It’s so great to see you! How are you doing? I was wondering what happened to you!”

  Under her friendliness, her face was wild, like something inside her was crashing together and breaking, then crashing i together again. Her voice was pleasant, but she did not look pleasant, or thoughtful, or like she gave a fuck about passing a test.

  I told her about my boyfriend, with whom I now lived. “That sounds wonderful!” she said. “I have my own place just a few blocks away from here. Would you like to come visit?” Then, seeing my expression, she added, “Or maybe just go for a coffee now?” I stood there, nervous and speechless. She frowned, peering at me slighdy, maybe noticing finally that I was just a kid. “Or, or... an ice cream! Would you like an ice cream?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t have any money.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, already leading me away without checking to see if I was following. “It’s my treat.” From the side, her eye was glassy and hard. Gingerly, I fell in with her.

  We must have looked strange together. I was tall, but she was taller, and her high heels made her taller yet. Her burgundy dress was silken and plain, and it flattered the cutting, angular quality of her body. She wore sparkling earrings and eye shadow, lipstick and nail polish. It was hot and she was slighdy wet under the armpits, but still she gave an impression of dryness and gleaming I wore sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt, with no bra underneath. My hair was unkempt and I wore no makeup.

  I didn’t wear deodorant or bathe often; I might actually have smelled. She did not seem to notice any of this.

  She took me to a very stylish and expensive place with little white tables covered by green-and-white-striped umbrellas. A year later, I would know enough to be uncomfortable sitting in this place looking like I did then. But at that time, I only felt bewildered; we didn’t need to go there to get ice cream.

  I stared at the menu, dimly aware of the crudeness of my person for the first time. We ordered our ice cream. She looked at hers dully and began to eat as if she couldn’t taste.

  As we ate, a man in a suit came to our table and spoke to her in a foreign language. His voice was soft and he spoke briefly, but what he said enraged her. She did not act enraged, but I could see it, first in the muscles of her jaw and neck, then in her eyes. Rage was leaping from her eyes, but she answered him with a politeness so bitter, it seemed a kind of despair.

  “What did he say to you?” I asked, thinking it must have been very obscene.

  She literally clenched her teeth and said, ‘“You are very beautiful.’” Hatred illuminated her face like a bright flare and then went out. She returned to her ice cream.

  I was even more bewildered; I had known many girls who, when men flirted with them, would pretend to be offended and disgusted, but it was clear that this woman was not pretending I looked at her, really curious now why people thought she was beautiful and why it made her angry
that they did.

  But I didn’t ask her what I wanted to know. We talked awkwardly for about half an hour and then got up to go. When we returned to the street, she said we should get together again—tomorrow. Did I want to come to her apartment and listen to records? Another flare lighted her face; it was need, not hate, but it was as strong as the hate had been. I was very uncomfortable now, and felt that she was, too. But her need flared unabated, like a pounding drum that pulls you along to its beat and overrules your own emotions. I said yes, I would drop by her apartment at eight o’clock the next evening.

  But I didn’t. When I talked to my boyfriend about her,

  I said she was weird. “Then don’t go,” he said. “I have to,” if replied. “It would be mean not to.” But I sat there in the kitchen j with my boyfriend, eating cheesecake from a tin and watching 1 his huge black-and-white TV until I sank into a torpor. From I there, the German woman’s loud drum was hard to hear. I pic- | tured sitting with her on a nice pillow in front of her stereo. Lots 1 of records would be scattered about—she would have a huge | selection. She would go through them with her long manicured a hands and then put one on and listen to it dully, like she couldn’t 1 hear. Just picturing it made me feel heavy and tired. The gray | figures running around on the TV screen made me feel heavy I and tired, too, but in a comforting way. Eight o’clock came and I I thought I’d sit in my heavy comfort just ten minutes more and 1 then go. At 8:30,1 pictured her sitting alone, going through her I records, need and hate surging under her stiff face. She would I still be waiting for me to arrive. By nine o’clock, I realized I wouldn’t go. I felt bad—I felt like I was deserting a person who I was sick or starving. But I still didn’t go.

  About six months later, I saw her on the street again. I was dressed better then; I’d streaked my blond hair platinum and wore platform shoes. Maybe that’s why the German woman didn’t recognize me, or maybe she pretended not to see me, or maybe she didn’t see me. She didn’t seem to see anything. She was walking alone, her arms wrapped around her torso. Her clothes were ill-kempt and didn’t fit her right because she had