Veronica (16 page)

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 small 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,

one of them looking wide-eyed over his shoulder as he went. Duncan said, ‘Just a minute,” then got up and walked away. Veronica was left alone with love creaking and straining in the dark. An enormous cloud streamed across the sky, making the moon a radiant blur. It was beautiful, the voices coming out of the tiny machine to deepen a patch of night, a shimmering skin of eternal love cracked and strained, with mortality coming through. “Cosi I’effluvio del desio tutta m’aggira, felice mi fa,felice mi fa!” Her heart beat. She was afraid. Some bushes stirred. Had Duncan gone to the wide-eyed boy? She sat up, heart pounding. But it was him, coming back to her—and with him were two ragged white children, a small boy and a smaller girl.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“They lived in the tunnels under the subways. They’d come up looking for food for their family. Duncan knew the boy somehow—not that way, he said.”

The boy stood whispering to Duncan. The girl squatted next to Veronica, blinking curiously. Her clothes, her face, her hair were coated in oily gray dirt. When Veronica called her “hon,” she bared her teeth, then smiled. Veronica wanted to take them to the police, but they shook their heads vehemently; the cops would take them from their parents, said the boy. Instead, they greedily ate the grapes and then the bread. Veronica wished they had cookies to give them; she wished she could comb the girl’s hair. Duncan asked about somebody named Ray; in a careful voice, the boy said he was sick. They put the rest of the food in the basket and gave it to the children. They watched them carry it into the dark, each holding the handle like a modern Hansel and Gretel, filthy, sick, and innocent.

“Who was Ray?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Another of Duncan’s boys, I assume. Excuse me, hon.” In a curve of light on the convex face of my screen, Veronica’s tiny reflection approached the supervisor’s tiny desk. The fun-house curve stretched her body pencil-thin,

then mashed it, then pulled it grossly wide. I had a second of feeling—what was it? She came back, gross, mashed, elongated, then, stepping out of the curve, disappeared.

Another time, they went to the Museum of Modern Art, then returned to the park to ride the carousel, where stumbling security guards chased a shrieking homeless woman around the rising, falling ponies. They dined with an elegant old man, an author and lover of opera—“He once cared for Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dogs, exquisite chows”—who called them “Lord and Lady Bracknell.”

“To lose one’s girlfriend is perhaps careless,” said Lord Bracknell. “But to lose one’s boyfriend is incorrigible.”

“To lose one’s boyfriend is also impossible,” replied Lady Bracknell, “when one has so many.”

“Ah, but so many is the same as one, my love, and their one is nothing to your two.”

Lady Bracknell’s words were elegant in fragrant shapely smoke fresh from her throat. The red impress of her striated lower lip was perfect on her Styrofoam cup. The sugar sign beamed its red message across the river. Safety, it said. Stillness. Sweetness.

Lord Bracknell’s young lover arrived and there was a scene. He was a somewhat unclean but fetching boy with pocked skin and sullen, flashing eyes. He looked at Lady Bracknell and said, “Who’s the fish?” “Better fresh fish than rotten meat,” said she. “You don’t look so fresh to me,” he sniffed. “I’m still fresher than you smell, young man.” Lord Bracknell laughed like a hyena in a lace ruff and kissed his lady good-bye, first on her lips and then her hand. He was off into the night with his protege. Veronica shared a cab home with the elegant and embarrassed old man. The little wooden doors had whirred shut on the litde kissing figures.

I stop to wipe the sweat gathered at my eyebrows. My bad arm twinges as I crush it against my side, pinning the umbrella in place while I get the aspirin and water botde from my bag. I imagine massed atoms of gray and green rising from the ground in a moving cloud, twinkling like motes of dust, except alive, complex, full of joy and perversity. Alain’s eyes—perhaps they were the human form of this. Perhaps Duncan was the human form of this in his entirety. I imagine myself blundering through a night haunt, amid plain people dressed so fantastically, they make my beauty trite—an enormous cloud streams across the room and there is Duncan, singing, “E tu che sai, che memori e ti struggi da me tanto rifitggi.” I go into a bathroom, where the thudding music is dulled, and there a tinny thread of La Boheme flashes and disappears amid voices and rushing water—back to the enchanted park where Veronica and Duncan picnicked with their children. Walking home one morning—cold white sky with a thin aura of liquid gold quivering on buildings and roaring trucks—I saw a prostitute haggling with a john. Mockingly, she shouted, “Hey, blondie!” There was Duncan kissing Veronica in the street, and I did not care about heaven.

I smiled and said, “Good morning!” with such warmth that the prostitute looked abashed.

“Have you ever thought of modeling, hon?”

“I already was a model.” I didn’t take my eyes off the word processor.

“Really? What kind? Catalog or—”

“Print. Runway. Paris.”

“And what are-you doing here?' she asked.

“I’m here because I got cheated out of all my money and made bad enemies.” I trembled inside to talk about it. My contempt rose up to steady my trembling. “It’s a horrible business,” I snapped. “I’d never do it again.”

There was a wondering silence. Veronica smoked with her lips in a sideways purse so she could stare at me as she inhaled; her eyes flared with each tiny facial twist.

“How did you get into modeling to begin with?”

“By fucking a nobody catalog agent who grabbed my crotch.”

I didn’t have to be embarrassed or make up something nice, because Veronica was nobody. My disdain was so habitual, I didn’t notice it. But she did. She said, “Every pretty girl has a story like that, hon. I had that prettiness. I have those stories. I don’t have to do that anymore, though. It’s my show now.” And she turned into a movie star, strutting past me while I gawked.

It’s raining again. I am deep in the unfolding All around me living green opens and closes, undulating in ripples and great waves. The creek flashes, eager for the piercing rain, its hard, concentrated pouring A slim tree naked of bark, ocher, smooth, comes out of the ground in a sinuous twist. A piece of fungus grows in a neat half wheel around a twig, like a hat on a lady with a long neck. I think of Veronica. I speak aloud. “I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s nobody’s show now.”

“Well, hon, if I were you, I’d try again. This is New York, not Paris.” She lighted another cigarette. “But this time, don’t let anybody grab your crotch.” And she smiled.

One evening when I was walking in the East Village with Candy, we came on a party that had spilled out of an apartment building; people stood on the sidewalk, drinking from plastic cups, or lounged on the hoods of cars, like the girl in black laughing at the boy who tried to kiss the bottom of her silver shoe. Music fell out windows, splattered on the ground, got up, and walked away. Candy recognized somebody; he invited us into a tiled hallway (blue, gold, and ruined white) and up a linoleum stair to a large apartment sagging on its moldings and vibrating with many feet. Because I had to work that night, I drank orange juice straight and wandered through the party, bored by but still accepting the expression that rose on every face as I went past. “Beautiful.” “Beautiful!” “Bee-oot-ee-fool.” The expression might be formed with wonder or contempt or warmth or disinterest, but it was still the same coin I mechanically took and tossed on the pile. Half-looking for something else, I walked past a partially open door and saw a well-dressed boy sitting on a bed, gazing at the party with a look of intent, distant amusement. He held a worn toy dog on his lap, which he stroked as if it were a pet. There was something mocking in the gesture, as if it were meant to subtly ridicule anyone who saw it. When he saw me, his expression offered me the coin, but so casually that it fell on the floor before I could take it. He was very handsome himself. “Hello,” he said, holding the toy dog up to his face. “Would you like to meet Skipper?”

His name was Jamie. His soft voice was desiccated and voluptuous at once. He said he was in his room because it was his roommate’s party and he didn’t expect to be interested in anyone there, and besides, he was shy. A fragile system of model airplanes hung from the ceiling over his bed, casting soft, gently stirring shadows. “These are beautiful,” I said. I reached up to touch one; shyly, the system dipped and bobbed.

“Skipper likes you,” he said.

We left the party and went for a walk. On the bottoms of his severely pointed shoes, Jamie wore cleats, which clicked loudly on the pavement. The only people I’d ever known to wear cleats were middle-school boys, who wore them so they could kick hard and make a lot of noise when they walked. I asked Jamie why he wore them, and he said, “I just like them.” His words were modest, but they whirred with secret importance. He said everything that way. The British monarchy was very important; Prince Charles’s recent marriage was particularly so. Ornette Coleman was the only good jazz musician. He approved of men’s shoes on women. He approved of Buckminster Fuller and Malcolm McLaren. He approved of Bow Wow Wow.

His opinions were frivolous, fierce, and exact. He worked in a small graphics plant that made logos and labels for sundry products. But he was as proud and particular as any Parisian playboy. His favorite logo was the brand name of a line of white paper sacks commonly used by small grocers; I had never noticed, but tornado was printed in brown letters with a vibrant round T at the top of each bag. “It’s so elegant,” he said, and it was.