Three weeks later, Veronica’s sister called to tell me that Veronica was dead. She had been found by the police, who had gone to her building when the neighbors complained about the smell coming from her apartment. She had died of pneumonia. She died peacefully,” said her sister. “She was watching television.” The last cat had still been in the apartment. Veronica had apparently torn open a large bag of cat food and left it in the kitchen so the animal wouldn’t starve before someone found her.
I fold my umbrella and rest it against my thigh. I take off my gloves, put them on my other thigh, and look at the ring Veronica gave me. It is beautiful against my cold-bleached fingers. I try to draw from it some wisp of spirit, some faint echo of
Veronica’s smile, her touch, her mad anger, a ghost of fiercely exhaled smoke. Nothing. I put the gloves back on.
Veronica was cremated. I went to New York for the memorial. The rented hall was filled with the coworkers Veronica had hated, including a supervisor. There were also a few temps I’d worked with five years earlier—among them the woman who had once called Veronica a “total fucking fag hag.” When I walked in, they turned to stare at me. I wonder if I looked like Nadia to them.
“I knew she was sick with something,” I heard the supervisor say, “but I had no idea it was AIDS. Somebody’d told me her boyfriend had had it, but she just never looked that bad to me.”
I found George and stood with him. His face was puffy and his eyes sad. A former lover of his had been hospitalized, probably for the last time. He had not seen or spoken to Veronica since I had last visited her. I asked what had happened to the last cat. He said David had adopted it.
“Where is David?” I asked.
“He decided not to come, I guess.”
“And you’re the model!” A woman had my hand and was shaking it. She looked like Veronica in a mask of terrible happiness. “Hi, I’m Veronica’s sister, June. I’ve been following your career, so exciting. How did you meet my sister again?”
George uttered a courtesy that sounded like a curse and
fled.
“Oops,” said June. “Did I say something? And there’s my mother. We’d better keep it down—whatever it is!” She winked as she pointed to an elderly woman with a hive of dry bleached hair, who was standing a few feet from us. She did not look like the kind of person who would abuse laxatives in order to lose weight.
When I stood up to talk, I told how I had met Veronica. I said that she knew I had been in Paris before I told her; I said that when I was looking for a job as a secretary, she’d told me I had to be like Judy Garland in A Star Is Bom. I said that once when I’d complained about a feeling of tightness in my forehead, she’d said, “No, hon, that’s your sphincter.” I said, “Veronica was very beautiful.”
Then George told a story about a party Veronica had given years ago in L.A., where a faded pop musician had walked into the room naked. Everybody laughed. “Naked?” said Veronica’s mother in a loud, querulous voice. “Naked!” she repeated. Everybody laughed.
The last person I spoke to before I left was Veronica’s mother. I didn’t mean to speak to her, but she grabbed my hand as I walked by. “You were my daughter’s friend?” Her voice was made of dead, still sparking wires. I looked at her face, swollen under her hive of hair, and, for a moment, saw her daughter. Except that this woman did not have Veronica’s armor of pain sculpted to look like sophistry. Her face reflected pain received with the simplicity of a child.
“Yes,” I said. “I was her friend.”
“Thank you so much for coming. I’m so glad to see Veronica had friends.”
I was angry, but I just said, “She was a wonderful person.
And the old lady embraced me and pulled me close, where I could feel the full force of her pain and fear and need. My anger left me. Gently, I patted her poor back. 1 felt her quiet slighUy. I kept holding her. I felt her subtly open, like Veronica’s chest had opened under my hand. Emotion passed through me; Veronica seemed to move through her mother’s body, swift and graceful as light. I held tighter. Veronica was gone. The embrace broke.
“I’m just glad she didn’t suffer,” said Veronica’s mother.
I moved back a litde. My anger returned in a bolt. I said, “She did suffer, ma’am. She had AIDS.”
Veronica’s mother did not change her expression. She just opened her mouth and moaned. She sounded like my mother when she fell on the concrete and the wind was knocked from her.
Veronica’s father had not come to the service.
I sit on the wet ground. My cruelty had been pointless. My kindness had been poindess. I remember rubbing the small bones in the center of Veronica’s chest. I remember her surprise at being touched that way, the slight shift in her facial expression, as if feelings of love and friendship had been wakened by the intimate touch. The subtle muscles between her chest bones seemed to open a little. Then I left.
I never should’ve touched her like that and then turned around and left, leaving her chest opened and defenseless against the feelings that might come into it—feelings of love and friendship left unrequited once more. I put my head on my knees. I fantasize giving Veronica a full-body massage, with oil, with warm blankets wrapped around the resting limbs. Drops of sweat would’ve rolled from my arms to melt on her skin. When I finished, I would’ve held her in my arms. Except she never would have allowed any of that. She only responded to the chest touch because I took her by surprise.
My mind distends from me, groping the air in long fingers, looking for Veronica. The air is cold and bloated with moisture; Veronica is not here. I draw back inside myself. Again, I try to imagine. This time, I can. I imagine Veronica lying on her couch, descending slowly into darkness, the electronic ribbon of television sound breaking into particles of codified appetites, the varied contexts of which must have been impossible to remember. I wonder if, at certain moments, a peal of music or an urgent scream had leapt in tandem with the movement of the darkness, and if so, what it had felt like. I wonder if Veronica’s spirit had tried to cling to the ersatz warmth of the rrV noise; I think of a motherless baby animal clinging to a wire “mother” placed in its cage by curious scientists. I imagine Veronica drawing away from everything she had become on earth, withdrawing the spirit blood from what had been her self, allowing its limbs to blacken and fall off. I imagine Veronica’s spirit stripped to its skeleton, then stripped of all but its shocked, staring eyes, yet clinging to life in a fierce, contracted posture that came from intense, habitual pain. I imagine the desiccated spirit as a tiny ash in enormous darkness. I imagine the dark penetrated by something Veronica at first could not see but could sense, something substantive and complete beyond any human definition of those words. In my mind’s eye, it unfurled itself before Veronica. Wthout words it said, I am Love. And Veronica, hearing, came out of her contraction with brittle, stunted motions. In her eyes was recognition and disbelief, as if she were seeing what she had sought all her life, and was terrified to believe in, lest it prove to be a hoax. No, it said to Veronica. I am real. You have only to come. And Veronica, drawing on the dregs of her strength and her trust, leapt into its embrace and was gone.
I stare at the clay dirt before me. I think of the great teeth; the lion cub torn to pieces in the adult’s embrace. I imagine the methodical grind of digestion and blood. I imagine a moving black coil with white shapes inside it disintegrating in a grind of dirt, roots, and bones. I look up. Before me is a small tree with delicate orangy skin, its limbs, with dull sparse clusters of leaves and buds, arrayed like static flame. It plants its roots in the bones and the dirt and it drinks. I think of my sister’s bit of flesh, red with triumph, and my mother’s joyous head. I think of Veronica leaping into complete embrace, her love requited now forever.
Ater the memorial, I visited my family. While my mother / % and Sara were out, I asked my father to play Rigoletto for -X. me. I told him I had a friend who loved a particular aria and that I’d like to hear it. “It’s a love
song,” I explained.
My father was happy to play it for me. I rarely spent time alone with him, and I even more rarely showed any interest in the things he loved. I wasn’t really showing interest now. I didn’t want to hear his Rigoletto. I wanted to hear Veronica’s Rigoletto, and it didn’t seem possible to hear both. If my father had met Veronica, he would’ve liked her. But he would not have wanted to meet her. She had loved a bisexual and thus had done wrong. It wouldn’t matter to him that she’d loved the music he loved, that she might’ve understood his sentimental passions in ways that I could not.
With self-righteousness and also a wish that he might know me, I talked to my father about Veronica. I could tell immediately that he didn’t want to hear what I said but that, because he respected death, he would suffer it. This made me all the more determined to make him hear me. I told him of Veronica’s loneliness, her idiosyncrasy, her love of order. I told him how kind she had been to Sara. I told him that Veronica, too, had despised the way people used words like choices. “It’s
terrible for anybody to get a disease like AIDS,” I said. “But it seemed even worse for her. Because she tried so hard to be proper and dignified. She didn’t want to be phony; she didn’t want pity. She wound up being and getting what she didn’t want. But at least she fought.”
My father’s face had the retracted look of a threatened animal—tense around the jaw, ready to bite. But he nodded to let me know he was listening.
I told him about sitting in the cafe with Veronica, listening to the aria from Rigoletto. “The sad thing is, I think she was telling me the truth. I think there probably was love between her and Duncan. But it got put together with a lot of other horrible stuff that both of them couldn’t stop doing to themselves. So the love didn’t help them. That’s sadder to me than if they didn’t love each other.”
He didn’t answer. Loud voices leapt up in declarative oblongs, then divided into fine, vibrant strands of delicacy and strife; father and daughter sang against each other. But my father didn’t answer me. He didn’t look at me. He said, “Now Rigoletto is talking to Gilda, his daughter. He’s warning her not to leave the house. He says, ‘It would be a good joke to dishonor the daughter of a jester.’”
He said this last phrase with relish, as if the idea of a daughter’s honor was like a precious jewel to him, a jewel the world no longer valued (not even his own daughter!), and now here it was, celebrated and jealously guarded in Rigoletto. The idea of a daughter’s honor, I thought bitterly, not the reality. In reality, he didn’t honor me enough to answer what I’d said to him. I thought of telling him more, of forcing him to respond. But how could I insist that he face what I had failed to face?
“Now here’s the love duet,” he said. “The Duke has come to woo Gilda, only she doesn’t know who he is.”
I listened to see if this was the music I had heard in the caf<§. I didn’t recognize it. I imagined a vessel of fluted glass
falling through the air, landing, and shattering. I had just said that there was love between Veronica and Duncan. But how could I believe Duncan had loved her, when he had been so careless with her life and his? How could I believe she even knew what love was? My thoughts faltered and will-lessly followed the music. No. People who loved each other would never treat each other, or allow themselves to be treated, with such indifference and cruelty. But even as I thought this, I felt, rising from under thought, the stubborn assertion of love living inside their disregard like a ghost, unable to make itself manifest, yet still felt, like emotion from a dream.
“Now Rigoletto’s back,” said my father. “And Gilda’s gone! He cries out, ‘Gilda! Gilda!”’
The words cracked his voice as they burst from his lips, more fierce and dramatic than the voice of the singer. The music rose in a great fist. He said it again, more quietly this time. “‘Gilda! Gilda!’” I stared at him, shocked. His voice was full of emotion, but his face was rigid, his eyes glassy.
When I got back to L.A., I went for a job the next day. John drove me to it, hectoring me about learning to drive. In his voice I heard my father crying out. He laid on the horn and braked as a big white car cut us off, its rear end wagging. A blond child with a blurred face clutched a soft toy and waved at us out the back window. “Son of a bitch!” yelled John. We got slammed from behind and thrown forward. I grabbed the dashboard hard with one hand. John swerved the wrong way and sideswiped a white blur. Crashing and grinding rose in a great fist. Veronica came at me with razor teeth. I screamed. We swerved again and went off the road.
I came to strapped on a gurney in a white corridor of pain and intercom noise. My first thought was, I have AIDS. Then I remembered. A nurse came to check my vitals. “Is my face all right?” I whimpered. “Just bruised,” she replied, and said they’d take me for X-rays soon. People moaned. People ran up and down the hall. I could not move my head enough to see them; there were only upside-down white backs flapping away. Five hours later, I was fighting with a technician who insisted on taking out my earrings before she did the X-ray. She yanked them out so hard, I thought she’d tear my ears.
“If you fuck up my ears, I swear I’ll sue you,” I said. “I’m a model and I can’t have fucked-up ears!”
“Why not?” she asked. “You got a fucked-up head.”
I had a broken wrist, a torn rotator cuff, and whiplash. Because I didn’t have insurance, they let me go that night with a neck brace and a sling for my arm. They told me to wear the sling for three weeks or my rotator cuff wouldn’t heal properly. But I was frantic for money. I persuaded a doctor to take my wrist out of the cast early, then took a hundred-dollar taxi ride to audition without the sling or the brace. Even the tryout hurt like hell. I got the job but broke down with pain in the middle of it. When I told them why, they felt bad for me, but they had to let me go anyway. I got paid for the whole thing. But my neck and arm were never right after that.
John had a concussion, a broken ankle, and two broken ribs. He had insurance, so they kept him longer. When I went to visit him, he .said, “See? Didn’t I tell you? You have to learn how to drive!”
Going back down the mountain, I see some bushes I didn’t notice on the way up, even though they grow thick all along the edge of the path. They have twisted little trunks and limbs, dark red and wryly formed. I think of the devil sticking out his tongue of snakes; I think of Robert Mapplethorpe, triumphant, with a whip up his ass; I think of Veronica crying, “They’re taking it all away.” I hadn’t understood her then. But I do now. They did take it away. Veronica’s world is gone, campaigned against by people like my father, who saw his world taken away from him by people like her—I understand that now, too.
A lot was taken. But not everything. Not from Veronica, and not from my father, either. When we listened to Rigoletto together, he had not ignored me. He had sent me a signal through his music. A signal so strong that twenty years later, I finally hear it. I hear him crying out with grief for his daughter, who was taken away from him and violated by people he found alien and terrible. I hear him crying out for Veronica, too, another daughter taken and violated fatally. I hear him signaling a grief so private, I knew nothing about it, even though it hurt so much, it made him cry out.
On both sides now, devil trees escort me. I hear her. The sun has come out. I hear him.
I gave up on music videos and moved back to New York. Incredibly, Morgan was still able to get me work. But I was older and something had gone out of me. I arrived late for bookings and on two occasions slept through them. My arm had lost full range of motion, which put me off balance. I drank too much and took pills and played with heroin. The work stopped coming. John called me from San Francisco to say he was starting an agency there; I went.
The agency was up a narrow flight of stairs on a cold Mission District street, next to a taqueria. Just before I went up the stairs, I spied a bag made of hot pink leather lying on the street with its gold clasp open. I thought I’d pick it up on my
way out to see if it could be salvaged, but when I emerged, somebody else had gotten it.
The agency lasted a litde over a year; then it became a modeling school (“... opening the door for potential models to enter an incredible career—or to make a splash in any field”), and I found myself telling nervous teenagers with bad skin and longing eyes that they might be models. After a month of this, I began drinking every night with a washed-up local musician and a former Playboy bunny who’d had an unhelpful face-lift. After two months, I had a terrible fight with John because I’d told an especially hopeless girl not to waste her money. I ran out, slipped on the stairs, and dislocated my shoulder when I grabbed the banister, hoping to break my fall. John drove me to the hospital. At a particular intersection, I could see unshed tears shining on his sideways eye.
I went back to temping, but my skills were dulled and the injuries to my arm and neck had traveled into my hand, making typing impossible. I saw a doctor, who said the problem stemmed from my neck and that there was an operation that might fix it. Years later, I read in the paper that, in addition to ruining my neck and arm, he had gotten into trouble for trying to perform cosmetic surgery on a horse. By that time, I had discovered I had hepatitis. Who wants to think about their liver or their hand? Now I have to think of mine—all the time.
When I come to the waterfall, I see someone standing on the rocks abutting it, looking into the rushing water—a man wearing a yellow rain slicker. We say hi and I stand near him for a minute, watching the movement of the water. I say, “Those trees there.” I point to a sick ocher tree visible in the canyon. “There must be something really wrong with them to make them look like that. But they’re so beautiful—it seems funny the disease would make them beautiful.”
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