“I’m in here, Allie,” says Joanne from the kitchen.
“So he expects me—me with the bad back!—to carry two bags of clubs for this asshole,” says another voice.
“Watch your mouth, Karl,” says Joanne mildly. “Hi Allie.” She puts her cigarette out on a litde plate and smiles. The girls smile, too—not only Jason’s Heather and Joelle but also seven-year-old Trisha from down the block. They’re at the table, drawing pictures. Another roommate, scrawny, pissed-off Karl, stands there bare-chested, raging about his golf course job. He’s hunched over Joanne, sending small, concentrated rage at her, like she’s standing there with a big bag to catch it. He looks at me, his raging head pulled into such a point, it’s like his eyes are on the end of his nose. He says, “Hi,” then continues his rant.
“I’m gonna tell that. . . that. . . pig, that fat pig—”
“Look,” says Heather. “Look at my castle and my glass mountain!”
“I’m not gonna tell him anything! I’m gonna go to Loomis and tell him what’s been going on in accounting! And then I’m gonna get Harris and get him together with—”
“Want some tea, Allie?” Joanne is sandy-colored, her skin and her hair. Her eyes are light brown, and they remind me of Alain’s because they are sometimes filled with pouring movement. Except her movement isn’t in pieces. It’s continuous, like the movement of a plant or human cell fluxing with light or water or blood. Joanne is drinking from the world through her eyes, maybe even from beyond it.
“Look at my beach birds!” cries Joelle. “Look at my bird balls!” The children crowd around Joanne as she’s trying to get up, loving what is in her eyes.
“I’ll get the tea,” I say, then realize I forgot to take off my wet shoes. I’ve tracked dirt through the house like a stoner or a senile old lady. Oh well. I bend to pull off my shoes. I feel my aging gingerly. I sit up. The children’s faces are bursting with expressions, each gently crowding out the others. Karl looks at them, and his eyes go back where they’re supposed to be. He
turns around and gropes through a cabinet, pulls out a box of cereal with a cartoon tiger on it. The tiger roars as magic sugar flies over his giant bowl of cereal.
“Joanne, look! Look, Alison!” Trisha is dancing and waving her drawing. She is erect and seeking, and her white skin is as vibrant as color. Her brown eyes are radiant, but her small lips have a soft dark color that suggests privacy, hiddenness. Her dancer is red leaping on white, with wiggle arms and pointy yellow shoes on the ends of wiggle legs.
“Wow!” I say. “This is a real dancer. This is like real dancing!”
“Yes,” says Trisha, “now look!”
Even Karl looks as Trisha stands exulting with her arms in the air. “All the way up to here!” She bends and puts her palms on the floor; her cartwheel is a quick, neat arc. “All the way down to there!” Her belly flashes its button. She laughs, cartwheels again, out of the kitchen into the hall. Heather and Joelle somersault after her, screaming, “Me, too! Me!” We applaud. I get a mug from the cabinet, brushing against Karl as I go past. His rage is still there, but it’s inside now. I picture a little metal ball with spikes, rolling in one spot, tearing a hole in his heart while the rest of Karl holds it together, eating his cereal and thinking about other things.
“I’ll get it.” Joanne brushes past me, gets the kettle, runs water into it.
“It’s total disrespect,” says Karl. “He’s shitting on me, and he’s doing it so everybody else knows.”
“Karl,” I say. “I don’t exactly know what you’re talking about. But if you’re talking disrespect at the workplace, I once worked with a photographer who told a girl to put her hand down her pants and masturbate.”
“What.V*
“He put it more nicely than that, but he meant, Stick your hand down your pants and masturbate. He wasn’t kidding, either. And she was fifteen.”
This happened in Naxos, Greece. The photographer #1 an American named Alex Gish. He was considered an artist Whatever he looked at, he took apart and put back together with his mind, furious because he knew it would just go back to 1 being itself as soon as he looked away. He was looking at me this fifteen-year-old Brit named Lisa, and three local men his assistant had hired. He called the men “magnificent” and then gazed at them, rearranging. They gazed back, huge, bemused ^ squinting. One of them affably spat.
“So did she do it?” Karl pauses over his cereal, spiked ball on hold. He is curious. His eyes are a little turned on, but his small chest is soft and open. He has compassion. I get stuck on this for a second. If his compassion comes from the place where he’s clawing himself, is it real? It seems mean to say no. But I wonder. One of the Greek men looked at Lisa with compassion, too. His look was not about something torn. He looked at her before she was disrespected. He looked like a kind dog might look at a nervous cat. Majestic wet tongue out, rhythmically , inhaling the scent of feline. Store info in saliva, lick the chops, swallow it down. Blink soft, merciful eyes. Put tongue out again. Sometimes dogs are more dignified than cats. This man was probably sixty years old, and he was so beautiful, they wanted to put him in a fashion magazine.
“Yeah, she did it. He spent the whole day telling her she was bloated and fat. ‘The lips are too thin, Andre. Can you work with that? And while you’re at it, do something about those bags under the eyes.’ ”
“Pricks like that should just be killed,” says Karl with feeling.
“I’ll bet she was making a lot more than Karl is.” Joanne’s voice is careful and pointed. She pours the boiling water carefully. “And I’ll bet she could’ve said no and not gotten fired.” “Yeah,” says Karl. “It’s not the same. But I still think the photographer should be killed. Along with—”
“I’m just saying, if you want to talk about disrespect...” I trail off. Joanne doesn’t like it when I tell stories like this. She thinks I’m acting dramatic and victimized. But that’s not how I feel. I feel like the bright past is coming through the gray present and I want to look at it one more time.
“My God!” cried Alex, throwing another Polaroid on the ground. “Can’t you do better than that? Do you even know what fucking is?” I was drinking orange soda and giggling with a stylist. The shiny litde picture flapped across the sand and got caught in some weeds near my feet. Lisa’s mouth quivered. She was thin-lipped for a model. I tipped my head back to drink more soda and to look at the deep and bright blue sky.
“I still think you should try talking to him.” Joanne’s tuned into Karl. “Use the skills we went over. Always talk in terms of ‘I.’ Like, ‘When you had me carry those bags, it made me feel—”’
Trisha’s laughter sails into the room with a cloud of TV noise. They’re playing with the channel changer. Zip—voices— zip—music—gray buzz—zip. Their laughter rolls together with the electronic babble in a dissolving ball of sound. Flesh and electricity gather and disperse.
“Okay.” Alex sighed. “Look. We’re going to be shooting from the waist up only. Just put your hand down your pants and make yourself feel good.” One of the Greeks smiled nervously at me and kicked a little sand over my foot. The stylist threw me a hot smirk. Lisa’s mouth was twisted with embarrassment. My heart beat. Tears shone on her face. I frowned and shook sand off my foot. “You haven’t got the Ups,” yelled Alex, “so use your eyes! You’ve got the eyes! Use them!”
It was disrespect. But it was something else, too— something I would not be able to explain to Karl or Joanne. Afterward, we all went out for dinner and everybody was nice to Lisa. She sat there, tense and hunched under the niceness. The tension only heightened the beauty of her huge eyes and
delicate movements. We ate lamb and sardines, tomatoes drip, ping with oil. We were sitting on an outdoor patio and the men went to piss in the darkness outside the strung ring of colored lights. It was warm. We could smell one another’s sweat mingled with food and flowers. Alex sat across from Lisa. His face was naked and strange. He said something in a low
voice, and for an instant her spirit showed itself—a bright orange pistil in a white flower. “There’s a lady,” he said, and his voice was warm.
Joanne puts her cigarette to her lips. Karl eats his cereal. His rage is quiet. His hurt is quiet. I have aspirin and codeine with my tea. Rain spatters the roof. We sit connected in a triangle. On television, haunted music tiptoes about. Animals bellow. Humans mutter. Comedy music bumps and stumbles. A voice says, “We are here to be the eyes and ears of God.”
I think of Drew’s room of furniture. Some of it he’ll sell, but most of it will build up in that room and spread out through the house. He’s building onto himself and out into the world at the same time. His furniture is for use. But whether anyone uses it or not, each piece adds to the huge place he’s building inside—a place where the physical laws don’t apply, where you can sit in orange flame and be okay. He’s using physical tools to describe this place. He’s leaving physical markers.
One night when I was here, I was alone in the kitchen for a minute and Drew came up behind and pressed against me. I could hear Joanne in the living room, talking to Karl over emergency music on the TV Fear, pain, excitement, said the music. Sorrow, secret sorrow. We were all high on pot. I was standmg at the counter, pouring apple juice. He came in and put one hand on my hip and one arm around my chest, as though to hold me steady. He crouched a little and pressed against me. He put his cheek against the side of my head. Joanne laughed in the next room. For a second, her laugh blended with his touch and I felt held by it. He pressed against my butt. I felt that soft noise feeling all through his body, insistent, warm, ardent, like a snuffling bear at a berry bush. His cheek against me ardent, too. Respect-
ing the bush: May I? Before I knew it, Yes shot down my spine and lifted my tailbone slighdy. Ossifier, love’s desire. But silent now, huge and soft with sadness. I put my hand on his. “Stop,” I said. “We can’t.” He held me long enough for me to feel his ardor turn to embarrassment, then sadness, then nothing. He let go, coughed, and opened the refrigerator. I went into the living room. A grim woman flew through gray traffic on a motorcycle. Triumph, said the music. Grim, lonely triumph flying through space. I imagined letting the feeling continue, letting it bend me forward. Open the door to the place where the huge things are. Let him stick it in. He sat far away from me, face blank, cheeks flushed. What would it have been like to open that door again? 1 might’ve done it, except for Joanne.
Karl puts his dish in the sink and disappears. Joanne takes my wet shoes and socks and puts them in the dryer off the kitchen. Gives me a pair of Drew’s socks to wear. We make lunch—sandwiches and boiled eggs and carrots cut into neat strips. The girls run back in, clamoring for carrots and animal crackers. They sit and draw red animals, whole furious sheets of them. My shoes thud in the dryer. Roommate Nate comes out of his basement room in a pajama top and a cowboy hat. He works the night shift in the emergency room and he’s training to be a fireman. He walks into the kitchen singing, “Move it in, pull it out, stick it back, and waggle it about, Disco Warthog!” “One,” says Joanne, “quit singing dirty songs. Two—” The girls crowd around him with their drawings.
| ‘Disco Warthog,’ ” says Nate, pouring himself a cup of coffee, “is derived from the classic ‘Disco Lady,’ and is therefore not a dirty song.”
“Nate,” says Trisha, looking up, “warthogs are dirty. They’re pigs with teeth!”
“Two. Could you and the girls go into the living room so | can visit with Alison?”
Nate leads the girls from the room, coffee cup aloft. "Let’s go be clean lady warthogs!”
‘And no disco whatever!” shouts Joanne. She turns to mil and smiles.
Joanne is making a place inside her, too. She doesn’t do it physically like her husband. She does it with thoughts and words. We move around the kitchen, and I can feel the builHmgB going on. She’s talking about people we know at the support group. She’s talking about a woman with hepatitis named Karen, who is superpissed about people who help her when she doesn’t want their help. People who lecture her about her smoking and her soothing double vodkas at night, who harangue her about everything from interferon to Bach flower remedies, f including yoga, root vegetables, and salmon. “ ‘The worst thing j isn’t even being sick.’” Joanne imitates Karen’s bitter, husky whine, so heavy, it’s almost sensual. “‘The worst thing is having | some yoga-class, health food-eating, New Age therapist-gai||i prick jam you about being a junkie. And like’ ”—with fine, hoarse disdain^-1"‘I can afford salmon. Fuck you!”’ We laugh | because Karen is royal, with her long dyed black hair and jew*, J elry, her harsh wild eyes with their ring of green around file , gray. We laugh because she’s an asshole. We also laugh because i we know what she means about the health pricks, going to gyms, sitting in hot tubs, taking their stinking vitamins and anti- • depressants. “ ‘Tellin’ me what I need to do, what to eat, what to think about before I go to bed at night—because everybody has to be fucking perfect like they think they are. Because the reality that they can’t control it, that people get sick no matter what they do, scares the shit out of them.’”
She’s right about that, too. I think of the guy with hepatitis who was written up in the local paper as a success story last year; he thought he’d beaten the disease with a macrobiotic diet, Chinese herbs, acupuncture, and vigorous exercise. The son of a bitch ran five miles every day, then went home and sat in the hot tub he’d built himself. In the newspaper photo, he looked very pleased with himself; the caption under the photo said “In control.” Then liver cancer squashed him like a mallet. He
didn’t know that high temperatures are very bad for the hepatic liver, and he’d apparently cooked the damn organ in his hot tub. Which is exacdy what drives Karen crazy—his thinking that if only he did everything right, he might control mortality. His bossy litde will with its nose in the air, up on a pedestal to be worshiped. Except she wants to put her sickness on a pedestal and worship it. She wants other people to worship it, too.
“Do you remember,” I say, “all those spiritual healing books from the eighties? There was one that said HIV came to Earth because of shame. Do you know what I’m talking about?” “Yeah.” Joanne makes a carrot-strip sunburst on a yellow plate. “I think I read that one. Wasn’t it by this grandmotheriy old lady?” She goes to the refrigerator and comes back with handfuls of radishes. “There was an exercise you were supposed to do. I remember ...” She stands at the sink, running the radishes under the water, quickly and lightly rubbing them.
“You were supposed to address each body part and tell it you love it, especially any part you felt shame about. A long time ago, I gave it to this woman named Veronica. She had HIV and I was desperate to give her something, even though she didn’t want it.”
“Like Karen talks about.” 1'
“Yeah, except she didn’t get mad at me. She laughed instead.”
Joanne cuts the radishes like my mother did, like her mother must’ve done—like flowers. I cut the sandwiches into triangles, like Daphne, Sara, and I used to have sandwiches. Like Trisha and Heather and Joelle might one day make sandwiches for children.
“She gave the book back and told me it was sweet. I asked if she did the exercise, and she said, ‘Hon, I may not know much about love, but I know it’s not an act of will.’ She said picturing all those fags chanting ‘I love my ass’ made her laugh.” In fact, Veronica said she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Trying to put love up their asses like they used to put dick, under the benevolent ur-gaze of this grandmotherly ‘healer’ like finally Grandma loves and accepts your ass—please. Mv shame didn’t cause this and my love won’t cure it.”
“I remember she said, ‘How do you think Stalin and Hitler wound up killing so many people? They were trying to fix them. To make them ideal.’ She said, ‘There’s violence in that hon.’”
“Yeah,” says Joanne. “I see what she means. But I liked the exercise. I didn’t expect it to fix me. I just foun
d it comforting.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me, too.”
She drops a double handful of cut radishes in the center of the sunburst. Light comes through the window and shines on her hands; they are wet, rough, and slighdy red at the knuckles. There’s a torn hangnail on her thumb and chipped silver polish on her broken transparent nails. “Do you want apple juice?” she asks.
Heather and Joelle run through the room, using our legs to play hide-and-seek. Their young faces peep in and out of our aging limbs; their hands and eyes flash. I think of roses climbing a battered trellis.
“We’ve gotta get lunch on,” says Joanne. “My radio program is gonna be on in forty minutes, and today it’s the director of Lost in Translation, and I loved that movie.”
The place Joanne is building inside has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors and old-lady healers and people trying to love their asses and people who think they’re stupid for it. In these rooms, each thing that looks crazy or stupid will be like a drawing you give your mother, regarded with complete acceptance and put on the wall. Not because it is good but because it is trying to understand something. In these rooms, there will be understanding. In these rooms, each madness and stupidity will be unfolded from its knot and smoothed with loving hands until the true thing inside it lies revealed.
Joanne goes to get Jerry for lunch. The girls help me carry the food into the living room so we can eat it on a blanket while we watch Animal Planet. There’re cheese sandwiches with lettuce, peanut butter and jelly ones, radishes and carrots, plus animal crackers and juice in little cartons. Joanne and I sit on the floor with the girls; Joelle sits between Joanne’s spread legs, her plate balanced on Joanne’s thigh. Jerry’s next to Nate on the couch, laughing about something. The light from the fish tank glows behind them; fish traverse the rippling green.
Veronica Page 8
