“What d’you mean? Of course she does. It’s horrible that she’s got AIDS. But she’s got a choice, just like everybody else. You can be her friend, but you can’t help how she chooses to handle what’s happened to her.”
“But sometimes I get this picture of what it’s like inside her. I picture inside her being like a maze that’s really small and dark, full of roadblocks and trick doors. I picture her twisting around and around, wanting to go forward and not being able to find the way. Like a bee that’s banging on the screen door—
you open the door and you wait for it to go out, but it just keeps banging on the screen.”
“But she’s not the bee,” said Daphne. “She’s the person who built the maze.”
I wished my father had been there right about then. He’d have said, 11 You don’t build anything! You come up out of the ground like a tree and that’s what you are! You’re not the one who made it!”
But I said, “Is she? Even if she built it the way it had to be when she lived with crazy parents?”
“Yes, she still did it. Everybody does. You create these strategies—”
Discussing and describing things we didn’t understand, we walked around a winter block in a sunny kitchen, past little girls dancing on green chairs or sucking up milk shakes in a warm car smelling of mother and vinyl; of Mother’s bare shoulder in her sleeveless blouse with its piercing half circle of sweat. You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off you. We walked and walked against the impassable membrane of our understanding. Good to be true. We pressed against it until we could press no more. Eyes off you. We returned to the kitchen and finished our tea.
On my way back to Manhattan on the train, I remembered that lying in bed with Daphne six years earlier had been like lying in a hole with a dog. The memory was flickering and far away as “heaven” had once been. It flew past me, like the shabby old houses and cars and discarded bathtubs flew past as the train gathered speed, then plunged into a coruscating black tunnel. I dozed in the droning car. I felt like a discarded bathtub sitting out in a yard with sun shining on it. I felt good.
Patrick and I broke up. We had a fight about something I can’t even remember. There was a break in the yelling and I said, “Maybe we should just stop seeing each other.” And he looked up with gratitude and relief. We were quiet for a while. He asked me if I wanted to walk a bit and I said yes. We walked for about an hour, not saying much of anything. At the end of it, we were done and it was okay.
I saw other men after Patrick. They were important to me at the time, but now I can’t remember why. Maybe there was a demon in my pants saying, Do it with this one! No, don’t do it with that one! I did it with one named Chris, a thirty-five-year-old former model with the touching face of an unformed boy. His blond hair fell in his eyes. He wore pastel jackets over white pants. I lay awake at night thinking about him. When we kissed, I felt hope and joy. When we fought, I cried. Now the things I remember most viscerally about him are the way he smartly tapped his packets of artificial sweetener against his saucer, and that he left most of his food on his plate. He was very thin and when you first looked at him, he appeared much younger than he was. His eyes were young. But there was rigidity in his mouth and neck and chest and it was old, very old. One night in a cafe, I said something and he leaned toward me with tenderness in his eyes. For a moment, his rigidity trembled, trying to move with the feeling; then it was gone.
Years later, when I was lying in my bed crying because my life was broken, Chris came to me as powerfully as in a waking dream. He was leaning toward me, full of tenderness. He did not tremble. His mouth was not rigid; it was alive and firm, and his neck was supple. His chest radiated warmth that was more loving than erotic. My heart was comforted, my mind calmed. In life, we had parted coldly. Afterward, we didn’t speak. We
didn’t even look at each other. Still, I believe that somehow he came to me.
There were several others. I lay awake thinking of them, too. I leapt into their arms, laughing, and covered their necks with kisses. I told them secrets and stories from my childhood. I told them I loved them. Now I can’t think why. Perhaps it was simply that, in each case, I was the woman and he was the man. And that was enough.
In the winter, I began to get catalog work rather than fashion assignments. It was dull, and I knew that one day soon I would want to find something else. But I was not bitter or afraid. I was twenty-five years old and I was stronger than I had been in Paris. I waited, alert and listening.
In the spring, Daphne got married in someone’s backyard. There were children running around shouting. There were two-colored tulips and slim trees with heavy bunches of white flowers. While Daphne and Jeff made their vows, a child cried, “There’s a daddy longlegs!” and Daphne laughed under her veil.
In the summer, Sara moved to a Newark bedsit with an aide from the old people’s home. He was a tall, handsome black man with loose, gangling limbs, and he almost wordlessly loaded Sara’s cardboard boxes of things into his car. One raucous night at the bedsit, Sara put her hand through a window-pane; he made a tourniquet and took her to the emergency room. “He thinks quick and he did the right thing,” said my father. “He might not be so bad.” But then he drove off with the car, leaving Sara without any way to get to work. After a few weeks, he brought the car back with a smashed windshield. Sara moved back in with my parents and went to school to learn court reporting.
In the fall, I got a job with a photographer named John, He had a small, tense body and a large head that craned around like something on a turret. He asked me if I was from San Francisco. Because I was wary, I said no. Halfway through the shoot,
I recognized him.
A night or two later, we met for coffee in a large cafe. It was raining; the shadow of a dripping little branch shivered happily on the lit pane. John hunched forward over his thick white cup, warming it with his hands. He said I should go to L.A. There was more joy there, he said, and he had connections to music video work. I said, “I’m not one of those idiots who thinks she can be an actress.” He said, “This isn’t acting.” I said, “I don’t know anybody there.” He smiled and raised a hand off his coffee cup. He had a fleshy, emotional hand. He said, “You know me.”
In a surge of headlights, the grain of the window glass became suddenly visible. Its lines were fine, glowing and curved in shape. They joined the glistening shadow branches and made a phantom web dripping with wet, senselessly beautiful light.
“Can you help set things up for me?” I asked. “Can you help me find an apartment?”
I love you, said John’s eyes. I love you, said the set of his lips. I love you for a little street girl who’d take off her clothes if you gave her a glass of wine and told her she could be a model. But that’s not what I was. Thrilled and trembling, the phantom web filled with surges of traveling light. Yes, he could help me. Of course he could.
And he did. He found a cheap apartment for me in Venice Beach. I had money to pay for both places for a time. If it didn’t work out in a year or so, I could always come back to New York.
“I’ll see you off to the airport,” said Veronica. “I’ll wave my handkerchief. I’ll run alongside your cab waving my handkerchief.”
“Oh no, that’s all right.”
“Only joking,” said Veronica sharply. “Don’t worry.”
My new apartment was a small two-story with el sereno misspelled on its stucco front in worn-out cork. John took me to flea markets to shop for furniture; a polka-dot shag rug, an orange sectional couch, a red Formica table with matching chairs. He took me to lunch and sometimes to dinner. I told him about Paris and everything that had happened there. He told me about Gregory Carson, who’d folded his agency and gone back to Texas to run his father’s oil business. He told me I would have to learn to drive but that until then he would take me to jobs whenever he could. He said, “I got you into this mess, after all.”
My first video was for the comeback effort of a mi
ddle-aged trio of overweight guys with big beards. They played a song about hot girls; I rode in a pink car with two other models in tiny skirts, fighting crime and showing up obnoxious people. My big scene came when, fists on hips, I stopped a barroom bully by planting my gold-heeled foot on the bar, my skirt riding crotch-high. The bully’s eyes popped; he back-flipped out of the frame. Fists on hips, I bounced as if my crotch were the steed I’d ridden in on, humpty-hump! By catwalk standards, it was clumsy and crude, and at first I hated doing it. But then the clumsiness became fun. One of my gal partners stepped on the hand of a fallen villain; the other twirled a toy gun and blew on it with lush lips. The band wandered in, sharing a bag of potato chips.
I went home in a taxi that cost one hundred dollars and walked the peopled gray beach behind El Sereno, feeling my aloneness. It did not feel bad. It felt like something hidden was slowly becoming visible. I thought of Joy, Cecilia, Candy, Jamie, Selina, Chris. They fell away from me like empty potato chip bags thrown from a car. Even Patrick. He was good, I thought, but now he’s finished. And I pictured throwing away an empty milk shake container. These thoughts and images scared me. I could not believe I was really like that. I thought of Veronica.
Here there was a change. Veronica did not fall away or seem finished. She seemed to go on forever, all the way down into the ground. I asked myself why and was answered immediately. Her pain was so deep that she had become deep, whether she liked it or not. Maybe deeper than any human being can bear to be.
I went back to New York just before Christmas. The piss-elegant city wore salt-stained winter clothes and soiled jewels, its colors stunned and mute in the cold. People who passed me on the street looked like acquaintances whose names I would remember presendy. I went to dinner with Selina and to a party with the naked motorcycle girl. I thought, I will not throw them away like empty bags.
Christmas came. My father’s music boasted of fatted abundance, and so did the tree, the scented candles, the stockings, and the stuffed toy sheep my mother had dressed in red Santa suits she’d sewn. Fear was still in the house, as was the sadness and the unsaid things. But happiness had come and dazzled its eyes. Daphne was pregnant. Her breasts and belly were just starting to swell and her skin was plumped and rosy. Sara’s eyes had wakened. My mother bloomed. The decorations, which had looked sad and weak to me, now looked like offerings carried in my family’s arms. I saw my family, exhausted but still hopeful, walking with arms full of offerings down a long road, giving without knowing why to something they couldn’t see. Amid their giving, my video was a trinket, but it was a trinket everyone enjoyed. My father watched it again and again, smiling and expanding inside. For this was no flat picture in a magazine—this came with music! His daughter was punishing bastards to music and bouncing around like a girl nice enough to be a little clumsy. Even when he stopped watching, it stayed on the TV, mutely rewinding and replaying, becoming part of the tree and the stockings and the Christmas sheep.
“How’s Veronica doing?” asked Sara.
We were setting the table with the holiday silver from my mother’s side of the family, and that boasted, too.
“She’s okay.”
“Did you see a lot of her this visit?”
“No. I didn’t see her at all.”
“Oh.”
Of all the people I had spoken to about Veronica, Sara was the only one who didn’t know she had HIV
I flew back to L.A. just before New Year’s Eve. I had dinner with John. I said I felt bad about not seeing Veronica but that it was painful to be around her. “You can’t talk to her about it because she won’t listen to anything anybody says. But you can’t ignore it, either, because she acts so awful that you always have to remind yourself that she can’t help it, since she’s sick. And her parents were crazy, and they abandoned her. Et cetera.”
He agreed that I had to take care of myself and that she had choices.
I went home and took a hot bath. My mind talked and talked. I got in bed. The darkness of the room grew over me. Just before I curled into it, I started awake and thought, Where am I? Then I sank back to sleep as if slipping into black water.
Under the water, I saw two naked little boys tightly bound and hung upside down. One of them was dead. His rectum had been torn open and gouged so deep that I could see into his belly. Something white moved inside him. The living child sobbed with terror. “He has AIDS and now I have it,” he sobbed. “I’m going to die.” I put my arms around him and tried to hold him upright, but he was too heavy. I said, “I’m sorry you have AIDS,” and the insipid words were loathsome, even to me.
In a fury, he bit me; I dropped him and ran, terrified he would give me the disease. Veronica rode past in a cab; I was in the cab
telling her about the boys. “And then he bit me,” I said. Her eyes grew wild and she bit me with razor teeth. I jumped out of the car and ran. I woke up and a voice inside me said, You will go to hell. Silent and still, the room roared over me.
The next day, I called Veronica. The phone rang a long time. I was about to hang up when she answered. She sounded as if my voice had called her from a dark place she’d barely been able to pull herself from. As if my voice was a familiar but puzzling and distant sound, significant in a way she couldn’t quite remember.
“Oh, hon, hi. Do you need anything?” she asked. She sounded exhausted and hoarse.
“What do you mean? Are you all right? You sound terrible.”
“I’m not all right, hon. Not at all.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“No. I’m too weak to leave the apartment.”
A voice in my head said, This is real.
“Veronica,” I said. “I want to see you. I want to help. I can get a flight tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to do that, hon.”
“Please,” I said. “Let me come. If you really don’t want me to, I won’t. But I want to.”
She didn’t answer for a long moment.
“Hello?” I said.
“You don’t want to stay with me, do you, hon?”
“No! I mean, unless you want.”
“No, I really don’t. I’m a very private person. You know that. But if you stay in your own place, I’d love to see you. If it doesn’t put you out too much.”
“Veronica,” I said, “I love you.”
She didn’t answer.
On the plane, I sat next to a fat old woman who’d come on board in a wheelchair. She wasn’t crippled, but she was too sedated to walk. She was flying to see her son, who had just been shot. He was unconscious and would likely be dead by the time she arrived. Her grief fanned out from her, huge and tender. She did not try to display it or hide it. Her name was Suzanne Lowry: I listened to her talk about her son, and I talked to her about Veronica. She said she was sorry. It didn’t sound like politeness.
It sounded like her grief was big enough to take in my lesser grief. We talked about small things. She told me what she was knitting. We snorted over the airline food. She talked about an article in Ebony. She asked, “Do you read Ebony?” She was black, and when I said no, she said tartly, “Well, you should.”
She was in shock, and because she was heavily medicated, she kept dropping her knitting needles and her silverware. I had to cut her airline food into pieces for her. I poured her half a cup of water and she trembled so that she spilled it on herself anyway. The stewards and stewardesses rolled their eyes behind her back. They didn’t know about her son. They weren’t able to see her grief. They saw a fat old lady who kept screwing up, and they thought it was funny. One of them caught my eye and smirked, like I would think it was funny, too; I gave him such a look that he blanched and turned away. But the others kept giggling. I wanted to march down the aisle and make them stop.
But I pictured myself, skinny and prissy, shaking my finger and acting the good girl. I wasn’t the good girl. The old woman couldn’t see them anyway and would have had to put up with my climbing over her so that I could be the
good girl.
When I last saw Mrs. Lowry, she was being wheeled through the airport by personnel. I held up my hand in a static wave, but she no longer saw me. She probably forgot me as soon as she got off
the plane. But I still remember her. For a long time, the memory confused me. I would recall the soft feeling between us as something precious—and then I would see it as worthless. My feeling had not helped Mrs. Lowry, and her feeling had not helped me. Veronica was dead, and most likely the son was dead, too. The flight attendants had laughed behind their hands. But still I remember the feeling, like a trickle of water in a dry riverbed.
Veronica flung open her apartment door and stepped into the hall with the rakish pose of a cabaret emcee. She had lost weight, but she was not emaciated. Her undyed brown hair was cut close to her head. As I came closer, I saw the glitter of sickness in her eyes. We embraced, her head against my hard shoulder, her heart speaking to my belly with muffled, desperate joy. She was burning up and damp through her clothes. I looked over her head, and saw the last Siamese cat staring at me with a look of flat terror.
I took her to see her doctor. She’d apparendy had a bad reaction to AZT, compounded by a respiratory infection. She’d started smoking again, which had probably provoked the infection. She stopped taking the medication and quit smoking. She rested at home. I brought her takeout. In five days, she was well enough to go out. We went for brunch in a restaurant decorated with blue chinaware and animals that crouched on blond wood shelves. We ordered eggs and red flannel hash, and it was placed before us in squat blue pots.
“You always told me I should let my hair go natural,” said Veronica. “It looks good, don’t you think?”
Yes, I did.
“The barber in my building did it. He asked me what I wanted and I said, ‘Whatever you think would look good at a funeral. I am dying, after all.’ Scared him, I think. Goodness, this hash is delicious.”
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