On Animal Planet, people are putting computer chips under the skins of beautiful lizards in order to help save them from extinction. The camera zooms in on the writhing creatures. Their eyes bulge; their hinged red mouths fiercely gape. One strikes the air with a stiff webbed claw. Joanne presses the mute button to say grace. The bright and scalding past breaks through.
Toward the end, Alain would talk to people about me while I sat right there. I understood French well enough by then that I could understand most of what he said. “She’s gone cold. Morbid, a litde weird. She doesn’t have the strength to carry that off. But you should have seen her when she first came.” I just sat there, not saying anything. What shames me most about it is that by then I didn’t even love him. I loved the rich things and the money and people kissing my ass. I loved the song I was living in, and he was the singer.
He still used the apartment for meetings and to hang out. He brought over girls and his beautiful friend Jean-Paul, an exmodel who smiled, dirty and sweet, when Alain called him “cunt face.” He didn’t have official parties there. That was for his real house, which he shared with his real girlfriend. But the apartment was set up so that little parties could happen it they wanted to. There were fresh flowers in freshly polished vases.
The pantry was stocked with wine and fancy nuts, big fat oliv^aj figs, sugared almonds, and marzipan animals that I ate myself * sick on when I was alone. In the refrigerator were salted fish {Dates, cheeses. Also boxes of syringes filled with antibiotics fofjl syphilis and clap. There was always cocaine in a big china plate on the mantel. Some nights, people would tumble in like were being poured from a giant cornucopia, falling out on their royal asses, then getting up to dance and eat and strut. Some of them thought I was just a girl at the party. But lots of them knew this was actually my home. Alain insisted on keeping up the pretense of no sex, even though so many people knew. Once I did it with Cunt Eace when people were over, to mock Akin |j and his policy. That’s when I realized how many people knew I We came out of the bedroom and people looked at Alain to see i’ what he would do. When he didn’t do anything, they looked® away. little laughing people skipping and playing in the place 3 where the huge things are.
But I wasn’t a little person. I was huge. I was hugel||| drunk. I was a model and secret mistress of a powerful agen,t/i who could flaunt another lover in front of him.
I walked down a hallway crowded with gorgeous people. Lush arms, gold skin, fantastic flashing eyes, lips made up so big and full, they seemed mute—made not to talk but only to sense and receive. So much beauty, like bursts of violent color hitting your eye together and mixing until they were mud. I passed a bathroom and heard the sound of puking quickly covered by the music on the stereo. Rich, dreamy mud of sound. A girl met my eye and I was amazed to see her face emerge with such clar-ity. For a second, I was starded to think I knew her from childhood. Then I realized she was a movie star. I had watched her on TV with my family. She was looking at me curiously. I smiled and walked past. My father had loved her on TV If he could see this, he would reach up and scratch his ear, not knowing what to say. Jean-Paul had scratched his ear just before he leaned in to kiss me. His kiss had been surprisingly sweet. I ducked into
a bedroom to call my father and tell him about the movie star. I closed the door and sat with the phone cord wound against my chest, listening to the phone ringing in the dingy kitchen in New Jersey, my call hurding through the night, over the cold ocean to land in that dingy phone.
I was going to show myself to my father, living big and bold. Mosdy when I called him, I was stilted and hidden. Now I would show him something. I didn’t know what. But I would show him. Jean-Paul had fucked me shallowly a long time before finally sticking it in. I was still drunk with feeling between my legs. The room blurred and swam in my eyes. I heard myself murmur, “I love you, Daddy.” But when he answered the phone, I couldn’t speak. His voice was a mild voice, tired and kind. There was nothing big in it. I didn’t know how to speak to it. I was abashed before it. “Hello?” said the voice. “Hello?” Darkness spread around me, and in it I was tiny. “Hello?” Across the ocean, my father sighed. “Hello?” He hung up. Comforted, I went back to the party.
Sometimes, Alain and I still slept together. He would come into my room in the early morning, when it was still dark. He would bend over me and cover my face with tiny kisses, his rough coat brushing against me. He stroked my face with his cold hands and spoke so gendy that I couldn’t hear him. I thought I heard “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He was so drunk, his eyes were finally quiet, swollen and rolled back in his head. He would lie beside me, and I would kiss his hands and his temples, shivering with the night air on his clothes. He would kiss me back and touch my body and then fall asleep. I would put my back against him, then pull his arm around me and hold it there. Litde gusts of morning air made the shade tap against the window frame. Sunlight crept under the shade and across the floor. Strange to think it was the same sun the cat and I had watched on the dining room floor a long time ago.
But mostly, he didn’t sleep with me. Sometimes he didn’t sleep at all. Sometimes I’d wake up and find him in the living
room with Jean-Paul and some girl, watching TV with red eyes and open dry mouths. Once I came out and saw Cunt FaCe bent over the kitchen table with his pants down so that Aim could give him a clap shot. Alain didn’t look up. Jean-Paul smiled wanly, then winced when Alain jabbed him. He must’ve asked for the shot; Alain didn’t give them away. Even friends had to pay.
Heather and Trisha are almost asleep before the TV Joelle is •• standing at the sliding glass door, looking at the sky. The sun has broken through somewhere; the tops of the trees are glowing, •’ almost gold with sunlight. Everything else is gray. A piece of rippling fish tank is reflected in the glass, like a mysterious heart in a gray body. A tiny fish flickers across it. Joelle stretched up ; a hand. “This is my eyes.” She stretches up the other. “ThisM my ears.”
Joanne stands beside her The sun plays across her side- . ways face. I can see the white down on her skin. I can see thel tiny crosshatch marks in the softness of her cheeks, the acni'J scars pocking one side of her face, the dark pouches under her eyes. liver, weariness, bile. The weight of her cheeks just start? ing to pull her mouth into a severe shape. Sensitive lips now sensing death mingled with all the tastes of life. All her pores opened and saturated with waning life. Still sending Out the message of Here I am. The little girl stretches her face up to receive it, drinking in with her own perfect skin what it is to be. Joanne turns to face me. Behind her eyes, she is going from room to room, turning on the lights.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
That you are beautiful. That not everyone could see it. I almost became the kind of person who could not. I missed being that kind of person by a hair.
“About the way I used to be. Things I used to do. You jmow. Stuff I can’t understand anymore why I did it.”
The girl pricks up her ears. “What did you do, Alison?”
I turned into a puppet with a giant hand inside me. Not a particular hand. Just a hand. During a fitting, a client jabbed my crotch with her long nails. She was supposedly smoothing the wrinkles on some pants. She snapped, “You keep sweating!” then twisted my leg so hard, she hurt my knee. I went into hysterics and was fired for the first time. I insulted Alain in public and arrived home two days later, to find myself locked out of the apartment. I ran to the bank, but I was too late—two years too late. I could only get fifty thousand francs. The rest was in a Swiss bank account in the agency’s name.. <
; I look into the child’s eyes. She meets my look, takes it in. She frowns and looks down, fiddling with the hem of her shirt. At that age, they know about doing things you don’t know why you did. When I was five, I slammed Daphne’s leg in the car door. We were having a fight and she said something I didn’t like. I was in the car and she was just getting in and I slammed her leg. She screamed. My mother yelled, “Why di
d you do that?” I was too shocked to answer. I stroke Joelle’s lowered head. The shine of the sun follows my hand on her gold-brown hair.
We were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed before us. For tearing up the fabric of songs wise enough to acknowledge limits. For making songs of rape and death and then disappearing inside them. For trying to go everywhere and know everything. We were stupid, spoiled, and arrogant. But we were right, too. We were right to do it even so.
Drew walks in. Rough face flushed and sensate. Eye sparkle rooted in the slow, low body. The spry feet of a dandy. Long graying hair fluffy and touched with rain. He stops and his eyes zero in on me. I sit down and take his socks off my feet. I have to go. Heather and Trisha wake for me to kiss their cheeks. Trisha hugs my legs and shouts, “Good-bye!” I bend and kiss her forehead. Ten years from now, I will be a kiss in a great field of faceless kisses, a sweet patch of forgotten territn^B in her inner country. Joanne hugs me, too, her heart against mine. Nice to think that in her dreams Trisha might run through that field and love it without knowing why. Drew puts out his hand and I clasp it. There is a ball of heat and feeling in his palm. The same feeling as when he pressed up against me that time. If I asked him why he did that, what would he say? I still have this. Do you see? I am sick. One day, I could be very sick. But in the meantime, I still have this and it’s still good. Do you see? I do see. It’s not just sex. It’s why he can help other men without making them feel like bums. Why people will listen to him when he’s not saying words. Tes, I see. I tell him that with my eyes. He thanks me with his eyes. He lets go of my hand.
The rain is out again, hammering the puddles full of holes, pocking the black-and-silver world with shining darkness. Rain soaks each leaf and blade of grass, bloating the lawns until they seem to roll and swell. Houses recede. The wind rises. The eyes and ears of God come down the walk.
I should go home. I’m tired and weak. Should take the bus. Should call my father. He is alone in an apartment with junk mail and old newspapers spread all around. Looking here and there in bafflement while dry heat pours out on him from a vent in the ceiling. His radio with a bent antenna on the dining table is tuned to a sports channel. People on magazine covers smile up from the floor and tabletops—a flat field of smiles blurred with slanted light from the cockeyed lamp. My father doesn’t listen to his old songs anymore. They finally went dead for him. Instead, he has these people in magazines and on TV: actors, singers, celebrities. He knows they are vessels for a nation of secret, tender feeling, and he respects them. I think he tries to cleave to them. But I don’t think he can.
Above me, the treetops wave back and forth, full of shapes, like the ocean. Wild hair, great sopping fists, a rippling field, a huge wet plant with thousands of tiny flowers that open and close with the wind. Form recedes. All the smiling television faces blend to make a shimmering suit that might hold you. I see my father trying to put one of them on. Reaching for it trustfully, noticing the poor quality but letting it pass. Smiling like he doesn’t see when it falls apart in his hands. Still wanting to believe. Afraid not to.
Veronica had whole picture books of celebrities in her apartment, thick books by Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton, who were almost celebrities themselves. These books did not bewilder her; she understood them as vessels. I remember a picture of two slender, sinewy women in neon underwear, one bending over with perfecdy straight legs and a perfecdy straight back while the other one, perfecdy erect and frontal, pretended to spank her with a paddle. Veronica’s apartment was a condominium that she worked double shifts for a year to buy, and it wanted very much to be perfecdy elegant It was like an aquarium of gray and chrome waiting for something perfect to be placed in it. These pictures were the first perfect things.
When Alain locked me out and stole my money, I went back home. Eventually, I moved to New York; eventually, I returned to modeling. Eventually, I lived in a big apartment, too. I remember returning home to my big apartment alone and drunk. Moving through rooms, turning on the lights. The buzz of my own electricity loud and terrible in my head. Someday to be cut off. That doesn’t happen when I go home to my place on the canal. I am glad to be there. I always turn on the space heater
first thing, a wonderful humming box filled with orange bandpi of dry heat. Take off my wet shoes, sit in the chair, warming my wet feet. Look out the window, look at the wall. Travel slowlyf through the wall. My millions of cells meeting all its millions of cells. We swarm together like ants touching feelers. Now I know ^ you. Good, yes, I know you. I have some coffee. Listen to the radio. This afternoon maybe 1*11 call my father.
But not yet; I won’t go home yet. I’ll take the bus and go someplace beautiful and I’ll walk until I’m so tired that I won’t be able to stay awake tonight. So tired that my sleep will not be pestered by dreams or fairy tales.
At the end of the Naxos shoot, Lisa was not crying. Her face was ravaged and fevered, but she was erect, and her eyes were full of dull flame. She looked like a different person. She looked amazing. Alex moved about her, quick and silent. If he spoke, he did so in a very low voice, so that only she would hear him.
Everyone was so busy watching that I was the only one who saw the old Greek man. He was staring at Alex with a face of astonished disgust. His expression made me blush, and he wasn’t even looking at me. He took a step toward Alex, as if he meant to hit him. He stopped as if confused and wiped his mouth. He turned and walked away. He did not even come back to get paid.
Here’s the main street. Here’s the bus stop. Here’s a retarded girl coming toward me in a yellow slicker and baggy corduroy pants. She is dainty and shambling, with her big body and small feet, her ragged hems crushed and muddy under her heels. She comes close. Her fat, soft face is thick with feelings too blunt for words. Soft like paws, not nimble like fingers. Paws can read the
earth better than fingers. I can feel her reading me, running her senses over the invisible scars left by my appetites, vanities, and passive cruelties. Feeling my secret mouth—still there, even if the fangs have fallen out. Don’t worry about me, I think at her. I am harmless. But she looks wary. She doesn’t answer my hello. She keeps her eyes on me till she’s passed.
When I returned home to New Jersey, everybody met me at the airport. My mother had a fake smile on her face, meant to shield me from her tears. Daphne did not smile. She looked at me calmly, except that her brow was knitted up so high, her eyes were almost popped. My father’s face had the awful tact of a witness to an accident with bloody people sprawled out naked. Sara was the only one who seemed the same. She glanced at me to be sure I was still there, then went back into herself.
I sat in the backseat with my sisters, as if we were children again. For a second, they held apart from me and then we were joined together in the old membrane. My mother had come back to my father just weeks earlier, and the membrane was active and vibrating with recent vigor.
“Do you want anything special to eat?” My father raised his eyes in the rearview mirror but did not look at me.
“I’ve made spaghetti,” said my mother, j “Spaghetti would be good,” I replied.
We drove past low-built gray stores set back in lots half-full of cars and hunks of dirty snow. Their lights were starting to come on. The Dress Barn, Radio Shack, the 99-Cent Store. My mother began to cry; her tears scalded my face.
The bus is coming. I feel my fever subdy mount. A frowning young man, soft and slumped in his worn jacket, appears out
of nowhere and flags the bus. It stops, popping open its doll with a spastic rasp. The driver is small and bristling, with a lined face and jug ears. Hard and fiery, with a mouthful of spit waiting to be spat, he glares straight ahead as he pulls the door shut.
That night, I shared the big bed with Daphne. They had moved Sara into a small room in the basement, so we were alone. There was a desk where the maturity bed used to be. I piled my clothes on it until we could figure ©lit what to do with them all. We brushed our hair and changed in
to flowered gowns. I walked around naked more than I had to, She looked away. We had emotions, but we held them back. Silence and stillness connected us. Silence and stillness were where we understood each other. We could still be children together there, and we werel afraid to let adult emotions break it. We got into bed and shut off the light. I turned on my side. Silently, she put her arm around me. I took her hand and kissed it. We laced our fingers together and I kissed her hand again before resting it against my chest.
I sit next to a doughy girl with a stopped-up nose. Who’s the nose of God? The girl sniffs so hard, her head squeaks; she breathes softly through her mouth. Maybe the animals are in charge of smell. Taking everything into their hairy nostrils and translating it with their bodies, patiently putting it through each cell, each organ. Sitting and mulling it over with half-closed eyes. Licking their paws and sending it upward in an invisible skein of knowledge.
I enrolled in the community college. Daphne was already there. Sara had dropped out of school and taken a job at an old people’s home a few blocks over. She didn’t yell anymore. There were no boys to slap her ass. She came home from work and went down into the basement. It was winter and we could hear her hacking cough rise all the way up to the second floor. It was winter and my mother’s skin dried and her face grew thin and shrunken. I might look at her in her rubber boots and her wool cap pulled down over her forehead, the wool darkening with sweat as she worked to scrape ice off the chugging car, and I would think, No sexy pantsuit now. Nobody wants you now! And with that thought, my heart contracted and the world shrank around me so fast that I thought it would crush me. Every morning, my father got up looking like he felt the same way. The expression on his face said that the world shrank around him every day, so close in that it was hard to move. The expression on his face said that he pressed against the hard case of the shrunken world and pushed it back with every step. It was an expression I knew without knowing. I put my forehead down and I helped him push.
Veronica Page 9
