Veronica

by Mary Gaitskill

  I called the tiny dry editor. “Goodness,” she said. “I had completely forgotten about you. I’m afraid this week’s not so good after all. I still haven’t looked at your application. Could you call next week?”

  “Do you think she’s serious?” I asked Candy.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “She sounds like a bitch.”

  I registered at a temp agency with stick furniture and a thin carpet, the color of which made me think of cholera. When I walked in, the gimlet girl behind the desk sat up straight and stared. I remembered my fifteen-year-old enemy, one sharp elbow sticking out as she stroked the dresses that lay over her arm. I applied for a word-processing job and checked the box that said “night shift.” She sent me to an advertising firm that evening.

  The office was on the forty-second floor of a beautiful half cylinder of steel and glass. The word-processing room was large and curved, with whole walls made of enormous windows that had no glare on them. The supervisor showed me to my desk— a section of long table blocked off by low plastic barriers. Some day workers were finishing up a birthday party at the end of the table. There was laughter and crumbling cake. I turned on my machine, and a black square of infinity appeared, one flashing square star in its upper left corner. There was a burst of laughter. I glanced sideways and saw a strange little figure coming down the hall. From a distance, her whole face looked askew, puckered like flesh around a badly healed wound. She came closer. I saw the wounded pucker was a smile. She sat across from me. “Hi, hon,” she said.

  The mouth of the canyon opens to swallow the road. I walk down its slippery muddy throat. Old trees slowly tip into the ravine, gripping the crumbling pavement on one side, seizing fists of wet earth on the other. Their root systems come out of the soaked embankment like facial bones, clenched in unseeable expressions. At the bottom, their children—oak and madrone— stand close together and hold open their shining arms. They are covered to the waist with wet chartreuse moss; it grows away from the trunks in long green hairs that stand in the air like prehensile sense organs. I take off a glove and stroke the cold fur, then sniff my rank, wormy palm. I put my hand on the tree again to see my white skin against the green. When I was a kid, chartreuse was my favorite color. But I didn’t think it was real.

  Up close, she was not askew in any way. She was monstrously ordered. In her plaid suit, ruffled blouse, and bow tie, she was like a human cuckoo clock. She gave me a pursed smile, lighted a cigarette, and opened a magazine. We sat a long time with no work. I stared out the window. The East River became a dark length of flickering movement with a lit boat on it. In Queens, the neon sign of a sugar factory rose up, its script burning red and radiant in the night.

  “Excuse me,” said Veronica. “Have you spent time in Paris, hon?”

  I was surprised, but I just said, “Yeah.”

  “I thought so. You have a Parisian aura.” She turned her head sideways and worked her throat, head back, cigarette angled rakishly up and out. “I haven’t been there for ages, but I do so well remember the Jardins du Luxembourg in autumn, with the yellow horse chestnuts in bloom.”

  We were paired again for the next three nights. I got used to the strange, strident pitch of her voice, even felt oddly caressed by its twists and changes. I talked to her about looking for a job. I told her about the editor calling me “spooky and incongruous.”

  “Really? Dorothea Atcheson called you spooky? ] | delightful.”

  “You know her?”

  “Not personally. But I’ve read her publication.”^

  “I filled out an application, but when I called her, she said she’d forgotten about me. Then she said to call back this week Do you think she’s serious?”

  “No. Yes. Who knows if anybody’s serious? But I can imagine Dorothea Atcheson would appreciate you.”

  Her voice on appreciate was like the rough tongue of a cat absently licking a kitten on the head. I could not help raising my head to meet it.

  The next day, I called Dorothea Atcheson. “You’re going to think I’m awful,” she said, “but I’ve lost your application. Do you suppose you could run by the office and fill out another one?”

  “Well, ” said Veronica. She drew on her cigarette and tipped her head back; her throat beat like an intelligent heart. She exhaled and asked, “Have you ever seen A Star Is Born with Judy Garland and James Mason?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s worth buying a VCR for, but barring that, look for it late on the Movie Channel; they show it constandy.” She smoked; her heart-throat beat. “It’s about a girl whose dreams aren’t big enough, who gets a break and becomes a star.”

  “My dreams aren’t the problem. I’m looking for a job as a secretary and I can’t get one because I’m not qualified.”

  “Judy Garland isn’t qualified, either! But she meets someone who sees her qualities, who believes in her.”

  Another proofreader, a balding little queen named Alan, wheeled round in his frayed throne. “And then he kills himself because she’s left him in the dust.”

  ‘“It’s too late!”’ cried Veronica. “‘I destroy everything I touch. I always have! You’ve come too late!’ ”

  “‘No!’” fluted Alan. “‘It’s not too late, not for you, not forme!”’

  “‘Believe it!”’ exulted Veronica. ‘“Believe it! Believe it!”’

  In nine of the pictures, it was ridiculous and ugly. But in the tenth one, it was thrilling. I smiled.

  Veronica exhaled her smoke and smiled back with fierce, fancy-twisted warmth. “You won’t be here long, hon,” she said. “Trust me.”

  I cross into the canyon on a wooden footbridge. The stream below is awake and rushing, light tossing on its cold flux. Silver wrinkles flow in a quick sheet, churn into foam, disperse and sink, flow up and wrinkle the water again. Bright algae, pebbles, and tiny fish stir back and forth. I step off the bridge; huge and calm, the landscape unfolds. Silent and still, it rings with force and hidden motion. The ringing strength is like blood singing in the body of the ground—passionate music you don’t hear with your ear, but feel just outside your senses. Redwoods rise up straight; madrones elegandy wind. Soaked moss and brilliant leaves fill the air with green and tender feeling Tenderness seeps into and softens my fever. The unfolding deepens.

  I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook. The city was so big and bright that for a moment my terrible heaven paled, then went invisible. I thought it was gone, but what I couldn’t see, I felt walking next to me in streets full of vying people. I felt it in their fixed outthrust faces, their busy rigid backs, their jiggling jewelry, their creeping and swagger. I felt it in the office workers who perched in flocks on the concrete flower boxes of giant corporate banks, eating their lunches over crossed legs and rumpled laps, the wind blowing their hair in their chewing mouths and waves of scabby pigeons surging at their feet, eating the bits that fell on the pavement. I felt it in the rough sensate hands of subway musicians playing on drums and guitars while the singer collected money with his cup, still singing like he was talking to himself in a carelessly beautiful voice while riders streamed down concrete stairs like drab birds made fantastic in flight. I felt monstrous wants and gorgeous terrors that found form in radio songs, movie screens, billboards, layers of posters on decayed walls, public dreams bleeding into one another on cheap paper like they might bleed from person to person. I took it in and fed on it, and for a while, that was enough.

  Then one day on my way to work, a cab stopped in front of me on a trash-blown street and Alana got out. I looked at her and my breath stopped. She slammed the cab door; her shining hair flashed about her face. I stood still while everybody else crossed the street. She walked lighdy in neat white boots, but her eyes gave off the cold glow of an eel whipping through remote water. Down, down through the water floated a magazine picture o
f a girl in crumpled lace. A picture like a door with music behind it, rolling with the water and soon to be erased by it. “Alana,” I said, but too sofdy. She walked past me without turning. My face burned. And I wanted heaven again.

  But I didn’t know how to get it. Before I had gotten it because a hand had picked me up and put me in the middle of it. Then I lost it because a hand removed me. I knew Alain’s hand could reach across the ocean; I knew he was associated with two powerful New York agencies. Candy said he probably had too much on his mind to bother with me. But she hadn’t seen him naked, with coke coming out his nose, pacing and yelling into the

  phone, looking for people who might’ve said something bad about him just so that he could fuck them up. Years later and miles away, I still saw him. I saw my hands walking on rich red carpet like paws, me laughing at my legs in the air and his dick inside me. Or panting and openmouthed, a tiny strand of saliva glistening between me and the rug before it dropped.

  I looked for another hand to find me. I walked the street, searching for men in beautiful suits, searching their faces for the lips of a spider drinking blood with pure, blank bliss. If I found one, I would look into his eyes, and usually he would look back. If he asked me for my number, I would ask him for his card. The first few times, I looked at the card, put it in my pocket, and mentally threw it away. The last time, I dropped it on the pavement and cursed the gendeman spider to his face.

  I stopped looking for a permanent job. I went out whenever I could, under any circumstance. When Sheila’s cousin in Brooklyn had a birthday party, I took the train out, only to stand in a sparsely furnished room with strangers. When a temp at the office gave a reading combined with a dance performance, I showed up to watch determined girls in leotards creep and crouch across a ratty stage drenched in nightmare orange. A friend of Candy’s—a harmless girl I despised for being harmless—invited us to a bachelorette party and I went.

  No matter how unfashionable the party, fashionable music was always playing. The fashion then was silly and sepulchral at once, with hopping, skipping beats playing off a funereal overlay. Somebody sang, “This kiss will never fade away,” his voice like an oily black machine operating a merry-go-round of music flying on grossly painted wings. “It’s about the bombing of Dresden,” said a drunk boy. “Excuse me,” I said, and walked away. Heat flared in the flying music, then died like an explosion seen from far away. People walked around smiling and talking while the music likened mass death to a kiss and gave silliness a proud twist to its head. This kiss will never fade away. Alain kissed me for-

  ever while I stood on the outskirts of parties, watching people who meant something to one another. A fat person with an out-thrust jawbone took someone’s hand and squeezed it; there was a burst of goodwill. A woman with desperately bony calves, made stark by her big high heels, grinned at someone across the room, her grin a signal of deep things inside both of them that nobody else could see. Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the thrusting jaw and the bony calves and turned up my nose. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world described by music—a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too, singing on the surface of its human heart as the machine spread through its tissues and silenced the flow of its blood. In this world, there were no deep things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty, and even songs about mass death could be sung on the light and playful surface of the heart.

  I didn’t say any of this. I didn’t even think it. But it was visible in the way I held my body, and in my bitter, despising eyes. Other people could see it in me as surely as I saw it in them. And so I was able to make friends. I went to nightclubs with an “actress” named Joy, who might’ve been a model if not for hips that would’ve been ungainly in a photograph, but which gave her living walk a pleasing, viscous reek. She worked as a hostess in a piano bar, where she got paid to drink and talk to lonely businessmen. She lived in a tiny shotgun apartment piled with dirty dishes, cat boxes, and open jars of clawed-at cold cream. Hurled pairs of pants tried to flee across the couch; wilted dresses snored on the kitchen chairs. The two cats tore the stuffing out of the couch and rolled toilet paper down the hall. During the day, Joy sat in this ragged nest like a princess, bathing in the kitchen with one gleaming pink foot perched on the edge of the tub, or sitting wrapped in a soiled comforter to drink coffee and eat cheesecake out of a tin. At night, she sailed out wearing

  absurd clothes as if they were Givenchy gowns. Once when I complimented her on one of her mismatched earrings, she pointed at the sky and said, “That earring means, Don’t look at my finger; look at the moon.”

  Together, we were assured admittance to exclusive clubs where, lifted up and out of the hoi polloi and deposited at the entrance by the doorman’s fastidious gaze, we handed our coats to a gaunt creature in a coat-lined cave, then walked down the glowing sound-chamber hall, where music, lighdy skipping in the main rooms, here bumbled from wall to wall like a ghost groaning in purgatory. We turned a corner and the music showed its laughing public face. We entered the great night flower of fun, open and dark like a giant lily swarming with drunken fairies. Into the swarm we flew, Joy darting, hovering, seeking and finding the inevitable man handing out cocaine to girls.

  Our conversation was so much torn paper on the surging current of our united forward intent. But at some point, she would lean with her hip against me, and her body would talk to me, light and charmingly, of earrings and the moon. And at some other point, I would emerge from the bathroom and she would be gone, leaving me to wander with drunken, burning eyes, seeking a way into heaven. Sometimes I would wake with a dry mouth in the dim apartment of a naked man who’d promised he was that way but whose snoring face now denied it.

  If I called Joy, she would tell me of her own adventures, of this one’s amazing kiss, or that one’s art-world status. Otherwise, I didn’t hear from her until she wanted to go out again; if I wasn’t able to go out that night, she quickly got off the phone.

  Then there was Cecilia, with whom I went to movies and coffee and sometimes dinner. She had meager beauty and magnificent style. Her face was made of such dramatic planes that I remember her with her big bossy nose on sideways, one intense litde eye to the side of it and the other peering over its humped middle. She wore jewelry and hats and she sat in a sideways

  twist. She wrote plays. She had a rich family, who paid for her huge place; when she was depressed and feeling “trapped,” she would check into a suite at the Plaza for the weekend and return feeling refreshed. Most of our conversations were ironic and lively on the first layer, blunt and fixed on the second and only layer down. But she once called me late at night, crying because she felt ashamed of her wealth and her privileged family. “We thought we were so great because magazines came and photographed our fucking unlivable living room. But we were shit! Alison, we were shit! I don’t want to be shit! I want to be a real person!” I didn’t know what to say; dimly I understood, and was moved. But when I called her the next day, she just talked about a party she was giving, one to which she had not invited me. “I need people who can talk about the arts and current events,” she said. “It’s that kind of party.”

  “That is so rude,” said Candy.

  But to me, it wasn’t. I understood that Cecilia looked at me as an object with specific functions, because that’s how I looked at her. Without knowing it, that is how I looked at everyone who came into my life then. This wasn’t because I had no feelings. I wanted to know people. I wanted to love. But I didn t realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn’t realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn’t know how to be with another person. I could only fix that person in my imagination and turn him this way and that, trying to feel him, until my mind was tired and raw.

  Heart pounding dully, I climb the outer ridge of a smal
l but steep hill. I can smell my fever coming off me like mist. Tired and raw. My whole being is tired and raw. At the top of the hill are rotting trees, dying as they stand. I shouldn’t be walking up this hill. I should be home in bed. With each step, I sway in my basket of tendons and bones, my mind too weak to turn any-

  thing any way. My mind can’t protect me from feeling, and I’m glad for that. Sight and sound flow into it; feeling bleeds out of it. I walk up the mountain now because soon I may be too sick to do it. But still, I’m glad.

  At the bottom of the ridge, dead oaks have fallen, blanched as old bones, dry even in the rain. Above me, living trees list and groan. I climb over the bones. The gray bark of the freshly dead is loose and cracked open; pale lacy whorls of fern cling to it in clumps, like tangled baby’s hair. Sensitive and perse-verant, they cling to and comfort death. Beneath the fern, the bark is motded with light green mold, feeding lovingly. My thoughts dissolve in the gray and green, traveling from life to death to life.

  I did not fix Veronica in my mind, or turn her this way and that, because I didn’t care about her. But I was tolerant enough to take her in at the regular low decibel of work-time conversation. I was not interested in her, but I was curious about her, like I might be curious about an elaborate object. The cuckoo clock sounded the hour; the bird popped out. I listened to her talk about her movies, her six seal-point Siamese cats, and her bisexual boyfriend, Duncan. On either side of the clock face, tiny wooden doors sprang open and figures with blind eyes and puckered lips came whirring out to kiss.

  She and Duncan picnicked in Central Park late at night, she in a white lace dress, he in gray flannel pants and a straw boater. They packed their basket with smoked salmon, white bread, pate, olives, grapes, and deviled eggs. They lounged in the black and shadowed grass, drinking wine from the botde. La Boheme played on a cheap cassette deck with spools that creaked and strained. “Quando men vo soletta per la via, | sang Duncan, “la gente sosta e mira e la bellezza mia...” A gang of tough black kids drew near, then withdrew in bewilderment,