Veronica

by Mary Gaitskill

  “Wait,” I said. “Is this A Star Is Born?”

  “No, it’s Judy Garland, though. It’s Presenting Lily Mars, which was before she got all pitiful. So anyway—”

  Quick, smart, and tremulous, the girl’s voice was full of hot life rising out of her own liquid darkness. In nine pictures, she was a charming actress at the top of her form. In the tenth picture, she was a child crying because she’d dropped her radiant hope into a deep pool, where everyone could see it but she could never feel it. Believe! Believe! Believe! I don’t know what she was saying, but that is what I heard.

  When I saw the contact sheets, my heart sank. But Eric said they were great, and so I went to an agency wedged between a discount furrier and a furniture outlet. Sweating men carrying a houndstooth sofa wrapped in flapping plastic gawked at me on their way to a gaping truck.

  “Beautiful,” said one.

  I opened the shining glass door.

  “Cold feesh,” said the other.

  The door closed behind me.

  A Ms. Stickle stared at the contacts up close and at arm’s length.

  Voices rose over the cheap walls of her cubicle; one was

  crass, one was rapid, and one was a child staring shyly at its lap. So, sweetie, what’s your bra size?.. .You don’t know? Let’s measure it. .. Canyou call your mother?... tape measure?

  “How old are you?” asked Ms. Stickle.

  “Eighteen,” I replied, lying

  “Hum.” She pushed the pictures across the desk. “These photos are too downtown. See a real photographer and come back.”

  She says it’s—My God, will you look at this?

  “Can you recommend somebody?”

  Ms. Stickle grimaced. Then she wrote a name and number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me without looking

  Well, she is a monster.

  This photographer was a thin, small man with soft, sexy jowls and gloating eyes that made you feel like he was examining your ass even when he wasn’t. He slathered hair gel on his hands and asked what sign I was. I said, “Scorpio.”

  “I thought so.” He worked the gel into my hair so it stood up and away from my head. “I can tell you are strong” He stepped away and signaled his assistant. “But even so, I could dominate you completely.”

  That established, he photographed me in his bathroom^ where I leaned into the mirror in an ill-used evening gown, then on the roof in a white shirt and black leather jacket.

  I took the pictures back to Ms. Stickle. Once again, she sighed and stared as voices spoke into the air. “Don’t know,” she finally murmured. “I can’t tell if I love you or hate you.”

  I went to another agent. He tapped his finger on the shot of me in the white shirt. “This one,” he said. “This one almost makes me feel something.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to do it,” said Jamie.

  “I need money.”

  We were on my bed, eating hot cereal, a box of sugar on the rumpled bedding between us.

  “You could work at the Peppermint.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be there all the time.”

  He carefully poured a layer of sugar on his cereal and ate it with shallow bites. “Where do you want to be?” he asked.

  The season got cold and dark. When I arrived at work, people would be putting on their hats and tying their scarves; one girl, with wavy brown hair and a rosy, commonly pretty face, would tuck her chin against her lapel and button her coat with trustful, parted lips—her hands the mother, her body the tenderly buttoned child. Outside, night was already putting on its neon, and traffic was laying the streets with knotted jewelry. Veronica would come down the hall, her walk a waddle and a vamp, a bag of snacks bobbing at her side, her smile and waving hand stiff with routine.

  Before she had been a proofreader, Veronica had been a secretary at a screenwriters’ agency. She’d been an assistant script doctor for a television show that I’d never heard of. She’d written flap copy for a publishing house that had gone out of business. In college, she had been a social-work intern with a caseload in the worst neighborhood in Watts. Her first day, a young thug asked if she was the new social worker; she mimicked her own dumb grin and her “Yes.” He asked if he could walk with her, and she said yes again. As they walked, he told her the previous social worker had been shot.

  “Were you scared?” I asked.

  “No, I was too stupid. Anyway, he walked with me long enough for people to see us together. Later I realized he was a member of the neighborhood gang and it was to my advantage to be seen with him.”

  “Did he come on to you?”

  “No. He was protecting me. He was a gentleman.” She turned sideways to smoke, and when she turned back, her mouth had a little sarcastic twist. But her eyes were wide and suddenly deep. She had been given something by this thug-boy gentleman, and she had kept it. She was showing me that with her eyes.

  “What was it like being a social worker there?”

  “I was twenty-three years old. I was ignorant. I came from a psychotic family. That’s what it was like. Except for one thing.” She put out her cigarette with a proud, bristling air, and told me the story of a cat named Baldie, a stray that lived under a table at the community center where some of her cases played pool. One day, she brought in a can of cat food for him.

  ‘At first, I thought they were angry at me, the men. They glared and they said, ‘He don’t know what to do with that. He ain’t never had anything that good in his life.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll just try,’ and I opened the can. They stopped playing pool and they all watched when I put it down. And Alison, the way that cat buried his head in that can!” She thrust her head down, fingers splayed, her refined voice rolling and softly gobbling “He looked up at us, and if cats could cry, tears would’ve been streaming down his face. Nobody said a word. Then one of the men crouched down and held the can so the cat could get to it better.

  “Every day after that, I brought in a can of food and every day the men would gather to watch Baldie eat. It was probably one of the few times they got to see a righteous need completely satisfied. When I quit, I left a case of food. I like to think they kept it up. They were hard people, but they had real hearts.” She shrugged. “That was the good thing that happened there.”

  I come to a clearing filled with litde sticks poking out of the ground. Whatever they had been, somebody had chopped

  them off. Hard people, real hearts. So many of Veronica’s stories were coarse and sentimental. Another time, she told me about being raped by a man who broke into her apartment. He said he was going to kill her, but she talked him out of it. “I told him, ‘If you kill me, you won’t be killing just one person. You’ll be killing my parents. They’re old and it would kill them to know their daughter died like that.’ ” She shrugged and held out her hands like a Borscht Belt comedian. “And he didn’t!” She smoked luxuriously and leaned back in her chair, into the sky with red writ across it. “He was very tender.” Her voice deepened; it became fulsome, indulgent, almost smug “My rapist was very tender.”

  Smart people would say she spoke that way about that story because she was trying to take control over it, because she wanted to deny the pain of it, even make herself superior to it. This is probably true. Smart people would also say that sentimentality always indicates a lack of feeling. Maybe this is true, too. But I’m sure she truly thought the rapist was tender. If he’d had a flash of tenderness anywhere in him, a memory of his mother, of himself as a baby, of a toy, she would’ve felt it because she was desperate for it. Even though it had nothing to do with her, she would’ve sought it, reaching for it as it sank away in a deep pool. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing—

  I see myself, home for Christmas. There I am in the warm kitchen, seasonal music coming from the living room in great swollen chords. I see the red mixing bowl on the counter. I see the mixer, mashed potatoes stuck to its dull blades. My mother opens the oven; there is a golden turkey sweating juice
. My father sits in his living room chair, his eyes like deep holes full of layered visions invisible to us. Good King Wenceslas looks down at pictures flashing on the mute TV A local family is turned out of their apartment; alone and defiant, the mother leads her

  children down the hall, her eyes flaring into the camera. My mother stirs hunks of butter into the peas; she lays the pecan pies out on tattered pot holders. The local family finds shelter with a church group that has pledged to help them. Daphne decorates the tree with nimble, loving gestures. The children accept stuffed toys from strangers; their mother smiles and rapidly blinks. I light the red candles and put them on the dining room table. Rows and rows of wonderful cars are for sale. Santa takes aspirin for a headache. So bring him incense, gold, and myrrh; the music is deep and rich, with sparkling colors flashing in its depths. The TV station’s logo opens and closes like an eye. A mute reporter talks into a microphone; rows of hands pull up rows of pant legs to show rows of lesions. “This is outrageous!” cries my father. “Showing this tonight!” Mute doctors talk and speculate. “Everyone knows they’re diseased,” says my father. “We don’t need it shoved in our faces.”

  The rooms roll by. In them, there are plates heaped with apples and oranges, bowls filled with nuts in complex, perfect shells. There are stockings our grandmother made for us before she died, our names spelled in felt letters. There is a crystal dish of cranberry sauce, marked around its shiny middle with the circular impress of its tin. There is a feeling of fear. It connects and holds and flavors everything else like aspic. My father gets up and turns off the TV It is not really fear of homosexuals. That is just something to say. The real fear is of things that can’t be said. The fear shows through the purposeful expression in my mother’s eyes as she carries the turkey to the table. It gathers in every corner of the house and pools in the basement, where Sara hides in her room, splay-legged before the IV eating painkillers and hard candy by the handful. My father searches, but his brother has gone too far away to find in any song; when my father looks, he reaches into darkness and grasps nothing Against this darkness, our stockings were filled with candy canes and little toys; the table was laden and the tree—a real one my father held upright while my mother and Daphne

  struggled with the screws in the metal stand—was decorated with ropes of lights and tinsel and dear, strange ornaments— striped balls and snowmen and a silver peacock with its face worn away. How sad and weak these talismans seemed to me, like the music my father played for men who turned away from him. How weak against the fear and the terrible unsaid things.

  At night, when the others had gone to sleep, Daphne and I went out and walked in the neighborhood. Street and star light made the shoveled walks gray corridors of soft white mass and softer black shadow, and the crunch-crunch-crunch of our boots played up and down them in the ringing dark. Across the billowing snow, gaunt trees signed in shadow language. Modest houses hung their squares and rectangles with lights the blunt sweet colors of happiness—secret delight hidden in the cold body of winter. Felt but unseen except for now, the deity’s birthday, when people climb wobbling ladders to string symbolic lights on trees and around windows. Crunch-crunch. We used to run across these yards, shouting There was a birdbath and a strawberry patch behind that house hidden in pine bushes, under a sloping roof swollen twice its size with snow. There was a little girl named Sheila Simmons, who sat on the sidewalk and played with a red rubber ball and a handful of shiny jacks. Crunch-crunch-crunch. In some glossy folded place, they were still there, unseen but felt. And so, unseen but felt, were the unsaid things.

  “The thing is,” said Daphne, “his father was a wife-abusing drunk who was killed in a bar. His mother was crazy and his brother was really the one who raised him. And then his brother got killed. But his father was also this delicate, poetic person who sang for a living—”

  Giant figures came from their folded places and loomed about us. Walking among them with the hood of her parka over her head, Daphne spoke in a low and rapid voice, hectoring and beseeching them at once.

  “—and his brother was also this big, powerful, pragmatic

  jock type who didn’t really accept Daddy because he was like their father, and probably Uncle Ray could see that even then, the emotionality, the love of music, the fights over nothing” There was the Simmonses’ old house. Pale television light flashed on their ceiling, then darted down to flash even paler on the banked blue-shadowed snow outside their window. I wondered if they still lived there. A face emerged out of the dark; an open mouth and eye holes strained against the porous membrane of present time.

  “Daddy must’ve looked up to Ray so much, but he couldn’t please him, and if he tried to emulate him, he’d have to fail. The one he could be like was his father, a dead failure, and he didn’t want to be that. So he didn’t have anyone to be.”

  Quick and incessant, Daphne went on telling me things I had already heard, trying to say the unsaid things, to say them and say them and say them.

  “Except for his mother, who favored him and expected him to be like his dad, wanted him to be, including the abuse, including the drinking, sending double messages, like wanting him to win the statewide spelling bee, and being thrilled when he did, until the next day, when—

  Our father’s father was a heavy drinker who, to supplement his income as a mail clerk, sang for tips at a local bar. One night, he got in the middle of a fight; a knife was pulled, and my father, ten, was orphaned because an ambulance blew a tire on a back road. (Somewhere the driver is still trying to change the tire while his rotating red light rhythmically drenches the dirt and sweeps the sky.) His brother, Ray, fourteen at the time, helped his mother support the family by going to work for a butcher. He enlisted in the army at eighteen and was dead at twenty-two. This we knew. The rest we had invented by looking at pictures of Ray and listening to things our mother had said in certain tones of voice. We’d gotten the story about the spelling bee from Daddy’s great-aunt Claire, who’d been at the bank when Daddy had gone with his mother to deposit the fifty-

  dollar prize he’d won. He told the teller about the spelling bee and his mother snapped, “Stop bragging on yourself, you swellheaded brat.”

  Daphne gave a tense, shuddering sigh; her breath then was always high and strained. “Then Ray died in the war,” she said, “and he could be turned into the perfect brother who loved Daddy as much as Daddy loved him.” She finally fell silent, trying to calm her breath. Colorless smoke billowed out a chimney and rose churning into the sky. The folded place vanished. Our childhood slipped back through its private door. There was nothing but breathing and the light rub and rasp of our clothes. But somewhere, in the sky, in the snow, in a hidden, folded place between them, was a perfect brother who loved as much as he was loved.

  When we got back, the house was warm and dark except for the Christmas tree, its burning lights making glowing caves in its branches, jeweled with soft colors and the lit intensity of tiny needles. The blood tingled in our legs as we stamped our feet on the front mat; dangling tinsel stirred with our motion, ghost light alive in each strand. It was beautiful and brimmed with love. Yet the unsaid things remained mute and obdurate. As we went upstairs to bed, they stood like invisible stone tablets, unreadable and indifferent to our words. When we lay down, Daphne slept, but I turned back and forth between sleep and wakefulness. It was there again, clanging between dream and thought—the mental sensation that in the next room our parents were screaming curses and attacking each other like animals. I turned on the light and remembered them as I had seen them earlier that day at the grocery store: an overweight man and a tall pear-shaped woman with their glasses on the ends of their noses, staring about them in mild confusion, their carts full of bargain eggnog and candy canes. I remembered the tree downstairs, the lights outside, and the sky.

  Yes we were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed before us1 for trying to go everywhere and know everything. Stupid, spoiled, and arrogant. But we were ri
ght, too. /was right. How could I do otherwise when the violence of the unsaid things became so great that it kept me awake at night? When I saw my father sitting in a chair, desperate to express what was inside him, making a code out of outdated symbols even his contemporaries could no longer recognize? When I saw him smile because my mother fell on her face and then put the smile away like it was a piece of paper? When I heard him rail against dying men because otherwise he had no form to give his hates and fears? All the meat of truth was hidden under a dry surface, and so we tore off the surface with a shout. We wanted to have everything revealed and made articulate, everything, even our greatest embarrassments and lusts.

  I walk faster and faster, apace of my chattering mind. Here is another slim ocher tree naked of bark. It is utterly smooth and, in the rain, so shiny that it looks almost plastic. It is twisted so elegantly, it is like an art object, made to suggest irony and hauteur. Veronica and Duncan didn’t have to attack each other in the hidden world one glimpses before sleep. They were what they were in public. His lust and scorn, her abjection and bitterness—these were acted out on city streets in graphic, unapologetic form. Not merely unapologetic but ironic, elegant, and haughty. I take off my glove and stroke the tree trunk as I walk past. I wonder if it is diseased. Everyone knows they’re diseased.

  But we were not satisfied with revealing and articulating; we came to insist that our embarrassments and lusts were actually beautiful. And sometimes they were—or at least could be made

  to look it. The first high-end job I had in New York was with two other girls, one of whom was an unstable lesbian with dark, dramatic looks and a known hard-on for the other, a bland blonde from Norway who didn’t speak English. The photographer had us pose at night against the chain-link fence of a deserted ball field. He put me and Ava, the Nordic girl, on one side of the fence and Pia, the dyke, on the other. He photographed Pia alone. He photographed Ava and me together, me slightly behind her to indicate my sidekick status. He photographed Ava and me holding hands while Pia pressed up against the fence. At the end, he had Pia strip down to her underwear and hurl herself onto the fence, like she was “trying to get to Ava,” grabbing it with her hands and bare feet. Most models of Pia’s stature would never have done that. But he knew she would. She was half out of her mind with lovelessness and rage, and she wanted people to see it—she wanted it revealed and articulated. She threw herself at the fence again and again, until her hands and feet were bleeding. That shot ran at the end of a three-page spread and it was a great picture; Pia’s nakedness was blurred by the fence and by her motion, but her face and flying hair came at you like demon beauty bursting out of darkness to devour human beauty. Ava and I huddled together in our pale spring lace, two maids lost in a postmodern wood, she moving forward, me halfturning toward the demon who silendy howled at us with her great gold eyes, her genital mouth and long flawless claws with just a hint of anguish in their swollen knuckles. Of course, you didn’t see any blood. You didn’t see human pain on the demon’s face—or rather, you saw it as a shadow, a slight darkness that foregrounded the beauty of the picture and gave it a sort of luscious depth. It was a page-stopper. It restarted my career.