Sara would cut school and come home early, then leave. I’d see her outside, kissing some boy who’d slap her ass when he said good-bye. Or whispering to another chunky girl with saucy goblin eyes, who offered her tits to the world in a sequined T-shirt. In the street, boys rode their bikes in slow swooping curves and called to one another. I’d strain to hear them; I was afraid they were jeering at Sara. But she’d come in like a cat, with an air of adventure about her, inwardly hoarding it. She’d get some food and sit in the room with me, watching TV with one big leg slung over the arm of her chair. She didn’t ask questions about anything that had happened while I was away. She looked at me like she already knew and that it was okay. It felt good to be with her.
Once I asked my dad about her nose, and he said, “It’s broken? Are you sure?” He seemed shocked, and then he said, “Are you sure it hasn’t always been that way?” Maybe he felt like everything was broken and he didn’t have time for one more thing. Maybe that’s why Sara was so mad at him. When he would ask her to help Daphne make dinner or clean up, she’d yell, “In a minute!” and then she wouldn’t do it. Or she’d yell, “We’re not your wives, and it’s not our fault if you don’t have one!” Then she’d run upstairs, sobbing with rage, and our dad would stand there like she’d gut-punched him.
Daphne and I hated Sara for acting like this. But it was
hard to hate her all the way. Her rage was like gentleness trapped and driven crazy with sticks. It was flailing and helpless.
It made Daphne’s measured goodness seem somehow mean. Maybe our father felt this, too. He never chased Sara up the stairs to shout back at her. He just stood there in pain. Then later at night, I would walk by his room. He would be lying in his pajamas and Sara would be sitting on a chair at the foot of his bed, rubbing his feet. Even just walking past, I could feel her concentration; it was huge and fleshy, like her yelling. And his feeling for it was huge, too. Once I heard him say, “You have good hands, Sara. You should be a nurse.” And she said, “Thank you,” her voice small, like a child’s.
I didn’t tell them about the modeling contest. I only mentioned it to Daphne while we were driving to the store. She halflistened, because she was mainly concentrating on smoking her cigarette and dropping ash out the window. I lied and said the photographer was a guy I got high with, and it just flew by her as one more piece of sad crap.
I still thought about modeling, but it was like something I’d masturbate over without expecting it to happen: A door opened and I was drowned in images of myself, images strong and crude as sexual ones. They carried me away like a river of electricity. Electricity is complicated, but on direct contact, it doesn’t feel that way. It just knocks you out and fries you. The door would shut and it would be gone, except for a fading rim of electric fire, an afterimage burning a hole in normal life.
But mosdy, I studied, watched TV, helped with dinner, wrote, went for walks with Daphne, saw friends who were still in school. On the weekends, there were beer parties in apartments with older kids. My friend Lucia was beautiful, even though she had bad skin and bleached hair. She was three months pregnant. When she graduated, she was going to get married and work the cash register at a store where we used to steal candy. I didn’t have disdain then, and so when I told her about the contest, I lied to impress her. I said I’d slapped Gregory Carson’s face, and that John had followed me out, begging me to enter the contest. We were sitting on a concrete stoop outside an apartment complex, drinking beers and watching cars drive in and out of a strip mall across the way. She smiled without looking at me, and I knew she could tell I’d lied, and that she forgave me. Music and laughter tumbled from the apartment in a snarl. Headlights flew past Lucia’s face and she gazed into nothing with a contentment that I didn’t understand. I saw it and I fertilized it. For a second, I pictured her eating dirt. Then I went home and half-listened to my father talk about what had gone wrong with the marriage and what might be done to “bring it back together.”
I took the GED in an old elementary school classroom in Hoboken. The desks were gray linoleum; the chairs were wood. The facilitator was a big, proud man with a bulbous, veiny nose, and he held his cheap jacket open to show his stomach. The other test takers were mosdy middle-aged people with bodies curled like snails crossing a road. The only other young person was a girl wearing a skirt that showed the tops of her panty hose. She glanced at me with sullen camaraderie. Then we hunched over our tests. The facilitator watched us cross the road.
When my test scores came back, my father called my mother to tell her how well I’d done. She made her boyfriend drive her over and wait outside in the car while she kissed me. My dad yelled about “that bastard sitting out there where everybody could see,” and Sara ran upstairs and slammed the door. My mother went out and told him to drive around the block. We all sat down and planned a budget for classes. I ordered course descriptions. I made ready to register. Then the letter from the agency crashed into the side of the house.
It has stopped raining. My sneakers are soaked, so I go ahead and walk through the puddles. Silver and black, full | of sky and the solemn upside-down world. The bus shelter glides under my feet like a huge transparent fish. On the side of it is a model in a black sleeveless dress. An ad for perfume: watch OUT, monsieur. She has a neat, exquisite face, deep, dim eyes, and a sensitive, swollen mouth. Her slight body is potent and live, like an eel. I like her. I am on her side to destroy monsieur. She makes me remember Alana, another small eel girl.
I walk through black shadows, across the inverted sky. I met Alana at a benefit show put on to support and celebrate the renovation of an ancient Parisian department store, the first of its kind in that country. I walked into the tiny dressing room and saw her standing naked in heels, picking through gorgeous gowns and yelling how her agent had made her get an enema that afternoon so she wouldn’t look bloated. “Now Matmoi-selle, ve vill unlock ze bowel!” She was cracking everybody up, talking about the crazy German who’d hosed her out. “Everybody” consisted of the seven models, four makeup artists, and fifteen hairdressers packed into a hot, narrow room that was all mirrors and countertop. Getting their faces made up, talking about enemas and shit: passing out in a nightclub and waking
up in ruined panties; diarrhea attack during shoot; farting in boyfriend’s face. The girls giggled hysterically; the hairdressers were getting in on it. They’d probably been up all night and didn’t feel like doing this obscure show. I hesitated at the door' Alana saw me and pounced. “You look like you need an enema ” she snapped. I blushed. The other girls tittered and quieted. Alana flounced into her chair and grabbed a handful of dark red cherries from a plastic bowl next to a mountain of hot hairpieces. Slouching and chewing, she looked absendy at her reflection: precise round forehead, nose, and chin. Hot eyes, dark, violent bloom of a mouth. White pearls in her clean little ears. If they wanted to find something wrong, they’d have to look up her ass. They went up there to serve perfection, and she mocked perfection with the shit that came out.
But—Watch out, monsieur. On the runway, she was a bolt of lightning in a white Chanel dress. She turned and gave a look. Thumping music took you into the lower body, where the valves and pistons were working. You caught a dark whiff of shit, the sweetness of cherries, and the laughter of girls. Like lightning, the contrast cut down the center of the earth: We all eat and shit, screw and die. But here is Beauty in a white dress. Here is the pumping music, grinding her into meat and dirt. Here are the other girls coming in waves to refill Beauty’s slot. And here is litde Alana, shrugging and turning away. Everyone applauded— and no wonder.
I walk past old homeless people huddled together under the dripping awning of a record store—three of them, like bags of potatoes with potato faces looking out of the bag to see what’s going on. They look like they know me. Maybe they do. Alana disappeared almost as fast as I did. If I saw her sitting on the street like this, it wouldn’t surprise me.
“You take the food out o
f my mouth and I’ll kill you!”
Veronica had screamed that at a homeless guy once. We were walking down the street together and she was talking to me about how she had to hide her HIV from her coworkers. She was eating a bagel and this beggar made as if to grab it from her hand. The rage came up in her like fire; she turned with a scream and hit him in the face. He bolted and she whipped around to me. “They’re trying to take the food from my mouth. Just let them try. Anyway, hon—” Her eyes were still wild with screaming, but she didn’t miss a beat. For her, it was part of the same conversation.
She was like Alana that way: elegance and ugliness together. She’d take a sip of tea, properiy dab her lips, and call her boyfriend a “cunt.”
I stop to give change to one of the women huddled on the sidewalk. She looks up at me and it’s like seeing through time. A young girl, a woman, a hag, look at me through a tunnel of layered sight; three pairs of eyes come together as one. We let our hands touch. She’s given me something—what is it? I walk past; it’s gone.
Veronica’s boyfriend was a bisexual named Duncan. She’d go to a party with him and he’d leave with a drunk girl on his arm, looking like he was taking her out to shoot her. He’d come to dinner with a lovely boy who had bad table manners and a giant canker on his mouth. He’d go to a cruising ground in Central Park called the Ramble, where he’d drop his pants, bend over, and wait. “See what I mean?” she said. “A real cunt.” “Why do you stay?” I asked.
She tipped her head back and released a petulant stream of smoke. She righted her head and paused. “Have you ever seen Camille?” she asked. “With Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor?” Camille is about a beautiful prostitute who dies of tuberculosis—a despised woman who is revealed to be better than anyone else, including the aristocrat who loves her but can’t admit it. Veronica and Duncan purchased a VCR as soon as one was invented, so that they could watch a tape of it constantly. They
watched it on the couch, lying in each other’s arms under a blanket. They watched it eating dishes of expensive ice cream or chocolates in a gold box. They could speak the lines with the actors. Sometimes they did it for fun. Sometimes they did it while they cried. At the end, we cry together,” she said. “It’s gotten so I cry as soon as the credits roll.” She shrugged. “Who else could I do that with? Only a cunt would understand.”
My mother was going for elegance and ugliness when she dressed her adultery in earrings, fancy pantsuits, and heels. But she couldn’t do it right. It was at odds with the style of her time. Her generation distrusted the sentimental thrill of putting beauty next to shit. They didn’t want to be split down the center—they figured they’d see what was there sooner or later anyway. They understood the appeal—of course they understood it! They’d made Camille. But you were supposed to know that was a movie.
My parents went with me to the agency in Manhattan. They were not going to put me on a plane to a foreign country just because I’d won some contest. They were going to ask questions and get the truth. They put on their good clothes and the three of us took Amtrak into the city to a building of gold and glass. In the elevator, we stared silently at the numbers above the automatic door as they lighted up and dimmed in a quick sideways motion. For the first time in years, I could feel my parents subtly unite.
The agency person was a woman with a pulled-back, noisy face. Her suit looked like an artistic vase she’d been placed in up to her neck. When she smiled at me, it was like a buzzer going off. I could tell right away that my parents didn’t know what to do.
“Can you assure me that our daughter will be taken care of?” asked my mother.
“Absolutely!” said Mrs. Agency. She spoke of roommates, vigilant concierges who monitored the doors, benevolent chaperones, former models themselves.
“Aren’t there a lot of homosexuals in the fashion industry?” asked my father.
Mrs. Agency emitted a joyless laugh. “Yes, there are. That’s another reason your daughter will be as safe as a kitten.” My father frowned. I felt forces vying in the room. He sighed and sat back. “I just wish you didn’t have to interrupt your school,” he said. And then I was on another plane, humping through a gray tunnel of bumps. I stared into the sky and remembered Daphne at the airport, closing her face to me. She hugged me, but there was no feeling in it, and when she pulled away, I saw her closed face. Sara didn’t hug me, but when she turned to walk away, she looked back at me, the sparkle of love in her eye like a kiss. Droning, we rose above the clouds and into the brilliant blue.
When the plane landed, it was morning. Invisible speakers filled the airport with huge voices I couldn’t understand. I walked with a great mass of people through a cloud of voices, aiming for the baggage claim. I was distracted by a man in a suit coming toward me with a bouquet of roses and a white bag that looked like a miniature pillowcase half-full of sugar. His body was slim and his head was big. Deep furrows in his lower face pulled his small lips into a fleshy beak. His lips made me think of a spider drinking blood with pure blank bliss. Suddenly, he saw me. He stopped, and his beak burst into a beautiful broad smile that transformed him from a spider into a gende-man. “I am Rene,” he said. “You are for Celeste Agency, no?” Yes, I was. He took one of my bags and handed me his roses. He took my other bag, put it on the floor, and kissed my hand. In a flash, I understood: Seeing me had made him a gendeman and he loved me for it. I liked him, too. “It is Andrea, yes?” “No,” I said. “Alison.”
His car was sleek and white and had doors that opened
upward, like wings on a flying horse. We got inside it. He opened the bag (which was silk) and scooped the cocaine out of it with his car key. He placed the key under one winged nostril and briskly inhaled. I thought of the time my father was insulted by a car salesman who said, “All you want is something to get around in!” For a week after, my father walked around saying, “What do you do with it, you son of a bitch? Screw with it?” We passed the key back and forth for some moments. Finally, he licked it and put it in the ignition. He said, “Alison, you are a beautiful girl. And now you are in a country that understands beauty. Enjoy it.” He started the car. The drug hit my heart. Its hard pounding spread through my body in long dark ripples and for a second I was afraid. Then I stepped inside the electrical current and let it knock me out. We pulled out of the lot and into the Parisian traffic.
I had read about Paris in school. It was a place where ladies wore jewels and branches of flowers, even live birds in tiny cages woven into their huge wigs. The whipping boy sometimes played chess with the prince. The Marquis de Sade painted asylum inmates with liquid gold and made them recite poetry until they died. Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat butt-naked in the tub. I looked at the car speeding next to us; a plain girl with glasses on the end of her nose frowned and hunched forward. She cut us off and Rene muttered a soft curse. American pop music came out of her car in a blur. Ossifier. Love’s desire. Huge office complexes sat silent in fields brimming with bright green desire. The queen knelt before a guillotine. Blood shot from her neck in a hot stream. The next day, her blood stained the street and people walked on it; now her head was gone, and she could be part of life. Rene asked what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to write poetry. Cancan girls laughed and kicked. In paintings, their eyes are squiggles of pleasure, their mouths loose-shaped holes. On the street, people waiting for the light to change frowned and glanced at their watches.
Rene waited for me in the car while I went into the agency.
It was a medium-sized building with a shiny door on a cobbled street. The doorman had mad blue eyes and beautiful white gloves. The halls were carpeted in aqua. Voices and laughter came from behind a door. It opened and there was a woman with one kind eye and one cruel eye. Behind her was a man looking at me from inside an office. His look held me like a powerful hand. A girl’s small white face peeped around the corner of the same office. The hand let go of me. The girl blinked and withdrew. “Where is your luggage?” asked the double-eyed woman
. “With Rene, outside,” I replied. “Rene?” She rolled her eyes back in her head. When they came forward again, they were both cruel. “Very well. Here.” She handed me a piece of paper. “This is a list of go-sees for tomorrow and Wednesday. I suggest you use a taxi to get to them. Now tell Rene that Madame Sokolov says he must take you straight to rue de l’Estrapade.” “Ah,” said Rene. “Madame Sokolov is not always aware.” He tapped his head with two fingers and drove us to a dark door squeezed between a tobacco shop and a shoe store. The concierge was an old woman with a brace on her leg. She led me slowly up the dingy stairs, with Rene following, bags in hand. We moved slowly to respect the brace. Each short flight of steps came to a small landing with ticking light switches that shut off too soon. “Merde,” muttered the old lady. The light had turned off while she was looking for the key to my room. In the dark, I felt Rene’s hot breath on my ear. “Take a nap this afternoon, eh? I’ll be by at eight.” He bit me on the ear. I started and he disappeared down the stairs. The old lady pushed open the door; there was a weak burst of light and television noise and a high, cunty voice: “But don’t you see, I want you here now. Two days from now will be too late!” My roommate, in bra and underpants, sat cross-legged on the sagging couch, the phone to her sulky face. She acknowledged me with a look, then rose and walked into a back room, trailing the phone cord. She carried her slim butt like a raised tail and her shoulders like pointy ears When the old lady left, I sat on the couch and picked at a bo^fl of potato chips on the side table. Out a window, enamel roof, tops with slim metal chimneys were bright against the white sky; a shadow weather vane twirled on a shadow roof. I watched it until my roommate got off the phone and I could call my famikl
When Rene came, I told him I wanted to go someplace! that had pie. He laughed and said, “You will have French pie!” We went to a patisserie with cakes that looked like jewelry boxes made of cream. I ate them, but I didn’t like them. They had tocfef many tastes, and I wanted the plain chemical taste of grocery : store pie. But the tables were made of polished wood and the people sitting at them were drinking coffee from tiny white cups. A woman next to us took a cigarette out of a case and lit itH with a silver lighter. And because Rene asked him to, the waiter ; sang to me. The song was about little boys peeing on butterflies^ Papillon, pee, pee, pee. Papillon, non, non, non. The waiter bent down to the table and sang softly. His pocked face hung in bristly jowls-’ and I saw he was missing teeth. But his voice opened the song like a picture book with feelings and smells in it. Blue flowers bobbed on the wind and butterflies dodged the piss of laughing boys. Mothers called; the boys buttoned their flies and ran home. I had awakened in New Jersey with my parents and I was going to sleep tonight with my French lover.
Veronica Page 6
