Mary Gaitskill - Veronica

I took the GED in an old elementary school classroom in Hoboken. The desks were gray linoleum; the chairs were wood. The facilitator was a big, proud man with a bulbous, veiny nose, and he held his cheap jacket open to show his stomach. The other test takers were mostly middle-aged people with bodies curled like snails crossing a road. The only other young person was a girl wearing a skirt that showed the tops of her panty hose. She glanced at me with sullen camaraderie. Then we hunched over our tests. The facilitator watched us cross the road.

When my test scores came back, my father called my mother to tell her how well I’d done. She made her boyfriend drive her over and wait outside in the car while she kissed me. My dad yelled about “that bastard sitting out there where everybody could see,” and Sara ran upstairs and slammed the door. My mother went out and told him to drive around the block. We all sat down and planned a budget for classes. I ordered course descriptions. I made ready to register. Then the letter from the agency crashed into the side of the house.

It has stopped raining. My sneakers are soaked, so I go ahead and walk through the puddles. Silver and black, full of sky and the solemn upside-down world. The bus shelter glides under my feet like a huge transparent fish. On the side of it is a model in a black sleeveless dress. An ad for perfume: WATCH OUT, MONSIEUR. She has a neat, exquisite face, deep, dim eyes, and a sensitive, swollen mouth. Her slight body is potent and live, like an eel. I like her. I am on her side to destroy monsieur. She makes me remember Alana, another small eel girl.

I walk through black shadows, across the inverted sky. I met Alana at a benefit show put on to support and celebrate the renovation of an ancient Parisian department store, the first of its kind in that country. I walked into the tiny dressing room and saw her standing naked in heels, picking through gorgeous gowns and yelling how her agent had made her get an enema that afternoon so she wouldn’t look bloated. “Now Matmoiselle, ve vill unlock ze bowel!” She was cracking everybody up, talking about the crazy German who’d hosed her out. “Everybody” consisted of the seven models, four makeup artists, and fifteen hairdressers packed into a hot, narrow room that was all mirrors and countertop. Getting their faces made up, talking about enemas and shit: passing out in a nightclub and waking up in ruined panties; diarrhea attack during shoot; farting in boyfriend’s face. The girls giggled hysterically; the hairdressers were getting in on it. They’d probably been up all night and didn’t feel like doing this obscure show. I hesitated at the door; Alana saw me and pounced. “You look like you need an enema,” she snapped. I blushed. The other girls tittered and quieted. Alana flounced into her chair and grabbed a handful of dark red cherries from a plastic bowl next to a mountain of hot hairpieces. Slouching and chewing, she looked absently at her reflection: precise round forehead, nose, and chin. Hot eyes, dark, violent bloom of a mouth. White pearls in her clean little ears. If they wanted to find something wrong, they’d have to look up her ass. They went up there to serve perfection, and she mocked perfection with the shit that came out.

But— Watch out, monsieur . On the runway, she was a bolt of lightning in a white Chanel dress. She turned and gave a look. Thumping music took you into the lower body, where the valves and pistons were working. You caught a dark whiff of shit, the sweetness of cherries, and the laughter of girls. Like lightning, the contrast cut down the center of the earth: We all eat and shit, screw and die. But here is Beauty in a white dress. Here is the pumping music, grinding her into meat and dirt. Here are the other girls coming in waves to refill Beauty’s slot. And here is little Alana, shrugging and turning away. Everyone applauded — and no wonder.

I walk past old homeless people huddled together under the dripping awning of a record store — three of them, like bags of potatoes with potato faces looking out of the bag to see what’s going on. They look like they know me. Maybe they do. Alana disappeared almost as fast as I did. If I saw her sitting on the street like this, it wouldn’t surprise me.

“You take the food out of my mouth and I’ll kill you!” Veronica had screamed that at a homeless guy once. We were walking down the street together and she was talking to me about how she had to hide her HIV from her coworkers. She was eating a bagel and this beggar made as if to grab it from her hand. The rage came up in her like fire; she turned with a scream and hit him in the face. He bolted and she whipped around to me. “They’re trying to take the food from my mouth. Just let them try. Anyway, hon—” Her eyes were still wild with screaming, but she didn’t miss a beat. For her, it was part of the same conversation.

She was like Alana that way: elegance and ugliness together. She’d take a sip of tea, properly dab her lips, and call her boyfriend a “cunt.”

I stop to give change to one of the women huddled on the sidewalk. She looks up at me and it’s like seeing through time. A young girl, a woman, a hag, look at me through a tunnel of layered sight; three pairs of eyes come together as one. We let our hands touch. She’s given me something — what is it? I walk past; it’s gone.

Veronica’s boyfriend was a bisexual named Duncan. She’d go to a party with him and he’d leave with a drunk girl on his arm, looking like he was taking her out to shoot her. He’d come to dinner with a lovely boy who had bad table manners and a giant canker on his mouth. He’d go to a cruising ground in Central Park called the Ramble, where he’d drop his pants, bend over, and wait. “See what I mean?” she said. “A real cunt.”

“Why do you stay?” I asked.

She tipped her head back and released a petulant stream of smoke. She righted her head and paused. “Have you ever seen Camille ?” she asked. “With Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor?”

Camille is about a beautiful prostitute who dies of tuberculosis — a despised woman who is revealed to be better than anyone else, including the aristocrat who loves her but can’t admit it. Veronica and Duncan purchased a VCR as soon as one was invented, so that they could watch a tape of it constantly. They watched it on the couch, lying in each other’s arms under a blanket. They watched it eating dishes of expensive ice cream or chocolates in a gold box. They could speak the lines with the actors. Sometimes they did it for fun. Sometimes they did it while they cried. “At the end, we cry together,” she said. “It’s gotten so I cry as soon as the credits roll.” She shrugged. “Who else could I do that with? Only a cunt would understand.”

My mother was going for elegance and ugliness when she dressed her adultery in earrings, fancy pantsuits, and heels. But she couldn’t do it right. It was at odds with the style of her time. Her generation distrusted the sentimental thrill of putting beauty next to shit. They didn’t want to be split down the center — they figured they’d see what was there sooner or later anyway. They understood the appeal — of course they understood it! They’d made Camille . But you were supposed to know that was a movie.

My parents went with me to the agency in Manhattan. They were not going to put me on a plane to a foreign country just because I’d won some contest. They were going to ask questions and get the truth. They put on their good clothes and the three of us took Amtrak into the city to a building of gold and glass. In the elevator, we stared silently at the numbers above the automatic door as they lighted up and dimmed in a quick sideways motion. For the first time in years, I could feel my parents subtly unite.