Veronica

by Mary Gaitskill

  Our father dropped Daphne and me off at the college before he went to his job. He let us off at the end of the parking lot and we walked a long concrete path caked with blue-and-gray ice that gleamed on sunny days. The school was small and dingy. The people inside it stared at me like I was a stuck-up bitch. To get away from their stares, I climbed further up my stick. But I didn’t feel stuck-up. I felt scared. I felt like I had to prove I was smart enough to go to college. I worked hard. I wrote poems. The poetry teacher was a little man with sparse hair on his dry head and spotted, trembling hands. But I loved him because he wrote “very good” on my poems. At the end of the day, Daphne and I would sit in the Student Union eating sweetened yogurt and dime doughnuts. Night students came and stood in the cafeteria line. At six o’clock, we walked back down the concrete to meet the car.

  If we got home and our mother wasn’t there, our dad danced around the house, pretending he was an ape. He did it to relieve tension. He’d run into the living room swinging his arms and going, “Ooooh! Oooh! Eeee eee eee!” He’d jump up on a chair, scratching his armpit and his head. Daphne and I did it, too; we ran around after him. It was like dancing on the green chairs, only it wasn’t a song everybody knew. It came from the deep flesh place, except it was quick and alive and full of joy. Not that I thought of it that way. I just knew I loved it. If it had gone on longer, it would’ve been better than any song. But it lasted only a minute. Our dad would always call it; he’d suddenly go back to normal and climb down off the chair, his smile disappearing back into his face. “Whew!” he’d say. “I feel a whole lot better now!” Except once between ape and normal, he took my shoulders and hugged me sideways. “I’m proud of you,” he whispered, and kissed my ear.

  I was proud, too; I knew I was doing something hard. Sometimes I was even happy. But another world was still with me, glowing and rippling like a dream of heaven deeper than the ocean. I could be studying or watching TV or unloading clothes from the washing machine when a memory would come like a heavy wave of dream rolling into life and threatening to break it open. During the day, life stood stolid, gray and oblivious. But at night, heaven came in the cracks. I would want Alain, and want his cruelty, too. I would long for those cabinets of rich food and plates of drugs, for nights of sitting alone in the dark, eating marzipan until I was sick. For bitches who yanked at me and yelled at me for sweating. For nightclubs like cheap boxed hell, full of smoke and giant faces with endlessly talking lips and eyes and snouts swelling and bulbous with beauty. For my own swollen hugeness, spread across the sky. It didn’t matter that I had been unhappy in the sky, or that I had been cheated and used. I cried for what had hurt me, and felt contempt for those who loved me; if Daphne had put her arm around me then, I would’ve clenched my teeth with contempt.

  Then, lying next to her warm body was like lying in a hole with a dog and looking up to see gods rippling in the air of their hot-colored heaven. I wanted her to know that she was a dog, ugly and poor. I wanted all of them to know. I wanted my father to know that he would always be crushed, no matter how hard he pushed.

  On the last night I saw Alain, he took a bunch of us to a sado-masochist sex club. It was a dump guarded by a fat tattooed man who smacked his blubbery lips at us. Inside the cave, there was a bar and a handsome young man pouring drinks behind it. Cheerful music played. Two middle-aged women with deep, sour faces sat at the bar wearing corsets and garter belts. Some people were dressed in costume like them; other people were dressed normally. One man was naked. He was skinny as a corpse—you could see his ribs and the bones of his ass. He had long matted gray hair and thick yellow nails like a dog’s. He crawled on the floor, moaning and licking it with his tongue. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Nobody even looked at him. He crawled to the women at the bar and got up on his knees. He moaned and pawed the air like he longed to touch them but didn’t dare. Without looking, one of them took the riding crop from her lap and lighdy struck him across the shoulders. “Va, va!” she scolded gently. He reached down and yanked at his limp penis. He yanked it hard and fast but also daintily. She returned the crop to her lap and he scuttled away, balls swinging between his withered thighs. She saw me staring and made a face, as if I had broken a rule. I looked for Alain and saw him disappearing into a crowded back room with his arm around a dimly familiar girl. “Don’t worry.” Jean-Paul was suddenly beside me. “It is harmless here.” He winked at me. ‘Just a show, mosdy. Unless you want to join.” But I pushed through the crowd.

  Sometimes the spell would break: I would look away from the terrible heaven and see my sister lying next to me, her neat graceful form and her even breath beautiful and inviolate. If I put my hand on her warm shoulder, my thoughts might quiet-heaven would vanish and the ceiling would be there again protecting us from the sky. I could lie against her and feel her breath forgive me. The day would come. My night thoughts would pale. My sister and I would go to school.

  But sometimes I would barely sleep, then get up with heaven still burning my eyes. I would be full of hate and pain because I could not get back to it. On one of those mornings, I told Daphne the story of the sex club. We were moving around the room quickly, getting out of our warm gowns and into our cold clothes. I told her about the crawling man and the women at the bar. I could tell she didn’t want to hear. But I kept talking, faster and faster. I pushed through the crowd. A hand reached out of it and grabbed my wrist. I took its little finger and bent it back. It let go. I threw my gown on the bed and walked across the room naked. Daphne turned her back, bent, and showed me the gende humps of her spine. With dignity, she put on her pants.

  In a reeking back room, I found Alain with Lisa from Naxos. Her sensitive litde lips were tense and strange. They were watching a middle-aged woman climb onto a metal contraption so that a man could whip her. Daphne yanked open a drawer and slammed it shut. I brushed my hair with rapid strokes. Alain smiled at me. I told him I wanted to go home, now. “Then go home,” he said. Lisa was not looking at me on purpose. Daphne pared her nails. She was not looking at me, either. The man with the whip was waiting for the woman to get settled into the proper knee and hand grooves. He seemed nervous; twice he moved his arm, like he was anxious to assist her, then moved it back. “I want to go home!” I nearly screamed. Both the man with the whip and the climbing woman turned to look at me; she brushed a piece of hair from her quizzical eye.

  The people watching them looked, too. There was a crash; “Shit!” hissed Daphne. She had knocked a water glass off the bed table, splashing the mattress. Without looking at me, Alain took an ice cube out of his drink and threw it at my face. The woman setded her face into the metal headrest. I kicked Alain’s shin and ran.

  “That’s poetry,” I said. “Life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook.” Daphne slammed the glass back on the table so hard, I thought she’d break it. She went out of the room and down the stairs. She knew what I’d said was stupid, but she half-believed it, too.

  I left the sadomasochist dump with a girl from the south of France named Simone. She was wearing a tight blue dress with red wine spilled down the front of it. She was so drunk, she didn’t care. “Fuck it,” she kept saying in English, “you know?” The tattooed doorman called out an endearment to us as we emerged from his cave. “Fuck it!” she yelled. The club was on a tiny alley that smelled of interesting piss, but one block over, glamorous traffic ran biliously. Papillon, pee, pee, pee. We linked arms and walked. Simone was talking about her new boyfriend, but I didn’t listen. I was thinking about Lisa’s shame at Naxos, trying to gloat. But Alex was right: Even a young girl’s shame can be beautiful. The naked man in the club crawled on the floor, looking for his shame, starving for it. Locked out of life and trying to crawl back through a tunnel made of shame. Yanking his dead dick in reverence for a life he couldn’t have. I looked up at the sky. Gnats sparkled in the flickering light of a broken street lamp. Plunged into dark, then dancing for j
oy, over and over again. Alain hadn’t even looked at me. Just flicked the ice in my face.

  Simone raised her arm and stopped a taxi. The driver had

  a great bony jaw and hairy brows and lightning coming out of his forehead. Simone gave the address of a nightclub and he drove like a charioteer, war arm manning the wheel. I sank back in the dark seat.

  By spring, my father and I had succeeded; we had made an open space. I got S’s and even A’s. I spent more of my French money to take a class in the spring semester. I made friends with kids who liked it that I seemed stuck-up. They liked it even better that I was an ex-model who’d gotten kicked in the ass. “Models are stupid cows,” said a girl named Denise, and I said, “Yeah, they are.” She blinked her big heavy eyes and looked at me curiously.

  Denise was even taller and thinner than I was. Her round face and huge frantic hair sat atop her fleshless body like a large flower on a drooping stalk. She acted like she was too good for everything. She acted like everything had hurt her and used her, and that this made her superior. But she was nice. She was the kind of person who’d hold your head while you were puking and not mention it later. She almost made me believe in living like music again, just because of the way she’d hunch and rock herself and slowly bring her cigarette hand from knee to lip and back; it was like acoustic guitar on a scratchy record. Her boyfriend, Jeff, was also slim and slouching with a friendly pouchy face and sweet litde lips that he pursed and nervously bit. Then there was Sheila, small and royal, with lush bags under her bitter eyes, narrow hips, and tiny breasts. And huge square-shaped Ed, who’d first invited me to share a joint with them behind the Student Union.

  Behind the Student Union were a field of blue weeds and a half-built playground made of a swingless swing set, a rotted little merry-go-round, and a plastic red cube with half the red worn off. Water flashed from a rusted pipe in a little ditch. There were fireflies in the deepening sky. The traffic droned in the distance. It was a place of effaced sweetness, and we went to it every day to smoke and talk. After dark, Ed drove me home in his rattling car with its mad turn signal and tape deck full of surly love. His tape sang about a bridge of sighs like a drunk giant pushing a boulder up a mountain. A weird thunder of bells rumbled in the valley. Clouds flew by. I sank back in the dark. In Paris, the taxi dodged cars, ran up over the curb, over the walls of buildings, through apartments, out the windows, up over the sky. A woman’s voice unscrolled and made a road in the sky for us to ride on. It was La Traviata on my father’s record player, flying across the sea to carry me.

  A dark blur sails over thought. Veronica emerges. Is she here simply because now I am sick and alone? Yes—no. Candles burn behind her. A small plate of half-eaten cake sits before her. Rigoletto is playing. “He wasn’t a cunt,” she says. “He was a Ganymede. A beautiful boy, a jester.” Duncan bends over, reaching back with both hands to show his butt hole, naked except for little belled slippers and a striped belled hat. He grins over one shoulder. “The ‘Caro nome,3 ” says Veronica. Tears run down her face.

  kissed Ed on the cheek and got out of the car. In the house sat

  my father, drinking beer and waiting for dinner. La Traviata was

  on the record player. I said hi and walked through the room. Sara was in the dining room, crouching an inch away from the Ty straining to hear over the music. My mother was in the kitchen, stirring a fragrant pot. How I loved her. How I didn’t know. La, Traviata filled the house with woman’s love. My tiny father sat in his tiny chair while the singer’s giant voice took

  over his house. She sang of suffering and abasement. She sang of strength and love. Her voice made these feelings into great complex waves that opposed, then joined, then opposed one another again with a force that would’ve torn a lesser voice to pieces. My father’s eyes were glazed with concentration and his jaw moved rhythmically from side to side as his mind rose up the crest of one wave, then down the other, then back up, riding their impossible heights until they met in a crescendo of passionate joining. I padded indifferently through the room, on my way to the kitchen for something to eat.

  The worms go in, the worms go out. Lisa had no voice, and she was not an artist. But she had done it, too. Alex had pried her open and bullied her, and somehow, she had caught the force of his bullying and joined it to her own force. She caught it at just the right moment, made it into something sexual. And she didn’t even know what she’d done. This is what Alex meant when he called her a “lady.” This is what Alain meant when he called me “cold.” I couldn’t do what Lisa had done. I was too hard. I walked through the room, glanced at my father’s music, glanced away. It wasn’t that I was stupid. I could hear what it meant. But I would not let it in. I would not let myself be broken.

  “You’re different now,” said Sara. “You walk through the house like you’re alone on a beach. Like nobody’s there but you.”

  Simone yelled, “Arrete!” and we spilled out in front of the club. La Traviata vanished into the dark. A regal woman with a fierce dog face held off the crowd. Simone dug in her purse for the cab fare. Two dirty young boys sauntered past. They slowed down, looking at the crowd. They had craning necks and rubbery faces full of gawking scorn. Something in me lighted up at the sight of them; they were like New Jersey boys. The regal

  dog at the door glowered at them and one of them laughed and shouted, “Kalaxonez ton con!” Somebody laughed. “What did he say?” I asked Simone. The kid yelled again, “Petez des flames!”

  She said, “ ‘Go honk your pussy.’ And ‘Go fart flames.’ ” The fierce dog waved to us and let us in.

  At night, I went to strip-mall bars and apartment parties with my new friends. People crowded in, ready for anything. They yelled and drank and sang. Sheila turned into an imp, talking out the side of its mouth, her words a buzzing cloud that hovered above her like smoke. Jeff sat on the floor rolling joints and grinning and generally giving the impression that he was melting into a puddle of goo. Denise became the ringmistress, sitting spread-legged on the edge of the couch, cutting lines of coke with military precision. We drank and snorted until we turned into robots and root vegetables dancing and singing in litde pointed boots. Back from suffragette city! A guy with the face of a bloated sweet potato sang, “Hey, don’t lean on me, man,” and leaned into me hard. “Want to dance?” he slurred, and I shrank away so stiffly that he almost fell. You can’t afford the ticket, I thought, but he heard it like I’d yelled and he yelled back—“Oh pardonez bitch-ez!” Hoo ha! “With her lips that she’s always kissing at people, and her hair that she cream rinses!”—until Ed punched him in the face. The guy fell with one foot twisted under his skinny calf. Denise stood up so fast, she knocked down a bowl of goldfish. People roared with pleasure. The punched guy stood and ground a little dancing fish into the floor. He rubbed his face. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I just wanted to dance with her.” “Shut up,” said Ed. He turned to me. His dulled eyes and slack mouth came close. Beyond him was the body of the little fish, mashed except for its poor staring head. A girl walked by with a set mouth and fierce staring eyes with litde wet blobs of makeup underneath. Was this where I belonged? “I love you,” whispered Ed.

  Go honk your pussy. I looked at the beautiful nightclub crowd, the smart French businesswomen with matching gold

  jewelry, the models, the slouching playboys, the pretty boys and girls darting like minnows, and that’s what I thought. I thought it all night. I thought it at myself when I went to use the bathroom and saw my reflection in a mirror filled with female face* eyes made up smartly, but stupid with drunkenness, though sometimes shining nonetheless with intelligence at the very center. Lush fruits jumping down off a branch in human form and sauntering off.

  Because it was hot and crowded in the apartment, Ed and I took some couch cushions and a sheet out onto the fire escape. I woke with the sun warming my eyeballs through the lids. The inside of my mouth was sore and sweet with alcohol. Compared to Alain or Jean-Paul, Ed was a very
clumsy boy. He said he loved me, and all I could think of was the one who called me “bitch-ez.” But I said, “I love you, too.” Below us, beyond us, all around us, traffic ran.

  Alain and Lisa walked in just as Simone and I were walking out. I looked at Lisa and instead of thinking, Go honk your pussy, I shouted it. Alain glared after me as if his face might break. “Petez des flames!” I screamed. It was two days later that I got home from a job and found he had changed the locks. Fifteen months later, I sat in Ed’s car in the A&P lot with a copy of Vogue on my lap, sobbing and clawing at it. Lisa was on the cover. She was stunning. “I hate her!” I screamed. “I hate all of them!”

  Ed sneaked a hot slit-eyed look at Lisa. I screamed, tore the cover off the magazine, and threw it into the lot. A lumpy old man watched it scud across the asphalt. He gave me an irritated look. I hunched down in the seat and sobbed. Lumpy Man got in his car. Ed fiddled with his keys. “Why don’t you go to New York and be a model?” he asked. “You still could.”

  “No,” I moaned. “No, never.”

  “Then why don’t you go be a poet?”

  “I’m not a poet, Ed.” I sat up and stopped crying. “Then why don’t you just go?”

  The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery. As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whinging sound, like we’re streaking through space. Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them. Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around. More distant green, the side of a building. The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point. It sags down with a gassy sigh. Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor. Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus. The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on. The crabbed door suctions open. Teenagers stomp up through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words. “Cuz like—whatcho look—you was just a—ain’t lookin’ at you!” The old lady does not look. But I can feel her taking them in. Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine, and brain. Watering the flowers of her brain. The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap. Private snack suspended for public feast of youth. She would never be so close to them except on the bus. Neither would I. For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars. I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo. Bits of light fly across her windshield. I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.