Veronica (19 page)

That night, Veronica wasn’t at work, and for the first time I missed her. When the shift was over, instead of taking a taxi home, I walked blocks of asphalt glossy with yellow lamplight and streaming with yellow cabs, each with a hard nugget of human head inside. When the tears finally came, I sat on a bench in front of the Public Library and let them fall. A man with a face like the bottom of a broken shoe discreedy worked around me, slowly and painfully collecting cigarette butts off the ground and storing them in his pocket. He didn’t look at me, but he sang a nasal, wordless song that touched me like calm hands.

The following morning, I was awakened by the agent who had “almost felt something”; $ had a go-see. It was in a cavernous loft full of echoes that sprang from each scraping chair and clacking step, grew ceiling-high in one bound, bounced back, then subsided in sideways waves. Each girl rose from her chair and walked through her own rising echo into someone else’s, until they all overlapped and I couldn’t tell who might be chosen and who would not. The echo of a laughing eye lightly touched mine on its way up and down my body; long white curtains streamed out an enormous window on an ancient city; a demon whispered to a clitoris as if it were an ear; a girl laughed and ate cherries from a plastic bowl; I pounded a door closed to me forever. These and thousands of other bright-painted

moments became tiny and featureless as grains of sand that whirled about me while I whirled, too, a tiny grain among grains, condemned to whirl forever. The booker looked at one page of my pictures, then turned to chat with his assistant while absently flipping through the others. “I can’t work with any of these,” he said. “They’re not what I asked for at all.”

“What’s really sickening about it is, I’ll bet she really was his roommate’s friend’s daughter. I don’t think he went out to find her. She just appeared and he was charmed. That seems worse to me.”

“It’s awfully blithe,” agreed Veronica. “Do you think he had sex with her?”

Her tone took me aback. I hadn’t even asked myself that question. “Well, yeah. His eyes—yeah, of course. Don’t you think?”

“Not necessarily. The way you describe him, he’d be enchanted just to kiss and cuddle with her.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Not in my book, hon.”

Veronica had come back to work after being gone for an entire week. She and Duncan had broken up, too. He had promised, because of the new disease, that he wouldn’t sleep with anyone but her. Two weeks later, he confessed to an affair with a minor soap opera actor and Veronica walked out.

“Are you worried?” I asked.

“I’m worried for him, not me. They say it’s not a woman’s disease.”

“They don’t know that for sure.”

“Hon, it’s been ten years. If I have it, I have it. There’s nothing I can do.”

I thought, Most men who call themselves bisexual are really gay. Duncan had probably had sex with Veronica infre-

quently, and it was true: Everyone acted like women couldn’t get it. But why would Veronica have been involved with a gay man who could not desire her? How had she coded that humiliation so that it looked like something else? Perhaps to her, it had actually been something else. I pictured Veronica and Duncan side by side in a stifling pocket of refinement, dressed up to their necks in stiff Victorian clothing, their lips pursed, their pinkie fingers linked, viewing the world through tiny lorgnettes as they discussed Oscar Wilde and Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dogs. Meanwhile, dirty anal sex was happening somewhere else, between someone else and a Duncan she never had to know. Trips to the art museum and weeping at Camille continued unabated. I could see it.

“He took custody of the two big seal-point brothers, which is very sad. Technically, they were his, but I’ve had them since they were kittens. Now I’ve got all girls. A harem of beautiful Siamese.”

She put down her Styrofoam cup. The stirring coffee shone with oils from her lipstick. The side of the cup was marked with the impress of her lower lip. For a strange moment, I wanted to take her cup and kiss it, covering her mark with mine.

"Do you want to go out for a drink afterward?” I blurted it; Veronica blinked with surprise.

“Thanks, hon, but I can’t. I’ve got an appointment.” She took up her cup. “Maybe another time.”

“Maybe we could go see a movie?” I trembled in my extended position, but I held it.

She dropped her eyes. She said, “That would be lovely,” but her voice hesitated, as if her foot had halted midstep while her body veered in another direction. The moment was fragile and uncomfortable, and it united us as if by touch. Veronica raised her eyes. “I could do it this week?”

We met during a windy, trash-blown day—cold, but with a bright, triumphant sky. The movie was about a middle-aged woman, a former teacher, on a binge of young boys and

drinking in Mexico. “It’s supposed to be wonderful, hon.” We sat in the back, eating candy and popcorn. A crazily smiling woman with hot, besotted eyes and shoulder blades like amputated wings talked to the camera about being “on vacation from feminism” with a sultry blond acquaintance who’d “never heard of it and never had to.”

“Me and my aunt on vacation in Arizona,” whispered Veronica. “I was sixteen. She got drunk and danced with a truck driver who called her ‘a whore.’ ”

I stared at her. She faced the screen as if she’d addressed it, not me.

“ Are you a whore?’ She just smiled and nodded.”

The ex-teacher and her friend went to the hotel swimming pool; men churned the water as they swam toward the blonde, heaving their dripping, longing selves up onto the tile beneath the reclining chair where she lay, oblivious as a custard. “I don’t have that nonchalance,” said the ex-teacher. “I don’t have that beauty. What I have is desire. And there’s great purity in that.” She turned from the camera to gaze at the sleeping loins of a sloe-eyed boy in wet bathing trunks, then cut back to us with a pop-eyed “Here I go again!” grin.

“Purity,” whispered Veronica, “as in unalloyed.”

I looked at her. She ate a fistful of popcorn.

The ex-teacher walked with a Mexican man on a cobbled street at sunset. She had on a short skirt, and his hand was up so far between her legs that she was nearly walking on tiptoe. “Your name means fish,” he said. She smiled. Feesh,

“Duncan,” whispered Veronica, “both halves.”

She talked in and out of the movie, as if its enlarged characters were fragments escaped from her head and willfully acting out on their own, assuming the perfect narrative forms they were denied in life. It was like somebody in a church repeating and affirming the minister’s sermon in noises and half syllables. The Mexican man fucked the teacher so hard that her head

slammed against the wall; I whispered, “Me in Paris. Both halves.” And I could feel Veronica smile before I saw it.

By the end of the movie, Veronica had stopped whispering. Her feelings, grown too broad for words, were strong enough that I could feel them running, sinking, rising, and again running in an ardent fluxing pattern. The ex-teacher stroked the cheek of a beautiful teenager who didn’t bother to look at her. All the feeling in her face had sunk into her jaw and mouth in a heavy expression of appetite and pain— except for a tiny spark in one of her deserted eyes, which held aloof, amazed to find itself on this brink and wanting to stay conscious enough to savor it. Then the spark fell in with the rest and went out. Sick and feverish, the woman ran across a beach like an ostrich with no plumage, pinwheeling her arms ecstatically. Print appeared on the screen, saying she had disappeared in Juarez and was presumed dead. She ran and pinwheeled nonetheless. Ugliness had broken through into beauty and flown into death with it, pinwheeling and joyous in its pain.

When we emerged from the theater, two men stopped us in the lobby to ask what we thought of the movie. They were stout and barrel-chested, with a damp, testicular air that was wounded and bellicose and craved to be loved. I could feel they wanted to look at me, but they didn’t. They didn’t address me, either. They were there to talk to the ex-schoolteacher, not the custard. They were there to preen before her and to acknowledge her; it was her show now. “I loved it,” she said. “I loved her. I love anything that goes to the edge.” She gave her baubled voice to them and they saluted her with their stout, barreled chests.

Then we went to have ice cream under a green-and-white-striped umbrella. A living sea of pigeons boiled and ate bread at our feet. I looked at them and for a moment the world became strange to me. Then I remembered it had always been strange. I had a dish of pistachio gelato and remembered that the first time I met a model, I didn’t even know she was beautiful.

We went to the movies again the next week and several weeks after that. If we could sit alone in an isolated row, we talked our way through the story. If we had to sit where others could hear us, we didn’t. Either way, we left the theater feeling like we’d been talking in tongues. Sometimes I would see men look at me, and at her, then withdraw their eyes in confusion* Sometimes their confusion would confuse me; sometimes I looked through their eyes and saw that Veronica and I made no sense together. But then I came back into my own eyes, and that kind of sense seemed stupid. It could never see the tenth picture. It couldn’t even see past the first.

I went to more go-sees without being chosen; I was calm; My agent stopped calling me. I looked for another one. Instead of seeing Joy or Cecilia, I went to dinner parties at Veronica’s apartment. She lived up a dingy flight of stairs, behind a door painted with green lead dissolving in rust and rot-speckled yellow. The door opened; a Siamese cat peered from a dark crack; lounge music issued out like an enchanted cloud and in it was Veronica wearing an antique lace dress. The enchanted cloud formed a face with pouting lips and heavy-lidded eyes that beckoned us past a small bed wedged sideways, a giant TV, and a window with cracked moldings propped up by a rain-warped book. Another cat leapt up on a rickety table and tilted its velvet triangle head toward the living room, where a table was draped with linen doth and set with silver. I was introduced as “the Parisian gamine,” then greeted by a small circle of dignified old men and appealing boys—clerks, proofreaders, and word-processing drones gladly transformed by the enchanted cloud, which traveled among them, touching them here and there with subtle scent and color.

“So anyway, it’s the Korean War and these adorable soldiers are about to charge Pork Chop Hill, and the chaplain

says, ‘Let me tell you about another hill,’ and suddenly we’re at Calvary, and there’s James Dean as John the disciple—”

They were talking about James Dean’s debut on Catholic television, and Veronica led the conversation, directing it as if with a scepter made of cardboard and tufts of beaded netting, which, at certain moments, might burst into flame.

“—which was a superb choice. Just look at the old art. John is always slouching and bored.”

Remembering, I hear Charles Trenet’s voice traveling like sunlight over the surfaces of the earth, singing (“'heureux et malheureux”) and making beautiful shadows on the refrigerator or the prison-yard grass or a girl’s quiet, crying face.

“Magdalen had goodness, whereas Margary was just the meanest old—she was in Anthony’s last movie and she was just dreadful. The way she made that trailer shake from side to side!

It took her four hours to do the mascara on one eye, and that was after the false eyelashes!”

“Faye Dunaway played the maid in Tartuffe, a walk-on really, but I picked her out in a second.”

“I don’t want to read this nonsense where every other character is depressed. I want murder and they catch the killer and life is delicious.”

Heureux et malheureux—and life is delicious. Laughing sunlight plays with the shadows of trees, grasses, and birds in the heat-rippling air. The music plays. My father sits in his chair.

“—as we flew along past him, pussies to the wind—”

“—the snow all magical and pure and the lights ... the lights . . . well, anyway. Rosalyn died. And—”

“—then Gielgud spent five glorious minutes putting on his gloves. I could simply have screamed with pleasure.”

I think of my father because their signals were as elaborate and ardent as his, but theirs were received and passed along a living circuit, growing stronger and more affirming with each pass. I tried to feel superior, but I couldn’t. In that apartment, beauty and perfection belonged to Veronica and her guests in

the form of a glimmering mirror ball hung high above their heads. They could never reach it, but still they guarded it like fierce elves with lightning-quick rapiers that they drew with a jolly bon mot. Before this guard, I felt wordless, slow and shy, aware that the currency of my sex was worthless here. It made me even more shy to realize that they tolerated my awkwardness, and might even have been kind about any attempts at opinion and wit I might’ve but did not make.

“I’m so glad Veronica finally found a good girlfriend,” said George, a fatherly fellow who walked me home one night. “She really needs some female companionship—especially since the Travesty is finally over. Hopefully for good this time.”

“I never met Duncan.”

“Better for you—a very nasty man. If she gets back together with him, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay friends with her.”

One night, I went with Veronica and two boys named Thomas and Todd to see three legendary actors in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. According to The New Yorker, it was “like watching three old foxes at play,” but that was not the case; the male lead (“He looks like an old tortoise!”) bumbled and periodically fell asleep, so that his costars had to shout their lines in his ear in order to wake him. The bored boys, punchy and tired of jokes at his expense, began ecstatically to joke about Veronica’s vagina. To my amazement, she joked with them—so loudly that an usher rolled down the aisle with a flashlight in his fist. He leaned over us; the male lead woke with a start and blurted, “Be quiet—you’re behaving like a guttersnipe,” which caused Veronica and the boys to become so hysterical that we were thrown out. We made quite a procession up the aisle (Veronica, Thomas, and Todd waving and throwing kisses), out onto the street, and into a taxi, where Veronica got into a screaming fight